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MassIncarceration 8 - 07 Jul 2012 - Main.JaredMiller
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| | 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. | | | -- SkylarPolansky - 23 Feb 2012
Skylar, the strawman goes like this. Someone sets up two strawman positions as reflective of what the left think and what the right think. This reasonable person, of course, believes in neither of those positions, and is all the more reasonable for not thinking like those ideologues. I think Glopnik's using strawmen in this case because I don't see why most of his moderate, incremental proposals would be opposed by the left or right, with a couple of notable exceptions (such as profiling). I will say his idea of no jailtime for almost any nonviolent offenders would indeed get very little support. | |
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> | -Shaked
I've now spent six weeks in the state that incarcerates more individuals than any country in the entire world, and I decided to reread this thread and the two articles above. This struck me:
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime
Personally, I'm a bit hopeless when it comes to punishment/drug/prison reform. It seems like, as long as popularly-elected legislatures and prosecutors are given the bulk of the power to define and enforce laws, as long as popularly-elected judges are the ones refereeing the system, and as long as young black men are the ones that face the brunt of the consequences, the prospect for reform is negligible. The suggestions above are good ones, but will they happen? Can anyone think of ways to actually change the system? It seems like a boulder that's pretty impossible to nudge, in my view.
-- JaredMiller - 07 Jul 2012 |
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