Pamela Oliver
UPDATE: CLICK HERE TO SEE THESE FIGURES FOR 1978-2013 in a later post These graphs allow you to see the growth of state imprisonment 1978-2007, by race. I will have updated and error-checked data for 1978-2013 soon. Because I live in Wisconsin, I flagged the Wisconsin rates. These update at
Read moreWisconsin has stayed at the top of the pile in Black incarceration even though its Black incarceration rate has been declining. How can this be? The answer is that all the other states have been declining faster. By putting a scatter plot of state imprisonment rates on consistent axes, I’ve
Read moreDid Bill Clinton’s policies cause the mass incarceration of Black people? Since I’ve done a lot of analysis of incarceration trends in the 1990s, I thought I’d bring some facts into this discussion. Short version: The steep increase in the mass incarceration of Black people happened before Bill Clinton took
Read more
EDITED June 2020 to update links in the M4BL web site. Under the name Movement for Black Lives , a coalition of contemporary Black Power organizations (including Madison’s Freedom, Inc.) have worked for a year to develop a comprehensive vision and agenda for social change. This is an exciting moment
Read moreDoes protest help a group’s cause? Do cities with strong Black protest movements improve their policing practices in Black communities? Do police respond more repressively in places with strong Black movements? Does mass incarceration reduce the capacity for Black protest? To answer these questions, we need to know how to
Read moreThe Mobilizing Ideas blog has partnered with Jenn Earl’s Youth Activism Project which (as the name implies) studies activism by younger people) to provide advice to young activists by way of videos of top social movement scholars addressing important issues in organizing, supplemented with suggestions for further reading. The series
Read moreA local reporter sent me an email asking my opinion of proposals to increase community trust of police. My “some general comments” turned out to be really long, so I decided to put them in a blog post. Then I edited it a bit more. As I write, this has
Read moreAdministrative segregation–solitary confinement–in Wisconsin prisons and the Dane County jail are issues today. Extended periods of solitary confinement (defined as 15 days or more) is considered torture by many human rights conventions, as is any time in solitary confinement for a mentally ill person. US prisons and jails routine use
Read moreM Adams and Max Rameau have a forthcoming article titled “Black Community Control Over Police in the Wisconsin Law Review that they were kind enough to let me see in advance of publication. (UPDATE: Publication available here.) The key argument of the article is that traditional ways of thinking about
Read moreI have a review of Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied coming out in a forum in Contemporary Sociology, but I promised I would not scoop the journal by pre-publishing my essay.* I wrote my essay without reading other reviews, but now that I have read them, I find that although
Read more