Spencer Headworth

MAKING PUNISHMENT PAY

Sociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative and quantitative data from California, circa 1960-2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging of debt overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment and resistance to paying taxes for building prisons. The leveraging of bond debt deferred and externalized the costs of building prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged and extended this debt and dispensed with the requirement for direct voter approval. A Republican-dominated punishment regime capitalized debt to build prisons in selected exurban Republican California counties with growing visible minority populations. We demonstrate that the innovative use of lease revenue bonds was the essential element that enlarged and extended funding of California prison construction by an order of magnitude that made this expansion a boom. With what Robert Merton called the consequences of imperious interest, this prison expansion enabled the imprisonment of an inordinately large and racially disproportionate inmate population.

Diversity and talent at the top: Lessons from the boardroom

This Article describes the results from fifty-seven interviews with corporate directors and a limited number of other persons of interest (including institutional investors, executive search professionals, and proxy advisors) regarding their views on corporate board diversity. Diversity challenges and successes in the boardroom make a useful jumping off point for the study of diversity in other professional fields, including law firms, for a number of reasons. First, corporate boardrooms remain remarkably non-diverse, representing a highly visible “old (and, we might add, white) boys’ club.” Second, this club has come under tremendous pressure in recent years, with criticisms ranging from simple business imperatives to social fairness—a debate that is strikingly similar to diversity debates in very dissimilar settings, such as higher education. And finally, the variety of responses around the world to this increased public pressure for boardroom diversity—from legally-mandated quotas in much of Europe to a reliance on market forces in the United States—allows a comparison of many possible approaches to diversity challenges.