Mark Kleiman

This country has about five times as many people in prison and jail (per capita) as it ever had before 1975, and about seven times as many as other economically and socially advanced countries. Unfortunately, and contrary to current myth, most of those people aren’t innocent, and aren’t harmless “NonNonNons.” More than half are currently […]

Josh Barro’s report in the New York Times starts with the debate about the Washington D.C. grow-and-give system and opens out into the broader question of whether it’s possible to create a system of cannabis controls that: (1) Allows adult access; (2) Substantially eliminates the harms from organized illicit business; (3) Minimizes arrest and incarceration; (4) […]

Now that the teaching quarter is over, I can get to my piled-up “must-read” list. Sarah Chayes’s Thieves of State is high on that list. My students doing their master’s project on income maintenance in Afghanistan found it invaluable. Fortunately, today I was treated to the low-cost substitute for reading a whole book: Chayes gave a […]

Kevin Drum explains what would happen to him if ACA were repealed: due to his cancer, he’d be uninsurable. If his current employer folded – not a remote eventuality, in the world of magazine and online journalism – he’d be s.o.l. Kevin, let us recall, is neither poor nor reckless. He didn’t choose to get […]

Chris Ingraham at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog has an interesting take on the graduated re-entry idea. Ingraham’s piece addresses an obvious question: isn’t graduated re-entry just a halfway house under another name? The answer to that, as usual, is “Yes and no,” but in this case mostly “No.” A halfway house is a correctional facility […]

If we want to get our disgraceful incarceration rate back to our own historical level – let alone the lower levels enjoyed by other economically advanced democracies – we have to reduce the prison-plus-jail headcount by about 80%. You read that right: line up five prisoners, and let four of them out. There are innocent […]

Mike O’Hare explains how accounting policies (no, really) make art museums much less useful than they ought to be. The basic problem is that they don’t account for their art as an asset, and therefore don’t feel accountable – and aren’t held accountable – for whether they’re creating a reasonable return on that asset in […]

Getting out of the mass-incarceration trap is hard. We currently have five times our historical incarceration rate and seven times the incarceration rate of most of Western Europe. We also have a frighteningly high rate of homicide and other violent crime, albeit only about half as high as it was twenty years ago. To get […]

Having despaired for years about the unwillingness of the mass media to call out the Banana Republicans for their extremism and disregard of Constitutional norms, I’m happy to see the New York Daily News reacting strongly against the Logan Act violation by Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican senators. But the word “traitors” is simply […]

The American Historical Association, along with a group of historians of the family, has submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on the marriage-equality cases. Naturally, they’re for it. So am I. And – since I’m not an historian – I learned a good deal from the material presented in the brief, which is […]