A libertarian (not quite) writes about race, class, and prison

[nancylebov]

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/03/11/glenn-loury/a-nation-of-jailers/

It is precisely in these terms that I wish to discuss a preeminent moral challenge for our time — that imprisonment on a massive scale has become one of the central aspects of our nation’s social policy toward the poor, powerfully impairing the lives of some of the most marginal of our fellow citizens, especially the poorly educated black and Hispanic men who reside in large numbers in our great urban centers.

Addenda: Glenn Loury isn't a libertarian. I assumed he was because what he wrote was basically consistent with libertarianism and it was published by a libertarian source. However, he's apparently on the left. He's had quite an interesting career, including a while as a neo-con. I recommend the article.

Original link thanks to Marginal Revolution.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

My experiences communicating with Bill Wells are relevant to this. Over a year ago, I wrote to the prison inquiring about some grievances which Bill had. I know that the appropriate people received this, because Bill said he'd been told about the inquiry and had given permission to reply. I never got any reply.

Bill reports that he's been pursuing efforts for a long time to get his sentence vacated, based on his claim that his Public Defender shafted him in plea bargaining, getting him to plead guilty to an offense he wasn't guilty of given the accepted facts. The court keeps granting the government delay after delay.

Whether or not the government is in the right, these constant delays are a clear sign that it doesn't care.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

It could also be a sign that "the government" is grossly understaffed; but of course, according to libertarian dogma, there is no such thing as understaffed government.

[madfilkentist]

Other than libertarian anarchists (which I'm not), libertarians think some amount of government is necessary, which implies a nonzero level of staffing.

But this is a case of misallocated staffing rather than understaffing when you look at the whole picture. There are lots of people assigned to seeing that people get locked up, and not enough to checking whether they should have been locked up. The fact of having a certain amount of people to perform an act of force, however justified, creates an obligation to have people who check on whether it is actually justified.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

It is my embittered conclusion that most of the so-called libertarians in the U.S. are just Randite reactionaries, and believe that the only justifiable reason for government is to keep the peasants from stealing their stuff, by whatever means necessary.

Keeping anybody except gunowners, drug salesmen (especially "health" swindlers like the fake cancer cure hucksters) and railroaded corporate skating-on-the-edge-of-legality types out of jail doesn't seem to be on their radar.

(And all the exceptions I encounter are in fandom.)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I hope you'll read the article-- it's quite impressive, and very firm about everyone in a society being part of it, very specifically including prisoners, their families, and their communities.

As for the interesting to me but not as generally important matter of what you think of libertarians, I really think you're not doing the subject justice. Radley Balko at The Agitator seems to be libertarian, has done tremendous work on justice system outrages (mostly in the war on drugs, but also investigating over-aggressive prosecutors and lying forensics), and doesn't seem fannish.

The article about the US being addicted to imprisoning people was published at the Cato Institute, the premier libertarian think tank.

Just like any significant chunk of the left, libertarianism includes people with a range of ideologies.

[madfilkentist]

Re your addendum: Other non-libertarians have written for Cato when there's agreement on a specific issue. For instance, Harold Feld has written for them on the domain name system.