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Cycles of Fear and Bias in the Criminal Justice System
Pacific Standard: Discussions about how to reform the criminal justice system—whether through sentence-reduction proposals for low-level crimes, or limiting the use of data analysis in making sentencing decisions, or fightingvoter disenfranchisement—all have one talking point in common. When an overzealous
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In Interrogations, Teenagers Are Too Young to Know Better
The New York Times: Even when police interrogators left the room, cameras kept recording the teenage suspects. Some paced. Several curled up and slept. One sobbed loudly, hitting his head against the wall, berating himself.
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The Enforcers of the Death Penalty
The Atlantic: It was the late 70s, and Kathleen Dennehy was working at Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, the oldest running men’s prison in the state. Opened in 1878, it has a vault filled with
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Let’s Watch the Video—and Confirm Our Prejudices
Pacific Standard: “Let’s look at the tape” has become our go-to response for determining the truth of an ambiguous situation. With video recorders tracking everything from baseball games to riots, it seems natural to take
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How racism shapes prison policy
The Boston Globe: WHY DOES AMERICA incarcerate so much of its population compared to other first-world countries? New research from psychologists at Stanford University suggests that some of our toughness on crime may be driven by
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Seeing More Blacks in Prison Increases Support for Policies that Exacerbate Inequality
Informing the public about African Americans’ disproportionate incarceration rate may actually bolster support for punitive policies that perpetuate inequality, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological
