This article traces different forms of the same present throughout several eras in American political and social history. I focus on two texts, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, and Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in order to examine slavery as a legal institution in the United States, and, in particular, the constitutionality of slavery. Rather than a massive contradiction, the Dred Scott decision is just another iteration of American political and racial philosophy as it was 100, even 200 years earlier. Taney’s opinion is a reflection of what the Lockean social contract came to look like in a racially hierarchized, colonial society. The Dred Scott decision paints one of the most accurate pictures of American political thought but is always written off as nothing but bad law. A close examination of race and social contract theory as they influenced the American Constitution gives insight into more productive ways to talk about race today.

Abstract The ultimate goal in the South was to end segregation, but nationwide equal-rights were the common goal of all African-Americans. Nonviolent protests and over aggressive police departments became the norm within the African-American community. Understated in the history of the Civil Rights Era is the role of armed resistance and Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, and Malcolm X were Black Nationalists that led the charge of Black Nationalism worldwide. The Deacons of Defense, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense transformed the social makeup of the country and became major causes of the militarization of police departments across the United States. Many police departments across America began to create SWAT teams and use military-style weaponry following an outbreak of riots and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In New Orleans, Louisiana, stand-offs and shoot-outs with Black Panther members warranted a call for military backup, but it was the acts of Mark James Robert Essex that totally militarized the New Orleans Police Department.

This thesis examines how Jews of the Ottoman Empire responded to newfound opportunities that emerged across the domains of the late Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century due to the Ottoman bureaucratic reforms (Tanzimat). It challenges the discourses that argue that Jews engaged probing issues such as nationalism in a monolithic fashion. Rather, Sephardi and Arab Jews, based on socioeconomic status and geographic location in the Empire approached questions of affiliation with the Empire or attachment to new forms of nationalism based on divergent structures that informed their lives and personal political choices. This project explores the main avenues that Jews in the Ottoman world used to approach questions that animated the public discourse not just of Jews, but of peoples across the globe who struggled to find new avenues for belonging in shifting geopolitical terrains. For Jewish communities in the Ottoman world, four dominant avenues and attitudes emerged: traditionalists who desired to maintain the status quo; those who sought an Ottoman or Turkish Republican future; Sephardi Zionists who believed they were integral to Ottoman communal history; provincial nationalists who agitated for distinct regional identities. The thesis also briefly examines the Armenian millet’s socio-political situation during the nineteenth and twentieth century in order to show the ways in which the Jewish millet was both in tandem with broader nationalist discourses but were also less cohesively politically organized than other millets in the Empire.

Juvenile justice reforms in America today closely resemble the ones that occurred over a century ago. The reforms of both eras aim to separate juveniles from adults and emphasize rehabilitation over punishment. Why is policy repeating itself? In search of an answer, I look to a monumental series of liberal Supreme Court decisions made in the 1960s that constituted what is now known as the Civil Rights Era’s “due process revolution.” In these cases, the Supreme Court provided juveniles with procedural protections in attempt to prevent the manifestation of racial bias in the juvenile court. It is commonly agreed upon that the due process revolution failed in its mission to protect minority youth. However, scholars are divided on why it failed. Some claim that states simply did not implement the protections properly. Others argue that a conservative backlash obstructed their proper implementation. In this thesis, I put forth that the decisions themselves — specifically, Kent v. United States and In Re Gault — criminalized youth by mistakenly presuming that racism could be regulated out of the court by enhanced procedures of due process. The liberal decisions made in Kent and Gault ultimately paved the way for the conservative carceral agenda of the late twentieth century and subjected minority youth to unprecedented punitive policy. I refer to Naomi Murakawa’s “racial innocence” theory to illuminate this interpretation of events and suggest that communities look inwards for alternatives to institutional reform.

Assessing the effect of race on crime is an important topic of criminology and criminal justice research. Prior investigations have sought to uncover if racial disparities exist within certain aspects of the criminal justice system, such as arrests, trials, and sentencing. The existing scholarship, however, has largely focused on assessing differences between Black and Hispanic offenders in relation to White offenders. There has been little academic exploration to examine if racial disparities exist among American Indian offenders during criminal justice processing. To address this gap in knowledge, this study analyzes data collected from the United States Sentencing Commission to assess if American Indians receive different sentencing outcomes, when compared to other racial groups. The findings from a series of binary logistic and ordinary least square regression analyses suggest that American Indians are sentenced to prison more often than White, Black, and Hispanic offenders, but receive similar sentence lengths compared to Whites and shorter sentence lengths compared to Blacks and Hispanics. The implications of these results are discussed.

Inspired by words of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in California and Denmark, this thesis critically analyzes the American criminal justice system and asks if critiques of the institution can be addressed and improved through the implementation of kindness and compassion within the walls of prison, itself.

This research produces original empirical estimates of Hispanics in Florida’s Dept. of Corrections (FDOC) and uses those estimates to measure the impact felony disenfranchisement is having on Hispanics in Florida. Research institutions find that data on Hispanics in the criminal justice system, particularly in Florida, is either lacking or inaccurate. This research addresses this problem by applying an optimal surname list method using Census Bureau data and Bayes Theorem to produce an empirical estimate of Hispanics in FDOC’s data. Using the Hispanic rate derived from the empirical FDOC analysis, the rate of Hispanics in the disenfranchised population is estimated. The results reveal that FDOC systematically undercounts Hispanics (and overcounts Whites) by nearly 8 percent—i.e., there are over 2.5 times more Hispanics in FDOC data than actually reported by FDOC. However, even when applying the upward adjusted rate of Hispanics to the disenfranchised population, Hispanics are still underrepresented and less likely to be disenfranchised than their White and Black counterparts in Florida. This research provides an accurate up-to-date state of the data with respect to Hispanics in FDOC; it applies a surname method which other researchers can use to address lacking or inaccurate data on Hispanics in the criminal justice system; and it calls into question research that relies on FDOC’s inaccurate race data. Taken together, these findings might facilitate answers to many pressing questions on felony disenfranchisement in Florida and its impact on the political process.

This research study analyzes whether or not there is any relationship between sentencing and conviction and certain defendant characteristics in the US legal system. In the midst of a time where the nation is strongly divided politically, the topic is often the center of research projects and discussions in academic journals. Specifically, this research explores the 3 characteristics- race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Within this article, multiple case studies from other journals are cited in which research and experiments have suggested that these factors do have influence on both whether or not a defendant gets convicted or for how long the defendant is sentenced. With these cases in mind, we try to test the theory for ourselves in a survey experiment amongst college students. The survey tests cases with instances of academic dishonesty in university with the defendant characteristics being manipulated for race, gender, and socioeconomic status. However, the results were inconclusive of any sort of link between those characteristics and the "sentencing" in the study.

In June of 1844, James D. Saules, a black sailor turned farmer living in Oregon's Willamette Valley, was arrested and convicted for allegedly inciting Indians to violence against a settler named Charles E. Pickett. Three years earlier, Saules had deserted the United States Exploring Expedition, married a Chinookan woman, and started a freight business on the Columbia River. Less than two months following Saules' arrest, Oregon's Provisional Government passed its infamous "Lash Law," banning the immigration of free black people to the region. While the government repealed the law in 1845, Oregon passed a territorial black exclusion law in 1849 and included a black exclusion clause in its 1857 state constitution. Oregon's territorial delegate also convinced the U.S. Congress to exclude black people from the 1850 Donation Land Act. In each case, Oregon politicians suggested the legacy of the Saules case by stressing the need to prevent black men, particularly sailors, from coming to Oregon and collaborating with local indigenous groups to commit acts of violence against white settlers. This thesis explains the unusual persistence of black exclusion laws in Oregon by focusing on the life of Saules, both before and after white American settlers came to the region in large numbers. Black exclusion in Oregon was neither an anomalous byproduct of American expansion nor a means to prevent slavery from taking root in the region. Instead, racial exclusion was central to the land-centered settler colonial project in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to the Americanization of the Pacific Northwest, the region was home to a cosmopolitan and increasingly fluid culture that incorporated various local Native groups, exogenous fur industry workers, and missionaries. This was a milieu made possible by colonialism and the rise of merchant capitalism during the Age of Sail, a period which lasted from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This was also likely a world very familiar to Saules, who had spent his entire adult life aboard ships and in various seaports. However, the American immigrants who began arriving in Oregon in the early 1840s sought to dismantle this multiethnic social order, privatize land, and create a homogenous settler society based on classical republican principles. And although Saules was born in the United States, American settlers, emboldened by a racialist ideology, denied most non-whites a place in their settler society. Furthermore, during the early decades of resettlement, white American settlers often felt vulnerable to attacks from the preexisting population. Therefore, many settlers viewed free black men like Saules, a worldly sailor with connections among Native people, as potential threats to the security of their nascent communities.

Disparity in sentencing felons based on racial considerations has long has been considered a problem for civil libertarians and scholars alike. Examining data gathered in Kentucky, this thesis addresses this issue through the application of recently developed methodological techniques. Utilizing an index of sentencing equality, this study shows that while differences do exist in black and white offender offense characteristics, these differences do not account for the variations in sentences rendered in cases of white as opposed to black felons. This exploratory research reviews and critiques previous research and provides evidence which should prove useful in resolving the problem of racial-based sentencing disparity.