Archive: Aug 2006

criminologists often write about the costs of incarceration –generating crude estimates by multiplying the number of inmates by the per diem paid by the taxpayers. larger costs, of course, are borne by the inmates who don’t really need to be there.

though i’ve written about the relative safety of prisons and jails, they clearly remain dangerous places to spend the night — especially for younger arrestees and those brought in on minor charges.

carl edward moyle was booked into the sherburne county jail yesterday and was beaten to death within twelve hours. his crime was a simple traffic offense: driving without proof of insurance, which is a gross misdemeanor in minnesota for repeat offenders. his assailant was a state prison inmate awaiting trial for assaulting yet another inmate in a st. cloud penitentiary.

sherburne county sheriff bruce anderson, jail administrators, and minnesota corrections officials will surely be asked why they failed to segregate an inmate with a history of assaulting other inmates. but my question is more basic: do we really need to be locking up folks because they don’t have insurance? given state variation in insurance requirements, can you think of a better example of a mala prohibita offense?

doing prison interviews, i’ve asked inmates “how many of these guys need to be here?” most respond with an estimate between 25 and 75 percent of their fellow residents, easily pointing out examples in each category. i suspect that the incarcerated could have distinguished between mr. moyle and his assailant. i know that few would identify traffic violators as deserving of incarceration, much less a fatal beating.

criminologists often write about the costs of incarceration –generating crude estimates by multiplying the number of inmates by the per diem paid by the taxpayers. larger costs, of course, are borne by the inmates who don’t really need to be there.

though i’ve written about the relative safety of prisons and jails, they clearly remain dangerous places to spend the night — especially for younger arrestees and those brought in on minor charges.

carl edward moyle was booked into the sherburne county jail yesterday and was beaten to death within twelve hours. his crime was a simple traffic offense: driving without proof of insurance, which is a gross misdemeanor in minnesota for repeat offenders. his assailant was a state prison inmate awaiting trial for assaulting yet another inmate in a st. cloud penitentiary.

sherburne county sheriff bruce anderson, jail administrators, and minnesota corrections officials will surely be asked why they failed to segregate an inmate with a history of assaulting other inmates. but my question is more basic: do we really need to be locking up folks because they don’t have insurance? given state variation in insurance requirements, can you think of a better example of a mala prohibita offense?

doing prison interviews, i’ve asked inmates “how many of these guys need to be here?” most respond with an estimate between 25 and 75 percent of their fellow residents, easily pointing out examples in each category. i suspect that the incarcerated could have distinguished between mr. moyle and his assailant. i know that few would identify traffic violators as deserving of incarceration, much less a fatal beating.

shameless plug: michelle and i are speaking on public criminologies this sunday morning at the sociology meetings in montreal.

here’s the paper (comments welcome!) and here’s the session info:

Regular Session. Public Sociology
Scheduled Time: Sun, Aug 13 – 10:30am – 12:10pm Building: Palais des congrès de Montréal

Session Organizer: Eric Klinenberg (New York University)

Presider: Kieran Healy (University of Arizona)

Accessibility through Accountability: Moving Beyond the Traditional Literature Review in Public Sociology
Laurel E. Westbrook (Univ of California-Berkeley), Damon W. Mayrl (University of California-Berkeley)

Challenging Institutional Barriers to Community-Based Research
Randy Stoecker (University of Wisconsin)

Public Criminologies
Christopher Uggen (University of Minnesota), Michelle Inderbitzin (Oregon State University)

Publicly Financed Sports Stadiums, the Media, and Public Policy
Kevin J. Delaney (Temple University), Rick Eckstein (Villanova University)

shameless plug: michelle and i are speaking on public criminologies this sunday morning at the sociology meetings in montreal.

here’s the paper (comments welcome!) and here’s the session info:

Regular Session. Public Sociology
Scheduled Time: Sun, Aug 13 – 10:30am – 12:10pm Building: Palais des congrès de Montréal

Session Organizer: Eric Klinenberg (New York University)

Presider: Kieran Healy (University of Arizona)

Accessibility through Accountability: Moving Beyond the Traditional Literature Review in Public Sociology
Laurel E. Westbrook (Univ of California-Berkeley), Damon W. Mayrl (University of California-Berkeley)

Challenging Institutional Barriers to Community-Based Research
Randy Stoecker (University of Wisconsin)

Public Criminologies
Christopher Uggen (University of Minnesota), Michelle Inderbitzin (Oregon State University)

Publicly Financed Sports Stadiums, the Media, and Public Policy
Kevin J. Delaney (Temple University), Rick Eckstein (Villanova University)

i’m sure that plenty of americans would holiday on alcatraz, but something tells me this gulag won’t be a huge money maker. according to the independent,

Igor Shpektor, the Mayor of Vorkuta, 100 miles above the Arctic Circle and 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, says he is looking for an investor to turn an abandoned prison complex into a “reality” holiday camp for novelty-seeking tourists keen to understand what life was like for Soviet political prisoners at first hand.

His idea, which has upset survivors of the prison camp, envisages recreating a tiny part of the Gulag complete with watchtowers, guards armed with paintball guns, snarling dogs, rolls of barbed wire, spartan living conditions – and forced labour.

yeesh. they probably aren’t taking volunteers at guantanamo, but “extreme tourists” who want a prison experience might be better served volunteering or mentoring at actual prisons and juvenile training schools.

i’m sure that plenty of americans would holiday on alcatraz, but something tells me this gulag won’t be a huge money maker. according to the independent,

Igor Shpektor, the Mayor of Vorkuta, 100 miles above the Arctic Circle and 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, says he is looking for an investor to turn an abandoned prison complex into a “reality” holiday camp for novelty-seeking tourists keen to understand what life was like for Soviet political prisoners at first hand.

His idea, which has upset survivors of the prison camp, envisages recreating a tiny part of the Gulag complete with watchtowers, guards armed with paintball guns, snarling dogs, rolls of barbed wire, spartan living conditions – and forced labour.

yeesh. they probably aren’t taking volunteers at guantanamo, but “extreme tourists” who want a prison experience might be better served volunteering or mentoring at actual prisons and juvenile training schools.

how much do you think one day of your life is worth? no, really. if you had to give up one day, what would be your price? i’ll admit to occasionally having days that i would pay to have someone take for me, but in general, it’s hard to put a price on one’s life. some have tried to quantify it, but that doesn’t speak to issues of quality and what you may miss in a day that you gave up or lost.

now, what if you were wrongly convicted of a crime and spent years of your life behind bars? not only would you have missed all kinds of potentially lovely experiences, you would have been instead subjected to truly miserable ones. how much would a year of your life be worth to you then?

it’s difficult for the wrongly convicted–and imprisoned–to get compensation for the years that they have lost. a recent story suggests that in many states the wrongly convicted must prove “actual” innocence and/or police/criminal Justice misconduct to get compensation. for those who do prove their innocence, california allows $100 per day in compensation. do you think your life and your freedom is worth more than that?

michael evans thinks his is. the chicago sun-times reports that evans, who wrongfully spent 27 years in an illinois prison before being freed by dna evidence, is seeking up to $58 million dollars in damages. he is asking for $2 million per year he was in prison plus $1 million punitive damages from each of the four police officers who conspired against him. if the nine person jury finds for evans, the four officers will be personally responsible for the punitive damages and the city will pay the $54 million in compensation. the jury is currently in deliberations.

so how much is a day or year in your life really worth to you? do you have opportunities that may never come again? if so, are you taking full advantage of them? there may never be a better time.

how much do you think one day of your life is worth? no, really. if you had to give up one day, what would be your price? i’ll admit to occasionally having days that i would pay to have someone take for me, but in general, it’s hard to put a price on one’s life. some have tried to quantify it, but that doesn’t speak to issues of quality and what you may miss in a day that you gave up or lost.

now, what if you were wrongly convicted of a crime and spent years of your life behind bars? not only would you have missed all kinds of potentially lovely experiences, you would have been instead subjected to truly miserable ones. how much would a year of your life be worth to you then?

it’s difficult for the wrongly convicted–and imprisoned–to get compensation for the years that they have lost. a recent story suggests that in many states the wrongly convicted must prove “actual” innocence and/or police/criminal Justice misconduct to get compensation. for those who do prove their innocence, california allows $100 per day in compensation. do you think your life and your freedom is worth more than that?

michael evans thinks his is. the chicago sun-times reports that evans, who wrongfully spent 27 years in an illinois prison before being freed by dna evidence, is seeking up to $58 million dollars in damages. he is asking for $2 million per year he was in prison plus $1 million punitive damages from each of the four police officers who conspired against him. if the nine person jury finds for evans, the four officers will be personally responsible for the punitive damages and the city will pay the $54 million in compensation. the jury is currently in deliberations.

so how much is a day or year in your life really worth to you? do you have opportunities that may never come again? if so, are you taking full advantage of them? there may never be a better time.

as i reluctantly trundled a decade of sociology journals to the free shelf, my mind raced and ricocheted to all manner of worst-case scenarios. what if everybody dumped their paper journals but electronic access was sharply restricted? just because we have cheap or free electronic access today doesn’t mean that we’ll always have it, does it?

i quickly spun an(other) orwellian movie treatment in which all sociological knowledge was lost, save for the brave efforts of a rag-tag crew of grad students uploading pirate scans of ajs and asr, just one step ahead of the information police. in a cave. with a generator. more seriously, we all act as if services such as jstor or google will be around throughout our careers, and that we will be able to access such information — as well as the great libraries of books being scanned — for free or for cheap. maybe this is the case, maybe not.

i started a blog last year, in part, because i sensed that freedom this good is too good to last. i don’t keep pace with efforts to regulate blogs or net content, but reports like this sometimes give me pause. unfortunately, i don’t know what netcasting is either, just that my president is calling to regulate it.

in the end, i made the same stability assumptions as everyone else and gave away my old journals. that said, i suspect there’s a non-zero probability that what’s free is gonna cost, and it probably won’t be long before the doors start closing.

as i reluctantly trundled a decade of sociology journals to the free shelf, my mind raced and ricocheted to all manner of worst-case scenarios. what if everybody dumped their paper journals but electronic access was sharply restricted? just because we have cheap or free electronic access today doesn’t mean that we’ll always have it, does it?

i quickly spun an(other) orwellian movie treatment in which all sociological knowledge was lost, save for the brave efforts of a rag-tag crew of grad students uploading pirate scans of ajs and asr, just one step ahead of the information police. in a cave. with a generator. more seriously, we all act as if services such as jstor or google will be around throughout our careers, and that we will be able to access such information — as well as the great libraries of books being scanned — for free or for cheap. maybe this is the case, maybe not.

i started a blog last year, in part, because i sensed that freedom this good is too good to last. i don’t keep pace with efforts to regulate blogs or net content, but reports like this sometimes give me pause. unfortunately, i don’t know what netcasting is either, just that my president is calling to regulate it.

in the end, i made the same stability assumptions as everyone else and gave away my old journals. that said, i suspect there’s a non-zero probability that what’s free is gonna cost, and it probably won’t be long before the doors start closing.