Library

In An American Travesty: Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending Zimring argues that Megan’s Laws and other responses to these youths are based on certain assumptions about adult sex offenders—assumptions that don’t apply to adolescents. He finds there has been virtually no scholarly literature or research on the topic of adolescent sex offending: few scientific studies of sexual misconduct among children and adolescents, no rigorous assessments of strategies that address it, no dialogue among legal scholars or judges. Zimring’s book organizes the knowledge that does exist and considers the implications for policy and for further research—“a down payment on the debt scholarship owes the topic.”

Entries covering the relevant statute(s), age of consent, definitions, defenses, and penalty regarding the sexual exploitation of minors are provided.

State requirements for the registration of adult sex offenders are compiled and presented. Responses (if given) are reported for: registrable offenses; whether those individuals convicted of staff sexual misconduct need to register; information maintained in sex offender registry; community notification and website; limitations on residency or employment; and duration of registration.

Map of applicable regions for sex offender registration for staff sexual misconduct.

This document provides information regarding enacting state, statute number, statute title, coverage, definition and notes, penalties, and defenses (if given) for criminal laws prohibiting sexual abuse of inmates by staff.

Map of applicable regions.

Description: Map of applicable regions.

Description: "Information regarding state laws that prohibit sexual abuse of offenders is presented. Data provided (if available) includes: statutes; coverage of all forms of sexual misconduct; agency coverage related to secure confinement facilities, community corrections, juvenile, and private; personnel coverage related to correctional employees, volunteers, juvenile workers, and contractors; defenses; and penalties”

Description: This survey collects statutes that address vulnerable persons in all fifty states and the surrounding territories. The chart includes information on all of the statutes that specifically deal with vulnerable persons, as well coverage, definitions, penalties, and the statute’s applicability to youth in custodial settings.

This map indicates which state correctional staff are named as mandatory reporters in State Adult Mandatory Reporting Laws.

Map of applicable regions.

Summarizes state requirements for the registration of adult sex offenders are compiled and presented. Responses (if given) are reported for: registrable offenses; whether those individuals convicted of staff sexual misconduct need to register; information maintained in sex offender registry; community notification and website; limitations on residency or employment; and duration of registration.

Map of applicable regions.

At the time this paper was written, in 2006, California’s prison system was operating at 194% capacity and was in drastic need of reform. With the failure of the executive and legislative branches to ameliorate the growing problems, California’s judges took action and mandated sweeping reforms through their judicial decisions. This paper seeks to explore why California’s judges continue to take on this role of activism. First, the major cases that impacted the adult prison system from 1995-2005 are reviewed. Next, the paper explores national trends to determine whether or not California is an anomaly. Based on a review of the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996’s impact on prisoner litigation and the judicial trends in New York, Florida, and Texas, the conclusion was that California is, in fact, an anomaly. Accordingly, the paper identifies three factors as the most significant drivers of California’s judicial activism: the existence of the Prison Law Office; the personal influence of Judge Thelton E. Henderson; and California’s unique political climate. Finally, this paper concludes by identifying the policy implications of a judiciary-dependent path toward prison reform.

“Public law litigation”—civil rights advocacy seeking to restructure public agencies—changed course beginning in the mid-1970s. It has moved away from remedial intervention modeled on command-and-control bureaucracy toward a kind of intervention that can be called “experimentalist.” Instead of top-down, fixed-rule regimes, the experimentalist approach emphasizes ongoing stakeholder negotiation, continuously revised performance measures, and transparency. Experimentalism is evident in all the principal areas of public law intervention—schools, mental health institutions, prisons, police, and public housing. This development has been substantially unanticipated and unnoticed by both advocates and critics of public law litigation. In this article, the emergence of the experimentalist model is described, and it is argued that it moots many common criticisms of public law litigation. Further suggested is that it implies answers to some prominent doctrinal issues, including the limits on judicial discretion in enforcing public law rights and the constraints entailed by separation-of-Rowers norms. The interpretation understands public law cases as core instances of “destabilization rights”—rights to disentrench an institution that has systematically failed to meet its obligations and remains immune to traditional forces of political correction. It suggests reasons why judicial recognition and enforcement of such rights might be both effective in inducing better compliance with legal obligations and consistent with our structure of government.

In 1972, a Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) “inmate David Ruiz filed a hand-written lawsuit against [TDC], which was destined to become the most far-reaching prison conditions litigation in American history.” TDC was largely unaccountable; it was invisible to the general public and even to the rest of the state government. One of the many profound changes to TDC's successor agency, as a result of the Ruiz litigation, is a high degree of visibility, accountability, and concomitantly, fairly sophisticated methods of internal monitoring for accountability. This article is intended to highlight those methods, demonstrating how one professionally operated prison system detects and addresses problems and risks.

In 1995, prison and jail inmates brought about 40,000 new lawsuits in federal court—nearly one-fifth of the federal civil docket. Court records evidence a success rate for inmate plaintiffs under 15%. These statistics highlight two qualities long associated with the inmate docket: its volume and the low rate of plaintiffs’ success. Then, in 1996, Congress enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), which dramatically altered the litigation landscape, restricting inmates’ access to federal court in a variety of ways. This article examines inmate litigation before and after the PLRA. Looking first at the litigation process itself, it brings together prior research, the results of new quantitative analysis of a comprehensive database of federal district court cases, and interviews and other qualitative inquiry. The article canvasses filing trends, subject matter, and settled and litigated outcomes, exploring what is happening in each of these areas and why. Then it uses a variety of analytic tools to uncover and assess the PLRA’s impact. Most obviously, the PLRA has shrunk the number of new federal filings by inmates by over 40%, notwithstanding a large increase in the affected incarcerated population. Simultaneously, the statute seems to be making even constitutionally meritorious cases harder both to bring and to win. Finally, the article looks beyond federal courthouses to the ways litigation affects jail and prison operations. Specifically, it explores agencies’ efforts to respond efficiently to the high-volume, low-probability docket and to reduce their liability exposure, and offers some tentative observations about the PLRA’s likely impact on these efforts. The article suggests in conclusion that use of the PLRA as a model for broader litigation reforms should proceed with enormous caution given the statute’s problematic effects.