PRISON ABOLITIONISTS AND PARIS HILTON. Why, asks Jeremy Bearer-Friend at WireTap, didn’t progressives do more with the Paris-goes-to jail story? The travesty wasn’t only that a celebrity white woman was treated differently by the California police and courts than poor people of color. Rather, no one’s substance abuse problem should be answered with incarceration. It’s a strategy that just doesn’t work. And the anti-Paris frenzy was another example of our society’s knee-jerk zeal for putting more and more people in jail.

—Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.