I can’t think of anything much more unconscionable than a selling a kid to jail for kickback money. Then multiply that times 2,000 and you’ve got Judges Mark Ciaverella and Michael Conahan. Things were different in the Luzerne County juvenile courtroom, and everyone knew it. Proceedings on average took less than two minutes. Detention center…
Read more
Is this man the dumbest criminal in Pennsylvania? There’s so much competition. Here’s the story in the BBC: Retired police chief John Comparetto was attending the meeting of 300 officers when he was allegedly held up at gunpoint in the men’s toilets. … He described the suspect as “probably the dumbest criminal in Pennsylvania”. The…
Read more
It’s official. I don’t like them. See it says so right here: Professor Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who teaches law enforcement classes at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the Rockefeller laws “don’t make sense from a legal level or a moral level. They treat every problem as if prison…
Read more
The Oakland Tribunereports on this as does the San Francisco Chronicle: “The funeral will be unprecedented in at least one other respect – all 815 members of the Oakland Police Department are being allowed to attend.” It is set for 11AM.
I spend a lot of time defending the media. That’s an unpopular position among 90% of police officers. Well I’m not going to defend the S.F. Chroniclehere. Just yesterday the paper decided they needed to report “both” sides of the cop killings in Oakland. In their story, to my great dismay, they did what what…
Read more
I love smart cops. And I love cops than can write. After all, a lot of policing is about what you can articulate in writing. Here’s an op-ed in the New York Daily News from NYPD Captain Brandon del Pozo. He’s smarter than your average bear. The bailout: What would cops and firefighters do to…
Read more
The story in the LA Times: Most children who enter group probation homes in Los Angeles County remain in lives of crime and drugs years later, according to a new Rand Corp. study. … The think tank’s researchers began tracking nearly 450 youths who entered group homes in 1999 and 2000. The final survey, taken…
Read more
“This is a major impact on a small community,” said Paul Lashway, a Norwich resident and prison guard at Camp Pharsalia for the past 10 years. He is also a steward for the local corrections officers’ union. “I thought we were trying to save jobs,” he said. “Here, they’re trying to take ’em.” Here’s the…
Read more
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. It’s just another sign of the failure of the drug war. What’s our exit strategy? Here’s the story in the New York Times.
So I’m trying to write and Schoolly-D’s “A Gangster Story” comes on. I hear him say “B-more” and “yo-boy” and perk up. I’ve always liked slang and wondered about the term “yo-boy” because it’s so common in Baltimore’s ‘hood but I’ve never heard it outside of Baltimore (what’s a “yo-boy?” You gotta read my book.…
Read more