Prison reform

“Do you have any advice for other presidential candidates who might end up in federal prison?” I ask Joseph “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage, of Tiger King fame, on a recent phone call. And I say “other” candidates because Joe Exotic is running for president. “You know what, Trump ought to stop bashing the Mexicans too bad on that border crisis stuff down there because when he gets in here, he’s going to be outnumbered. He’s going to find out they’re going to be his best friend,” Exotic says. “And he better stock up on Big Macs because they don’t serve that shit in here.” After claiming he’d spent two-and-a-half years in solitary confinement, Exotic was recently released back into general population.

It ought to be a good day at the office (at last!) for Robert Buckland, the Secretary of State who has outraged the legal profession. He spent most of last weekend on the media rack defending the government’s position that it might break international law to defy an agreement with the EU that it had negotiated.  Today is much more straightforward. His ‘get tough’ sentencing white paper contains a myriad of proposals that will resonate with ordinary people baffled by a justice system ever more remote from the idea of public protection and punishment, lost in abstractions, passing sentences that bear little relationship to the gravity of the crime.