For this weekend’s reading list, we have articles on how Occupy Wall Street rejects the mindless messaging of the media, lessons that we can all learn from the successful effort to get single-payer insurance in Vermont, a review of an interesting new book on our failed criminal justice system, a report about the conservative attack on voting rights, and a new Congressional Budget Office analysis of economic inequality in the US.
If you have any feedback on these articles, or would like to recommend an article for next weekend’s reading list, please let us know at Winning Progressive’s Facebook page
Occupy the No-Spin Zone – Dahlia Lithwick at Slate praises Occupy Wall Street for rejecting the mainstream media’s call to adopt the type of simple-minded messaging that our media thrives on.
Help Wanted: Lessons From the Single-Payer State – a good overview of the five lessons that the progressive movement could learn from the successful effort to enact single-payer health insurance in Vermont.
Our ‘Broken System’ of Criminal Justice – former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens reviews William Stuntz’s interesting new book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, which discusses how our nation’s criminal justice system is too severe and imposes a disproportionate impact on African Americans.
The Right to Vote Under Attack – a helpful report from People for the American Way explaining the conservative myth of voter fraud, how conservatives are working to suppress voting, and the groups behind the attack on voting rights.
Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007 – a Congressional Budget Office report showing how the vast majority of national income growth over the past nearly 30 years has gone to the top 20% and, especially, the top 1%.
Great selection of articles, Winning Progressive. I especially liked the ones on Occupy Wall Street and Stuntz’s book. Over at Slate there’s also an article about how there may presently be more African Americans in prison than were ever enslaved.
No question in my mind that our entire police and justice system are tilted against so-called minorities.
Wow, great selections this week, Winning Progressive!
I enjoyed Dahlia Lithwick’s essay at Slate, which nicely summarized why the Occupy Wall Street protesters are wise to resist the media’s demands for sound-bite simplicity. The media focus on sound bites is, in part, why it is so difficult to have a meaningful national dialogue on issues like systemic political corruption and income inequality. The Occupy movement is less about a laundry list of policy demands than about changing the political conversation, and they are succeeding in that despite the media’s kvetching.
I also liked Justice Stevens’ review of Stuntz’s book. I haven’t read the book yet, so I can’t comment much on either the arguments either makes. As a former criminal appellate attorney, I can say a bit about sentencing guidelines and why they are both less and more troublesome than casual critics suggest.
While I was in law school, a federal judge came to our criminal procedure class to talk about guidelines. The most common criticism is that a trial court judge can carefully review the facts of a case and should have the discretion to decide the sentence based on those facts. But as this judge noted, the average sentencing hearing – before the guidelines – lasted less than two minutes. That is nowhere near enough time to “carefully review the facts.” Sentencing hearings are still brief, but the judge, prosecutor, and defense counsel can all work from a single document: the sentencing guidelines score sheet. That means “like cases should be treated alike” …
… at least in theory. In practice, politicians hoping to score “tough on crime” (read: tough on racial minorities) political points can and do nudge the guidelines to inject bias. Identical cases may be treated alike; given the same amounts and other circumstances, one crack cocaine offender will get about the same sentence as another crack cocaine offender. But change just one fact – crack to powder cocaine – and the sentence changes dramatically, even after a 2010 law that reduced the disparity from 100-to-1 down to 18-to-1. Guess which racial groups are more likely to use crack vs. powder?
That’s less an argument against sentencing guidelines than an argument against elected officials using sentencing guideline bills to score cheap political points.
Again, thanks for a great selection of articles this week!