| | |
|
MassIncarceration 4 - 21 Feb 2012 - Main.SkylarPolansky
|
| | I thought it would be useful to consolidate a conversation that's going on in the class facebook group. The material is interesting, important, and relates to our discussions in this class (most obviously regarding Robinson and his work). Hopefully it will also allow us to procrastinate from finishing torts or con law reading. I apologize for the scattershot nature of this post. I may go back and do more editing / summarizing of the links below if there's any interest or this sparks a discussion. Of course I welcome any interested person to do likewise, or just jump off from one of the articles or points and run with it.
A New Yorker article on mass incarceration that provides something of a historical overview. "The Caging of America" by Adam Glopnik, 1/30/2012. | | |
-- ShakedSivan - 19 Feb 2012 | |
>
> | Glazek presented some powerful emotional stories regarding crimes that occur in prison and then completely obliterated the force of his argument with the trite way in which I felt he dealt with the pros and cons (pun intended) of his proposed solution – “Over time, though, things will settle. There will be more fathers around, and more state money for things like education and healthcare.”
I found Glopnik’s article and Stuntz’ proposed solution much more compelling and seemingly in line with the functionalism proscribed by Cohen. Instead of focusing on due process rights, and the justice accorded to prisoners, we should be focused on the justness of a punishment (as guided by our gut-reactions) and the reality of what that punishment entails - “Basically…we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over.” So that we may understand what we are really condemning a human being to when we send them to prison, I believe the crimes that occur in prison need to be more publicized, and human faces need to be attached to those crimes.
I think it’s interesting that this year in our criminal law classes all of us hypothesize about and pontificate on the reasons we punish crimes, and why we have certain gradations of punishment, yet we learn almost nothing about what those varying methods of punishment actually entail or do to a man. Like an episode of law & order we learn nothing about what happens to the criminal after he is sentenced. How are we - the supposed future policy-makers of America – to begin to see the larger picture re: punishment, and what it actually entails and does to a man - without learning about it? Similar to the complaint I think is often voiced about how law school doesn’t teach us how to be real lawyers, there is not enough focus on the actual effects of certain policies we are encouraged to think about.
“Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.” I liked the solution proposed by Glopnik because it was a functionalist, de-politicized solution so I found it particularly interesting that he thought people in politics wouldn’t like it.
-- SkylarPolansky - 21 Feb 2012 |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |