In Sunday’s New York Times, Michelle Alexander advocates a kind of plea-bargaining strike to address the incarceration crisis. She writes:

The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.

I have argued that incarcerating 2.3 million people is unconscionable; that if we are going to put all those people in jail, we should do it as jurors; that an underlying reason for the incarceration crisis is public disengagement from civic life; and that we tolerate the vast prison-industrial complex because we are able to ignore it, since we don’t have to participate in, or even read about, jury trials. (Only about one in 40 felony charges go to trial nowadays.)

If many defendants started demanding trials, that would put us back in the jury room until we hollered for sentencing reform. I would regard that as a good result, but it seems awfully unlikely. They call it the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” for a reason. People always have difficulty coordinating high-stakes behavior, but the situation of a criminal defendant makes it harder. Since the middle ages, they have been separated to bargain individually with prosecutors precisely to prevent them from coordinating. Defendants would be better off if they all demanded trials. Each individual would be worse off if he alone demanded a trial and it yielded a “Three Strikes” conviction that he could have avoided if he’d bargained.

People interested in various aspects of civic education and civic renewal have a whole range of summer institutes to consider in 2012.

• At Tufts, we offer a Summer Institute of Civic Studies (a seminar with a strong focus on theory) followed by a larger public conference. The Institute  will take place from July 9-19, 2012. The conference will run from July 19 at 6 pm – July 21 at 3 pm. The Institute is selective, and applications are due (for best consideration) this Friday.
• John Gaventa now leads the Coady Institute in Nova Scotia, an international leader in education for social change. Coady offers a three-credit summer course from May 7 until 25, 2012. Click here for more information on this certificate program, fees and how to apply.
• An Institute entitled “What Civil? What Society” is being offered by the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL) at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. It is a Workshop followed by a PhD summer school. Participants will “examine the concept of ‘civil society’ not just in contemporary Europe and North America but historically and in contexts across the world as well as across academic disciplines. We will seek not to define ‘civil society’ but to identify the consequences – political, legal, social, moral, epistemological – of particular ways in which ‘civil’ and ‘society’ have been defined in different times and places.”
• The National School Climate Center is pleased to announce its 15th annual Summer Institute from July 10-13^th in New York City.

(en route to Atlanta for work related to the Common Core) Here are some open positions that involve civic engagement or democracy reform:

• Researcher and Senior researcher positions at CIRCLE
• Paid internships with Democracy Matters, which engages college students in democracy reform work, especially campaign finance reform.
• Tenure track professorship in public deliberation and/or community engagement at Colorado State.
• Communications director at Demos.

(I post a list like this every few months.)

(Chicago) I am here to speak at a Donors’ Forum. Almost 300 people, mostly foundation executives, are gathered to discuss “community engagement,” and my job is to help persuade them to invest in it. AmericaSPEAKS will be facilitating the group’s deliberations. WBEZ radio plans to tape and broadcast my remarks.

Meanwhile, CIRCLE is working on our Super Tuesday youth turnout release, which should be online soon.

The Coolidge Room in Tufts’ Ballou Hall is a grand Victorian space (1853-4) characterized by unusual free-standing columns of cast iron, thick patterned carpets, potted plants, and oil portraits of the Tufts presidents on the walls. Like any constructed place, it conveys cultural significance–and its meanings are perhaps complex and various–but overall, those hushed old white men on the walls do seem to dominate.

On Saturday, that space was filled with the voice of Professor Sonia Sanchez. I don’t know if her remarks were recorded, but this event at Georgetown gives a flavor of them. She argues, she cites information, she quotes, she analyzes, she remembers, she calls and awaits responses, she echoes and rhymes, she ululates, she sings, she exhorts, she weeps, she laughs.