I'm delighted to say that Bernard Harcourt — Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology at the University of Chicago and author of the just-released Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age and other books on broken-windows policing and youth gun carrying — will be guest-blogging here this week.

Prof. Harcourt's posts will chiefly focus on a new paper of his that looks at the massive shift in institutionalization from mental hospitals to prisons during the 20th century, a topic that's particularly timely in light of the Virginia Tech incident. The paper presents new findings from state-level panel regressions and builds on an earlier article in the Texas Law Review that looked at national level trends. I read the paper, found it tremendously interesting, and invited Prof. Harcourt to join us for the week.

Prof. Harcourt also edits a new journal, on-line and in-print called The Carceral Notebooks. A new volume of The Carceral Notebooks is just out and available on-line, and carries essays by Cass Sunstein, Martha Nussbaum, Geoffrey Stone, Jim Leitzel, and others on the legal enforcement of morality.