I’ve written about the intersection of “incarceration”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000087.html, “race”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000096.html and “the labor market”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000386.html several times in the past. In the United States, the remarkable expansion of the prison system over the past thirty years, despite generally falling crime rates, has had far-reaching effects on large segments of the population, but especially amongst unskilled black men. A striking way to characterize the depth of this change is to make a comparison to rates of participation in some other institution — say, for instance, that more black men have been to jail than are in college. But, as a lobby group found out last year, these comparisions are quite tricky to make properly, because the populations are different (all black men vs college-age black men, for instance).

But one of the many good reasons we have sociologists and demographers is to work out those numbers properly. A “new paper”:http://www.asanet.org/pubs/ASRv69n2p.pdf [pdf] by Becky Pettit and Bruce Western[1] does a terrific job of estimating how the effects of mass incarceration are distributed across the population. They estimate the risk of imprisonment for black and white men of different levels of education.[2] The paper is worth reading in its entirety, both to see how the findings might be understood and to understand how one goes about estimating these numbers in the first place — it’s not at all trivial to calculate them. Two core findings — bearing in mind these are the best available estimates — are remarkable:

* Among black men born between 1965 and 1969, 30.2 percent of those who didn’t attend college had gone to prison by 1999. A startling *58.9 percent of black high school dropouts born from 1965 through 1969 had served time* in state or federal prison by their early 30s.

* “Imprisonment now rivals or overshadows the frequency of military service and college graduation for recent cohorts of African American men. *For black men in their mid-thirties at the end of the 1990s, prison records were nearly twice as common as bachelor’s degrees.*” In the same cohort, “imprisonment was more than twice as common as military service.”

Interestingly, racial disparity as such has not grown in sentencing: the rates and risks of imprisonment are 6 to 8 times higher for young black men compared to young whites in both the ’45-’49 and ’65-’69 cohorts. But class inequality has increased. So while lifetime risk of imprisonment nearly doubled between 1979 and 1999, “nearly all of this increased risk was experienced by those with just a high school education.” Incarceration is now the typical life-event for young, poorly-educated black men.

fn1. Full disclosure: Becky’s a friend of mine and Bruce was one of my Ph.D advisers.

fn2. To forestall any misinterpretation, note that “risk” is a technical term here meaning roughly “the probability of being observed as ‘incarcerated’ during the period under study.”

I just got back from seeing Farenheit 9/11. There’s a little voice saying I should pick away, argue about this point or that point, qualify, criticize. Others can do that. Moore makes one point quite brilliantly: that those who suffer and die come overwhelmingly from families and communities that are, shall we say, _somewhat poorer_ than the politicians who chose to go to war, or the executives of the corporations who hope (hoped?) to profit from Iraqi reconstruction. Something like that is true of all wars, and if Moore were just making a general pacifist case then it would have been a weaker film. Instead, he was saying, or I took him to be saying , that those who expect others to bear the risks and costs of their projects better have a convincing justification for them. Self-defence might be one such justification, but plainly not in this case.

Those who have made the “humanitarian” case for war have never addressed the dirty little issue of who runs the risks and who does the dying. Rather, they’ve sought refuge in pointing out the plain truth that Saddam’s Iraq was an evil tyranny and that the world is a better place without it. So it was and so it is. But would or could this war have been fought if the children of the wealthy were at as much risk of dying as the children of the poor? One rather suspects not. It may be unpalatable to think that there’s a moral link between being willing to wage wars for democracy and human rights, and being willing to introduce conscription, but maybe those who have taken a leftist/liberal-hawk line on Iraq should be calling for a citizen army too. I’ve never read them doing so.

“Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/07/lawyers_or_unio.html makes an interesting argument about lawyers and trade unions as functional substitutes for each other in checking corporate power. He notes some evidence suggesting that states with low rates of unionization are “hellhole states” for business, where plaintiff’s lawyers deliver huge amounts for a small number of victims.

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In my previous life, I was a member of an active mailing list for fans of ska music. (In tribute, I’ve just created a ska name generator.) Every few months, members would talk about the music that they listened to, outside of ska. It quickly degenerated into a uniquely annoying form of indie one-upsmanship. Popular, marginal, and largely unknown bands were dismissed with contempt (“You’re still listening to Big Black?”). The discussion quickly disappeared down the indie rabbit hole, as members professed their love for vinyl-only releases from obscure foreign noise bands.

My friend Mark managed to shut them up. He wrote a long email about how everyone else was a sellout, and how he had gotten into the most obscure music ever. He would go to the local maternity ward with a stethoscope and listen to a particular fetus’s heartbeat.

Skagroup may be gone (or it might not), but the spirit lives on at the home of sloppy, reflexive contrarianism: Slate.

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The defeat of the Federal Marriage Amendment has led to some awfully good writing.

Fred Clark from the Slacktivist, a left-wing Christian, approaches the question “Why do some Christians hate gays but love bacon?” It’s a beautiful thing.

I’m not a fan of Thomas Frank. His adaptation of his thesis, The Conquest of Cool, is surprisingly good, but his pieces for the Baffler remind me of present-day Christopher Hitchens: sneering, blindingly angry, and unpersuasive to the unconverted. However, he’s managed to pop out a tight editorial for the NY Times. He argues that the failure of the FMA was intentional, part of a continuing effort to reclaim victim status for conservatives.

Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it.

John Scalzi points out that the effort to “defend marriage” would actually have the effect of breaking up thousands of existing marriages.

So it’s pretty simple: If you actually want to defend marriage, you have defend all the legal marriages, and that includes the ones with two men in them, and the ones with two women. Otherwise you’re explicitly saying that the government has the right to void any marriage of any couple, so long as two-thirds of the House, Senate and states go along. Who wants to be the first to sign up for that?

Finally, MoveOn is running a fundraiser specifically for opponents of vulnerable supporters of the FMA. I love this idea.

This little Flash movie by the ACLU about the loss of privacy is hilarious and, of course, scary at the same time.

Although there’s plenty of news coverage of inquiries into the “intelligence” that justified the Iraq war, coverage of events in Iraq itself seems to have declined sharply since the formal handover of sovereignty and the shutdown of the Coalition Provisional Administration. There seems to be a general media consensus that things have gone quiet, with the result that, when the usual news of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations is reported, it’s always prefaced with something like Suicide Blast Shatters a Calm (NYT 15 July) or after a week of relative calm (Seattle Times 7 July).

Regardless of the calmness or otherwise of the situation, the installation of Allawi as PM has certainly produced a new dynamic. Allawi has moved quickly to establish himself as a strongman, resolving by default the questions left unanswered in the “handover”. His announcements of emergency powers and the establishment of a security service/secret police have been criticised, but they amount to little more than the assumption of powers previously exercised by the CPA with no legal basis of any kind. The big question before the handover was whether any new military operations would be under the control of the interim government or of the American military. Allawi has moved pretty quickly to ensure that he will give the orders here, putting the onus on the American military to come to his aid if his forces run into serious resistance.

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Here’s a way to go on a fun and useful road trip this summer: drive to swing states to register Democrats to vote. Driving Votes provides all the necessary forms and helps you coordinate with others.

I’ve been spending the afternoon alternating between writing a syllabus for a decision theory course and websurfing. So naturally I’ve been drawn to web sites about decision theory and game theory. And I was struck by this question “David Shoemaker”:http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2004/06/teaching_or_exp.html raises – are games played in the classroom covered by rules on human experimentation?

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From an editorial in the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50490-2004Jul14.html today.

bq. According to the International Red Cross, a number of people apparently in U.S. custody are unaccounted for. Most are believed to be held by the CIA in secret facilities outside the United States. Contrary to the Geneva Conventions, the detainees have never been visited by the Red Cross; contrary to U.S. and international law, some reportedly have been subjected to interrogation techniques that most legal authorities regard as torture.

…

bq. What is known, mostly through leaks to the media, is that several of the CIA’s detainees probably have been tortured — and that a controversial Justice Department opinion defending such abuse was written after the fact to justify the activity. According to reports in The Post, pain medication for Abu Zubaida, who suffered from a gunshot wound in the groin, was manipulated to obtain his cooperation, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to “water boarding,” which causes the sensation of drowning. Notwithstanding the Justice Department opinion, parts of which recently were repudiated by the White House, U.S. personnel responsible for such treatment may be guilty of violating the international Convention Against Torture and U.S. laws related to it.

…

bq. Nor has the CIA’s illegal behavior been limited to senior al Qaeda militants. The agency has been responsible for interrogating suspects in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is believed to have held a number in secret detention facilities. According to official reports, the identities of several in Iraq were deliberately concealed from the Red Cross, a violation of the Geneva Conventions. At least two detainees have died while being interrogated by CIA personnel. One CIA contractor has been charged with assault by the Justice Department in the case of one of the deaths, and at least two other cases are reportedly under investigation. But no higher-ranking CIA officials have been held accountable for the abuses or the decisions that led to them, even though it is now known that former CIA director George J. Tenet was directly involved in the “ghost detainee” cases in Iraq.

bq. The Pentagon and Congress are investigating the Army’s handling of foreign detainees; though they are slow and inadequate, these probes contrast with the almost complete absence of scrutiny of the CIA’s activity.

I’m not especially keen on self-righteous denunciations of the “people of political position _x_ are lying hypocrites unless they immediately denounce _y_” variety. Still, like “Kieran”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002092.html, I have enormous difficulty in understanding why sincere, committed US libertarians (with some “exceptions”:http://www.highclearing.com/ ) aren’t up in arms about this sort of thing. It seems to me to be an open-and-shut case of the kinds of state tyranny that libertarians should rightly be concerned about. Why is state-organized torture a less topical issue than state-imposed limits on political free speech, or individual ownership of firearms? If someone has a consistently argued libertarian argument for why the state should be allowed to torture individuals, I’d like to hear it. If someone has a libertarian argument, or indeed any argument at all, for why the state should be allowed to do this with no public scrutiny or accountability, I’d like to hear that even more.

* It wasn’t intended as a follow-up to our earlier discussion on private vs public health-care performance, but nevertheless in that context it was very helpful for “Chris Shiel”:http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000537.html to link to “this paper”:http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf (PDF) on how well, or as it turns out badly, the US does on health-care outcomes.
* I missed this when it was posted a week ago, but if you’re still interested in this stuff “Geoff Nunberg”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001169.html has a very good dissection of that study by Groseclose and Milyo purporting to show liberal media bias.
* And “Ben Bradley”:http://mt.ektopos.com/orangephilosophy/archives/000563.html wants reader input to help choose a murder victim. Purely for academic purposes.

“John Holbo”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/07/superbeing_and_.html has an interesting post in his ‘John and Belle’ incarnation on superhero comics and nostalgia. His argument, as I understand it is that the classical superhero story is dead – that the ‘straight’ efforts to resurrect it (Michael Chabon’s ‘Escapist’) and the revisionist (Daniel Clowe, Chris Ware) are more closely related than they seem at first sight. They’re exercises in nostalgia, driven by how the “pain of unachieved adulthood contend[s] with hope for redeemed childish innocence.” If we look through the images around which we construct our identities when we are growing up, they provide luminous refractions of our adult complexities.

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I’m just back from a brief holiday in Pembrokeshire where, among other things, I managed to finish Hari Kunzru’s new novel “Transmission”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525947604/junius-20. “Transmission”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525947604/junius-20 is a fairly frothy but sharply observed tale of globalized internet folk which centres around the intertwined lives of Arjun Mehta, a microserf swept from his native India to code in the United States, Guy Swift, a London-based postmodern marketing executive and Leela Zahir, a Bollywood icon. I won’t say more, so as not to spoil it. But if you’ve read his earlier “The Impressionist”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452283973/junius-20 , then I’d say that this one is lighter but, on the whole, more satisfactory. Definitely worth taking to the beach.

Recent postings here on health care expenditure made me think of Ronald Dworkin’s essay “Justice in the Distribution of Health Care” (McGill Law Journal 1993, but also in Clayton and Williams eds, The Ideal of Equality. Dworkin is concerned to ask (a) how much society should spend on health care and (b) how that spending should be distributed. To answer this question he uses an ideal market (as a model, as a thought experiment, mind, he’s not advocating a market-based health care system). Dworkin argues that we should

bq. aim to make collective, social decisions about the quantity and distribution of health care so as to match, as closely as possible, the decisions that people in the community would make for themselves, one by one, in the appropriate circumstances, if they were looking from youth down the course of their lives and trying to decide what risks were worth running in return for not running other kinds of risks.

Dworkin enters three counterfactual modifications to his hypothethical choice situtation.

1. The decisions would be taken against a fair background distribution of resources. [See Dworkin, _Sovereign Virtue_ for his view on this.]

2. The choosers would know everything about risks, costs, procedures etc that very good doctors actually know.

3. Except that the choosers are to be deprived of the knowledge of the antecedent probability of any _particular_ person going down with any particular disease or infirmity. I think Dworkin’s idea here is that they would know about the incidence of a disease such a sickle-cell in the general population, but not, crucially, that blacks are more likely to suffer from it than whites.

Dworkin argues that choosers in that position and subject to those constraints would _not_ think it a good bargain to spend money that they could otherwise spend in their fit and healthy youth on insurance to cover them against some eventualities. In particular:

* Almost no one would injure to provide themselves with equipment to keep them alive if they had lapsed into a persistent vegetative state.

* Almost no one would insure to provide themselves with expensive medical treatment (even life-saving treatment) if they had lapsed into some form of irreversible dementia.

* Almost no one would by cover to extend their lives by a few months when doing so would be very costly and they would enjoy a low quality of life.

In all those cases, and others we can imagine, the cost of the treatment is so high and the expected benefit so low that it would be a poor bargain to buy the insurance rather than spending the money on education, training, travel, fun, whatever, today.