The Enduring Appeal of Perversity Arguments and Unintended Consequences Warnings
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…