Browsing by Author "Silva, Lahny"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Community Engagement at its “Best”: A Holistic Approach to Prisoner Reentry
    (Center for Translating Research Into Practice, IU Indianapolis, 2022-10-16) Silva, Lahny
    The 2022 Charles Bantz Community Fellowship was awarded to Lahny Silva, Professor of Law in the IU Robert H. McKinney School of Law. The project “Community Engagement at its “Best”: A Holistic Approach to Prisoner Reentry” is a collaboration between Thomas Ridley’s 1 Like Me, the Martin Luther King Community Center, and the Marion County Prosecutor's Office. The goal of the project is to utilize this collaborative effort in the reentry clinic to reduce recidivism and enhance public safety at a grassroots level in Indianapolis by helping released people from prison successfully navigate reentry related issues.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Trap Chronicles, Vol. 1: How US housing policy impairs criminal justice reform
    (Maryland Law Review, 2021-08-12) Silva, Lahny
    Close to fifty years after President Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration of a War on Drugs, America is attempting to remedy the aftermath. Today, the War is generally considered a failure. Despite all the arrests and prosecutions, the War has been unsuccessful in accomplishing its two touted objectives: eliminating drug trafficking and eliminating drug addiction in the United States. America paid dearly; it was extremely expensive, disproportionately impacted communities of color, and took hundreds of thousands of prisoners. This final cost was highlighted when the “the land of the free” earned the number one spot for having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Recognizing the substantial costs associated with wartime criminal laws and sentencing practices, a criminal justice reform is currently sweeping through legislatures across the country. In the spirit of fair sentencing and second chances, legislatures are commissioning studies of sentencing regimes and modifying criminal penalties with retroactive application. The return of judicial discretion with the United Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Booker now allows punishments that deviate from otherwise strict determinate criminal sentences. And clemency is making a comeback, with both Presidents Obama and Trump utilizing the executive power to commute overly punitive terms of imprisonment. Over 100 days into his administration, President Biden has not yet made his views clear on clemency. Ex-offender reentry as a substantive and procedural legal issue is now considered a legitimate legislative concern, with Congress putting federal dollars behind evidence-based programs proven to reduce recidivism. States are following suit. Although this is a positive step in undoing decades of ineffective policy, other areas of law impacted by the Drug War must also be reviewed and modified if the damage caused is to be truly rectified. Wartime legislation contributed to the proliferation of not only criminal statutes and sanctions, but also numerous civil penalties associated with drug-related suspicion and/or conviction. Drug war policies bled over into civil and administrative areas of law, manifesting in rules that work as a form of further government control—wreaking havoc on poor, mostly minority communities that already absorbed the bulk of the War’s attacks on the criminal front. Commonly referred to as the “collateral consequences of conviction” in the academic literature, these civil statutes and administrative regulations are pervasive and pernicious, hindering the transition from prison to society. Collateral consequences affect almost every part of one’s life: areas that are essential to productive citizenship and socio-economic stability. As the War seems to be winding down on the criminal front, other rules continue to endure and serve as the predicate for intensive regulation and exclusion in civil and administrative matters such as voting, employment, and housing. This Article contributes to the existing scholarship on the War on Drugs, collateral consequences, and offender reentry by reviewing federal criminal and housing laws in the aftermath of redemptive rhetoric that has been employed to pronounce a retreat from the War. It applies drug war criticisms to federal housing policy and argues that the ideological shift away from “tough on crime” to “second chances” in the criminal context must be extended to national housing policy. I argue that wartime costs associated with criminal law are mimicked in the federal housing policy context, a battleground during the War on Drugs. More specifically, I argue that with wartime policy deeply penetrating the national housing agenda, the drug laws continue to serve as a justification to inflict socio-economic violence on targeted groups. This violence takes the form of intensive regulation in federal housing programs and operates as an additional layer of criminalization and social control on an already powerless group. In neglecting to review wartime policies beyond the criminal law, this Article contends that policymakers are creating an ideological schism that has manifested in an inconsistent legislative agenda. There are thus two systems: one where prisoners of the War are to be viewed as redeemed and worthy of a second chance, and the other where prisoners of the War continue to be demonized and excluded from mainstream society. In the criminal context, the government is pivoting from taking people out of their communities and incarcerating them to now releasing the legislative pressure valves to open the prison gates and release prisoners of the War. The question is: Where will they all live? Housing is identified as the primary barrier for those reintegrating. During this reform movement, legislators are overlooking collateral consequences affecting housing prospects for criminal justice-involved individuals, especially drug offenders, thus continuing the War on the civil front. This Article reasons that the next natural step in the retreat from the War’s policies is to review and modify Drug War legislation that transcends criminal law. This is a necessity if the proclaimed political promise of a second chance is to be truly fulfilled. If it is not, then the redemptive rhetoric is nothing but a trap—a political ploy used to pander to public opinion on the criminal justice front, while laying cover to the grave legislative mistakes made in the shadows on the civil front during the War.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Trap Chronicles, Vol. 2: A call to reconsider 'risk' in federal supervised release
    (Maryland Law Review, 2022-07-27) Silva, Lahny
    Correctional supervision is one of the biggest traps in the criminal justice system. The current system involves a complicated web of vague statutes and amorphous rules set on shaky ideological ground. At last count, close to 4 million people, or 1 in 66, were under some form of state or federal supervision in the United States. This is an improvement from 1 in 31. And like most matters in criminal justice, race plays a correlative role with Black adults four times more likely as their White counterparts to be under correctional control and close to ten percent of the African American population under some form of supervision. While the War on Drugs is infamous for the institution of harsh sentences for drug offenders and the consequent mass incarceration of millions in American prisons, scant attention is paid in the legal academy to the battles waged in the nether land of correctional supervision. The irony is that the biggest explosion during the War was not in the prisons. Instead, it was in post-imprisonment supervision, a massive component of the federal carceral state, where the most pernicious bombs were detonated. The rules and regulations enacted during the War created a post-imprisonment structure that continues to keep prisoners hostage after release – under continued correctional surveillance with the threat of re-incarceration constantly looming. As we enter a new era in criminal justice, it is critical that we include correctional supervision in our reform discussions. This Article hopes to encourage a fresh socio-legal frame to examine the current rules and policies. More specifically, this paper aims to inform decision-makers about the structural condition of supervised release and offer alternatives to current models and practices. In an era of criminal justice reform, legal academics have an opportunity to make a significant contribution by reviewing current rules and offering solutions based on sound theory and recent data. Evidence of this type often comes from other disciplines, such as criminology, sociology, and psychology, and should be considered by decision-makers when crafting rules and making policy choices. Such interdisciplinary cross pollination allows for the creation of legal rules based on comprehensive and often more current data as opposed to policies based on wartime theory and dated models of supervision. In doing so, we should reflect on the theoretical foundations of supervision with an aim towards creating a firmer frame and improve our practices. This paper focuses solely on the system of federal supervised release. The decision to concentrate on this form of correctional supervision was chosen for a myriad of reasons. First, federal legislation often prompts state legislation and regularly serves as the legislative model at the state and local levels. This is particularly true of criminal justice policy over the past forty years, and specifically with origin and evolution of supervision in America. And although much of the discussion applies to supervision practices in a general sense, the need to focus on one specific supervision approach was critical to an extensive case study examination. Second, federal supervised release is now the dominant form of federal supervision. In the federal system, probation and supervised release are governed by the same statutory and regulatory rules and share the same purpose (public safety and rehabilitation) but are imposed for different reasons. At the federal level, probation is currently a criminal sentence reserved for low level offenders, while supervised release is imposed in addition to a prison sentence. During the War on Drugs, the imposition of probation decreased significantly, while supervised release was imposed regularly. Finally, I selected federal supervised release because my reentry clinic works with individuals on federal supervised release. This paper is dedicated to them.