Prof parses prisons

[Joanne98]

Prof parses prisons
Loury addresses race bias in U.S. incarceration system
April 5, 2007
By Sam Bhagwat
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/4/5/profParsesPrisons

Levinthal Hall was packed last night as Brown University Economics Prof. Glenn Loury delivered a simple message.

Joel Lewenstein
Professor Glenn Loury, an economics professor at Brown, speaks on the historical, political and sociological role race has played, and continues to play, in the remarkable post-1970 transformation of America's punishment policies.

“Crime and punishment in America have a color,” he said bluntly.

True to his economics background, Loury supported his claim with chart after chart of detailed evidence. But his data were in service of a passionate vision.

“Someone needs to speak for the juveniles locked up in Florida for life without possibility of parole, for AIDS victims chained to their bunk and dying of neglect,” Loury said. “If not me, who? If not now, when?”

Loury peppered the audience with statistics: The proportion of the population in prison in America is 6.1 times that of Canada and 12.3 times that of France. Violent crime has plummeted by 60 percent per capita in America since 1993, but the amount of nonviolent offenders in prison has skyrocketed. There is nearly a three-fifths chance that a black male high-school-dropout born between 1965 and 1969 will have gone to prison before the age of thirty-five.

But Loury did not confine himself to the language of statistics. Instead, he leaped to the realm of morality and ethics and drew conclusions there.

One of his prominent arguments was that a failure in personal responsibility did not alone account for the problems of America and African-Americans.

“I know how attractive such ideas can be,” Loury said. “I once espoused them myself.”

Instead, he argued that the state, by exerting an overblown response to crime, also bears responsibility.

“Whose failure is it when 15-year-olds threaten us with guns in the streets?” Loury asked. “Yes, it’s theirs, yes, it’s their families’ — and it stops there?”

Loury said that the rates and methods of imprisonment in America have helped create a vicious cycle with incarceration fostering a prison culture that leads to more crime, harsher punishment and yet more incarceration.
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/4/5/profParsesPrisons

[jody]

1. Has Loury reached a conclusion about the cause of crime? n/t