Michael T. Cahill (Brooklyn): Punishment Pluralism. Keramet Reiter (UC-Berkley): Parole, Snitch, or Die: California’s Supermax Prisons & Prisoners, 1987-2007. Do police need book smarts? Better-educated police officers resort less often to using force, research shows. More democracy, more incarceration: Radley Balko on the devastating mix of politics and crime policy. Sherry Colb on evaluating the Eighth Amendment's ban on only cruel and unusual punishments. Confessing to crime, but innocent: New research shows how people who were apparently innocent could provide a detailed account of a crime. True crime costs: Does every murder in the United States really cost society $17 million? From Good, a look at which inmates get abused in prison. From The Texas Observer, most Texans avert their eyes from the state's machinery of death — but at what cost? Too many laws, too many prisoners: Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little. The UN votes on a death penalty moratorium — guess where the USA stands? A review of One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty. Toxic Persons: New research shows precisely how the prison-to-poverty cycle does its damage. Unforgiven: After paying their debt to society, millions are still branded by their felony records. British author Alan Shadrake sentenced to six weeks in prison and fined for contempt over claims in his book about Singapore's death penalty. The number-one reason whites join prison gangs has nothing to do with criminal intent, ideology, or even racial views — they join for survival. Keeping America's prisons overcrowded: In a case before the Supreme Court, California Gov. Schwarzenegger is arguing that judges have no right to tell states to reduce their prison populations.
