Sentencing and Corrections

9 March

• Norval Morris was a University of Chicago guy, who was among the first to study how prisons work from a legal perspective. See also "The Brothel Boy."
• Maconochie's experiments were influential. The British evolved ticketed "degrees" of freedom, which was the model for the US parole system.
• Federal prisons: locally recruited guards and nationwide pool of offenders (see, e.g., supermax in WV) can create tensions. Also, the federal prison population is getting more violent because of the war on drugs (i.e., not just white collar criminals). Prisons tend to get built in rural areas, but most prisoners come from urban areas: the guards may never have seen these cultures or this level of violence.
• PREA: Prison Rape Elimination Act. Prisoners can't "consent," and also a lot of the abuse is trades between guards and prisoners for contraband.
• "Good Time" credits are based on the notion that if people have an incentive to behave well, they might just do so.
• National Geographic (or maybe Nova) has a program on the CO supermax-- it's on solitary confinement. Get from NetFlix instant.
• Check out also Courtroom 302.
• Public opinion is the biggest obstacle to lasting prison reform. Maybe this would be better handled by a non-elected bureaucracy, because of that pressure.
• Does compliance with prison rules have anything to do with ability to comply with societal norms? Probably not. Likewise, we know that prisoners, disproportionately (though not exclusively) come from backgrounds including abuse and neglect. So we know if we do bad things to people, they in turn do bad things. Do we honestly believe that doing more bad things to these people will fix the problem?
• Think about the length of the criminal procedure: whatever positive effects punishment might have are diluted by distance in time. Punishing quickly and consistently might have more positive effects than punishing inconsistently and to a high degree.
• A lot of parents would never respond to their own kid screwing up the way they'd want the criminal justice system to respond to somebody else's kid screwing up. Not just because it's their child, but because they can see it's counterproductive.
• Contrary to expectation, court-ordered treatment for addictions has some degree of success.
• Ordinary Injustice is another good book.