Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Governing Through Crime

Criminal Law

: Governing Through Crime

California Style Mass Incarceration

By Jonathan Simor

Socio-legal scholars have long spoken of "naming, blaming, and claiming" (Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat, The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, and Claiming, 1981) to describe how disputes arise and move toward legal realization. If the same may be said of polities, than the Supreme Court's oral arguments a couple of days ago, in the great California prison population case (Schwarzenegger v. Plata) may mark the moment when the harm of mass incarceration in America broke out of its canyons of attention, and became a public dispute for the US. For the Court's "liberals", the staggering portrait drawn by the many experts who testified before both original courts and the 3-Judge panel of the way physical and mental health needs are unmet appears to have broken through their own instincts to defer on criminal matters...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on December 06, 2010 (boomark / email).