anotherpanacea

Tag: prisons

  • “Expanding College Opportunity in Our Nation’s Prisons”

    “Expanding College Opportunity in Our Nation’s Prisons”

    College in prisons is the easiest and most obvious of a host of criminal justice reforms that we absolutely must be making and for which there is bipartisan support. We incarcerate 2.3 million people in the US, at a rate more than seven times higher than the global average. We’re not seven times more violent…

  • “That man who has nothing to lose:” Black Americans and Superfluousness

    “That man who has nothing to lose:” Black Americans and Superfluousness

    Long before white Americans felt like their society had abandoned them, Black Americans knew the feeling. Just like whites do today, some Black Americans responded to earlier superfluousness by “clinging to guns and religion” to use Barack Obama’s famous analysis. (cf. Kinsley gaffe) Here’s James Baldwin, describing the Nation of Islam: “I’ve come,” said Elijah,…

  • For Education, Against Credentialism

    For Education, Against Credentialism

    Today I’ll be addressing a group of imprisoned students, university administrators, and prison officials to inaugurate the University of Baltimore’s partnership with the US Department of Education and Jessup Correctional Institution to offer Bachelor’s Degrees. We have a few tasks today, including inspiring the students and encouraging the officials that their support for the program…

  • Civic Death and the Afterlife of Imprisonment

    Civic Death and the Afterlife of Imprisonment

    The fantasies of social death are pernicious precisely because they imagine no return. The reality is that most of these men must someday rejoin the communities from which they have been exiled. People come back. What’s more, they’re never really that far away.

  • Thursday Links, Agglomerated

    Nathan Smith: “American egalitarianism is a sheltered creed that needs the border as blindfold to retain its limited plausibility as an ideal.” Literary Magazines for Socialists funded by the CIA, ranked (Partisan Review is #3) Pope Francis to visit a Pennsylania prison and call for reform in Congress. Michael Rosen: I sometimes fear that people might…

  • Social Media, Public Shaming, and the Prospects for Prison Reform

    Social Media, Public Shaming, and the Prospects for Prison Reform

    Everyone always learns the wrong lesson from the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Shock Study: we always think it means that other people are horrible. We ignore the possibility that we might be horrible, too, given the right circumstances.