Month: January 2012 (page 1 of 2)

A call to think harder: Guenther on Gopnik’s privilege

Right after I posted on Adam Gopnik’s piece in the New Yorker, I ran across this sharp and excellent criticism of it by Lisa Guenther, who calls Gopnik out for failing to interrogate the racially determined– or let’s just say racist– claim that crime in the U.S. has decreased since the 1980s, which he takes primarily from Berkeley criminologist Franklin Zimring’s book about New York. You can almost hear Guenther’s weariness as she obligatorily reminds us to ask whether New York or the country is “safer” for the young black men who, like Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and countless others, are routinely targeted and lose their lives as a result of the “stop and frisk” programs that Zimring praises and tries to distinguish from racial profiling.

At the same time, by addressing Gopnik’s perspective– and exclusion of the perspectives of people and communities most affected by mass incarceration and associated police practices– Guenther raises the traps of the question of platform, writing,  “To be sure, poor people do not often publish books with Oxford University Press, nor publish articles in The New Yorker.  This is part of the problem.”

What kind of ideas can or could not make it into the New Yorker or any major press? What do those limits have to do with the positions that we embrace, endorse? How do our adjusted expectations contribute to a status quo? Many thanks to Guenther for prompting these questions, and her tempering with realism my excitement about the fact the New Yorker is willing to publish a long piece advocating sentencing reform and to offer the U.S. racial caste system as an explanation for mass incarceration. Please don’t miss her piece, especially if you’ve read the Gopnik. I’ll give her the last words here:

“Those of us who are privileged enough to enter these sites of power have an obligation to push beyond what seems like “common sense” to us – especially when we are addressing issues that directly affects those who do not share this privilege.  This obligation is both political and epistemic; we simply cannot get a sense of what the world is like by remaining entrenched in our privilege, and we certainly can’t change the world from this position.”

 

Federal sentencing and the GOP

This article‘s discussion of mandatory sentencing guidelines versus discretion shows how stuck the debate is and conveys how depressingly racism will shape both approaches, quite aside from aspirations to create uniformity in sentencing or to reserve a place for consideration of particular contexts.

The Price of Prisons

The Vera Institute of Justice has released a report entitled “The Price of Prisons,” outlining a new methodology to calculate the real cost of prisons for taxpayers. The Center on Sentencing and Corrections and Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit studied 40 states, finding significant costs not included in the corrections budgets but directly affecting taxpayers nonetheless. For more, see their report and state fact sheets here.

Lockuptown, America

I hope you’ll all read Adam Gopnik’s recent article in the New Yorker, which addresses how “[m]ass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today.” In his attempt to answer the question, “how did we get here?” he describes two different ideas: one, elaborated by the late, beloved Bill Stuntz, that conceiving of justice as procedure and process rather than principles results in a system that is essentially impersonal and insulated from its human effects; the second, put forth by Michelle Alexander among others, that the prison is an institution of white supremacy that functions in the service of racial domination as social control.

This long and thoughtful piece opens with a nice meditation on time in the context of incarceration– the “timeless time”  of death row, and the way that in prison, time becomes something being done to you, not something you do things with. It also offers some sobering facts: six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S., more than were in Stalin’s gulags; Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teenagers to life imprisonment; during the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. There is more– a discussion of the relationship between crime and such punishment, and of stop and frisk programs, some Shakespeare and a little hope– and more than that too, that makes it worth your while to take a look.

Event 1/25 to support incarcerated women

For more about the Framingham project, see here.

Quincy Prison Book Program is Amazing– Visit, Help Out!

When I went to drop off books at the Prison Book Program in Quincy last week, I walked into a whirlwind of activity generated by a big, diverse and inspiring community of people committed to getting reading materials into prisoners’ hands. Some of the forty-some volunteers that evening, who were young, old, and everything in between, were catching up with each other at round tables where they were packaging books to send out to prisons; others were absorbed in processing and filing letters and requests from prisoners all around the country; more were stocking and organizing the shelves of their small bookstore-like supply room, sorting donations, or dashing around pulling books for packages.

PBP has been increasing prisoner access to resources for education and personal development by sending out books to incarcerated individuals since 1972. They’ve moved locations a number of time over the years but since 2004 have been housed in the basement of the United First Parish Church in Quincy, Mass. I hate to give away surprises but as an inducement for you to go check it out, this Unitarian Universalist church is worth a visit itself. It was opened in 1639 as “Ye Church of Braintry” and holds the remains of two former presidents, John Adams and John Quincy, and their spouses, Abigail and Louisa Catherine. A part of your tour of PBP can include a detour round the corner to the crypt that holds the four tombs:

PBP receives around 200 letters from prisoners per week, ships to over 800 facilities, serves around 7000 individuals a year. In order to do this work, they rely entirely on volunteer labor and donations, which almost all go to postage costs. Every hour and every dollar makes a big difference. Please consider sharing some of yours! I can’t think of many ways they could be better placed.

Quincy isn’t far from Boston, and the Program has regular volunteer hours every Tuesday and Thursday evenings and some special Saturday hours over the next few months too. You can get more info about all of this from their website. Literature about the program and one of their partners, Better World Books, is also available in the PLAP office, so please look for it.

RA for Charles Hamilton Institute

The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard is looking for research help on projects related to commutation and pending three-strikes legislation in Massachusetts. If you’re interested, see more here.

Ex-Guantanamo Prison Commander believes facility should be closed

The former commander of America’s most notorious detention facility describes his experiences at Guantanamo and offers an opinion on its usefulness here.

 

More press urges MA legislature to rethink enacting Three-Strikes bills

The editors of the Boston Phoenix weigh in on what Three-Strikes legislation would mean for Massachusetts, in a way consonant with the article discussed in this earlier post.

Massachusetts, a resource compendium for thinking about Juvenile Life without Parole

Take a look! The Coalition for Effective Public Safety has compiled the following recent articles urging Massachusetts to reconsider its law on Juvenile Life without Parole:
January 3, 2012
  • Letter to the Editor from David Fassler, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont:
  • Letter to the Editor from Jody Kent Lavy, Director of the National Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth:
December 31, 2011
  • Forgotten Change: State Fails to Measure Impact of Historic Juvenile Justice Reform. Follow up article by the New England Center for Investigative Journalism on JLWOP in Massachusetts:

December 27, 2011
  • For teens guilty of murder, penalties can vary widely. Article in the Boston Globe by the New England Center for Investigative Journalism on JLWOP in Massachusetts.
  • ‘Our Youngest Killers’: Juvenile Sentencing Varies Widely Report Shows. Coverage by WBUR, Boston NPR, of JLWOP in Massachusetts:

December 25, 2011
  • If sentences vary too widely, court should make corrections. Boston Globe editorial supporting greater judicial discretion in JLWOP cases and the review of Joe Donovan’s case and a sentence reduction:
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