Reason Foundation

Recent Research and Commentary

PA Lawmakers Should Encourage Prison Health Competition, Not Ban It

January 20, 2012, 1:03pm

Harris Kenny

With Pennsylvania facing at least a $500 million budget deficit next year, the last thing fiscally responsible policymakers should be doing is protecting sacred cows in government. Unfortunately, those trying to advance legislation to protect the jobs of Commonwealth prison nurses are attempting just that.

Lawmakers Should Encourage Prison Health Competition, Not Ban It

Attempt to ban privatization of prison nurses is misguided

January 19, 2012

Leonard Gilroy, Harris Kenny

With Pennsylvania facing at least a $500 million budget deficit next year, the last thing fiscally responsible policymakers should be doing is protecting sacred cows in government. Unfortunately, those trying to advance legislation to protect the jobs of Commonwealth prison nurses are attempting just that.

Embrace Competition to Lower Costs, Improve Performance in Prisons

Private sector can drive efficiency, improve offender rehabilitation and save taxpayer money

October 12, 2011

Leonard Gilroy

Since the private corrections industry emerged in the 1980s, over 30 states — including California, Texas, Florida and Colorado — have embraced public-private partnerships. Today approximately 9 percent of federal and state inmates are held in privately-operated prisons. One reason is clear: The private sector is saving governments, and thus taxpayers, money.

Uncertainty Looms As California Corrections “Realignment” Plan Begins Saturday

September 26, 2011, 12:44pm

Harris Kenny

On the heels of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Plata ruling that deemed California's publicly-operated prisons provide unconstitutional medical and mental health care, the Golden State is about to gamble on an untried realignment plan that would transfer the responsibility for punishing and rehabilitating thousands of nonviolent felons from the state prison system to local communities.

Your Lying Eyes

How fallible memories send innocent people to prison

August 31, 2011

Jacob Sullum

Three-quarters of the defendants who are cleared by DNA evidence were convicted based on sincere yet inaccurate eyewitness testimony. The New Jersey Supreme Court highlighted that problem last week when it revised the state's rules for pretrial hearings and jury instructions based on three decades of research exposing the fallibility of human memory. Senior Editor Jacob Sullum says the decision reminds us that the most powerful testimony jurors hear may also be the weakest, subject to hidden influences that can send an innocent man to prison if they remain unexposed.

Injustice, In Plain Sight

The trouble with eyewitness testimony

August 29, 2011

Steve Chapman

It's a dismally familiar tale: a victim making an eyewitness identification that later turns out to be horribly mistaken. As Steve Chapman explains, this type of mistake is universally known as the most common cause of false convictions. Yet law enforcement authorities, courts, and juries continue to treat eyewitness testimony as pure gold.

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