Tag: prisons
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IRAA 3.0: Second Look Review for Adults
Today I am testifying on behalf of the Second Look Amendment Act of 2019, sometimes dubbed IRAA 3.0. The initial IRAA, the Incarceration Amendment Act, was designed to provide post-sentencing review to those who committed crimes as juveniles and were given life or near-life sentences. IRAA 2.0 extended eligibility and clarified some issues in the…
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Entrepreneurship and Returning Citizens
Entrepreneurship is a particular approach to citizenship. It’s about trying to find new ways of being of use to each other. Formerly incarcerated people are increasingly marginalized in our society–but they deserve to be treated as valuable and with dignity.
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Foucault on School-Prison and Prison-School Pipelines
“So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of ‘failures’, the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 277 In my mini-review of Bryan Caplan’s polemic against education, I noted that he partly ignores Foucaultian arguments…
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Provoking pedagogically-effective discussion in college courses, with an example using Danielle Allen’s Cuz
Today is the first day of classes in my seventeenth year of teaching. I have taught a lot over those years–sometimes as much as a 5/5/1 (5 courses in Fall, 5 in Spring, and one over the summer.) My sense from that time is that the value of a philosophy course is largely not derived…
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The Enduring Appeal of Perversity Arguments and Unintended Consequences Warnings
James Forman, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize last week for his book Locking Up Our Own. It is well-deserved. That book–and his earlier work wrangling with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow–shows the ways that we have arrived at the wicked problem of mass incarceration through something much harder to disdain than evil scheming by distant elites. We…
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6/7s Abolition
It’s France’s fête nationale–Bastille Day–marking the storming of the Bastille Saint-Antoine. The crowd of revolutionaries were mostly looking for guns and ammunition held by the garrison of soldiers stationed there, but they also suspected that the prisoners were being tortured. (They weren’t.) Seven prisoners were freed that day: four forgers, two mentally-ill people, and one aristocrat.…