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Do Movies Make Us Stupid About Prisons?

by SeleneTierney Posted on February 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Keith Humphreys recently attended a dinner party where everyone he talked to seemed quite sure they knew everything there is to know about prisons. Most of them were dead wrong:

Nobody is informed about all areas of public policy. And most people don’t have trouble admitting that they don’t know anything about, say, the US-Brazil diplomatic relationship, Libor rate management, or sugar subsidies. But for a subset of public policy issues, a large number of completely ignorant people are dead sure they have all the facts….Prison is one of those areas, and I strongly suspect it is because there is so much fictionalization of it. If I were bored, I am sure I could easily list a hundred movies set in prisons. The Big House is also a common backdrop for TV shows, novels and comic books.

I suppose that’s part of it. But here’s a different theory: When it comes to issues of general public interest (i.e., not Libor or sugar subsidies), the less people know about something the more confident they are in their opinions. Everyone with the manual dexterity to hoist a beer can regale you with confident answers to all the ills of society, while in the very next breath insisting that you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to subject X. That’s a lot more complicated than you think.

Subject X, of course, is something they happen to know a lot about, probably because they work in the field. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that they’ve learned to be cautious about the one field they know the most about doesn’t stop them from assuming that every other field is pretty simple and tractable.

I am, of course, a professional in this kind of behavior. But lemme tell you, this blogging stuff is a lot trickier than you’d think. There are no easy answers to doing it right and attracting a large audience.

As for prisons, click the link if you want to learn five things that you might not know. But since you read this blog and are obviously smarter than the average bear, I will be disappointed if you don’t already know at least one or two of them. You do know that the prison population is shrinking, don’t you?

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Do Movies Make Us Stupid About Prisons?

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Compound Inflation Is Probably Higher Than You Think

by NevilleGipson Posted on February 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Atrios wants the older generation to get it through their heads that kids today don’t exactly lead cushy lives:

I increasingly do think nominal illusion is part of it, as, say, $50,000 sounds like A LOT OF MONEY for a starting job for the older generation, but in 2014 it isn’t that much money.

Yes, yes, yes. If you’re my age, that sounds like a pretty good income for someone a few years out of college. But it’s nothing special. It’s the equivalent of $18,000 in 1980 dollars. If you’re part of an even older generation, think of it as the equivalent of about $6,000 in 1960 dollars.

This isn’t a poverty-level income or anything. But it’s not nearly as much as it sounds like if you’re just vaguely comparing it to what you made in your first job. What’s more, it’s not as if every 20-something college grad makes $50,000 either. Plenty of them make $35,000 or so, and that’s the equivalent of $12,000 in 1980 bucks. That’s what I made in my first job out of college, and although I was never in danger of starving or anything, I wasn’t exactly living like a king in the room I rented out from some friends.

People don’t always have a good sense of just how much inflation compounds to. But as a quick rule of thumb, prices have gone up 3x since 1980 and about 10x since 1950. Keep that in mind whenever you’re mentally comparing current prices and incomes with those from your early adulthood.

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Compound Inflation Is Probably Higher Than You Think

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Obama Trade Deals Are in Trouble, and They Deserve to Be

by AbbieUsusd Posted on February 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dean Baker is no fan of the trade deals currently being negotiated by the Obama administration. They aren’t being negotiated for the benefit of consumers, he says. “In reality these deals were being negotiated by corporate interests from day one”:

Of course it is possible to craft a trade deal that would promote real economic gains. Doctors in the United States earn salaries that are hugely out of line with those in other wealthy countries. The same is true for other highly paid professions. If a trade deal focused on reducing the barriers that prevent these professionals from providing their services in the United States the gains would be substantial. The savings on doctors alone could be close to $100 billion a year (0.6 percent of GDP).

The agreements could also focus on reducing the value of the dollar, which would make our goods and services more competitive internationally. This would lower our trade deficit and potentially create millions of jobs. And, we could reduce patent and copyright barriers, lowering prices and making markets more competitive.

But these items don’t come up at trade negotiations because the folks at the table would lose from these growth enhancing measures. Instead we get silly stories about trade pacts being negotiated by disinterested parties who are only looking out for the good of the country. Come on folks, you’ve got to do better than this.

It’s pretty hard to get excited about either the TPP (Pacific partners) or the TTIP (Atlantic partners). And it looks like it’s pretty hard for Congress to get excited too. Ironically, the reason for this is largely due to provisions in these deals that the United States itself has been responsible for foisting on everyone else. If we had stuck to a deal that our trade partners liked better, we’d also have a deal that Congress liked better.

For once, it looks like corporate interests in the United States have outsmarted themselves. Instead of settling for a merely lucrative deal, they demanded outrageously favorable treatment. By doing so, they’ve pissed off everyone: our trade partners and Congress and large swatches of even the neoliberal community that would normally be sympathetic to treaties like these.

Who knows. Maybe they’ll learn a lesson from this.1

1Just kidding.

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Obama Trade Deals Are in Trouble, and They Deserve to Be

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Why It’s Getting Harder to Sue Illegal Movie Downloaders

by IssacTenreajbyw Posted on February 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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The company behind the Oscar-nominated film Dallas Buyers Club sued 31 people in a federal district court in Texas this month for allegedly using the legal file-sharing service BitTorrent to download the movie illegally. The lawsuit is one of thousands that have been brought by companies against BitTorrent users in recent years, in an effort to crack down on Americans who are stealing movies, music, porn, books, and software. But it could have a tough time. Recently, several federal judges have ruled that key information—computer Internet Protocol (IP) addresses— used by film studios and others to target supposed thefts is insufficient proof to proceed with the lawsuits. And copyright experts say that even though companies are still winning lots of settlements, these firms are going after fewer plaintiffs at once than they were a few years ago. This suggests that their ability to pursue large piracy cases has been hampered.

“I think the trend is towards judges looking at piracy cases more carefully than they used to, requiring more upfront investigation,” says Mitch Stoltz, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “There may always be some judges who will simply rubber-stamp these cases…but there are fewer of those judges than before.”

When companies bring copyright lawsuits, they often don’t know the identities of the alleged pirates. (This was true in the Dallas Buyers Club case.) Instead, they use IP addresses, unique numbers assigned to each device on an internet network, to track the computers that have been used for illegal downloading. Then they ask a judge to issue a subpoena to the internet service providers, so they can obtain the name of the person associated with that IP address. If the judge approves this request, plaintiffs can make additional demands, such as seeking a copy of the person’s hard drive. Armed with this information, the plaintiff then typically forces the defendants to settle. The average settlement ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, says Jeffrey Antonelli, a Chicago attorney who has represented numerous people accused of illegal BitTorrent use.

But this strategy isn’t perfect. “IP addresses are continuing to be less and less of an indicator of the identity of a particular person or computer on the net,” says R. Polk Wagner, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in intellectual property law. The name connected to an IP address usually identifies who is the paying the internet bill, not who is doing the downloading. Ten years ago, most people didn’t use wireless routers at home, but now, more than 60 percent of people do. And all the computers using a single wireless router have the same IP address. So if your tech-savvy neighbor is piggybacking off your wireless internet—and illegally downloading Mean Girls—you could take the heat. And Stoltz, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, points out that when people receive settlement letters, they are often scared into paying up—”even when they didn’t download illegally, or had valid defenses.”

Here’s an example of how imprecise IP addresses can be in pinpointing a specific computer: In 2012, law enforcement tried to catch a person making online threats to local police in Indiana by tracing the person’s IP address to a specific house. After a SWAT team broke down the door and tossed a couple of flashbangs into the entryway, they realized they’d gotten the wrong place. The home had an open wi-fi router. The threats were coming from down the street.

Recently, some judges have become more wary about granting subpoenas to companies who come to them with only IP addresses. Last month, a judge in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle dismissed a case brought by the studio that produced Elf-Man—a direct-to-video Christmas movie—against 152 anonymous defendants. According to the judge, “simply identifying the account holder associated with an IP address tells us very little about who actually downloaded Elf-Man.” In May 2013, a federal judge in California came down hard and issued a $81,320 fine against copyright holders that were “porno trolling” or going after people accused of downloading porn illegally. According to the judge, the plaintiff, Ingenuity 13 LLC, relied too heavily on IP addresses and did not do an adequate enough investigation to bring claims. And in May 2012, a federal district judge in New York reached a similar conclusion about IP addresses, as did a federal judge in Illinois the year before. Wagner notes, “Judges are increasingly realizing that IP addresses don’t have a high degree of reliability, and they’re not an accurate representation of who has control of the computer.”

Antonelli, the Chicago attorney, takes a different position. “Sure, we’ve seen a sprinkling of courts that have taken this position,” he says, “but in my opinion, it’s not enough, especially when you look at just how many lawsuits are being filed. I don’t see a trend yet.” He notes, however, that studios are no longer going after tens of thousands of plaintiffs at once, like they were doing from 2011 to late 2012. In 2011, for example, the producers for Hurt Locker sued almost 25,000 BitTorrent users—and almost all the claims were voluntarily dismissed by the studio, because it was taking too long to track down all of the defendants via their IP addresses. “That’s certainly changed. Typically we see no more than 100 defendants…I think that was a smart move on the plaintiffs. Courts were losing patience,” says Antonelli. Wanger adds, “It’s possible companies think that if they sue fewer people who are doing more significant activities, that’s a more defensible public relations approach.” (The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America didn’t provide comment to Mother Jones as to whether studios are now going after fewer plaintiffs.)

For now, whether or not the Dallas Buyers Club producers will be able to successfully subpoena the alleged downloaders remains to be seen. (An attorney representing the producers did not return multiple requests for comment.) “It really depends on the judge assigned to the case,” says Stoltz. He says movies studios should be able to bring claims that are plausible, based on the facts they gather before suing.

The founder of the website Die Troll Die, who goes by the name John Doe, says that he started his website to fight alleged copyright trolls after being sued for copyright infringement—something he claims he didn’t do. He says he’s happy to see that the tide is turning against companies using IP addresses to bring lawsuits. He told Mother Jones via email, “I can say first-hand that being threatened with a lawsuit because someone else used your internet connection is a horrible experience.”

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Why It’s Getting Harder to Sue Illegal Movie Downloaders

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Why There’s an Even Larger Racial Disparity in Private Prisons Than in Public Ones

by czeajanvsn Posted on February 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s well known that people of color are vastly overrepresented in US prisons. African Americans and Latinos constitute 30 percent of the US population and 60 percent of its prisoners. But a new study by University of California-Berkeley researcher Christopher Petrella addresses a fact of equal concern. Once sentenced, people of color are more likely than their white counterparts to serve time in private prisons, which have higher levels of violence and recidivism (PDF) and provide less sufficient health care and educational programming than equivalent public facilities.

The study compares the percentage of inmates identifying as black or Hispanic in public prisons and private prisons in nine states. It finds that there are higher rates of people of color in private facilities than public facilities in all nine states studied, ranging from 3 percent in Arizona and Georgia to 13 percent in California and Oklahoma. According to Petrella, this disparity casts doubt on cost-efficiency claims made by the private prison industry and demonstrates how ostensibly “colorblind” policies can have a very real effect on people of color.

The study points out an important link between inmate age and race. Not only do private prisons house high rates of people of color, they also house low rates of individuals over the age of 50—a subset that is more likely to be white than the general prison population. According to the study, “the states in which the private versus public racial disparities are the most pronounced also happen to be the states in which the private versus public age disparities are most salient.” (California, Mississippi, and Tennessee did not report data on inmate age.)

Private prisons have consistently lower rates of older inmates because they often contractually exempt themselves from housing medically expensive—which often means older—individuals (see excerpts from such exemptions in California, Oklahoma, and Vermont), which helps them keep costs low and profits high. This is just another example of the growing private prison industry’s prioritization of profit over rehabilitation, which activists say leads to inferior prison conditions and quotas requiring high levels of incarceration even as crime levels drop. The number of state and federal prisoners housed in private prisons grew by 37 percent from 2002 to 2009, reaching 8 percent of all inmates in 2010.

The high rate of incarceration among young people of color is partly due to the war on drugs, which introduced strict sentencing policies and mandatory minimums that have disproportionately affected non-white communities for the past 40 years. As a result, Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows that in 2009, only 33.2 percent of prisoners under 50 reported as white, as opposed to 44.2 percent of prisoners aged 50 and older.

So when private prisons avoid housing older inmates, they indirectly avoid housing white inmates as well. This may explain how private facilities end up with “a prisoner profile that is far younger and far ‘darker’… than in select counterpart public facilities.”

Private prisons claim to have more efficient practices, and thus lower operating costs, than public facilities. But the data suggest that private prisons don’t save money through efficiency, but by cherry-picking healthy inmates. According to a 2012 ACLU report, it costs $34,135 to house an “average” inmate and $68,270 to house an individual 50 or older. In Oklahoma, for example, the percentage of individuals over 50 in minimum and medium security public prisons is 3.3 times that of equivalent private facilities.

“Given the data, it’s difficult for private prisons to make the claim that they can incarcerate individuals more efficiently than their public counterparts,” Petrella tells Mother Jones. “We need to be comparing apples to apples. If we’re looking at different prisoner profiles, there is no basis to make the claim that private prisons are more efficient than publics.”

He compared private prisons to charter schools that accept only well-performing students and boast of their success relative to public schools.

David Shapiro, former staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, agrees. “The study is an example of the many ways in which for-profit prisons create an illusion of fiscal responsibility even though the actual evidence of cost savings, when apples are compared to apples, is doubtful at best,” he says. “Privatization gimmicks are a distraction from the serious business of addressing our addiction to mass incarceration.”

But in addition to casting doubt on the efficacy of private prison companies, Petrella says his results “shed light on the ways in which ostensibly colorblind policies and attitudes can actually have very racially explicit outcomes. Racial discrimination cannot exist legally, yet still manifests itself.”

Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News, calls the study a “compelling case” for a link between age disparities and race disparities in public and private prison facilities. “The modern private prison industry has its origins in the convict lease system that developed during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, as a means of incarcerating freed slaves and leasing them to private companies,” he says. “Sadly, Mr. Petrella’s research indicates that the exploitation of minority prisoners continues, with convict chain gangs being replaced by privately-operated prisons and jails.”

*The study draws on data from nine states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas—selected because they house at least 3,000 individuals in private minimum and medium security facilities.

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Why There’s an Even Larger Racial Disparity in Private Prisons Than in Public Ones

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Hot Hand? Well, Maybe a Lukewarm Hand….

by XNYMelisajdeots Posted on February 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Decades ago, the “hot hand” theory of sports was debunked. Massive statistical analysis showed that players in most sports went on streaks about as often as you’d expect by random chance, and when they were on a streak, their odds of making the next shot/goal/hit/etc. were no higher than at any other time. You might feel hot when you sink three buckets in a row, but that’s just the endorphin rush of doing well. It doesn’t mean you’ll make your next basket.

But now, there are all-new mountains of data to crunch, and two teams of researchers have concluded that hot hands really do exist in at least two sports:

Baseball: Brett Green, at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley, and Jeffrey Zwiebel, at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business…controlled for variables, like the abilities of the batter and the pitcher, the stadium in which the at-bats took place, and even matchups like lefty versus lefty. And their findings, laid out in a working paper, show that a baseball player on a hot streak is batting 15 to 20 points higher than a teammate who is cold.

Basketball: Ezekowitz and his coauthors…with the help of cameras that NBA teams had installed at 15 arenas…could see that players with recent success in shooting were more likely to be taking shots from further away, facing tighter defenses, and throwing up more difficult shots….So the researchers controlled for these variables—and found what players and fans have long believed: The hot hand does exist. At least a little. According to the new research, players enjoying the hot hand are 1.2 to 2.4 percentage points more likely to make the next shot.

Hmmm. So that’s about 1-2 percentage points in both cases. And even that tiny effect is visible only after introducing a whole bunch of statistical controls that strike me as being a wee bit subjective. I suspect that if you varied your assessment of how tight the defense was or how difficult the shot was, the effect might go away entirely.

But even if it’s all legit, I have to say that 1-2 percentage points is pretty damn close to zero. And frankly, that’s still surprising. The truth is that it’s always seemed pretty logical to me that players would have hot hands now and again. But they don’t. At best, they occasionally have lukewarm hands. All the rest is just chance.

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Hot Hand? Well, Maybe a Lukewarm Hand….

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Yep, There’s a Medical Code for Being Bitten by Shamu

by ArleenFriese Posted on February 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff reports on the ongoing battle over the ICD-10, a set of medical codes for illnesses and injuries that’s far more detailed than the current ICD-9:

There are different numbers for getting struck or bitten by a turkey (W61.42 or W61.43). There are codes for injuries caused by squirrels (W53.21) and getting hit by a motor vehicle while riding an animal (V80.919), spending too much time in a deep-freeze refrigerator (W93.2) and a large toe that has gone unexpectedly missing (Z89.419).

….Hospitals and insurers have fought the new codes, calling them a massive regulatory burden….ICD-10 proponents contend that adding specificity to medical diagnoses will provide a huge boon to the country. It will be easier for public health researchers, for example, to see warning signs of a possible flu pandemic — and easier for insurers to root out fraudulent claims.

“How many times are people going to be bitten by an orca? Probably not very many,” said Lynne Thomas Gordon, chief executive of the American Health Information Management Association. “But what if you’re a researcher trying to find that? You can just press a button and find that information.”

Depending on who you listen to, we are either hopelessly behind the rest of the world in implementing common-sense international standards or else the only country in the world that’s holding out against the madness. Read the whole thing and decide for yourself.

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Yep, There’s a Medical Code for Being Bitten by Shamu

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Quote of the Day: Mammograms Shouldn’t Be Pawns in a Religious War

by Sherri20Cxlfidz Posted on February 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Aaron Carroll, responding to the deluge of lame criticisms aimed at a recent study showing that mammograms don’t do much to reduce mortality from breast cancer:

I leave you with one final thought. If you’re not going to be swayed at all by a randomized controlled trial of 90,000 women with 25 year follow up, excellent compliance, and damn good methods, it might be time to consider that there’s really no study at all that will make you change your mind.

This really has taken on the nature of a religious war. But eventually we have to face facts. If you have a family history of breast cancer, or some specific markers of vulnerability, or if your doctor thinks you need one, then of course you should get a mammogram. But despite what we’ve all been taught for the past several decades, the evidence is becoming overwhelming that a blanket recommendation of routine annual mammograms for everyone over the age of 40 just isn’t good medicine. This isn’t coming from people who are anti-woman or who are just trying slash budgets. Nor is anyone saying that mammograms are useless. That just isn’t what’s happening.

What’s happening is routine science. And unlike religion, the answers change now and then when you do routine science. That’s sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes scary. But that’s the story here. Right now, the answers are changing, and we need to change along with them.

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Quote of the Day: Mammograms Shouldn’t Be Pawns in a Religious War

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The Amazing, Hypnotic Appeal of Rand Paul

by Rosaura19L Posted on February 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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So Rand Paul filed a lawsuit yesterday against the NSA’s phone record collection program, and he’s already getting flack for parachuting in and trying to steal the limelight from a guy who filed a similar suit months ago. Some other awkward questions are being raised too, including one from Steve Benen, who wonders why this entire effort is being run through his campaign operation instead of his Senate office.

I think the answer to that is pretty obvious, but it also gives me a chance to mention something: Is anyone in Congress right now more of a genius at self-promotion than Rand Paul? Sure, Ted Cruz gets some attention for being an asshole, but that’s ephemeral. Nobody’s really very interested in Cruz.

But despite the fact that Paul’s political views make him wildly implausible as a candidate for higher office, everyone finds him endlessly fascinating. He mounts a meaningless “filibuster” and suddenly everyone wants to Stand With Rand. He wants to end the Fed and the tea partiers go gaga. He starts talking about Monica Lewinsky and it prompts a thousand thumbsuckers in the Beltway media. He opposes foreign interventions and somehow manages to hypnotize the punditocracy into thinking that maybe dovishness represents the future foreign policy of the Republican Party. He gets caught plagiarizing and shakes it off. He gets caught hiring an aide who turns out to be a former radio shock jock who specialized in neo-Confederate rants, and it just adds color to his resume.

It’s remarkable. Is he just an amazing, intuitive self-promoter, like Sarah Palin? Is he a case study in how being a nice guy (which apparently he is) gets you way more sympathetic coverage than being a lout (which apparently Ted Cruz really is)? Is this just an example of how bored the media is and how desperate they are for even small bits of sideshow amusement?

Beats me. But backbench senators sure don’t normally attract the kind of coverage that Rand Paul gets unless they’re legitimate presidential prospects. Which Paul isn’t. Not by a million miles, and everyone knows it. Don’t make me waste my time by pretending otherwise and demanding that I explain why he’s obviously unelectable.

But he sure does have the knack of entertaining bored reporters.

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The Amazing, Hypnotic Appeal of Rand Paul

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Rescinding the Cuts to Veteran’s Pensions Was In the Cards From the Start

by Teofil1vo Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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December’s budget deal between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray included a bit of relief from the 2011 sequestration cuts, with the relief split evenly between domestic and military budgets. That even split was one of the guiding principles of the deal. But part of the military relief was paid for by $7 billion in cuts to veterans’ pensions, something that immediately prompted a storm of protest and, eventually, a move to rescind the cuts. Jared Bernstein comments:

True, that’s not huge bucks in the scheme of things. But the violation of this budget principle should not be taken lightly. A key point of the budget machinations that brought us to where we are today is that automatic spending cuts should be split between evenly between defense and non-defense (forget for a moment, that it’s not the discretionary side of the budget that’s responsible for our longer term fiscal challenges anyway). If Congress starts stealing from domestic programs to boost defense, it will unfairly and unwisely exacerbate already unsustainable pressures on domestic spending.

I’d take a slightly different lesson from this: Democrats got snookered. Only a little bit, and they knew they were being played, but they still got snookered. It was obvious from the start that cuts to veterans’ benefits would be unpopular and unlikely to stand, but Democrats agreed to them anyway in order to get the budget deal across the finish line. Maybe that was the right thing to do, but it was no accident. They did it with their eyes wide open.

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Rescinding the Cuts to Veteran’s Pensions Was In the Cards From the Start

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