FWIW, I have specific programs* in mind that directly reduce incarceration at very low costs - it's not all vague and hand-wavy.
* basically modeled on a tutoring/mentoring thing I was involved with for a few years. I doubt that it took any future felons and turned them into model citizens, but it certainly reduced some kids' contacts with the criminal justice system, and the whole thing cost as much as 1 incarceration-year.
And does it need to be said that the post in question is guilty of "both sides do it" nonsense? There's truth to it, but there's only one side in modern American politics that's actually interested in problem-solving, especially in an iterative basis. Liberals used to think that banning environmentally problematic substances was most effective. Evidence suggested, and acid rain reduction proved, that auctioned permits were a better approach, and now that's a standard part of the toolkit for liberals, even though it's counter to simplistic liberal ideology.
In contrast, deficits go up after conservatives pass budgets they claim will cut them, teen sex goes up in the face of abstinence-only programs, abortion goes down under Clinton and back up under Bush, but the GOP has only doubled down on their ideological commitments.
If some governor had a high profile success with radical prison reform, you'd soon find national Democrats talking about it (maybe not enough, given the larger politics), but you'll never find the current GOP responding to evidence like that.
I think anyone who uses this formulation* needs to acknowledge that it, itself, is an automatic urge among for many people.**
* neither the left nor the right...
** see, for instance, Broder, David; Moynihan, Daniel...
I do like the shit-storm metaphor for the downtrodden of any society that he quotes from Gopnik.
||
NMM to Karen Handel's vice-presidency at Komen.
|>
I'm also not seeing how the author's thesis, "how weak democracy is for solving complex problems," follows from his right-wingers sit like this, left-wingers like this bit. Criminal punishment, sentencing, and prison conditions are complicated subjects, and their interactions with "democracy" (whatever that is) are likewise complicated. It's true that there seems to be a ratcheting effect that produces longer prison sentences as succeeding generations of politicians (whether legislators, governors, or elected judges) want to look tough on crime. On the other hand, sometimes sentences get lowered. Other industrialized countries that are arguably at least as democratic as the U.S. don't see this ratcheting. And there's the massive element of racism in the U.S. penological experience; when you see mass incarceration as Jim Crow by other means, you have to look at how democracy interacts with civil rights and racism, and that really starts to call into question who the "we" is in democracy that is supposedly making decisions.
The invocation of 'stop and frisk' as an important cause of lowered crime rates also struck me funny. I suppose it's not impossible that a really high rate of Terry stops has an effect on crime rates. But I don't think I've ever seen that established as a cause of the giant drop in crime over the last couple of decades -- seriously, I don't think I've ever really seen it mentioned, much less established, as a cause there. "Broken windows" policing, arresting turnstile jumpers, all of that yes, but not an argument that heavy frisking was important.
The civil rights arguments against indiscriminate frisking are obvious; I'm a little bemused that practical arguments for it are being alluded to without being made.
7: I must admit "the massive element of racism in the U.S. penological experience" triggered my inner Beavis. But I'm semi-refraining.
Penileology does seem to address racial questions distressingly often.
I don't see that the interaction with democracy - at least in the U.S. -is all that complicated.
When you a) have a system that basically runs on bribery as ours currently does, and b) create a large for-profit prison industry that has the resources to pay lots of bribes, then you have a recipe for a f*cked up penal system and massive over-incarceration.
Except the penal system was fucked up before the for-profit prison industry got started.
I will say again, part of what I appreciated about reading Mark Kleiman's book about crime -- it allowed me to replace some of my vague handwavy sense that, "wouldn't it be better to somehow do [x]" with some specific ideas, and some context about the various trade-offs.
Noted without comment from some sociological research I was engaged in related to 10 and 11 (John Holmes' Wikipedia entry): Despite the notoriety and infamy associated with Holmes, he also devoted much time to charities involving the environment. He was known to campaign and collect door-to-door for charities such as Save The Whales.
I'll stop now and let you guys get on with fixing the prison system.
9: Indeed. Stop and frisk has led to an increase in incarceration rates, with inmates coming in at younger ages, but I doubt it has led to the lower crime rates.
I think legalized abortion has contributed greatly to the lower crime rates.
That was one of the Freakonomics ideas, wasn't it? I thought the statistics had fallen apart a bit on closer examination. In the same vein, though, I like the ban on leaded gasoline as an explanation: all those teenagers in the high-crime demographic being less brain-damaged than their predecessors had been for a couple of generations.
Kevin Drum always points to the reduction in environmental lead.
There goes my neighborhood car-battery incinerator plan.
Thanks for the link, Heebie!
Like most of my posts, all I was really trying to do was chide myself for groupthinking. I'm totally one of those people who responds to basically every social problem (violent crime, income inequality, gender discrepancy) with some sort of structural plea: 'You have to deal with the poverty first, man.'
Regardless of whether other ideologies do this harder than me, I find that my ideology sometimes keeps me from listening. And that makes me sad. So I told the internet.
And yes, 'racism' and 'penal' need to be in more sentences together, both for ideology's and giggling's sake.
Checking whether your ideology is blinding you to something that works is an excellent thing to do. But you don't want to dismiss yourself as ideologically driven when you're actually right.
You can't function in any reasonably complex political process without either ideology and a set of dice. You don't want to dismiss it. You may want, as noted in the OP and 22, to be self-conscious about it.
I mean, you can function without something as fully developed as an ideology, but you need some way to reduce the information-seeking and decision-making work loads.
After googling John C. Holmes, however, I'm going to rest my eyes for a while.
26: But the council said, "The number of `fleeting' penises we expect to see on broadcast television is zero."
29: The Parents' Television Council has hundreds of DVRs going 24/7, just looking for fleeting penis. They could develop software that would scan and identify fleeting penises automatically, rather than having to personally review the hours of tape. But what would be the fun in that?
"Fleeting penis" is going to be the name of my debut solo album.
18: Freakonomics and others. I don't know if the math fell apart. I know that endorsing abortions is a harder political sell than endorsing less lead pollution. Maybe they both contributed.
Currently, our incarceration numbers are very high and our crime rates are low, and many people are doubting that the former caused the latter.
Keeping all those (primarily black and Hispanic) people in prison is costly and creates problems.
So, what to do, what to do?
They're saying on Twitter that the 9th Circuit has upheld the ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional.
||
Apparently the 9th Circuit, if not actually in favour of good, is opposed to evil.
|>
"Penological" or some variant thereof appears once in my class notes from yesterday and many times in the reading I did last night. I suppose I'm becoming penologically desensitized.
31: The state of the art in automatic fleeting penis detection marches ever forward.
36: I understand a gel bicycle seat can help with that.
||
Interesting post on TigerBeatdown about Lana Del Rey. I think the writing is a bit clunky, but it makes an interesting argument (which I am not in a position to agree or disagree with).
|>
Fleeting penis" is going to be the name of my debut solo album.
Already done, the place to look for misplaced penises is apparently St. Mark's Pl.
So, NMM to Prop 8, at least for the time being? Interesting.
TigerBeatdown is a genius name. (Where have you gone, Willie Ames?)
I'm too tired to talk meaningfully about this, but I think one of the many reasons foster care is such a clusterfuck is that both the left-wing and right-wing people involved are torn all over the place because it draws out a lot of the mutually exclusive parts of the ideologies. But when I went to type more here, it was incoherent. Maybe I'll try after lunch.
I think the writing is a bit clunky
On TigerBeatdown?!
I am not a licensed penologist but I like to keep a hand in.
But yes 7 is heaps of right.
I hate that I missed this New Yorker article and I can't find the issue AND my login doesn't work.
I'm adding Lana Del Ray to the list of things I refuse to have an opinion on, along with women's footwear and the Kennedy assassination.
45 was me.
File under "to this we've come..."
RE: 9th Circuit, Here's the ruling, suitable for masturbating to. I haven't read it, over 120 pages, but apparently they cleverly struck down prop 8 only, and avoided making same sex marriage legal everywhere.
46.last: things I refuse to have an opinion on
The Kennedy assassination, some say national tragedy, others say necessary corrective action.
They're quite explicit about that, too, in the paragraph spanning pp 5–6.
The Kennedy assassination, some say national tragedy, others say necessary corrective action.
I say the Kennedy assassination, it is a flower, and you its only seed.
|| NMM to the Great War, as Florence Green, the last surviving WWI-era veteran, dies at 110. |>
49: I imagine this subtil craft is meant to give it the greatest chance at being upheld by SCOTUS?
39. it seems that LDR has become a way for people to talk about all the things that bother them about everybody else.
Almost every time I read TigerBeatdown (which, admittedly, is very infrequently), I start off thinking, "Hey, this is pretty good examination of--" and then I hit a quote like this one:
Another dude says she kind of wants to sound like the music Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch wrote for Twin Peaks. While I amuse myself with dudes who disapprove, I am alarmed by this one comparison. Because our culture is already rife with instances of young girls abused, raped and murdered, like Laura Palmer was in Lynch's series. Is that the kind of fantasy Lana Del Rey evokes in these dudes?
And giant, puffy WTFs come streaming out of my ears.
It's an image, as if his brain were on fire.
The quote in 58 is kind of crazy, yes.
58 save some WTF for me. In other WTFery, Twin Peaks' Madchen Amick shows up as an unusually, even for that show, thinly characterized "cougar" on Gossip Girl. What, I'm home with a cold.
Other industrialized countries that are arguably at least as democratic as the U.S. don't see this ratcheting
Very, very few Western democracies have elected prosecutors and judges.
The most annoying thing with 58 is that LDR makes the David Lynch analogies her own damn self all the time. (And I think all the anti-LDR invective I've read [like 2 pieces] has been written by women musicians.)
And giant, puffy WTFs come streaming out of my ears.
Somebody should make a .gif of this.
I had never even heard of Lana Del Rey before she was on SNL (which I didn't see, but there was no escaping the story). I've only ever heard the one song, which didn't help me to understand why her name suddenly began popping up everywhere or why people were all worked up one way or the other about her. My only reaction to it was that it sounded like the (only) Chris Isaak song I know. You know the one.
The "sand would be every where but I still wouldn't care" one.
I had never even heard of Lana Del Rey before she was on SNL
I first heard of her on this very blog.
I have a google alert that tells me when a new statuesque redheaded woman appears on the cultural scene.
You know the one.
Whatever happens, wherever we go, we'll always have that Chris Isaak song.
Instead of addressing the issue of whether Tiger Beatdown is correct that guys hate women who affect a superficially sexy persona whereas girls love said women, I'll point out something else.
I just realized what "mansplaining" is. All these years when feminist websites say they're tired of mansplaining and they get sick of conversations that inevitably lead to mansplaining, I assumed it meant they were so tired of having to explain things to men again and again that men refuse to understand. It turns out that is not what it means.
I just realized what "mansplaining" is.
I advise against saying that at Crooked Timber.
FWIW, 58 is generally my reaction as well, but I still find TigerBeatdown valuable. I'm willing to put up with the WTF (and the often overwrought prose) for the worthwhile bits.
68: Hmm. The time stamps indicate I'd read the name on this very blog prior to the TV appearance. I guess it didn't stick.
re: 66
Yeah. I think a lot of the appeal for people who like bitching about music [like me] is that it sounds a lot like other things, prompting lots of discussion/accusations/counter-accusations.
It reminded me of Gemma Ray, who is criminally unknown, for example, and who does a nice line in reverb'd up 50s style guitar playing and Twin Peaksy vibes.
66:"Wicked Game"
Having spent a little time, I don't mind LDR's music or image, but reading the interviews I think she is ten kinds of deep bullshit. I don't trust a word she says. I suspect the resistance is a) she's coastal and connected as hell, and b) is pretending to an authenticity "just living in my trailer park, writing my songs, goodness I never wanted to be rich and famous it's always been about the music" that would be funny if she were winking along with us.
71:Good grief
Just because I could, I did a quick review of how prominent the Prop. 8 stuff was on various media sites. Almost universally the top story except 2nd after Syria on CNN, and when I first checked not on FoxNews at all. Now it is on the front page but somewhat buried, above "Golfer impaled on broken putter during a fight" but well below, "Hatchet Wounds on Dead Boys, Killer Dad 'Sorry'".
I know, why bother.
So nobody knows why violent crime has dropped? Murder rates look to have dropped in Oakland, Houston and Chicago too. Are all the big city police really being more effective?
Not to be contrarian or anything, but something's happening. I don't think it's head start.
Obesity means today's kids aren't fast enough to kill in some circumstances and aren't hungry enough to need to kill for food.
71:Mansplaining
61 is an example of mansplaining, claiming the TigerBeatdown writer is deranged to think that men have violent erotic fantasies about women.
The immediate above is not serious, but meant to be an example of how "mansplaining" can be used by feminist bloggers to stake and control rhetorical turf, to control the discourse. See definition 5 in the link.
It might go like this:
The quote in 58 is kind of crazy, yes.
61 is an example of mansplaining, claiming the TigerBeatdown writer is deranged to think that men have violent erotic fantasies about women.
Wait, all men all the time?
I never said that at all. This is just "what about the poor men" and why are defending violence against women?
Wait...
You're banned.
(I don't comment on the feminist blogs I read.)
||
I flew to Denver today, and there was something I actually wanted: waterproof keyboards and mice, including a portable one. They claim to be sealed well enough that they 're dishwasher-safe.
|>
72: And now I know what kyriarchy means.
Addendum to 82: in the SkyMall Csralogue.
"Golfer impaled on broken putter during a fight"
Well, that is news.
84: Would you like for me to explain how to create html links, Kraab?
Apo's just pulling your chain, Kraab. He does that a lot around here.
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/Kyriarchy
Looks right to me.
18: A friend of mine wrote a paper on that. He said that there might be some small amount, but the statistical analysis was crap. The data sets were on his website. The exchange of letters as mistakes were pointed out was kind of funny.
I'm visualizing John Goodman delivering 85 in a burning hallway with a shotgun.
89:The fuck it does, unless I am mistaken as to MM's and CN's gender. It just shows that G doesn't get it at all.
Men can and should talk about feminism among themselves, preferably without attacking and denigrating women as crazy and controlled by emotions or whatever apo and MM were doing to Sady Doyle.
The quote in 58 is absolutely right, and we men would be better off understanding why it is right, and why we are resistant.
Men should read articles and notice by whom they are written, rather than be sexist jags who just assume they must know.
I have a general impression that when you make substances illicit, harder versions become more common. So, during prohibition hard liquor grew in popularity relative to wine, because it was easier to smuggle. My other theory is that this tends to make people use more dangerous forms of the drug etc. therefore, drugs should be legal! (plus, you know less criminal activity and fewer violations of civil liberties.)
But then, I watched a Frontline episode on the meth epidemic, and I thought, "Shit, there's no way that should be legal.". So, I was sort of hoping that all the people who are meth addicts now might have used cocaine instead if it were legal and not quite so expensive. Based on the maps, it looked unlikely. Cooking meth is so dangerous, but I'd hate to see it produced legally.
Can anyone recommend any good books?
78: Murder rates got really low in Boston, but they've gone up again since.
I'm a woman with a nominally male pseud. I'll await bob's ruling as to whether I'm allowed to like the awesomeness that is 85 + 93.
Perhaps he could set forth the arguments on each side in a clearly organized fashion for you. It's often helpful when a logical thinker does that sort of thing.
96: I can't recommend any books, but I can recommend that episode of Frontline to the rest of the Mineshaft (it's available for streaming from their website). Meth is scary as a drug and fascinating as a case study. Which reminds me that I should go poke around on the Frontline website for the extras from that episode.
we men would be better off understanding why it is right
Perhaps you could explain it to me.
99:I am not your boss
103:okay, apo and MM let me help you out here on 58.
If you are on a first date, and your date sees a Bugatti and says...
"You know, that car reminds me of Pasolini's Salo"
...it might be wise the gently and politely extricate yourself from the situation
Similarly, if you and your date see a abandoned railroad car and he is reminded of Fire Walks With Me rather than The Station Agent be careful
Besides the fact that he felt a need to bring it up.
Sometimes Bob's trolling is even more tiresomely obvious than just the normal tiresome and obvious. So, as per usual, fuck off, Bob.
104 meet 64. And, fuck off, Bob.
If you are on a first date, and your date sees a Bugatti
First world problem.
Also, if somebody is forever reminded of Japanese cinema, it's generally because they spend their quiet moments fantasizing about the Rape of Nanking.
That's just violent and racist, not sexist.
108:Actually, you mention Nanking, and what first comes to my mind is Yasujiro Ozu, that gentlest kindest of men, at Nanking
108: I'll show you the life of the mind.
107: Not only a first world problem, a Beverly Hills in front of Bijan's on Rodeo problem. Does he pay the city for the rights to that parking space?
I see Bugattis fairly often, but that's because I make a point of walking by the dealership on Eleventh Avenue.
We can start by reevaluating our priorities. There's no use saying that progressive goals aren't in competition with one another. They very surely are, and criminals have lost that competition again and again, with tragic results. For decades, politicians from Nelson Rockefeller to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama have sold out criminals in order to win concessions on health care, abortion, gay rights, early education, progressive taxation, and any number of other worthy objectives. Prison abolitionists must now perform the reverse procedure--we must be ready to sacrifice the traditional progressive agenda on the altar of criminal justice. Morality, like politics, starts at the edge of Ockham's razor: the bad can no longer be allowed to obscure the evil.
[snip]
When evaluating the impact of the war on drugs on the country's incarceration crisis, it helps to keep in mind a statistical nuance: a large fraction of prison sentences are for nonviolent drug offenses, but a small fraction of the prison population is in for a nonviolent drug crime. This is because, despite the harshness of mandatory minimum sentences, drug criminals don't spend nearly as much time in prison as other kinds of criminals.
It's tempting to believe that we could free most of the prison population simply by liberating nonviolent drug offenders. Nonviolent drug offenders are "innocent"; they haven't hurt anybody. Advocating on behalf of criminals is much easier when they haven't committed any violent crime. And yet this misses the point of the prison crisis: you cannot relieve the suffering of the prison population without increasing safety risks for the rest of us.
And increasing those risks, from a moral standpoint, is the right thing to do.
Not as optimistic as Mark Kleiman.
Also, here's my favorite recent Lana Del Rey salvo: Molly Lambert at Grantland
Also, here's my favorite recent Lana Del Rey salvo: Molly Lambert at Grantland
I read that when you linked it earlier, and wasn't sure what to make of it. I thought it was interesting, if overwritten at times, but I wasn't quite sure how it arrived at the conclusion:
In their vastly different ways, so are Del Rey and Swift, suggesting that what happens when you follow instructions explicitly can still be completely out of your control, you might be punished whether you're good or bad.
116: Molly Lambert was good. The Japenese were there first of course, with Lolita fashion; and so far ahead now, with Japanese teenaged girls following closely manga and movies about chaste and romantic boy-boy love.
NMM to Zalman King? Christ why didn't anybody tell me?
Re:Zalman King
"Love Street" was better.
And I remain amazed that the lead actress of one of my favorite LS episodes has seemingly erased that credit from the internet.
IMDB doesn't even have a blank spot where her name should be.
That's just interesting.
Paragraphs like this demonstrate how weak democracy is for solving complex problems.
This bugs me. Weak compared to what? What's the contrasting other form of government with a track-record of being stronger at solving complex problems?
This bugs me. Weak compared to what?
If elections are not the answer, then what explains the ability of the world's leading democracies to survive crises, something which has been demonstrated time and again over the last century? My best guess is that their crucial advantage lies in being more politically flexible than the alternatives. That is, in a crisis democracies can experiment with autocracy but autocracies can't experiment with democracy, not even in small doses. They daren't, for fear of losing control. This is the real problem for the Chinese system. At some point, perhaps at some point quite soon, China's leaders will face a critical situation in which they would be better off if they could find an outlet for popular dissatisfaction with the regime. But they will be extremely nervous of opening that door for fear of what lies behind it. So they will be stuck. Democracies can put democracy on hold and get away with it; if autocrats suspend their autocratic powers, they tend not to get them back.
102: Meth is scary as a drug
Apparently there was some big study in the 1970s that evaluated various drugs of abuse in a sort-of "objective" manner. All the other ones had something good going for them, except IV amphetamines.
At the same time, there was a time within the memory of some of our commenters here, when it was relatively easy to procure amphetamines legally in the US and UK. It's one thing to talk about the terrible, terrible social cost of decriminalizing cannabis, but whatever burden we incur by allowing pretty much everyone direct access to strong drugs, it doesn't seem to have been too heavy in the past.
it doesn't seem to have been too heavy in the past.
Right. I mean, look at me. I'm just fine, mentally and physically.
Excuse me while I brush off all these damn ants.
Who better to determine the best path for a nation than a statistician-king?
It's true, the Kings of Statisticia held out against the Roman Empire much longer than other nations. In the end, of course, they couldn't account for the Romans' numerical superiority.
Apparently, the ladies of the harem of the court of King Statisticus constituted a representative sample of the relevant population.
121: I have a vagye sense that amphetamines are less bad than methamphetamine.
121: I have a vagye sense that amphetamines are less bad than methamphetamine.
I've got a ding dong dinger of a sense that methamphetamines are just a grand ol' time.
I'd give more weight to 130 if it were double or even triple posted.
If amphetamines were easy to get, maybe methamphetamine would be less popular.
