Cure-alls and Remedies
Today I am testifying on behalf of the Second Look Amendment Act of 2019, sometimes dubbed IRAA 3.0. The initial IRAA, the Incarceration Amendment Act, was designed to provide post-sentencing review to those who committed crimes as juveniles and were given life or near-life sentences. IRAA 2.0 extended eligibility and clarified some issues in the…
Entrepreneurship is a particular approach to citizenship. It’s about trying to find new ways of being of use to each other. Formerly incarcerated people are increasingly marginalized in our society–but they deserve to be treated as valuable and with dignity.
“So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of ‘failures’, the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 277 In my mini-review of Bryan Caplan’s polemic against education, I noted that he partly ignores Foucaultian arguments for…
Today is the first day of classes in my seventeenth year of teaching. I have taught a lot over those years–sometimes as much as a 5/5/1 (5 courses in Fall, 5 in Spring, and one over the summer.) My sense from that time is that the value of a philosophy course is largely not derived…
James Forman, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize last week for his book Locking Up Our Own. It is well-deserved. That book– and his earlier work wrangling with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow –shows the ways that we have arrived at the wicked problem of mass incarceration through something much harder to disdain than evil scheming…
It’s France’s fête nationale– Bastille Day–marking the storming of the Bastille Saint-Antoine. The crowd of revolutionaries were mostly looking for guns and ammunition held by the garrison of soldiers stationed there, but they also suspected that the prisoners were being tortured. (They weren’t.) Seven prisoners were freed that day: four forgers, two mentally-ill people, and…
College in prisons is the easiest and most obvious of a host of criminal justice reforms that we absolutely must be making and for which there is bipartisan support. We incarcerate 2.3 million people in the US, at a rate more than seven times higher than the global average. We’re not seven times more violent or larcenous than the rest of the world–perhaps we are seven times more racist, but even that isn’t clear any longer–so we need to fix this over-incarceration crisis. But for the time being, educating the people we incarcerate is almost literally the least we can do.
Long before white Americans felt like their society had abandoned them, Black Americans knew the feeling. Just like whites do today, some Black Americans responded to earlier superfluousness by ” clinging to guns and religion ” to use Barack Obama’s famous analysis. (cf. Kinsley gaffe ) Here’s James Baldwin, describing the Nation of Islam: “I’ve…
Today I’ll be addressing a group of imprisoned students, university administrators, and prison officials to inaugurate the University of Baltimore’s partnership with the US Department of Education and Jessup Correctional Institution to offer Bachelor’s Degrees. We have a few tasks today, including inspiring the students and encouraging the officials that their support for the program…
The fantasies of social death are pernicious precisely because they imagine no return. The reality is that most of these men must someday rejoin the communities from which they have been exiled. People come back. What’s more, they’re never really that far away.
Nathan Smith: “American egalitarianism is a sheltered creed that needs the border as blindfold to retain its limited plausibility as an ideal.” Literary Magazines for Socialists funded by the CIA, ranked (Partisan Review is #3) Pope Francis to visit a Pennsylania prison and call for reform in Congress. Michael Rosen: I sometimes fear that people might…
Everyone always learns the wrong lesson from the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Shock Study: we always think it means that other people are horrible. We ignore the possibility that we might be horrible, too, given the right circumstances.
We’re about to find out what would happen if policing decreased by 66%-94% : It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage. NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and…
Charles Koch is committed to reforming the criminal justice system : “We are not a nation of bad people. We are a nation that made some bad choices,” he said. “We’ve become addicted to severe sentences, to the point where we are mass-producing convictions in many courts, while not providing defense counsel on a timely…
Recently I’ve been thinking about a book by Erin McKenna which I read as an undergraduate: The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective . I read it then because it promised to bridge the divide between my favorite genre, science-fiction, and my interest in philosophy. But the book profoundly changed me, and I’m…
A couple of weeks ago, I joined with hundreds of other students and scholars at Johns Hopkins for a conference on prisons and the social determinants of health . The star of the conference was this story: One day three men were fishing in the river when they noticed a baby floating towards them. Two of the men…
[caption id=”attachment_3029″ align=”aligncenter” width=”300″] by Seany2000[/caption] Via Metafilter’s kliuless (who definitely has a kliu): The Conservative War on Prisons: “Right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform. Is this how progress will happen in a hyper-polarized world?” Raise The Crime Rate: “Statistics are…
I haven’t written much about status emotions , recently, but I came across one of my favorite Facebook memes and remembered again how central it seems. I don’t endorse the misogyny here, but it perfectly describes the way that fundamental attribution bias transforms resentment into contempt, and thus leads, in my view, to both epistemic…
My department invited Sharon Meagher to do a seminar last Friday on how to redirect our energies towards “public philosophy.” Meagher has a great textbook for introducing philosophy through an exploration of urban issues that offers a situated approach to philosophical inquiry, and she’s done a lot of work trying to organize and advocate for…
Please read these two extracts from Clive Stafford Smith’s forthcoming book Bad Men , recounting his experience as a lawyer for prisoners at the military base in Guantanamo: ” No fairytales allowed ,” and ” Have you received your gift pack? ” From the first: One of the escorts told me that, on pain of…
It’s probably obvious to most people, but the complete works of Shakespeare are available online . I just discovered this, and am currently reading The Tempest . Some of my favorite Shakespeare lines appear in that play: PROSPERO Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied…
On July 8, 2004, in my new home state of Tennessee, five Campbell County Sheriff’s deputies used torture and intimidation to try to get a warrantless search form signed. For more than two hours, they beat and threatened Eugene Siler with, among other things, genital electrocution: “…until you sign that form, its fixin to get…
Sentiments of Rationality is at it again. Dom seems to have convinced himself that conservatives are actually right about criminal justice, since they care about victims and safety more than liberals, and trust their authority figures. He goes on to suggest electric shocks in order to speed punishment and reduce incarceration time. Here’s the gist:…
Dom, over at Sentiments of Rationality writes: “A good psychologist knows that punishments are most effective if they are swift, certain, and severe. In our current system, this is often not the case with punishments. It’s easy, particularly for first-time offenders, to get off with a light sentence or no sentence at all. It would…