So says the Washington Times about my defense of flogging. Though I’d say overall it’s neutral (to mildly negative). The reviewer seems upset that the book is actually more about prison than flogging (but of course, that’s the point) and also that I didn’t convince her that flogging is the answer. Oh well. Here’s the…
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This must have been one of the easiest suspect-IDs in world history: Bangladeshi woman cuts off rapist’s penis and gives it to police.
An NIJ report says Tasers are fine when used on “healthy, normal, nonstressed, nonintoxicated persons.” Okaaaay… [Thanks to The Agitator] [Update: I just read the report. It is quite an unambiguous green-light for Taser use: “Law enforcement need not refrain from using CEDs to place uncooperative or combative subjects in custody.” It’s that “uncooperative” part…
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I just got this gem of a line from a police officer who just turned in his retirement papers: “This job is like cigarettes–hazardous to your health, addictive, and occasionally strangely satisfying.”
I received an email yesterday from Lorne Caplan, who gave me permission to republish it with attribution. I’ve edited it slightly: As a former investment banker and having recently been freed from prison in 2007, I have to agree with much of what you said today. Most importantly, it is the culture of eternal punishment…
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These were the two officers who stranded two 15-year-olds far from their home. They were not the first officers to do this. They may be the last. (My earlier post.) From the Sun: [Judge] Doory said the fact that Johnson was left in Howard County without shoes “stood like a monument” in the middle of…
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New York City is certainly not immune to destructive urban “progress.” Here’s a shot from Shorpy of Cortland Street from 1908. Here’s the view today: But what’s really interesting is what happens when you turn around. Back then, it would have looked much like the picture above. You were in the heart of what was…
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The other day I saw a young black man on the corner of 32nd Street and 6th Avenue with his arm up, trying to hail a cab. He wasn’t particularly well dressed, but he didn’t look like a hoodlum (the same could have been said of me). “How many empty cabs are going to pass…
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James Q. Wilson writes some good stuff on crime in the Wall Street Journal. But this worries me: Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and testable theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not…
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OK. That’s not really news. But this report is kind of a big deal. So says the BBC, the “Global war on drugs has ‘failed’.” Imagine that. The panel included former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, the current Prime…
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