Back home, with still more insights

Another fascinating conference (followed by easy travel) has me home cheery despite being tired. As with all great conferences, the OCU 21st Century conference I participated in on Friday had too many highlights to readily summarize. At the well-conceived and well-run event, I learned still more about Blakely, and I’ll share some of these thoughts in a post later this weekend.

But, as highlighted before here, the conference was about a lot more than Blakely, and all of the speakers were engaging and informative. It was especially fun to see Professors Paul Robinson and Franklin Zimring in action and in fine form. Both studiously avoided discussion of Blakely, though I kept wondering how Professor Robinson’s varied theoretical insights about desert and also how Professor Zimring’s varied empirical insights about the scale of imprisonment might map on to the post-Blakely world. Indeed, Professor Zimring in his remarks detailed three periods of rising imprisonment rates over the last 30 years, and I will be interested to see if the next decade could possibly, as a direct or indirect result of Blakely, have a much different data trend.