This Note will suggest bringing a Fair Housing Act ("FHA") disparate-impact claim to combat aggressive policing practices in New York City Public Housing Authority ("NYCHA") communities. Part I will explore the relationship between policing and public housing communities in New York. It will examine how police officers use high-crime doctrine and trespass law to justify stops of residents and vertical sweeps of buildings. These practices lower community trust and perpetuate the public-housing-to-prison pipeline in New York City. Part II will describe how & sect; 3604(b) of the FHA can be used as a tool to challenge the discriminatory impact of policing on Black and Latino residents in NYCHA communities. It will explore cases where disparate-impact claims addressing aggressive police behavior have been recognized as viable by the Southern District of New York. Part III will examine the requirements of making an FHA disparate-impact claim. This Note suggests that providing evidence to demonstrate statistical proof of disproportionate impact will be the largest challenge for NYCHA plaintiffs in a disparate-impact claim. Although tailored to New York, the recommendations of this Note are relevant to FHA Plaintiffs throughout the country.
If you believe major retailers, the United States is in the midst of a national shoplifting crime wave. Violent gangs rob big box stores, mom-and-pop stores, and pharmacies alike, and in the process, pilfer millions of dollars' worth of merchandise, resell it through online marketplaces, and use their illicit proceeds to fund international terrorist organizations and transnational gangs. The harms, retailers argue, are substantial -because this is not just typical shoplifting. Yet these groups are getting away with it all -because existing criminal statutes are too weak and soft-on-crime prosecutors will not bring cases. This narrative has been hugely influential. National and local media outlets breathlessly cover "smash-and-grab" robberies and credulously report retailers' own statistics about the extent of organized retail crime. And since 2003, federal lawmakers have unsuccessfully pushed for the creation of a federal "organized retail crime" offense, an unprecedented expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction that would empower U.S. Attorneys' offices to brings low-level thefts into federal court. But though these efforts have stalled nationally, in the last two decades, nearly forty states have adopted "organized retail crime" statutes, which create new offenses for repeated thefts done by organized gangs. Yet this narrative, while clearly powerful, is wrong. Retail groups have misrepresented the extent of organized retail crime in the United States -and, under increased scrutiny, were forced to walk back their characterizations and correct their flawed data. And federal and state prosecutors both have ample tools at their disposal for charging organized retail crime. Virtually all conduct undertaken by shoplifting enterprises would easily trigger liability as well as substantial punishments -under existing criminal statutes, and "organized retail crime" statutes would add comparatively little muscle to these laws for most defendants. So far, little scholarly attention has been focused on organized retail crime statutes. This deficiency is stunning at a time when a majority of states now have versions of these statutes in place and Congress is actively considering legislation that would dramatically expand the scope of federal jurisdiction. Accordingly, this Article makes two distinct contributions to existing criminal scholarship. First, I assemble a comprehensive survey of the history, content, and impact of organized retail crime statutes. Second, based on that survey, I argue that retail groups are pulling a bait-and-switch. Organized retail crime statutes will likely be ineffective against their ostensible targets, the groups involved in multi-million-dollar crime rings, yet highly effective against their likely intended targets -low-level shoplifters and reform-minded prosecutors.
Across the United States, carceral economies exploit the labor and resources of incarcerated people -disproportionately Black -for state and corporate profit. Enabled by the Thirteenth Amendment's Punishment Exception Clause, which permits slavery as punishment for a crime, and reinforced by state economic policies that reach far beyond prison walls, these systems siphon wealth from Black communities into government budgets and private industries. They reflect racial capitalism: an economic system in which racism and capitalism operate in tandem to sustain structures of profit and exploitation. Laws and policies at every level entrench this system, ensuring that Black overincarceration continues to fuel a profitable carceral economy. This Article centers state-run prison industries as a core, yet underexamined, engine of carceral capitalism. Using Maryland -which has the nation's highest percentage of Black people in its prison population relative to the state's general population -as a case study, it examines how the state has deliberately designed a prison labor economy. At its center is Maryland Correctional Enterprises (MCE), a state-run program that pays incarcerated workers exploitatively low wages to produce goods and services for state agencies. Maryland law requires state agencies to make purchases from MCE, guaranteeing a market. To sustain this labor force, the state pays low wages and charges inflated prices for necessities, extracting wealth from incarcerated people and perpetuating the very conditions that drive incarceration. Although scholars have long critiqued exploitative prison labor and called for reforms such as repealing the Punishment Exception Clause, raising wages, and extending labor protections to incarcerated workers, this Article argues that such efforts are necessary but insufficient to dismantle the deliberately designed carceral economy that makes exploitative labor possible. It argues that doing so also requires dismantling both the economic logic that hides the true costs of incarceration and the legal architecture that allows exploitation to persist. Building on existing scholarship and drawing insights from Maryland's carceral economy, this Article contends that abolishing state-run prison industries and the economic policies that sustain them is essential to ending exploitive prison labor and advancing the broader abolitionist goal of dismantling the carceral economy. Accordingly, it calls for additional measures: repealing procurement mandates, eliminating authorizing statutes, and advancing abolitionist advocacy that exposes the true costs of incarceration. Together, these strategies confront the legal and economic structures that link incarceration to profit and enable exploitative prison labor and carceral economies to thrive.
"Accountability" can be a political buzzword. But in criminal law, it forms the foundation for punishment and brings a measure of justice for victims. Politicians and legal commentators agree that holding wrongdoers accountable is one of the primary functions of criminal law. Yet, in the context of corporate crime, the means of achieving genuine accountability are not clear. This article argues that the existence of two distinct systems of criminal law one for street crime and the other for white-collar and corporate crime -is the reason accountability remains elusive in the corporate context. To he sure, there are certain features of criminal conduct in the corporate world that set it apart from other types of crime. However, these apparent differences cannot justify the conceptual status of corporate crime as a separate system. After examining the most common reasons for differentiating between corporate and street crime, the article demonstrates that none of these justifications is compelling. As long as we focus on the unique features of corporate criminality, we will not succeed in holding wrongdoers accountable and will therefore undermine the deterrent effects of criminal law. Instead, we must develop a unified system of criminal law that properly holds each individual offender accountable without granting special status to a whole category of wrongdoers: white-collar and corporate criminals.
