Louisiana Prison

The Times-Picayune has come out with an 8-part series on prisons in Louisiana in which reporter Cindy Chang spent over a year researching how Louisiana became the prison capital of the world.  It's a well-researched and thorough report with special attention to a number of areas (e.g., pardons, sentencing laws and the state's sentencing commission, costs of incarceration, and economic incentives to incarcerate).  Here's the video that opens the series.  There are a number of other videos and graphs.

Prison Proliferation: 1778-2005

Here's a great visual representation of the growth of prisons in the U.S. over the past couple centuries.  The green dots represent prison construction from 1778-1900 (122 years).  The yellow dots represent prison construction from 1901-1940 (39 years); orange dots from 1941-1980 (39 years) and the red dots from 1980-2005 (25 years).  The artist does a great job capturing the growth in the prison industry since the Civil Rights movement and the recent War on Drugs.  This is when prison became political and the number of those incarcerated in state and federal prison grew from around 300,000 (early 1970s) to 2.3 million (today). This represents the greatest number and rate of incarceration in the world.  That's right, in the world. China might share the title, depending on measurement.  Further, the U.S. incarceration rate for African Americans is over 2,000 per 100,000--4,919 black men per 100,000 according to the Department of Justice.  This represents a higher incarceration rate than was the case in apartheid South Africa.  Not surprisingly, the growth in incarceration has had virtually no effect on violent crime.  In fact, New Orleans has one of the highest incarceration rates for cities in the world and it's still one of the most violent cities in the U.S.   Check it out, it's about 10:00 minutes long.

Jimmy Carter calls for an End of the Global Drug War

So most criminologists will tell you that the War on Drugs is an utter failure.  Drugs today are more potent and easily accessible than they were decades ago when this version of the War on Drugs started (Nixon > Reagan > Bush > Clinton).

Prison, Reform, and New Orleans

The Lens lately has been providing some good insight into what's been going on in city hall regarding a number of criminal justice related issues in New Orleans.  Topics include the new jail that's currently under construction, funding for the jail, police oversight, and expert suggestions (such as building a smaller jail).

Safe Streets/Strong Communities a New Orleans-based organization that's dedicated to criminal justice reform, has published a number of post Katrina reports on the social and economic conditions and costs of incarceration in the city.  I read through "Big Jails and Big Costs."

The Political Uses of Crime

For the past few years I've used a book called "Making Crime Pay" by Katherine Beckett in my criminology courses.  I like it because through the combined use of historical research, political discourse, media narratives, and public opinion polls, she shows how both fear of crime and the image many of us have in our heads of the young black male criminal are social and political constructions.  Here's the basic outline/argument:

Interesting Social Fact on Urban Crime

So, one of the most recognized social facts among criminologists is that violent crime and crimes against property are more commonly found in certain areas of a city and less commonly found in others. This is no surprise, but the interesting thing is that as people who live in the crime ridden sections move out, the crime, by and large, stays. That is, it doesn't move with them. This was something criminologists discovered way back in the 1920s. Today, the reasoning and argument are much more complicated than was the case back in the day. For instance, it's now also widely recognized that some of the high rates of crime in particularly urban areas are also due to the high rates of policy surveillance, so that some of the difference in crime rate is due to the simple fact that some areas of the city aren't crawling with police. Despite this issue of visibility and enforcement on crime rate numbers, the fact remains. As people move out of crime prone areas, the crime tends not to move with them. The reason people believe this is an important social fact is because it make us ask about crime as a function of an individual, where it's due to one's psychological makeup or genetics or a function of conditions/environment. That is, an area as criminogenic, where crime is a somewhat normal reaction to abnormal conditions.