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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Call Off the Cops
TS Candii had already been awake for seven hours when she stepped up to a bouquet of microphones at the base of the elaborately carved Great Western Staircase in the New York State Capitol on the morning of May 7. Behind her stood more than one hundred sex workers and advocates, ...

Plight of the Squeegee Kids
In 1982, political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling published an essay in The Atlantic outlining a new form of policing that aimed to preempt a perceived threat. They argued that “disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked,” and that, ...

Foucault in the Valley of Death
The first time that Simeon Wade read Michel Foucault was in a graduate seminar at Harvard in the 1960s. Madness and Civilization had been translated into English in 1965, and the book excited Wade, who had been vice president of the Baptist student union at the College of ...

Locked Up
The United States’ experiment with a relentlessly punitive criminal justice system is now more than four decades old. But it’s worth remembering that things were not always this way. For most of the twentieth century, America was not too different from Canada or Europe in ...

The Prisoner Dilemma
When Texas inmate David Ruiz filed a handwritten petition to sue the Texas Department of Corrections in 1972, it led to a landmark case that turned on whether Texas prisons violated the United States Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. In 1980, a ...

The Women Who Knew Too Much
Horror films might be the only genre that punishes black women credibly, or at least in a way that’s true to our lives. Modern comedies are often too slapstick to approach us accurately, whatever their intentions. Dramas tend to give us the Madonna-Whore treatment, or else ...

Afraid of the Dark
These are dark times for the republic, all right-thinking persons agree. Unfortunately, most right-thinking persons don’t know the half of it. We’re understandably fixated on the fact that a vindictive, mean-spirited yahoo has a finger on the nuclear trigger and veto power ...

How to Win a Drug War
Eight months after the fact, it was decided that February 5, 2016, would mark the fifteenth anniversary of Plan Colombia, the $10 billion counternarcotics assistance package. Two 737s worth of government ministers, generals, media executives, and illustrious hangers-on ...