Sunday Reading, and a Programming Note

Here’s a roundup of some recent scholarship and online commentary about prison-related issues:

• “Prisons, Privatization, and the Elusive Employee-Contractor Decision,” by Alexander Volokh in the Emory Law Review
• “Forms of Deference in Prison Law,” by Sharon Dolovich in the Federal Sentencing Reporter
• “Slavery Revisited in Penal Plantation Labor,” by Andrea Armstrong in the Seattle University Law Review
• “Queering Prison Abolition, Now?,” a round-table at the American Quarterly
• “Against Law, for Order,” by Mike Konczal in Jacobin: touches on a lot of recent books related to crime, policing, and prison policy

Also, via Doug Berman, I noticed that the Yale Law Journal is running a prison law writing contest. If you are or have been in prison or jail, you may be eligible to enter.

A programming note: the blog has been slow this spring. This has been my way of “winding down.” I’ll actually be moving on to some new endeavors soon where for various reasons I won’t be able to blog, so I will be putting the blog on indefinite hiatus as of June 2012. I will leave the site up for archival purposes as long as WordPress will have it.