Keith Humphreys

An academic colleague once made an intriguing observation about his left wing, multicultural theory-influenced undergraduates (i.e., all of them…he taught at UC Santa Cruz). They were absolutely unforgiving when judging the past of their own culture but were resolutely opposed to making any judgments about other cultures existing today. For example, when learning about the […]

One of the happy outcomes of the cable television revolution was that more stations were competing to brand themselves with audiences, and one method some of those chose was to start making their own films. The budgets were not as large as what Hollywood might provide, but the results were often more original. Such is […]

Earlier this week, I gave an optimistic read on the state of criminal justice reform in response to Max Ehrenfreud’s more pessimistic take (Ed Kilgore summarizes the exchange nicely and adds his own thoughts here) The news today from the Department of Justice belongs to the optimists: The U.S. imprisonment rate has fallen for the […]

Max Ehrenfreund reads the eulogy for criminal justice reform in America: The right-left alliance on criminal justice seems to be breaking apart. Sentencing reform is stalled in the Senate. Conservative commentators are pronouncing ominously about a phantom crime wave. Donald Trump’s old-fashioned, tough-on-crime presidential campaign is a smashing success. In fact, there was never much […]

The word “heroin” strikes terror into the heart of most Americans, with good reason. But the increasing heroin problem in the U.S. is actually just a small part of a much longer and deeper epidemic that was started by doctors and pharmaceutical companies beginning in the late 1990s. Paul Costello, a terrific interviewer, asked me […]

As a field, criminology pays insufficient attention to two things: political science and political conservatives. The former oversight derives from the siloization of social science in most universities, the latter emerges from the field being almost uniformly left-wing, such that conservatives can be dismissed as the unthinking enemy rather than understood as political and policy […]

If I told you I was going to recommend a funny 1951 movie about class differences, you would naturally expect something British. But this week’s film recommendation shows that post-war Americans too could also mine the comic possibilities of people from different economic strata rubbing shoulders: The Mating Season. The plot of this mistitled little […]

Dave Collins of the Associated Press has covered a grim story (Emphasis mine): Middletown police say 21-year-old city resident Tony Moreno confessed to throwing his son, Aaden, off the bridge July 5 and then jumping himself amid a custody dispute with Aaden’s mother. After the 7-month-old boy was thrown to his death from a bridge […]

Using some already appropriated funds, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy is allocating $2.5 million to support public health approaches to the heroin epidemic. Meanwhile HHS Secretary Burwell is asking Congress for $133 million to respond to the overdose epidemic and a bipartisan group of legislators has proposed their own $80 million […]

Kirk Carapezza’s report on professors who don’t want to retire is worth listening to (you can also read about it at our sister site Washington Monthly). But it frustrated me in covering an old white male college professor who sees no reason to retire without ever challenging him (or the audience) about how the lingering […]