Author Archive | Stuart Benjamin

In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault documented a remarkable continuity of confinement through different stages of Western European history, from the lazar houses for lepers on the outskirts of Medieval cities, to the Ships of Fools navigating down rivers of Renaissance Europe, to the establishment in the seventeenth century of the Hôpital Général in Paris […]

Andrew Gelman at Columbia University writes on his statistics blog here that the findings I discussed yesterday seem correct and don’t surprise him in the least. (He also has some entertaining reactions to some of the comments from yesterday). I’ll confess that I not only find the results surprising, I also think that, if they […]

Yesterday’s post triggered a lot of comments regarding this graph – it’s on page 23 of the new study on asylums and prisons that I was discussing previously. The figure graphs two time-series using national-level data: the overall rate of institutionalization in the United States (in mental hospitals and prisons) and the homicide rate over […]

In response to my first blog entry here, some readers asked how the rates of institutionalization in the United States compare to Western Europe. There is no doubt that the graph of institutionalization over the twentieth century immediately raises the question whether Western or industrialized countries with currently low prison populations use their mental health […]

Was the tragic incident at Virginia Tech the result of a failure of Virginia’s mental health system? Slate recently posted Seung-Hui Cho’s commitment papers and they are revealing: the magistrate who heard Cho’s case determined that he was “an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness,” but determined that there were “alternatives […]

The rap on Roy Cooper (the North Carolina Attorney General) among my friends who know a good bit about him is that he is overcautious — a smart guy who is too often hesitant and a bit of a plodder. People I know who followed the investigation closely were confident that Cooper’s investigators had concluded […]

I’ve been thinking a bit about information asymmetries. I opposed the Iraq war from the start – it seemed to me that for the invasion to make sense, almost everything had to break our way, so the invasion was akin to making a bet with a 1:1 payoff that you would win only if you […]

My intimate homicide data does not conclusively explain why the criminal justice system in the late 1800s and early 1900s punished intimate murders committed by men but failed to prevent them from occurring. However, my University of Colorado Law Review article (see 77 Univ. Colo. L. Rev. 101 (2006)) offers several hypotheses: “First, the decline […]

My data supports the conclusion that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intimate homicide cases in New York and Colorado produced remarkably similar results: “In both states, men who killed intimates risked a murder conviction, while female defendants tended to be acquitted or found guilty of lesser crimes by juries sympathetic to their stories of physical […]

The provocation doctrine did not give men carte blanche to kill intimate partners who were unfaithful or who sought to leave the relationship. It did not even offer a successful means of mitigating a murder charge to manslaughter for many male defendants. Today’s post provides an excerpt from, “Intimate Homicide: Gender and Crime Control, 1880-1920,” […]

This post continues the description of my intimate homicide research, which I recently published in “Intimate Homicide: Gender and Crime Control, 1880-1920,” 77 Univ. Colo. L. Rev. 101 (2006) and “Public Responses to Intimate Violence: A Glance at the Past,” 121 Public Health Reports 460 (2006). Today, I’ll focus on the comparatively lenient treatment that […]

My work on the legal history of public responses to intimate homicide has attracted attention in part, I think, because it taps into present-minded concerns about domestic violence and the gendered politics of the criminal law. Over the next week, I will share with you my research on intimate homicide in the late nineteenth and […]

A major aspect of today’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld opinion was the Court’s conclusion that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to Al Qaeda. (Common Article 3 applies to “armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties.”) Some conservative bloggers have expressed outrage about […]

There’s a pretty interesting article in the latest U.S. News about David Addington, Cheney’s right-hand man. I’ve heard scary stories about him from a number of friends in the White House and various departments — basically, that he belittles and denigrates those whom he regards as insufficiently hard-line about presidential power, and is ruthless. I […]

My post on the letters responding to legal arguments on wiretapping, and some of the feedback to it, got me thinking about two signals beyond mere political pigeon-holing, at least one of which is of greater substantive relevance. First, the DOJ memo has a very strange attribute — its lack of attribution. It is not […]