Sunday, September 23, 2007

Walk, Don't Run

to this excellent piece in today's Boston Globe which details the civil rights implications, as well as the impact on the entire society, of our insistence that incarceration, which is at the low-end of our means of preventing crime and victimization, be our only significant investment in crime control. As we've said repeatedly, why this isn't the number one motivator for a resurgence of the civil rights movement, as opposed to, say, whether Michael Vick gets to play football again, is something that the major rights groups and leaders will have to answer for for a long time. There have been pockets of legislators or scholars here or there, but maybe now some critical mass is forming, thanks to nooses popping up back in trees in MS. It's always interesting how bad things can come from good intentions and good things from bad.

[And while you're at the Globe, perhaps relatedly, read this article on why people cheat, how they justify it, and why they don't think about getting caught and ponder yet again why sometimes the exact same behavior is criminalized and sometimes it's not. And don't think Belichick won't receive handsome remuneration by the end of this year's Super Bowl that will dwarf what most offenders are doing time for.]

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