Search results

The very contextual nature of most mitigating evidence runs counter to America’s individualistic culture. Prior research has found that capital jurors are unreceptive to most mitigating circumstances, but no research has examined the capital sentencing decisions of trial judges. This study fills that gap through a content analysis of eight judicial sentencing opinions from Delaware. The findings indicate that judges typically dismiss contextualizing evidence in their sentencing opinions and instead focus predominately on the defendant’s culpability. This finding calls into question the ability of guided discretion statutes to ensure the consideration of mitigation and limit arbitrariness in the death penalty.

A central tenet of Progressive era responses to prostitution was the alleged over-representation of white, US-born daughters of foreign parentage in the prostitution population. We detail a statistical error in an influential 1913 study from the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford as an important source of this tenet. Using archival data to more accurately reconstruct the Reformatory population, we find that Black women constituted the only over-represented group, but were all but ignored by reformers. We foreground how ideas about race and immigration informed the social response to prostitution in this period, highlighting the importance of critically analyzing historical sources.

In this chapter, I present narratives of two Black men who represent a population of people who are often talked about but seldom heard from in school-to-prison pipeline research. To analyze their stories, I employed a framework that centers on understanding human dignity and the conditions, circumstances, and experiences that threatened it. I found that their sense of self was eroded by moments of personal loss, disposal, and ways that even well-intentioned people marked them as “problems.” I explore how their eroded sense of self led them to engage in disruptive and destructive behaviors. I conclude by discussing the importance of supplementing school-to-prison pipeline research with Black boys’ and men’s first-hand accounts of their own experiences as a way of humanizing the primary subjects of this burgeoning area of education research.