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Lawless, overcrowded prisons are machines for producing Nazis.
Archive for the ‘Prisons and penal policy’ Category
March 18th, 2013
Category: Drug Policy, Prisons and penal policy
I was glad to see that my post on the declining rate of incarceration in the U.S. was picked up by a number of other blogs and newspapers. In those fora, a number of people argued that the recent decrease is simply a function of state budgets being tight. The Pew Charitable Trusts has a [...]
February 16th, 2013
Category: Prisons and penal policy
Cheap model helicopters with video cameras could transform the problem of violence and contraband in prison. Can you say “Panopticon”?
February 12th, 2013
Category: Prisons and penal policy
Since I moved to California last year, California’s Prison Realignment policy has been getting deserved attention. It’s no secret that prisons are the site of an acute concentration of medical and social service problems. But where did that concentration come from? In my first post I thought I’d take a moment to enumerate some of [...]
February 9th, 2013
Category: Crime Control, Prisons and penal policy
Why HOPE isn’t just a deterrence program.
January 3rd, 2013
Category: Prisons and penal policy
There aren’t 25,000 prisoners who need long-term total isolation. And SuperMax is torture by sensory deprivation. Shut ‘em down!
November 13th, 2012
David Dagan and Steven Teles tell a fascinating story of conservative support for prison reform.
October 1st, 2012
The two most-commonly proposed policy solutions for drug-fueled crime are alike only in being wrong. The hard-edged approach, whether borne of anger, fear or frustration, is to bang up as many intoxicated offenders as possible. Politicians who adopt this stance rarely suffer at the ballot box, but in policy terms they’re on a hiding to [...]
May 11th, 2012
Category: Film, Prisons and penal policy
Sidney Lumet‘s brutal, gripping 1965 movie “The Hill” opens with a solitary figure laboring up the man-made torture device that gives the film its title. In one of Oswald Morris’ many mesmerizing crane shots, the man collapses in the North African heat and then the camera begins to move slowly away, off into the distance, [...]
April 3rd, 2012
Not very much, according to Justice Kennedy. I couldn’t help thinking about the Affordable Care Act cases when reading his opinion for the Court in Florence v. Burlington County, handed down yesterday. The Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not forbid law enforcement from strip searching arrestees even if there is no reason to suspect that they possess [...]