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In the first four years as the first black president, Obama has largely avoided addressing race directly. Some historical context: “Thus the myth of ‘twice as good’ that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—­enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American […]

The life of the great English novelist, as documented in a biography by Claire Tomalin: “The great drama—which is to say, the abiding trauma—of Dickens’s childhood was his year-long stint in a rat-infested blacking factory near the Thames, when he was twelve years old, following the arrest of John Dickens for debt in 1824 and […]

William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed: “Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before […]

Our growing prison population, and whether there’s a link to the dropping crime rate: “The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had […]

Peter Neufeld is the co-director and one of the two founders of the Innocence Project – the organization I mentioned earlier that uses DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions. In addition to trying to free innocent people from prison, he and his colleagues work to improve criminal justice procedures so that fewer mistaken incarcerations occur […]

In 15 prison interviews with Yahoo! Sports and hundreds of telephone and email interactions, Shapiro laid out a multitude of reasons for blowing the whistle on his illicit booster activity. Chief is his feeling that after spending eight years forging what he thought were legitimate friendships with players, he was abandoned by many of the […]

How smarter parole and probation can cut the nation’s incarceration rate.

Incarceration In America Is A Failure By Almost Any Measure. But What If The Prisons Could Be Turned Inside Out, With Convicts Released Into Society Under Constant Electronic Surveillance?