So this isn't meant to be a dunk, but this is not really true. The problem of punishment is not that we are ignoring a good set of criminological recommendations, or that our punishment practices are poorly thought out or not backed by research. 1/ https://twitter.com/DRangaviz/status/1276971036798414848

Tons of research has gone into the carceral state. Like a ton. In fact, there’s a whole school of criminological thought based around “what works.” There is a whole field devoted to this, yes, but the problem is actually that we *are* doing so much of what this field suggests 2/

The “evidenced-based practices” paradigm has long existed, and has taken off in the past 20 years especially. This paradigm is deeply harmful, and a lot of people have written about it, including Jessica Eaglin and Marie Gottschalk, two of my faves. 3/

Marie Gottschalk writes: “The narrow emphasis on evidence-based research…fosters the impression that the birth of the carceral state was the result of bad or nonexistent research rather than bad politics of policy.” 4/

This basically suggests that the problem of our system is that we're doing punishment the wrong way, that we need to recalibrate...which is actually what we've been doing for decades, always making the problem worse. 5/

I haven’t read this book, and I’m sure there’s some good in it. But from the book description: the book’s “prescriptions are rooted in a thorough and refreshingly ideology-free cost–benefit analysis of how to cut mass incarceration while maintaining public safety” 6/

Likewise, “Prisoners of Politics aims to free criminal justice policy from the political arena, where it has repeatedly fallen prey to irrational fears and personal interest, and demonstrates that a few simple changes could make us all safer.” 7/

I actually don’t think we need to free criminal justice policy from the political arena. Also, much of criminal justice policy already happens outside the political arena — the administrative growth and operation of the carceral state has been massive in the past 50 years. 8/

As many have said, we need more politicization, more political education around what the system was designed to do and what it does on a daily basis. Because again, the problem of the carceral state is not that it was poorly thought out. 9/

One caveat is that the original statement *is* true on a broader scale — we do know that *punishment* and the system as a whole does not work, that it has had 200 years to harm us and has never made things better. 10/

But anyway I think it's important to push back on the idea that the problem is *which* punishment practices we choose to employ, or that we need to just follow the research on how to appropriately deploy the punishment system, because we've been doing that for a long time. 11/