Overcrowding the Courts Isn't the Way to Reform Our Justice System

Will crowding an already-crowded criminal justice system lead to reform?

In yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Review, Michelle Alexander has a provocative column called “Go toTrial: Crash the Justice System.” Alexander has a book out called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in theAge of Colorblindness, which argues that the outlandish rates at which we incarcerate African-Americans and Hispanics has created a new system of segregation, based on legal discrimination against people with criminal records. (Full disclosure: I have not actually read the book, although it’s on my list!)

In her column yesterday, Alexander makes a proposal. At the moment, less than 10% of criminal defendants ever make their case in front of a jury; the rest take plea deals that often destroy their future prospects for jobs, housing, social services, and other necessities. If more people accused of crimes actually demanded a jury trial rather than taking a plea deal, the courts would be unable to handle the increase. Then, Alexander says, there would be ”only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial ‘emergency’ fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash.”

While I share Alexander’s desire for serious criminal justice reform, recent history suggests a major problem with her idea. Nearly 50 years ago Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward made a similar proposal about the welfare system. In the 1960s, many people who were eligible to receive welfare benefits never applied for them, or applied and were wrongfully rejected. If more of those people actually demanded the benefits to which they were entitled, Piven and Cloward predicted, the insufficiently-funded welfare system would collapse under the weight of the demands and policymakers would be forced to establish a new, more equitable, more sustainable system of social provision.

Unfortunately, something different happened. In the 1960s and early 1970s, more people did demand the welfare support for which they were eligible. The number of welfare recipients increased dramatically (although there were also other reasons for the increase), as did the percentage of eligible people who actually received benefits.

But then there was a major backlash against welfare in the 1970s. Much of the New Right (whose legacy is the Tea Party) was mobilized by anger about increasing government spending on social services, especially welfare and other income supports. The federal government and the states began a decades-long effort to make welfare harder to get and more punitive to its recipients. This culminated in a major overhaul of the welfare system in 1996 that undercut the assistance programs that had supported millions of low-income Americans for six decades. Piven and Cloward’s proposal was doomed by many of the same social dynamics that, I think, would doom Alexander’s: racism, hostility towards the poor and minorities, and the belief that the people trapped in the system “deserve what they get.”

Alexander is absolutely right that increased numbers of jury trials would place more stress on our deeply flawed criminal justice system. But what’s to say that wouldn’t just result in longer delays before trial, ever-larger workloads for public defenders, and even worse outcomes for defendants? The criminal justice system is already overloaded; stressing its resources even more won't solve that problem. I’m all for dramatically reducing the number of people trapped in our so-called justice system, but I think history suggests that this isn’t the way to do it.

What Alan Lomax Can Tell Us About Research and Teaching in the Digital Age

Last week the New York Times reported that the world will soon have digital access to an unbelievable trove of recorded music and dance from around the globe, thanks to the decades-long effort by Alan Lomax and a crew of archivists who, since Lomax’s death in 2002, have worked to digitize the recordings and photographs he collected. According to the Times, this includes

some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts.

Lomax was an ethnographer who traveled throughout the U.S. and, eventually, the world to record people playing music and talking about their art. He later became interested in dance and performance. His recordings document musical traditions from around the world and are an unparalleled resource for musicians and historians. Now, the collection is in the process of being fully digitized and made available for free on the internet. 

As I work on my dissertation and contemplate my career prospects, I am constantly confronting questions about the roles of scholarship, academia, and education in an era in which an unimaginable amount of information is available to anyone with a computer. What’s the role of researchers, writers, and educators when everyone can find the answers to their questions with a Google search? Reading about this enormous digital collection helped me figure out a way to articulate an answer. 

Planned Parenthood: Health Care or Feminism? Can It Be Both?

For 36 hours my Facebook feed has been overflowing with people angry at the Susan G. Komen Foundation for canceling grants to Planned Parenthood that paid for breast cancer screenings. According to the Associated Press, the grants totaled about $680,000 last year – which is not actually very much in the context of PPFA’s and the Planned Parenthood affiliates’ budgets, which totaled over $1 billion in FY 2010. 

More significant than the amount of money is the spotlight this puts on Planned Parenthood’s careful positioning as a women’s health care organization – emphasis on the health care.

For nearly a century and a half, birth control has stood at the uncomfortable crossroads of medicine and services designed to empower women. Abortion was first outlawed in America in the 19th century as part of physicians’ (who were overwhelmingly male) efforts to make maternity care their responsibility rather than leaving it up to midwives (overwhelmingly female). But doctors didn’t quite know what to do about birth control, since it was preventive rather than curative -  and they specialized in curing diseases and solving problems - so their solution was basically to not provide birth control. When Margaret Sanger founded her first clinic in 1916, she argued that women needed birth control in order to control their own lives, but she soon lost command of her own organization to male doctors who had more respectability and clout but played down the women’s empowerment side of their work. In 1942, they changed the organization’s name from the Birth Control League to Planned Parenthood so they wouldn’t scare people who were put off by the idea of women “controlling” their reproduction.

1928 Catholicism = 2011 Mormonism? Or is it Islam?

Historian Robert Slayton has a column in the Times today about the anti-Catholic hysteria that Al Smith provoked when he ran for president in 1928 after four terms as NY governor. This is one of those pieces of history that, in my pessimistic moments, makes me think that we (as a society) haven't actually learned much from the past. It seems pretty clear to us now that it was, indeed, hysteria that caused people to think that, for instance, “if you vote for Al Smith you’re voting against Christ and you’ll all be damned,” or that Smith's election would mean that “you will not be allowed to have or read a Bible.” Shouldn't it be totally obvious to all Americans, then, that the election of a Muslim congressman would not result in sharia law (whatever the right wing means by that) usurping the U.S. Constitution?

You Know Who Doesn't Need More Cash?

Corporations and their shareholders. A study out yesterday from a group of U. Mass. economists says that major U.S. banks and corporations are in possession of $3.6 TRILLION in cash and other liquid assets, of which at least $1.4 TRILLION isn't necessary for their financial health and could instead be used to create 19 MILLION new jobs. They predict that if all of that money were actually spent on "productive investments and job creation" instead of remaining hoarded in the bank, the unemployment rate could fall below 5% by 2014.

So the next time you hear that raising taxes on rich people and corporations would hurt "job creators" by taking the cash they need to hire people, it's worth asking whether these corporations would even notice if a small bit of that $3.6 trillion left their pockets to help pay for needed government services. When you're swimming in the giant pool of money, you don't notice when the water drops an inch.

Also, check out this interesting take on why raising taxes would create jobs (hint: it's not because rich people would then willingly start paying more taxes).

Does Anybody in Washington Have Any Actual Ideas?

Instead of grading papers, I was procrastinating by browsing Twitter (obviously), which recommended that I check out @NRCC - the National Republican Congressional Committee. So I did, expecting to find something infuriating about the Republicans' positions - but I found something even worse: every single tweet is about Obama and the Dems. Do the Republicans have any actual ideas of their own?

Then I headed over to the NRCC's website, and here's what I found:

Keep in mind that these are the people in charge of shaping the Republicans' congressional campaign efforts and yet they seem unable to actually articulate something they stand for (although they're adept at finding things to oppose). Why is their lead banner about the Blue Dog Democrats, rather than about something the Republicans are actually doing?

But not to let the Democrats off too easy: for comparison, I checked out @DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Twitter feed. Here it is:

I guess from reading that we know that the DCCC is pro-union (really?) but otherwise it's much of the same: attack, attack, attack. And as for that labor thing - perhaps the DCCC just wants you to buy its merch? The DCCC website clearly shows, front and center, how to buy Dem merchandise (travel mug, anyone?*) and how to contribute money, but the most it has to say about what Dems actually support is this:

Supporting the DCCC is the single most effective step you can take to continue leading our country in a new direction. By fighting to retake the Democratic Majority in 2012 through protecting our Democratic members and electing new Democrats to Congress we can keep moving America forward.

And what does "moving America forward" mean, exactly?

Not to state the obvious, but perhaps we would end up with a more effective federal government if someone in either party came up with and advocated for actual ideas and policies, rather than just attacking the failures of the other side. 

And so begins another day of righteous indignation at our politicians and political system.

*Incidentally, the Dem merchandising program looks a lot like JetBlue's loyalty rewards program:

For some perspective: Jane Meyer on the successful efforts to stop the Keystone XL pipeline

Related to my previous post about movement-building: Jane Meyer has a nice Talk of the Town piece in last week's New Yorker about the successful efforts to stop the Keystone XL pipeline project, with a brief (but illuminating) comparison to OWS:

Yet the Occupy movement could do worse than to learn from the pipeline protest. The difference between the focussed, agenda-driven campaign fought by the environmentalists and the free-form, leaderless one waged by the Occupiers, the historian Michael Kazin says, is that the environmentalists grasped the famous point made by Dr. King’s political forebear, Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”