Interview in the Texas Monthly.
Interview in the March 2010 issue of Texas Monthly, with an emphasis on racial politics, crime rates, and prison building in Texas and the wider South.
…Isn’t it a good thing that 2.4 million criminals are off America’s streets?Yes, criminologists call this the incapacitation effect. It works better than deterrence and has been more politically fashionable than rehabilitation. But incapacitation has serious limitations. First, it works only while inmates are actually behind bars. Second, there are moral and practical problems in justifying penalties based on what inmates might do rather than what they actually did; in practice, incapacitation becomes a kind of preventive detention. Third, caring for potential criminals in cages is just about the most expensive crime prevention program imaginable. …More
