University of Arkansas at Little Rock
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Contract and Property Law—Fee-Shifting Statutes and Landlord-Tenant Law—A Call for the Repeal of the English Rule Loser Pays System Regarding Contract Disputes and Its Effect on Low-Income Arkansas Tenants
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Private Prisons and the New Marketplace for Crime
Get PDFA saner and safer prison policy in the United States begins by ending the scourge of the private prison corporation and returning crime and punishment to public function. We continue by radically reimagining our sentencing policies and reducing them significantly for non-violent crimes. We end the War on Drugs, once and for all, and completely reconfigure our drug and prison policy by legalizing and regulating marijuana use and providing health services to addicts of harder drugs and using prison for only violent drug kingpins and cartel bosses. We stop the current criminalization of immigration in its tracks and block the private prison lobby from influencing legislation in our current immigration policy debates. We provide prisoners a fair wage for work done in prison, allowing them a re-entry account upon release filled with the money they earned while working in prison. We provide humane and habitable prison cells populated by one inmate, as saner and safer crime and punishment policies will imprison far fewer American citizens.
At their core, private prisons reflect a continuation of policies that have tainted the criminal justice system with perceptions of arbitrariness, unfairness, and injustice. As this article has shown, the continued proliferation of private prisons does not save taxpayers money, increase prison safety, or elevate the conditions of the prison environment. Conversely, they do the opposite. Inmates are being physically abused, denied medical care, and forced to endure inhumane living conditions, as corporations like CCA and GEO Group realize higher profits from a marketplace in which prisoners are in high demand. Indeed, CCA is a textbook example of the grave injustices that can occur when profit maximization clashes with human dignity. The time has arrived for private prisons to be eliminated and for legislators and courts to realize that this experiment is one that has failed. Until that time comes, Congress should implement purpose-driven reforms to ensure that private prisons can no longer be institutions where inmates have rights but no remedies
Constitutional Law—Fourth Amendment and Seizures— Accidental Seizures by Deadly Force: Who is Seized During a Police Shootout? Plumhoff V. Rickard, 134 S. Ct. 2012 (2014).
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Infrequently Asked Questions
Get PDFIf appellate advocates could hear from courts about topics that might be raised during oral argument—as opposed to relying solely on their ability to anticipate the issues—might their answers be better? That seems likely, but it is unlikely that research could confirm that, as judicial practice overwhelmingly favors impromptu questioning. Spontaneity may be harmless if the question was predictable, or unavoidable if a judge just thought of the question. But sometimes advocates have to answer challenging questions concerning the law, facts, or implications of a position—questions that help decide the case, either due to the quality of the answer or the question’s effect on other judges—and all would be better served by advance notice to advocates that specific issues might come up during oral argument.
This article doggedly pursues this simple but important proposition. It explores contemporary conditions that increase the value of preliminary questions, the empirics of their present (and limited) use, and the most compelling circumstances for employing them, illustrated primarily through missed opportunities in recent Supreme Court cases. Preliminary questions interrogate the traditional view of argument—itself fairly recent, and persisting despite erosion of its preconditions. But the potential for preliminary questions to improve judicial communication and deliberation is too compelling to leave muted. The article concludes with a mooting of the proposal
