Daily Archives: February 14, 2007

The depravity of prison

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Shawshank.jpgRegular readers of this blog know that I frequently criticize the deplorable condition of Houston’s local jail facilities. Also, it will surprise no one that I don’t agree with the governmental policy of throwing wealthy businesspeople in prison for engaging in merely questionable business transactions, and I also am not supportive of the largely futile policy of locking up thousands of citizens for nothing more than a personal drug problem. Not to mention the absurdity of locking up legitimate businesspeople who simply facilitate bettors engaging in online gambling.
One of the primary reasons for my opposition to needless imprisonment of citizens is the deplorable state of many American prisons. Inasmuch as I visit jails and prisons from time to time, I am not surprised by the foreboding nature of this Christopher Hayes post (HT Ezra Klein) excerpting a part of this Human Rights Watch report on prison rape. The story reinforces graphically why imprisonment is a horrifically overused remedy in America’s criminal justice system.
Not all prisons in the United States are like the one described in the report. But many — particularly in the widely inconsistent state systems — are every bit as bad. And don’t think for a minute that all public officials are particularly interested in changing the status quo. Remember when the attorney general of California once suggested a similar fate to the one described above for the late Ken Lay? The deeply ingrained inhumanity of many American prison systems is one of the primary reasons to be vigilant in opposing the demagogues in our society who advocate increasing criminalization and imprisonment of American citizens.
In this timely National Journal op-ed,, Stuart Taylor examines the brutality of America’s sentencing laws, noting that a “world-record 2.2 million people [populate] our nation’s prisons and jails. Justice aside, there are better ways to spend scarce tax dollars.” Meanwhile, Scott Henson reports on the status of current legislative efforts to bring sanity to the Texas prison system.

The fading allure of the “Superstar Cities”

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night%20Houston%20skyline.jpgUrban economics expert Joel Kotkin (previous posts here) reports on the myth of the “superstar cities” in this WSJ ($) article and he sums up the bullish prospects of cities such as Houston in comparison to supposed superstar cities such as New York, San Francisco and Boston:

Economic and demographic trends suggest that the future of American urbanism lies not in the elite cities but in younger, more affordable and less self-regarding places.
Over the past 15 years, it has been opportunistic newcomers — Houston, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Riverside — that have created the most new jobs and gained the most net domestic migration. In contrast there has been virtually negligible long-term net growth in jobs or positive domestic migration to places like New York, Los Angeles, Boston or the San Francisco Bay Area.
What as much as anything distinguishes elite places — what Wharton real-estate professor Joe Gyourko calls “the superstar cities” — are their absurdly high real-estate prices. New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles have long been more expensive than, say, Dallas, Houston or Phoenix — but in recent years the difference in price, he calculates, has increased beyond all reason. San Francisco prices since 1950, for example, have grown at twice the national rate for the 50 largest metropolitan areas.[. . .]
This perhaps explains why the largest companies — with the notable exception of Silicon Valley — have continued to move toward the more opportunistic cities. New York and its environs, for example, had 140 such firms in 1960; in 2006 the number had dropped to less than half that, some of those running with only skeleton top management. Houston, in contrast, had only one Fortune 500 company in 1960; today it is home to over 20. Houston companies tend to staff heavily locally; this is one reason the city was able to replace New York and other high-cost locales as the nation’s unchallenged energy capital. Another example of this trend is Charlotte’s rise as the nation’s second-ranked banking center in terms of assets, surpassing San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles, indeed all superstar cities except New York.

Houston’s own urban policy wonk, Tory Gattis, has more of the Kotkin article and provides his own series of posts on why young cities such as Houston are well-positioned to take advantage of opportunities that are not rich enough for the superstar cities. Not a bad position to be in, folks.

Five big health care issues

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stethoscope021407.jpgEconLog’s Arnold Kling, who is doing some of the best thinking these days on reforming America’s dysfunctional health care finance system, identifies in this TCS Daily op-ed the five big questions in health care:

1. What will we do about the large projected deficit in Medicare?
2. What can we do to reduce government subsidies for extravagant use of medical procedures with high costs and low benefits?
3. What should we do about the health care needs of the very poor?
4. What should we do about the health care needs of the very sick?
5. What should we do about a scenario in which both income inequality and the share of average income devoted to health care rise sharply?

Kling goes on to discuss our social fetish with health insurance, which is really not insurance at all:

If you ask me what kind of health insurance I would like for my family, my instinct is to answer, “None.” The only reason we have health insurance now is to avoid the stigma of being called “uninsured.”
Somehow, health insurance has become a social fetish. I could travel to the far reaches of the globe, and almost everywhere I would find merchants where my credit is good and my dollars are welcome. But here at home, trying to enter a local hospital with nothing but a wad of cash and a credit card would be like urinating on the sidewalk.

Read Kling’s entire piece. As the WSJ’s ($) Holman Jenkins pointed out awhile back, government policy has exacerbated these issues and is unlikely to solve them through greater involvement in the system:

The tax code is the original hectoring mommy behind our health-care neuroses. It gives the biggest subsidy to those who need it least. It pays the affluent to buy more medical care than they would if they were spending their own money. It prompts them to launder our health spending through an insurance bureaucracy, creating endless paperwork. It prices millions of less-favored taxpayers out of the market for health insurance. It fosters a misconception that health care is free even as workers are perplexed over the failure of their wages to rise.