The past several years have seen an explosion of public awareness, abetted by a spate of excellent journalism, about the epoch-defining crisis of mass incarceration in America. To take just one notable example, Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, summarizes the situation in unequivocally stark and apocalyptic language: Mass incarceration on a scale almost…
Tag: prison
Recommended Reading 8
This week’s link list is slightly shorter than usual, because my time and energy have been dominated for the past few days by the task of writing three essays for ABC-CLIO’s “Enduring Questions” academic reference database, in the enticingly titled category, “World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy.” But there’s still plenty of worthwhile reading here,…
Private corporation to U.S. states: “We’ll buy your prisons if you guarantee 90% occupancy rate”
Welcome to the rest of our corporate-consumer dystopian future. It’s nice to see/hear some politicians speaking out against this development, but we can rest assured that such protests won’t really matter, since all policy decisions are now automatically and universally determined by financial considerations (see the final line excerpted below), and thus, many or most…
40 years on, the Stanford prison experiment continues to disturb
I first heard of the Stanford prison experiment several years ago in a televised lecture by Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who devised and conducted it. It was a gripping way to learn of it, I can tell you. And wow, does the cultural memory of it, not to mention the lessons from it, continue to…