Fifty years ago, more than half a million mentally ill Americans lived in state-run mental hospitals like the one depicted so searingly in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Today, laws protect the mentally ill from needless involuntary stays. As a result, fewer than 80,000 people now live in such institutions. The revolution in mental-health […]
Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at Demos and a writer on social-justice issues. His latest book is The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives.
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No Resources, No Results
In the early 1970s, America’s prison population began a dramatic expansion that has continued, uninterrupted, ever since. By the year 2000, one in every 14 general-fund dollars spent by the states was being spent on incarceration. Vast high-security prisons were constructed at a cost of a quarter of a billion dollars each. Today, prison spending […]
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Small-Town Blues
On April 17, about 50 residents of Encinal, Texas, drove across the railway tracks to the Veterans’ Hall community center to debate whether the impoverished town should add a large, privately run U.S. Marshals Service prison to its meager list of possessions. Specifically, they discussed an environmental assessment commissioned by prison proponents to reassure locals […]
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Return of the Madhouse
Last summer, some 600 inmates in the notorious supermaximum-security unit at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison stopped eating. They were protesting the conditions in which the state says it must hold its most difficult prisoners: locked up for 23 hours out of every 24 in a barren concrete cell measuring 7 1/2 by 11 feet. […]
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Did Roe v. Wade Abort Crime?
C rime is down across America. The nation’s crime rate has been dropping for the best part of a decade now, and everyone is keen to take the credit. New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani claims that zero-tolerance policing is responsible; former California Governor Pete Wilson credits three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws; President Bill Clinton says gun control and […]
