Texas Tough

Having led the country’s prison buildup for a generation, the Texas legislature, in the last three sessions, has managed to push through various reforms, chiefly related to probation and diversion, that have helped contain the growth of the prison population. For a basic overview, see: States Seek Less Costly Substitutes for Prison – washingtonpost.com.

I’m somewhat dubious of the treatment protocol championed here, but it’s a thoughtful piece and includes a useful collection of statistics on the severity of racial disparity in the prison system. America’s Prisons: Is There Hope? – The New York Review of Books.

Not only did the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program trash the constitution, it did so for naught. U.S. Wiretapping of Limited Value, Officials Report – NYTimes.com.

A peculiar artifact of the severity revolution in criminal justice is that the United States has returned to a two-tiered model of citizenship, a sort of legally inscribed segregation in which convicted felons are permanently denied basic rights. We see this in extremely long sentences meted out to juveniles, felony disenfranchisement, and in the myriad legal restrictions placed on ex-cons upon their release. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of sex offenders, who in some jurisdictions are effectively banished from the free world forever, long after the expiration of their sentences. In the case of Miami, profiled in this New York Times piece, many ex-felons returning to society find they are permitted to reside only in an encampment under a bridge: a convict Bantustan in post-civil rights America.

This piece I wrote for The Nation, “Prison Dilemma,” assesses a novel explanation for the punitive turn in American criminal justice and examines prospects for reversal in the Age of Obama. The Webb bill is a good place to start.

A damning portrait of the chief justice and his hostility to civil rights. See Jeffrey Toobin’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy” in the New Yorker.

Policymakers and criminal justice officials from coast to coast are starting to realize that America’s prison colossus costs too much, delivers too few benefits, and inflicts unacceptable collateral damage. In order to chart a better way forward, however, we first need to figure out how we landed in the muck in the first place. Here scholars disagree widely. In this essay I just finished for Boston Review, I examine competing explanations for what historians call “the punitive turn.” I also develop my own argument that mass imprisonment took shape largely as an inchoate political reaction against the victories of the civil rights movement. The article appears in a special issue that also includes thoughtful, provocative essays by Bruce Western, Mary F. Katzenstein, and Mary L. Shanley.

The Duke lacrosse rape case—although the prosecution disintegrated and the DA was hustled off to jail—remains something of a cause célèbre. A number of blogs have kept up the drumbeat of indignation, and there are now three books out on the travesty. For all the commentary, however, I argue in this piece I wrote for The Nation that the wrong lessons are being drawn. The rottenness at the heart of this wrongful indictment is not political correctness run amuck, as most pundits are claiming, but prosecutorial power run rampant.

Over the past few decades, America’s soaring prison population has passed a series of milestones: 1 million, 2 million, now 2.2 million. A new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts reveals that 1 out of every 100 adults now lives behind bars. For most of American history, prisons existed on the margins of society. This report suggests that, especially among African Americans and Latinos, imprisonment has become a core function of American government, a defining feature of American civilization. Pew’s novel slice into the statistics has generated a great deal of media attention. You can read the full report here.