Over at the Cato Institute, Steven Teles wrote a piece about conservatives and how we can de-incarcerate. A group of people, myself included, are writing response pieces. Here is mine: A few years back, for a brief while, it really did seem as if conservative Republicans were interested in reducing the number of prisoners in…
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Shane Bauer researched and wrote an amazingly important article for Mother Jones. (It’s a book really, at 35,000 words.) Bauer because a prison guard for a few months, took notes, and wrote about it. It can be that simple. You really should read all this. It’s gripping. And big props to Mother Jones for doing…
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Apparently, in the Stanford rapist case, the judge. If you’re still in denial that our justice system can be mean and even racist, would you at least consider that it often benefits the rich and privileged? And then can you see that these two statements are essentially one and the same? Here’s very interesting take…
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I don’t know much about LA county. The LA Sheriff’s Department has 18,000 employees and 9,100 sworn officers. And running a huge jail system ain’t easy. But Sheriff Baca and his cronies have been in trouble for a long while. His people tried to strong-arm an FBI agent investigating his department. Not cool. Perhaps we…
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I’m not for “three strikes and you’re out.” I am, however, supportive of 32 strikes and you’re out (I’d even go down to 20). Kari Bazemore, who has a history of random violence, slashed a woman walking down 23rd St at 6AM. There’s something particularly chilling about the pointless randomness of it. No argument. No…
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This goes against common accepted wisdom, which refers to a recidivism rate (ending up behind bars again within three years) of about two-thirds . Here’s another good piece by Leon Neyfakh in Slate, an interview with William Rhodes. The basic gist is this. Some people recidivate a lot while others do not at all. So…
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In the Washington Post. In the 11 months since the passage of Prop 47, more than 4,300 state prisoners have been resentenced and then released. Drug arrests in Los Angeles County have dropped by a third. Jail bookings are down by a quarter. … Robberies up 23 percent in San Francisco. Property theft up 11…
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Meanwhile, with people too busy complaining about cops, I think we’re missing the big picture. We really need to prioritize a bit here. In 2010 a 16-year-old boy was accused of stealing/robbing a backpack. He spent 3 years in a Rikers Island jail. Three years. He could have gotten out earlier, but he would have…
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This is the second paragraph of an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates: When Walter Scott fled from the North Charleston police, he was not merely fleeing Thomas Slager, he was attempting to flee incarceration. He was doing this because we have decided that the criminal-justice system is the best tool for dealing with men who can’t,…
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“According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Mr. Hinton is the 152nd person exonerated from an American death row since 1973.” You’d think people would care more.