Today and tomorrow (Sept. 18-19, 2014) at UC Berkeley we will be launching a new undergraduate course thread titled “Carceral Geographies.” Our launch will begin with a keynote address by the great Ruth “Ruthie” Wilson Gimore, scholar/activist extraordinaire who has given us the definitive study of California’s descent into mass incarceration, Golden Gulags: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, … Continue reading »
prisons
Abandoning a failed penal experiment: New York’s historic advantage
The State of New York has made it share of bad penal policy choices. Remember the “Rockefeller Drug Laws” — mandatory life sentences for persons arrested with large quantities of dangerous drugs, which helped set the nation on the path toward indiscriminate use of incarceration? But the Empire State has also had a historic knack … Continue reading »
From humanity to health: Why can’t California get prison healthcare right?
To considerable embarrassment, no doubt, in the Brown-Beard administration, admissions to California’s newest prison near Stockton California were halted Feb. 5 by the court-appointed healthcare receiver, law professor Clark Kelso. The prison, the first new facility in a decade, is the lynch-pin of the administration’s frequent claim to have gotten on top of California’s decades … Continue reading »
From the War on Crime to ‘World War Z’: What the zombie apocalypse can tell us about the current state of our culture of fear
Zombies are everywhere. Ok not (yet) on the streets (so far as I know); but in our cultural imaginary they are everywhere. You can find them (in small groups and hordes) in high budget nail biting thriller movies like Brad Pitt’s World War Z (2013), on television, and all over print and digital reading material, much of … Continue reading »
To the Fruitvale Station
Thanks to the persistence of my wife who has insisted for some time that as residents of the East Bay we must see it in the theater along with fellow East Bayers, our whole family saw this remarkable film a couple of weeks ago. The film moved me to tears and then settled into my … Continue reading »
Penal trends: Strange weather or climate change?
The most important political storm in recent history (was it the storm or the meme?), “Super-Storm Sandy” helped not only President Obama but to re-raise the question of whether unusual weather is a sign of profound climate change, in this case global average temperature rises caused by human carbon effects. When it comes to our … Continue reading »
Prison time: How long is long enough?
It is hard to say whether they are the worst crimes. They are the crimes that horrify the most. A baby-sitter, for no apparent reason, strangles the 15 month old child she has been hired to protect. A professional thief shoots a young police officer in his face, while the victim is on his knees … Continue reading »
Occupy’s prison protest: It’s not yesterday any more
Getting people around my age, late boomers who grew up in the “fear years” of the 1970s, to rethink their assumptions about prisons, crime and criminal justice is hard; and it keeps us locked into mass incarceration. Consider SF Chron Columnist Chip Johnson’s broadside at the Occupy Movement in the Bay Area’s demonstration at San … Continue reading »
The poor storm: Ending mass incarceration in America
“But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s … Continue reading »
Cupcakes, affirmative action and mass incarceration
Yesterday Berkeley’s College Republicans were generating big crowds on Sproul Plaza and big media coverage with a retread of an old bit of anti-affirmative action agit-prop; a cupcake sale in which prices were set by race (just like academic “preferences” for students of color in admissions, get it). (Read Nanette Asimov’s reporting in the SF … Continue reading »
The paradoxical status of ‘life without parole’
The New York Times earlier this week published a strong editorial criticizing America’s increasing use and abuse of life without parole (LWOP) sentences (read it here). The use of such sentences was largely unknown in the past and remains rare outside the US. Even murderers who did not get the death penalty could be virtually … Continue reading »
Attica, forty years on
On the editorial pages of the NYTimes, historian Heather Thompson reminds us all of how profoundly the Attica prison uprising and its violent suppression, 40 years ago, shaped our penal imagination and prepared the grounds for what we now call “mass incarceration.”(read it here) The prisoners who took nine correctional officers hostage and gained control … Continue reading »
Troubling questions on the border between the prison and hospital
Deborah Sontag’s outstanding feature on the murder of a psychiatric facility worker by a schizophrenic patient with a history of violence is a great overview of one of the most complicated corners of our domestic security governance problem. As recently as the 1970s there were still far more people in mental hospitals than there were in … Continue reading »
Progress and peril in California’s prison crisis
Maria Lagos of the SF Chron provided an excellent year start summary and analysis of where things stand with California’s both chronic and acute prison crisis. Progress? Only 8,200 prisoners are sleeping in “non-traditional” quarters, like day rooms and gyms, down from 20,000 in 2006. But almost all of this improvement has come from shipping … Continue reading »