Jailing kids is a proud American tradition

Thomas Frank gets his Jonathan Swift on regarding the juvenile detention kickback scandal in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a step in the right direction, but what we didn’t have — until recently — were proper instruments for incentivizing the judiciary. That’s what the “kids for cash” judges were apparently experimenting with.

Today the do-gooders revile those efforts as “kickbacks,” but before long we will see them as legitimate tools of justice. Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government’s justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?

I am rarely as outraged as I was upon hearing about the scandal in Luzerne County; I admire Frank’s ability to channel his outrage into something this brilliant and cutting.

Against the Grain: Place Matters

Nato Thompson, editor of the recent Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism , and University of Alabama law professor Debra Lyn Bassett are guests on the most recent Against the Grain radio program.

I’m busy tonight (hence the light posting) but I plan to listen to the rest of this in the morning (and hopefully post some more).

The kids are alright

On London’s absurd anti-anti-social behavior zones.

There’s a curfew for unsupervised under-16s, from 9pm to 6am. Any group of 2 or more people can be broken up and/or that the member of the group have to leave the designated area (if they do not live there). Crucially, police do not have to see actual anti-social behaviour, but a constable in uniform has reasonable grounds for believing that the presence or behaviour of a group of two or more persons in any public place in the relevant locality has resulted, or is likely to result, in any members of the public being intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed.

When I checked to see who had bookmarked this, all but one of the seven were already in my network (I’ve since added the outlier, dotx3).

This link is a perfect candidate for becoming a shibboleth (shibbolink?) by which I identify people I might add to my network. If somebody saves this link, there’s a good chance they’re interested in any number of things that also interest me (e.g., geography, mapping, London, and the rights of marginalized groups).

I’ve begun keeping track of similarly distinguishing bookmarks using the shibbolink tag. We’ll see how it goes.

VAT cut as court rules that video and light art is sculpture

The UK’s VAT and Duties Tribunal recently ruled that works by electric-light installation artist Dan Flavin and video artist Bill Viola are not subject to the same customs duties as ordinary “image projectors [or] photographic enlargers and reducers” or “chandeliers and electrical ceiling or wall light fittings.”

It’s a good ruling. The article points out the American precedent: in 1928 a US court ruled that Brancusi’s Bird in Space was not actually a kitchen utensil.