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The article presents response to the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys' paper "The Dangerous Myths of Drug Sentencing Reform." Topics discussed include federal prison population explosion due to mandatory minimum drug sentences, data on incarcerated Americans from 1920-2013 and drug offenders sentenced to mandatory minimum sentences; and data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission revealing false claim on violent drug trafficking.

In the second half of the twentieth century consensus became the language through which scientists and other experts spoke truth to power and provided expert advice for policy making. Historical scholarship on science policy has acknowledged this trend but has not explained how consensus came to play such a large role in the relationship between experts and policy makers. This paper examines two historical case studies from the mid-twentieth century in which consensus was introduced--the failed consensus report experiments of the American Economic Association and the successful establishment of the National Research Council's consensus studies. These examples demonstrate that consensus was not a natural or obvious choice. Rather, the choice was driven by the growth and definition of the postwar scientific community and its negotiated relationship to the Cold War national security state. In this context, consensus became associated with depersonalized and objective knowledge. As it reinforces the notion of a divide between science and politics, consensus has remained an instrumental part of the relationship between the NRC and its patrons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bloody confrontation between Utes and the U.S. Cavalry at the Colorado Ute Indian Agency in 1879 was a significant chapter in U.S. history. The government and Colorado citizens used this battle as a rhetorical flashpoint to justify removal of Utes from their land. This conflict presents an opportunity to revisit nineteenth-century violence over land. I suggest that a religious studies framework can deepen our understanding of the entanglement of tensions among ethnicity, morality, and land use. Ute Indians pastured hundreds of horses on land that Nathan Meeker, the white Indian agent, wished to plow. This paper argues that notions of religious and racial difference framed the land conflict between Meeker and the Utes, even as both groups viewed land as a means to gain status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that Aldo Leopold's pursuit of unpeopled wilderness had a disturbing corollary--a disdain for human population growth that culminated in a critique of providing food and medical aid to developing nations. Although Leopold never fully shared these ideas with the public, he explored them in multiple unpublished manuscripts, and he submitted a first draft of one of these essays to a press. Leopold also exchanged these views with the most popular environmental Malthusian of his day, William Vogt, whose exposition of nearly identical arguments won him national fame. By revealing connections between wilderness thought and callous proposed social policy, this paper identifies a new dimension of what environmental historian William Cronon called the ''Trouble with Wilderness. '' This manuscript further calls into question whether the concept of wilderness is inherently exclusionary and misanthropic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first four decades of the twentieth century, horse racing was one of America's most popular spectator sports. Members of America's elite took to breeding and racing horses as one of their preferred pastimes. Coinciding with an increase in immigration and the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, the idea that careful breeding of thoroughbreds would result in improved horses resonated with Americans worried about racial degeneration. Scientists committed to racial ideologies looked to thoroughbreds--whose owners and breeders maintained extensive pedigree records--to understand the science of genetic inheritance. Harry H. Laughlin, superintendent of research at the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, pored over breeding charts and race results to develop a mathematical model of inheritance that he called the ''inheritance coefficient.'' He believed his careful study of horses would yield findings that he and his fellow eugenicists could apply to humans. Thoroughbred breeders followed trends in genetics while contributing to the production of scientific knowledge. Pedigree charts available to bettors at race tracks helped normalize concepts of biological inheritance for race track attendees of all classes. Horse racing's popularity in the United States contributed to the diffusion of the concept of biological race that originated as an ideological project of the ruling class. This paper analyzes the role of thoroughbred breeding and racing in the formation and popularization of racial ideology by situating breeding farms as sites of knowledge production and racecourses as places that exhibited performances of racial science for large audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]