This just in:
The Indiana Tech Law School will hold its Fourth Annual Symposium on the pressing issue of the prison industrial complex, and specifically the role of private prisons in mass incarceration. The symposium, titled Private Prisons: The Corporatization of Criminal Justice and the New Marketplace for Crime, will seek to contextualize the criminal justice system against the backdrop of the for-profit prison system, particularly the system’s reliance upon high rates of incarceration to sustain its business model.
The symposium seeks to address a broad range of questions, including how the profit-motive of private prisons influences the length and severity of sentences and availability of parole, how private prisons and mass incarceration disproportionately impact communities of color, and how private prisons contribute to social inequality and oppression. The United States imprisons more people, both per capita and in absolute terms, than any other nation in the world. Since the 1980’s, the government has increasingly turned to private corporations to build, maintain, and operate prisons to house the burgeoning prison population. This unprecedented level of incarceration by for-profit corporations has important implications for law and policy, not only in the context of criminal justice but also in immigration detainment and deportation matters. Currently, for- profit prisons detain 6% of state prisoners, 16% of federal prisoners, and nearly half of all immigrants detained for documentation status. The private prison system raises issues that touch upon criminal sentencing, immigration policy, the legitimacy of delegating carceral policy to the private sector, and fundamental liberty guarantees under the Fourteenth Amendment.
We seek papers that will contribute to the important dialogue about the legal system’s responsibility for both producing and correcting these outcomes. Papers accepted for the symposium will be published in a special symposium edition of the Indiana Tech Law Review.
Workshop Contacts: andré douglas pond cummings ([email protected]), Adam Lamparello ([email protected]) and Yvonne Lindgren ([email protected])
Submission procedure: Email a proposal of up to 500 words as a Word or PDF document by May 1, 2016. Please include your name, institution, and contact information in the proposal and submit it via email to Lydia LaMont ([email protected]) with the subject line “Symposium Call for Papers.” Decisions will be made by June 1st and working paper drafts are due by October 15th.
Symposium Details: The Symposium will be held at Indiana Tech Law School in Fort Wayne, Indiana on November 11, 2016. The program will consist of panel discussions and a keynote address. Dinner will precede the panel presentations on Thursday evening.
Comments