The idea that citizens should be empowered by law to lethally judge who is a criminal threat is dangerous and wrong. Here's one reason why: Just a small-n social experiment? Yes, though here are some stats to demonstrate how this does and is likely to play out in the...
Over the years, the so-called global "war on terror" (or "war on terrorism") has had its ups and downs as a foreign policy framing device. The George W. Bush administration, of course, relied upon...
Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman have published a study in the American Political Science Review on the relationship between contact with the US criminal justice system and disaffection from US...
I've been traveling in the southwest and reading different newspapers than I usually do. As a result, I learned that Phoenix is America's "kidnapping capital." The LA Times published the AP story I...
The US needs prison reform as badly as it needs affordable health care. I haven't written about this before. Because America does such an excellent job of compartmentalizing its incarcerated population from its elite, those of us living in eastern urban areas rarely need to think about our prisons. Traveling across the wastelands of Kansas and Nebraska and Utah, however, where one is as likely to see a chain gang as an elk, and where the signs remind you not to pick up hitch-hikers instead of not to litter, one begins to give this some this thought. In 1998, the US surpassed the former...