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In Such Ways as Promise Some Success
No full textThis year is the centenary of the birth of philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) and the semi-centenary of his monumental A Theory of Justice (1971). This essay explores the differences between political opposition and political resistance as reflected in his work. Rawls is remembered for the careful conditions he imposed in the Vietnam-War era upon justifiable civil disobedience in “nearly just” societies. It is less well known that he came to regard the United States as a fundamentally unjust society. The nation has shown itself not merely unserious about political equality—the cornerstone of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness—but hostile to it. The Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence sanctifies spending as speech and denies Congress the power to try to level the electoral playing field. In the Supreme Court’s Constitution, substantive political equality is of no value. The upshot is that civil disobedience, conceived as an appeal to a just constitution, is no longer possible in the United States. Political resistance may be permissible, however, within the bounds of right, “in such ways as promise some success.” This essay ekes out Rawls’s suggestive remarks about the justification of political resistance and attempts to extend them to current conditions
Power Imbalances Are at the Root of Sexual Harassment - But Statements Like Andrew Cuomo\u27s Don\u27t Acknowledge That Inconvenient Fact
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Less Prison Time Matters: A Roadmap to Reducing the Discriminatory Impact of the Sentencing System Against African Americans and Indigenous Australians
Get PDFThe criminal justice system discriminates against African Americans. There are a number of stages of the criminal justice process. Sentencing is the sharp end of the system because this is where the community acts in its most coercive manner by intentionally inflecting hardships on offenders. African Americans comprise approximately 40% of the incarcerated population yet only about 13% of the total population. The overrepresentation of African Americans in prisons is repugnant. Despite this, lawmakers for decades have been unable or unwilling to implement reforms which ameliorate the problem. This is no longer politically or socially tolerable in light of the groundswell of support for the Black Lives Matter movement following the killing of George Floyd.
This Article proposes a number of principled reforms that will immediately reduce the incarceration levels of African Americans and assist to overcome the systemic biases against this group. One of our key recommendations is for the immediate release from incarceration of all African Americans who have served three-quarters or more of their sentence. This reform builds on the early release concept underpinning the First Step Act, which commenced in December 2018, but applies it specifically to African Americans.
A number of other reforms are suggested to redress the wider causes of discrimination against African Americans in the sentencing system, including placing less emphasis on the prior convictions of offenders in the sentencing calculus and improving the educational outcomes of African Americans. Discrimination faced by the most socially and economically vulnerable groups in society is not limited to the United States. Indigenous Australians are overrepresented in prisons at an even higher rate than African Americans. We argue that the solutions to ameliorating the unfair burdens on African Americans are equally appropriate in the Australian context
