News coverage about the Graham-Cassidy bill has been inescapable in recent weeks. This news coverage has primarily focused on comparing the Graham-Cassidy bill with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in terms of essential benefits and caps on coverage. However, there has been some confusion over how this
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The Illegalization of Undocumented Immigrants
With the Trump administration announcing the end of DACA, which protected undocumented immigrants who arrived as children, the issue of undocumented immigrants is a topic of intense debate, with some favoring increased efforts to locate and expel all undocumented immigrants and others viewing this as part of a larger context
Read moreThe Struggle for Criminal Justice Reform
This is a guest post by Michelle Phelps, Joshua Page, and Philip Goodman. The history of criminal justice in the U.S. is often described as a pendulum, swinging back and forth between strict punishment and lenient rehabilitation. Before the election of President Donald J. Trump, many argued the pendulum was
Read moreThe Harmful Effects of Implicit Racial Bias in the Police
In a study of police body camera footage recently undergone by researchers at Stanford University, it was found that police officers on average spoke less respectfully to black residents than their white counterparts. This meant that black community members were less likely to be addressed with a formal greeting, titles
Read morePrison Isolation is Torture, Ineffective, and Illogical
Solitary confinement is, at its core, simply what its name suggests; being confined to solitude. Sometimes called disciplinary segregation, administrative segregation, or simply “the hole”, solitary confinement involves cutting a prisoner off from almost all human contact for 22-24 hours a day by placing them in a compact and barren
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Use of Pepper Spray to “Fog” Inmates in Jail: A National Trend?
Police use of force has recently stirred widespread public interest and concern. Recent use of force incidents have been well-publicized on social media due to the ability of the public to witness and video record police actions. However, owing to the fact that the operations of jails and prisons are
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Changes in White and Black imprisonment rates: poverty, education, type of place
In my previous posts, I showed that White imprisonment has been growing more in rural areas than urban areas, and that this is tied to the fact that rural places are much more likely to have high poverty rates and low average educational levels. In this post, I follow up
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Education, Poverty, and Rural vs. Urban Incarceration Rates
In a previous post, I showed how the White imprisonment rate rose in rural counties even as the Black and White imprisonment rates in metropolitan areas fell. In this post, I show that the White rural-urban difference in imprisonment is linked to the White rural-urban difference in poverty and education,
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White rural imprisonment rates
Unremarked until very recently* , there is a hidden story to be told about the rise in White incarceration in the United States to supplement the story about the mass incarceration of Black people I and many others have been writing about for years. The White story has been going
Read moreOf Risk Assessment and the Problems of Bias and Justice
In his Scatterplot post algorithmic-decisionmaking-replaces-your-biases-with-someone-elses-biases Sociologist Dan Hirschman has written a good summary (with links) of recent discussions of the problems with COMPAS, a “risk assessment” tool that is used to decide whether people are released from prison or jail. He calls particular attention to the story in Rebecca Wexler’s
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