\u201cPhotos of 1960s US Prison System Attempt to Show that Inmates Are Us\u201d<\/strong>:<\/p>\n Lyon\u2019s images are an echo of an earlier time, a time when uniforms were white and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was doing time. But the photos also serve as a dark omen, of a prison-industrial complex that would only grow more hungry, more unjust, more powerful.\u00a0\u201cThe prison changed me a lot, and not in the way I could have predicted,\u201d Lyon said. \u201cThere is an expression about dope, \u2018Once the needle goes in, it never comes out.\u2019 I never really shook the Texas Prison off.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n more<\/a>\u2013these are just great photographs<\/p>\n Dara Lind on \u201cban the box\u201d<\/strong>:<\/p>\n It\u2019s something advocates have been asking Obama to do for a long time, and a concrete step toward not just reversing mass incarceration in the future, but also making sure its past victims don\u2019t slip through the cracks. But it\u2019s also a reminder that fixing discrimination is rarely simple \u2014 and that the people who are most victimized by a problem might not be the ones most helped by a solution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n more<\/a>\u2013surprised this doesn\u2019t mention employer fears around liability, even if only to assuage them. Anyway, see Lind also re: reducing Draconian sentencing can increase racial inequality<\/a>.<\/p>\n More Lind<\/strong>\u2013Lind is sort of our theme this week, along with the usual theme that humans interpret solutions as damage and route around them:<\/p>\n De Blasio is far from the first politician to find himself in this trap. The promise of \u201csmart on crime\u201d-style criminal justice reform is to reduce incarceration while reducing crime. But too often, that means that when crime actually happens, reformers react the same way their tough-on-crime predecessors did: by keeping more people locked up.<\/p>\n Policy is about trade-offs, and crime policy isn\u2019t any different. But policymakers still see it as an unacceptable failure of criminal justice policy if someone who has been in contact with the justice system and is released goes on to commit another crime. That prevents any genuine discussion of costs and benefits \u2014 and it leads, inexorably, to mass incarceration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n more<\/a><\/p>\n Follow Dara Lind<\/a> on the twitter.<\/p>\n \u201cMany Police Departments Have Dismal Body-Camera Laws\u201d<\/strong>:<\/p>\n Since last fall, outfitting every cop on the streets with a body camera has moved from a fringe issue to de facto national policy. The federal government has provided $23 million in funding for the technology; cities have flocked to buy devices for their departments. Cameras are the country\u2019s single most unified reply to accusations of police abuse and systemic racism.<\/p>\n But according to a new report from an umbrella organization of major national civil-rights groups, the city laws that govern body cameras\u2014in other words, the very thing that will determine how body cameras work in the field\u2014are deeply, sometimes fundamentally, inadequate. Many of the nation\u2019s largest police departments do not address important aspects of body-camera use or have policies directly contrary to those that civil-rights organizations believe to be necessary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n more<\/a><\/p>\n And speaking of solutions<\/a>, schools are reducing suspension rates through in-school isolation, punitive \u201calternative schools,\u201d and paddling<\/strong>:<\/p>\n \u2026In January 2014, the Obama administration issued new federal guidelines<\/a> under which schools must reduce their reliance on out-of-school suspensions and expulsions. The Department of Education\u2019s Office for Civil Rights has since been investigating school districts across the country that use suspensions to unfairly \u201cpush out\u201d students of color and students with disabilities.<\/p>\n Mississippi, which suspends a higher ratio of black to white students than any other Southern state<\/a>, has received the message loud and clear.<\/p>\n In the southeast part of the state, schools in the town of Meridian\u2014which were investigated by the Department of Justice<\/a> for routinely suspending, arresting, and sending students to jail for minor in-school infractions like using profanity, flatulence<\/a>, and \u201cdisrespect\u201d\u2014have been ordered by their superintendent to stop calling the police unless a student commits a felony.<\/p>\n Toni Kersh, director of school attendance for the state\u2019s Department of Education, says, \u201cWe\u2019re encouraging schools to start handling discipline in-house.\u201d<\/p>\n That in-house discipline includes policing the hallways, having students walk through metal detectors daily, patting them down, relying even more heavily on corporal punishment and in-school detention, sending more students to alternative schools, and surveilling them with cameras. The Tupelo Public School District, in eastern Mississippi, for instance, recently promised the Office for Civil Rights<\/a> that it would \u201censure to the maximum extent possible that misbehavior is addressed in a manner that does not require removal from school.\u201d In June, the school board authorized security guards to start carrying pepper spray<\/a> in classrooms and hallways.<\/p>\n National experts on school discipline point out that these measures are not unique to the South. \u201cYou see it at charter schools a lot,\u201d says Kathleen Nolan, a professor of teacher preparation at Princeton University and an expert on zero-tolerance policies in schools. \u201cStraight from the model of order-maintenance policing\u2014dress code, silence, walk in straight lines, metal detectors\u2014except now it\u2019s in the schools and being done by teachers with less training in this than the actual police have.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n