This Essay investigates Chicago city-government policy responses to the four largest homicide waves in its history: 1920–1925, 1966–1970, 1987–1992, and 2016. Through spatial and historical methods, we discover that Chicago police and the mayor’s office misused data to advance agendas conceived prior to the start of the homicide waves.
We describe and apply three empirical approaches to identify superfluous police activity, unjustified racially disparate impacts, and limits to regulatory interventions.
This Essay explores police practices that marginalize Black people by limiting their freedom of movement across the spaces of Black neighborhoods.
In this Essay, I argue that, in urban metros like Chicago, poor Black children are victims of not just gun violence but also the structural violence of systemic educational stratification.
This article proceeds by engaging the critical reflections, writing, organizing, and imaginative visions of contemporary abolitionists who are confronting the sources of violence by building solidaristic and equitable economic alternatives, proliferating peaceful and constructive approaches to violence that do not rely on militarized criminal law enforcement, working to reallocate resources from militarism toward human flourishing, and to commence a just transition to more environmentally sustainable forms of organizing human life on earth.
Twenty years ago, Professor William Stuntz wrote an arti-cle, The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law, that has become a classic of the field. His thesis was that criminal law is beset by political problems (mostly collusive incentives) that cause it to steadily expand, with ever more statutes criminalizing ever more conduct, and punishing more harshly as well.
The last several years have seen “a truly astounding” and “unprecedented” outpouring of scholarship and commentary decrying the large number of individuals held in pretrial detention, measuring the negative social consequences of such detention, and debating what to do about it.
In 2020, the U.S. federal government carried out ten exe-cutions, more than in any year since 1896. In a single week in January 2021, it carried out three more.
