Life After Commutation:
Reentry in the Trump Era
Geneva Brown,
Valparaiso University Law school
The U.S. has
the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Therefore, it also has the
largest population reentering back into society. The Obama administration
sought to reduce the prison pipeline by Attorney General Eric Holder issuing a
series of memos addressing sentencing philosophy. The Obama administration
acknowledged the problem of mass incarceration and sought to remedy its effect.
The
administration also implemented the Clemency Project to review offenders who
received life and long-term sentences. We at Valpo became part of the project
and submitted six clemency applications. We then had four clients granted
clemency. These clients were serving life sentences
My clients
were released into a changing political environment. The approach to criminal law
and mass incarceration from Obama to Trump is striking. Attorney General
Sessions revoked 25 memos of the Holder era. I have very little hope that the
Trump administration will put reentry programs in place to assist in their
reentry. My goal is to contact the four clients I represented to see how their
adjustment to society is going. I will profile each client with their
permission and see how they have fared since release.
The Trafficking Jam
Julie
Dahlstrom, Boston University School of Law
Since 2000, the crime of human trafficking in the United
States has expanded its scope through legislation and legal interpretation. In
the context of sex trafficking, in particular, various actors, ranging buyers
of sex, commercial sex websites, credit card companies, and hotels, have been
caught in the anti-trafficking crosshairs. This development has certain
positive features, as it marshals new energy and focus against a diverse array
of conduct associated with human trafficking. However, as the definition of
trafficking expands, it necessarily overlaps with—and potentially conflicts
with—other definitional frameworks and prosecutorial approaches. This trend has created a rhetorical and
doctrinal “trafficking jam” in need of attention.
This article examines one recent example of this
trafficking jam: the legislative expansion of human trafficking to include
buyers of sex with children. This new re-conceptualization of buyers of sex
with children as “human traffickers” has achieved moderate success. However, many
states and localities continue to use other conceptual frameworks—some
venerable, some new—to define the crime and shape enforcement efforts. This
article examines these alternative frameworks and suggests that they may offer
important, more general lessons to inform the emerging human trafficking
framework.