Suchergebnisse

At a time when prisons are overcrowded and magistrates are being told to impose sentences other than prison terms, it might seem counterintuitive to propose demolishing a dozen of them, but there is merit in the idea.Many of London's prisons are antiquated, some dating back to the Victorian era. They are difficult to man, to clean and to service, and modern technology has made it easier for inmates to be supplied with smuggled drugs. The solution is to replace them with new purpose-built prisons. But how might this be afforded?Many of the sites occupied by some of the London ones could be sold or leased for huge sums of money to have office blocks built on their sites for business, commercial and residential use. This money could be used to fund the building of new prisons in economically-deprived areas such as the North of England, This would generate thousands of jobs in areas that need them. Firstly to construct them, and then to man, service and supply them. If handled judiciously, they could be financed by the sale of the London sites they will eventually replace.Of course, government contracts being what they are, the costs could escalate, but then so might the land value of the sites freed up by their replacement.This would be a big step to the 'levelling up' campaign we were promised. The talk is of sending civil servants, BBC personnel and Channel Four to the North, but we should send the prisoners with them.

In this week's episode we are looking at prison protests in Palestine. What are they about? What do they achieve? What can we learn?

This is a draft oped. It didn't make it as events in Israel are now consuming attention. But sooner or later we need to elect a president and live with the results. I went light on the economics, but you can see the basic game theory of the analysis. It amplifies some comments I made on Goodfellows. **** If, as it appears, the election will come down to Trump vs. Biden, the US is headed for a constitutional crisis, and the social, and political chaos that implies. Like prisoners of the economists' dilemma, there seems no easy way out. Whichever wins, the others' partisans will pronounce the president to be fundamentally illegitimate. In turn, Illegitimacy justifies and emboldens scorched-earth tactics, more norm-busting and institution-destruction.If Biden wins, Trump supporters will see an official Washington, especially its justice system, enmeshed in presidential politics. They remember Hilary Clinton's laptop, the Russia collusion hoax, and endless investigations. Now they see sprawling indictments for process and paperwork crimes, that nobody else would be charged for.  They see a Washington-media-intelligence cabal censoring news, from censorship of Covid policy dissenters — who turned out to be largely right — to the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the last election. See the scathing Missouri V. Biden. And they see the Family Business. Sure, Biden, like so many in public office who somehow end up with millions in family wealth, likely has enough lawyers and shell companies to avoid provable illegality.  But illegality is not the issue. Trump supporters will see the stench of the swamp, secret email accounts, the reins of power covering up the embarrassing facts. If Trump wins, Democrats will go ballistic. Democrats have refined de-legitimization for decades. Trump's denialism was almost comical in its incompetent emulation. Recall Bush derangement syndrome, continuing claims that the 2000 election was  stolen or decided by a corrupt court; Stacey Abrams, the #resistance, #not my president. But it's all worse now. Though Democrats express themselves in legalisms, in the end they feel that Trump's actions after the last election amount to a nearly treasonous violation of his oath of office to defend the Constitution.(Before you start yelling your side's spin, take a breath. Yes, you see things differently, but how will they see things, no matter you loud you yell? How will they act? That's what matters.)Our next election is likely to be chaos, enhancing the voices claiming illegitimacy. The election will be close. There will surely be a nationwide legal battle. Every questionable vote, every smudged postmark, every local decision to stretch a ballot deadline, every change in procedures will end up in court. Losing Democrats will cry "racist voter suppression." Losing Republicans have gotten good at even more fanciful stolen election claims. If the election is decided by courts, heaven help us. The Democrat's efforts to de-legitimize the Supreme Court are already well under way. Media now routinely refer to every federal judge by the president that appointed him or her, not, say, by the school they went to or their most famous decisions. Large swaths of the population will tell themselves that the election was stolen. With No Labels and Kennedy in the fray, it is possible that the election will come down to many ballots in the electoral college. Having tried to de-legitimize Trump for losing the popular vote in 2016, will democrats accept an electoral college result if the popular vote is 40-30-30? Will Republicans? It is possible that the electoral college fails, and the Presidency is decided by the House of Representatives, itself chaotic and under a razor-thin majority. Our Constitution brilliantly prescribes fail-safe procedures to produce a decision. But it only works only if people accept that decision. With so many already opining that the electoral college is an illegitimate anachronism, and with the House in such chaos and low esteem, will losers calmly accept the results of the Constitutional mechanism?Widely believed, and more widely spun illegitimacy justifies horrendous behavior. You can tell the Jan 6 rioters were play-acting by how unserious they were. People who really believe an election was stolen bring tanks. Widespread violent protests are easy to foresee. Widely perceived illegitimacy leads to constitutional crisis and chaos. People will simply disregard presidential actions, action by his appointees, and court orders. They will violently resist attempts to enforce government actions. How do we avoid this mess? There is a lot of hope that one or the other party will blink, and choose a vaguely sensible candidate who will then sweep the general election. But candidates are chosen by primaries, a "democratic" reform we may wish to rethink. (Old men in smoke filled rooms, desiring to win a general election, would never have picked these two.) It's not so easy. And even a reasonable candidate will only postpone the deeper question: Why is attacking the legitimacy of elections, institutions, and the courts gaining in strength? It is a scorched earth policy — ruin the institution to gain temporary advantage. The answer seems clear: The rewards of winning and the costs of losing are now too great. Narrowly, each of Trump and Biden could well end up in jail if he loses, a situation familiar in, say, Pakistan, but so far undreamt of in the US. Avoiding that is worth a lot of scorched earth. More broadly, winning an election now confers the power to rule by executive order. It confers power over administrative fiat, the power to shower billions on supporters, control of the regulatory machine that lines up corporate support, the power to censor the internet, and the power to hound your opponents and their supporters through the intelligence and judicial system. Losing graciously is a less and less viable option. Democracy isn't so much about who wins elections. Democracy requires the ability to lose elections, admit the legitimacy of the loss, but live on to regroup and win another day. Only when the power of the winners to impose immense changes with narrow majorities is constrained can losers do that.

Jacob Gordon (Harvard Law School) has posted Prison Abolition Without the Ethic on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Prison abolitionists stand for an "ethic." The ethic rejects punishment of all kinds, as well as capitalism broadly understood. By focusing on...

A girl in the United Kingdom's Wetherby Young Offender Institution twice had her clothes removed while being restrained by an all-male team of prison officers, according to a report by the Inspectorate of Prisons. The girl was reportedly trying to use her clothes to harm herself. Wetherby is a correctional institution for people aged 15–18.…

The issue was rejected because it "jeopardizes the good order and security of the institution."

An interesting new article in The Hill by my occasional coauthor T. Markus Funk, based on his upcoming Oxford University Comparative Law Forum piece on the subject; an excerpt: [I]t would be a mistake to accept the invitation to follow the examples of countries like Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, the Netherlands and Austria, which do not…

James A. Dorn


Hong Kong, once one of the freest jurisdictions in the world, with a rule of law that protected freedom of speech and assembly as fundamental human rights, is now under the direct hand of Beijing after the passage of the National Security Law (NSL) in July 2020. One of the victims of that law is Jimmy Lai, founder of Next magazine and Apple Daily, two of Hong Kong's most popular and free‐​market publications.
His strong criticism of the NSL, and his support of mass protests against it, led to the shutdown of both publications and Lai's imprisonment for "subversion." By speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its cronies in Hong Kong and defending the rule of law and freedom, Lai now faces the possibility of life in prison. Like many others before him, he is a prisoner of the state.
In honor of his valiant effort to uphold the principles that made Hong Kong a bastion of freedom and his courage in standing up to Beijing's suppression of liberal principles in Hong Kong, the Cato Institute awarded him this year's Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Sebastian Lai accepted the award on his father's behalf.
Jimmy Lai, like other prisoners of the state, understands the key role a free market in ideas plays for both economic and personal freedom. In a recent documentary produced by the Acton Institute, he stated: "Information is choice and choice freedom." When the free flow of information is crushed by the state, there can be no criticism of current institutions and leaders: wrong ideas persist and good ideas are suppressed. Consequently, both economic development and personal freedom suffer (see Zhang 2015).
Peter Bauer (1957: 113), the first recipient of the Friedman Prize in 2002, held that "the principal objective and criterion of economic development" is to widen "the range of effective alternatives open to people." Restricting the flow of information and free speech limits the range of choices open to people, impedes the market discovery process, and weakens the moral fabric of society.
China's Attack on the Free Flow of Information
When Deng Xiaoping began to open China to the outside world in 1978, there was both an economic liberalization and an opening of the market for ideas. However, preserving the CCP's monopoly on power has always come first. Although freedom of speech is now embedded in the PRC's Constitution (Art. 35), the state has the upper hand, as expressed in Art. 51: "Citizens of the People's Republic of China, in exercising their freedoms and rights, may not infringe upon the interests of the State." Those interests are wide‐​ranging and offer no guarantee of free speech or other fundamental human rights.
The Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 stalled liberalization until Deng's Southern Tour in 1992. One of the many casualties of that crackdown was Zhao Ziyang, then Party General Secretary and a firm proponent of liberalization. When he spoke out in favor of a peaceful settlement with the protesters, he was purged from his position and put under house arrest for the remainder of his life.
Although Zhao's voice was silenced, his posthumous book, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang (2009) became a New York Times bestseller. In that book, he argued that, if China wants to fully develop, it must move toward a parliamentary democracy with a genuine rule of law and a free press (pp. 270–71).
Another enemy of the Chinese state was Liu Xiaobo, one of the drafters of Charter 08. He was charged with "speech crimes" for "inciting subversion of state power" and imprisoned. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his strong support of democracy and human rights—especially free speech. The empty chair at the Nobel ceremony symbolized the struggle for truth against power.
In a statement released on December 23, 2009, Liu wrote: "Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth." Jimmy Lai would undoubtedly agree
Since Xi Jinping took over in 2012 as General Secretary of the CCP, there has been a carefully managed campaign to squash dissent within the Party and establish Xi as the paramount leader. Now the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, Xi has silenced all critics, including those in Hong Kong.
In January 2017, the cyber police in Beijing shut down the website of China's leading private, market‐​liberal, think tank—the Unirule Institute of Economics—as well as the personal websites of its scholars. The director of Unirule, Sheng Hong, in a memorandum dated January 24, 2017, pointed to the hypocrisy of Xi Jinping, who paid lip service to free trade in his remarks at The World Economic Forum, while cracking down on free speech at home. According to Hong, "As ideas are more valuable than commodities, anyone who truly defend[s] the freedom of trade will defend freedom of expression" (quoted from a personal copy of the memorandum). The Unirule Institute was permanently banned in August 2019, and the voice of its co‐​founder, Mao Yushi, who received the Friedman Prize in 2012, has been silenced.
Today, access to economic and financial data is being restricted in the name of national security, making it difficult for foreign firms and scholars to gather information necessary to conduct business in China and to understand policy changes (see Wei, Kubota, and Strumpf 2023). Without a free market for ideas and access to relevant databases, it will be difficult to make informed decisions and develop China's financial markets.
China's Future Development
In 2015, Zhang Weiying, a pioneer in China's transition from plan to market, predicted: "The future of China's reform will depend on the kind of ideas and leadership the new leaders, particularly General Secretary Xi Jinping, have. To succeed in a peaceful transition to a liberal society, China must get rid of the wrong ideas" (Zhang 2015: 13). The most serious wrong idea is that economic and social harmony come from top‐​down planning—not from the spontaneous order of free markets and free people bounded by a rule of law that protects persons and property.
Continuous improvement in people's lives comes from taking advantage of new opportunities to exchange goods and ideas. In that endeavor, there must be competition in all markets, including the market for ideas. China's one‐​party system and the lack of free speech are impediments to future development. That is why Ronald Coase and Ning Wang have emphasized that, "when the market for goods and the market for ideas are together in full swing, each supporting, augmenting, and strengthening the other, human creativity and happiness stand the best chance to prevail" (Coase and Wang 2012: 207).
Globalization and trade liberalization help bolster the free market for ideas and widen the range of choices open to people, thus increasing the wealth of nations. Crude nationalism and protectionism do the opposite. Politicizing trade and blocking the free flow of information risks losing the gains from globalization and marketization that have benefited both China and its trading partners.
Conclusion
Hong Kong's turn from the principles that made it a great society—namely, the rule of law, nonintervention, and a free market for ideas—has made successful entrepreneurs and advocates of freedom like Jimmy Lai enemies of the state. By silencing critics—under the guise of national security—both Hong Kong and China have sacrificed liberty in the name of "stability." Reversing that trend is the biggest challenge they face in achieving social and economic harmony.

Plus: Repealing tobacco bans, UN pointlessness, Substack's "Nazi problem," and more…

This blog is based on an article in the Journal of Social Policy by Richard Dorsett and David Thomson. Click here to access the article. Children who are imprisoned go on to have worse labour market outcomes than those who are not. This is unsurprising, since children in prison are disproportionately drawn from the amongst the… Continue reading The Enduring Penalty of Prison For Children →

Further to Sir John Major's speech on penal reform in early May, Sam Warner & Dave Richards agree that the 'prison works' legacy delivers poor value for money and discuss the many challenges of meaningful reform.
The post Breaking from the iron cage of 'prison works' appeared first on Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

Florida's mandatory minimum sentences created a large, elderly prison population. Now the bill is coming due.

According to the Indictment in U.S. v. Comiskey, the defendant tweeted, about Rep. Lauren Boebert, "If I ever saw Lauren I'd be glad to take her out and go to prison. Would be job well done." "Don't worry Lauren, someone is coming soon to show your face the 2nd amendment in practice with a copper…

Mississippi's prisons are falling apart, run by gangs, and riddled with sexual assaults, a Justice Department report says.