Farewell to “Prison Law Blog,” Hello to “Evolving Standards of Decency”

Dear all,

As I noted a few weeks ago, I am officially placing this blog on hiatus as I am moving onto some new endeavors. But there are two pieces of good news. First, I am happy to announce that a new blog, “Evolving Standards of Decency,” will be picking up where I left off and covering prisoners’ rights litigation. This new blog is spearheaded by Margaret R. Moreland, a lawyer and law librarian at the Pace University Law Library, and aims to “creat[e] a forum for discussing the constitutional rights of those in America’s prisons and jails.” I hope you will bookmark the site and check it often. 

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Prison Law Blog’s Greatest Hits of 2011

Hi all — Thanks for reading and commenting in 2011! Although I was mostly on hiatus during the fall, the blog is now back up and running (although not, perhaps, at the several-posts-per-day rate of the blog’s earliest days). I’ll get back to regular posting beginning tomorrow. In the meantime, here (according to WordPress.com’s neato year-end stats feature) were this blog’s most-visited posts of 2011, along with the dates they were originally published:

• 1 Downsizing the Prison-Industrial Complex, February 2011
• 2 Mass Incarceration: Breaking Down the Data by State, July 2010
• 3 Realignment in California: The Basics, Plus How Counties Are Preparing, August 2011
• 4 “Truly Appalling”, January 2010
• 5 “Wisconsin prison population 2.5 times larger than Minnesota’s”, April 2010

Programming Note

For the month of July, I’ll be guest-blogging for The Informant, the crime-and-punishment blog of local NPR affiliate KALW. My first post asks, “Is California torturing prisoners at Pelican Bay?”

How California Might Comply with Plata

I have a guest post today for Adam Serwer at The American Prospect outlining a few of the policy options for bringing California’s prison system into compliance with Plata. Maybe not news for readers of this blog, but check it out if you’re so inclined.

Programming Note

This week I’m one of a handful of excellent guest bloggers filling in for Adam Serwer of The American Prospect. I’ll be covering some prison-related topics, including my first post today on the CCPOA. (I’ll be posting about once a day through Friday.) Hope to see you there!

EDITED TO ADD: That first sentence sounds kind of self-congratulatory because I wrote it too hastily. What I meant to say was, I’m a guest blogger and also, there are these other guest bloggers who are excellent and you should check them out too — not that I’m personally so excellent. The perils of early-morning blogging! (Early on the West Coast, anyway. Well, not *that* early.)

Spring Hiatus

Barring any big developments (like a SCOTUS decision in Plata? that would be nice) the blog will be mostly on hiatus for the next couple of weeks as I finish up my many end-of-quarter obligations here in academia-land and then head into the bowels of the library for a big research project. In the meantime, for aggregation of criminal justice news, I recommend The Crime Report and for anything else, check my blogroll on the right-hand side of the page. Or go wild in my archives: I don’t even remember what all is in there!

I also recommend that you check out this brand-new book that’s definitely on the top of my stack of things to read: The Toughest Beat, Joshua Page‘s new history of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, aka prison guards’ union. Hopefully I’ll get around to posting something more detailed about it soon, but in the meantime, I can safely say that anyone who reads this blog should read it: it’s the first really thorough study of the CCPOA, an organization that has been the subject of much speculation and public handwringing, going all the way up the chain to Supreme Court Justice Kennedy. And now it has double relevance since we are in the midst of a national discussion about the merits and drawbacks of public employee unions.

Programming Note

So I’ve added a Twitter feed to the righthand column of the blog. It doesn’t look very pretty right now, so I’ll have to fool around with whether there’s a better way to do this or maybe a different WordPress template I should be using. In the meantime though, here it is.

Basically, I think Twitter is a more efficient way to share links when I don’t have anything to say about an article other than, “here’s the link” (or I have something to say that can be said in a few words). But I also know that not everyone who reads this blog uses Twitter. So this way you’ll be able to see the links from my Twitter feed here.

Bleg: What Do You Want to See on Prison Law Blog in 2011?

Hi all. Now that I’ve more or less gotten organized for 2011 and I’m done with my guest stint at TNC’s, the blog should be back up to full speed next week. In the meantime, I thought I’d borrow an idea from Rortybomb, and throw out a “request for requests.” What do you want to see more or less of in this space in 2011? What types of posts have been most helpful or interesting to you? Anything you just skip right over in your RSS reader?

Here’s an example of one area where I’d be interested to get some feedback. When I first started Prison Law Blog almost a year ago, I devoted a lot more space than I have in recent months to keeping track of lower federal and state court decisions on prisoners’ rights and conditions of confinement litigation. That was partly because there were some legal issues that I needed to learn more about myself and this was a handy way to do it. It sort of fell off my radar screen more recently, as I’ve been paying more attention to the broader policy landscape for various reasons. My sense is that most of my readers aren’t lawyers, and so the really technical legal posts may be more inside baseball than you’re looking for (and conversely, those of you who actually do prisoners’ rights litigation probably don’t need me to tell you about the state of the case law). But maybe I’m wrong about this — and I can certainly go back to checking in with the case law more frequently if that’s something that’s useful for folks. Of course, either way I’ll try to stay on top of big cases like the California overcrowding litigation, cases that present novel issues, or cases with particularly compelling facts — otherwise I might have to change the name of the blog! But I’m just curious as to what precise mix of content would be most useful for those of you who have kindly bookmarked, read, and spread the word about my site.

Anyway, I thought I’d open it up for feedback, requests, suggestions, etc. in two ways: you can chime in either by leaving comments or emailing me through the contact form. I look forward to hearing from you!

Programming Note

I am guest-blogging this week on various topics at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog on TheAtlantic.com, so I’ll be back with prison law updates either later this week, or early next week. In the meantime, as always, do check in with the folks on my blogroll for updates on all things criminal justice!

Happy Holidays from the Prison Law Blog

See you in 2011!