Longreads Pick
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 his incarceration in the debtors’ prison at Marshalsea. Much has been written about this long-secret episode in Dickens’s life, including, most recently, Michael Allen’s heavily documented Charles Dickens and the Blacking Factory (2011), a work of some three hundred pages of interest primarily to Dickens scholars, but very likely impenetrable to Dickens readers in its concentration upon historical minutiae only tenuously related to Dickens and his novels. Another recent book, Ruth Richardson’s Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor (2012), gives a more intimately evoked view of Dickens’s childhood and the New Poor Law of 1834 by which workhouses became ‘a sort of prison system to punish (the poor).’
“For the child Dickens, the shock of this change of fortune was all the more in that his seemingly loving parents so readily agreed to the enslavement of their bright young son:
“‘No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.'”
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Published: Jul 31, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,891 words)
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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 he died at age 52. ‘The Collapse of American Criminal Justice‘ was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.
“Where American Criminal Justice Went Wrong.” — Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe
See also: “The Caging of America.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, Jan. 23, 2012
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Longreads Pick
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 he died at age 52. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.”
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Published: Feb 26, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,264 words)
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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 more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a ‘carceral state,’ in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
“The Caging of America.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker
See also: “A Boom Behind Bars: Private Jail Operators Profit from Illegal Immigrant Crackdown.” — Graeme Wood, Bloomber Businessweek, March 19, 2011
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Longreads Pick
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 more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a ‘carceral state,’ in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.”
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Published: Jan 23, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,469 words)
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Longreads Pick
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 the first place. This means Neufeld spends a lot of time telling people that they’re wrong, or that the way they do their work is unjust and dangerously error-prone. As you might imagine, dealing with denial is a de facto part of his job description. When I met Neufeld in his offices in lower Manhattan, one of the first things he did was walk me through the many different stages of denial he routinely encounters. He was quick to point out that not everyone goes through all these stages, or even through any of them: many people working in law enforcement support the work of the Innocence Project and cooperate fully in its efforts to free the wrongfully convicted.
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Published: Sep 22, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,777 words)
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Longreads Pick
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 same Miami athletes he treated so well. He told Yahoo! Sports that following his incarceration, he asked multiple players for financial help – either with bail money, or assistance to individuals close to the booster. Shapiro admitted some of those inquiries included angry letters and phone calls to players whom he provided benefits. “Some of those players – a lot of those players – we used to say we were a family,” Shapiro said. “Well, who do you go to for help when you need it? You go to your family. Why the hell wouldn’t I go to them?”
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Published: Aug 17, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,148 words)
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Longreads Pick
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?
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Published: Sep 1, 2010
Length: 26 minutes (6,686 words)
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Longreads Pick
How smarter parole and probation can cut the nation’s incarceration rate.
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Published: Jul 28, 2009
Length: 13 minutes (3,261 words)
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