Letter from the Director: Spring Break
Spring Break - In this issue of the ISERP newsletter, Jeffrey Fagan and colleagues report on the findings of their recent study, which shows that capital punishment has no visible deterrent effect on death-eligible crimes.
By some odd coincidence, exactly two years ago, I flew down to North Carolina to meet with Governor Mike Easely, who was deciding whether or not to approve the execution of William "Bugs" Powell. Powell, high on crack, killed a convenience store clerk in a botched robbery. In North Carolina, as in some other states, when a jury returns a sentence of death, the State Supreme Court engages in what is known as proportionality review-an assessment of whether the sentence of the case at bar is proportional to other sentences returned by juries. They do this by looking at all of the elements of the case and comparing them to all the elements in all of the other death sentences returned by juries. When they find comparable elements, the case is considered to be comparable. It is pretty easy to see that since each case has hundreds of elements, it is almost impossible to find a death eligible case that is not comparable on some elements to another and thus considered "proportional" by the court. But if one does the analysis properly, as substantively directed by the U.S. Supreme Court, comparison would be made to meaningfully similar life-cases.
Years ago, when I was working on the death appeal of another individual, our analyses of proportionality review practices in North Carolina revealed that the Powell case was the most egregious we had observed. This was noted in the report, and eventually, when Powell came to his last appeal, the report found its way over to Mike Easely. Faced with clear evidence that executing Powell would be unfair-that is, disproportionate, and therefore cruel and unusual-and ignoring the fact that Powell provided the strongest emotional link to his developmentally disabled son, Mike Easely, a self-identified "regular church attendee" and "family man," decided to kill him anyway.
The alternative was to lock Powell up for life. Locking people up-and especially locking young black men up-is something that this country at this moment in time specializes in. Locking individuals up for some limited periods of time is not supposed to be a life sentence. But as David Weiman shows in his article, labor market reentry is difficult for individuals convicted of crime-so much so that it is reasonable to ask whether most prison spells do not turn into some form of life sentence.
Here at ISERP, it is Spring Break. New programs and initiatives announced in the winter are coming into clearer focus. Specifically, the Mellon-funded interdisciplinary training program in social science for advanced graduate students is now soliciting applications for the first cohort, our joint MA program with the Oral History Office has been undergoing review in the Graduate School for Arts and Sciences, and we are starting the complex process of selecting undergraduate and high school student interns for the summer internship programs we run.
Beyond our offices, the Provost's office has been actively engaged in supporting the establishment of a population center (under the leadership of Irv Garfinkel and Connie Nathanson) and the creation of a regional health center network for Central Asia (under the leadership of Nabila El-Bassel).
Finally, we are actively engaged in a broad self-study and revision of the mechanics of running an institute. When we started seven years ago we had one staff member and one external grant (for $200,000). Most of our operating costs were covered by University funding. Now, as our external grant portfolio closes in on $10 million and more of our staffing costs are covered by outside grants, the systems we established early on are not scaling as well as they ought to. Faculty with grants at ISERP should already be seeing changes in the ways that their monthly budgets are reported, and we expect to make further changes to basic operating procedures over the next few months.
Peter Bearman, Director
Institute of Social and Economic
Research and Policy
