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I am teaching this course again. Every year it changes, and this year I hope it changes a lot. Here’s what I said about this today, our first day of classes:
Any story about crime and punishment is bound to start with a few stylized facts. Until this year, I’ve started with the same number: 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States, which is roughly seven times as many people as our peer nations would incarcerate if they had the same population we do. But last year something extraordinary happened: somewhere around 8% of those people were released and not replaced. We can’t be very exact because prisons across the country are not very careful about counting and reporting the number of people they imprison, but any way you slice it the pandemic has started an unprecedented process of decarceration that we’re going to be talking about throughout the semester.
I’m starting with that stat, but I could equally well start with another one:
The FBI says that—during the first six months of this year—the number of murders in 22 cities increased by 16% compared to the same period in 2020 and by 42% compared to the first six months of 2019.
(cite)
Incarceration is down. Crime is up. Could there be a connection?
First, an interlude: when I taught this course in 2019, I had a student stand up about halfway through class and loudly leave, commenting “I thought this was going to be a course on Dostoevsky’s novel.” That’s a different class. And while I can tell you that there is almost certainly not a connection between decreasing incarceration and increasing violence, that’s not really what this class is about, either.
What we will do together if you continue in this class is somewhat different. I want to remind you about something literally academic: departments and disciplines. This is a philosophy class. And there’s a difference between how we approach a problem like mass incarceration in this department, compared to how it might be approached in a political science class, a psychology class, or a history class. I have colleagues and collaborators in all of those departments—as well as Theology, Linguistics, English, Biology, Sociology, and others—who apply their disciplinary approach to this issue. Meanwhile, we all are truly colleagues and collaborators: we work together, learn from each other, and read each other’s work.
So what I want you to think about—a little bit—is what the specifically philosophical approach to crime and punishment might be.
One specifically philosophical approach is the analysis of concepts:
I have lots of good things to read on all those questions, and lots of little lectures to give on the history of answers to these questions, and honestly I think we can’t avoid some of them. But I don’t think this is the only right way to do philosophy, and in this class I think it’s more important to start with the real questions we have about these issues and try to weave these questions into them. Maybe in the abstract caning is a potentially legitimate punishment—but in the US, given the strong association between torture and slavery, we can’t endorse it.
Right now, today, we face multiple crises related to crime and punishment. And I believe we are obligated to think through what we are doing in response to those crises. I believe that sometimes the best philosophy on a specific question is done in some other department or discipline: the historians, psychologists, linguists, and sociologists are usually pretty good at some crucial philosophical steps that philosophers ourselves sometimes miss.
So I ask you: what questions are you bringing to the classroom?
As you can see, primed with those analytic questions, my students ended up sounding pretty analytic! (Also, my handwriting is atrocious.) My humble observation is that often five groups of questions and themes emerge when I teach this class:
Now look: we can’t duck the econometrics of crime and punishment. But we are going to ask some critical and philosophical questions about their methodologies.
I then led the class through some charts and graphs that debunk some of the major myths about mass incarceration in the US.
Next week? Danielle Allen’s Cuz. She’s a philosopher, after all!
The University of Toronto’s Sociology Department posts the reading lists for its PhD comprehensive exams. This is the list of books and articles that the faculty think are required for serious scholarship in these subfields, and it’s a great place to look for syllabus ideas for courses in related fields. (h/t Raul Pacheco-Vega)
There are a bunch of different ways to teach undergraduates about moral psychology in a philosophy department:
I love all these different versions of the class and I’ve taught them all, and probably there are more I haven’t thought of. But I think moral psychology courses shine when they emphasize the good old fashioned “hermeneutics of suspicion” I name-checked in my title. What if we are strangers to ourselves? What if we know not what we do? What if we live under conditions of radical self-deception? What if evolutionary psychology or an understanding of the human archetypes captured in Sophoclean tragedy can show us our true motivations and debunk our fake ones?
Basically, we have easy phenomenological access to some parts of our own psyches, but we also have plenty of evidence that there’s “more to it” than what we can easily see about ourselves. We are uneasy inhabitants of our own heads, and there’s something interesting and provocative in that experience of self-estrangement.
In contrast with most of the straight-ahead moral philosophy out there, moral psychology tends to call our motivations into question. I quite like this Regina Rini paper on psychological debunking of moral judgments, but she casts this as an objectionable experience of disunity. I’d argue that our continued fascination with psychological debunking comes both because it provides a satisfying opportunity to debunk others (to see them better than they see themselves) and to explain the parts of our own experience that don’t quite make sense and hold out hope of greater unity.
For my money the notion of self-estrangement is the fundamental insight of psychology as a discipline separated out from philosophy. (I follow Anthony Appiah on this: the growth of philosophy as it’s understood today largely tracks the creation of independent departments of psychology.) It’s precisely because we can’t see ourselves clearly and we engage in elaborate justifications and deceptions that we can’t study the mind from the arm chair with introspection and meditation. We need at least two arm chairs for the talking cure, or rather we need the analyst’s couch, the psychiatrist’s prescription pad, the neuroscientist’s fMRI, and the social psychologist’s tricksy experiments. Ironically, we even need some bad developmental psychology so we can do better social psychological experiments: Milgram’s experiment famously works because we trick people into thinking they’re researching BF Skinner’s behaviorism but really they’re proving that most of us are Good Germans underneath it all.
Anyway, much is made of the standard moral error theory—that we simply don’t understand what our moral talk is really about, because moral states are not about anything at all. But I prefer the kind of error analysis you get from the “heuristics and biases” literature, which is also embedded in the Rawlsian notion of reflective equilibrium: if there’s nothing at all that our moral judgments are about, then it doesn’t make sense to say that our judgments are biased or wrong. But if they are clearly inconsistent with each other, then at least greater consistency is possible. The evidence from psychological studies of moral development and the experiment philosophy results about our moral behavior can all help us identify candidate moral intuitions or judgments upon which to train that search for consistency.
That’s through-line between Freud’s psychoanalysis and Haidt’s moral foundations theory: that we can learn things beyond “bubba psychology,” i.e. the psychology of wise old women who have observed many generations of people and have finely attuned and richly aware assessments of themselves and others. Yet at the same time, because psychologists (inhabiting the same buildings in universities and the same sections of the book store) both research the mind and provide specific clinical support to suffering individuals, there have been some key bubba psychology insights that required this rejection of common sense to make clear.
Both therapeutically and philosophically, then, there’s something like a set of deep and potentially clichéd lessons to learn from moral psychology here:
Probably it is more complicated than this. Probably there are more. Families matter. Community matters. Institutions and incentives matter. The prevalence of conformity and social normativity, for instance, makes me think that “pick your friends and associates carefully” is maybe a bit more difficult to implement than I’ve made it sound here. There are contributing factors that seem to make the very notion of “picking” a misnomer, since it is rarely under our conscious and fully autonomous control to decide with whom we are going to spend our time. And thus if you’re doing psychology, pretty soon you need to start doing sociology, and economics, and anthropology, and political science too. It really requires a kind of interdisciplinary social scientific approach. Or maybe we just call it philosophy?
I have a bunch of colleagues who do serious work on stoicism, and, well, I don’t. (1) But I’m teaching moral psychology again this semester and there’s a lot of relevant insights from various debates that I think are stoicism adjacent. (2) So here’s a kind of typology:
There’s stuff-upper-lip stoicism (which I associate with Rudyard Kipling and pasty British imperialism) that engages in emotional compression in the name of power-wielding, declaims the passions as unmanly, and has this dangerous tendency to explode when challenged. It’s actually deeply sentimental in its denial of emotion—it puts emotions to work ordering the world towards a hierarchical goal, that requires the passionate pretend to dispassion. Kipling’s poem “If” captures it perfectly, (“If you can fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,/Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,/And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”) but so does Henley’s Invictus. (“I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.”) And to be clear I like both poems!
There’s the stoicism of the weak: don’t get angry or resentful even at outrageous injustice because these reactions are seen as challenges to powerful and punished. Nietzsche hated this kind of stoicism: it makes all kinds of external circumstances over into an unchangeable order of Nature, flattening mortality, morality, and mores into a single situation we must merely find a way to stomach. Of course this can be pragmatic but it denies so many possibilities in the name of survival. Ironically, a lot of Admiral Stockdale’s “Courage Under Fire” probably should be classified here, in large part because he embraces Epictetus over Marcus Aurelius, and because his main practice is in his incarceration rather than in his warfighting.
Finally there’s the mindfulness stoicism of modern western buddhists (lowercase because they tend to be anti-metaphysical) and Silicon Valley self-help gurus and “techbros.” This has a developed a few different strands, but the key as far as I can tell is that there is a mix of practices: meditate to be 10% happier, update your priors dispassionately, take bets when offered, and entertain provocative ideas without blinking.
That said, I think a crucial precursor to all these ideas is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Allen was a heroin addict and he transformed his drug recovery and New Age mysticism into a project management method for translating projects into discrete tasks, and allowing the careful management of those tasks to free oneself of anxiety. It’s all about preventing perseveration and allowing easy flow states—but it also suits automation and software replacement really well. That’s why Tim Ferris claims stoicism is “an ideal ‘operating system’ for thriving in high-stress environments.”
I sometimes talk about the way that doing logic sets—or programming for that matter—can feel like turning off your brain. That’s obviously not true: it’s “cognitively loaded” work, and confusing if you don’t know where to start. But it’s also mechanical and somewhat pleasant for its ability to give you direct feedback. The word “flow” seems to apply here: GTD is all about how to reduce big projects into discrete tasks small enough to develop that meditative flow while completing. And meditation holds out the same promise: to relate to your life with a little less attachment, to do your work with less friction, and yet still be very productive. The “Bayesian” rationalists sometimes promise a similar experience of mechanically updating ones’ priors as new information comes in—but I’ll note that one of the first metacognitive strategies of the Less Wrong rationalists is the Stoic move of separating the world into facts and beliefs, external realities and internal states. Once that is done there’s no reason to stress about it any longer: the goal is to make one’s internal states (of belief) match up with the external realities, and to bracket the various anxieties and hopes that often lead us into false beliefs.
What worries me about Silicon Valley’s mindfulness stoicism is the sense that it combines all the worst elements of world mastery and manliness with the stoicism of the weak: acceptance of injustice, the embrace of a hostile natural (and social!) world to which we must conform, and a quietism that locates our agency in that compliance while praising it as mastery. Ironically, some of the Bayesian rationalists are not at all quietistic. They create new things and institutions, organize communities, and protect their interests. There are social norms and trendsetters. But I think it’s pretty obvious that these activities fall outside of their principles, and that to a certain extent they are setting aside their stoicism when they do it. (That’s particularly obvious when they take non-rationalists to task for putative betrayals.)
There’s a lot more to be said about the intersections of buddhism and stoicism (and indeed about the intersection of Buddhism and Stoicism) but I have been pondering the role of the subject. The detachment of the stoic is hyper-individualistic in some ways: it counsels the precarity and fragility of others and the external world, but in the name of self-discipline, personal honor, and a duty to integrity. The detachment of the buddhists (and Buddhists) can’t be so easily incorporated here: embracing no-self and emptiness can be a lot more challenging and disruptive. So while Silicon Valley has adopted meditative practice without a care for the metaphysics that might be smuggled in, it may also be that these practices carry their own phenomenological lessons and insights. Perhaps the techbros are going to learn some things in spite of themselves.
I wrote this little primer at the bottom of a long discussion of the Schocken Books editions of Arendt’s work, and then reposted it a while back on Facebook. It’s been popular, so I’m reposting it again here so I can easily link to it without feeding social media.
Propublica thinks so: What Can Mayors Do When the Police Stop Doing Their Jobs?
Rises and falls in crime rates are notoriously hard to explain definitively. Scholars still don’t agree on the causes of a decades long nationwide decline in crime. Still, some academics who have studied the phenomenon in recent years see evidence that rising rates of violence in cities that have experienced high-profile incidents of police brutality are driven by police pullbacks. Many criminologists also cite the general deterioration of trust between the community and police, which leaves residents less likely to report crimes, call in tips or testify in court. Added to that are the dynamics that are now likely also driving a rise in violent crime, even in cities that have not witnessed recent high-profile deaths at police hands: the economic and social stresses of the pandemic lockdowns, including disruptions to illegal drug markets, and the usual seasonal rise in violence during summer.
I tend to discount the so-called “Ferguson Effect,” because the overall crime rates are already so noisy, and Michael Brown was killed while there was already a rising crime rate.
ProPublica acknowledge this evidence, but then cites anecdotes from Baltimore to raise the problem anew:
But the post-consent-decree pullback did not result in a rise in violent crime in the city, whose homicide rate remained very low compared with other large cities. In this, the city is representative of a broader trend, according to two recent de-policing studies. Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, and Joel Wallman, the director of research for the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, examined the impact of arrest rates in 53 large cities on homicide rates from 2010 to 2015. They found that arrests, especially for less serious crimes such as loitering, public intoxication, drug possession and vagrancy, had already been dropping over that period, even prior to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014. And they found that in nearly all of those cities, the declining arrest rates did not result in higher rates of violence. To put it another way: Over the first half of the past decade, many cities shifted away from the “broken windows” style of policing popularized in New York under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but even as they did so, violent crime continued to decline in most places, as it has since the early 1990s.
Here are the anecdotes about Baltimore:
In Baltimore in 2015, the underpolicing was so conspicuous that even some community activists who had long pushed for more restrained policing were left desperate as violence rose in their neighborhoods. “We saw a pullback in this community for over a month where it was up to the community to police the community. And quite frankly, we were outgunned,” the West Baltimore community organizer Ray Kelly told me in 2018. In fact, the violence got so out of hand — a 62% increase in homicides over the year before — that even some street-level drug dealers were pleading for greater police presence: One police commander, Melvin Russell, told New York magazine in 2015 that he’d been approached by a drug dealer in the same area where Gray had been arrested, who asked him to send a message back to the police commissioner. “We know they still mad at us,” the dealer said. “We pissed at them. But we need our police.”
I think there’s good reason to be skeptical (beyond the self-serving motivated reasoning inherent in a police commander’s report of a drug dealer’s plea): aggregate crime levels are a noisy phenomenon, and they’re unusually responsive to the agencies that are charged both with monitoring them and lowering them. We know precincts in NYC would “juke the stats” and we also know that a lot of crime is inexplicably random, or tied to the efforts of third parties. So if there are two cities where police pullback was associated with subsequnce increases in violent crime, and hundreds of cities where it wasn’t, it looks irresponsible of ProPublica to write this article, even if it’s ultimately a sympathetic one.
There’s some historical justification for this view, as well:
The Week Without Police: What We Can Learn from the 1971 NYC Police Strike
Over the course of the five day strike, there was no apparent increase in crime throughout the city. In fact, the only real differences noted by reporters were an increase in illegally parked cars and people running red lights, the actions of opportunistic motorists. Richard Reeves, writing for the New York Times, said “New Yorkers— ‘a special breed of cats’…went about their heads‐down business. There was no crime wave, no massive traffic jams, no rioting.” Some attributed all of this to Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy’s “visible presence” strategy of deploying superior officers and detectives in patrol cars in heavily populated areas, like Times Square. Others simply attributed it to the cold. However, the strike brought to light another very real possibility: maybe the city was able to function as normal with a much smaller number of police officers.
In New York, major crime complaints fell when cops took a break from ‘proactive policing’
Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints.
Here’s the underlying 2017 study. (Here’s where I predicted these results in 2014.)
At the same time, the version of policing reform that’s most commonly endorsed by leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one where the simultaneous over- and under-policing of African-American communities is understood to be part of the same phenomenon, and corrected together such that Black Americans finally receive the same treatment as middle-class whites.
If the ideal of policing abolitionists is that we should all have responsive, service-oriented police, then a very good way to get there would be community control boards. My colleague Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has argued that this could just as easily be abolitionist as reformist:
By taking public control over the police who handle the bulk of arrests, we act before other parts of the system can get involved. Without community control, abolition just means asking a larger set of white supremacist institutions to restructure a smaller set. Instead, we are asking our neighbors.
We’re hiring two new staff for the education team at PJI, which I will supervise.
(We’re also hiring a Department Administrator!)
I’m incredibly proud of the work that we do at the Prisons and Justice Initiative–but this has been an especially powerful year. After the Pivot graduation this June, we all thought we had settled into a rhythm, until a confluence of events suggested that we’d be able to expand the Scholars program in the corrections system in the state of Maryland, with a bachelor’s degree. Now the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has agreed to help fund that expansion.
Georgetown has been committed to teaching in prisons in one way or another for almost forty years. The support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow us to redouble that commitment, with a bachelor’s degree and an expanded footprint in Maryland. We love to showcase the genius of students who are incarcerated—both their greatness and their goodness—because it points to the more fundamental fact that they are our neighbors and fellow citizens.
Because of mass incarceration, there are millions of people incarcerated in the US who would not be incarcerated in most of the rest of the world: generations of should-have-been undergraduates in prisons and jails who have been waiting for their chance to be that first year student in a philosophy class or to write that senior thesis on trade policy. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Georgetown is going to educate the next generation of formerly-incarcerated leaders who will help to reverse the policies that trapped them.
I’ve always argued that punishment requires mutual responsibility, and that one form of that mutual responsibility is a willingness to both teach and learn. We need to respond to harm with something other than more harm. Georgetown gets this, in part because of the Christian commitment to “visit the prisoner” and the Jesuit ideal of cura personalis, “care for the whole person.” That pedagogical ideal ends up meaning more than just “a sound mind in a sound body.” It means a commitment to serious attention to others, even students and even those we tend to ignore. Ignatius—himself formerly incarcerated—put it this way: “be slow to speak and patient in listening to all.” It’s the model for what we’re trying to do with prison education.
If those sound like your values, please apply!
I’m speaking today at the RAND Corporation on “Career Prospects for People with Criminal Records.” While I’m there, I’ll speak about our work at the Prisons and Justice Initiative (founded by Marc Howard) at Georgetown University, focusing on the education work: the Scholars Program, the Paralegal Program, and the Pivot Program.
In addition to discussing our programs and bragging about our graduates, I plan to make two points:
When we say that the three year recidivism rate is 68% (which is what you’ll find when you look at Bureau of Justice Statistics) we’re saying that 68% of formerly incarcerated folks are rearrested for something–but not necessarily for a crime, and certainly not for a crime that has a victim. More often then not, recidivism is the result of technical parole violations. These are activities that are not themselves illegal, but violate the terms of a person’s parole and lead to a short (or sometimes long) stint of re-incarceration.
Parole can thus interfere with the building blocks of reentry: housing and employment. What I’ve observed is that the restrictions of parole around housing can leave DC residents housing-insecure or homeless–while the meddlesome nature of drug tests and CSO visits can lead many employed returning citizens to lose their jobs because they must continually leave work to race across the city for a timed urine sample, or stay home unexpectedly for a home inspection.
Parole officers are not always caring and concerned mentors, either. It’s rare–I’m sure!–but sometimes they can be rude and disrespectful, not only to the person on parole but to their employers and family members as well. All of this puts unneeded stress on frayed bonds that returning citizens need to take advantage of their second chance. It is something that potential employers have to factor in to their decision to hire returning citizens.
Some supervision agencies are working to provide alternative hours for employed returning citizens, and to punish disrespectful attitudes from officers. However, the ongoing stigma and skepticism directed at returning citizens means that enforcing these provisions remains difficult.
Ideally, we’d treat supervision in much the same way that we treat other factors that hamper full commitment to an employer: parents face similar pressures from school cancellations and illnesses, for instance, but to at least some extent we socially value these conflicts and thus work to manage the difficulties parents face–again, not adequately but to some extent. We can and should do the same for returning citizens who face difficulties from supervision and monitoring. But we do not accommodate them!
This failure to accommodate returning citizens is exacerbated when an individual applicant or employee has multiple intersecting strains: a family to care for, a parole officer to negotiate with, a chance of being re-incarcerated. Employers struggle to manage these risks, and so they resist hiring returning citizens–even when they are missing out on talented workers.
It may well be that court supervision serves important public safety goals. However, it is long past time for supervision itself to be assessed for its efficacy and evaluated according to its benefits and its economic (and human!) costs. We already know that supervision is creating serious obstacles to measuring the efficacy of every other reentry program, since it undermines the efficacy of measures of recidivism by aggregating technical parole violations with reoffenses. If the true measure of “corrections” is “desistance” then we will struggle to measure that against the backdrop of drug and alcohol screenings, GPS monitoring, and association violations.
It’s worth repeating this fact: the US incarcerates 2.3 million people, ten times the global average. What’s more, almost 70 million of our fellow citizens have a criminal record. It’s almost certainly not a good idea to discriminate against returning citizens, because it’s a signal that no other country provides, meaning most returning citizens would be employed if only they had had the good luck to be born outside of the US.
Reasons for Tolerating Papists Equally with Others
I read about it in the Guardian yesterday, and my cousin at St. John’s found the digital copy right there on the internet in plain sight. Apparently no one had attempted to transcribe it yet? It’s a confusing document–looks like reading notes from some separate document, as there are page numbers which appear out of order in the manuscript.
Here is a rough first effort. Please share edits! The folks who discovered the original manuscript in Annapolis have published a transcription at the end of this article–I used it to correct my transcription, though the remaining errors are mine. (Especially impressed by them figuring out “lex talionis” which was really irking me.) Congrats to Walmsley and Waldmann for showing that archival work can be rewarding!
7 Persecution disobliges the best sort amongst the papist as well as amongst others.
12 If liberty of conscience makes
allmen faily more and more to abhor popery, papists may be tolerated as well as others.13 If liberty of conscience breed men up in an irreconcilable dislike to all imposition in religion, Papists may be safely tolerated.
If liberty of conscience unite the Protestants against the Papists, Papists may be safely tolerated.
15 If toleration be the way to convert Papists as well as others, they may equally be tolerated.
16 If Papists can be supposed to be as good subjects as others they may be equally tolerated
17 If all subjects should be equally countenanced and employed? by the Prince, the Papist have an equal title.
If ability alone ought to prefer men to employment and the King ought not to lose the use of any part of his subjects, Papists are to be tolerated.
If liberty of conscience oblige all parties to the Prince and made them wholly depend upon him, then the Papists may be tolerated.
18 If to force dissenters to one’s opinion be contrary to the rule of religion and to no purpose, Papists should be tolerated.
20 If suffering for it will promote any opinion, Papists are to be tolerated.
3 The papsist can be as little satisfied with or reconciled to the government by toleration as restraint. Liberty of conscience being here intended to unite the protestants under one common interest, under one protector in opposition to them, and so can not oblige them.
3 Persecution of them alone can as little make them unite with the other parties, as toleration can make them divide amongst themselves. Both which effects follow a general toleration or persecution of other dissenters.
4 In punishing papists for their religion, you are not so liable to mistake ??? (agreement?) by prosecuting that as faction which is indeed conscience.
For those who are guidedas in persecuting other dissenters for those who are absolutely disposed of by an authority supposed infallible, whose interests is directly opposed to yours, must necessarily be all factions however some of them may be similarly conscientious.
Though persecution usually makes other opinions be sought after and admired; yet perhaps it is less apt to recommend popery than any other religion. 1st because persecution is its own practice and so begets less pity. 2ndly The principle and doctrine of that religion seem less apt to take inquisitive heads or unstable minds, men commonly in their voluntary changes do rather pursue liberty an enthusiasm, wherein they seem their own disposers, rather than give themselves up to the authority and imposition of others. Besides Popery, having been brought in and continued by power and force joined with the art and industry of the clergy, it is the most likely of any religion
to decay, where the secular power handles them severely or at the least takes from them those encouragement and supports they receive from their own clergy.
Query: Whether the Papists or Protestants gains most proselytes by the persecution they suffer in those changes at the beginning of the reformation?
7 Standards-by will be less dissatisfied with severity used to papists then to others because it is lex talionis. Besides he cannot be thought to be punished merely for conscience who owns himself at the same time the subject and adherent to an enemy prince.
8 That a prince ought to encourage knowledge, from whence springs a variety of opinions on religion, matters not at all for papists who own an implicit faith and acquiesce in ignorance and who may as well submit to the imposition of their own lawful prince, as those of a foreigner. The infallibility of both sides as being equal.
All the rest that is said (on page 8) favours the toleration of papists less than others.
9 Twill be less dangerous to discontent the papist when the other parties are pleased then now. Especially when indulgence will less secure you of their fidelity to the government then that of others. Every subject has an interest in the natural prince, whilst he does not own subjection to another power.
Liberty will less destroy the hopes and pretensions of papists that desire public mischief, then of others. Because they are backed by the foreign power and are obliged to propagate their religion by force.
A small part of the trade of English is (I think) managed by papists ad the imposition of religion will lessen their trade
It is perhaps a reason why they should not be tolerated.
10 If it be the King’s interest to be head of the Protestants this bespeaks no indulgence for Papists. Unless the persecuting of them here will draw the same wage or worse upon the protestants beyond sea. And how far own that may be advantageous to us in the present posture
offof affairs, can only be determined by those who can judge whether the Hugonots in France or Papists in England and likeliest to make head[way], to disturb the respective governments.11 I doubt whether upon protestant principles we can justify punishing of Papists for their speculative opinions on Purgatory, transubstantiation, as if they stopped there. But possibly no reason nor religion obliges us to tolerate those who practical principles necessarily lead them to the eager prosecution of all opinions and the utter destruction of all societies, but their own so that it is not the difference of opinion, but their dangerous and factious foments in reference to the state which are blended with and make a part of their religion that excludes them from the benefit of toleration who would think it fit to tolerate either Presbyterian or Independent, if they made it a part of their religion to pay an implicit subjection to a foreign infallible power?
13 Severity to papists only cannot make them unity with any other party. nor toleration disunite them among themselves.
Today I am testifying on behalf of the Second Look Amendment Act of 2019, sometimes dubbed IRAA 3.0. The initial IRAA, the Incarceration Amendment Act, was designed to provide post-sentencing review to those who committed crimes as juveniles and were given life or near-life sentences. IRAA 2.0 extended eligibility and clarified some issues in the original bill, and the current incarnation is designed to provide that same post-sentencing review to those convicted of crimes from 18-25 years old.
I represent the Georgetown Pivot Program—a reentry program based at Georgetown University that began last year. I am also a DC resident, residing in Ward 4, and I support the Second Look Amendment Act.
No discussion of DC sentencing review can proceed without a few basic facts:
At the Pivot Program we have 15 Pivot Fellows studying entrepreneurship alongside a traditional liberal arts curriculum, including two IRAA 1.0 clients. Through my work with the Georgetown Prisons and Justice Initiative, the Prison Scholars Program, and the Paralegal Program I’ve had the opportunity to work with several IRAA 1.0 clients, as well as many who would qualify for post-sentencing review under the Second Look legislation.
We are incredibly lucky to have started our programs at around the same time that the IRAA clients were returning to DC—and I can report that our programs both inside and outside the Jail are desperate for more participants like the ones that IRAA has granted us.
Kareem McCraney, Charles Fantroy, Tyrone Walker, Halim Flowers, Troy Burner, Mustafa Zulu, and Momolu Stewart: I have been working with incarcerated students for almost a decade and these are among the best students I have taught in all that time. But we are just as excited to work with students who would qualify for review under the Second Look Act. In particular I would highlight the current mentors on the Young Men Emerging unit at DC’s Correctional Treatment Facility: Joel Caston and Michael Woody.
These men seem exceptional to all who meet them, and they are truly excellent students and teachers. But the truth is that there hundreds more like them among our fellow citizens imprisoned in the FBOP—men and women whose talents are currently unavailable to us here in the District, and slated to be wasted for decades longer, because they received very long sentences for crimes committed after their 18th birthday, yet while they were still too young to have the full cognitive capacities of adulthood.
I want to point to three challenges that will continue to plague returning citizens in DC, whether from IRAA-style post-sentencing reviews or the 5,000 citizens returning to the District every year:
DC is in an enviable position: we are poised to do the right thing for all our fellow citizens. We should pass Second Look, end a significant injustice, and reap the dividends. Thank you for your time.
[1] Peter Wagner and Alison Walsh, States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2016, available at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2016.html
[2] Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019, available at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html
[3] Peter Wagner and Alison Walsh, States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2016, available at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2016.html
[4] James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017) and Daniel Roodman, The Impacts of Incarceration on Crime, Open Philanthropy Project 2017, available at: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Focus_Areas/Criminal_Justice_Reform/The_impacts_of_incarceration_on_crime_10.pdf
[5] Urban Institute, A Matter of Time, available at: http://apps.urban.org/features/long-prison-terms/a_matter_of_time_print_version.pdf
[6] Gideon Yaffe, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility. (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2018)
[7] Richard Frase, Second Look Provisions in the Proposed Model Penal Code Revisions, 21 Fed. Sentencing R. 194 (2009), available at http://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/522 and Meghan J. Ryan, Taking Another Look at Second-Look Sentencing, 81 Brook. L. Rev. (2015). Available at: http://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol81/iss1/4
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