No Child Left Confined: Challenging the Digital Convict Lease

The following is a lightly edited transcript of comments provided at the Journal of Health Care Law & Policy’s Spring Symposium entitled “Uneasy Alignments: The Mental Health Turn in The American Legal System.” This event was hosted on March 16, 2023, by University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in collaboration with the University of Maryland School of Social Work’s Daniel Thursz Social Justice Lecture Series. The Symposium examined how legal systems, like child welfare and juvenile law institutions, use coercion to force engagement or compliance with often unproven therapeutic interventions. The presentation took on the question of how the negative impacts of this turn manifest in the home. The lecture centers on the use of digital surveillance technologies, like electronic ankle monitors, by juvenile courts as presumed rehabilitative tools and alternatives to incarceration. It argues that not only is electronic monitoring ineffective as a therapeutic intervention toward adequate adolescent development, but also it leads to a marginalization that severs youth from the community ties necessary for growth. The lecture concludes that a critical race and technology approach is useful for understanding how this practice feeds an expanding data economy that exploits poor families of color under the premise of contributing to public health and public safety

Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy

Americans face increasingly stark choices each presidential election and a growing sense that our government can\u27t solve the nation\u27s most urgent challenges. Our eighteenth-century system is ill suited to our twenty-first-century world. Information-age technology has undermined our capacity to face common problems together and turned our democracy upside down, with gerrymanders letting representatives choose voters rather than voters choosing them. In Parliamentary America, Maxwell L. Stearns argues that the solution to these complex problems is a parliamentary democracy. Stearns considers such leading alternatives as ranked choice voting, the national popular vote, and congressional term limits, showing why these can\u27t solve our constitutional crisis. Instead, three amendments—expanding the House of Representatives, having House party coalitions choose the president, and letting the House end a failing presidency based on no confidence—will produce a robust multiparty democracy. These amendments hold an essential advantage over other proposals: by leaving every member of the House and Senate as incumbents in their districts or states, the amendments provide a pressure-release valve against reforms threatening that status. Stearns takes readers on a world tour—England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela—showing what works in government, what doesn\u27t, and how to make the best features our own. Genuine party competition and governing coalitions, commonplace across the globe, may seem like a fantasy in the United States. But we can make them a reality. This rare book offers an optimistic vision, explaining in accessible terms how to transform our troubled democracy into a thriving parliamentary America.https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/books/1140/thumbnail.jp