Sandra Babcock, Nathalie Greenfield and Kathryn Adamson

This article presents a comprehensive study of 48 persons sentenced to death between 1990 and 2023 who presented as women at the time of their trials. Our research is the first of its kind to conduct a holistic and intersectional analysis of the factors driving women’s death sentences. It reveals commonalities across women’s cases, delving into their experiences of motherhood, gender-based violence and prior involvement with the criminal legal system. We also explore the nature of the women’s crimes of conviction, including the role of male co-defendants and the State’s use of aggravating factors. Finally, we reveal for the first time the extent to which capital prosecutions are dominated by men—including judges, elected District Attorneys, defense attorneys, and juror forepersons—and explain why gender matters in determining who lives and who dies.

We present our data against the backdrop of prevalent theories that seek to explain both the rarity of women’s executions and the reasons why certain women are singled out for the harshest punishment provided by law. We explain why those frameworks are inadequate to understand the role that systemic gender bias plays in women’s capital prosecutions. We conclude by arguing for more nuanced research that embraces the complexities in women’s capital cases and accounts for the presence of systemic and intersectional discrimination.

Cardozo Law Review, Forthcoming (Written April, 2024}.

By United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Offices, Northern and Southern Districts of Mississippi Civil Divisions

The Department of Justice has reasonable cause to believe that the State of Mississippi and Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) violate the constitutional rights of people incarcerated at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (Central Mississippi), South Mississippi Correctional Institution (South Mississippi), and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility (Wilkinson).

• MDOC fails to protect incarcerated persons from violence. MDOC does not adequately supervise incarcerated people, control contraband, and investigate incidents of harm and misconduct. These basic safety failures and the poor living conditions inside the facilities promote violence, including sexual assault. Gangs operate in the void left by staff and use violence to control people and traffic contraband.

• Restrictive housing practices create a substantial risk of serious harm. MDOC holds hundreds of people at Central Mississippi and Wilkinson in restrictive housing for prolonged periods in appalling conditions. Restrictive housing units are unsanitary, hazardous, and chaotic, with little supervision. They are breeding grounds for suicide, self-inflicted injury, fires, and assaults.

These violations are systemic problems that have been going on for years. In April 2022, we found conditions at another MDOC facility, Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman), violated the Constitution. Many of the conditions we identified at Parchman exist at Central Mississippi, South Mississippi, and Wilkinson. Across all these facilities, MDOC does not have enough staff to supervise the population. The mismatch between the size of the incarcerated population and the number of security staff means that gangs dominate much of prison life, and contraband and violence, including sexual violence, proliferate. Prison officials rely on ineffective and overly harsh restrictive housing practices for control. This Report begins by explaining the methodology and scope of our investigation. It then describes the facilities we investigated. Next, the Report identifies the constitutional violations. We grouped the violations into two sections: failure to protect from violence and substantial risk of serious harm from restrictive housing practices. In each section, we highlight particular incidents of violence, gang activity, and misconduct as examples of the type of incidents that give rise to constitutional violations and to show the severity of the harm. We also examine MDOC’s recent steps to address these concerns and why their efforts fall short. We end by outlining the minimum measures needed to remedy the violations.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2024. 60p.

By John J. Dilulio, Jr.

FROM THE COVER: The American prison, in conventional wisdom, 1s doomed to be filthy, violent, and unproductive. It is a breeding ground for crime rather than a punishment for it, an institution where lawless inmates and abusive guards confront each other in riots that erupt in response to oppressive conditions. Now, John J. Dilulio, Jr., already considered one of the most original thinkers about prisons in a generation, challenges all these accepted notions about incarceration. Dilulio argues that-far from necessarily being hellish traps for society's refuse-prisons must and can be safe and humane, despite overcrowding, budget limitations, and racial polarization. The key is good government.

The Free Press. London. NY. 1987. 357p.

By Miranda Davies, Rachel Hutchings and Eilís Keeble

There were 11,494 people under 25 years of age in young offender institutions and prisons in England and Wales as of 31 December 2022, representing 14% of the total population in custody. While the number of children (under 18) in secure settings has fallen sharply over the past 15 years, very serious challenges remain over the use of force in the children’s secure estate, with ongoing concern over children being held in solitary confinement, some for extended periods. From a legal perspective, young people are treated as adults from the age of 18 within the criminal justice system, but there is recognition of the needs of 18- to 25-year-olds as ‘young adults’ (see the work of t2a.org.uk), distinct from the needs of children or other adults. This analysis uses routinely collected hospital data to look at the service-use patterns of children and young adults aged 25 and under in young offender institutions and prisons in England. We engaged with experts and looked at the literature to consider this in the context of the key health care needs of young people. Looking across the children’s secure estate as well as the adult estate provides a novel perspective on the key health care issues for young people, allowing us to compare experiences in the so-called ‘children and young people secure estate’, which caters for those aged 18 and under and is run as a distinct part of the custodial estate, with those in the adult estate, which manages young adults alongside prisoners in older age groups. Understanding how health care access and needs differ is important, because the distinction between the two parts of the system is becoming increasingly blurred. Recently, population pressures in the adult estate have led to an increase in the number of young people aged 18 or over in the children’s secure estate, which will drastically alter the age profile of the children’s secure estate population.

A summary of the key findings and some considerations for policy-makers are provided below. We found that some of the biggest problems affecting the adult prison estate – violence and self-harm – have a disproportionate impact on young adults. We consider how the prison service can meet the needs of young people in custodial settings, and the benefits of providing tailored support for young adults in particular.

London: Nuffield Trust, 2023. 55p.

By Elias Neibart

In September 2021, New York Governor Kathy Hochul quietly signed into law the Less Is More: Community Supervision Revocation Reform Act, the state’s fourth major criminal justice reform enacted in the past three years. Less Is More made dramatic changes to the state’s parole system, specifically: Creating a system of earned time credits to incentivize good behavior;Significantly limiting reincarceration for “technical” violations of the terms of parole (i.e., a violation other than committing a new crime), and shortening the length of reincarceration;Limiting the presumption of detention for parole violators, such that technical violators are detained only if they abscond, and criminal violators detained only if a judge rules them at risk of absconding;Raising the burden of proof at revocation hearings and expediting their processing time;Shifting revocation hearings to court rooms and otherwise giving them the trappings of a court proceeding. These changes, supporters argued, were necessary to minimize the unnecessary and counterproductive reincarceration of petty technical violators—the parolee who is on the straight and narrow but who nonetheless finds himself back in prison due to a minor slip-up. In making these changes, however, they also made it harder to detain many serious offenders, including serious criminal violators; evidence from NYC jails show that detention of even violent criminal violators fell in the wake of Less Is More. In addition, it created a greater burden on victThis, we argue, is due to the broad-reaching procedural changes enacted by Less Is More. The lost presumption of detention, heightened evidentiary standards, and constraints placed on the use of technical violations—all of which apply not only to petty technical violators but to more dangerous parolees—have defanged the supervision system. While reforms that reward good behavior and do not over-punish minor violations are desirable, we propose a series of changes to blunt the unintended effects on the more serious offender population. Specifically, we suggest several reforms of the reformims, who are often now involved in revocation hearings in addition to new criminal proceedings.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2022. 28p.

By Róisín Mulgrew

The State duty to prevent preventable prisoner deaths is easy to state and substantiate. Yet prisoner death rates are increasing around the world and are often much higher than those in the community. To understand why this is happening, the findings and recommendations of the country reports of international oversight bodies and thematic reports from international rapporteurs are synthesised with contemporary rights-informed penal standards, multi-disciplinary scholarship, non-governmental organization reports and media extracts. On the basis of this knowledge, this reform-oriented article explores the impact of structural, societal and environmental factors on natural and violent prisoner deaths and how these factors operate cumulatively to create dangerous and life-threatening custodial environments. The paper makes recommendations to reaffirm and enumerate the positive obligation to protect prisoners’ lives, develop specialist standards, adopt a broader approach to prison oversight and create a specific United Nations mandate on prisoner rights.

Human Rights Law Review, 2023, 23, 1–25

By Alabama Appleseed

The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude, and others have generated increased scrutiny of how the government and law enforcement treat Black people. These police killings of unarmed Black people are perhaps the starkest example of the many ways the state inflicts violence on individuals, contrary to both our legal and social code. But in Alabama and elsewhere, another, pernicious form of deadly state violence continues with far less scrutiny. Black people are dying violent deaths while in custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), the largest law enforcement agency in the state — and they are dying in disproportionate numbers as compared to their white peers. This continuum of Black people being killed by police and in prisons amounts to two sides of the same coin. Police are the front end of law enforcement, and prisons are its back end. They are inseparably connected. In this report, Alabama Appleseed seeks to document and demonstrate the ways in which deaths — particularly deaths resulting from homicide, suicide, and COVID-19 in Alabama prisons — are prompted by the same issues of state violence and deliberate indifference to the safety of people in government custody as the police killings that have inflamed the country and energized the Black Lives Matter movement. Alabama Appleseed has identified, by name, 89 people who have died violent, preventable deaths from homicide, suicide, or drug overdose over the last six years while in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections. These incarcerated individuals lost their lives due to the State’s failure to provide “basic human needs, one of which is reasonable safety”. The neglect, violence, and death disproportionately impacts Black men, who are dying at over three times the rate of white men.  

Montgomery, AL: Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, 2021? 18p.