Forensic Science

Over at HuffPo, Radley Balko has a disturbing post about thousands of cases that the FBI labs may have mishandled.

Apologies for the most recent hiatus. There are posts about pretrial detention and legitimacy in the works.

Thanks for reading.

J

New Orleans' Priorities

Just today, the Times-Pic reported that "New Orleans judges have in the last three...years illegally used public money to buy more than $800,000 in supplemental insurance, and spent excessively on travel and lodging expenses." Their actions contravene a Louisiana statute that prevents judges from paying a different rate on their insurance premiums than other state employees.

There's a lot to pick at here. A curious soul might wonder whether Leon Cannizzaro, a former New Orleans judge and the city's current DA, was aware that his actions were illegal when he "may have participated at some time in the conduct [1]." Perhaps our intrepid inquisitor would inquire as to where the $800,000 came from in the first place. Presumably, this person would be shocked to learn that the cash came from a judicial expense fund that judges order criminal convicts to pay into: as much as $250 for a misdemeanor and $2,000 for a felony [2].  If our swiftly jaded protagonist dug a little deeper, they would find that Cannizzaro (who, it seems, ought to know) has claimed that judges extort money from convicts with the threat of revoking their probation [see 1].

From Been There, Done That.

So, in short, judges have been extracting a tax (of sorts) from convicts that is supposed to be used to fund necessary court operations, but is actually used to pay for the judges' healthcare.

One of the more disheartening aspects of this story is the fact that many parts of New Orleans' criminal justice system desperately need more funding. Orleans Public Defenders is always on perilous financial footing [3], as is the nascent pretrial services program.

The pretrial services program seeks to assess defendants and determine the risk that they will fail to appear for court dates or be rearrested if released. It is an attempt to provide judges with more information, and more knowledge about what information matters, so that those judges can make an intelligent decision about bail. A well-run pretrial services program can lead to cost savings (less people will be detained pending disposition), increased public safety (potentially dangerous defendants are flagged and detained), and a more just system (release decisions are based on evidence and not on a defendant's ability to pay for bail).

From NOLA.COM

The New Orleans pretrial services program started on April 30th, and has been screening roughly 60% of felony defendants. The program has cost New Orleans only $200,000 because of grants from the Bureau of Justice Assistance and Baptist Community Ministries. Those grants are expiring, though, and - if the program is to continue and expand to screening all defendants - the city will need to find $623,000. At the moment, it has only scrounged up $184,000 [3].

I truly hope that the Landrieu administration is putting on a show in the hopes that the tab will be picked up by someone else, and that they are not actually considering ending the program.

After its first three months of operation, the program had screened 928 felony defendants. Nearly 30% of those defendants were released on low or no bond ($325 or less), and 93% of the released defendants had appeared at their next court date. The program screens for indigence (i.e. whether the defendant needs a public defender) and for the DA's diversion program [4]. The program is still young, but stakeholders from every part of the criminal justice system of have praised it, and it is reasonable to expect that it will lend a strong consistency to bail decisions in New Orleans (for a concise report on the otherworldly pre-Katrina situation, take a gander at the Metropolitan Crime Commission's 2005 report on bail bond) and help reign in the cost of pretrial detention. In 2010, New Orleans' jails held roughly 1,956 defendants [5]. At $22.39 a day, for a year, the detention of those men cost New Orleans almost $16,000,000 [6].

$623,000 seems a small price to pay.

Thanks for reading.

J

Camden's Police Force

The NY Times has an article about Camden's crime problem, and the what the city is trying to do to solve it. The city has become so poor that it can no longer afford to sustain a police force of the size that it needs (the article cites generous union contracts as a partial cause). In order to resolve the issue, Camden is planning to shutter its police department in favor of pooling its resources with other municipalities to establish a county-wide police force of 400 officers.

As a point of reference, I should point out that Wilmington, DE - just 30 miles down the Delaware from Camden - has a comparable population (Camden is home to roughly 6,000 more people) and a comparable police department (289 officers to Camden's 273; Wilmington's force costs about $5 million less than Camden's). In 2010, Camden's violent crime rate was 2,328 per 100,000 residents, while Wilmington's was 1,909 per 100,000 residents. Neither of those numbers is good (by the violent crime rate measure, Wilmington and Camden are both more dangerous than Detroit), but I think that they imply that there are a number of things that Camden's police department could do to improve public safety that are less radical than shutting down completely.

From The Streets of Camden.

The larger issue is that it's unclear how a county-wide force will make things better. The force will have to patrol a much larger area (228 square miles instead of 10) that holds a much larger number of people (513,241 vs. 79,081) with a number of officers that hardly exceeds the size of Camden's department before layoffs in January 2011. It's difficult to see how Camden and the county will both be able to get the service they need.

Perhaps the hope is that a new department will allow officers to start from a new baseline in their relationships with communities in Camden, and in terms of department morale and organization. I think that this is the best justification for a radical restructuring, but I'm skeptical of its success without a sense of specific plans. It's in no way clear that the division of the new department that patrols Camden will be much different from the old Camden police department (even if, as the article says, there is a cap on the number of old officers that the new department can hire, that won't mean that those rehired officers can't be disproportionately staffed in Camden). Alternatively, one can imagine a system like the NYPD's where rookies cut their teeth in places like Brownsville and East NY before gaining seniority and opting to move to more affluent areas. A structure like this would ensure an inexperienced force in Camden. As for relationships with Camden residents, I'm curious about what is planned beyond a simple rebranding.

I sympathize with the city's dire situation and understand that civic leaders feel like the need to do something, but it's worth asking whether this reform will do much of anything to improve Camden's situation.

Thanks for reading.

J

Central Park Five

California Proposition 36

Proposition 36, a ballot initative in California meant to ameliorate harsher elements of CA's three strikes law, was approved last night. The media hasn't paid much attention yet (people appear to be more caught up in gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana), but it's wonderful news and will lead to a much more just policy for repeat offenders.

Specifically, the proposition modifies the three strikes law so that it only applies when an offender's third conviction is for a serious or violent crime (i.e. no more Ewing v. California), and it allows judges to re-sentence convicts who were incarcerated under the harsher three strikes law. As many as 3,000 of the current 8,800 inmates serving life under the three strikes law could be resentenced[1], which would - on top of rectifying thousands of appalling sentences - save the state gobs of money.

Curiously, Proposition 34, which would have repealed the death penalty, did not pass. Prop 36 won the majority of the vote in every single county [2], while Prop 34 lost by wide margins in most counties, only garnering most of the vote in urban centers along the cost [3].

A gym full of voters, not prisoners. From SFGate.





Criminal Justice in New Orleans

Before Katrina, and in its wake, the criminal justice system in New Orleans was a total mess. It didn't succeed in ensuring public safety, it didn't produce just outcomes, and it did both of those things at an exorbitant price. Over the last few years, a number of people have worked hard to alter the status quo. The NOLA PBS affiliate is running a three-part series detailing aspects of that effort. Watch the first installment here.

School to Prison Pipeline

On October 24th, the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against against Meridian and Lauderdale County in Mississippi for maintaining a regimen of school discipline that includes incarceration at a detention center 80 miles away. The list of offenses that a student can be incarcerated for include flatulence and dress code infractions. Need I even note the complete absence of due process? The Washington Post has a more here.

Shaken Baby Syndrome

First of all, let me apologize for the long hiatus. A period of intense inquiry into graduate school and Hurricane Sandy are largely to blame...

Over at Slate, Emily Bazelon has an interesting piece about a criminal case in Arizona that has recently been overturned. It seems that the scientific consensus behind what signs and symptoms indicate that has a baby has been shaken has frayed (in some cases, at least). Take a look.

Criminal Law and Science

In Superstition and Force, Henry Charles Lea relates the story of Joannes Demarest, a coroner in Bergen County, NJ in 1767. Demarest and a coroner's jury were tasked with inspecting the body of Nicholas Tuers and determining whether he had been murdered. At the time, a common superstition held that if a murderer were to touch the body of his victim, the corpse would bleed. One of the jury members decided there was nothing to do in this case but submit Harry - a slave and the prime suspect - to this ordeal (commonly known as bier right). The jury member touched Tuers body; nothing happened. When Harry touched the body, though, it bled. Demarest, by his own admission a skeptic, asked for the experiment to be repeated and reported that, upon Harry's touch, the corpse did indeed bleed from its nostrils.

Bier Right (sketch) by Jeno Gyarfas (1857-1925). Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

The use of bier right was not uncommon, nor was it restricted to the 18th Century. Lea mentions a number of examples of bier right that occurred after the Civil War, as well as one case in 1860 where relatives of the deceased begged the coroner to exhume the body so that they might test the guilt of a suspect. Thankfully, their exhortations went unheeded.

Before I lose too many readers, I ought to clarify: I don't mean to make a direct analogy between practices like bier right and the sciences that are currently applied in criminal law. Bier right and other more ancient ordeals were superstitions perpetuated by tradition and religion. These methods were based on a stubborn belief in the supernatural, and, though they persisted for quite a long while, they were critiqued and discouraged even in their own time. In fact, in 1215 Pope Innocent III forbade Catholic clergy from administering the ordeals of boiling water (in which a person would fish around in a cauldron of boiling water for a small stone or ring - their innocence being determined by whether god protected them from severe burns) and hot iron (in which a person would carry red-hot iron for a small number of steps). Historical records indicate that the clergy didn't pay much mind to Innocent III's edict.

Pope Innocent III: thwarted reformer. Taken from Wikipedia.

There may not be a directly analogy between atavistic ordeals - buttressed by blind belief - and modern science, but there is one parallel worth pointing out. Like trials by ordeal, science (as presented in courtrooms) is a form of evidence that refuses doubt. This is true for a number of reasons. The error rates of particular branches of forensic science have never been determined. Juries made up of laypeople (not to mention judges!) may not have the education or training to question the evidence that experts present. Defendants may not be able to afford experts of their own or a lawyer well versed in crossing experts.

Any evidence labelled scientific and any witness admitted as an expert immediately gain serious credibility and value. The failure to interrogate what passes for science in criminal courtrooms puts innocent people in jail and creates (even more) disparate outcomes for poor and rich defendants.

In the coming weeks, I'll be writing a series of articles about different applications of science in criminal law. As a teaser, let me leave you with three links.

(1) An article in the NY Times about "behavior analysis" as practiced by the TSA. 

(2) A piece by NPR's Alix Spiegel about the misuse of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), a test designed to diagnose psychopathy that is now used by several states (including California) as a major factor in parole hearings.

(3) David Grann's tragic article about Cameron Todd Willingham and the role that arson investigators played in his wrongful conviction. If you're going to click one link, choose this one.

Thanks for reading.

J

Taken from Cameron Todd Willingham - Innocent and Executed.

Confidential Informants

Over at The New Yorker there's an incredible article by Sarah Stillman about the use of young confidential informants by Narcotics Units. The piece highlights the tragic human cost of a system characterized by misaligned incentives and a paucity of oversight. The silent question that haunts the heartrending stories Stillman tells is 'what did these people die for?' The American war on drugs is expensive, consuming dollars and lives on an astounding scale, and its value is (at best) unclear, particularly when one examines the effect of decriminalization policies that countries like Portugal have put into place.

Brown v. Plata, Part II

On Saturday, the NY Times published an op-ed about the current state of California's effort (or lack thereof) to meet the mandated population limit affirmed by Brown v. Plata. Interestingly, the article mentions a movement to reform the state's three strikes law. The proposed changes would prevent harsh sentences like the one handed down in Ewing, where a defendant was given 25 years to life for stealing $399 worth of golf clubs.
 
I apologize for last week's brief hiatus. There should be one or two more extensive posts up by next Monday.

Thanks for reading.

J

Russian Hooliganism

In February, three members of Pussy Riot, Moscow's most famous (only?) feminist punk band, were arrested after they snuck into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in order to perform in front the church's holy doors. The band later released an anti-Putin music video that featured snatches of the incident confusingly spliced with footage from another church (there are four women in the latter recording). Last Friday, those three women were convicted of hooliganism and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. There's been a great deal of commentary already, including an excellent article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian that highlights how hypocritical Western critiques of Russian criminal justice practice are. Jenkins focuses mostly on the UK, and I thought that subjecting the USA to similar scrutiny might prove edifying.

Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Taken from Eye Flare.

The women were charged with hooliganism: "a gross violation of the public order which expresses patent contempt for society, attended by violence against private persons or by the threat of its use, and likewise by the destruction or damage of other people's property [1]." As many observers have noted, the prosecution's account of the incident appears facially insufficient; the facts simply don't support the charge [2].

The case and its outcome were disturbing for three main reasons: (1) the weakness and corruption of Russia's judiciary, (2) the criminalization of free speech, and (3) the harshness of the sentence. These issues are not unique to Russia; they exist in the United States, too.

As noted above, the prosecution's case was facially insufficient, and yet, the judge (presumably bowing to political pressure from the Kremlin or Russian Orthodox Church) found the defendants guilty. Judges in the United States are less likely to bend the law in such an obvious way, but they are not insulated from political pressures, and often knowingly contravene statutes. Outside of the federal system, many judges are elected (in fact, 32 states elect the judges that sit on their highest court), and these elections open the door to improper influences [3].

Power is not life's only temptation; American Judges have also been seduced by money. In a recent scandal, two Luzerne County (PA) judges were found guilty of conspiring with for-profit juvenile detention centers. The judges would deny defendants counsel, find them guilty, and sentence them harshly in order to keep facility beds full [4].

Even when judges have no clear motivation, they will violate the law or interpret it incorrectly. A recent report on the Orleans Public Defenders office found that Criminal District Court judges often block a defendant's access to OPD's services if the defendant manages to make bail (i.e. the judges assume that if someone can pay bail they can afford legal services). CDC judges are also notorious for their liberal use of contempt citations; defense attorneys have been held in contempt for innocuous deeds: talking to a child witness or "asking a particular question on cross-examination [5]."

New Orleans Criminal District Court. Taken from The Lens.

America's criminal justice system also often violates the right to free speech. The Occupy Wall Street protests that began last September testify to the restrictions local governments in America place on political action. In July, the Protest and Assembly Rights Project released Suppressing Protest, an examination of ways in which political speech was silenced and punished in New York during the Occupy protests [6]. The report details (among other things) instances of unnecessary force, obstruction of the press, "baseless arrests," "closure of public spaces," and "dispersal of peaceful assemblies." Police and prosecutors in New York used broad criminal laws like disorderly conduct to chill speech. Admittedly, sentences for these violations were far more lenient than the one handed to the women of Pussy Riot (many cases were adjourned in contemplation of dismissal), but that doesn't change the fact that protesters were arrested while exercising their First Amendment rights.

Taken from ABC News.

The enactment of laws that explicitly prevent speech is an equally disturbing American trend. On August 6th, President Obama signed a new law that prohibits demonstrations within 300 feet of military funerals (the demonstrations also must be held either two hours before or after the burial). The law is designed to prevent the Westboro Baptist Church from holding their repulsive rallies - a goal with much (bipartisan!) support. It's important to understand, though, that there are - in all likelihood - a substantial number of Russians who are as disgusted by Pussy Riot's stunt as many Americans are by Westboro's hurtful tactics.

It's not only the federal government; a number of states have criminalized political speech, too. Over the last 20 years, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, and Utah have all enacted "Ag-gag" laws. In Kansas, Montana, and North Dakota these statutes criminalize the production and distribution of unauthorized pictures, videos, and audio recordings taken in an "animal facility [7]." In Iowa, it is a crime to fraudulently gain access to an animal facility (i.e. by lying on a job application or in a job interview) [8]. Ag-gag laws are designed to criminalize the exercise of speech. The laws explicitly prevent the production of material that will be used for political purposes, or criminalize ways in which activists gain access to animal facilities, stymieing the process by which the materials are produced.

An animal facility might allow the production and distribution of this picture. Taken from Fatback DC.

The harsh sentences handed down to the members of Pussy Riot also provoked condemnation. Two years in jail for something that (arguably) ought not to be criminalized is bad, but compare that to the sentences which result from three-strikes laws in America: 25 years to life for stealing $399 worth of golf clubs (Ewing v. California) or life imprisonment for forging a check worth $88.30 (Bordenkircher v. Hayes)[9].

The truth is that all nations have imperfect criminal justice systems. It's inspiring that injustice in Russia has spurred such close attention and strident criticism, but we must recognize that Moscow's ugliest judicial tendencies exist in America and - if we are incensed enough - work to change that.

Thanks for reading.

J







[9] In this context, it is mind-boggling to think that Anders Breivik will spend 21 years in jail for killing 77 people.

Alan Lomax at Parchman Farm

Earlier this year, much of Alan Lomax's life's work was placed online.

Lomax was one of the 20th Century's most prominent collectors of folk music. He started recording American musicians in the field with his father in 1933 for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. This project continued until 1942, and the material gathered over those nine years includes famous sessions with Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly. Unfortunately, those are not the recordings that are now available gratis. It turns out that the best things in life are sometimes owned by the federal government and, inexplicably, only available from small independent record labels for an extortianate sum.

In 1946, Lomax began recording on his own using tape (rather than aluminum and acetate discs), and he continued into the 1990s, traveling the world in order to preserve aural traditions. This later set of recordings, 17,400 audio files in all, is the collection that has been digitized and made available by the Association for Cultural Equity.

Alan Lomax at the 1979 Mississippi Delta Blues Festival in Greenville, Mississippi. Photo by Bill Ferris, from the William R. Ferris Collection.Taken from Field Trip South.

During 1947 and 1948, Lomax recorded the inmates on Parchman Farm. Parchman, as I've discussed below, was an infamous prison plantation. Convicts were forced to work, and the labor conditions inside the prison were largely indistinguishable from slavery. In order to pace their work, the inmates would sing. And the songs were good. Lomax observed, "I had to face that here were the people that everyone else regarded as the dregs of society, dangerous human beings, brutalized and from them came the music which I thought was the finest thing I’d ever hear coming out of my country.[1]"

While researching Parchman, I came across an album of songs from the 1947-1948 recording sessions that had been released in 1997. All of the music was wonderful, but one song haunted me: Jimpson's rendition of "No More, My Lord." Jimpson isn't exactly as well known as Lead Belly, but you may have heard his voice without realizing it. A version of "Murderer's Home," sung by Jimpson, is featured on the Gangs of New York soundtrack. To listen to any of these songs, just visit the Association for Cultural Equity's sound recording home page, and use the search bar on the right to look for music by Jimpson.

"No More, My Lord," is a fantastic song in its own right, but what I really love is a moment specific to the second recording that Lomax made. Most of the way through the two minute track, the usual axe-stroke beat is followed by syncopation: two unexpected strikes. During the song, Jimpson is actually chopping wood. The surprising percussion is a wood chip striking Lomax's microphone and rebounding off of it.

Those two small beats encapsulate, in many ways, what I love about recordings of live music. Studio albums, as sanitized as they tend to be these days, are not linked with specific times and places. In some ways, this is an advantage: a listener can, by playing an album obsessively (as I tend to do) associate the music with anything (this can lead to some odd connections; The Lord of the Rings will forever be linked with Radiohead's Amnesiac in my mind). On the other hand, live recordings, and this is particularly true of the best of them (Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival or The Band at Winterland in '76), evoke a specific time and place.

The wood chip striking Lomax's microphone draws the listener, however subtly, into the world of Parchman Farm, where the music is always undergirded and overshadowed by brutal force and its effects. Because Jimpson sings the blues, the disturbing power relations that form the song's context do not distract from its beauty and emotional impact; they amplify them. The pain that forms the basis for Jimpson's music - the pain that the music is meant to assuage - is, by accident, made manifest to the listener.

The other reason I love that moment is that it sounds good. That flying piece of timber may have been a mistake, but it was a felicitous mistake: the beats fit the song. I find this example of contingent beauty comforting; I hope that moments like these were plentiful at Parchman, and helped to soften the Sisyphean existences of the men who worked there.

Thanks for reading.

J

Zeitoun

 I awoke last Friday and saw this article in the NY Times.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun, hero of an eponymous book by Dave Eggers, had been arrested in New Orleans for allegedly attempting to arrange the murder of his ex-wife and two other people.

Photograph: Julie Dermansky/Polaris. Taken from The Guardian.

I'm ashamed to say that I've never read Zeitoun, despite my interest in criminal justice and the fact that I spent a year living in New Orleans. The news still shocked and fascinated me, though. More than anything, it drove home the simple point that people are complicated - a reality that our criminal justice system often ignores. Defendants are almost never permitted to present information that allows the court to consider them in toto (if such a thing is even possible). The major exception is during the mitigation phase of capital cases [1]. 

After finishing the piece, I recalled an interview I had had with the Committee for Public Counsel Services. It was spring of my senior year; I desperately wanted to be an investigator at a public defender's office, but I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. One of the attorneys interviewing me asked what should have been a softball question: why did I want to defend people? I gave some convoluted answer about fairness, the necessity of a zealous defense, and bloated prison sentences. The attorney interrupted my rambling thought with a question: did I think that good people could do bad things? It was only after I left the interview that I realized how incomplete this justification was.

In his life, Zeitoun has helped save lives and, perhaps, endangered them. What does that make him on the balance? If our actions define us, how do we balance good and bad deeds; how might we compare them? Does Zeitoun consider his own actions consistent?

If anyone wants to really delve into a mind-bending example of this sort of quandary, I'd recommend listening to the Fritz Haber section of Radiolab's The Bad Show.

Thanks for reading.

J

Brown v. Plata

In May 2011, the Supreme Court released its decision in Brown v. Plata, holding that a previously mandated population limit was necessary to remedy constitutional violations in California prisons. This was a big deal for a number of reasons, one of which was the fact that in order for California to meet the population limit, tens of thousands of prisoners would have to be released from correctional facilities. The Eighth Amendment violations at the heart of Brown v. Plata did not originally arise from overcrowding (you would be forgiven for assuming this based on the proposed remedy and the picture below). What judges in the lower courts had found cruel and unusual was the paucity of quality medical care provided in prisons. The absence of basic care was determined to be a result of overcrowding, which could only be alleviated through either the construction of new facilities or the emptying of existing ones. Hence, it was decided that inmates were to be released.

I won't really discuss any of the legal issues here; I'm sure that analysis has been done more expertly in other places.

California Institution for Men (Chino, Calif.), August 2006. Courtesy California CDCR. Taken from Prison Law Blog.

Instead, I want to highlight two small sections, one from Scalia's dissent and one from Alito's.

On the fifth page of his opinion, Scalia writes:

It is also worth noting the peculiarity that the vast majority of inmates most generously rewarded by the release order - the 46,000 whose incarceration will be ended - do not form part of any aggrieved class even under the court's expansive notion of constitutional violation. Most of them will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness; and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the gym.

Compare that with a passage from Alito's dissent:

Instead of crafting a remedy to attack the specific constitutional violations that were found - which related solely to prisoners in the two plaintiff classes - the lower court issued a decree that will at best provide only modest help to those prisoners but that is very likely to have a major and deleterious effect on public safety.

The three-judge court ordered the release of approximately 46,000 criminals - the equivalent of three army divisions [emphasis in original].

In essence, the two sections make the same point, and it is certainly a point worth making.  Scalia and Alito take issue with the remedy that the majority upholds because the people who most directly benefit from the release are not necessarily the same people who have been deprived of their constitutional rights.

What strikes me is the way in which Scalia and Alito (and their clerks) choose to make their point. They support legal arguments with unabashedly demagogic language. Alito tries to help his readers comprehend "46,000" by translating the number into army divisions. This strategy is ridiculous (can anyone but soldiers and military historians grasp what a division looks like?), and Alito's implication that criminals represent an internal enemy capable of inflicting damage comparable to that of a foreign army is equally absurd.

Scalia's description of buff convicts is more immediately visceral, freighted as it is with violent connotations. It is only upon later reflection that we might wonder what Nino himself might do if he were sentenced to a few decades in San Quentin (would he avoid the gym entirely?), or thank those fit inmates for reducing tax-payer dollars spent on prison healthcare. We ought not be concerned with the circumference of inmate biceps. If anything, we should worry about convicts' violent tendencies. It turns out that 70,906 men serving time in California have never been convicted of a violent crime. The number of inmates who must be released does not even make up two thirds of that total [1]. I hope that these numbers help Justice Scalia sleep at night.

The fact that Supreme Court Justices stoop to this level of rhetoric is disturbing. The notion that this type of emotional logic might be what inspires their rational justifications is even more unsettling.

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt collects decades of research that demonstrate our moral reasoning is often a "post hoc fabrication" marshaled in support of our gut moral emotions. We don't necessarily use reason to arrive at a conclusion, rather, it is a way to justify our own intuitions and convince others. High school civics teachers may still cling to the belief that American courts of law function through an impartial weighing of evidence, but in reality judicial systems are permeated and heavily affected by intuitive biases [Efran, "The Effect of Physical Appearance on the Judgement of Guilt, Interpersonal Attraction, and Severity of Recommended Punishment in a Simulated Jury Task."; Mazzella and Feingold, "The Effects of Physical Attractiveness, Race, Socioeconomic Status and Gender of Defendants and Victims on Judgments of Mock Jurors: A Meta-analysis."; Stewart, "Defendant's Attractiveness as a Factor in the Outcome of Criminal trials: An Observational Study."]. Dan Kahan has also done wonderful work on the role that disgust plays in criminal law [2]. No one can definitively say what drove Scalia and Alito to dissent in Brown v. Plata, but the possibility that America's highest court reasons from intuition and not legal principles upsets me - particularly when the original intuitions are narrow and mean. I'm only speculating here, but my reflections are not entirely baseless. If Scalia and Alito did not consider emotional appeals important to their argument, why did they bother to include them in their decisions?

It saddens me to think that these two men have such dim opinions of inmates in California (all the more so because their opinions carry such staggering weight). Instead of demonizing people they know nothing about, Scalia and Alito ought to recall Phil Ochs' aphoristic refrain: "There but for fortune may go you or I."

Thanks for reading.

J

Welcome

Hi there.

Glad to see you've made your way to this little blog. I intend, at the moment, to use this website as a space to chronicle my thoughts on American criminal justice and culture (a broad topic, indeed). Initially, the page will function much like an annotated aggregator with longer ramblings interspersed. That ratio may change in the future depending on my opinion of my opinions and how much free time I have. My interest in these sorts of projects can be fickle.

The picture that heads the blog encapsulates some of the themes I'd like to explore. The photograph was taken in 1935 by a young, white woman at Parchman Farm, Mississippi's infamous prison plantation. I dug it up in the Beinecke Library senior year and have been a little obsessed with it since then. I had to crop it a bit for the website, but the basic scene is preserved. Two white prisoners stare directly into the camera. One embraces a snow woman (one can make out "her" breasts under his right arm), while a black prisoner watches on.

Photograph: Estelle Caro Eggleston

The tableau is extraordinary and captures a stunning amount of information about the culture of the time. The white men stare roguishly at the photographer - an observer can easily imagine the risque thoughts racing through their heads. They don't suffer the camera's gaze passively; they commandeer it for themselves, posing as a particular criminal archetype, one based on the joyous and pleasurable nature of transgression. The cigarette communicates this wonderfully. It wasn't until the 1930s that American society thought it acceptable for women to smoke in public [1], and so the cigarette represents a 'harmless' indulgence with a naughty connotation. I imagine that the men hope their female portraitist might view a tryst with a convict in the same light.

In contrast, the black prisoner has been cast as a janitor, an emasculating role that, particularly in the context of Parchman, recalls slavery. As I'm sure the reader (intelligent, well-read, and lovely as you must be) knows, 1935 Mississippi was not the place to toy with inter-racial romance. The inmate is wise to keep his distance from the flirtatious scene.

Cultural prejudices affected more than just individual behavior; they shaped criminal justice policy, too. One of the prevalent stereotypes about African-Americans held that they were more lustful than whites. They simply needed more sex. As ridiculous as this now sounds, it was taken seriously by the men who ran Parchman. They didn't much care for the well-being of the convicts under their supervision, but they did care about their profits. In order to get the maximal labor from black laborers, they instituted the first system of conjugal visits in America and, amazingly, it was available to only black inmates for a period of time [Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery].

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In The Prison and the American Imagination, Caleb Smith makes the argument (an argument I largely buy) that incarceration was conceived by early American penal innovators as a method for remaking the souls of convicts. This (theoretically) rehabilitative policy emerged from a particular cultural understanding of humanity. As America's cultural beliefs have changed and fragmented, criminal justice policy has changed, or been interpreted and justified in different ways. Criminals, convicts, and their portrayal in the arts and media actively affect this process. The photograph that I've chosen to highlight is a snapshot of a cultural moment, one that illuminates where we've been and elucidates themes that remain salient today (to name a few: the legacy of slavery, popular conceptions of criminality, and the politics of sight). It is a fascinating, ongoing story, a saga worth monitoring and exploring.

History, culture, sex, race, crime, punishment - what else does a good blog need? Did I mention sex?

Thanks for reading.

J