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EuropeNow

Habitual Punishment: Family Detention and the Status Quo

By David Hernández

The problem with framing mass emigration of refugees and asylum seekers as one-off crises is that they demand one-off solutions—walls and fences, military deployments at the border, and deterrence that hinges on mass detention of families.

Notes on Teaching in Prison

By Julia Gardiner

I feel guilty, as usual, because I can leave and my students cannot. Razor wire glitters in the dark as I walk down the hill from the school building to the front gate. Not for the first time in my experience, I see a bus idling in the dark as women board, holding small bundles of their possessions.

Rationing Justice: Risk Assessment Instruments in the American Criminal Justice System

By Julie Ciccolini and Cynthia Conti-Cook

Naturally, in a system already primed for triage, actuarial risk assessment instruments are spreading rapidly. At nearly every stage of decision-making—including bail, program eligibility, sentencing, probation, prison classification, parole release and supervision—actuarial tools are assisting decision-makers to ration liberty and due process.

 

America First and the End of Pax Americana

By Stuart Mackintosh

As we approach the two-year mark of the Trump Presidency, the implications and the effects of the “America First” policy are becoming clear. Supporters of the multilateral rules-based world order are alarmed. We are witnessing the end of Pax Americana; the end of a generally benign U.S. hegemony; the end of U.S. support for a global system created by America and her allies after the Second World War.

Damon’s Case and the Meaning of British Antislavery

By Padraic X. Scanlan

In practice, there was a law for the rich and a law for the poor in Britain. In the British Empire, there was a law for whites and another for everyone else. Courtrooms were officially blind to race, but racism was everywhere.

The Strange Career of the Artisanal Penitentiary

By Anne Kerth

The similarities between convict leasing and modern mass incarceration are uncomfortably clear: in both systems, convicts are cordoned off from larger society and coerced into the performance of menial labor, from which they gain neither profit nor personal advancement. In this version of history, slavery, convict leasing, and modern incarceration merge to form an unbroken legacy of American coercion of unskilled and easily replaced black labor.