criminal justice
Is moral progress real?: The Story
The arc bent, and then it bent back In 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. William Wilberforce wept in the gallery.... What should law look like in 2050?: The Story
The backpack In 2023, a man in Tennessee spent eleven months in pretrial detention. The charge: misdemeanor theft. The item: a forty-dollar backpack. His public defender had 437 other clients.... What actually happened on January 6th?: Political persecution frame
The grandmother On January 6, 2021, a sixty-year-old grandmother from Indiana walked into the Capitol through a door that had been opened. She did not break anything. She did not assault anyone. She was inside for ten minutes, took photographs, and left.... What actually happened on January 6th?: Insurrection frame
The legal record On January 20, 2025, Trump signed executive clemency for over 1,500 January 6th defendants. Some had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Some had pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers with flagpoles and chemical spray.... Can you fix prisons without abolishing them?: Public safety first
The question nobody answers On September 11, 2007, Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters were murdered in their home in Cheshire, Connecticut. Both men had been released on parole. One had been arrested over twenty times. The system told Dr.... Can you fix prisons without abolishing them?: The Story
Twenty-eight years for a painting In 2021, Ndume Olatushani walked out of a Tennessee prison after twenty-eight years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He entered at thirty. He left at fifty-eight.... What is justice for?: Natural law
What a person is I teach philosophy at a small Catholic university in the Midwest. My students come in already knowing the positions — retribution, restoration, distribution. They can argue any of them on an exam. What they usually can’t say is why any of it matters.... What is justice for?: Distributive justice
The map already tells you In 2016 the DOJ investigated the Baltimore Police Department. Officers had made 300,000 pedestrian stops in a city of 620,000. One man was stopped thirty times in four years. Never charged with anything.... What is justice for?: Retributivists
The line I’ve been on the bench twenty-two years. My daughter asks me sometimes how I sleep. I sleep fine. Not because I’m callous. Because I’ve watched what happens when people lose faith that the system will say, clearly, this was wrong.... What is justice for?: The Story
The forgiveness next door In 2018, Oshea Israel knocked on Mary Johnson’s door in Minneapolis. Twenty years earlier he had shot her only son Laramiun in the head at a party. He was sixteen. Israel served seventeen years.... Mechanism Design for Harm Reduction
I’ve just posted a new paper on SSRN: Mechanism Design for Harm Reduction: Game Theory and Social Choice for Carceral MOUD and Recovery Institutions 👉 Read it here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6173484 The core question: Why do our institutions so often... Introducing Lauren Tenney, PhD, MOh. Hi! I am Lauren Tenney. I have several tracks I operate on including social media content development, art, public policy, and environmental psychology. My book on a history of psychiatry is forthcoming.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-tenney?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_appWhen I started the research, I knew modern public psychiatry benefits from forced court order treatment and I positioned that as a form of modern slavery.... Rightness is the stance of all who do harm in the world. They do the harm because it is right to do the harm, because not doing the harm would be wrong. They control to make things go right. They blame to correct for how things went wrong.... Jeffrey Epstein—what do y'all think? Let's try making sense of the thing surrounding Epstein—
US corruption, money and status and power, sexual abuse and trafficking, complicity, and justice, etc...
Here's a little context, summarized:Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier and convicted sex offender who built a fortune through relationships with celebrity politicians, business people, and royalty. He's thought to have run a vast sex trafficking operation, victimizing hundreds of underage girls, and it's unclear how many of his associates were involved or aware of what was happening. Things like his controversial plea deal in 2008 indicate American corruption—using his wealth and connections to evade accountability. He was arrested again in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges but died in a way that is officially called "suicide" and widely considered a cover-up.
Why it matters:
The Epstein case erodes public trust in institutions, fuels partisan weaponization and conspiracy theories about elite corruption, and has become a self-created political nightmare for Trump, who promised file releases during his campaign but now refuses disclosure after learning his name appears in documents, causing unprecedented fractures within his MAGA base who view him as part of the establishment cover-up he once opposed.yeah I wonder if the spirit of not releasing bad suspicion X, which I do think is healthy so we don't start witch-hunts, has overreached. That said, as I type this, I can see an argument for anyone who ever associated with Epstein's being assumed to be guilty until proven... AMA - I recently served as a juror on a murder trial. The crime happened within the last five years, and the trial happened within the last six months. I'm happy to discuss anything about my experience except:
- The exact time and location of the crime
- The names of the people involved
Those restrictions are to protect the family members involved in the case, and to protect me in case a family member doesn't like the jurors :|
Any other question is fair game.
And I'll answer the most salient question here first: we did find the defendant guilty of murder.
We got along very well, there was almost no tension at any point of the process, which I'm guessing is unusual. The deliberation didn't go very long, a little over an hour. The forensic evidence was so clearly in contradiction with the defendant's claim of self defense.... AMA - I recently served as a juror on a murder trial. The crime happened within the last five years, and the trial happened within the last six months. I'm happy to discuss anything about my experience except:
- The exact time and location of the crime
- The names of the people involved
Those restrictions are to protect the family members involved in the case, and to protect me in case a family member doesn't like the jurors :|
Any other question is fair game.
And I'll answer the most salient question here first: we did find the defendant guilty of murder.
I felt a good bit of compassion for the defendant throughout the trial. It seemed very likely that he was a good person who chose to remain in a very toxic situation for a long time, and he snapped.... AMA - I recently served as a juror on a murder trial
The crime happened within the last five years, and the trial happened within the last six months. I'm happy to discuss anything about my experience except: The exact time and location of the crime The names of the people involved Those restrictions are to protect the family... ‘Gangs’ are not bad per se
Gangs are neutral-there are good and bad versions. A healthy society will have gangs of people that take charge of their shared public space and take care of the community, even if they have to employ the threat of violence....