UNIVERSITY OF THE DISTRICT OF - UDC Law Review

Section 2: Editing Exercise
Section 2 Instructions: The excerpt below is from a forthcoming UDC Law Review
article. Several errors have been deliberately inserted: Five grammatical or spelling errors
and ten Bluebook citation errors. Your task is to identify and correct as many of these
errors as possible. This task is a preview of the work performed by an associate editor.
Additionally, you may offer suggestions for substantive improvement where you think
appropriate (i.e., where there is not an error, but sentence phrasing, word choice, or some
other aspect of the writing or argument could be improved).
The Juvenile Justice System and School-to-Prison Pipeline
America is in the midst of a multi-decade explosion of incarceration rates. 1
The number of people in local, state, and federal incarceration facilities has risen,
since 1970, by approximately 1100 percent. 2 Both as a percentage of the
population and in terms of actual numbers, the United States is the mostincarcerated
country in the world, with a rate of incarceration that is four times
the average rates of other countries. 3 The United States’s youth incarceration rate
is the highest, by far, of any developed nation. 4 The over-reliance on incarceration
has been counterproductive not just in terms of dollars wasted, but also, more
significantly, in terms of lives derailed. 5
This unparalleled increase in incarceration is not colorblind. Rather, it is
primarily a function of radical rises in the incarceration rates of black and brown
people, principally low-income African-American males. 6 Although three-fifths
of the youth population of America is white, approximately three-fifths of
incarcerated youth are African-American or Latino. 7 The population of
1 DAVID M. KENNEDY, DON’T SHOOT: ONE MAN, A STREET FELLOWSHIP, AND THE END
OF VIOLENCE IN INNER-CITY AMERICA 146-47 (2011).
2 Id. cf., e.g., Stephen B. Bright, Legal Representation for the Poor: Can Society Afford
this Much Injustice, MISSOURI L. REV. 683 (2010) (calculating increase in the number of
incarcerated persons from approximately 200,000 to 2.3 million as an 800 percent increase).
3 See, e.g., CHRISTOPHER HARTNEY, US RATES OF INCARCERATION: A GLOBAL
PERSPECTIVE 1-3 (2006), available at www.nccdcrc.org/nccd/pubs/2006nov_factsheet_incarceration.pdf
(last visited Feb. 18, 2012).
4 THE ANNIE E. CASEY FOUND., NO PLACE FOR KIDS: THE CASE FOR REDUCING
JUVENILE INCARCERATION 2 (2011), available at
http://www.aecf.org/OurWork/JuvenileJustice/JuvenileJusticeReport.aspx. The juvenile
incarceration rate in the United States in 2002 was 336 per 100,000 persons, nearly five times
higher than the next-highest national rate. Id.
5 Id. at 3.
6 See, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 9 Ohio St. J. of Crim. L. 1, 11-15 (2011);
see generally, MICHELLE ALEXANDER, THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN THE AGE OF
COLORBLINDNESS (2010).
7 Annie E. Casey Found., id. note 4, at 2.
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