By Laura I Appleman

Profits have long played a critical role in the administration of punishment in America. This Article provides one of the first full-length historical accounts of how the pursuit of private profits has shaped the American carceral system over time. It argues that deriving profits from punishment has been a crucial and formative aspect of American carcerality since our earliest days. Although most scholars have focused on convict leasing in the postbellum era as the first major example of private prison profiteering, this Article shows how a predatory for-profit system of punishment well predates this, originating in the colonial era. The story of American corrections, fully told, reveals four distinct transformative periods over the nearly five-century evolution of American incarceration, ultimately explaining the condition of today’s carceral state. In addition to providing a broader and more complete historical perspective, this Article also explains how the most recent inroads of privatized, for-profit correctional entities have overtaken the contemporary workings of the carceral system, causing chaos, abuse, and death. The Article details the mechanisms through which seeking profits from incarceration has led to objectively worse conditions and outcomes for the punished. Given the now widespread privatization and corporate takeover of so many aspects of the carceral state, from healthcare to food services and beyond, it is well past time to question the role of “Big Capital.” This Article shines a light on the forgotten history of the American carceral crisis, tracing the role of profits from colonial days to the 21st century.

Forthcoming Maryland Law Review

By Craig S. Lerner

For over 250 years, Western intellectuals have been pronouncing capital punishment a barbarity doomed to be swept into the dustbin of history. The death penalty, we have repeatedly been told, is an “anachronism” inconsistent with the spirit of the modern age—a relic that would, in a generation or two, fade away. What is distinctive about recent decades is the confidence and monolithic quality of elite opinion, at least in the West. There is a swelling confidence that the death penalty is, at last, at the cusp of extinction.

This Article questions the descriptive claim that the death penalty is dying, either in the United States or in the world at large. Simply counting the number of nations that have technically abolished the death penalty fails to capture the apparent permanence of capital punishment. Many non-Western civilizations retain the death penalty with a vigor that surprises and disappoints Western intellectuals. And even within the United States, given the prohibitive cost of imposing a death sentence, it is remarkable how determined so many Americans are to continue to execute the worst of criminals.

As argued in this Article, the simplest answer to the puzzle of capital punishment’s persistence is that the retributive impulse is, as Justice Potter Stewart observed, “part of the nature of man.” The answer is so obvious that what is puzzling is not the persistence of the death penalty but that some people regard this persistence as puzzling. The dismay of modern Western intellectuals at the recurring failure of abolitionist efforts points to defining features of that intelligentsia. Since the Enlightenment, many intellectuals have regarded nature as a weak and even nonexistent constraint on human progress. It is from this perspective that the persistence of capital punishment, so seemingly rooted in human nature, comes to sight as such a puzzling disappointment.

Lerner, Craig S., The Puzzling Persistence of Capital Punishment. 2024, 48pg

By James Hess

The California Prison Industry Authority (CALPIA) is a self-supporting training and production program currently operating within the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). CALPIA provides training, certification and employment to inmates in a variety of different fields. The goods and services produced by CALPIA are sold to the state and other government entities, which provides an economic benefit to the state. In addition to the vocational and economic aspect of the program, one of CALPIA’s missions is to reduce the subsequent recidivism of their inmate participants. This research examines the effect of participation in CALPIA on the recidivism of CDCR inmates released into the community. 

Irvine, California, School of Social Ecology. 2021, 40pg