Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In recent years, the State of New York has been moving in the direction of evidence-based practices in sentencing and corrections. In 2004, New York was one of eight states selected to participate in the National Institute of Corrections’ Transition from Prison to the Community Initiative (TPC), which provided the opportunity to develop re-entry programming that conforms to national best practices. More recently, the New York State Division of Parole has shown interest in applying evidence-based practices to their system, and more specifically, in the area of graduated sanctions for parole violators. At their request, the Vera Institute of Justice conducted a study of parole violators to help inform the development of such a system in New York. Vera researchers conducted quantitative and qualitative analysis to answer four main research questions: 1) what are the risk factors for different types of parole violations; 2) what are the main influences on the type of sanctions parole violators receive; 3) how can violations be prevented; and 4) for whom are graduated sanctions appropriate? These questions were addressed through logistic and survival analysis of administrative parole data, as well as qualitative interviews with parolees and parole officers. This presentation will highlight the main findings with respect to these four questions, along with the policy recommendations and the subsequent steps taken by parole toward the development of graduated sanctions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: An ongoing debate within the field of criminal justice is whether criminal justice officials should be allowed or encouraged to exercise their personal discretion in dealing with an accused offender who violates the terms of release. In 2003, the American Probation and Parole Association (APPA) members were surveyed to discover variations in decision making among community corrections officers. Survey respondents, all of whom were either line level officers or middle managers, were presented scenarios and questions in which they were asked if they would initiate formal action against a violator. This paper discusses the results of the survey and examines background factors (such as gender, ethnicity, years of experience, geographic location and other factors) that contribute to the decision as to whether to initiate formal proceedings.

Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: Although an increasing number of women are being released on parole, little is known about their experiences while on community supervision, especially with respect to technical violations. Technical violations pose a unique problem and dilemma for many parole departments in their supervision of parolees. The current study compares the experiences of male and female parolees while on community supervision. A primary focus of this analysis examines differences in parole violations such as the number of violations, the type of violations, and the parole department’s response to these violations. This type of analysis provides additional insight as to whether there are possible gender-specific needs for women offenders.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines a new attempt to make U.S. corporations accountable for their complicity in human rights violations occurring abroad by using the Alien Torts Claims Act (ATCA) in U.S. courts. Although these cases have yet to be resolved, a preliminary analysis shows that powerful actors from the state and the business community have come together to oppose this use of the ATCA, commonly invoking free-market rhetoric. Furthermore, the ATCA cases allow us to look into a novel, legal approach to affecting human rights in a global world.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The photographic exhibition of Abu Ghraib as a state of exception—a site constituted by the US liberal democratic state where the permissibility to strip prisoners of various forms of psychic, social and/or corporeal life was integral to the Global War on Terror—raises complicated questions about modes of spectating the suffering of non-American subjects. In examining modalities of viewing the Abu Ghraib photographs released to the American public, this paper considers the role of American cultural fantasies of Muslims and the Middle East in viewing the violated Abu Ghraib prisoners in the photographs. If cultural fantasies play a complex role in structuring intelligibilities, in informing and normalizing the ways subjects see each other, the assumptions subjects implicitly make, the fears and desires subjects have of each other, this paper focuses on those cultural fantasies that contributed to forms of spectatorship that 1) could not register the Abu Ghraib tortures as violations and/or 2) viewed the instrumentality of Abu Ghraib prisoners as permissible and/or justified. The American public fascination with the Abu Ghraib photographs—particularly with their representations of sexual violation—suggests that the photographs are part of a historical genealogical legacy where the public viewing of sexually violated bodies functions as a mechanism that binds collective anxieties raised by racial, gendered and national conflicts. (The public practice of lynching in the US is the first example that comes to mind.) This paper considers correlations between national and transnational scenes of spectatorship, between historical and contemporary mechanisms of viewing violated bodies. The public viewing of the Abu Ghraib photographs also raises difficult questions about forms of pleasure (individual and collective) derived from watching violated bodies. The essay interrogates the role viewing pleasures play in sustaining and (re)producing American geopolitical states of exception like Abu Ghraib; and in how such pleasures affect possibilities for developing ethical forms of witnessing others’ suffering.