I’ve been so busy with the end of the semester it’s been hard to keep up with the flood of recent talk on my favorite topic.
First, Jason Briggeman at Productivity Shock, put up some revealing interpretations of prison rape statistics. I think his estimates are accurate, and I commented on his blog that were it not for the conditions of incarceration a lot of these rapes logistically couldn’t take place.
Some additional thoughts: Rape and sex in prison is no new thing, it’s commonly reported by inmate accounts and ethnography work on the subject. But its pervasiveness is presented differently from the ethnographic research. One thing that’s overlooked in these statistics is the usage of sex as payment or the use of rape as enforcement in prison. There is very little work exposing how order is maintained amongst the inmate population. These statistics don’t show what a rape victim may or may not have done to induce violent aggression by other prisoners? Could greater rates of inmate conflict currently be avoided by the threat of rape?
Secondly, Marginal Revolution reports a new study on the training of prisoners to become better criminals. This was a hot topic around the eighties and nineties, especially after Reagan era drug policy the tough on crime tradition. But it has dropped off a bit since violent crime rates are generally down. The general wisdom on the subject was that prisons were filled with violent veteran criminals, then enforcement started sending non-violent drug users to jail when they came out they were prepared and trained to commit more violent types of crimes. This new study seems important because it focuses on crime specifically after release, whereas many studies in the past lumped crime committed in prison as recidivism.
Finally, the US has caught some flack in recent press (here, and here) for being the developed nation with the highest prison population as reported by the new DOJ statistics.

Type one and type two errors often refer to the economic problems associated with government regulating organizations like the FDA. Type one errors are when the FDA allows a drug on the market that ends up being harmful. Type two errors are when they restrict a drug that is actually beneficial. The insight behind the destinction is that type one errors are self-correcting. We get a grasp of how extensive the costs of type one errors are simply because they get exposed, but we are completely ignorant as to how prominent and persistent type two errors might be.

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In his “Libertarian Manifesto,” Rothbard devotes three sections to solving traditional problems of public goods in The Public Sector. In the third of these sections, Rothbard takes libertarianism into a more anarchist direction by explaining how the services of Police, Law and Courts can be provided in the free society. Unfortunately no specific attention is paid to the ex-post enforcement mechanism of imprisonment and incarceration. Why I’m not entirely sure, but if I had to offer a theory, I’d lean in the direction that it was a conscious ommission. Perhaps because the text is more a primer on libertarianism than it is an explicit case for anarchism, which I think is more directly implied by the implications of private incarceration than it is by private patrolling and detecting police.

Readers should be keen to notice the text’s earlier attention to prisons in the subsection “Courts” contained in the chapter on Involuntary Servitude. It is reprinted below:

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After many attempts to find a journal interested in running a book review on this text, I have decided to post it here and on Amazon instead. The main reasons for the difficulty in finding a journal were as follows:

1. Scholarly journals rarely accept unsolicited book reviews.
2. This text has more to offer to a sociology and or criminology audience than it does to an economics one. My familiarity with these journals is small but growing, as I did find a few that had already ran a recent review by the time I contacted them. Which leads me to beleive…
3. Books must be reviewed recently after their publication. Or have lasting contribution to warrant being re-addressed.
None the less I think the book is worth reading and an important piece of the broader economics of prisons research agenda.

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This material, printed under the subheading PRISONS was taken from:
“Thinking Practically About Crime,” by James Q. Wilson, contained in the preface of Assessing the Criminal: Restitution, Retribution and the Legal Process, edited by: Randy E. Barnett and John Hagel III.

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I’ve been trying to write a survey of the literature on libertarian punishment theory. This body of work overlaps to a large degree with the anarchy v. state literature. Each typical justification for the state or some specific state-operated mechanism of justice (police, courts, production of law, prisons, etc.) shares a similar structure. They begin by making reference to the harsh conditions of the state of nature. Then they imlpy a superior social condition achieved by means of the institution in question, and conclude with a normative justification for the institution’s creation and maintenance. In other words, everyone benefits by living in a society protected by the institution of punishment, therefore a victim or an enforcer is legitimized to punish the guilty becasue even the guilty has the benefit of such protection.

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This excerpt was taken from Pursuing Justice in a Free Society Part II: Crime Prevention and the Legal Order by Randy Barnett. The full article is available at Professor Barnett’s homepage.
Pursuing Justice in the Free Society Part I: Power v. Liberty
Part II: Crime Prevention and the Legal Order

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I was recently directed to Herbert Spencer’s “Essays” as a source on prison ethics and libertarian punishment theory. I was specifically looking for something along the lines that, libertarians lack a theory of punishment but do possess a theory of restitution. I didn’t find such a quote explicitly though I beleive the claim to be true and the publication to be in agreement to it. The entire relevant section is contained in the extended entry of this post.

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I just read this story linked by Lew Rockwell.com, about California police shootings. The article mentions that a number of California police districts have had soiled pasts of deadly shootings and they commonly complain of low budgets and an innability to afford non deadly force technologies such as stun guns, pepper spray, and rubber bullets.

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I’ve recently been reading David Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylym: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Rothman links the development of American penitentiaries with the development of insane asylums because both institutions possess an intentional core of rehabilitation. Thus, Rothman’s story centers around the ideological transition from Puritan punishment practices to reformatory rehabilitation.

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