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.

An n+1 article on mass incarceration that advocates the abolition of prisons. "Raise the Crime Rate" by Christopher Glazek, 1/26/2012.

A few takeaways from Glopnik's piece:

1) One argument ("Northern") is that the Bill of Rights emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles, to the detriment of justice in America. This reminds me of the last lines of "Ages of American Law" (Gilmore), which I read for Legal Methods. "The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. The values of an unjust society will reflect themselves in an unjust law. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed."

2) A second argument ("Southern"), one that appears often in discussions of mass incarceration, is that our prison system stems from white superiority -"mass imprisonment became a way of re-imposing Jim Crow."

3) Glopnik reviews a new book, "The City That Became Safe," by Franklin Zimring. The book argues that the precipitous fall in the crime rate in NYC over the past few decades did not arise because of mass incarceration but because of "small acts of social engineering," such as "hot-spot policing" and, controversially, the use of "stop and frisks."

4) Glopnik argues that the deterrent effect is very weak, so very few nonviolent offenders should be in jail.

The n+1 article makes a much more radical argument: Glazek advocates the abolition of prison entirely. Glazek goes into grim detail about the horrors of prison. Unlike Glopnik, Glazek writes that mass incarceration has effectively lowered the crime rate -outside of prisons, that is. Inside of prisons, crime (especially rape) occurs at horrific rates. Glazek argues that we effectively condemn and ignore a massive population in order to make the rest of us safer. His framework reminds me a great deal of the Ursula K. Le Guin short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" about a society in which happiness for every inhabitant is purchased by the horrible suffering of one innocent child. For Glazek, this is a moral outrage.

Glazek's argument is much too radical for me (I'm a soft, slow reformer at heart), but it forces the reader to confront the moral choices implicit in mass incarceration.

-- ShakedSivan - 19 Feb 2012