Crooked Timber

I’m reading an interesting book, Eye For An Eye, by William Ian Miller [amazon]. (I don’t know anything about him. I just grabbed this off the shelf.) It’s a discussion of lex talionis style justice systems – a somewhat unsystematic ‘antitheory’ of justice, the author styles it. Lots of quoting from Old Norse stuff and Babylonian stuff and ancient what-not. Very colorful. Here’s a bit that’s interesting, in a subsection on “Paying Gods in Bodies and Blood”. Maybe Kieran will have something to say.
Continue reading “Last Best Gifts: Retaliation and the market for human blood and organs”

Jeremy Waldron has a great piece in the latest LRB reviewing a recent book by Cass Sunstein. He has a nice discussion of the Cheney doctrine that even a one-percent probability of a catastrophic event should be treated as a certainty for policy purposes, where the class of catastrophic events is limited to those with a military, security or terrorist dimension. Reasoning like this interacts neatly with “ticking-bomb” scenarios: now a 1 per cent chance that the there’s a ticking bomb the terrorist knows about is sufficient in to justify waterboarding or worse. Of course other potentially catastrophic developments—such as climate change—haven’t generated a “treat as if certain” policy response from the US government, even thought even the most determined denialists must evaluate the probability that anthropogenic global warming is happening at greater than one in a hundred.

Waldron is also pretty acid about Sunstein’s treatment of global warming and distributive justice, noting some of the shortcomings of the idea that poor people’s lives should be valued according to what they’re prepared to pay to avoid the risk of death. But read the whole thing, as they say.

From today’s Times:

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report. Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars. Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

Here is an older post about how the U.S. incarceration rate compares to other countries. Here is Becky Pettit & Bruce Western’s (2004) ASR paper, with its frankly astonishing result that in the cohort born between 1965 and 1969, thirty percent of black men without a college education—and sixty percent of black men without a high school degree—had been incarcerated by 1999. Recent cohorts of black men were more likely to have prison records (22.4 percent) than military records (17.4 percent) or bachelor’s degrees (12.5 percent).Here is Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality in America, a superb analysis of how the prison system is now a key instrument not just of social control, but also social stratification, in America.

The BBC reports that a change may be in the offing in Britain’s policies on cadaveric organ donation:

Gordon Brown says he wants a national debate on whether to change the system of organ donation. He believes thousands of lives would be saved if everyone was automatically placed on the donor register. It would mean that, unless people opted out of the register or family members objected, hospitals would be allowed to use their organs for transplants. But some critics say the state should not automatically decide what happens to people’s bodies after they die. Currently there are more than 8,000 people waiting for organ transplants in the UK - a figure which rises by about 8% a year. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, the prime minister said a system of “presumed consent” could make a huge difference. … The system already operates in several other European countries and has boosted the number of organs available for transplant.

My view is that Gordon Brown is wrong, but not for the reasons you might think.

Continue reading “Opt-Out Organ Donation in the U.K.?”

John Sides at The Monkey Cage asks whether whites are more likely to support the death penalty when they think black people are being executed, and finds that the answer is yes.

In a 2001 survey conducted by Mark Peffley and John Hurwitz, a random subset of whites was asked:

“Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 29%
Strongly favor: 36%

Another random subset of whites was asked:

“Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 25%
Strongly favor: 52%

That is a 12-point increase in overall support

See more here (and original paper here.

The NY Times has an interesting piece on statistical studies of the deterrent effect (if any) of the death penalty. For those who want to get straight into fact-free debate, the bottom line is that the evidence is too weak to allow a firm conclusion one way or the other. What’s interesting to me, though is the way in which debates within different disciplines proceed, and the lags in transmission between them. Here I think the NYT story, while excellent in many respects, is quite misleading, presenting a story of deterrence-hypothesis economists facing off against legal critics.

That was pretty much the way things stood in the 1970s, after the publication of Isaac Ehrlich’s study in the American Economic Review claiming that one execution deterred 7 or 8 homicides. Ehrlich used multiple regression analysis (quite difficult and computationally demanding in those days, and correspondingly highly regarded) in an attempt to control for other factors affecting homicide rates and isolate the effect of the death penalty.

Over the next decade, economists learned a lot about the limitations of regression analysis. With limited amounts of data, it’s impossible to avoid mining the data for patterns which are then used to fit the model. And if you try enough specifications on weak data, you can get just about any result you want. A classic exposition of this point was Ed Leamer’s 1983 article “Let’s take the con out of econometrics” which pointed out the fragility of regression analysis on time-series data and picked, as an example, the deterrent effect of the death penalty.
Continue reading “Disciplines and deterrence”

If you haven’t read Malcolm Nance’s Small Wars Journal essay, “Waterboarding is Torture … Period” – well, you should. It is a clear, cogent, forceful statement of the anti-torture position. At the bottom of that page you also get a long list of links and trackbacks, and a comment box. Here, for example, is a helpful explanation of why all the anti-torture complaints about ticking time bomb scenarios miss the point:

One need not imagine a ticking nuclear bomb, by the way. One only need imagine that they are a father who has captured a man who belongs to a pedophilia ring that managed to kidnap his 2 year old daughter. In other words, the life of the innocent need not be in direct or immediate danger, nor must there be a high number of innocents in danger. A single innocent babe in danger of being subjected to such inhuman cruelty deserves to be protected by any means necessary, provided one is certain they have collared a member of the ring. I would never ever be able to forgive myself for allowing my daughter to be degraded in that way, and believe I would sleep well and without guilty conscious should I subject such a man to the minimum force possible to rescue her.

Jesus wept. Meanwhile, another commenter earnestly wonders whether the reason there is so much resistance to torture is that leftists have been watching too much TV.

Then you get Alan “for it even while I was against it” Dershowitz. And Blackfive, on ‘the virtues of waterboarding and secret prisons’: “The reason that character is so important in choosing a President is that the Commander in Chief powers are almost unchecked.”

Sigh.

I don’t have original ideas to contribute to the ‘debate’. I’m against torture. Maybe this would have some rhetorical effect: you can’t waterboard your way to winning hearts and minds. Giving up our country’s longstanding commitments against torture means giving up any hope of winning any War on Terror we might think we are fighting.

I hereby add my humble voice to the chorus of indignation at the sorry sight of the Mukasey confirmation. What follows are my stray, semi-formulated musings about how we got to hell in this handbasket Continue reading “Torture, torture, torture”

Over the last few years, Crooked Timberites, myself included, have given some grief to Jonathan Adler both under his own name and his ‘Juan non-Volokh’ pre-tenure pseudonym for failing to say very much about torture, abuse of state power etc. So it’s only fair to note that he has recently been much more willing to directly criticize Bush administration overreach than in the past and seems to be moving towards saying that waterboarding is indeed torture. Unfortunately, Alan ‘if torture was good enough for the Nazis, it’s good enough for us’ Dershowitz seems, if anything, to be getting worse.

I was going to respond at length to commenter sg in the thread to John Quiggin’s post, but decided I would just bump it up to a post. I think I may fairly summarize sg as saying that some drugs are so intrinsically harmful that they must be illegal. Further, that the US wouldn’t be awash in guns and drugs “if the US would actually try and police the drug trade.” This last is just madness, on my view, and anyone who thinks different should just go peruse Radley Balko’s archives. [In fairness, it seems sg is referring to more competent policing rather than more overwhelming force and aggressive raids, but I’m unclear on how this is meant to work.]

I wanted to talk about something that would-be legalizers often hear, namely, “you’re not willing to admit that under your system there would be lots more drug addicts, and being addicted to drugs is, in itself, a bad thing.” In my experience this isn’t right at all, and everyone who advocates decriminalization will admit that more people will use drugs if they are more widely available and there are no legal penalties. This means more people would become addicted to drugs. How could it be otherwise? This doesn’t mean that I think it’s good thing for people to abuse IV drugs—it’s obviously a bad thing. But the costs our own nation incurs in the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs are crushing: citizens jailed for drug possession and minor sales; the wholesale violation of civil rights that attends aggressive enforcement of anti-drug laws; the fundamental unfairness of denying sick people access to drugs give them relief. With decriminalization we would need fewer police officers, and those we had could focus on violent crimes. We could reverse pernicious trends in which more and more African-American men are shoveled into the maw of the prison system. That’s not even considering the violence and misery spawned around the world by our insatiable appetite for drugs. You’ll pretty much have to convince me that decriminalization will mean free samples of heroin-enriched enfamil before I even bother to reconsider my cost-benefit analysis. Continue reading “Yes, Even Heroin”

Here’s Andrew Sullivan :

“Effective liberty.” Two of the most chilling words you’ll ever hear. Crooked Timber wants the government policing speech to protect minorities. At last they’re honest about the true agenda of the left. Notice this isn’t about “hate-crimes”. It’s about “hate-speech.” But the motivation behind hate-crime laws – a loathing of liberty and group-think victimology – is still out there. …. Once you start deciding what speech is or is not acceptable, we no longer live in a free society. We live in a tyranny – where Crooked Timber and the benign left will call the shots and enforce their orthodoxy.

Let’s put things in simple terms. Most of the people who discuss this topic, and especially most Americans, have some Lockean view of individual rights in mind, rights that stop where the other guy starts. Government, seen as some alien policeman, only has a legitimate role in stepping in to stop people harming one another, where the paradigm cases of harm involve punching people on the nose or stealing their stuff. Since speech isn’t like that, government has no business regulating it.

Well I see where you’re coming from. But I think it’s from the wrong place. The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves. First, there are the obvious procedural ones, the rules for running the meeting, as it were. Second, there are the financial ones: we can’t have the conversation dominated by those who are rich enough to buy up all the megaphones. Third, if we are trying to implement such a conversational ideal in a society riven by deep ethnic or religious divisions, we’ll need to take seriously the idea that despised or stigmatized groups might not get their voices heard, and that one reason for this might involve the discourse of other citizens. This isn’t a matter of “the government” policing speech, it is a matter of us regulating our collective conversation.

However … and it is a big “however”, the states in which we live are a long way from that ideal of self-government. Given that they are at that distance, there are strong reasons to think that those who dominate government will abuse their power, we ought to be very wary about restrictions on hate speech, and we ought to be sensitive to the fact that any regulations will be subject to abuse (including by people who represent themselves as victims to gain an edge), may be counterproductive, and so on. Hence it is false to say—at least as some blanket proposition—that I (rather than CT collectively, some of whom may think I’m nuts, for all I know) want “the government policing speech to protect minorities”.

Small additional note. Sebastian writes in comments “The United States courts have some of the most extensive thinking about free speech recorded anywhere—complete with built in case studies.” Well sort of. The Americans have a long tradition of trying to discuss these things using the language of an 18th-century document. Given the difficulties of shoehorning a lot of real-world problems into that frame, that gives them a long history of acrobatic hermeneutics somewhere in the vague area of free speech. Some of it is even relevant. The trouble is that many Americans (at least the ones who comment on blogs!) can’t tell the difference between discussing the free speech and discussing the application of their constitution.

Small extra additional note. Someone might put the argument that the best way to regulate “the conversation” involves giving people 1st Amendment-style protections. They might be right about that. There’s a case to say that. But note that that’s a different argument from “government should only stop harm, and speech isn’t harm.”

I’m doing some research on Italian mafia-type organizations at the moment, and came across this great article (PDF) by Federico Varese on the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and social capital. Those that have read Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work will be familiar with his claim that the main reason for the differences between crime-infested and economically and politically underdeveloped Southern Italy and the relatively advanced North is their respective levels of social capital. Varese asks what happens when the ‘Ndrangheta tried to expand its operations from the low social capital South to the high social capital areas in the North. He finds that the ‘Ndrangheta has been more successful in transplanting its networks than social capital theory would suggest, but documents one case in which a ‘highly civic’ town – Verona – managed to repel mafioso drug dealers who were trying to infiltrate the city. The Catholic Church, the local Communists, and various social groups went into action to boot them out, and to get rid of officials and politicians who had taken bribes from the mafia. The end result of their successful efforts – a resurgent local heroin market run by vibrant community networks.

operators in the market belonged to the same social milieu that had given rise to a flourishing economy and adopted the same entrepreneurial spirit and straightforward commercial practices that characterized the legal sectors of the economy. Transactions in the illicit drug market took place according to shared rules of fair bargaining, and punishment took the form of exclusion from future exchanges and refusal to offer credit and discounts. In addition, a significant level of barter and individualized exchange existed in this market, and no third-party mechanism to punish defectors existed.

This did lower the rates of violent crime. Even so, I suspect that it’s not going to get prominent discussion in the Communitarian Newsletter anytime soon. Varese’s book on the Russian Mafia is also an excellent read – his description of the sociology of the vory in Russian prison camps reads like something from Dostoevsky.

Microsoft received a very significant setback this morning – its appeal against anti-trust actions taken by the European Commission was rejected by Europe’s Court of First Instance (with the exception of one, more or less unimportant aspect of the Commission’s oversight regime) (NYT story here, Court press release here. This is a very interesting ruling, not only for the EU but for US markets as well. While Microsoft can (as it has done in the past) continue to sell tailored products for the European market only, it is likely to find its business model quite significantly constrained by the threat of future action. More detailed analysis below the fold … Continue reading “Microsoft gets clobbered”