By Jacqueline Altamirano Marin, John Bae and Niloufer Taber

Housing is foundational for people to succeed post-incarceration. However, restrictive housing policies bar people with conviction histories from securing a home. To estimate the scope of this issue in Oklahoma, Vera analyzed criminal justice data and the admissions policies of public housing authorities and developments funded by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. The fact sheet sheds light on the number of people affected by these policies and offers recommendations to increase access to safe and affordable housing for all individuals.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 3p.

By Daniel LaChance

It was a compromise that admitted Missouri into the Union as a state in 1821, temporarily settling a question that would soon divide the country into civil war: was it moral for white people to own Black people as property? In Missouri, the answer was yes, and it joined the Union only with assurance that white people could lawfully continue to own enslaved Black people in the territory. A few decades later, the United States Supreme Court told one of those enslaved men, a man named Dred Scott, that not only would he remain in slavery in Missouri, but also that he was not, and never would be, a citizen of the United States. From the beginning, therefore, race was a critical part of Missouri’s origin story, and racial bias in all its forms — segregation, discrimination, con#ict, and violence – informed its future. "is report focuses on the death penalty — its past and present use. By studying who are targeted, prosecuted, and executed  in Missouri, both legally and illegally, clear patterns emerge. "e data show that the race of defendants and the race of their victims has always played an outsize role in determining who will be sentenced to death in Missouri. "ere are also strong correlations suggesting that charging decisions, crime solving, and policing are also in#uenced by Missouri’s historical treatment of Black people. "e areas of concern identi!ed in this report are deserving of careful study, and may be of particular interest to researchers, legislators, and advocates. Early death penalty statutes identified specific crimes that were only punishable by death if committed by an enslaved person. Historically, a person’s race was the most important factor in determining whether they would be punished by death in Missouri. In 1804, the territory encompassing present-day Missouri adopted “"e Law Respecting Slaves,” which outlined a series of crimes punishable by death only if they were committed by an enslaved person. "ese crimes included slave conspiracy to rebel, make insurrection, or murder; slave preparation, exhibition, or administration of any medicine; and stealing a slave. Black people and white people alike were eligible to receive death sentences for any of the following crimes: treason, murder, arson, and burglary or robbery where an innocent person died.1 "en in 1820, white delegates in the territory attended the Missouri Constitutional Convention and drafted the !rst state constitution. Among the provisions they adopted was a death penalty statute that purported to eliminate these racial distinctions. Article III, Section 27 of the constitution read in part, “...a slave convicted of a capital o%ence shall su%er the same degree of punishment, and no other, that would be in#icted upon a free white person for a like o%ence...” "e subsequent section dictated that “Any person who shall maliciously deprive of life or dismember a slave, shall su%er such punishment as would be in#icted for the like o%ence if it were committed on a free white person.”2 While this provision super!cially eliminated racially speci!c death sentences, the reality was that race continued to play a critical role in determining who would live or die in Missouri, either at the hands of the state or by a murderous mob. 

Washington, DC: Death Penalty Information Center, 2023.   43p.

By Daniel LaChance

In the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, coverage of executions in the Atlanta Constitution and the New Orleans (Times-)Picayune occasionally portrayed African Americans executed by the state as legally, politically, and spiritually similar to their white counterparts. But as radical white supremacy took hold across the South, the coverage changed. Through an analysis of 667 newspaper articles covering the executions of Black and white men in Georgia and Louisiana from 1877 to 1936, I found that as lynching became the principal form of lethal punishment in the South, accounts of Black men’s legal executions shrank in length and journalists increasingly portrayed them as ciphers, nonentities that the state was dispatching with little fanfare. In contrast, accounts of white men’s executions continued to showcase their individuality and their membership in social, political, and religious communities. A significant gap between the material reality and the cultural representation of capital punishment emerged. Legal executions in Georgia and Louisiana overwhelmingly targeted Black men. But on the pages of each state’s most prominent newspaper, the executions of white men received the most attention. As a result, capital punishment was increasingly represented as a high-status punishment that respected the “whiteness” of those who suffered it.

Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , August 2023 , pp. 999 - 1022

By The World Rainforest Movement

Almost 30 years of UN climate negotiations have resulted in the establishment of policies and practices that facilitate the constant expansion of the fossil fuel-based economy (and its profits) while hiding its implacable negative impacts for the territories where it expands. Almost 30 years of UN climate negotiations have resulted in the establishment of policies and practices that facilitate the constant expansion of the fossil fuel-based economy (and its profits) while hiding its implacable negative impacts for the territories where it expands. Particularly, the fantasy of carbon offsetting as a solution to the climate crisis is ever more present among the methods of corporate greenwashing for expanding their businesses, despite the mounting evidence of its complete failure to reduce emissions or deforestation - as recently denounced by several organizations. However, the strategies adopted by corporations are unable to hide the oppressive and colonial essence of their advances in the Global South. Precisely for this reason, they keep encountering much resistance when they arrive in the territories of the Peoples and communities. This issue of the WRM Bulletin shares articles that can be divided in two parts. The first part exposes four initiatives that dress themselves up as ‘green’ or ‘socially beneficial’ so as to ensure that extractive and production activities carry on unhindered. After all, these are the engine of the capitalist economy, which in turn is the main cause of the problems that such ‘green’ ventures claim they help solving. The second part highlights three experiences of resistance from the territories to such corporate assault. The first article highlights the embedded contradictions of the so-called “energy transition” by exposing how “the largest green industrial area in the world”, in Kalimantan, Indonesia, will in fact lead to an increase in coal extraction in the region. At the same time, this multi-billion dollar project threatens to appropriate and destroy the livelihoods and interconnected spaces of life on land and sea from which grassroots communities depend upon. These communities are at the frontlines resisting this industrial park in order to defend life. The next two articles show the different consequences of two kinds of projects that claim to be offsetting carbon and which largely depend on community territories. One exposes the trend to expand problematic tree plantations, above all in the Global South, with the argument that the trees will “offset” the pollution emitted somewhere else. This includes the whole gamut from large-scale monoculture plantations sponsored by the pulp industry to those nicely sounding plantations promoted by investment funds by means of abusive contracts with indigenous communities. The other article reflects on the abusive contracts for establishing REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects in the brazilian Amazon region, specifically on how they compromise millennia-old indigenous practices and communities’ future generations.  The fourth article presents an overview of the perverse logic of certification schemes that over the last 30 years have given ‘sustainability’ and ‘responsibility’ seals to companies from different industries that cause destruction, such as the pulp and paper, palm oil and carbon offsets industries, among others. Such seals often completely ignore violations caused by corporations and legitimize their presence in community territories. The following two articles also expose the greenwashing of industrial monoculture plantations through certification, yet, the focus is turned to highlight the experiences of people’s resistance and organization. In Cameroon, women organized in the Afrise association have shouted a fearless and determined “Enough!” against oil palm plantation company Socapalm/Socfin, which is responsible for decades of “suffering, abuses, violations, theft, hunger, frustration and violations” of their bodies, rights and dignity. We express our full solidarity with these women who, with each others’ support, have declared that they will not tolerate the replanting of oil palm monoculture plantations in their territories. The next article reflects in an interview with Pablo Reyes Huenchumán, member of a Mapuche community in Chile, on the impacts of the violent forestry model imposed on the country which is based on large-scale monoculture plantations. But also, on the achievements and challenges of the Indigenous Mapuche to defend their communities and lives. Pablo explained how the Mapuche have been reclaiming their territories for over 20 years, showing that self-organization and resistance are key.

WRM Bulletin 268 December 2023

Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan

The events of September 11, 2001, have had a strong impact on theory and the humanities. They call for a new philosophy, as the old philosophy is inadequate to account for them. They also call for reflection on theory, philosophy, and the humanities in general. While the recent location and killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, in Pakistan on May 2, 2011—almost ten years after he and his confederates carried out the 9/11 attacks—may have ended the “war on terror,” it has not ended the journey to understand what it means to be a theorist in the age of phobos nor the effort to create a new philosophy that measures up with life in the new millennium. It is in the spirit of hope—the hope that theory will help us to understand the age of terror—that the essays in this collection are presented.

With essays by Christian Moraru, Terry Caesar, David B. Downing, Horace L. Fairlamb, Emory Elliott, Elaine Martin, Robin Truth Goodman, Sophia A. McClennen, William V. Spanos, Zahi Zalloua.

Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press - An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor , 2012. 250p.

By Gijs Kruijtzer

How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, this book shows that people in both these worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating, and writing about proscribed practices. It compares how people in the two worlds came to terms with the proscriptions of sodomy, idolatry, and usury. When historians speak of the gap between premodern practice and the legal theory of the time, they tend to ignore the myriad of justifications that filled this gap. Moreover, a focus on justification evens out many of the contrasts that have been alleged to exist between the two worlds, or the Muslim and Christian worlds more generally. The similarities outweigh the differences in the ways people came to terms with the various rules of divine law. The level of flexibility of the theologians and jurists in charge of divine law varied more over time and by topic than between the two worlds. Both worlds also saw the development of ever more sophisticated justifications. Amid the increasing complexity of justifications, a particular kind of reasoning emerged: that good outcomes are more important than upholding rules for their own sake.

Berlin: DeGruyter, 2024. 344p.

By : Joshua Kleinfeld and Joshua Hoyt

For many criminal justice reformers, the Holy Grail of change would be a criminal system that ends the war on drugs; punishes minor property and public order offenses without incarceration (or does not handle them criminally at all); and reserves prison mainly for violent offenders. What few appreciate is that California over the last nine years has done exactly that, and the results are breathtaking in their magnitude and suddenness: from 2011 to 2019, California released 55,000 people convicted mostly of nonviolent offenses (a quarter to a third of all California prisoners) and has been declining imprisonment—which often means declining arrest and prosecution altogether—for tens of thousands more who likely would have been imprisoned a decade ago. The changes happened piecemeal; this Article is the first to put the whole picture together. But we are now in a position to describe and evaluate the whole.

We come to three conclusions. First, California criminal justice reform reduced incarceration without increasing violence, but in so doing increased property crime, public drug use, street-level disorder, and likely homelessness to such an extent as to change the texture of everyday life in some California cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. Second, these changes alter the relationship between individual and state substantially enough to constitute a new social contract: California has gone farther than any other American state toward a society based on John Stuart Mill’s harm principle.

Third, this array of costs and benefits is complex and nuanced enough that it is not irrational or otherwise normatively illegitimate for someone to think them either justice-enhancing or -diminishing, good for human welfare or bad for it. But what unequivocally redeems California’s new policies for California are their democratic credentials: they were accomplished through a series of elections over multiple years at multiple levels of government with a high degree of public deliberation. Criminal justice democratizers and strong proponents of federalism should endorse what California has done as a matter of political self-determination. But they might rationally not want the same thing for their own states.

Southern California Law Review, Vol. 94, No. 1, 2020

George Mason Legal Studies Research Paper No. LS 23-19

By Jessica Saunders and, Greg Midgette

Objective: Our goal was to develop a framework to test for implicit racial bias in discretionary decisions made by community supervision agents in conditions with increasing information ambiguity. Hypotheses: We reasoned that as in-person contact decreases, community supervision officers’ specific knowledge of clients would be replaced by heuristics that lead to racially disproportionate outcomes in higher discretion events. Officers’ implicit biases would lead to disproportionately higher technical violation rates among Black community corrections’ clients when they have less personal contact, but we expected no analogous increase in nondiscretionary decisions. Method: Using data from Black and White clients entering probation and postrelease supervision in North Carolina from 2012 through 2016, we estimated the difference in racial disparities in discretionary versus nondiscretionary decisions across five levels of supervision. We evaluated the robustness of our main fixed-effects model using an alternative regression discontinuity design. Results: Racial disparities in discretionary decisions grew as supervision intensity decreased, and the bias was larger for women than men. There was no similar pattern of increased disparity for nondiscretionary decisions. Conclusions: Criminal justice system actors have a great deal of discretion, particularly in how they deal with less serious criminal behavior. Although decentralized decisions are foundational to the function of the criminal justice system, they provide an opportunity for implicit bias to seep in. Shortcuts and mental heuristics are more influential when the decision-maker’s mental resources are already strained—for instance, if someone is tired, distracted, or overworked. Therefore, limiting discretion and increasing oversight and accountability may reduce the impact of implicit bias on criminal justice system outcomes.

Law and Human Behavior 2023 Volume 47, Issue 1 (Feb)

By Nicholas Austin

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an Italian Dominican friar and Catholic priest, is one of the most influential theologians in the Christian tradition. Scholarship on Aquinas is flourishing, with studies of natural law theory, action theory, the morality of the passions, feminism, political theory, etc. Yet despite the contemporary renewal of virtue ethics, to date no full-length treatment of Aquinas' theory of virtue exists. Aquinas on Virtues offers a new and comprehensive interpretation of how Aquinas uses the four causes--formal, material, final, and efficient--to understand virtue in general, and how these causes underlie his treatment of specific virtues that make up the bulk of his ethics. In the final part of the book Austin applies the causal approach to four contested issues in contemporary virtue theory: practical wisdom; virtue and the passions; the teleology (or ultimate end) of virtue; and infused moral virtues, exploring the relation between grace and virtue.

Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018. 258p.

Edited by Gerhard Ernst and Jan-Christoph Heilinger

The notion of "human rights" is widely used in political and moral debates. The core idea, that all human beings have some inalienable basic rights, is appealing and has an important practical function: It allows moral criticism of various wrongs and calls for action in order to prevent them. The articles in this collection take up a tension between the wide political use of human rights claims and some intellectual skepticism about them. In particular, three major issues call for clarification: the questions of how to justify human rights, how to determine their scope and the corresponding obligations, and how to overcome the tension between universal normative claims and particular moralities.

Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2011. 273p.

By Frauke Albersmeier

What is moral progress? Are we striving for moral progress when we seek to "make the world a better place"? What connects the different ways in which moral agents, their actions, and the world can become morally better? This book proposes an explication of the abstract concept of moral progress and explores its relation to our moral lives.

Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2022. 257p.

By John J. Dilulio, Jr..

FROM THE JACKET: “Do you know is you are going to heaven?" Shortly after being appointed the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives--the "faith czar." John J. Dilulio, Jr., was asked this question. Suddenly Dilulio, a practicing Catholic and a New Democrat who had pioneered "faith factor" studis and founded programs for inner-city children, became acutely aware that he was no longer a private citizen who might have humored the television evangelist standing before him. Now he was an Assistant to the President, as he recalls in his introduction-"someone responsible for assisting President George W. Bush in faithfully upholding the Constitution, faithfully executing democratically enacted public laws, and faithfully acting in the public interest without regard to religious identities (and all contrary political purposes be damned). So I paused.*

Using his brief tenure in the Bush administration as a springboard, Dilulio leaps into the ongoing debate over whether as a nation America is Christian or secular and to what degree church-state separation is compelled by the Constitution. Avoiding political pieties, this lively, informative, and entertaining book makes an impassioned case for a middle way: one that recognizes the United States as a "Godly republic" under whose Constitution sacred institutions may be empowered to partner with the government…”

Berkeley Los Angeles. University Of California Press. 2007.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP.

By Huston Smith

FROM THE PREFACE: “In the spring of 1995 I gave a course on The Religions of Man over KETC, The St.Louis educational television station. The response revealed a real hunger on the part of Americans to know the great faiths that have motivated and continue to motivate the peoples of the world. Over 1200 men and women in this one community enrolled as tuition-paying students while the viewing audience rose to the neighborhood of 100,000. The second thing the response revealed was the need for a different kind of book on world religions, a book which without sacrificing depth would move more rapidly than the usual survey into the meaning these religions carry for the lives of their adherents…”

NY. Harper & Row. 1986.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Edith Hamilton

FROM THE COVER: “The Classic Of Classics ...A father and husband caught up in a quarrel between gods and who finds his short sail home turning into a twenty-year journey filled with witches, storms, and one-eyed monsters. A family cursed by the sacrifice of a daughter in return for favorable sailing wnds a curse that can only be expiated in blood. A worried goddess who exacts a promise from all living things never to harm her son--but who misses one little, fatal shrub ….

"Classical mythology has long needed such a popular exposition as Miss Edith Hamilton has given us in this volume, which is at once a reference book and a book which may be read for stimulation and pleasure." -New York Times Book Review.

NY. Warner Books. 1942. 347p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Sam Harris

FROM THE COVER: “In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs- even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic.

"The End of Faith is a genuinely frightening book. ... Read Sam Harris and wake up." -Richard Dawkins, The Guardian

NY. W•W• Norton. 2004. 341p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Susan Jacoby

FROM THE JACKET: At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers celebrates the noble and essential secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, Susan Jacoby offers a powerful defense of more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth-century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected accomplishments of secularists who, allied with tolerant and liberal religious believers, have stood at the forefront of the battle for social reforms opposed by reactionaries in the past and today. Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Clarence Darrow--as well as once-famous secularists such as Robert Green Ingersoll, "the Great Agnostic"-Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanist champions. It is they, Jacoby shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the unique combination of secular government and religious liberty that is and always has been the glory of the American system.

NY. Henry Holt and Company. 2004. 441p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Frank Morison

FROM THE COVER: “I wanted to take this last phase of the life of Jesus, with all its quick and pulsating drama, its sharp, clear-cut background of antiquity, and its tremendous psychological and human intersEt - -to strip it of its overgrowth of primitive beliefs, dogmatic suppositions, and to see this supremely great Person as He really was.”

Such was English journalist Frank Morison's drive to learn of Christ. The strangeness of the Resurrection story had captured his attention, and, influenced by skeptic thinkers at the turn of the century, he set out to prove that the story of Christ's Resurrection was only a myth. His probings, however, led him to discover the validity of the biblical record in a moving, personal way. Who Moved the Stone? is considered by many to be a classic apologetic on the subject of the Resurrection. Morison includes a vivid and poignant account of Christ's betrayal, trial, and death as a backdrop to his retelling of the climactic Resurrection itself.”

Grand Rapids. Michigan. Lamplighters Books. 1958 (1930) 192p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Martin Luther

“Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred & Theology, and ordinary lecturer therein at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following state- ments and to dispute on them in that place. There fore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.”

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Dr. Benjamin Spock and Michael Zimmerman

FROM THE COVER: “The Untold Story of Vietnam- WHAT IS THE TRUTH? What would happen if the U.S. stopped the bombing? Or pulled out her troops? Or else went after total military victory? Are we in Vietnam because of a request from the Vietnamese people? Or because of treaty obligations? Or because of past pledges? Do the Viet Cong hold the people in check through terror? Is the war in the South an invasion from the North? What was the significance of the recent South Vietnamese elections? How valid is the "domino theory? What is the danger from China? Is the United States being threatened? Can we believe what our own government tells us? You may think you have the answers to these ques tions. You may not be quite as sure when you finish this book by a famous American who could no longer remain silent.

NY. Dell. 1968. 96p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By John Leale

“'Saint,' said a boy as they were having a walk together. 'If you went home andfound that a bad man was in your house, what would you do about it?'

'I would try to make friends with him,' replied the saint.

'Yes, but supposing that he didn't want to make friends with you, what would you do then?” asked the boy.

'I would go on trying to make friends with him,' said the saint.

'Yes, but supposing he stamped his foot and thumped the table with his fist, and said: "Saint, I won't be friends with you." What would you do then?*

'I would ask the Good Lord what I ought to do.'

…..

London. The Epworth Press. 1957. 104p.