Tag: punishment
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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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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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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.
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Reprobation as Shared Inquiry: Teaching the Liberal Arts in Prison
One of the reasons I blog less than I used to is that in addition to running this journal I’ve been teaching and organizing a college program at Jessup Correctional Institution. (Although I think it was having a daughter that really sucked the wind out of my sails, blogging-wise.) Anyway, to prove I haven’t been…
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Scanlon’s “Giving Desert its Due”
A couple of years back Tim Scanlon did a blog post and comment-section discussion on PEA Soup. Here’s one bit: In earlier work, including my Tanner Lectures on the significance of choice and Chapter 6 of What We Owe to Each Other, I rejected the idea of moral desert because I identified it with the…