“This Boston Review piece”:http://bostonreview.net/BR34.6/barry.php by Tom Barry is very much worth reading, as a background briefing to the “prison funding shenanigans”:http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/10/behind_hardin_jail_fiasco_private_prison_salesmen_prey_on_desperate_towns.php recently described by _Talking Points Memo._

These immigration prisons constitute the new face of imprisonment in America: the speculative public-private prison, publicly owned by local governments, privately operated by corporations, publicly financed by tax-exempt bonds, and located in depressed communities. Because they rely on project revenue instead of tax revenue, these prisons do not need voter approval. Instead they are marketed by prison consultants to municipal and county governments as economic-development tools promising job creation and new revenue without new taxes. The possibility of riots usually goes unmentioned. … Initially, most speculative prisons were privately owned, a case of the federal government outsourcing its responsibilities. But prison outsourcing is rarely that simple anymore. The private-prison industry increasingly works with local governments to establish and operate speculative prisons. Prison-town officials have a mantra: “If you build a prison the prisoners will come.”

Most of the time, these public-private prisons are speculative ventures only for bondholders and local governments, because agreements signed with federal agencies do not guarantee prisoners. For the privates, risks are low and the rewards large. Usually paid a set fee by local governments to operate prisons, management companies have no capital investment and lose little, other than hefty monthly fees, if inmate flows from the federal government decline or stop.

… Prisons are owned by local governments, but local oversight of finances is rare, and the condition of prisoners is often ignored. Inmates such as those in Pecos are technically in the custody of the federal government, but they are in fact in the custody of corporations with little or no federal supervision. So labyrinthine are the contracting and financing arrangements that there are no clear pathways to determine responsibility and accountability. Yet every contract provides an obvious and unimpeded flow of money to the private industry and consultants.

The piece isn’t perfect – it can’t quite decide whether it is a story about the problems of the prison system or about the problems of the US approach to immigration. The two are of course closely connected, but each is very complicated in its own right, and trying to explain both at once makes for a top-heavy account. I would also have liked to have seen more aggregate data to support the specific arguments that the author is making (I suspect though that one of the problems with keeping this metastasizing system under control is that there isn’t any source of good general data out there). But it is an eye-opening piece of investigative journalism, looking at a story that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves. Recommended.

I watched Paolo Sorrentino’s quite extraordinary film Il Divo last night. It is remarkable in so many ways, but especially, as a portrait of evil in the form for Giulo Andreotti (as depicted by Toni Servillo) and also, in terms of the most marvelous cinematography. In a recent post I attracted hostility from some by doubting the West’s commitment to individual rights. No doubt I overgeneralized a little, but post-war Italy would be a part of any case for the prosecution. Andreotti as portrayed in the film, is prepared to go to almost any lengths, to inflict evil in pursuit of what he takes to be the good, to deal with the Mafia, to sacrifice his colleagues (I’d say his friends, but it isn’t clear that he had any). I wonder if it isn’t possible that Italy between some date in the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, wasn’t the European state where a person was most likely to be the victim of political murder? (Actually, I’m guessing that Romania might take that prize.) Not to be missed.

Here.
Enjoy. It’s Sunday after all.

Two photos today. My partner, Pauline Powell and I visited East Germany and West Berlin in 1984. The first picture is a shot of the Berlin Wall from the western side, and seems appropriate as tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of its fall. The second shot, taken inside the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, announces one of the prayers for peace meetings that helped to build the popular movement that would eventually contribute to the fall of the regime. (Some details of this are on the St. Nikolai Church website.)Both pictures are Pauline’s, not mine (all rights reserved etc). We believe the swords into ploughshares picture is unique on the web, though perhaps others exist as prints. As such, it is something of a historic document.

One of the longest-running of culture wars, that of Mac vs PC (or rather, Mac OS vs MS-DOS and then Windows) can finally be declared at an end. After this piece by Charlie Brooker, nothing more need ever be written on the subject (hat tip, Nancy Wallace).

Work on my book-in-progress has been slowed by other commitments. Among other things I’m fighting privatisation proposals from a Queensland Labor government that seems to have learned entirely the wrong lessons from the global financial crisis. Here’s a section on the GFC and the failure of the micro-foundations approach to macroeconomics. As always, comments much appreciated

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It’s that time of year again, only worse.

The academic job search process is under way, and in the modern languages, things look quite dismal.  Yes, I know, things have looked quite dismal for some time now, but this is extra extra dismal, because the effects of the Great Collapse of 2008 are only hitting this part of the academic machinery now.  Colleges and universities have already taken — and administered — hits elsewhere, via salary cuts and/or freezes, furloughs, elimination of travel and research budgets, etc.  And I don’t know how many searches were cancelled last year after being advertised.  But I do know that in the modern languages, we might be looking at a 50 percent dropoff in jobs from last year, and there’s no federal stimulus coming to bail us out.

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Fred Halliday writes, as part of a (not unsympathetic) twenty-year retrospective on communism:

bq. … underpinning these three ideas – “state”, “progress”, “revolution” – lay a key component of this legacy: the lack of an independently articulated ethical dimension. True, there was a supposedly ethical dimension – whatever made for progress, crudely defined as winning power for a party leadership, and gaining power for a, mythified, working class – was defended. However, the greatest failure of socialism over its 200 years, especially in its Bolshevik form, was the lack of an ethical dimension in regard to the rights of individuals and citizens in general, indeed in regard to all who were not part of the revolutionary elite, and the lack of any articulated and justifiable criteria applicable to the uses, legitimate and illegitimate, of violence and state coercion. That many of those who continue to uphold revolutionary-socialist ideals, and the potential of Marxist theory, today appear not to have noticed this, that they indeed reject, when not scorn, the concept of “rights”, is an index of how little they have learned, or have noticed the sufferings of others.

There is a difficulty, or at least, so it seems to me, in making this point as part of a diagnosis of what was wrong with the communist movement _in particular_. It is that the very same disregard for, or scepticism about, the rights of individuals, the same willingness to sacrifice individual lives for valuable goals (or even in the name of “progress” broadly conceived) has usually characterized communism’s enemies and competitors too. Consequentialism was the dominant philosophy of government pretty much everywhere throughout the twentieth century.

So we were down for a few hours this afternoon thanks to a massive flood of comment spam. Tyler Cowen had a “post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/09/not-bad-for-a-spam-comment.html a few weeks ago on the cognitive benefits of spam, which made me realize that much of my knowledge of the society I live in comes from trawling this spam and deleting it. At least 80% of the (presumed) female celebrities whose nude pictures are yours if only you click on this dodgy-sounding address are known to me from spam and spam alone (Jessica Simpson???). I would have no idea that “Ugg boots” (whatever they are) existed, let alone that anyone cared about them, were it not that a particularly persistent Chinese spammer tries to tell the users of my “academic blog wiki”:http://www.academicblogs.org about them at every possible opportunity. Sadly, given the existence of “Chris Uggen”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/, I can’t just ban page changes using the term in question.

There’s a quasi-serious point buried in there, which is that the Internets, and the possibilities it offers to non-regular TV watchers like me to retrieve the information that we are interested in _and no more_ can lead to deficits in certain kinds of common cultural knowledge. Not the kinds of civic knowledge that Cass Sunstein etc care about – but celebrity gossip, junky pop culture etc.¹ Targeted advertising – to the extent that it actually works – is obviously no solution. But spam, designed as it is to cater to the lowest and broadest of tastes actually provides me with significant information that I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise. Not that it makes spam trawling worthwhile or anything, but at least it gives me _some_ benefit.

¹ Not that I am above these things at all; just that I don’t usually have the time, energy and attention to dig it out. It has to be a Jon Stewart-worthy scandal, preferably involving Republican senators, highly specialized providers of intimate services, and greased porcupines or the like, to make it through my filters.

Being the second part of my reply to “Eric Posner”:http://volokh.com/2009/10/26/bloggingheads-cont%E2%80%99d/ …

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I recall a short but striking conversation with the formidable Piero Sraffa at the Economics Faculty cocktail party after Dennis Robertson’s Marshall Lectures. I well knew that it was Sraffa whom Wittgenstein had described as his mentor during the gestation of the Philosophical Investigations, but I still ventured a rather simple-minded remark about the obvious importance of the fact-value distinction to the social sciences. He turned on me his charming smile and glittering eyes. Did I really suppose that one could switch from fact to value as if simply moving a handle? His voice rose and his Italian accent grew sharper. “Fact, value! Value, fact! Fact, value! Value, Fact! FACT, VALUE! VALUE, FACT!” I beat a swift and chastened retreat. — W.G. Runciman, Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist, 18.

We announced a while back that we’d be doing a regularish photo slot on Sundays, so here’s an offering for today, sparked by no better reason than that I was leafing through a large compendium of photos of the 20th century yesterday (some famous, some not) and I was arrested by Aleksander Rodchenko’s portrait of Lilya Brik. Reused, recycled, copied, imitated, parodied, the original still has the capacity to make me stop and wonder at it. Such energetic, dynamic composition in the picture, and such optimism and vigour in the woman depicted.

Back in June, I excoriated Gordon Brown for his appointment of Alan Sugar as his “enterprise czar”. Since then, I’ve sometimes wavered in my determination not to vote for NuLab again, particularly when I consider the appalling nature of their replacements (even if Rory Stewart does sound slightly exciting). After all, I sometimes say to myself, Gordon Brown did do pretty well when faced with teh end of the world, and that ought to count for something … But the latest bit of populist meddling, sacking David Nutt for saying that drugs policy should be guided by science, reminds me of why they deserve to be beaten (and establishes why Alan “the minister” Johnson is unfit to succeed Brown), Oh for someone decent to vote for.