Flow chart showing the U.S. spends $445 billion on mass incarceration each year.
Happy Tax Day. Just a reminder, as you potentially owe Uncle Sam: Mass incarceration costs the U.S. $445 billion every single year.
ICE just released new detention statistics. First update in about 2 months.
As of April 4, 2026, ICE was detaining 60,311 people across the United States.
www.ice.gov/detain/deten...
Tomorrow we’re covering conspiracy, which means introducing the students to The Wire and one of the greatest moments in the series
CHIEF JUSTICE TODD OPINION No. 3 WAP 2024 Appeal from the Order of the Superior Court entered June 13, 2023, at No. 1008 WDA 2021, Affirming the Order of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County entered December 19, 2016, at No. CP-02-CR-0016878-2014. : : : : : : : : : : : ARGUED: October 8, 2024 DECIDED: MARCH 26, 2026 In this appeal by allowance, we granted allocatur to consider whether a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a felony murder conviction violates the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution or Article I, Section 13 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.1 For the reasons that follow, we determine that a mandatory life without parole sentence for all felony murder convictions, absent an assessment of culpability, is inconsistent with the protections bestowed upon our citizens
under the “cruel punishments” clause of our Commonwealth’s organic charter.2 Thus, we reverse the order of the Superior Court, vacate Appellant’s judgment of sentence, and remand for resentencing. However, as we have done under similar circumstances, we stay our order for 120 days to provide a reasonable amount of time for the General Assembly to consider remedial measures.
BREAKING: The PA Supreme Court holds that mandatory life without parole sentences for all "felony murder" convictions -- a sentence more than 1,000 people in PA are serving -- violates the state constitution's "cruel" punishment ban. This is GROUNDBREAKING: www.pacourts.us/assets/opini...
96-year old Dolores Huerta made a gutting confession today. She deserves to be heard in her own words.
Even the most righteous movements find ways to make space for misogyny. medium.com/@dolores_hue...
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Book launch day! “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self Surveillance” is out.
Bluesky friends, I would be so grateful if you would buy a copy. And if you can’t afford it, could you at least share this announcement. Thank you. #BookSky
politics-prose.com/search?q=You...
People on awards shows don't "make it political." The world is political. Our lives are political. Our choices are political. The only decision is whether to acknowledge it.
A tweet that reads “The new academic wealth gap isn't your university. It's not even your advisor's connections. It's who knows Claude can turn 50+ research papers into a thesis chapter in 3 hours and who's still manually coding qualitative data. I just watched a sociology PhD skip 8 weeks of analysis. Here are the 9 prompts they used:”
fuck this so much
we are so not prepared for the mountain of dogshit “scholarship” about to flood journals everywhere
SCOOP: Federal judiciary approves new Supreme Court defender office to help represent indigent defendants at #SCOTUS.
Its full-time director will serve as a counterweight to the U.S. solicitor general in federal criminal cases. The first will be former Kagan clerk and SG atty Ashley Robertson.
There are some (rare) law review pieces that I click into and then find myself unable to stop reading. This was one of them! Highly recommend everyone read it!!
An important introduction to the rationale and risks of using AI and big data in higher education, including novel applications for improving educational practice.
sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-...
Excited to share this work soon! Forthcoming June 2026 @sunypress.bsky.social
sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-...
The symposium editor and students of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review deserve every bit of praise for the Symposium's success. Stay tuned for all the incredible scholarship!
As an education law and policing scholar, I often rely on the stories and impact of the Little Rock Nine. To sit on a panel about the future of juvenile law through education, healing, and accountability a few miles from Little Rock Central High School was an out of body experience.
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending & speaking at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Bowen School of Law 2026 Symposium: Rethinking Juvenile Law Through Education and Trauma.
I presented my forthcoming article, Rethinking the School-Prison Nexus, which will be available on SSRN soon.
Florida v. Jardines, as painted by Xavier Cortada
When visiting FIU last week for a workshop (shoutout to @vanessamiller.bsky.social), I saw Xavier Cortada's "May It Please the Court" series of paintings of Florida-related U.S. Supreme Court cases, which I didn't know about. His depiction of Jardines is quite striking.
cortada.com/art2021/pain...
Congratulations!!
Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”
GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn
Likewise, many of the folks coming after Ivy League schools went to Ivy League schools. The hypocrisy suggests they believe only they and people who think like them should be considered smart or should have the access to what they thought were private clubs.
They beat a blind refugee who speaks no English for failing to obey police commands he could not understand. Then instead of apologizing, they charged him with possession of a “weapon”—HIS WALKING STICK. Then they dumped him miles from home without notifying anyone, after which he was found dead.
Students walk around Robert Manning Strozier Library at Florida State University
Florida Hands Down Sociology Curriculum to State Colleges
The sociology curriculum is likely just the state’s first foray into course development; the Florida Department of Education is already working on a similar framework for American history classes. https://bit.ly/4s6gkQj
#EDUSky #AcademicSky
ICYMI, Rice University students have developed a free online map to track ICE activity throughout the country.
Find it here: www.icemap.dev.
Gift link to @houstonchronicle.com story about it:
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston...
Newly released records show a U.S. citizen was shot and killed in Texas by a federal immigration agent last year during a late-night traffic encounter that was not publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security.
Working on Restoring Justice kept me grounded this past year, so I share it w/ excitement & some nervousness.
Written w/ Meredith Elizalde, whose son Nick was killed in a shooting at his high school, we argue for a right to restorative justice.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
If you were hoping for some sort of overt political statement: see the literal plantation Benito created to perform in.
That critique of the government extracting resources from PR. The power poles.
Writing currently feeling like the second heavy rep: pushing through 🥲
Abstract Once an exclusively white enterprise, the last forty-five years have witnessed the emergence of a disproportionately Latinx immigration law enforcement workforce. This article addresses the question of why Latinxs elect to work for agencies that have systematically targeted the ethnic communities to which they belong. Where existing scholarship has often implied Latinxs may self-select into immigration law enforcement due to a lack of identification with the immigrant-experience, a dissociation with ethnic identity, and generally restrictionist immigration attitudes, this article finds little empirical evidence to support such an assumption. Analysis of interviews with sixty-one Latinx Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents across Arizona, California, and Texas reveals, instead, Latinxs elect to work in immigration law enforcement in service of economic self-interest and survival, with “money,” “a good job,” and “benefits” cited as the primary motivation(s) behind applying for and accepting a job in immigration. This pattern holds irrespective of individual agents’ levels of identification with the immigrant-experience and particular attitudes toward immigration, and suggests a diversity in the demographics of immigration law enforcement agencies that extends beyond mere race and ethnicity, to include a diversity of perspective and potential for empathy.
Probably a day to promote this research from David Cortez. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
