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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Mirror Image Of Asylums And Prisons, Sacha Raoult, Bernard E. Harcourt
The Mirror Image Of Asylums And Prisons, Sacha Raoult, Bernard E. Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
This article analyzes trends in prison rates and mental hospital rates in France since the earliest available statistics. It shows that, on almost two centuries of data and amidst an agitated political history, every asylum trend in France is "countered" by an inverse prison trend, and vice-versa. Both trends are like a mirror image of each other. We reflect on the possible explanations for this intriguing fact and show that the most obvious ones (a population transfer or a building transfer) are not able to account for most of the relationship. After these explanations have been dismissed, we are left …
On The American Paradox Of Laissez Faire And Mass Incarceration, Bernard E. Harcourt
On The American Paradox Of Laissez Faire And Mass Incarceration, Bernard E. Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
In The Illusion of Free Markets (Harvard 2011), Professor Bernard Harcourt analyzes the evolution of a distinctly American paradox: in the country that has done the most to promote the idea of a hands-off government, we run the single largest prison complex in the entire world. Harcourt traces this paradox back to the eighteenth century and demonstrates how the presumption of government incompetence in economic affairs has been coupled with that of government legitimacy in the realm of policing and punishing. Harcourt shows how these linked presumptions have fueled the expansion of the carceral sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth …