Prisons Then and Now – Plus Ça Change

le 14 juillet 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Bastille was a prison, and I assume that like most European prisons of the time, it was a miserable place. De Tocqueville’s ostensible purpose in visiting America a generation or so after the fall of the Bastille was to study our progressive prison system.


Some things change, some stay the same. The Bastille was torn down during the Revolution. Now the only prison still standing within the official Paris boundaries is the Prison de la Santé, built in 1867, and it was not much of an improvement.


On Bastille Day in 1944 an inmate uprising was brutally suppressed by the Vichy regime. Recently, a blogger at Invisible Paris, Adam, referred to its squalor as “Zola-esque” (that’s French for Dickensian). He saw it only from the outside, but an American reader who had visited her brother* there then wrote to Adam providing more detail.

Veronique Vasseur, the prison physician, told me that the cells were full of rats and lice. Suicide is rampant, and depression lurks in every crowded cell.

That was in 1994. A few years later, Dr. Vasseur published an exposé of conditions in the prison. According to the story in the Times,

Skin diseases were rampant because showers were only available twice a week, though temperatures sometimes soared to more than 100 degrees in cramped cells holding four prisoners each.

Inmates stuffed their clothes in the cracks in their cells to keep the rats out, and most of the mattresses were full of lice and other insects. Some of the weaker prisoners, Dr. Vasseur came to understand, had been turned into slaves by their cellmates.

But what caught Adam’s attention in the letter from the woman who had visited the prison was this paragraph:

There were many international prisoners there awaiting extradition to their countries. Remarkably they all felt that extradition to the US would be the least desirable outcome, and they were correct. La Sante is unsanitary, and frightful looking - terribly crowded and unhealthy, but somehow civil.

Some things stay the same – French prisons perhaps. Some things change – in 1830, America was the country whose prison system a young idealistic Frenchman might hope to learn from. Today, our prisons have such a bad reputation that even prisoners in a disease-ridden, rat-infested French prison want to avoid extradition here.

No 21st-century de Tocqueville will be coming to the US to pick up pointers about prison reform.

* According to the Website supporting him, the brother, John Knock, was caught in a marijuana sting. He was extradited to the US. He pled not guilty. He was convicted, and sentenced to “2 life terms for conspiracy to import and distribute marijuana, and 20 years for conspiracy to money launder.” He was a first-time offender.

Economics Made Simple - Unemployment Version

July 11, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economics, as Tyler Cowen says, is “really, really, really . . . hard.” But there are simple versions of economics, and I don’t mean just Father Guido Sarducci’s five-minute- university version (this earlierSocioblog post has a link to Fr. Sarducci).

Here’s a letter from the New York Times arguing that current proposals to extend unemployment benefits will actually increase the unemployment rate.

The more government subsidizes unemployment, the more people will indulge in it for longer periods of time.
--Ryan Young, Washington, July 6, 2010
The writer is a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

When I read this, I assumed the writer was some smug, smart-assed kid (what is a “journalism fellow” at CEI anyway?) who had learned one or two principles in Econ 101 and had no sense of how real people think and act – people who have lost their jobs and are scraping by on $300 a week in unemployment benefits (the US average).

A couple of days later, the Wall Street Journal ran a full op-ed by Arthur Laffer, a well-known economist and not a kid, saying the same thing.

The most obvious argument against extending or raising unemployment benefits is that it will make being unemployed either more attractive or less unattractive, and thereby lead to higher unemployment.

Economists sometimes clarify principles by using simplified models. Here’s Laffer’s explanation of the effects of unemployment benefits.

Imagine what the unemployment rate would look like if unemployment benefits were universally $150,000 per year. My guess is we'd have a heck of a lot more unemployment.

Marx (or somebody) said that differences in degree eventually become differences in kind, but Laffer doesn’t think so. He is arguing that a few more weeks at $300 is just a smaller version of $150,000 a year for life.

He provides some evidence in this graph (note the compassionate title):


According to Laffer, the graph shows that “since the 1970s there’s been a close correlation between increased unemployment benefits and an increase in the unemployment rate.” [emphasis added]

Correlation is not cause. In fact, what I see in the graph is that the increase in benefits almost always follows the increase in unemployment. That’s exactly what would happen now. Unemployment goes up, people can’t find work, and Congress increases the amount or length of benefits. There is a correlation, but the cause goes the other way.

I have heard many politicians argue that because unemployment is high, we need to extend benefits. It’s much rarer to hear people say that they have chosen not to work because that $300 a week is just too tempting.

From Cheney to BP

July 9, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

When did the BP oil disaster (11 people killed, untold environmental damage) begin? The explosion occurred in April 2010.

But in 2001, one of the first things Dick Cheney did when he became president vice-president was to convene a task force on energy. The process was so important that the government refused to tell the public who was on the task force or who they were consulting. After all, in a democracy, it makes no sense to let the people know what the government is doing or who they’re doing it with.

The task force did produce an energy policy and a document that contains this prescient bullet point:

• Advanced, more energy efficient drilling and production methods:
— reduce emissions;
— practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms; and
— enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources

Nine years later, those chickens came home to roost, feathers drenched in oil.

There’s probably some larger sociological point here, maybe about how industries “capture” regulatory agencies, though capture suggests that there was some actual struggle going on. With the Cheney-Bush administration, that would be like saying that a rich kid “captured” the extravagant birthday presents he’d been whining for. In both cases, it would be technically more accurate to use the term gift .

(HT: Eric Alterman )

Writing Contest

July 8, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The InsideHigherEd table of contents listed:

Provost Prose
And the winner is . . .

I hadn’t read Ed in a while, so I thought they must have been running a contest with faculty submitting actual sentences from memos from their provosts.

Turns out, “Provost Prose” is a column written by an actual provost (Herman Miller of Hofstra), and his prose is surprisingly clear, readable, and non-bureaucratic. The column in question was about Hofstra’s Teacher of the Year award and whether a winner should be allowed to repeat, threepeat, etc., hence the title of the column.

But there should be an academic prose competition – like the Bulwer-Lytton awards. I used to collect particularly opaque gems of the genre, full of bureaucratic vagueness, but I must have deleted the file. Maybe some other more widely read blog would run the contest. Only authenticated memos from authenticated administrators. One hundred word maximum. All entries become the property of the blog. Offer not good where prohibited by law. Eyes on your own paper, turn off all cell phones, no flash photography, and if you have cellophane-wrapped candy, open it now.