The Faculty Lounge

Blackmon on Convict Labor

If you're by a television tonight, you'll want to check out Douglas Blackmon's interview with Tavis Smiley about his new book, Slavery By Another Name.  It's about convict labor.  Here's a description from the webpage for Slavery by Another Name.

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude.

It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.

Consecutive Sentences and the Right to a Jury Trial

Exciting news for all you sentencing fans:  today the Supreme Court granted cert. on the application of Blakely to consecutive sentences:

Oregon v. Ice, No. 07-901. Does the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, as construed in the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings in Apprendi v. New Jersey and Blakely v. Washington, require that facts (other than prior convictions) necessary to imposing consecutive sentences be found by a jury or admitted by the defendant, as opposed to being found by a judge?

From my new home state--I'm so proud!!

1 out of 100 Americans are behind bars

An astounding article from the New York Times, based on a new Pew study, discusses the latest imprisonment rates:  1  out of every 99.1 Americans is currently in prison.  And that's just the averaged figure.  One out of every 36 Hispanic adults are imprisoned.  One out of every 15 (FIFTEEN!!) black adults are imprisoned.  Perhaps most troubling, one out of every 9 black men between ages 20 and 24 are currently behind bars (and 1 out of 100 black women). To pay for all this incarceration, states spent $44 billion of your tax dollars in 2007.

I'm speechless.  If this isn't a call to action, than what is?