Cure-alls and Remedies
“My child is dead, and someone must pay.” There are no words that make so much sense to me as these. People say “I can’t imagine what it would be like”—but I can. I do. It’s bound up with my love for my daughters, my joy at their growth, and my hopes for their future….
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…
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…
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.
One of the reasons I blog less than I used to is that in addition to running this journal I’ve been teaching and organizing a college program at Jessup Correctional Institution . (Although I think it was having a daughter that really sucked the wind out of my sails, blogging-wise.) Anyway, to prove I haven’t…
A couple of years back Tim Scanlon did a blog post and comment-section discussion on PEA Soup . Here’s one bit: In earlier work, including my Tanner Lectures on the significance of choice and Chapter 6 of What We Owe to Each Other, I rejected the idea of moral desert because I identified it with…
The profile of Judith Clark from last month has me worried: We are more willing to impose death when the killer is painted in monochrome—if we can define him or her by the horror of the crime. Many think this is just; that is what blame and punishment are about. But in rare public comments…
It looks like I’ll be co-teaching a course on violence with Daniel Levine in the spring, and I have some questions: Is it just me, or do philosophers rarely talk about violence? We talk a lot about killing, and war, and punishment, and even torture. We talk about peace and non-violence. But “violence” doesn’t come…
[caption id=”attachment_3023″ align=”aligncenter” width=”300″] Old Ohio Penitentiary by J. Harris Day[/caption] This semester I taught a course on crime and punishment, and in part out of competition with my colleague Seth Vannatta , I set out to give a final presentation on the dimensions of the course. This is the presentation I wrote. Introduction…
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…
George Lakoff responds to Steven Pinker’s review of Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea. Highlights include shocking charges of deception or incompetence on both sides. This is the only paragraph of vitriol-free prose I could find in the review, and since it’s mostly summary I’ll include it here: Lakoff’s theory is aimed…
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…