Endebted prisoners

I have little to add to this piece by Tabarrok on debtor's prisons.

In Washington state unpaid legal debt accrues at an interest rate of 12%. As a result, the median person convicted in WA sees their criminal justice debt grow larger over time.
Many states are now even charging the accused to apply for and use a public defender! As a result, some defendants are discouraged from exercising their rights to an attorney.
Most outrageously, in some states public defender, pre-trial jail and other court fees can be assessed on individuals even when they are not convicted of any crime. Failure to pay criminal justice fees can result in revocation of an individual’s drivers license, arrest and imprisonment. Individuals with revoked licenses who drive (say to work to earn money to pay their fees) and are apprehended can be further fined and imprisoned. Unpaid criminal justice debt also results in damaged credit reports and reduced housing and employment prospects. Furthermore, failure to pay fees can mean a violation of probation and parole terms which makes an individual ineligible for Federal programs such as food stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Family funds and Social Security Income for the elderly and disabled.
It’s difficult to argue against criminal justice fees for those who can pay, but for those who cannot– and most criminal defendants are poor–such fees can be a personal and public policy disaster. Criminal justice debt drags people further away from reintegration with civil society. A person’s life can spiral out of their control when interest, late fees, revocation of a driver’s license and ineligibility for public assistance, mean that unpaid criminal justice debt snowballs. You can’t get blood from a stone but if you try, you can break the stone.
Optimal punishment is swift and sure but also has a defined endpoint. As with bankruptcy, punishment must end, leaving both hope and opportunity. We used to release criminals without a nickel or a nail but with an understanding that their debt to society had been paid. Today, we release criminals with a ball of debt and other restrictions that chains them to the criminal justice system and which can pull them back into prison long after their sentences have been served. Releasing people with little hope or opportunity for reintegration with civil society is good for neither the releasees nor society.

Other than once more taking the opportunity to remind people of the brilliance of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, in which credit lines for convicts to pay the cost of their imprisonment ensures their continued indebtedness.

Noted assholes

Noted asshole, Mark Leonard:

Europe's transformative power comes from its ability to reward reformers and withhold benefits from laggards.

How's that working out in the age of austerity? He is right in the sense that 'Europe' has certainly increased its institutional authority over Europe. And the talk of withdrawal seems to have receded since Greece defaulted and the world didn't end.  But to many Europeans this hardly looks like a recommending feature. Rather, the entire continent is now beholden to an institution that won't/can't do its job as the lender of last resort, and who have used this as leverage to make the working and middle classes suffer.

From a truly insufferable book: why europe will run the 21st century.

And for those who want more, from the jacket sleeve:

Europe only looks dead because it is seen through American eyes. But America's reach is shallow and narrow. It can bribe, bully, or impose its will anywhere in the world, but when its back is turned its potency wanes. Europe's reach is broad and deep, spreading its values from Albania to Zambia. It brings other countries into its orbit rather than defining itself against them, and once countries come under the influence of its laws and customs they are changed for ever.

Emphasis inexplicably in the original, although this is presumably more Fourth Estate, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers (emphasis also inexplicably in the original), than Leonard.

Thoughts that leap to mind:

1. Where the fuck is Albania? Oh I forgot: it's in Europe, not the incomparably more important 'Europe.'
2. "... rather than defining itself against them..." Does anyone else remember Turkey, and the delightful ugly that accompanied its fated efforts to join the club?
3. "...once countries come under the influence of its laws and customs they are changed for ever." No disagreement here. Or is he talking about 'Europe' again?

His new book is called What Does China Think? It is a "highly readable" 224 pages that YQ Magazine describes as a "detailed and investigative study on the Chinese psyche."

UPenn UPay

Apparently the University of Pennsylvania has the highest average pay for assistant professors. But don't worry, female assistant professors only make 88% of their male counterparts, below the sector median of 94%. The school does better with full professors, at 92% of male counterparts.

It did not report data about its instructors.

Nor did it report data on adjunct salaries. Probably because no one reports on this because it is quite clearly below minimum wage once course prep, grading, and office hours are taken into consideration.

The school is 5 percentage points below the median doctoral institution in the percent of faculty who are tenure track positions (52.3%), and about 6 points below the percent who are full time (72%).

This report is interest group data, from the American Association of University Professors, who are claiming a "very slow recovery." I would love to see what they have to say about adjuncts.

Labor, Civil, and Social Rights

Erik Loomis is doing wonderful things at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. This time, he is doing a wonderful thing by bringing to my attention what Jake Blumgart is doing.

It is for these reasons that Kahlenberg and Marvit argue that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act should be extended to cover labor organizing. In Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right (available April 1), the authors claim it is time to change both the broken legal system that ineffectually “protects” American workers like Ballard, and the tactics of reformers who want to change it.

Kahlenberg and Marvit first argue the legal case. Title VII provides a powerful defense against discrimination based on race, sex, age, and religion (among others). Under the Civil Rights Act the employee can opt out of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission process (close to the civil rights equivalent of the NLRB) and take the case to a federal court, before a jury, where they are provided with the means to retain a lawyer if they do not have the necessary funds.

Such suits are not an easy win. The opponent is almost always a business with substantial legal and monetary resources. But the incentives are not one-sided: Employees stand to win much more than $5,000. As Kahlenberg and Marvit note, “a plaintiff may be awarded a variety of remedies, including back pay (with interest), reinstatement or front pay, equitable relief, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.” Lost overtime, health and pension benefits are included, as are “money damages to cover emotional pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental anguish.” These cases also make the right of “discovery” available, opening up internal documents and data to the court and the public—a prospect many companies dread. In short, firing workers would no longer be a painless way to stamp out a union organizing drive.

This goes back to my post earlier today on labor and contraception, and why I don't categorize issues along an economic/social divide, or an economic/civil rights divide. I see the fight instead as being to what extent do we want to embed the principle of autonomous control by individuals and self-organized communities over their decisions and actions into our institutions. It is not my position that maximizing this is always preferential, nor that there are not in fact tradeoffs and conflict between which individuals and communities are accorded preferential treatment in their capacity to have authority over their decisions: racist store-owners, most people would agree, should be denied a capacity to exclude people based on color (or class, but fewer people agree) from their establishments, and racist unions should be denied the capacity to organize their associations as they see fit if that involves the exclusion of persons from other social categories.

But labor rights are civil rights are association (labor organizing) rights are social (privacy) rights . Abortion restrictions, yellow-dog contracts, and the exclusion of workers from a say in the operation of their workplace are all instances of the same basic conflict: who should be accorded authority in a given place and a given area, and how far does this authority over persons extend.

3rd Ave El

From Ephemeral New York, which is one of the more enjoyable blogs on my roll.

This is an odd movie that follows a number of characters along the 3rd avenue El, prior to its removal. A great scene is the rotation of the bridge. Wait for it. A beautiful vignette of a former New York. But note which character gets the token. New York and American have changed less than we presume.

Anti-Labor Philosophy and Birth Control

Santorum, from February's ginned up controversy on birth control:

"When government gives you rights, the government can tell you how to exercise those rights," Santorum said during his victory speech in St. Charles, Mo. "And we saw that just in the last week, with a group of people, a small group of people — just Catholics in the United States of America! — who were told you have a right to health care, but you will have the health care that we tell you you have to give your people, whether it is against the teachings of your church or not."

This is the language of subordinate control, of having a train of dependents whose lives are structured not by their own autonomous decisions and their own self-chosen values, but by yours. The "your people" Santorum is referring to, of course, are the employees at Catholic institutions, many of which serve public purposes, and who are themselves often not Catholic.

This is core of anti-labor philosophy: the belief that an employer's relatively legitimate authority (control over the means and ends of a discrete decision area) over employees in the workplace extends outward into the private and social life of the worker. The fight between the 'free labor' liberal and more radical labor philosophies was, in one sense, about the authority of the employer in the demarcated work space. It's good to know that we've so conceded the authority of the employer in the 'workplace' that we can once again make room for the fight over the employer's authority in the total life of the worker.

This, by the way, is why I am always reluctant to embrace the "fiscal liberal/social liberal" dichotomy.

Best news in a while...

Reform

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.” “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

To be clear, the $75,000 is the bonus, not the salary. Also, the national real median household income in the United States is $49,445, or 66% of this banker's estimated bonus. It does make one long for a non-existent past when our pampered elites were not so sophomoric, not such colossal whiners, so eager to shift the blame onto their girlfriend's eating habits and taxes, so eager to attribute credit for their inflated incomes to their intelligence and drive.

Maybe this is why Downton Abbey is having such success.

Placeholding

The DNC has a new website organizing against voter ID laws. It's probably not new, but I am a little behind. Worth noticing and paying attention. One of the downsides of frantically finishing the dissertation is that I am bookmarking too many developments in state voter ID laws, a next phase of research for me.

So this is a placeholder page for me, one that I will update as needed hopefully.

Florida and the impact of new laws on registration drives.


Daily Kos: Manufacturing Voter Fraud. I think that unless those opposed to voter ID laws are able to address the absurdity of registering a dog, even though the only people who do it seem to be Republican operatives and even though there is no evidence of anyone trying to vote under a dog's registration, then they will continue to fight a losing battle. This does sound like faux-centrism, but people often assume the decency of others, and rightfully so; when those advocating restrictions can point to instances of this, those suggesting the purpose of the restriction is actually to prevent Democratic-leaning voters from registering are facing the uphill climb of saying that restrictions that would prevent dog-registration are unjustified.

Justice Department and Blocking Texas

Why TNC rules all...

Quote:

Hitler rooted for Max Schmeling. But Max Schmeling was so much more than that.

We knew Newt was toast, but...

...this makes it as close to official until a majority of delegates have been assigned.

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino executive keeping Newt Gingrich’s presidential hopes alive, has relayed assurances to Mitt Romney that he will provide even more generous support to his candidacy if he becomes the Republican nominee, several associates said in interviews here.The signals from Mr. Adelson, whose politics are shaped in large part by his support for Israel, reflect what the associates said was his deep investment in defeating President Obama and his willingness to play a more prominent role in the Republican Party and conservative causes. The assurances have been conveyed in response to a highly delicate campaign by Mr. Romney and his top Jewish financial supporters to dissuade Mr. Adelson from adding to the $10 million that he and his wife have given to a pro-Gingrich “super PAC,” Winning Our Future, that has been tearing into Mr. Romney through television advertising.

Also, can anyone read this article and not come away with the impression of sustained coordination between the campaigns and the PACs? 

I've been under the impression since Newt's surge that this was really about Adelson flexing his muscles in the GOP. Newt was a pawn in Adelson's game; this is Adelson signaling to Romney what he wants in order to clear the field.

Civilization and its discontents...

I know this is tired and played, but man does it still get my goat.

At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.

Good lord. Damnable civilized values, deceiving him into the trap of drugging and raping a child (sodomy, because he couldn't get assurances from her that she was on the pill).

The 20th century was brutal; many people, however, managed to enjoy their newfound sense of freedom without doing what Polanski did.

p.s: There is a complete effacement of agency here: exactly the type of effacement that conservatives accuse liberals of whenever liberals say "statistical correlates of crime include poverty" and that liberals enable when they respond by attack conservatives for saying "statistical correlates of crime include broken homes." The "newfound sense of freedom" is not some Pied Piper. I am as willing as anyone to efface agency, which is both excessively mystified and black boxed in a causal sense and exaggeratedly liberal. But even I have my limits.

Michele Bachmann's district is taking care of business

I want to give all my money to Tammy Aaberg. I want to give her money, time, and anything she might need in this world, the next, or the last. No quotes. Read the whole thing. And then remember they have declared war on our kids, our friends, ourselves.

An excellent article. Only critique: who was #2 or #1?

Underbelly is always good

But is he really keeping the edited diary of George Templeton Strong sitting around so that he can see what Strong was thinking 150 years ago today? Strong on Lincoln:

He is a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla, in respect of outside polish (for example, he uses "humans" as English for homines), but a most sensible, straightforward, honest old codger.  The best President we have had since old Jackson's time, at least, as I believe; for Zachary Taylor's few days of official life can hardly be counted as a presidential term.  His evident integrity and simplicity of purpose would compensate for worse grammar than his, and for even more intense provincialism and rusticity.

The bolded part is, of course, Strong being an asshole. But this is how the Republican coalition was forged: the committed egalitarians had to win power, and so they had to embrace to some extent the white supremacy of the time, even more than the white supremacy they had been unable to avoid imbuing and taking into their worldview. That meant winning over people like Strong, who saw reference to blacks as humans to be a stretch.

More voter fraud

This is interesting, as here there seems to be some evidence that the non-citizen registered to vote actually did so. That, unlike faulty registry lists, actually constitutes fraud.

Naples resident Yvonne Wigglesworth is also a not a citizen, but is registered to vote. She claims she doesn't know how she got registered. "I have no idea. I mean, how am I supposed to know."

Records show Wigglesworth voted six times in elections dating back eleven years

The Wire: dumbest show to be considered smart, or fakest show to be considered real?

Reading up on Elijah Anderson, I found his thoughts on 'The Wire':

“I am struck by how dark the show is,” says Elijah Anderson, the Yale sociologist whose classic works Code of the Streets, Streetwise, and A Place on the Corner document black inner-city life with noted clarity and sympathy. Anderson would be the last person to gloss over the severe problems of the urban poor, but in The Wire he sees “a bottom-line cynicism” that is at odds with his own perception of real life. “The show is very good,” he says. “It resonates. It is powerful in its depiction of the codes of the streets, but it is an exaggeration. I get frustrated watching it, because it gives such a powerful appearance of reality, but it always seems to leave something important out. What they have left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.”

Had he pretty much stopped at "what they have left out are the decent people," that would have been fine.[1] But of the four adjectives he gives to describe the 'decent people'--themselves apparently a discrete category--do two of them really need to be "God-fearing, churchgoing"? Not necessarily redundant, but nothing to do with decency either.

I believe I am the only person I know with similar interests who found the show to be ludicrously bad. It didn't resonate, nor was it at all powerful in its "depiction of the code of the streets." It was organizational theory (good) and 7th grade dialogue (terribly bad). The overall result was silly. What it got right--the geography of the drug trade[2], the ongoing and antagonistic relationship between individual cops and individual young men, the attention to political constituency service--is pretty much swamped by what it gets wrong, namely, everything else.

And a pet peeve: writers in love with their own damned words. Many people, myself included,  begin papers/book chapters with a quote from one of the principals that succinctly states the argument, the puzzle, or the basic problematic that the paper is going to worth through. Would you ever consider starting, or would you take seriously a paper that started with an indented quote from your own damned writing. And yet every episode, this is what the egos behind 'The Wire' would do. And especially obnoxious: these were never thematically tied to what was going to come. They were pretentious filler, which didn't even have the merit of remotely resembling the way anybody actually talks, ever, anywhere.

[1] He could also have said "what they left out are the decent actors" of "what they left out are the decent writers." The only few characters with any charisma or presence, the only ones you actually believed or at the very least liked to see on screen, were Omar, Stringer Bell, and... I don't know, maybe Avon, once in a while.
[2] But not the ludicrous volume. Pay attention to the amount of coming/going in the high rises and projects, and then on the corners, in the first and third season. More than half of Baltimore would have to be buying from these three places in order to get that level of foot traffic.