Readers know I have a continuing side obsession with prison reform. With that in mind, a host of good pieces have come out in the past few days, and since I don't quite have time to comment on them all, I can at least link:
• Over at TAP, Sasha Abramsky and Marie Gottschalk discuss the evolution and future of the prison state.
• In The Boston Review, Glen Loury argues, scarily and convincingly, that imprisonment rates have skyrocketed not for any external or rational reasons, but because we as a society are growing ever more enamored with punishment. "Imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen," he says, because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment."
• And in The Nation, Daniel Lazare reviews a whole host of books that have recently come out on the prison state.
