In the United States, numerous standards have been developed for the operation of correctional facilities. States and the federal government have constitutional protections. Professional bodies like the American Correctional Association and the American Jail Association offer accreditation. Courts have weighed in repeatedly. And yet most people who have spent time inside a correctional facility as an inmate, a worker, or a researcher know that the gap between those standards and actual conditions is often great, and sometimes unconscionable.
The question is not whether American prison conditions are bad, but why we keep failing to fix them. Three obstacles explain the impasse: little to no independent measurement, no meaningful enforcement, and no political incentive to care. These failures are sustained, in part, because we ask the wrong questions, and when we ask the right ones, we ask them of the wrong people. Five questions, in particular, about prison conditions deserve more attention.
Who is collecting the information, and who controls it?
Most data on prison conditions comes from the institutions being evaluated (i.e., state corrections departments, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and facility administrators). This is a structural problem. Similar to the problems encountered with COMPSTAT (the relatively recent data-driven police accountability and crime tracking system) when the entity responsible for conditions is also the one measuring them, the reliability of that data can be questioned. We would not accept this logic in any other domain of public accountability. Thus, we shouldn’t accept it here.
Whose voices are being included and whose are being excluded?
Scholarly research and consulting reports have their place, but they are not sufficient. The people with the most direct and detailed knowledge of prison conditions are typically the inmates themselves, their families, and the correctional officers who work alongside them daily. These voices are frequently underrepresented in official assessments. Gathering these constituencies’ opinions should be done in a serious manner, and not simply be a cute add-on. This information can and should be collected in a rigorous manner, through structured interviews, surveys, and independent review processes that protect participants from retaliation.
Is the problem systemic or localized?
When conditions at a specific correctional facility come to light through litigation, a death, or a news media investigation, administrators and state departments of corrections frequently treat it as an isolated case. Sometimes it is. More often, it reflects long-term patterns that exist across a correctional system. Without consistent, comparable, and meaningful data collected at the facility level and aggregated at the state and federal levels, we have no reliable way to distinguish between the two. This matters enormously for how we respond.
What happens when findings are ignored?
Standards mean nothing without enforcement. Accreditation processes, legislative oversight, and court orders have all produced findings that were subsequently minimized, delayed, or ignored. The question of what accountability actually looks like is one that the field has never answered adequately.
What would an early warning system look like?
We have dashboards for economic indicators, public health metrics, and infrastructure conditions. We do not have anything comparable for the state of American correctional facilities. A well-designed monitoring system that tracks overcrowding, rates of violence, healthcare access, staffing levels, correctional officer integrity, sanitation, temperature, and the availability of rehabilitation programming across facilities would allow problems to be identified before they become crises. It would also make it considerably harder to ignore them.
These questions are not simply academic or those posed by prison activists. They have direct consequences for the 1.9 million people currently incarcerated in the United States, for the correctional workers who work in deteriorating and dangerous conditions, and for the communities to which the vast majority of incarcerated people will eventually return. Poorly funded, poorly monitored facilities do not simply punish the people inside them. They pose serious public safety concerns to everyone outside them.
The argument that prisoners deserve poor conditions because they committed crimes is both morally bankrupt and empirically counterproductive. People who leave prison without skills, without adequate healthcare, and without having been treated with basic human dignity are more likely to return. That’s not a liberal talking point. It is the consensus of the research literature.
We currently spend more on immigration detention than on the basic conditions of the facilities where sentenced prisoners serve their time. That tells us something about our priorities. It should prompt us to ask whether those priorities reflect evidence, or simply the political convenience of a public that would rather not think about what happens behind prison walls.
Photo credit
Title: Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, New York (2007).
Photographer: Xamreb
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Clinton_correctional_facility_Dannemora_NY_2007-scaled.jpg17032560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-03-01 05:01:172026-03-01 05:01:17What Are the Most Important Questions to Ask About US Prison Conditions?
This past week, I rescued my favorite reusable shopping bag from our own trash bin. My wife had thrown it away.
This wasn’t because it was splitting at the seams; I only noticed that after I rescued it. She threw it away because she’s never liked it. And this isn’t the first time I’ve rescued this particular bag.
I spotted it a couple of years ago in a trash receptacle at a Rewe supermarket in Berlin. A man and woman who looked like street people with substance abuse issues had used it to return bottles for refunds, then discarded it.
I immediately saw potential: it was oversized and made of sturdy plastic, with long handles that let me carry it over my shoulder rather than straining my hands with a heavy load. It also meant I could carry everything in one trip instead of juggling multiple bags.
I took it home, washed out the stale beer smell, and it became my favorite shopping bag.
It’s not a particularly attractive item. From a fashion point of view, it’s actually quite ugly, even tacky in a suburban kind of way. On one side is a poorly reproduced photo of a panda (reminding me of the DC Zoo), and on the other are supermarket vegetables.
I appreciate the small irony: it’s an Edeka bag (a competing German supermarket chain) that I found discarded at Rewe.
I’ve even packed it when I travel. It carries groceries, books, and recycling.
Most importantly, I consider rescuing and using this bag an act of defiance against a culture that treats everything as disposable.
Consumer culture encourages disposing of old items and purchasing new ones. Minimalism argues that attachment is unhealthy. But despite an overabundance of reusable bags competing for space in our pantry, I’m not in a rush to throw this one out.
The reason is simple: objects with stories resist disposability.
We live in a culture with contradictory messages about possessions. Planned obsolescence forces us to abandon rather than fix things once they show wear. Marketing constantly pushes us to want something new. Minimalism reinforces this activity by calling attachment to objects pathological.
But this bag isn’t just a bag. It’s a story about resourcefulness, recycling, and noticing what others overlook. It represents a moment in Berlin when I saw value where others saw trash. To a certain extent, getting rid of it would mean erasing that story.
This object isn’t just a utility; it’s also about identity.
I’ve noticed a pattern in what I keep versus what I discard. I hold onto clothing with stories, books I’ve read and marked up, objects I’ve rescued or repurposed, even when my wife tries to throw them away. I can let go of purely functional things that don’t carry a narrative. The difference isn’t about value or cost; it’s about whether something is identity-bearing or just useful.
This isn’t separation anxiety. It’s resistance to treating objects, and by extension, almost everything, as disposable. Maybe the pathological thing is a culture that insists we should feel nothing for our possessions, that everything should be easily replaceable the moment it shows wear.
That’s why I’ll keep using this rescued bag until it literally can’t hold anything anymore. Not because I’m pathological, but because I refuse to treat objects with stories as disposable.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Reusable-Plastic-Shopping-Bag-scaled.jpeg25602225Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-02-22 04:19:422026-02-22 04:20:28Why I Keep a Shopping Bag I Rescued from the Trash in Berlin
After heavy snowfalls in American cities, people dig out their parked cars, and some try to “hold” the cleared space with lawn chairs, trash cans, traffic cones, etc. The logic is familiar: I did the work, so I should get the benefit.
Last week, my neighborhood listserv lit up with complaints from people who had shoveled out their cars, left an object to reserve the space, and returned later to find another vehicle parked there. Then they described the inconvenience of circling the neighborhood, or adjacent ones, looking for another spot. One resident emphasized that this had happened multiple times and argued that, because they worked as a nurse in a hospital, convenient access to their vehicle was essential to their job.
Understandably, not everyone can work remotely, and reliable transportation matters. But these practical concerns don’t answer the underlying question at stake in these disputes: Does the act of shoveling snow create a legitimate claim to a public parking space?
The intuition behind “snow dibs” closely resembles a popular interpretation of John Locke’s labor theory of property. The basic idea (stripped of its qualifications) is that mixing one’s labor with something generates ownership. Clear a field, build a house, improve unused land, and the property somehow becomes yours. This intuition is powerful, and it feels fair. But the logic breaks down when applied to public space.
Labor alone does not create ownership, even in private property systems. Labor can justify ownership only within a legal framework that already recognizes title, boundaries, and exclusion. Clearing snow from a public street does none of those things. The street was not yours before you shoveled, even if you have a yearly parking pass, and your effort does not magically convert it into private property afterward.
These snow shovelers are applying private property logic to a public good. They treat public parking as a common resource that can be claimed through use or maintenance. They feel fairness demands compensation for effort. This is a moral claim, not a legal one. And they’re asserting a vernacular norm that conflicts with municipal law.
This is why the belief feels so compelling. Typically, effort and improvement are connected to ownership. Build a deck on your house, plant a garden in your yard, and those improvements become yours because the legal system allows it. But public space works differently. Use is temporary and non-exclusive. Just like a picnic table in a public park, no individual can legitimately claim ongoing control over a specific street parking spot.
Snow shoveling produces a hybrid situation. It is an effort combined with temporary use. It feels like ownership even though it is not. The result is a clash between two systems:
Municipal law says street parking is public and first-come, first-served. Vernacular norm says shoveling creates a temporary claim that others ought to respect.
Cities (which are typically too busy cleaning the snow from busy streets) often exacerbate this conflict through inconsistent enforcement. When rules against reserving public parking aren’t enforced, informal norms take over. Boston’s well-known (and unofficial) “dibs” culture is tolerated. Meanwhile, other cities explicitly ban chair-saving. In many neighborhoods, enforcement is inconsistent or nonexistent, leaving residents to negotiate (or fight – guns drawn or fired) these norms themselves.
This recurring dispute reveals a larger question: can labor generate claims to public space, and if so, who decides their scope and duration? Similar conflicts play out with street vendors claiming sidewalk space, graffiti writers and street artists putting their work on urban surfaces, or communities creating unsanctioned memorials, each asserting informal claims the city may not recognize.
The answer, legally speaking, is no. Shoveling snow does not create parking rights. But the moral intuition behind the claim is strong enough that people enforce it anyway through chairs, notes, social pressure, and occasionally real conflict.
Shoveling out a car after a major snowfall is hard work, and it feels unfair when that effort yields no lasting benefit. But fairness and legality are not the same thing. Public goods do not function like private property. Labor does not generate exclusive rights to shared space, even when it feels as though it should.
Until cities consistently enforce their own rules or neighborhoods settle on a shared norm, these disputes will recur every winter. For now, snowstorms turn street parking into a kind of urban Wild West, where moral intuition, informal norms, and public law will repeatedly collide.
Photo Credit
Photographer: Woody Wonderworks
Title: “Reserved Parking Space…Unfair?” (2016)
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2026-02-09-at-12.40.01-PM.png9781524Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-02-09 18:30:092026-02-09 18:48:36Why Shoveling Your Car out of the Snow Doesn’t Create Parking Rights (But Feels Like It Should)
What Are the Most Important Questions to Ask About US Prison Conditions?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossIn the United States, numerous standards have been developed for the operation of correctional facilities. States and the federal government have constitutional protections. Professional bodies like the American Correctional Association and the American Jail Association offer accreditation. Courts have weighed in repeatedly. And yet most people who have spent time inside a correctional facility as an inmate, a worker, or a researcher know that the gap between those standards and actual conditions is often great, and sometimes unconscionable.
The question is not whether American prison conditions are bad, but why we keep failing to fix them. Three obstacles explain the impasse: little to no independent measurement, no meaningful enforcement, and no political incentive to care. These failures are sustained, in part, because we ask the wrong questions, and when we ask the right ones, we ask them of the wrong people. Five questions, in particular, about prison conditions deserve more attention.
Who is collecting the information, and who controls it?
Most data on prison conditions comes from the institutions being evaluated (i.e., state corrections departments, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and facility administrators). This is a structural problem. Similar to the problems encountered with COMPSTAT (the relatively recent data-driven police accountability and crime tracking system) when the entity responsible for conditions is also the one measuring them, the reliability of that data can be questioned. We would not accept this logic in any other domain of public accountability. Thus, we shouldn’t accept it here.
Whose voices are being included and whose are being excluded?
Scholarly research and consulting reports have their place, but they are not sufficient. The people with the most direct and detailed knowledge of prison conditions are typically the inmates themselves, their families, and the correctional officers who work alongside them daily. These voices are frequently underrepresented in official assessments. Gathering these constituencies’ opinions should be done in a serious manner, and not simply be a cute add-on. This information can and should be collected in a rigorous manner, through structured interviews, surveys, and independent review processes that protect participants from retaliation.
Is the problem systemic or localized?
When conditions at a specific correctional facility come to light through litigation, a death, or a news media investigation, administrators and state departments of corrections frequently treat it as an isolated case. Sometimes it is. More often, it reflects long-term patterns that exist across a correctional system. Without consistent, comparable, and meaningful data collected at the facility level and aggregated at the state and federal levels, we have no reliable way to distinguish between the two. This matters enormously for how we respond.
What happens when findings are ignored?
Standards mean nothing without enforcement. Accreditation processes, legislative oversight, and court orders have all produced findings that were subsequently minimized, delayed, or ignored. The question of what accountability actually looks like is one that the field has never answered adequately.
What would an early warning system look like?
We have dashboards for economic indicators, public health metrics, and infrastructure conditions. We do not have anything comparable for the state of American correctional facilities. A well-designed monitoring system that tracks overcrowding, rates of violence, healthcare access, staffing levels, correctional officer integrity, sanitation, temperature, and the availability of rehabilitation programming across facilities would allow problems to be identified before they become crises. It would also make it considerably harder to ignore them.
These questions are not simply academic or those posed by prison activists. They have direct consequences for the 1.9 million people currently incarcerated in the United States, for the correctional workers who work in deteriorating and dangerous conditions, and for the communities to which the vast majority of incarcerated people will eventually return. Poorly funded, poorly monitored facilities do not simply punish the people inside them. They pose serious public safety concerns to everyone outside them.
The argument that prisoners deserve poor conditions because they committed crimes is both morally bankrupt and empirically counterproductive. People who leave prison without skills, without adequate healthcare, and without having been treated with basic human dignity are more likely to return. That’s not a liberal talking point. It is the consensus of the research literature.
We currently spend more on immigration detention than on the basic conditions of the facilities where sentenced prisoners serve their time. That tells us something about our priorities. It should prompt us to ask whether those priorities reflect evidence, or simply the political convenience of a public that would rather not think about what happens behind prison walls.
Photo credit
Title: Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, New York (2007).
Photographer: Xamreb
Why I Keep a Shopping Bag I Rescued from the Trash in Berlin
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThis past week, I rescued my favorite reusable shopping bag from our own trash bin. My wife had thrown it away.
This wasn’t because it was splitting at the seams; I only noticed that after I rescued it. She threw it away because she’s never liked it. And this isn’t the first time I’ve rescued this particular bag.
I spotted it a couple of years ago in a trash receptacle at a Rewe supermarket in Berlin. A man and woman who looked like street people with substance abuse issues had used it to return bottles for refunds, then discarded it.
I immediately saw potential: it was oversized and made of sturdy plastic, with long handles that let me carry it over my shoulder rather than straining my hands with a heavy load. It also meant I could carry everything in one trip instead of juggling multiple bags.
I took it home, washed out the stale beer smell, and it became my favorite shopping bag.
It’s not a particularly attractive item. From a fashion point of view, it’s actually quite ugly, even tacky in a suburban kind of way. On one side is a poorly reproduced photo of a panda (reminding me of the DC Zoo), and on the other are supermarket vegetables.
I appreciate the small irony: it’s an Edeka bag (a competing German supermarket chain) that I found discarded at Rewe.
I’ve even packed it when I travel. It carries groceries, books, and recycling.
Most importantly, I consider rescuing and using this bag an act of defiance against a culture that treats everything as disposable.
Consumer culture encourages disposing of old items and purchasing new ones. Minimalism argues that attachment is unhealthy. But despite an overabundance of reusable bags competing for space in our pantry, I’m not in a rush to throw this one out.
The reason is simple: objects with stories resist disposability.
We live in a culture with contradictory messages about possessions. Planned obsolescence forces us to abandon rather than fix things once they show wear. Marketing constantly pushes us to want something new. Minimalism reinforces this activity by calling attachment to objects pathological.
But this bag isn’t just a bag. It’s a story about resourcefulness, recycling, and noticing what others overlook. It represents a moment in Berlin when I saw value where others saw trash. To a certain extent, getting rid of it would mean erasing that story.
This object isn’t just a utility; it’s also about identity.
I’ve noticed a pattern in what I keep versus what I discard. I hold onto clothing with stories, books I’ve read and marked up, objects I’ve rescued or repurposed, even when my wife tries to throw them away. I can let go of purely functional things that don’t carry a narrative. The difference isn’t about value or cost; it’s about whether something is identity-bearing or just useful.
This isn’t separation anxiety. It’s resistance to treating objects, and by extension, almost everything, as disposable. Maybe the pathological thing is a culture that insists we should feel nothing for our possessions, that everything should be easily replaceable the moment it shows wear.
That’s why I’ll keep using this rescued bag until it literally can’t hold anything anymore. Not because I’m pathological, but because I refuse to treat objects with stories as disposable.
Why Shoveling Your Car out of the Snow Doesn’t Create Parking Rights (But Feels Like It Should)
/by Jeffrey Ian RossAfter heavy snowfalls in American cities, people dig out their parked cars, and some try to “hold” the cleared space with lawn chairs, trash cans, traffic cones, etc. The logic is familiar: I did the work, so I should get the benefit.
Last week, my neighborhood listserv lit up with complaints from people who had shoveled out their cars, left an object to reserve the space, and returned later to find another vehicle parked there. Then they described the inconvenience of circling the neighborhood, or adjacent ones, looking for another spot. One resident emphasized that this had happened multiple times and argued that, because they worked as a nurse in a hospital, convenient access to their vehicle was essential to their job.
Understandably, not everyone can work remotely, and reliable transportation matters. But these practical concerns don’t answer the underlying question at stake in these disputes: Does the act of shoveling snow create a legitimate claim to a public parking space?
The intuition behind “snow dibs” closely resembles a popular interpretation of John Locke’s labor theory of property. The basic idea (stripped of its qualifications) is that mixing one’s labor with something generates ownership. Clear a field, build a house, improve unused land, and the property somehow becomes yours. This intuition is powerful, and it feels fair. But the logic breaks down when applied to public space.
Labor alone does not create ownership, even in private property systems. Labor can justify ownership only within a legal framework that already recognizes title, boundaries, and exclusion. Clearing snow from a public street does none of those things. The street was not yours before you shoveled, even if you have a yearly parking pass, and your effort does not magically convert it into private property afterward.
These snow shovelers are applying private property logic to a public good. They treat public parking as a common resource that can be claimed through use or maintenance. They feel fairness demands compensation for effort. This is a moral claim, not a legal one. And they’re asserting a vernacular norm that conflicts with municipal law.
This is why the belief feels so compelling. Typically, effort and improvement are connected to ownership. Build a deck on your house, plant a garden in your yard, and those improvements become yours because the legal system allows it. But public space works differently. Use is temporary and non-exclusive. Just like a picnic table in a public park, no individual can legitimately claim ongoing control over a specific street parking spot.
Snow shoveling produces a hybrid situation. It is an effort combined with temporary use. It feels like ownership even though it is not. The result is a clash between two systems:
Municipal law says street parking is public and first-come, first-served. Vernacular norm says shoveling creates a temporary claim that others ought to respect.
Cities (which are typically too busy cleaning the snow from busy streets) often exacerbate this conflict through inconsistent enforcement. When rules against reserving public parking aren’t enforced, informal norms take over. Boston’s well-known (and unofficial) “dibs” culture is tolerated. Meanwhile, other cities explicitly ban chair-saving. In many neighborhoods, enforcement is inconsistent or nonexistent, leaving residents to negotiate (or fight – guns drawn or fired) these norms themselves.
This recurring dispute reveals a larger question: can labor generate claims to public space, and if so, who decides their scope and duration? Similar conflicts play out with street vendors claiming sidewalk space, graffiti writers and street artists putting their work on urban surfaces, or communities creating unsanctioned memorials, each asserting informal claims the city may not recognize.
The answer, legally speaking, is no. Shoveling snow does not create parking rights. But the moral intuition behind the claim is strong enough that people enforce it anyway through chairs, notes, social pressure, and occasionally real conflict.
Shoveling out a car after a major snowfall is hard work, and it feels unfair when that effort yields no lasting benefit. But fairness and legality are not the same thing. Public goods do not function like private property. Labor does not generate exclusive rights to shared space, even when it feels as though it should.
Until cities consistently enforce their own rules or neighborhoods settle on a shared norm, these disputes will recur every winter. For now, snowstorms turn street parking into a kind of urban Wild West, where moral intuition, informal norms, and public law will repeatedly collide.
Photo Credit
Photographer: Woody Wonderworks
Title: “Reserved Parking Space…Unfair?” (2016)