N+1 reviews the Millenium trilogy, a Swedish crime series that takes a surprisingly dim view of the welfare state: [Read more →]

Yes, says David Downes, professor of criminology at the London School of Economics. No, says Heather Mac Donald, writing a few weeks back in The Wall Street Journal. Downes also suggests that the breakdown of social cohesion – eroding working class institutions, rising inequality – encourages criminality. The conservative counterpoint – again from Mac Donald – also emphasizes cohesion as a buffer against crime, but locates the traditional two-parent family as the fulcrum for social stability.

It looks as if Huckabee’s decision to grant clemency to an unstable criminal will cost him the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Joe Carter, who worked on the governor’s campaign, has written a great post on Huckabee’s views of rehabilitation. A telling quote: [Read more →]

Arizona is considering selling off its prisons as part of a larger process of balancing the budget.  Even death row would be privately run.  The state government predicts the move could save them $100 million dollars, which is a sizable chunk of change until you consider the budget shortfall totals over $2 billion dollars.  According to the New York Times:

Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state, then charge them per prisoner to run them. But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million up front to operate one or more prison complexes. Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided between the state and the private firm.

I can certainly see why governments would want to contract out the building of prisons, or some of the services surrounding the management of prisons.  But I get wary when we start talking about wholesale privatization of prisons or any other part of the legal system.  The whole “crime doesn’t pay” thing should apply to everybody, not just the criminals.  When we start profiting of the results of crime, a whole lot of bad incentives come into play, not the least of which is lobbying to keep current bad laws in place or to crack down even further on easy targets like non-violent offenders.

But there’s more to this story.  At the same time as prisons are being privatized, school budgets in Arizona face major shortages.  There’s talk of a number of schools being shuttered entirely, massive layoffs, and increased classroom sizes.  Last year, in my home town, every teacher with fewer than three years service, every art and music and extra-curricular teacher, every counselor and school psychologist, and a number of other education professionals were advised that their contracts would not be renewed.  They were saved by the stimulus.  This coming year, with no bailouts for the states, and with over $300 million likely to be cut from education and social services by the state – not to mention the falling local revenues from decreased home values and sales taxes – things look much more grim. [Read more →]

I wanted to briefly respond to a few points inspired by Sonny Bunch’s defense of the death penalty from last week. First, Andrew Sullivan suggests I have “mixed feelings” about executing prisoners. Well, not really. I may not have been very clear in my original post, but for the record, I oppose state-sanctioned execution. In an abstract sense, I suppose I don’t have any moral qualms about killing criminals, but abstract concessions mean very little in the context of a legal system that seems woefully incapable of overcoming human bias.

I very much doubt that technology will ever solve this problem, either. If anything, Radley Balko’s series on Mississippi’s fraudulent forensic investigators suggests that technology has made juries and judges more amenable to pseudo-scientific claptrap, not less. Science is also unlikely to replace or diminish the emotionally-charged circumstances surrounding capital punishment trials.

In a follow-up post, Bunch argues:

Will doesn’t say it this way, but you often hear the argument that life imprisonment is worse than execution because the criminal has to suffer in prison and then he dies anyway. But if life imprisonment is just as awful — nay, worse — than execution, why should we be happy that supposedly innocent people have been stuck in prison with no hope of parole for the rest of their lives? And how many of these innocents will manage to prove their innocence without the neverending legal process that has freed the innocent from death row?

I’m not sure if life imprisonment is worse than execution. The death penalty, however, is irrevocable. Setting an innocent man free isn’t a perfect solution, but it is better than offering our belated condolences to his family after he is wrongfully executed.

Imprisonment also allows us to address many procedural questions after defendants have been tried and found guilty. The finality of execution, on the other hand, means that every procedural concern must be addressed before punishment is carried out. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I think this detracts from any deterrent effect derived from capital punishment. And because of the system’s inherent fallibility, we still risk executing innocent defendants.

UPDATE: Here’s an excellent op-ed on the death penalty from McClatchy.

Sonny Bunch has written a long, impassioned defense of the death penalty. Here’s the crux of his argument:

Every time I start to waver on my support for the death penalty — as I did in the wake of another New Yorker piece, about a possibly-innocent man who was executed — I see a story like this and it snaps me right back into line. I’m all for containing prosecutorial abuses. I’m all for reforms to the way prosecutors seek the death penalty: Only in cases where there’s an eye witness or a confession or videotape evidence, perhaps. Maybe raise the bar for “scientific” evidence* to include only DNA evidence that conclusively proves the perpetrator was there.

But those monsters — the animals who would do that to a family of human beings — don’t deserve to live, and I don’t buy the argument that it’s a harsher penalty for them to live out their lives in prison. I want the state to wreak vengeance upon them. And, god help me, I want them to suffer when it happens. If this makes me a bad person, then so be it.

I’m basically agnostic on the moral issues surrounding state execution: if a criminal is obviously guilty of a heinous crime, I don’t have any qualms about putting him to death. I am suspicious, however, of our practical ability to distinguish between airtight death penalty convictions and cases that deserve a second look. I also think that the alternative to execution – lifetime imprisonment without parole – satisfies the demands of retributive justice without risking the lives of innocent defendants.

On another level, there’s some real tension between calling for greater prosecutorial oversight and the underlying rationale for executing prisoners. At its core, the death penalty is supposed to deter crime. If the process is hamstrung by judicial oversight, the risk of execution is unlikely to actually convince potential offenders not to do bad things. So we’re left with a system that occasionally delivers some morally satisfying verdicts but still risks killing innocent defendants. To me, this is just about the least satisfactory outcome imaginable.

N.B. – I’ve linked to these articles before, but you really should read Rod Dreher on the death penalty and The New Yorker on the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.

This op-ed should send chills up every law-abiding citizen’s spine (via Reason).