Criminology

This webinar features K-Sue Park, professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Her scholarship examines the creation of the American real estate system and the historical connections between property law, immigration law, and American Indian Law. Previously, she was the Critical Race Studies Fellow at UCLA School of Law and an Equal Justice Works Fellow and staff attorney in El Paso. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her Ph.D. in rhetoric from UC Berkeley.

Have questions? Please reach out to the DJSS Committee: Dr. Lee Cabatingan (lcabatin@uci.edu), Dr. Amanda Geller (agellers@uci.edu), and Juan R. Sandoval (jrsando1@uci.edu)

 Presented by UCI Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Criminology, Law & Society, Lillian T. Jungleib.

Police use of force continues to be a problem, and communities across the nation are demanding reform that includes providing police with less violent tools and tactics. One option that is becoming popular is for law enforcement to collaborate with paramedics to use chemical restraints – drugs typically used in hospital settings to calm agitated patients – to subdue people detained by the police. While injecting people with sedatives might seem harmless, there are increasing reports that using chemical restraints in this manner is leading to significant injury and death.
What are the constitutional limits on medical professionals who ostensibly use “force” as part of a police seizure, albeit with drugs rather than guns or chokeholds? Does the use of sedatives by paramedics in pre-hospital settings that leads to physical harm or death constitute excessive force that violates the Fourth Amendment? This talk will explore these questions and offer legal and policy frameworks for police/paramedic partnerships that centers the health and safety of community members rather than the needs or convenience of law enforcement.

Drawing on ethnographic research at a halfway house for men leaving prison and jail, this paper examines the experience of three residents who accept program mandates and identify as "in-recovery" - but often reject the associated practices when away from official surveillance. The men use recovery less as a program of drug abstinence then a flexible resource for reintegrating to a hostile social order. Differences in practice emerge from distinct locations in a racialized structure of opportunities: white resident Paul Barry juggles conflicting demands on his time from the program and the factory where he  works by defining paid work as itself a form of recovery, black resident Tim Williams looks to recovery as a mobility pathway and chance to overcome racial barriers to employment, and Puerto Rican resident Joe Badillo becomes a cultural broker between the neighborhood street scene and a white program administration. At a time when prisoner reentry is increasingly governed by logics of coercive drug treatment, the paper traces the interplay of structure and agency as people navigating these systems make sense of recovery while trying to reintegrate to a postindustrial urban landscape.

Digitization of public records means criminal records have a broader dissemination than ever before. Data brokers and websites have capitalized on this massive set of records, duplicating and disseminating them across the Internet. At the same time, states have increasingly been adopting “clean slate” policies to expand criminal record sealing and expungement. Using empirical data from New Jersey, this presentation discusses the difficulties of expunging a record in the digital age and offers possibilities for policy reform. 

Sarah Lageson is an Assistant Professor at the Rutgers University-Newark School of Criminal Justice. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2015. She studies public access to criminal justice data, error in criminal record databases, and associated issues with punishment, Constitutional rights, and inequality. Sarah’s current research examines the growth of online crime data that remains publicly available, creating new forms of “digital punishment."

Lunch will be served.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Criminology, Law & Society and the Center in Law, Society & Culture

The series highlights scholars who study issues of social justice from an innovative and diverse perspective characterized by novel theoretical advances, new methodological approaches, or research on underrepresented groups. 

Light refreshments will be provided.

Newkirk Alumni Center
5:00 pm Program

5:00 – 5:15 Introduction
Simon A. Cole, Director, Newkirk Center for Science & Society

5:15 – 5:30 Research
David Bjerk, Russell S. Bock Chair of Public Economics and Taxation, Claremont McKenna College, “Race and Wrongful Convictions”

5:30 – 6:15 Storytelling
Edward Humes, Pulitzer Prize and PEN award-winning author will talk about his new book BURNED: A Story of Murder and the Crime that Wasn’t (Dutton: January 8, 2019), a chilling and vivid narrative
of a 30-year-old arson-murder conviction now being reopened as the science behind it is challenged as mere guesswork
Click here for more information on "Burned" and Edward Humes.

6:15 – 7:00 Exoneration
Exonerees Anna Vazquez and Elizabeth Ramirez, two of the “San Antonio Four,” will answer questions about Southwest of Salem.

"The case against Larry Nassar: A survivor and trial attorney’s perspective," featuring a discussion with John Manly, partner at Manly, Stewart and Finaldi, and Jeanette Antolin, a former American artistic gymnast and member of the US national team from 1995-2000. You can read more about the speakers here.

Within the last year, multiple states have moved to limit or even abolish the use of long-term solitary confinement in prison, the federal government has piloted programs to restore Pell grants to prisoners to provide financial support for education, and Congress passed the First Step Act to reform federal sentencing laws. What motivated these reforms, what do they actually mean for people in prison, and, most importantly, how will they affect us as citizens, neighbors, and taxpayers?

Join the Social Ecology ChangeMakers and Professor Keramet Reiter as she discusses prison reform in the United States, and California especially.