The Timesand a grim read about a boy with mental problems, gone bad. It’s interesting but in all-too-many ways nothing new. But what struck me was this great example of doublespeak: Mr. Clergeau was discharged … with the expectation that he would be imprisoned. Hospital authorities told the state police that he was “not a…
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From the Singapore Straits Times: A Briton on a visit here was charged on Friday with outraging the modesty of a 30-year-old woman in a Clarke Quay club. Austin Charles Arnold Cowburn, 34, is alleged to have grabbed her buttock in the China One pub at 4am on April 3 2011. AOL Travel adds: The…
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Three cheers for actor Matt Damon! You know, Matt and I have a lot in common. Both our mothers are retired school teachers. Both of us went to school in Cambridge, Mass. And both of us are devilishly good looking! But seriously, both of us know that the answer to bad teaching is not job…
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From the AP: The number of homicides in Mexico rose by nearly a quarter in 2010 compared to the year before as the drug war intensified across the country, Mexican statisticians said Thursday. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography recorded 24,374 homicides over the course of last year, a 23 percent increase from 19,803…
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Thoughtful piece by Thane Rosenbaum in today’s New York Times: It’s difficult to have honest conversations about revenge. Seeing someone receive his just deserts often feels righteous and richly deserved, and yet society regards vengeance as primitive and barbaric. Governments warn citizens not to take justice into their own hands, insisting that the state alone…
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Omar from The Wire, that is. The story from the Balto Sun. [thanks to a reader]
USA Today has five ways to fix our prison system. I have a sixth.
…enters it’s second week. From the S.F. Weekly: Activists and inmates say the strike is meant to call attention to inhumane conditions in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit (SHU), where dangerous prisoners are lodged in small, windowless cells, often without access to other people or open space for extended periods. Critics of the SHU say…
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Those Mexican drug kingpins are dropping like flies. By my count thismakes eight! Let me know when the violence stops.
Gregory Hladky of the Hartford Advocate writes one of the better pieces on In Defense of Flogging (not that I like to pick favorites, because like the children I don’t have, I love them all). But this one ismore interesting than many.