Statistics: Posted by admin — Sun May 15, 2016 9:07 am

Statistics: Posted by admin — Sun May 15, 2016 3:22 am

Statistics: Posted by admin — Wed May 11, 2016 9:12 am

Statistics: Posted by admin — Thu Apr 28, 2016 7:25 pm

are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them. [33]

National Guardsmen search homes in Plainfield, New Jersey, for carbines and ammunition stolen from an arms maker.



National Guardsmen search homes in Plainfield, New Jersey, for carbines and ammunition stolen from an arms maker.



The inside of a Plainfield home after National Guardsmen and the state police have finished their search for arms.

-- Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission Report, 1967)

6. Sodom Be Gomorrah; Abraham Be Isaac

Then we got to stories like Sodom and Gomorrah. All I remembered about that story is that they were these two sinful cities, like Las Vegas and Reno or something, and God got mad and wiped them out. And Lot's wife looked back when she was told not to and she got turned into a pillar of salt.

But the nuns of my grade school didn't explain to us about what happens right before they flee. Right before they flee, Lot is visited by these two angels, who are masquerading as two men, and they come and stay overnight at his house. And this mob forms outside and they yell, "Send out those two angel-like men to us so we can have sex with them!" And Lot yells "No!" (Which I think is a basic rule of hospitality: don't give up your guests to be raped by the angry mob outside.)



But then, what does he say next? He says, "Why don't you take my daughters and rape and do what you will with them? They're virgins!"

Okay, so Lot is evil, right? How is it that the story we know about him is about his wife getting turned into a pillar of salt? Maybe that was her only way out. Maybe being a big pillar of salt is preferable to being married to Lot!

Anyway, after Lot and his two traumatized daughters flee Sodom and Gomorra, they all go up to a cave in the mountains. And during the night, Lot's two daughters get Lot drunk and then rape him. Do they do this in revenge of what their father did to them? No. The Bible says it's because there aren't any other men around. Even though, the Bible also says that they're not that far from a city named Zoar. So, I guess no men around for maybe a few miles?

And wait a minute, so Lot's two daughters just had to drug and rape somebody? And then I guess if you're their dad and you're the only one there....

Okay, I knew the Bible had nutty stories, but I thought they'd be wedged in amongst an ocean of inspiration and history. But instead, the stories just got darker and even more convoluted.

This Old Testament God makes the grizzliest tests of people's loyalty. Like when he asks Abraham to murder his son, Isaac. As a kid, we were taught to admire it. I caught my breath reading it. We were taught to admire it?

What kind of sadistic test of loyalty is that, to ask someone to kill his or her own child? And isn't the proper answer, "No! I will not kill my child, or any child, even if it means eternal punishment in hell!"?

At the next Bible study class Father Tom reminded us, "That Isaac represents what matters to Abraham most. And that's what God asks us to give up for him."

I said, "But loving and protecting and caring for the welfare of your child is such a deep ethical, loving instinct and act. So, what if what matters to you most is your own loving behavior? Should we be willing to give up our ethics for God?"

And he said, "No! No, it's because your ethics, because your ethics IS your love and faith in God." That confused me a little bit, but I decided to just let that one go. But then, I found out that Abraham is not the only person willing to murder his own child for God. They're all over the place in the Bible.

For example, in the book of Judges, this guy named Jephtheh tells God that if he can win this battle, he will kill the first person who greets him when he comes home as a burnt offering. And who is the first person he sees? His only child, his beloved daughter, who runs up to him playing with tambourines and singing. "Hi daddy... what?"



And does God say, "No, don't kill your only child as a burnt offering to me!" Or even, "Jephtheh, who did you expect to be the first person to greet you when you came home?"

No, it appears the most important point of this story is that Jephtheh allows his beautiful daughter to go off into the woods for two months to mourn her virginity (I kept thinking, "Run! Run!") before she comes back and he kills her... by lighting her on fire.

Even if you leave aside the creepy sacrifice-your-own-offspring stories, the laws of the Old Testament were really hard to take. Leviticus and Deuteronomy are filled with archaic, just hard to imagine laws. Like if a man has sex with an animal, both the man and the animal should be killed. Which I could almost understand for the man, but the animal? Because the animal was a willing participant? Because now the animal's had the taste of human sex and won't be satisfied without it?

Or my personal favorite law in the Bible: in Deuteronomy, it says if you're a woman, married to a man, who gets into a fight with another man, and you try to help him out by grabbing onto the genitals of his opponent, the Bible says you immediately have to have your hand chopped off.

8. The New Testament



But, oh dear. Well, first of all, Jesus was much angrier than I had expected him to be. I mean, I knew Jesus got angry with all those moneychangers in the temple, but I really had no idea that he was so angry so much of the time. And very impatient.

Jesus says that he speaks in parables because the people, they just don't understand anything else. But the parables are often foggy and meaningless. And Jesus is snippy when even the disciples don't get them. He says to them, "If you don't understand this parable, then how can you understand any parable?" And "Are you incapable of understanding?" I kept thinking, "Don't teach in parables then. It's not working! Even your staff doesn't understand them! Why don't you just say what you mean?"

Okay, so, Jesus isn't so patient and I think he picked a very ineffective lesson giving technique, and he's angry most of the time, but that doesn't make him bad. It's just, wow, I really expected someone else.

Some of the parables are not just foggy, but to me, they're really sort of offensive. Like, in Luke, Jesus helps us understand God's relationship with humans by telling us a story about how God treats people the way people treat their slaves. They beat some more than they beat other ones.

Okay, I know this was a different time and everything, and I really tried to keep that in mind as the Bible refers to slavery all over the place. And not only does it not say it's wrong, I mean, the Bible gives advice about how you're supposed to keep your slaves and how slaves should behave obediently at all times to their masters.

But I don't know, I sort of thought the Son of God would say slavery was wrong. But no, Jesus does not say that. In fact, he uses slavery as an example of how God treats people.

It was really hard to stay on Jesus' side when he started saying really aggressive, just hateful things. Like in Luke, Chapter 19, Jesus says that he is like a King who says, "Anyone who does not recognize me, bring them here and slaughter them before me." Or in John, Chapter 15, where Jesus says, "Anyone who does not believe in me is like a withered branch that will be cast into the fire and burned!" In Matthew he says, "I come not to bring peace, but a sword." In Luke he says, "And if you don't have a sword, sell your clothes and buy one."

Then Jesus just starts acting downright crazy. Like in Matthew, Chapter 21, when this fig tree doesn't have a fig for Jesus to eat, he condemns the fig tree to death. That's right, Jesus condemns a fig tree to death. Not a parable, by the way. Just Jesus pissed off that the fig tree didn't have a fig for him to eat when he wanted one! Not exactly the Prince of Peace who taught us to turn the other cheek....

And then, there's family. I have to say, that for me, the most deeply upsetting thing about Jesus, is his family values. Which is amazing when you think how there's so many groups out there who say they base their family values on the Bible.

I mean he seems to have no real close ties to his parents. He puts his mother off cruelly, over and over again. At the wedding feast he says to her, "Woman, what have I to do with you?" And once, while he was speaking to a crowd, Mary waited patiently off to the side to talk to him, and Jesus said to the disciples, "Send her away, you are my family now."

Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell this exact same story, but Mark actually tells us why Mary was there to see Jesus. He says, Mary came to see Jesus to restrain him, because the people were saying, "He's gone out of his mind." I kept thinking, "Yes! Let's go get Jesus and get him some help!"

Anyway, Jesus discourages any contact his converts have with their own families. As we know, he himself does not marry or have children and he explicitly tells his followers not to have families as well, and if they do, they should just abandon them.

Now, mostly Jesus says this because he believed the End Of All Time was imminent. Jesus said over and over again that the people who were alive when he was alive would not die naturally, but see the End Of Times. He tells us this in Mathew, Mark and Luke.

So, okay, Jesus tells us not to have families because he (mistakenly) believed that the End Of All Time was imminent, but then he tells us not to take care of the families that we do have already. In Luke, Chapter 14, Jesus says, "Anyone who comes to me and does not hate father and mother, brothers and sisters, wife and children cannot be my disciple."

I mean, isn't that what cults do? Get you to reject your family in order to inculcate you?

So, that's the New Testament family values for you. The supposed big improvement over the Old Testament family values, which seemed to me to be mostly about incest and mass slaughter and protecting your own specific genetic line at all costs.

9. St. Paul & The Book Of Revelation



After the Gospels, there's a bunch of letters written by the early Christians, the most important of which were written by St. Paul. Now, the Bible's view of women is dreadful in general, and I know this was a different time and everything. But St. Paul? Man, he really gets right to the point.

St. Paul writes, "Man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or have any authority over a man; she must be silent. If there is anything a woman desires to know, let her ask her husband at home. For Adam was formed first, and then Eve. And it was not the man who was deceived, it was the woman who was deceived and became the sinner."

The Bible. The Bible. The Good Book! The Good News!

I was so disillusioned by the time I finished the epistles, I just didn't think it could get any worse. But, it did. We were just about to read the last, and most oddball book of the Bible: Revelation.

Now, apparently, Revelation was written by St. John, the same person who wrote a Gospel and some of the epistles. The biblical historian Ken Smith says that "If his epistles can be seen as John on pot, then Revelations is John on acid." It describes the End of Days with a little too much gruesome enthusiasm.

Revelation tells us that in heaven there "is a throne, and the One who sat there had the appearance of a jasper." "Around the throne were four living creatures, and they're covered with eyes, front and back. Day and night they never stop saying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come.'" In heaven, Jesus resembles a dead lamb with seven horns and seven eyes. When the gates of Hell are opened, locusts pour out with human faces, wearing tiny crowns, and they sting people with their tails.

Revelation tells us that only 144,000 people will be saved and go to heaven and that none of them will have, quote, "defiled themselves with women." Which I guess excludes most heterosexual men from heaven and, depending on how you interpret that word "defiled," I would say excludes all women, too.

After we finished the Book of Revelation, the entire Bible Study group sat there, dumbfounded, our Bibles on our laps. Father Tom said, "Revelation's a poem about the end of the world?" I said, "Father Tom, I'm having a really hard time with this book." And he told me to, "pray for faith."'

I left the church thinking, "Is this one big practical joke? Where is my God? The Jesus I know? The one that 1 love and the one who loves me?"

I was driving home, and I was stopped at this red light on Crenshaw and Wilshire, and it was a Sunday, and all these people were walking to church, holding their Bibles. And I wanted to roll down the window and say, "Have you read that book? I mean, really!"

I felt like I was in a horror film and the clue to the insanity was not a secret document, it was a book that everyone was holding, that was on every coffee table, the biggest best seller of all time, in every hotel room in the land, the key to the understandings of the faith!

And yet, if you cared enough to glance inside, you found you'd opened the door to an insane asylum, with a bunch of crazy people dancing around saying, "Yippity, yippity yah!" And now I'd shut that door and how could I pretend that I hadn't opened that door?

My mother said, "Julie, I just ignore what I don't like. Why would you do something like read the Bible cover to cover if you weren't just looking for reasons to get upset? You make your life so much harder than it has to be, honey!"

-- Letting Go of God, by Julia Sweeney

Statistics: Posted by admin — Thu Apr 28, 2016 7:24 pm

A number of years ago there began to appear, in the windows of automobiles parked on the streets of American cities, signs which read: "No radio." Rather than express outrage or even annoyance at the possibility of a car break-in, people tried to communicate with the potential thief in conciliatory terms. The translation of "no radio" is: "Please break into someone else's car, there's nothing in mine." These "no radio" signs are flags of urban surrender. They are hand-written capitulations. Instead of "no radio," we need new signs that say "no surrender." [13]

This period [the 1960s through the 1990s] has witnessed an unprecedented decline of the family as a social institution. Families have lost functions, social power, and authority over their members. They have grown smaller in size, less stable, and shorter in life span .... Moreover, there has been a weakening of child-centeredness in American society and culture. Familism as a cultural value has diminished. [14]

Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom . . . gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement . . . but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed and in the end helplessness before its great problems. [29]

Larry King was intimately involved with Boys Town. The institution came up repeatedly during the Legislature's Franklin investigation, and even earlier.

Foster Care Review Board Executive Director Carol Stitt's July 1988 plea to Attorney General Robert Spire, for an investigation of child abuse, included that youth care worker Kirstin Hallberg "told me about three youth at Boys Town who all reported inappropriate activities with Larry King of Omaha." On March 29, 1989, her colleague Burrell Williams told investigator Jerry Lowe, "that on several occasions in the past he had heard of kids transported from Boys Town and the north Omaha Girls' Club to functions allegedly linked to King."

Boys Town youth care worker Julie Walters, when she interviewed the Patterson Webb girls in 1986, reported her findings about Larry King and Boys Town youth, to the orphanage's executive director, Father Val Peter. According to an FBI and Nebraska State Patrol interview with the girls' foster mother, Kathleen Sorenson, "Walters related Nelly's statements to Father Val Peter. ... Val Peter then stated that Boys' Town would conduct its own discreet investigation into Nelly's statements." Peter apparently did nothing, as Carol Stitt informed the legislature's Executive Board on December 19, 1988: "It has been brought to my attention that no such investigation ever took place."

The FBI/NSP brief on Sorenson's interview said:

Sorenson stated that an unspecified time in the summer of 1988, Julie Walters spoke to two prominent black males and one black female at Boys' Town confirming Nelly Webb's statements about Larry King. Sorenson could not recall the names of these individuals. The individuals were either employees or associates of Boys' Town. These individuals told Walters not to ask questions about King "because it could be dangerous."

King was highly visible on the Boys Town campus, because of his distinctive yellow Tojan car. On March 27, 1989, Jerry Lowe interviewed Julie Walters by phone:

Julie indicated that she subsequently had a conversation with Val Peter regarding the yellow Tojan including discussions that several Boys' Town teachers, including those as having the last names Barksdale, Wilson, and Gary, had been seen driving the automobile. Julie indicated that when she brought the matter of the Tojan up to Father Peter, that he had initially denied any knowledge of the automobile, however, later on indicated that it was his belief that Omaha people couldn't accept black male teachers at Boys' Town and blamed the information regarding the Boys' Town black male teachers driving the Tojan, on racism.

At least one reported driver of the Tojan, John Barksdale, was closely associated with Larry King. Barksdale worked at the credit union, as well as at Boys Town, and had been tapped by King to head up a planned nationwide expansion, known as Franklin, U.S.A.

In January 1988, Father Peter summoned Kirstin Hallberg. She submitted her notes on the discussion to Franklin investigator Jerry Lowe:

Father Peter called me (Hallberg) and expressed an interest in Loretta's case and said he felt that Boys' Town could offer her "a safe place to heal." When I commented that she probably wouldn't feel too safe if she saw "the yellow Tojan," he (Peter) said that he heard it had "been around" and then quickly changed the subject.

Under pressure, Peter once again promised an investigation. Julie Walters recalled, in her March 27, 1989 phone conversation with Lowe:

Julie indicated that she later learned that Val Peter had given an individual by the name of Dave Shanahan, who is the Director of Admissions at Boys' Town, the responsibility of conducting, what Julie described, as a staff practice investigation of the Tojan automobile and the accompanying references to Boys' Town personnel riding in it. Julie indicated that she was uncomfortable about Shanahan investigating this as she expressed the personal opinion that she does not trust Shanahan. Julie indicated that Shanahan was a white male in his early forties and a long time employee of Boys' Town and indicated if she had to describe Shanahan she would describe him as being an individual with a good ole boy mentality who was not interested in the truth as much as making sure that nothing of a negative nature involving Boys' Town came out of the investigation.

Walters was right -- honest investigations of Larry King at Boys Town were quashed, as Franklin investigator Karen Ormiston found out when she interviewed former policeman Alan Kupres, on August 14, 1990.

Mr. Kupres indicated that he had worked as a police officer for Boys Town for approximately three years. He stated that he had run the license plates on a vehicle which was registered to Larry King several times, but that his superiors had directed him to "leave it alone."

Alisha Owen, Paul Bonacci, and Nelly and Kimberly Webb all reported that King took boys from Boys Town for his pedophile activities.

Omaha author Steve Bowman, who is preparing a book on the Franklin Credit Union for release in 1992, discovered as he interviewed Boys Town grads, that King's activities there were scarcely anomalous. "You would keep hearing the same thing, over and over again," Bowman said of the graduates, many of whom were homosexually involved with Larry King. "They would invariably say, 'I first discovered my homosexuality during counseling at Boys Town.'"

The homosexual ambiance at the orphanage was featured in a novel, reported on in the August 27, 1989 World-Herald:

An Omaha native said his new novel describing a youth's painful upbringing in a boys' home, including many homosexual encounters, is based on his eight years at Boys Town. Jimmy Cheshire, 44, of Yellow Springs, Ohio, said in an interview that "Home Boy" accurately depicts life as he saw it at Boys Town from 1955 to 1963 when he graduated as class valedictorian. ... Cheshire said homosexuality was "rampant" at Boys Town while he was there. "Everybody I knew was involved in it. After graduation, no one talks about it," he said. "In my opinion, one third of the Boys Town counselors were pedophiles. The only reason they were there was because kids were there. A lot of kids were seduced". ... Cheshire said he did not find any adults at Boys Town who were "reliable." "There were some brutal people, some sick people," he said. "The children turned to each other for support."

Father Val Peter said of Cheshire's book, "Boys Town would never condone any activity like that, nor do we have knowledge of it. I think sex sells, like the National Enquirer."

Boys Town officials deny with equal vehemence, that Larry King was associated with their facility in any way. Evidence from Franklin Credit Union files contradicts them.

Working relations between the credit union and the orphanage were in order as of a December 13, 1979 letter from Franklin employee Joel Rogers, one of King's homosexual lovers, to Boys Town Deputy Director for Development William E. Ramsey: "Mr. King, Mr. Larson, and myself are appreciative of your visit yesterday, and look forward to working with you and the Father Flanagan Boys' Home." The extent of the planned collaboration is not known, but at one point Franklin was paid $15,000 to do a study on the relocation of people who lost their houses because of an expansion of Boys Town.

Boys Town boys could get jobs at Franklin. King hired Brandt Thomas*, a 1984 graduate, to work at the credit union, according to a July 5, 1983 report from Doyle and Carol Gillespie, Boys Town family teachers. They also noted that "Brandt has moved in with his employer, Mr. King." Thomas was still under care of the school, and his change of residence was sanctioned by the highest official at Boys Town, then-Executive Director Father Hupp. His March 26 1983 letter to Brandt's mother, Lila Thomas*, was summarized by legislative Franklin committee researcher Jose J. Soto: "This letter from Father Hupp advises Brandt's mother of steps to take before Brandt moves in with Larry King." Hupp even attended the party King threw for Thomas, after the boy moved in.

Two and a half years later, Nelly Webb was to tell Julie Walters, that King frequently took Thomas around with him to serve as a homosexual prostitute.

By the time Franklin Credit Union met its fate, Boys Town had deposited, or planned to deposit, one million dollars in the credit union!

-- The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, by John W. DeCamp

Statistics: Posted by admin — Thu Apr 28, 2016 7:00 pm

Only 15 percent of the heroin users in the study (23 of 150) had never participated in substance abuse treatment. Of the 85 percent who had received treatment, one-third (42 of 127) were currently enrolled in a treatment program ....

Among users with treatment experience, the median number of times enrolled in treatment was five. However, more than a fourth reported having been in treatment on more than ten occasions. One user reported 67 treatment experiences. [77]

While many users benefit from treatment, compulsive use is most frequently a chronic condition. The Treatment Outcome Prospectives Study (TOPS) showed that for every 10 clients who used cocaine regularly during the year prior to treatment, six clients had returned to heavy use one year after treatment, and eight clients had relapsed into heavy use within three to five years after treatment. These statistics do not accurately reflect the success of treatment outcomes. (The TOPS study is the most recent large-scale study of treatment outcomes. Many smaller scale treatment studies show results with better long-term outcomes.) Nevertheless, the TOPS data suggest that treated cocaine users are more likely than not to return to drug use. [78]

Statistics: Posted by admin — Thu Apr 28, 2016 6:59 pm

While a biomedical or causal relationship between the two has not been established, 12 to 17 year-olds who smoke marijuana are 85 times more likely to use cocaine than those who do not. Adults who as adolescents smoked marijuana are 17 times likelier to use cocaine regularly. Sixty percent of adolescents who use marijuana before age 15 will later use cocaine. These correlations are many times higher than the initial relationships found between smoking and lung cancer in the 1964 Surgeon General's report (nine to ten times), high cholesterol and heart disease in the Framingham study (two to four times), and asbestos and lung cancer in the Selikoff study (five times). [38]

b. Crack Cocaine and Sentencing Disparities

Perhaps no aspect of the drug war has contributed to the rapid increase of African American prisoners in federal prisons more than the federal cocaine sentencing scheme. Federal sentencing rules for the possession and sale of cocaine distinguish between cocaine in powder form and cocaine prepared as crack. A person sentenced for possession with intent to distribute a given amount of crack cocaine receives the same sentence as someone who possessed one hundred times as much powder cocaine. This difference in sentencing exists notwithstanding the fact that cocaine is cocaine, and there are no physiological differences in effect between the powder and the crack form of the drug.

The difference in crack/powder cocaine sentencing is significant because African Americans are more likely to use crack, while white drug users are more likely to use powder cocaine. Since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which first enacted the crack/powder sentencing disparity, virtually all federal cocaine prosecutions have been against African Americans charged with the possession or sale of crack cocaine. Although, the disproportionate racial impact of the Anti- Drug Abuse Act of 1986 has been noted by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, neither Congress nor the executive branch has moved to rectify the disparities in the law.

The disparity in cocaine sentencing is obvious and may be traced to the language of the underlying statute. Even in the absence of such a manifest cause of discrimination, African Americans have traditionally received more severe sentences than similarly situated whites. Although it is by no means conclusive, there is substantial evidence that racial discrimination within the criminal justice system is the cause of the sentencing disparities that exist between Blacks and whites. Numerous surveys have found racial disparities in the sentencing process and attributed those disparities to racial discrimination. For example, a study by Miethe and Moore in 1984 found that African Americans received longer sentences than whites and that African Americans were less likely to benefit from lower sentences as a result of plea-bargaining. Likewise, Welch, Spohn, and Gruhl reviewed convictions and sentences in six cities nationwide in 1985. They found that African Americans were substantially more likely to be sentenced to prison than whites and that the disparity in incarceration rates is due to 'discrimination in the sentencing process itself.' In 1983, Baldus, Pulaski, and Woodworth subjected death sentences in Georgia to painstaking review. Using multiple regression analysis to control for over 230 nonracial factors, the researchers found that the race of the victim was the determining factor in whether a defendant received the death penalty. They found defendants who killed white victims were over four times more likely to receive a death sentence than defendants whose victims were not white. In addition, African American defendants who killed whites were eleven times more likely to receive a death sentence than white defendants who killed Blacks.

-- Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: or Why the 'War on Drugs' Was a 'War on Blacks, by Kenneth B. Nunn

"No Regrets," by Tara Carreon

[Hillary Clinton] I didn't mean to say ...

[Bill Clinton] I'm just saying ...

[Media Minstrel Show] Super Predator

[Black Lives Matter Protesters] Is My Son Next?
Justice for Eric Garner -- Black Lives Matter
I Can't Breathe
Black Lives Matter

Bill Clinton responded, “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders, who got 13-year-olds hopped up on crack and sent them out in the street to murder other African American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t. She didn’t. You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter. Tell the truth.”

-- Bill Clinton Says Black Lives Matter Protesters Defend Gang Leaders, Crack Dealers, by Kevin Gosztola

The mass incarceration of African Americans is a direct consequence of the War on Drugs. As one commentator states, 'Drug arrests are a principal reason that the proportions of lacks in prison and more generally under criminal justice system control have risen rapidly in recent years.' Since the declaration of the War on Drugs in 1982, prison populations have more than tripled. The rapid growth in prison populations is particularly clear in federal institutions. Although the overall federal prison population was only 24,000 in 1980, by 1996, it had reached 106,000. The federal prison population continued to grow in the 1990s. In 2000, the federal prison population exceeded 145,000. Fifty-seven percent of the federal prisoners in 2000 were incarcerated for drug offenses. In 1982 there were approximately 400,000 incarcerated persons. By 1992, that number had more than doubled to 850,000. In 2000, there were over 1.3 million persons in prison. From 1979 to 1989, the percentage of African Americans arrested for drug offenses almost doubled from 22% to 42% of the total. During that same period, the total number of African American arrests for drug abuse violations skyrocketed from 112,748 to 452,574, an increase of over 300%.

-- Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: or Why the 'War on Drugs' Was a 'War on Blacks, by Kenneth B. Nunn

Despite assertions to the contrary, the evidence indicates that presently drugs are not accessible to all. Fewer than 50 percent of high school seniors and young adults under 22 believe they could obtain cocaine "fairly easily" or "very easily." Only 39 percent of the adult population reported they could get cocaine; and only 25 percent reported that they could obtain heroin, PCP, and LSD. Thus, only one-quarter to one-half of people can easily get illegal drugs (other than marijuana). After legalization, drugs would be more widely and easily available. Currently, only 11 percent of individuals reported seeing drugs available in the area where they lived; after legalization, there could be a place to purchase drugs in every neighborhood. Under such circumstances, it is logical to conclude that more individuals would use drugs. [56]

Last week, Governor Wolf’s (D) signature made Pennsylvania the 24th state to legalize medical marijuana. In addition to the 24 states (and the District of Columbia) which have legalized marijuana for medical use, four states (Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska) as well as D.C. have legalized the recreational use of marijuana.

This year, the legislature in Vermont is heading towards passage of a bill (VT SB 241) to legalize, regulate, and tax recreational marijuana. After the Senate passed the measure, a House committee approved the bill, and Governor Shumlin (D) supports the legislation. “There is no question that we can and must improve on the current system of marijuana prohibition that is failing us so miserably,” the governor said in a statement. Vermont would be the first state to legalize recreational marijuana through the legislative process (as opposed to a ballot initiative or referendum).

Voter approved ballot initiatives have been the primary route to pass recreational marijuana laws—and often to legalize medical marijuana use as well. This year will see no shortage of ballot measures. According to Ballotpedia, there are currently 53 proposed marijuana related measures in sixteen different states that are still making their way through the certification process and could potentially appear on 2016 ballots. Thus far, Nevada is the only state that has certified a measure to legalize marijuana for recreational use on its ballot. In Florida, a constitutional amendment (Amendment 2) to legalize medical marijuana gained enough signatures to qualify for the November 2016 ballot.

Because marijuana legalization polls well with voters, especially recently, there is a good chance that in 2016 several more states will legalize marijuana. While Ohio voters rejected legalization of recreational marijuana last year, there are two ballot initiatives that have been proposed there for this November regarding medical marijuana. And interested parties will be watching California, the first state to pass medical marijuana legalization, as proponents try again to pass a recreational marijuana measure after voters rejected the first attempt in 2010.

As marijuana legalization proliferates, the haze of unanswered questions thickens. Employers have voiced concerns over liability and drug screening policies. Businesses have sought to ensure that the laws clearly allow them to maintain safe and productive workplaces. The federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 Drug, raising federalism conflicts over banking and law enforcement. The safety of edibles is a rising concern, especially because of their attractiveness to children. Lawmakers are unable to foresee and respond to all of these questions while drafting initial legislation, meaning future legislators and the courts will be grappling with answering them for many years.

-- Wave of States Legalizing Marijuana Use, by Bill Kramer, 04/25/2016

YES #44 - Barack Obama: The current president wrote about his cocaine and marijuana use as a youth in Hawaii and famously said, “When I was a kid, I inhaled, frequently. That was the point,” when running for president in 2008.

YES #43 - George W. Bush: Dubya was known as a cocaine user in his younger days, but he would never respond to questions about his marijuana use. Later, he told his biographer, Douglas Wead (yes, pronounced like “weed”), “I wouldn’t answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don’t want some little kid doing what I tried.”

YES #42 - Bill Clinton: Slick Willie famously said, “When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale and never tried it again,” when asked about his marijuana use. In true Clintonian fashion, he may have been telling the truth. The late Christopher Hitchens, who attended Oxford with Clinton, said Bill had an affinity for pot brownies, so he may not have ever tried “it” (inhaling) ever again....

YES #35 - John F. Kennedy: JFK used marijuana to deal with severe back pain, according to a few written accounts, including “John F. Kennedy: A Biography”, which described this White House scene: “On the evening of July 16, 1962, according to [Washington Post executive] Jim Truitt, Kennedy and Mary Meyer smoked marijuana together. … The president smoked three of the six joints Mary brought to him. At first he felt no effects. Then he closed his eyes and refused a fourth joint. ‘Suppose the Russians did something now,’ he said.”...

YES #14 - Franklin Pierce: One of three military men to become president who enjoyed smoking marijuana with the troops fighting the Mexican-American War. In a letter to his family, Pierce wrote that marijuana smoking was “about the only good thing” about the war.

YES #12 - Zachary Taylor: Another of the three military men who smoked marijuana with the troops.

YES #7 - Andrew Jackson: Third of the three military men whose letters referred to smoking marijuana with the troops.

YES #5 - James Monroe: Openly smoked hashish while he was Ambassador to France and continued smoking it until his death at age 73.

YES #4 - James Madison: The “Father of the Constitution” claimed that hemp gave him the insight to create a new democratic nation.

YES #3 - Thomas Jefferson: In addition to farming hemp, Jefferson was Ambassador to France during the hashish era there. At risk of imprisonment if caught, Jefferson smuggled hemp seeds from China known for their potency to America. However, as far as our research takes us, he never said or wrote, “Some of my finest hours have been spent sitting on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see.”

YES #1 - George Washington: The father of our country kept meticulous diaries, wherein he noted “Sowed hemp at muddy hole by swamp” away from the hemp he grew for fiber. “Began to separate the male from female plants at do [sic --rather too late” and “Pulling up the (male) hemp. Was too late for the blossom hemp by three weeks or a month” indicates he was going for female plants with higher THC content. There is also indication he used hemp preparations to deal with his toothaches.

-- 11 US Presidents Who Smoked Marijuana, by Russ Belville, 2/17/14

Statistics: Posted by admin — Thu Apr 28, 2016 7:44 am

The seven children, ages 4 to 16, lived in a cramped, fly-infested hovel on the second floor at 5 North Third Street. Their pregnant mother and her boyfriend, the police said, smoked crack around the children. And they clearly indulged squalor.

Today, the kitchen table, the stove, and the sink were piled with dirty dishes and pans containing chunks of old fried food. In the two tiny bedrooms, heaps of clothes a foot or two deep surrounded the ripped mattresses. Near one bed, apparently the one used by the mother, was a big plastic pail containing what appeared to be urine, an inch-deep. A few feet away was a pail brimming with garbage.

Three Paterson police officers discovered the family's sordid world Sunday night after one child, a I4-year-old girl, called and said her mother had beaten her.

"The stench in the apartment made the officers almost vomit," Detective Robert Vogt said.

Detective Vogt said that an argument over dirty dishes had set off the event that led to the phone call. The mother, Josephine Davis, 34, struck her daughter several times on her shoulders and upper arms with a 3-foot board with a nail protruding from it, he said. Then the girl was locked in an attic room, the detective said. About 7:30 P.M., she got out, ran to a friend's house around the corner on Temple Street and called the police. [1]

The Carter family is being stalked here by what the clan's 54-year-old matriarch, Regina, calls a monster -- crack cocaine. She has watched it swallow her daughter and now she is fighting it for her grandson's soul.

The 15-year-old boy disappeared from her house six months ago and was found by police officers on Monday, after a half-year odyssey of beating, hunger and sexual abuse, with a tale that is a searing reminder of how desperately those on the front lines are fighting the war on drugs.

Initially the police thought the boy's mother, who has been in jail on an unrelated burglary charge for about two weeks, sold him to dealers to payoff a $1,000 debt, which she has denied.

But after several days of questioning the boy, the authorities say it appears that he went willingly with the dealers but found out, painfully, that he was not as tough as they were.

His grandmother says her grandson told her that he descended into the drug underworld to work off his mother's debt to dealers who had threatened to kill her. The police say he told them that he went with the dealers because he wanted to earn enough money to help his mother move out of the crumbling apartments, abandoned buildings and crack houses where she had spent so many of the last eight years doing almost anything to make the dope man and his monster happy.

But when the boy wanted to leave, after several weeks of selling dope to other people's mothers, fathers, and children, he was tied up and beaten by one dealer, the police said, and later by another. The boy was given crack to numb his hunger, his grandmother said; his knuckles were burned by cigarettes.

Prosecutors, who have charged a man with criminal sexual conduct, say the dealers offered the boy to female drug customers as a sex toy.

"He was forced to sell drugs," said Inspector Michael Hall of the Detroit Police Department. "He was physically assaulted on a number of occasions. He's a victim. He's just a kid."

Mrs. Carter said she wants her grandson to have an AIDS test. "He needs a lot of help," she said. "Now, he's messed up with the crack just like his mama."

Whatever happened, the story of the Carters illustrates the power of crack to hurt and haunt entire families, from one generation to the next.

"This case has rung a bell that we still have plenty of work to do," said Ronald L. Griffin, the president of the Detroit Urban League, which runs a mentoring program for thousands of young people in Detroit. "There are a lot of boys like Mrs. Carter's grandson," he said. "We have to tighten our belts and start working harder to reach them." [2]

The homemade video shows a man sitting at a table packaging what looks like crack cocaine, a shotgun and a 9mm handgun at the ready. As the man fills small zip-lock bags and puts them into a larger one, a 4-year-old beside him does the same.

When the man fills a glass from a Seagram's gin bottle and then drinks from the glass, the little boy drinks from the same glass. When the man picks up the 9mm, appears to aim it at someone and then hands it to the little boy, the child also takes aim.

Throughout the video, everything the man does, the boy mimics. And when the man throws another man to the floor and stands over him with the 9mm, the little boy does the same to a younger sibling, standing over the toddler with a toy gun.

Family members who testified late Friday in a neglect hearing concerning the boy and his three siblings said that the weapons were just toys, that the rocklike chunks were really soap flakes, that the gin was water and that no harm was done.

The boy's mother testified that her son and husband merely were acting out "gangsta rap lyrics" for a music video they could sell and "make some extra money for the family."

D.C. Superior Court Hearing Commissioner Evelyn Coburn said she simply didn't believe the family members' versions, but whether crack cocaine or soap flakes, real guns or toy ones, "that children are being taught this behavior at such an early age" is unthinkable ....

She ordered all four children in the family placed in shelter care and said she would allow the mother supervised visits with the children only if she submits to drug testing. Neither the mother, her mother nor other relatives showed any emotion as Coburn ordered the children taken from their care.

"To say the least, this is beyond the pale ... an absolute tragedy," Coburn said. [3]

Even now, when the dangers of drug abuse are well understood, many educated people still discuss the drug problem in almost every way except the right way. They talk about the "costs" of drug use and the "socioeconomic factors" that shape that use. They rarely speak plainly -- drug use is wrong because it is immoral and it is immoral because it enslaves the mind and destroys the soul. It is as if it were a mark of sophistication for us to shun the language of morality in discussing the problems of mankind. [4]

The superpredator myth gained further popularity when it was linked to forecasts by James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio of increased levels of juvenile violence. Wilson (1995) asserted that “by the end of [the past] decade [i.e., by 2000] there will be a million more people between the ages of 14 and 17 than there are now. . . . Six percent of them will become high rate, repeat offenders—thirty thousand more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now. Get ready” (p. 507). DiIulio (1995a, p. 15) made the same prediction. Media portrayals of juvenile superpredators have created the impression that juveniles are most likely to be armed—heavily armed—and to use guns in attacks....

Where Did the Superpredators Go?

The short answer is that the large cadre of superpredators that DiIulio described never existed, and the growth of this mythical group never happened. Several researchers have debunked the superpredator myth and doomsday projections (Howell, 1998c; Males, 1996; Snyder, 1998; Snyder & Sickmund, 2000; Zimring, 1998a). The illogical nature of DiIulio’s projection is readily apparent. He assumed that 6% of babies and children as well as juveniles would be chronic offenders (see Zimring, 1996). If we were to apply the 6% figure to the 1996 population under age 18, according to DiIulio’s analysis, there already were 1.9 million superpredator juvenile offenders in the United States. This number is larger than the total number of children and adolescents referred to juvenile courts each year. Wilson and DiIulio were guilty of other errors in logic (see Zimring, 1998a, pp. 61–65).

In addition, DiIulio and Wilson apparently were not aware that the majority of the 6% “chronic” offenders in the Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study were never arrested for a serious violent crime (Weitekamp, Kerner, Schindler, & Schubert, 1995). The 6% figure was based on police contacts, not actual arrests. In fact, only one-third of the police contacts resulted in an arrest, and only half of this group’s police contacts resulted in a court adjudication of delinquency (Bernard & Ritti, 1991). This oversight exaggerated further the potential dangerousness of future juvenile offenders.

DiIulio, Fox, and Wilson also made the mistake of assuming a direct correlation between population size and crime rates. As Cook and Laub (1998) have shown, the size of the juvenile population “is of little help in predicting violence rates” (p. 59). In fact, they found a negative relationship between the size of the juvenile population and the number of homicides in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That is, the high juvenile homicide rates of this period occurred when the size of the adolescent population was low. Juvenile homicides and other violent crimes are decreasing, while the size of the juvenile population is increasing. In fact, the end of the period covered in the doomsday projections (1995–2010) of waves of juvenile violence is near, and juvenile violence decreased from 1994 to 2005 (Butts & Snyder, 2006; Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). For a decade (through 2004), juvenile Violent Crime Index offenses decreased, proving that DiIulio, Wilson, and Fox were seriously wrong in their forecasts (Butts & Snyder, 2006; Butts & Travis, 2002). Specifically, between 1994 and 2004, the juvenile arrest rate for Violent Crime Index offenses fell 49% (Snyder, 2006). As a result, the juvenile Violent Crime Index arrest rate in 2004 was at its lowest level since at least 1980. From its peak in 1993 to 2004, the juvenile arrest rate for murder fell 77% (Snyder, 2006).

-- Chapter 1: Superpredators and other Myths about Juvenile Delinquency, by James C. Howell

Poverty in the United States is now concentrated in single-parent families.... Moreover, starting in 1974, for the first time in our country's history and possibly for the first time in any advanced society, children became the poorest group in our population.

Such families, moreover, appear to be relatively unreachable by standard economic policy prescriptions. The annual poverty status report recently issued by the Bureau of the Census, for example, provoked concern that the poverty rate seems stuck, that the economic growth and high employment levels of the last decade made no impact on the poverty rate. The number of single-parent families grew. With the advent of AIDS and "crack" the no-parent family appeared. [13]

Public opinion about legalizing marijuana, while little changed in the past few years, has undergone a dramatic long-term shift. A new survey finds that 53% favor the legal use of marijuana, while 44% are opposed.

-- In Debate Over Legalizing Marijuana, Disagreement Over Drug’s Dangers: In Their Own Words: Supporters and Opponents of Legalization, by PewResearchCenter, 4/14/15

November 1, 1984: Felix Rodriguez's partner, Gerard Latchinian, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Latchinian was then tried and convicted of smuggling $10.3 million in cocaine into the United States. The dope was to finance the murder and overthrow of the President of Honduras, Roberto Suazo Cordova. Latchinian was sentenced to a 30-year prison term....

January 18, 1985 (Friday): Felix Rodriguez met with Ramon Milian Rodriguez (not known to be a relative of Felix), accountant and money launderer, who had moved $1.5 billion for the Medellin cocaine cartel. Milian testified before a Senate investigation of the Contras' drug-smuggling, that more than a year earlier he had granted Felix's request and given $10 million from the cocaine cartel to Felix for the Contras.

Milian Rodriguez was interviewed in his prison cell in Butner, North Carolina, by investigative journalist Martha Honey. He said Felix Rodriguez had offered that "in exchange for money for the Contra cause he would use his influence in high places to get the [Cocaine] cartel U.S. 'good will'.... Frankly, one of the selling points was that he could talk directly to Bush. The issue of good will wasn't something that was going to go through 27 bureaucratic hands. It was something that was directly between him and Bush.'' Ramon Milian Rodriguez was a Republican contributor, who had partied by invitation at the 1981 Reagan-Bush inauguration ceremonies. He had been arrested aboard a Panama-bound private jet by federal agents in May 1983, while carrying over $5 million in cash. According to Felix Rodriguez, Milian was seeking a way out of the narcotics charges when he met with Felix on January 18, 1985. This meeting remained secret until two years later, when Felix Rodriguez had become notorious in the Iran-Contra scandal. The Miami Herald broke the story on June 30, 1987. Felix Rodriguez at first denied ever meeting with Ramon Milian Rodriguez. But then a new story was worked out with various agencies. Felix "remembered'' the Jan. 18, 1985 meeting, claimed he had "said nothing'' during it, and "remembered'' that he had filed documents with the FBI and CIA telling them about the meeting just afterwards. [fn20]

January 22, 1985 (Tuesday): George Bush met with Felix Rodriguez in the Executive Office Building. The agenda may have included the results of the meeting five days before with Medellin cocaine cartel representative Milian Rodriguez....

March 1986: According to a sworn statement of pilot Michael Tolliver, Felix Rodriguez had met him in July 1985. Now Rodriguez instructed Tolliver to go to Miami International Airport. Tolliver picked up a DC-6 aircraft and a crew, and flew the plane to a Contra base in Honduras. There Tolliver watched the unloading of 14 tons of military supplies, and the loading of 12 and 2/3 tons of marijuana. Following his instructions from Rodriguez, Tolliver flew the dope to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. The next day Rodriguez paid Tolliver $75,000.

Tolliver says that another of the flights he performed for Rodriguez carried cocaine on the return trip to the U.S.A. He made a series of arms deliveries from Miami into the air base at Agucate, Honduras. He was paid in cash by Rodriguez and his old Miami CIA colleague, Rafael "Chi Chi'' Quintero. In another circuit of flights, Tolliver and his crew flew between Miami and El Salvador's Ilopango air base. Tolliver said that Rodriguez and Quintero "instructed me where to go and who to see.'' While making these flights, he "could go by any route available without any interference from any agency. We didn't need a stamp of approval from Customs or anybody....'' [fn57] With reference to the covert arms shipments out of Miami, George Bush's son Jeb said: "Sure, there's a pretty good chance that arms were shipped, but does that break any law? I'm not sure it's illegal. The Neutrality Act is a completely untested notion, established in the 1800s.'' [fn58]...

But the whole truth is much uglier. We have documented in detail how the Iran-contra drug-running and gun-running operations run out of Bush's own office played their role in increasing the heroin, crack, cocaine, and marijuana brought into this country. We have reviewed Bush's relations with his close supporters in the Wall Street LBO gang, much of whose liquidity is derived from narcotics payments which the banking system is eager to recycle and launder. We recall Bush's 1990 meeting with Syrian President Hafez Assad, who is personally one of the most prolific drug pushers on the planet, and whom Bush embraced as an ally during the Gulf crisis.

Bush's "soft on drugs" profile went further. In the Pakistan-Afghanistan theatre, for example, it was apparent that certain pro-Khomeini formations among the Afghan guerillas were, like the contras, more interested in trafficking in drugs and guns than in fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul and the Red Army forces that maintained it in power. There were reports that such activities on the part of such guerilla groups were seconded by parts of the Pakistani secret intelligence services, the Inter-Service Intelligence, and the National Logistics Cell. According to these reports, Bush's visit to Pakistan's President Gen. Zia ul-Haq in May, 1984 was conducted in full awareness of these phenomena. Nevertheless, Bush chose to praise the alleged successes of the Zia government's anti-narcotics program which, Bush intoned, was a matter of great "personal interest" to him. Among those present at the banquet where Bush made these remarks were, reportedly, several of the officials most responsible for the narcotics trafficking in Pakistan. [fn 2] But there is an even more flagrant aspect of Bush's conduct which can be said to demolish once and for all the myth of the "war on drugs" and replace it with a reality so sinister that it goes beyond the imagination of most citizens....

Tommy Teagle, an ex-convict interviewed by Burdick, said he feared that George Bush would have him killed because information in his possession would implicate Jeb Bush in cocaine smuggling. Teagle's story was that Aronow and Jeb Bush had been partners in cocaine trafficking and were $2.5 million in debt to their Columbian suppliers. Dr. Robert Magoon, a friend of Aronow, is quoted in the same location as having heard a similar report. But Teagle rapidly changed his story. [fn 3] Ultimately, an imprisoned convict was indicted for the murder of Aronow.

But the circumstances of the murder remain highly suspect. Starting in 1985, and with special intensity during 1987-88, more than two dozen persons involved in various aspects of the Iran-contra gun-running and drug-running operation met their deaths. At the same time, other persons knowledgeable about Iran-contra, but one or more steps removed from eyewitness knowledge of these operations, have been subjected to campaigns of discrediting and slander, often associated with indictments on a variety of charges, charges which often stemmed from the Iran-contra operations themselves. Above and beyond the details of each particular case, the overall pattern of these deaths strongly suggests that they are coherent with a damage control operation by the networks involved, a damage control operation that has concentrated on liquidating those individuals whose testimony might prove to be most damning to the leading personalities of these networks. The death of Don Aronow occurred within the time frame of this general process of amputation and cauterization of the Iran-contra and related networks. Many aspects of Aronow's life suggest that his assassination may have been a product of the same "damage control" logic....

During 1991, reports surfaced of a joint project of the CIA and the Mossad in central America which included large-scale smuggling of illegal drugs from Colombia through Panama to the United States. This was code-named "Operation Watchtower." According to an affidavit signed by the late Colonel Edward P. Cutolo, a US Army Special Forces Commander who was in charge of operations in Colombia subsumed under this project, "the purpose of Operation Watch Tower was to establish a series of three electronic beacon towers beginning outside of Bogota, Colombia and running northeast to the border of Panama. Once the Watch Tower teams were in place, the beacon was activated to emit a signal that aircraft could fix on and fly undetected from Bogota to Panama, then land at Albrook Air Station." [fn 30] According to Cutolo, the flights were often met at Albrook Air Station by Noriega, other PDF officers, CIA agents, and an Israeli national believed to be David Kimche of the Mossad. Another Israeli involved in the flights was Mossad agent Michael Harari, who maintained a close relation to Noriega until the time of the US invasion of December 20, 1989. According to Cutolo's affidavit, "I was told from Pentagon contacts, off the record, that CIA Director Stansfield Turner and former CIA Director George Bush are among the VIPs that shield Harari from public scrutiny." According to Cutolo, "the cargo flown from Colombia to Panama was cocaine," which ultimately ended up in the United States. The profits were allegedly laundered through a series of banks, including banks in Panama. According to published reports, Cutolo and a long list of other US military personnel who knew about Operation Watchtower died under suspicious circumstances during the 1980's, one of them after having vainly attempted to interest the CBS News "60 Minutes " staff in this matter. Mike Harari of the Mossad is reportedly a prime suspect in the death of one of these US officers, Army Col. James Rowe, who was killed in the Philippines on April 21, 1989. Was Operation Watchtower on the agenda of the Bush-Noriega meeting of 1976?...

On April 5, 1991, newspapers all over Latin American carried details of a new report by the US Drug Enforcement Administration confirming that the US-installed puppet president of Panama, Guillermo Endara, had been an officer of at least six companies which had been demonstrably implicated in laundering drug money. These were the Banco General, the Banco de Colombia, the Union Bank of Switzerland, the Banco Aleman, the Primer Banco de Ahorros, Sudameris, Banaico, and the Banco del Istmo. The money laundered came from a drug smuggling ring headed up by Augusto Falcon and Sahvador Magluta of Colombia, who are reported to have smuggled an average of one ton of cocaine per month into Florida during the decade 1977-87, including many of the years during which Bush's much-touted South Florida Task Force and related operations were in operation.

With the puppet president so heavily implicated in the activity of the international drug mafia, it can be no surprise that the plague of illegal drugs has markedly worsened in the wake of Bush's invasion. According to the London Independent of March 5, 1991, "statistics now indicate that since General Noriega's departure, cocaine trafficking has, in fact, prospered" in the country. On March 1, the State Department had conceded that the turnover of drug money laundered in Panama had at least regained the levels attained before the 1989 invasion. According to the Los Angeles Times of April 28, 1991, current levels of drug trafficking in Panama "in some cases exceed" what existed before the December 20 invasion, and US officials "say the trend is sharply upward and includes serious movements by the Colombian cartels into areas largely ignored under Noriega." This was all real drug activity, and not the cornmeal tamales wrapped in banana leaves that Bush's mind war experts found in one of Noriega's residences and labeled as "cocaine" during the invasion.

-- George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

Statistics: Posted by admin — Thu Apr 28, 2016 7:32 am

Iraq's weapons programs were probably bigger and more advanced than the IC had judged ... the uranium probably is in the form of yellowcake .... Iraq probably is searching abroad for natural uranium to assist in its nuclear weapons program.... Iraq was probably seeking uranium from Africa ... the [aluminum] tubes were probably intended for Iraq's nuclear program ... Iraq probably retained the personnel, documentation, and much of the critical equipment necessary to continue and advance its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and delivery programs ... Iraq probably is pursuing development of additional bacterial and toxin agents ... Baghdad probably has developed genetically engineered BW agents ... Iraq probably renovated the facility after UNSCOM's work ... Iraq probably has retained unauthorized stocks of Variola major virus, the causative agent of smallpox ... Iraq's biological warfare (BW) program are active, and most elements are probably larger and more advanced than they were in the pre-Gulf War program."

-- Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, by Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. Senate

One of the youthful criminals whose story is told in Edward Humes' finely etched, powerfully upsetting portrait of a gloomy corner of American life is one George Trevino, sentenced to 10 years of detention for participating in a bungled armed-robbery attempt when he was 16. George is a remarkable young man, and this judgment is not made in the spirit of "society is always to blame" liberalism. George, like the youth in Francois Truffaut's "400 Blows," had been abandoned by almost every adult responsible for his welfare. He was ditched first by his single mother, when he was 5, and thereafter by overburdened social workers for the state of California who managed his life as though it were a bureaucratic abstraction. They removed him from places where he was doing well, for example, and sent him to live with dysfunctional, crack-smoking relatives. When George (a pseudonym, like those given to some of the book's other young offenders) started getting arrested for fights and hanging out with gang members, the probation system ignored him. "The state made George what he is today," Humes declares. "No one blamed the nameless bureaucrats who took an A-B student and sent him to a home troubled by drugs," he writes. "There is no accountability in the system." Later, after his sentencing, George tells Humes: "That's how the system programs you. They let you go and they know that just encourages you, and then they can get you on something worse later on. It's like they set you up. Of course I'm to blame, too, for going along with it. I didn't have to do those things, I know that." [56]

CompStat was started by Jack Maple when he was a Transit police officer in New York City. The system was called Charts of the Future and was simple -- it tracked crime through pins stuck in maps. Charts of the Future is credited with cutting subway crime by 27 percent.

The original commanding officer of the Transit Police Crime Analysis Unit was Lieutenant Richard Vasconi. Chief of New York City Transit Police William J. Bratton was later appointed Police Commissioner by Rudolph Giuliani, and he brought Maple's Charts of the Future with him. Not without a bit of struggle, he made the NYPD adopt it after it was rebranded as CompStat, and it was credited with bringing down crime by 60%. There was a CompStat meeting every month, and it was mandatory for police officials to attend. The year after CompStat was adopted, 1995, murders dropped to 1,181. By 2003, there were 596 murders—the lowest number since 1964.

-- CompStat, by Wikipedia

Other American cities

This Compstat allure of crime reduction, through technological advancement, is reflected in an in-depth study of the Lowell Police Department’s Compstat (Willis, Mastrofski, Weisburd, & Greenspan, 2003a, p. 11):

What police department, however, would not want to adopt a program whose clear purpose is to reduce crime through the implementation of a well-defined set of technologies and procedures? The appeal of Compstat’s crime fighting goal to the police increases the likelihood that it will endure.

Compstat crime reduction efficacy is frequently advocated by police administrators, several of whom moved from the NYPD to head other city police departments. Compstat’s introduction in New Orleans, for example, corresponded with a reported decline in murders from 421 in 1994, diving 55 per cent in 1999 to 162. Minneapolis’s version of Compstat, CODEFOR (Computer Optimised Deployment-focus on Results), has been credited for a double-digit decrease in homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies, burglaries and auto thefts between 1998 and 1999 (Anderson, 2001, p. 4). In 2000, Compstat was introduced in Baltimore by its new chief, a former NYPD deputy police commissioner. By the end of the year, the city experienced below 300 homicides for the first time in 20 years, accompanied by an overall crime drop of 25 per cent (Anderson, p. 4; Clines, 2001, p. 15; Weissenstein, 2003, p. 27). Between 1999 and 2001, Baltimore’s overall violent crime declined 24 per cent, homicides dropped 15 per cent, shootings fell 34 per cent, robberies dropped 28 per cent, rapes 20 per cent and assaults 21 per cent (Henry, 2002, p. 307). Philadelphia’s former police commissioner, another former NYPD deputy police commissioner, attributed a decline in the city’s crime to Compstat-driven policing.

On the other hand, concerns have been raised in many jurisdictions that Compstat has served as a catalyst to inaccurate law enforcement statistical measurement (Long & Silverman, 2005; Manning, 2001; Willis et al., 2003b). When this type of system becomes excessively supervised, whether within a highly centralised organisation or from external political or hierarchical organisations, the consequences can be alarming. Subordinate units will naturally concentrate on those items being measured. Or, as the saying goes, ‘what gets measured gets done’. This can lead to crime statistics manipulation and/or downgrading, which has been reported in numerous locales including Philadelphia, Atlanta (Hart, 2004, p. 6), New Orleans (Ritea, 2003a, p. 1, 2003b, p. 1), New York (Gardiner & Levitt, 2003, p. 8; Parascandola & Levitt, 2004, p. 5) and Broward County, Florida (Hernandez, O’Boye, & O’Neill, 2004, p. 9). In Philadelphia, charges of altered crime reports emerged after the police department introduced Compstat. ‘If a person was punched in the eye, it might have been written up as a hospital report, so it didn’t reflect a crime had occurred’, reported one Philadelphia police official (Webber & Robinson, 2003).

International examples

Internationally, Compstat-like performance management systems have also been subjected to controversial claims. In the United Kingdom, for example, commentators have cited the ‘emergence of US style criminal justice policies in other industrial democracies’ (Jones & Newburn, 1997, p. 123).

Like the NYPD Compstat model, the UK approach stresses police results and outputs through the setting of explicit and measurable crime level indicators (Clark & Newman, 1997). There have been numerous UK manifestations of police performance management criteria dating back to 1983 (Jones & Silverman, 1984).

In 1997 the UK government directed the police forces to achieve ‘best value’ and ‘crime reduction targets’ (McLaughlin, 2007, p. 184) through ‘league tables, ranking and performance measures’ (Loveday, 2005, p. 150).

Yet reviews suggest that crime statistical performance indicators might create ‘perverse incentives [that] compromise local innovation, efficiency and accountability’ (Flanagan, 2008, p. 21). The collection and recording of crime statistics was questioned in a report entitled ‘Collection and Accuracy of Police Incident Data’, commissioned by the Home Office in 1996, which stated, ‘there appears to be some variation not only in the number and type of events being recorded by the police, but also in the way certain events are interpreted for statistical purposes’ (Portas & Mason, 1996, p. 24). A Home Office (2000) report revealed significant under-recording of crime by the police.

Other evidence suggested that in some cases crimes were reclassified so that burglary was recorded as criminal damage or other type of theft (Loveday, 1996). In 1999, a Police Complaints Authority investigation into recording practices in one force found that over 9,000 crimes were absent from official crime figures, indicating that the force’s crime recording policy ‘was designed to have the effect of artificially reducing recorded crime to a more politically acceptable level’ (Davies, 1999, p. 3; for a fuller discussion see Hallam, 2009).

In addition to academic and government analyses, the popular press has publicised distorted crime statistics. In October 2008, it was reported (‘Violent crime soars’, 2008) that:

Some police forces have been under-recording the most serious violent crimes, the Home Office said today, as it released figures showing a 22% increase. The category includes serious assault, murder, attempted murder and manslaughter.

Officials admitted the under-counting could have been going on for more than 10 years. They said 13 forces were asked to re-examine their figures after they discovered some serious assaults were being recorded in a lower category of offence.

Two months later, the head of the UK Statistics Authority accused the Home office of releasing ‘selective’ knife-crime figures in order to downplay the extent of knife stabbings (Booth, 2008). By April 2009, a respected Home Office adviser observed that the public had little confidence in the accuracy of the government’s crime statistics (Whitehead, 2009).

An in-depth analysis of three UK police forces involved in Compstat-like performance management activity concluded that ‘. . . the conflicting priorities brought about by managerial dictum and the bureaucratic rules governing the recording of crime are to define crime down. It leads to a manipulation of data to provide pleasing results’ (Hallam, 2009, III). Another UK study referred to ‘repeated reports of the massaging of figures by the police’ (Martin, 2003, p. 161).

In Australia, Compstat-like performance management systems were also modelled after New York’s Compstat. Queensland’s Police Service version of Compstat is known as Operational Performance Review (OPR). One study found the introduction of OPR ‘associated with a significant decrease in the total number of reported offences’ (Mazerolle, Rombouts, & McBroom, 2007).

The country’s largest police force, the New South Wales police, developed its Operations and Crime Review (OCR) management system after visits to NYPD’s Compstat (Davis & Coleman, 2000). A previous commissioner stressed that OCR policing is data driven, ‘uncompromising difficult and stressful’ (Ryan, 2000 cited in Kennedy 2010).

Like elsewhere, Australian performance-based policing is controversial. On the one hand, for example, two Australian scholars’ evaluation of the OCR found this process to be effective in reducing three of the four offence categories studied (Chilvers & Weatherburn, 2004). Yet a 2000 evaluation by an independent consulting group (Hay Group Consulting Consortium, 2000) found communication to be largely a oneway process with little feedback to commanders, ‘reinforcing the culture of fear and punishment’. The following year, the deputy commissioner resigned after he announced that crime was falling when the Bureau of Crime Statistics said it was increasing (Kennedy, 2000, p. 27).

Australia’s National Uniform Crime Statistics Committee reported variations in crime statistics due to ‘. . . the extent of unreported crime; inadequacies in offence definitions, counting rules and offence classifications; procedural differences such as the offences under which an offender may be charged; differences in the way statistics are compiled as a result of the lack of uniformity in systems used and noncompliance with the rules governing the collation of statistics’ (Hallam, 2009, p. 55) Carach and Makkai (2002) found that recorded crime statistics in the State of Victoria varied depending on whether an evidential or prima facie approach was applied by officers involved in the crime recording process.

The current study focuses on the reliability of crime statistics in the law enforcement agency which has the longest-running and most widely publicised Compstat process. It has been over 15 years since the NYPD first introduced Compstat to law enforcement. We now turn to our research approach and findings.

-- The NYPD’s Compstat: compare statistics or compose statistics?, by John A. Eterno and Eli B. Silverman

The NYPD's public spaces strategy and its civil enforcement component are strengthening community policing by providing the organizational means and the tactical knowledge to accomplish community ends -- to shut down drug-dealing locations, take noisy cars off streets and deter low-level offenders from coming into New York City neighborhoods. As communities see the police taking effective actions against the problems that they care about, residents will be far more likely to view us as their allies and work cooperatively with us. Working together, we can achieve what every community wants -- streets that not only are safer, but feel safer, too. [66]

Both of Rhonda Scott’s wrists were broken when she was arrested for standing outside her house without ID.

Mental health worker Rhonda Scott, 39, of Chauncey Street, says that on one day in 2008, she had just come back from returning a plate she'd borrowed from a neighbor, and was stopped and challenged by officers. Her ensuing arrest left her with two broken wrists, which put her out of work for seven months.

The incident took place on August 2, 2008, on Chauncey, east of Howard Avenue, records show. It was a warm night. There were a lot of people socializing on their stoops and on the sidewalks. Police were already on the block, evidently trying to move people from a stoop across the street.

She crossed the street to return the plate, but was stopped by an officer who she says told her to "be quiet."

She returned to her home and asked her boyfriend to obtain the officer's name and shield number. By the time the boyfriend returned, many more officers had arrived on the block.

Scott went outside and stood behind the gate on her property to watch what was happening. Two police cars had stopped in front of the house.

They asked for her ID, which she didn't have with her. She says the officers demanded that she show them ID or they would arrest her. She told the officers that she lived there, and asked a friend to check her car, parked across the street, for her driver's license.

Scott says the police didn't believe her, and as she stepped onto the sidewalk to help her friend find the ID card, one of the officers told her, "I'm locking your ass up."

Three officers twisted her wrists behind her back, cuffed her, and put her in the back seat. But she wasn't all the way inside, so an officer grabbed her by the hair and pulled her all the way in. She denies that she struggled with the officers.

She repeatedly asked to be taken to the hospital. She instead was taken to central booking after about 14 hours in a precinct cell. She finally saw a doctor on her own two days later.

"I've lived here my whole life, and I'm a part owner of this building," Scott says. "Yes, there are problems in the neighborhood, but they're treating us all like criminals, and we're not all criminals."

Scott's criminal case was closed with an "adjournment in contemplation of dismissal," which is a provision to dismiss charges if a suspect is not rearrested in the following six months (which she was not). Her civilian complaint was closed, with the Civilian Complaint Review Board siding with the officers.

Scott adds that her boyfriend recently got a ticket for blocking the sidewalk after he was stopped on his way to the corner store.

"If you're walking to the store, and you run into two friends and you're talking on the sidewalk, they'll stop you, put you in handcuffs, and take you to the precinct," she says.

-- The NYPD Tapes, Part 2, by Graham Rayman

Anecdotes about how well the policy works abound in the department, passed on from cop to cop with the same enthusiasm that transit police felt five years ago when they started arresting fare-beaters at the orders of their then-boss, Bratton, and discovered that these seemingly inconsequential lawbreakers often turned out to be carrying illegal weapons.

A supervisor makes a couple of other off-handed comments to Schoolcraft, noting that the pressure to artificially lower crime statistics is fueled by the bosses downtown. "The mayor's looking for it, the police commissioner's looking for it . . . every commanding officer wants to show it," he says. "So there's motivation not to classify the reports for the seven major crimes. Sometimes, people get agendas and try to do what they can to avoid taking the seven major crimes."

-- The NYPD Tapes: Inside Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct, by Graham Rayman

In the 9th Precinct, a man arrested for public urination provided information about a neighbor who was handling stolen property, especially guns. Police arrested the man and recovered a stash of weapons. What makes these experiences in the NYPD so convincing, even in advance of formal research, is that the department itself has called the shots. It publicly declared it would improve the quality of life in New York, and it is doing so -- the virtual elimination of the squeegee nuisance is just one example. It said it would take guns off the streets, and preliminary evidence suggests that it is doing so: in August 1995, for instance, the proportion of arrested suspects who were carrying guns was 39 percent lower than two years earlier. The department has said that taking guns off the streets would reduce violent crime, and statistics show that it has. Because its successes are not random, it's hard to attribute them to luck or to anonymous "larger forces," such as demographics. [67]

With a mix of tough, innovative police tactics and personal magnetism, [Reuben] Greenberg has cut Charleston's murder, robbery and burglary rates in half, back to levels as low as they were in the early 1960s before violent crime rates soared nationwide .... His policies and his politics, he delights in telling people, are as unorthodox as his background as a Southern black Jew. Although he earned two master's degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, his programs are based on old-fashioned notions of strengthening parental authority, imposing a curfew on teenagers and rounding up truant students and transporting them back to school.

-- FOX BUTTERFIELD [68]

Now public housing is one of the safest places in the city. Taxis now go into public housing and pizzas are delivered there. You can call the Maytag man and he will come.... Any city where public-housing residents are victimized and children have to sleep on floors to avoid being shot should be ashamed of itself. [74]

-- CHIEF REUBEN GREENBERG, CHARLESTON, S.C.

The precinct's campaign led to a 900 percent increase in stop-and-frisks in the neighborhood, which commanders demanded from officers in order to hit statistical quotas. It also resulted in several dozen gun arrests, hundreds of arrests on other charges, and thousands of summonses for things like disorderly conduct, trespassing, and loitering.

-- The NYPD Tapes, Part 2, by Graham Rayman

Veteran Philadelphia police officer Patrick Boyle suffered the murder of the fellow officer he loved the most -- his only son, 21-year-old rookie cop Daniel Boyle.

Out on patrol, Daniel had stopped the driver of a stolen car in North Philadelphia. In a flash, the stolen car's drug-using driver, a street-wise repeat felon named Edward Bracey, fired numerous shots through the windshield of the rookie officer's patrol car. The bullets struck the young officer in the head. A police radio chillingly captured the fatal shots and Daniel Boyle's final words. A few days later, Pat Boyle buried his son. Bracey had been arrested many times for car theft (a "mere auto thief"). Twice he had been released without bail or supervision for failing to show up for trial. In 1994 alone, Philadelphia judges were forced to release defendants in 15,000 cases because a federal judge had imposed a population cap on the city's jails.

Like Bracey, the defendants released because of the judge's order did not go straight with gratitude. Instead, they just kept right on committing crimes. In one 18-month period, Philadelphia police rearrested 9,732 defendants released because of the federal judge's edict. These defendants were charged with 79 murders, 959 robberies, 2,215 drug-dealing crimes, 701 burglaries, 2,748 thefts, 90 rapes, 14 kidnapping charges, 1,113 assaults, 264 gun-law violations, and 127 drunk-driving incidents. "Can anyone explain to me why Danny had to die?" Pat Boyle asked. No one could. [80]

Statistics: Posted by admin — Wed Apr 27, 2016 6:36 am

Over the past 40 years, criminal justice policy in the U.S. was shaped by the belief that the best way to protect the public was to put more people in prison. Offenders, the reasoning went, should spend longer and longer time behind bars.

Consequently, offenders have been spending more time in prison. According to a new study by Pew's Public Safety Performance Project, the length of time served in prison has increased markedly over the last two decades. Prisoners released in 2009 served an average of nine additional months in custody, or 36 percent longer, than offenders released in 1990.

Those extended prison sentences came at a price: prisoners released from incarceration in 2009 cost states $23,300 per offender -- or a total of over $10 billion nationwide. More than half of that amount was for non-violent offenders.

The report, Time Served: The High Cost, Low Return of Longer Prison Terms, also found that time served for drug offenses and violent offenses grew at nearly the same pace from 1990 to 2009. Drug offenders served 36 percent longer in 2009 than those released in 1990, while violent offenders served 37 percent longer. Time served for inmates convicted of property crimes increased by 24 percent.

Almost all states increased length of stay over the last two decades, though that varied widely from state to state. In Florida, for example, where time served rose most rapidly, prison terms grew by 166 percent and cost an extra $1.4 billion in 2009.

A companion analysis Pew conducted in partnership with external researchers found that many non-violent offenders in Florida, Maryland and Michigan could have served significantly shorter prison terms with little or no public safety consequences.

The report also summarizes recent public opinion polling that shows strong support nationwide for reducing time served for non-violent offenders.

-- Time Served: The high cost, low return of longer prison terms, by The Pew Charitable Trusts

David Shotkoski had always wanted to become a Major League pitcher. One day in 1995, he kissed his wife and young daughter good-bye and left North Aurora, Illinois, for spring training with the Atlanta Braves in West Palm Beach, Florida. There, the 30- year-old Shotkoski was taking an evening walk when a gunman demanded his money. Shot twice, he managed to stagger some 300 feet to a busy street before collapsing near the curb.

Indicted for his murder was Neal Douglas Evans, a career criminal who, despite 13 previous convictions for drug crimes, theft, burglaries, and robberies, had slip-slided past forgiving judges for years. Because of a judicial order to relieve alleged overcrowding in Florida prisons, Evans was on his fourth so-called conditional release when he was charged with killing David.

"I just don't understand," Felicia Shotkoski said when she learned that a habitual felon had been charged with her husband's murder. How could she understand? For the man who killed her beloved husband, the man who stole a young girl's father away from her for life, was a known felon released repeatedly by a justice system that all the experts agree imprisons mainly first-time, nonviolent, petty drug criminals for long periods. [26]

On any given day in the U.S. in 1991, there were an estimated 435,000 probationers and 155,000 parolees residing in local communities who have been convicted of violent crime -- or over a half million offenders. If we compare that to the number of violent offenders residing in prison during the same year, we see that there were approximately 372,500 offenders convicted of violent crime in prison, and approximately 590,000 outside in the community on probation and parole! [28]

Robert "Mudman" Simon, a violent and repeat offender, was in Pennsylvania's Graterford prison. He was serving a 10-to-20-year sentence for third-degree murder. He was paroled from Graterford in 1995 after serving 12.5 years-longer and a higher percentage of the sentence than most prisoners ever complete. But "Mudman" had a criminal history that involved outlaw motorcycle gangs, and a poor overall prison disciplinary record to boot. During his last two years at Graterford, however, he had no official infractions, so the staff recommended him for parole. A Pennsylvania parole board member spent only a few minutes reviewing the recommendation and "Mudman's" criminal history before authorizing a release date. One condition of "Mudman's" parole was to stay away from criminal associates and bikers. But, like so many parolees, he received no close supervision. Within three months of his release, he fatally shot a New Jersey police officer. As a result of the public furor over the case, Pennsylvania has begun to tighten its parole practices. But, as in most states, there's a long way to go before early-release practices and failures to supervise dangerous criminals released to the streets become things of the past. As a Graterford official described the state's usual, pre-"Mudman" parole process, "We didn't look at the crime." [30]

Between 1991 and 1995 the number of media reports on crime in the United States more than tripled, coinciding with a jump in public concern about the issue.Federal and state lawmakers saw the reports and responded quickly. Reasoning that harsher sentences enacted in the 1970s and 1980s had been responsible for the declining crime rates of the early 1990s, they decided the answer was to go still further. At the time, little attention was paid to the impacts extending prison terms might have on public safety, or on costs to taxpayers.

-- Time Served: The high cost, low return of longer prison terms, by The Pew Charitable Trusts

Supervisors told officers to make an arrest and "articulate" a charge later, or haul someone in with the intent of voiding the arrest at the end of a shift, or detain people for hours on minor charges like disorderly conduct—all for the purpose of getting citizens off the street. People were arrested for not showing identification, even if they were just a few feet from their homes. Mental health worker Rhonda Scott suffered two broken wrists during a 2008 arrest for not having her ID card while standing on her own stoop.

The precinct's campaign led to a 900 percent increase in stop-and-frisks in the neighborhood, which commanders demanded from officers in order to hit statistical quotas. It also resulted in several dozen gun arrests, hundreds of arrests on other charges, and thousands of summonses for things like disorderly conduct, trespassing, and loitering.

Defense attorneys and civil rights groups say Mauriello's instructions to his troops appear to have strained the limits of probable cause, and raise questions about the legality of the many arrests. The tactics, which are used in many other parts of the city, also caused an undercurrent of resentment among residents.

"The Police Department is using these numbers to portray themselves as being effective," says Marquez Claxton, a retired NYPD detective and the director of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance, which studies police issues. "In portraying that illusion, they have pushed these illegal quotas which force police officers to engage in illegal acts."

And all of it—the questionable arrests, the campaign of aggression—occurred with the added pressure of severe shortages in manpower and patrol cars. The tapes show that the shortages got so bad that some days the most effective way to fight crime was just to pray for rain.

-- The NYPD Tapes, Part 2, by Graham Rayman

Moreover, between 2003 and 2008, Florida experienced a big jump in the use of “year and a day” sentences. This is notable because offenders sentenced to a year or less serve their time in local jails rather than in state prisons. These “year-and-a-day” sentences often were imposed by courts under pressure to relieve crowding and costs in their local jails and included a large proportion of offenders snared by a Department of Corrections policy requiring “zero tolerance” for probation violations. The policy was revoked by 2008; but, while in effect, the number of violators sentenced to prison rose by nearly 12,000.

-- Time Served: The high cost, low return of longer prison terms, by The Pew Charitable Trusts

Less retributive but more rational

Joyous life without a creator would be less retributive and more rational. Retribution satisfies one's sense of justice that he who makes other people suffer must also be made to suffer. It is in part punishment and in part sadism. Punishment is primarily a painful method used in modifying the undesirable behaviour of an offender. Morbid gratuitous enjoyment of deliberate and excessive infliction of pain on others, without retribution and punishment in mind, is called sadism. Thus retribution is somewhere in-between punishment and sadism. This is the meaning that Marquis De Sade had in mind when he said: "Any punishment that does not correct (meaning retribution), that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted."

Retribution is a religious term. It is man's emulation of what god will supposedly be doing on the Day of the Last Judgment, i.e. to punish the souls before him for their evil deeds done on earth. It is giving in return, a repayment to the offender for the suffering caused by him, by making him suffer commensurately: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. There are a number of questions in this regard. Does retribution accomplish what it set out to do? Does it benefit the offender, public at large, or the retributor?

Rationally thinking persons would come to an irrefutable conclusion that retribution does not serve the intended purpose. It does not accomplish what it set out to do; it is impossible to apply in practice and should be abandoned forthwith. This being the case, supporting retribution cannot be anything else than sadism, legitimized and sanctified by one's religious belief.

Shakespeare ridiculed retribution in "The Merchant on Venice." Shylock's daughter Jessica of Jewish faith, eloped with Lorenzo a Christian. To Shylock losing his daughter was like losing his own flesh and blood. In addition he bore Antonio "a lodged hate and a certain loathing." Antonio owed him three thousand ducats, which he was unable to repay because of his state of bankruptcy, but for which he signed a bond nominating the forfeit "of an equal pound of his flesh, to be cut off and taken in what part of his body would please Shylock." He hated Antonio because as a Christian "Antonio laughed at his losses, mocked at his gains, scorned his nation, thwarted his bargains, cooled his friends and heated his enemies." But above all, he hated him because as a Christian he taught him to resort to retribution when he was wronged: "If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrongs a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge."

Now it was Shylock's turn to practice what he was taught: "The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction." Having lost his flesh and blood Jessica, and under the pretense of the legally signed bond, he was able to feed his revenge towards Antonio and exact from him the agreed-to pound of flesh: "The pound of flesh which I demand of him, is dearly bought: 'tis mine and I will have it."

Shylock's retributive attitude was thwarted in practice by a judge, who instructed him: "Shed thou no blood; nor cut thou less, nor more, but just a pound of flesh; if thou tak'st more, or less, than just a pound, thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate." This is where the retributive doctrine of 'an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth' breaks down. An eye of a painter, astronomer, microbiologist, architect, fashion designer, etc is not the same as the dead eye of a musician, gambler, fortuneteller, mathematician, or a menial worker. A loss of tooth by a wealthy man is not equivalent to the same loss by a pauper, as the wealthy will replace it and be even better looking in the end, whereas the other may not even be able to chew his food.

This brings us to the conundrum of exactly measuring 'one pound of flesh' not only in a physical sense, but also in terms of mental and emotional suffering. It is impossible to measure and compare mental anguish and suffering. All people differ from each other in their sensitivity to loss and pain. Some people are genetically wired to feel 'a pea under a hundred mattresses,' and some can skin a cat alive and laugh in the process. Some people sniffle and choke up with emotions when eulogizing at the funerals; some are loath to go to movie theaters because they are easily moved to tears and have to blow their noses and disturb persons sitting next to them; some faint at the sight of the open wound. On the other extreme there are people with thick skins who are provoked to laughter when watching most sadistic scenes and chastise their spouses for overreacting to the flicker of light projected onto the screen. For this reason there can be no agreement on the degree of retribution, since for the sensitive most of it will be cruel and inhumane, whereas for others, drowning, followed by hanging, decapitating, quartering and burning may be still insufficient unless the victim could be made to retain its consciousness and the process could be repeated in a circular fashion for ever and ever.

In this connection I feel sort of malicious glee, or what Germans call "Schadefreude, that sadists are tantalized by not being able to have their way here on earth. Human consciousness and life are too quickly extinguished with little force. It saddens me, however, that in the afterlife the sadists may be rewarded by the opportunity to practice their craft on damned souls for eternity, running no risk that they would die, no matter how severe torture they might be subjected to. But here is the problem: if the retribution is too excessive, the chain of counter-retributive tit-for-tats may follow for generations to come. Thus living without the creator may facilitate us giving up this pound-of-flesh attitude and leave it up to god to bask forever in his retributive wrath against unrepentant sinners.

Less punitive but more realistic

Joyous life without a creator would be less punitive and more realistic. Even though there is a separation between the state and the church on the North American continent, we still live in a society driven by an ideology, which has its roots in religion. To be judgmental and punitive may appear atheistic on the surface but it is religious in nature. It would seem that we justify our need for a creator by our punitive attitudes toward our fellow men and in a circular fashion we justify our needs to judge and to punish others by the scriptural commandments imposed on us by a creator. Big Dad in heaven is a bogeyman carrying a big stick behind his back. He has set an example how to punish the sinners when he rained flaming tar on Sodom and Gomorrah, utterly razing these cities to the ground, eliminating all life -- people, plants, and animals. He is the one who contracted Satan to prepare torture chambers in the realm of hell, where some sinners may end up after they appear before him on the day of retribution. In some way the existence of the creator also makes us feel more humane and less guilty because less divine, as when we sentence the evildoer to five consecutive life imprisonments, and pat ourselves on our backs for not doing it for eternity (as you know who would do it), and even allow ourselves to be moved to pity and reduce the sentence to three consecutive life terms instead of five.

In line with our religious teaching, we believe that everyone would, so to say, be saved if he were to be shown the path to righteousness. All one would need to do would be to change his thinking, as if all of us were thinkers and measured things twice before we proceeded to cut once. But how realistic is such expectation? Let us take for example an attempt to try to make a person love his neighbour as he loved oneself. The reality of the situation is that someone, who intensely hates another, cannot be made to love him at the same time. Also, he may nurture intense hatred of himself in which case he would be commanded to act on the same feelings towards others.

Love is not based on rational considerations. We also know what happens when we try to make one person to stop loving another. The forced solution of the problem leads to evil, because one either has to use violence to reform the other person to make him more lovable and therefore easier for us to love him, or resort to violence to remove ourselves or the object of our hate from the equation. In other words, one has to act as if saying: "If I or you were not around, I would not be put in a position to have to love you, and feel guilty if I fail to do so."

Immorality and criminality is in large measure a reflection of the prevailing religious climate and the social structure. If the commitment of adultery or using god's name in vain is a sin, a number of individuals may be stoned to death for their supposed immorality. If the social structure makes it mandatory that one has to have money in order to eat, then some people will become criminals by obtaining either food or money by crook. If one's survival depends on cutthroat competition, then there will be many cutthroats and as many throats cut, and those that cut it in disregard of the commonly accepted practices, will be labeled as murderers. Thus, we are not evil by nature but rather by our religious beliefs and by culture.

Some people of renown did not think highly of people bent on punishment. Friedrich Nietzsche advised to "distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish was powerful." Oscar Wilde said: "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted, as a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crimes."

Punishment is the infliction of pain, deprivation, or other unpleasant consequences on an organism responding incorrectly under specific conditions so that, through avoidance, the desired learning or behaviour becomes established. Can punishment cleanse a person from the undesirable traits of his character so that he would behave decently and of his own volition? And, does belief in a Creator facilitate such a cleansing? Is there not a possibility that punishment could lead to more violence in its wake?

Punishment does not work on philosophical grounds, and this is why not: our freedom to choose is a fixed reality; we can neither abrogate it nor be forced to do so by others. We exercise this option each moment of our lives. Choices we make are not made in a vacuum but in a complex set of circumstances, which for the most part we create through our choices, and through which we wade, using the same judgment, which was instrumental to bring us to the point where we happened to be in the beginning. In other words, our poor judgment is the mad dog that bit us in the first place, and whose hair we then use to cure us of the consequences.

Judgment used in exercising our freedom to make choices depends on a number of things. They include our brain capacity to store and retrieve data, our ability to reason, i.e., to deduce relationships between these data (intelligence), to concentrate, to apply the knowledge gained, the degree of awareness, ability to empathize, depth of feeling, self-esteem, self-confidence, our goals, degree of hope for the future, the degree of anxiety generated when taking risks, etc. Some of us exercise poor judgment and consequently make wrong choices.

We all use our judgment in making choices and because we cannot see into the future, we always take risks that whatever we decide upon may turn into a disaster. Thus we make a decision to fly, or to drive a car, and the knowledge that fatal accidents do happen does not deter us from our goal. We take calculated risks that bad luck will not be with us, because we are good drivers and fly with the airlines which have a good safety record. A criminal is acting in a similar way. He knows that he may be caught and sanctioned for his acts. He also knows of the dire consequences suffered by others caught in a similar act, but he proceeds, hoping that he will be all right. Neither he nor us need to be lectured to make us aware of what might happen and be punished for what happened. How would we like it if after a head-on collision, in which a number of people were killed, we were hauled before the judge and lectured on the dangers of driving, of how lives could have been saved if we were not behind the steering wheel; that we knowingly undertook a dangerous course of action and need to be punished and rehabilitated. Thus all of us exercise our freedom to choose between two evils, accidentally resulting in good, or two goods leading to an unpredicted disaster, or between good and evil leading to either one or another.

To change somebody then would mean one of two things: to make him abrogate the freedom to choose, or to improve his judgment. In the first instance it means to improve his ability to judge what is the right thing to do in given circumstances, keeping in mind that we really do not know what the outcome of any of our actions will be, and generally make a calculated guess and hope for the best.

Both things are impossible because freedom to choose cannot be abrogated and a person's ability to judge is genetically wired. A person may be able to function at the maximum of his potential in all areas required to make a judgment, but it may still not be sufficiently good enough. Things are made even worse since each situation created with the help of a poor judgment requires progressively that much better judgment to cope with, which is not to be had. There is no room for punishment here. Beating a dead horse will not restore him to life or put him in a good working order.

Failure of punishment to reform

The theoretical foundation of all our punitive attempts to alter someone's mind, to brainwash, to indoctrinate, to teach and to reform him, is based on the knowledge derived from Pavlov's conditioned reflex experiment. In that experiment the bell was rang each time the dog was fed, which conditioned him to salivate when he heard the sound of the bell alone, without any food being offered to him. In general terms it means modifying a person's behaviour in such a way that an act or response previously associated with one stimulus becomes associated with another. It is also referred to as aversion therapy. The purpose is to change habits or antisocial behaviour by inducing dislike for them through association with a noxious stimulus. This is what punishment is supposed to accomplish. Thus, when the shoplifter begins to 'drool' in the store full of articles to be appropriated without paying for them, an instantaneous recall of the term spent in jail on a similar charge, is supposed to make his mouth unpleasantly parched and make him abstain from stealing. Ideally then he would substitute the irresistible impulse to steal with having a drink from a fountain. This however does not work in practice. Why not?

Punishment, as a form of aversion therapy, fails for three reasons: 1) the effect of one's action is too far removed from the cause, 2) no two situations in life are ever exactly alike, 3) to serve as a deterrent for others, the history of crimes committed and punished would have to be taught, which would not only instruct the student in what not to do, but also what to do well enough in order not to get caught.

To be effective, the resulting response to an action has to be instantaneous. All people, with the exception of those whose IQ is a zero, become easily conditioned to avoid common dangers. Once we experience an electric shock, burn ourselves when touching a hot plate or a flame of a candle, cut ourselves, or choke when submersed under water, we do not need to attend group therapy sessions to teach us how to avoid getting hurt again in the future. Why does it have to be instantaneous? Because one has to be absolutely clear that only a single variable was present at the time of the accident and not a combination of factors which produced the unwanted painful effect. Thus touching the live electric wire with one's bare hands leaves no doubt in one's mind that the cause of the electric shock which one experienced, was not due to having gone to bed late last night, or not having said one's prayer, or having had red meat for supper, but due solely to the touching of the live wire.

A term in jail cannot produce similar avoidance response to e.g. shoplifting for the reason that no one ever was actually caught at the instant of shoplifting. Every law-abiding customer in the store behaves in an identical manner to that of the shoplifter, in that he wanders around the store with his shopping cart full of merchandise for which he has not yet paid. It is the exiting from the store, without paying for the goods in one's possession that transforms an honest shopper into a shoplifter. In addition, one is also not immediately found guilty without the appearance before the judge, and punishment comes weeks or months later. When finally the time comes to suffer and to connect it to the cause, the cause becomes obfuscated by the chain of hundred-and-one events preceding, surrounding and following the episode of shoplifting, such as" not having eaten for a day, carelessness in avoiding the eyes of a detective known to be very mean, not hiding the stolen object in the right place, raising suspicion by exhibiting a guilty look on one's face and by making facetious remarks to the cashier,, the store manager disliking his patronizing the store, etc., etc. It is our wishful thinking that the offender would connect his punishment exactly to the point of him exiting the store without paying for the goods. But, as in any chain of events, picking up this or that link is the arbitrary matter.

In Hindu philosophy it is the dwelling on material things that forms the first link of the chain that leads to the destruction of man. It runs as follows: dwelling on material things leads to the liking of the object and the desire to own it. Frustration follows when, due to the circumstances beyond one's control, one is unable to take the possession of the loved object. This leads to an irritable and an emotional upheaval. In such a state of mind one's judgment becomes impaired and a felony is committed. In a roundabout way the devil also gets to be blamed, and the role of god as a culprit is not far behind. In the courts of law the background of the alleged felon is scrutinized, the character witnesses are called, past history of similar alleged offenses scrutinized and the findings are then submitted to the jury for their verdict. None of this happens when one suffers an electric shock by touching the live wire. It is not 'the devil made me do it' or 'my repressed memories of sexual abuse in infancy' produced the shock, but it was a poignant life experience and his immediate grasping of what life was trying to tell him. This is why the consequence of one's action has to be instantaneous.

Suppose that the electric shock could not be felt immediately upon touching the live wire but some time later, as an aftershock. Suppose that one were able to hold onto it for hours, without untoward effects and that the time factor was of no consequence. Then let us suppose that in reality a great harm to one's health was done by this act, but the jury was still out whether there was any connection between the two. Electric aftershocks described as excruciating, lightening, shooting, lancinating pain, lasting only a few seconds, and coming up sporadically without any known precipitating cause seems to afflict many people. It is called in medicine by the name of neuralgia, e.g. trigeminal neuralgia, whose cause is still unknown. How would one be able to de-condition such a sufferer from ever holding onto the live electric wire? One would be groping for an answer in our dietary habits, the style of life, genetics, traumatic stress syndromes, repressed memory of sexual abuse, present marital conflicts and whatever have you.

An identical situation occurs with regards to smoking. If taking the first puff was to produce a whooping type of cough, and the second one would flatten one on the floor in a convulsive seizure, and the third one would produce near-death experience, there would be no smoking addicts. However, as things stand now, statistical causal connection between smoking and health is not that convincing to all, especially when one knows of 30 year old sportsmen, in good physical health, who never smoked, but died suddenly while jogging or playing tennis, while an extremely obese sedentary octogenarian, continues to puff on his cigar, frustrated by the fact that he still wakes up to life the next morning.

Failure of aversion therapy in alcoholism

Anectine, the neuromuscular blocking agent, is used as an adjunct to general anesthesia, to provide relaxation during surgery and to facilitate tracheal intubation, amongst other things. It was routinely used when treating depressive disorders with electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), after the patient was put under anaesthetic. Given in appropriate dosage by intravenous injection, within a few seconds it produced a complete paralysis of all the muscles in the body including the diaphragm. This made the person unable to breathe and to speak. The effect lasted for a few minutes only and the person was given oxygen under pressure to breathe as soon as his breathing ceased. Anyone experiencing this for the first time in his life, while being fully conscious and without being adequately prepared for it, goes through a most traumatic, life-threatening experience, which he usually never forgets. What a boon would it be if one could link this traumatic experience with the harmful habit that one wished to condition a person to avoid, like for example abusing alcoholic beverages. Wouldn't it be a miracle cure, similar to touching electrically live wires, and never doing it again?

Thus for a very short while Anectine became a tool in aversion therapy in alcohol abuse disorders. I do not know how the medico-legal requirement of patient signing the consent form was overcome, but it was reported that a person was put on a stretcher in the emergency room of a hospital, and keeping him totally ignorant of the unpleasant details of treatment, he was given an intravenous injection of Anectine. Just a few seconds before the onset of generalized paralysis, he was visually presented with an open bottle of e.g. Balvenie single malt Scotch Whisky, his favourite drink. He was asked to smell its aroma, and to taste the drops of whisky applied to his lips. At that instant he became paralyzed, was unable to breathe and went into life-and-death panic. He wondered if his doctor knew what was happening to him, but was unable to sign to him even by raising his finger. A few seconds later an oxygen mask was placed on his face and he was given oxygen under pressure to help him to breathe.

The result of this aversion treatment was predictable and a great success, albeit a very limited one. From then on the patient abstained from drinking single malt scotch of the Balvenie brand, and vowed never again to drink scotch in a hospital's emergency room, while lying on a stretcher and being surrounded by people dressed in white coats. He did not stop drinking altogether, as it was hoped for, but instead he switched his drinking to another brand. As the time when on he recovered his appetite for scotch, but was unsuitable for the second aversion therapy session because, having gone through it once, it ceased to be traumatic to him, as he knew what to expect.

Now this brings us to another point, why the aversion therapy cannot be of practical use: no two situations are alike and the aversion to one does not constitute an aversion to all of them. It was reported to me that a deeply religious priest, consulted a psychiatrist with a problem that interfered with his duty as a priest and made him feel very guilty. Being young, good looking, and testosterone driven, he was exposed to many irresistible temptations posed to him by young women seeking his spiritual guidance in his capacity as a priest. As such he had unlimited visitation rights, could enter any house of his faithful at any time, no questions asked (in contradistinction to doctors making housecalls). He sought aversion therapy for his obsession with lust and lechery, and the resulting promiscuity. Could aversion therapy be successful in helping him?

For the argument's sake let us suppose that in the course of aversion therapy, he was allowed to grow more and more amorous towards the attractive women-therapists. Then, all of a sudden, in line with the aversion therapy protocol, they would turn vulgar, unkempt, dirty and hostile, castrate him psychologically by shaming him and making him the butt of all their jokes. There is no doubt that in relationship to them he would become sexually impotent and actually become panicky at their approach. But would this end his previous womanizing and promiscuity? It certainly would not, the reason being that there are no two women in the world who are exactly alike physically and psychologically. Even the same woman is not the same on two different days, or even five minutes later on the same day.

It follows from the above argumentation that punishment and retribution are useless and irrational, and in absence of the divine creator could be discarded as outdated and harmful superstitions.

-- Neither Created Nor Evolved: Living Joyously Without a Creator, by Walter Prytulak

Statistics: Posted by admin — Wed Apr 27, 2016 6:13 am

Four young Milwaukee men charged in a recent crime spree that included gunshot murders at a Blockbuster Video store and a liquor store had 92 prior arrests for armed robbery, burglary, battery, arson, weapons violations, theft and other alleged violations, according to Milwaukee police records. One of the defendants, 24-year-old Willie Dortch, had 51 arrests alone, records show. The four defendants slipped through the cracks of the justice system -- through plea bargains, early release from prison on parole, luck and brazen arrogance -- leaving them free to allegedly carry out numerous violent crimes outlined in criminal complaints, a check of police and criminal records showed. [1]

Consider this additional handful of cases of innocent people sentenced to die – some executed and some spared:

•In 2011, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a Black man who was almost certainly innocent of the murder of a white off-duty police officer. The circumstances of his execution raised an international outcry, for good reason. Davis was convicted based on eyewitness testimony, since there was no murder weapon or physical evidence presented by the prosecution. Seven of the nine eyewitnesses recanted or contradicted their trial testimony, many of them saying they were pressured or threatened by police at the time. Troy Davis came close to execution three previous times, because of the difficulty of getting any court to listen to new evidence casting doubt on his conviction. After passage of a federal law in 1996, petitioners are very limited in their ability to appeal death sentences, and courts routinely refuse to hear new testimony, even evidence of innocence. When Troy Davis finally did get a hearing on his evidence, the judge required “proof of innocence” – an impossibly high standard which he ruled that Mr. Davis did not meet. Despite the overwhelming call for clemency, supposed to be the “fail-safe” of the death penalty system, the Georgia Board of Pardons refused to commute the sentence to life and Mr. Davis was executed. Only one day after Troy Davis was executed, two men were freed by the special Innocence Commission of North Carolina after a decade apiece in prison. The two men had actually pled guilty to a crime they did not commit, because they were threatened with the death penalty.
•In Texas in 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for the arson-murder of his three children. Independent investigations by a newspaper, a nonprofit organization using top experts in the field of fire science, and an independent expert hired by the State of Texas all found that accident, not arson was the cause of the fire. There simply was no reliable evidence that the children were murdered. Yet even with these reports in hand, the state of Texas executed Mr. Willingham. Earlier this year, the Texas Forensic Science Commission was poised to issue a report officially confirming these conclusions until Texas Governor Rick Perry replaced the Commission’s chair and some of its members. Cameron Todd Willingham, who claimed innocence all along, was executed for a crime he almost certainly did not commit. As an example of the arbitrariness of the death penalty, another man, Ernest Willis, also convicted of arson-murder on the same sort of flimsy and unscientific testimony, was freed from Texas death row six months after Willingham was executed.
•In 1985, in Maryland, Kirk Bloodsworth was sentenced to death for rape and murder, despite the testimony of alibi witnesses. In 1986 his conviction was reversed on grounds of withheld evidence pointing to another suspect; he was retried, re-convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. In 1993, newly available DNA evidence proved he was not the rapist-killer, and he was released after the prosecution dismissed the case. A year later he was awarded $300,000 for wrongful punishment. Years later the DNA was matched to the real killer.
•In Mississippi, in 1990, Sabrina Butler was sentenced to death for killing her baby boy. She claimed the child died after attempts at resuscitation failed. On technical grounds her conviction was reversed in 1992. At retrial, she was acquitted when a neighbor corroborated Butler's explanation of the child's cause of death and the physician who performed the autopsy admitted his work had not been thorough.
•In 1990, Jesse Tafero was executed in Florida. He had been convicted in 1976 along with his wife, Sonia Jacobs, for murdering a state trooper. In 1981 Jacobs' death sentence was reduced on appeal to life imprisonment, and 11 years later her conviction was vacated by a federal court. The evidence on which Tafero and Jacobs had been convicted and sentenced was identical; it consisted mainly of the perjured testimony of an ex-convict who turned state's witness in order to avoid a death sentence. Had Tafero been alive in 1992, he no doubt would have been released along with Jacobs. Tafero’s execution went horribly wrong, and his head caught on fire during the electrocution.
•In Alabama, Walter McMillian was convicted of murdering a white woman in 1988. Despite the jury's recommendation of a life sentence, the judge sentenced him to death. The sole evidence leading the police to arrest McMillian was testimony of an ex-convict seeking favor with the prosecution. A dozen alibi witnesses (all African Americans, like McMillian) testified on McMillian's behalf that they were together at a neighborhood gathering, to no avail. On appeal, after tireless efforts by his attorney Bryan Stevenson, McMillian's conviction was reversed by the Alabama Court of Appeals. Stevenson uncovered prosecutorial suppression of exculpatory evidence and perjury by prosecution witnesses, and the new district attorney joined the defense in seeking dismissal of the charges.
•In 1985, in Illinois, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez were convicted of abduction, rape, and murder of a young girl and were sentenced to death. Shortly after, another man serving a life term in prison for similar crimes confessed that he alone was guilty; but his confession was inadmissible because he refused to repeat it in court unless the state waived the death penalty against him. Awarded a new trial in 1988, Cruz was again convicted and sentenced to death; Hernandez was also re-convicted, and sentenced to 80 years in prison. In 1992 the assistant attorney general assigned to prosecute the case on appeal resigned after becoming convinced of the defendants' innocence. The convictions were again overturned on appeal after DNA tests exonerated Cruz and implicated the prisoner who had earlier confessed. In 1995 the court ordered a directed verdict of acquittal, and sharply criticized the police for their unprofessional handling of the case. Hernandez was released on bail and the prosecution dropped all charges.
•In 1980 in Texas a black high school janitor, Clarence Brandley, and his white co-worker found the body of a missing 16-year-old white schoolgirl. Interrogated by the police, they were told, "One of you two is going to hang for this." Looking at Brandley, the officer said, "Since you're the nigger, you're elected." In a classic case of rush to judgment, Brandley was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The circumstantial evidence against him was thin, other leads were ignored by the police, and the courtroom atmosphere reeked of racism. In 1986, Centurion Ministries -– a volunteer group devoted to freeing wrongly convicted prisoners -– came to Brandley's aid. Evidence had meanwhile emerged that another man had committed the murder for which Brandley was awaiting execution. Brandley was not released until 1990.(Davies, White Lies 1991)

This sample of freakish and arbitrary innocence determinations also speaks directly to the unceasing concern that there are many more innocent people on death rows across the country -– as well as who have been executed. Several factors seen in the above sample of cases help explain why the judicial system cannot guarantee that justice will never miscarry: overzealous prosecution, mistaken or perjured testimony, race, faulty police work, coerced confessions, the defendant's previous criminal record, inept and under-resourced defense counsel, seemingly conclusive circumstantial evidence, and community pressure for a conviction, among others. And when the system does go wrong, it is often volunteers from outside the criminal justice system -– journalists, for example -– who rectify the errors, not the police or prosecutors. To retain the death penalty in the face of the demonstrable failures of the system is unacceptable, especially since there are no strong overriding reasons to favor the death penalty.

-- The Case Against the Death Penalty, by American Civil Liberties Union

On June 29, 1992, Kimber Reynolds pulled up outside Fresno, California's popular Daily Planet Restaurant. She and a friend went into the restaurant and ordered dessert. At about 10:30 p.m. they headed back to Kimber's car. Her friend let himself in on the passenger side. Kimber checked the one-way street for traffic and started to get in.

She never made it. Two men on a stolen motorcycle appeared, pinned her against the door, and grabbed her purse. She resisted. One assailant put a .357 magnum in her ear and shot her in cold blood. Her parents' phone rang with the news at 2:30 a.m. They rushed to the hospital. Twenty-six hours after she was shot, and four months shy of her nineteenth birthday, Kimber Reynolds was dead.

Kimber's killers were violent and repeat offenders with long drug-and-crime offense records. The shooter, Joe Davis, had been on a major crime spree since his most recent release from prison. When the police tracked him down and surrounded his house, he vowed to his mother, "I'm gonna take some cops out with me." He wounded one officer, but his gun jammed. The officers fired every round they had at him. He was hit by ten rounds of pistol fire and four gunshot blasts in 52 seconds. His mother chose to have his body viewed without hiding the wounds. She told a local newspaper, "I wanted to let others know what happens when you abuse drugs, when you get involved in crime." [13]

In 1990, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) published a study based on interviews with 154 incoming inmates in three states. The NCCD claimed in its summary that "the vast majority of inmates are sentenced for petty crimes." Writing in the New York Times, columnist Tom Wicker asked, "Why does our nation spend such an exorbitant amount of money each year to warehouse petty criminals?" He summarized the NCCD study as finding that "80 percent of those going to prison are not serious or violent criminals but guilty of low-level offenses: minor parole violations, property, drug and public disorder crimes." Others made similar claims, and the NCCD study is cited to this day. But when Professor Charles H. Logan, a University of Connecticut criminologist and fellow at the U.S. Department of Justice, scrutinized the NCCD study, he discovered that 25.4 percent of the inmates whose conviction offense was categorized as "petty" had revealed to the interviewers that they were high-rate offenders committed to a criminal lifestyle. By Logan's count, nearly three-quarters of the new admissions were either serious or high-rate offenders, not even counting the 21 percent of the sample who, while not identified as high-rate offenders, were described as having been on a "crime spree" at the time of their commitment offense. Logan's sobering analysis of who really goes to prison, however, wasn't touted in the New York Times, which had labeled Wicker's column on the NCCD report "The Punitive Society." [14]

The RAND Corporation is surely one of the world's most unusual, Cold War-bred private organizations in the field of international relations. While it has attracted and supported some of the most distinguished analysts of war and weaponry, it has not stood for the highest standards of intellectual inquiry and debate. While RAND has an unparalleled record of providing unbiased, unblinking analyses of technical and carefully limited problems involved in waging contemporary war, its record of advice on cardinal policies involving war and peace, the protection of civilians in wartime, arms races, and decisions to resort to armed force has been abysmal.

For example, Abella credits RAND with "creating the discipline of terrorist studies," but its analysts seem never to have noticed the phenomenon of state terrorism as it was practiced in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America by American-backed military dictatorships. Similarly, admirers of Albert Wohlstetter's reformulations of nuclear war ignore the fact that that these led to a "constant escalation of the nuclear arms race." By 1967, the U.S. possessed a stockpile of 32,500 atomic and hydrogen bombs.

-- The RAND Corporation: America's University of Imperialism. For decades these self-professed saviors of the Western world helped precipitate U.S. foreign policy disasters like the Vietnam Warm by Chalmers Johnson

Have you heard the one about the "pizza thief," the 29-year-old California man who was sentenced under California's three-strikes-and-you're-out law for stealing a slice of pizza from children in a shopping mall? Although much of the national press spun this story as a self-evident example of the folly of three-strikes (and other "get-tough" legislation), the facts paint a different picture. The offender's adult criminal history dated back to 1985. He had been convicted of five serious felonies inside of a decade. He was granted probation five times in five years for convictions on two misdemeanor charges and three felony charges. Between 1985 and 1990, he had five suspended sentences. At one point he moved to Washington State -- and was arrested there on additional charges. During his criminal career, he used eight aliases, three different dates of birth, four different Social Security numbers, and marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, and PCP. Standing six feet four inches, his "third strike" occurred when he and another man frightened and intimidated four children (ages 7, 10, 12, and 14), stole their pizza, and then walked away laughing. He was not sentenced to life; he could be eligible for parole in the year 2014. As one California official quipped, this repeat felon was already "doing life on the installment plan. Three strikes simply reduced the number of future installments and the number of future victims." Indeed, a 1996 series in the Sacramento Bee reported that 84 percent of the 1,477 felons thus far convicted under three-strikes were violent offenders who averaged five felony convictions. And a 1996 survey by the Joint Centers for Political and Economic Studies found that 82 percent of all Americans, including 73 percent of black Americans, favored three-strikes laws. [19]

***

After Three Strikes passed, the supporters expected not only to sentence people with three separate convictions for serious crimes but also four-time and even five-time violent criminals. These four-and five-strike crimes would have been prevented if Washington State had enacted Three Strikes sooner.

Charles Ben Finch has always been a violent predator. Strike one occurred in 1970 when he was convicted of assault and battery with a deadly weapon in Oklahoma. He was also convicted of two non-strike burglaries that same year. He was sentenced to three years but was paroled in 1971.

Strike two was for a first-degree manslaughter conviction in 1976, also in Oklahoma. This time he was sentenced to four years in prison. Again, he did not serve his complete sentence since Finch arrived in Seattle in June 1979.

Finch committed strike three that same year for the first-degree rape of an elderly widow during a burglary. Angry and intoxicated, Finch broke into a home-furnishing store and started breaking lamps, cabinets, tables, and other items. The widow who lived above the store investigated the noise and was dragged into an elevator and raped at least twice.

If Three Strikes had been the law back then, his violent crime sprees would have ended there. Unfortunately, Finch was released on parole just nine years later.

The consequences were deadly. In the summer of 1994, Finch committed strike four when he walked into a mobile home occupied by his estranged wife and fatally shot a visiting blind man in the head. He then threatened his wife and her eighty-one-year-old mother with the gun.

Charles Finch eventually called the police and opened fire when they responded to his 911 call. A Snohomish county deputy sheriff was murdered by one of the six shots fired by Finch.

Finch has now been sentenced to death for the cold, calculated murders of two men. These two murders would have been prevented if Three Strikes had been enacted sooner.

--DAVE LACOURSE, "HOW THREE STRIKES HAS FARED IN WASHINGTON STATE," WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES, FORTHCOMING FALL 1996

California's Three Strikes law has its origins in a terrible event from October 1993, when, in a case that outraged the entire country, a violent felon named Richard Allen Davis kidnapped and murdered an adolescent girl named Polly Klaas. Californians were determined to never again let a repeat offender get the chance to commit such a brutal crime, and so a year later, with the Klaas case still fresh in public memory, the state's citizens passed Proposition 184 -– the Three Strikes law -– with an overwhelming 72 percent of the vote. Under the ballot initiative, anyone who had committed two serious felonies would effectively be sentenced to jail for life upon being convicted of a third crime.

The overwhelming support for the measure touched off a nationwide get-tough-on-crime movement, embraced especially by third-way-style Democrats, who seized upon the policy idea as a powerful weapon in their efforts to throw off their party's bleeding-heart image and recapture the political center. Having seen their wonk-geekish 1988 presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis, expertly exploded by the infamous Willie Horton ad cooked up by Republican strategist Lee Atwater -– an ad that convinced voters that the Democrats were the party of scary-looking black rapists on furlough -– Democrats had spent years searching for a way to send Middle America a different message.

Three Strikes was a perfect way to convey that new message. The master triangulator himself, Bill Clinton, stumped for a national Three Strikes law in his 1994 State of the Union address. When a federal version passed a year later, Clinton took special care to give squeamish wuss-bunny liberals a celebratory kick in the ear, using the same "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" rhetorical technique George W. Bush would make famous a few years later. "Narrow-interest groups on the left and the right didn't want the bill to pass," Clinton beamed, "and you can be sure the criminals didn't either."

A national craze was born. By the late Nineties, 24 states and the federal government had some kind of Three Strikes law. Not all are as harsh as the California law, but they all embrace the basic principle of throw-away-the-key mandatory sentencing for the incorrigible recidivist.

Once California's Three Strikes law went into effect at midnight on March 8th, 1994, it would take just nine hours for it to claim its first hapless victim, a homeless schizophrenic named Lester Wallace with two nonviolent burglaries on his sheet, who attempted to steal a car radio near the University of Southern California campus.

Wallace was such an incompetent thief that he was still sitting in the passenger seat of the car by the time police arrived. He went to court and got 25 years to life. In prison, Wallace immediately became a target. He was sexually and physically attacked numerous times -– there's an incident in his file involving an inmate who told him, "Motherfucker, I'll kill you if you don't let me go up in you." He was switched to protective custody, and over the years he has suffered from seizures and developed severe back problems (forcing him to walk with a cane) and end-stage renal disease (leading to dialysis treatments three times a week). And even months after California voters chose to reform the law, the state still won't agree to release him. "He's a guy who's literally dying," says Michael Romano, director of Stanford's Three Strikes program and a key figure in the effort to reform the law, "and he's still inside."

Wallace's conviction set off a cascade of preposterous outsize sentences of nonviolent petty criminals. In many of these cases, the punishments were not just cruel and disproportionate, but ridiculously so. Oftentimes, the absurdity would end up being compounded by the fact that there would be another case just like it, or five just like it, or 10 just like it. They began to blend together, and if you could keep track of them at all, it was only in shorthand.

Lester Wallace became the schizophrenic-on-dialysis-who-stole-a-car-radio­ case, not to be confused with Gary Ewing, the blind-in-one-eye AIDS patient, who died in prison last summer while serving 25 to life for the limping-out-of-a-sporting-goods-store-with-three-golf-clubs-stuffed-down-his-pant-leg case.

In that one, the Supreme Court decided life for shoplifting wasn't cruel and unusual punishment, with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor defending the sentence as a "rational judgment, entitled to deference." She added, with a straight face, that the Supreme Court does "not sit as a 'superlegislature' to second-guess" the states, despite the fact that that's precisely what the Supreme Court has been doing for almost 250 years.

-- Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws. While Wall Street crooks walk, thousands sit in California prisons for life over crimes as trivial as stealing socks, by Matt Taibbi

A large number of [Wisconsin prisoners] are not violent or assaultive [and] pose little risk of harm to others.... Forty-two percent of Wisconsin prison admissions have been identified on the "low-risk sentence track."

-- WISCONSIN CORRECTIONAL SYSTEM REVIEW PANEL, FINAL REPORT, JUNE 1991

Over half the offenders sent to prison in Wisconsin each year have committed a property offense. About ninety percent have not committed any assaultive offense. While there are certainly some assaultive, dangerous, sophisticated offenders in Wisconsin's prisons, most do not fit this profile.

-- ROBERT M. LAFOLLETTE INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, DOLLARS AND SENSE, POLICY CHOICES AND THE WISCONSIN BUDGET, 1994

Statistics: Posted by admin — Wed Apr 27, 2016 4:38 am

Following the L.A. riots of 1992, two reporters for U.S. News & World Report, David Whitman and David Bowennaster, perceptively challenged their readers to imagine the life of a typical inner-city child who lives near the flash point of the riot: to middle-class African-Americans and whites, liquor stores are generally a remote presence, located far from where adults pray and children play. But to John, Tom's Liquor is a short walk from his house, school and storefront church in the same shopping strip. A slew of transactions take John to Tom's. He tags along with his mom when she goes to cash her welfare checks free of charge. With no supermarket nearby, John goes to Tom's when he wants a candy bar. Even when his mother takes him to the adjoining neighborhoods, John rarely sees a bank or supermarket .... Many neighborhood traits convey disorder but unchecked public drinking is a particularly potent affirmation that "no one cares." That is the message John gains by observing Tom's Liquor, where winos and crack addicts congregate at night in the parking lot ... In fact, eight times in the 14 months preceding the riot, LAPD dispatchers sent squad cars to the store to investigate robberies, assaults, and a shooting. [118]

Alcohol use has been associated with assaultive and sex-related crimes, serious youth crime, family violence toward both spouses and children, being both a homicide victim and a perpetrator, and persistent aggression as an adult. Alcohol "problems" occur disproportionately among both juveniles and adults who report violent behaviors. [119]

while under the influence of alcohol, a parent may strike a child, a college student may force [his] date to have sex, friends may escalate an argument into a fist fight, a robbery victim may attempt to resist an armed mugger, and soccer fans may turn disappointment over an unsatisfactory game into a riot. [120]

Where disorder problems are frequent and no one takes responsibility for unruly behavior in public places, the sense of "territoriality" among residents shrinks to include only their own households; meanwhile, untended property is fair game for plunder or destruction ... [and] a concentration of supposedly "victimless" disorders can soon flood an area with serious, victimizing crimes. [161]

the relative power of alcohol producers and wholesalers, who supply liquor outlets, banks who loan money to store owners, and state regulators whose activities are more oriented towards the interests of alcohol industry lobbying than the regulation of that industry, and the relative powerlessness of the poor and unemployed individuals and groups who live in greater concentration in these areas of high outlet density. [162]

Social bonds that tie individuals to each other and to larger social collectivities have played a key role in the understanding of how crime and violence come about. ... [But social bonds] break down in the presence of high rates of alcohol consumption .... [T]he basic form of this relationship may be one in which higher alcohol consumption reduces the effectiveness of attachment to institutions, thus leading to higher rates of homicide. [166]

Get a grip, take a sip,
And you'll be picking up models
And it ain't no puzzle my cousin
'Cause I'm more a man
I'm downin' a forty [a 40-ounce bottle]
Be a man and get a can of St. Ides. [171]

Homicide for children under the age of 4 has reached a forty-year high. It is now the leading cause of death among this age group . . . . Most of these deaths were perpetrated by parents or caretakers .... It is estimated that about 22 percent of children with learning disabilities acquired their disability as a result of severe child abuse and neglect .... [The National Institute of Justice has reported that] being abused or neglected as a child increases the likelihood of arrest as a juvenile by 53 percent, as an adult by 38 percent, and for a violent crime by 38 percent.

-- J. TOM MORGAN, METROPOLITAN DISTRICT ATTORNEY [176]

Many caretakers were criminals; most had violent tempers; most physically abused their children; most had addictions to drugs and alcohol; most had little affection for each other or their children. There was no family intimacy; the parents had no commitment to each other or to their children's emotional, physical, or educational well-being. Most addicted parents were more attentive to drug and alcohol addictions than to their children. Children cared for themselves as if they were orphans .... Years of neglect by parents are followed by rejection outside the family too, when primary and secondary school teachers and peers can't cope with these children. My informants, even before their teenage years, were driven away from homes and schools .... Once they began to commit delinquent acts and were arrested and imprisoned in juvenile detention facilities, social isolation heightened, and opportunities to acquire the social skills and daily experiences that lead "normal" children into adulthood were gone.

-- PROFESSOR MARK S. FLEISHER [177]

She wants to be called Charlette. She lives in a New York shelter for teenagers who've had babies. Her story is not unusual. The guy's name was Mickey. He was older, in his mid-20s. Charlette was going through a bad time: her stepfather had come home from prison, was beating her mother, was beating on her. "I lived in the streets for a while, starting when I was 14," she said. "I was young and vulnerable, I had problems. He was going to protect me, teach me things, discipline my mind. But when I told him I was pregnant, he was gone. I began to ask around. I asked his cousin. I found he had six other children, mostly with younger girls. I was naive, and he took advantage of me." This is what we're learning about teen pregnancy: it is, too often, a form of child abuse.

-- JOE KLEIN [178]

Statistics: Posted by admin — Wed Apr 27, 2016 4:37 am

There is a perennial invasion of barbarians who must somehow be civilized and turned into contributors to the fulfillment of the various functions requisite to societal survival. ... The increase in the magnitude of the socialization tasks in the United States during the past decades was completely outside the bounds of previous experience. [59]

3. The Collapse of Traditional Institutions

The contradiction regarding social control has been amplified by the near collapse of the traditional authority structure which was buttressing social control processes. The collapse is partly due to the disruptive effect of change, but it can also be viewed as the logical outcome of a general evolution of the relationship of the individual to society.

Everywhere in the West the freedom of choice of the individual has increased tremendously. With the crumbling of old barriers everything seems to be possible. Not only can people choose their jobs, their friends, and their mates without being constrained by earlier conventions, but they can drop these relationships more easily. People whose range of opportunities is greater and whose freedom of change also is greater can be much more demanding and cannot accept being bound by lifelong relationships. This is, of course, much more true for young people. It has further been compounded by the development of sexual freedom and by the questioning of woman's place in society. In such a context traditional authority had to be put into question. Not only did it run counter to the tremendous new wave of individual assertion, but at the same time it was losing the capacity which it had maintained for an overly long time to control people who had no alternatives.

The late sixties have been a major turning point. The amount of underlying change was dramatically revealed in the political turmoil of the period which forced a sort of moral showdown over a certain form of traditional authority. Its importance has been mistaken inasmuch as the revolt seemed to be aiming at political goals. What was at stake appears now to be moral much more than political authority—churches, schools, and cultural organizations more than political and even economic institutions.

In the short space of a few years, churches seem to have been the most deeply upset. In most of Europe, a basic shift was accelerated which deprived them of their political and even moral authority over their flocks and within society at large. The Catholic church has been hit the hardest because it had remained more authoritarian. Yet as opinion polls have shown, religious feelings and religious needs persist. They may even have been reactivated by the anxieties of our time so that eventually churches will be able to regain some of the ground they have lost. In order to succeed they will have to open up and abandon what remains of their traditional principles.

This may have been already achieved since the authoritarian pattern is vanishing. The crisis is much more apparent within the hierarchy than among the laity. Priests are leaving the churches at an increasing rate; they cannot be replaced, and those who stay do not accept the bureaucratic authority of their superiors and the constraints of the dogma as obediently as before. They are in a position to exact a much better deal, and they get it. Conversely, they feel less capable of exerting the traditional moral authority they maintained over laymen. It may be exaggerated to pretend that the age-old system of moral obligations and guidance that constituted the church has crumbled; it is still alive, but it has changed more in the last decade than during the last two centuries. Around this change the new effervescence that has developed may be analyzed as a proof of vitality. New rationales may emerge around which the system will stabilize. But it seems clear enough already that the traditional model, which had been for so long one of the main ideological strongholds of European societal structures, has disintegrated. This is certainly a major change for European societies. Such a model provided a basic pattern for the social order and was used as a last recourse for buttressing social control, even in the so-called laicist countries like France where the Catholic church was supposed to have only a minor influence. The impact of the basic shift of values will be widespread. Even the nonreligious milieus, which had maintained similar models of social control despite their opposition to the Catholic principles, will not be able to resist change any better even if at first glance they seem less directly affected.

Education as a moral establishment is faced with the same problem and may be the first example of this corresponding similarity between opposing traditions. Whatever philosophical influences were exerted over it in particular countries, education is in trouble all over Western Europe. It has lost its former authority. Teachers cannot believe anymore in their "sacred" mission and their students do not accept their authority as easily as they did before. Along with the religious rationale for the social order, educational authority does not hold firm anymore. Knowledge is widely shared. Teachers have lost their prestige within society, and the closed hierarchical relations that made them powerful figures in the classroom have disappeared. Routine makes it possible for the system to work and the sheer necessity and weight of its functions will maintain it in operation. But the malaise is deep. The dogmatic structure disintegrates; no one knows how to operate without a structure and new forms do not seem to be emerging. We are still in the process of destructuration where generous Utopias still seem to be the only constructive answers to the malaise.

Higher education, which has had a more spectacular revolution, may have been partly revived, but in many countries and in many disciplines it is still in chaos. European universities do not offer any kind of institutional leadership. They are not real institutions for their students. Very few teachers will be able to propose positive and non-ideological models of commitment to values which can be acceptable to students. Consequently, the universities' potential cannot be used as a stimulant for change in society and young people's energies are easily diverted toward meaningless and negative struggles.

Other institutions are also, if less severely, perturbed by this collapse of moral authority. Among them the army, at least in its roles as training school for organizational disciplines and symbol and embodiment of patriotic values, has lost its moral and psychological appeal. Defense may be more and more entrusted to professional armies that may remain reliable. But the conscript army as a school for the citizen and as a model of authority is on the wane. It has lost all sense of purpose. It is really isolated from the mainstream of human relationships. Thus, another stronghold of the moral fabric of Western societies disappears.

-- THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY: REPORT ON THE GOVERNABILITY OF DEMOCRACIES TO THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION, by Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki

There is, perhaps, a "critical mass" of young persons such that, when that number is reached, or when an increase is sudden and large, a self-sustaining chain reaction is set off that creates an explosive increase in the amount of crime, addiction, and welfare dependency. What had once been relatively isolated and furtive acts (copping a fix, stealing a TV) became widespread and group-supported activities. [60]

[There is a] nearly invisible relationship between unemployment and crime rates. Charting homicide since 1900 reveals two peaks. The first is in 1933. This represents the crest of a wave that began in 1905, continued through the prosperous '20s and then began to decline in 1934 as the Great Depression was deepening. Between 1933 and 1940 the murder rate dropped nearly 40%. Property crimes reveal a similar pattern.

-- DAVID RUBINSTEIN [64]

From slavery times until present, black families and churches helped people resist this insidious effect of oppression. How they did so is one of the most important things we have to think about here. We know already, from bitter experience, what happens when these crucial institutions can no longer play their vital role.... The failure to pass on the values that helped black Americans to survive not decades, but several centuries, of mistreatment is taking an awesome toll, especially among the young. In many urban neighborhoods today, random murder stalks the streets. The stray bullets of gang clashes and drug-related executions claim the lives of infants and passersby ... When a people has passed through hell and survived to curse the devil, why should they suddenly collapse just as they push aside its open gates? Can the answer be racism or economic deprivation? If so, how do we explain the fact that our ancestors endured racial and economic abuse that was arguably greater and more systematic than we face now, yet managed to resist self-destructive moral disintegration of the type that is killing our people today?

-- DR. ALAN L. KEYES [65]

Rand Corporation: CIA front; involved in intelligence projects, weapons development, and underground bases development.

-- To Be A Hero, Stolen Honor: Inside the FBI, CIA and the Mob: The True Story of an FBI Agent, US Army Lieutenant Colonel, A Decorated War Hero, his life with the Bureau, the CIA and the Mob, as told by Col. Richard Maurice Taus, written by David Richard Taus

Henry's mother swears she has not used cocaine in three weeks, but her good pink suit cannot hide the shaking in her voice and the twitches in her body as she begs juvenile court Judge Cheryl Allen Craig for her children's return. Her 13-year-old son, slumped in a chair between his younger brother and his lawyer, has his own troubles. "Henry" (not his real name) has helped adult friends commit a burglary, regularly ditches his after-school probation program and has been shot twice, the last time at Christmas. Craig keeps Henry in a cousin's care and orders Pittsburgh police to take him to the juvenile jail if he misses curfew. "I'd rather have you be an angry, alive child than a dead child," she says .... Three days a week, children come to answer charges that they have committed a crime. On the other two days, the court hears cases of child abuse and neglect and of parents needing help controlling their children ... Police accustomed to picking up 16- and 17-year-olds are now attesting 12- and 13-year-olds. [78]

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS LESS POPULAR THAN THE ALTERNATIVES

It is commonly reported that the American public overwhelmingly approves of the death penalty. More careful analysis of public attitudes, however, reveals that most Americans prefer an alternative; they would oppose the death penalty if convicted murderers were sentenced to life without parole and were required to make some form of financial restitution. In 2010, when California voters were asked which sentence they preferred for a first-degree murderer, 42% of registered voters said they preferred life without parole and 41% said they preferred the death penalty. In 2000, when voters were asked the same question, 37% chose life without parole while 44% chose the death penalty. A 1993 nationwide survey revealed that although 77% of the public approves of the death penalty, support drops to 56% if the alternative is punishment with no parole eligibility until 25 years in prison. Support drops even further, to 49%, if the alternative is no parole under any conditions. And if the alternative is no parole plus restitution, it drops still further, to 41%. Only a minority of the American public would favor the death penalty if offered such alternatives.

-- The Case Against the Death Penalty, by American Civil Liberties Union

Participation in East Jersey State Prison's "Lifers' Group" doesn't shorten any inmate's sentence .... What it does, and has done for 20 years, is give inmates who have essentially thrown away the bulk of their lives the chance to make a difference in the lives of complete strangers, a chance to keep some kid from making the same mistakes the Lifers themselves have made ... The Lifers' confrontational, almost brutal, method of bringing home the reality of prison life quickly gained notoriety around the country. The program was captured on the Oscar-winning 1978 documentary film, "Scared Straight." ... And the kids are getting harder and harder to "scare straight." Lt. Randall Sandkuhl, a corrections officer who works with the Lifers, said some of the young men and women who come in are already so hardened and tough they end up scaring the inmates. "You stand next to a kid in court and hear the judge sentence them to 40 years in prison without parole and they turn to you and say, 'What's for lunch, officer?' " Sandkuhl said. "They just don't care." [100]

We assume that for a man to become good he must first be trained and habituated properly, and then go on to spend his time, in the spirit thus engendered, on worthy occupations, doing nothing base or mean, either willingly or unwillingly.

-- ARISTOTLE, THE ETHICS [102]

His home on the southwest side of Detroit was a crack house. His father used to beat his mother. Jacob saw his sister shot in the face when he was 4 or 5. His father was shot to death in a bar fight about the same time ... He has seen family members pull guns on one another ... He was 9 when he took his first drag of marijuana. An older sister gave it to him ... Court records show that [Jacob's mother] drank heavily, used crack and once even sold her children's clothes for drug money. She failed to show up at Jacob's first court hearings on the armed-robbery charge. She was drunk when she finally came to testify .... She did not even know her son's birthday. [103]

At age nine, Willie Bosket was in a state reformatory, the same reformatory that his father, Butch -- a man he never met -- had entered at age nine. There Willie assaulted, stole, and choked a nurse in the "Quiet Room." Lesser delinquents praised him: "Man, you real bad." At one point, he fought one of the men who kept company with his mother. His mother rarely visited him. Butch had been beaten by his father, James, who also sexually abused his grandson Willie. By age 15, Willie was shooting and robbing New York subway passengers. He killed two men in cold blood. Released after five years because he was technically still a juvenile, he did more crime, and in 1988 attempted to murder a prison guard. By then, he had done some 2,000 crimes, including 200 armed robberies, 25 stabbings, numerous for-fun-and-profit shootings, and the two murders. "Boiled down to its core," summarizes Willie's biographer, Fox Butterfield of the New York Times, the best research reveals "that most adolescents who become delinquents, and the overwhelming majority of adults who commit violent crimes, started very young ... They were the impulsive, aggressive, irritable children .... If children know someone is watching them and they may get caught, they are less likely to get into trouble." Nobody tended to Willie. Now, however, someone is watching him -- watching him do three 25-years-to-life sentences in a prison isolation cell, that is. [109]

Statistics: Posted by admin — Tue Apr 26, 2016 11:56 pm

It is not easy to come up with exact war casualty figures particularly in a long guerrilla war like Vietnam. Since the end of the war in 1975, there are a number of estimates of its casualties drawn up, but they often vary and sometimes even contradict each other. In the entire war, estimates of the total death toll range widely from 1.3 million, according to Guenter Lewy [1], to 3.9 million, according to R. J. Rummel [2].

-- How Many People Died in the Vietnam War?, by Ku Bia

[Baby Born Addicted to Crack] DA-DA!
[Da-Da] CIA

-- The Dark Alliance, by Gary Webb

It is clear that youth violence has reached epidemic proportions that must be addressed.... In 1993, law enforcement agencies made almost 2.4 million juvenile arrests; if present trends continue, the violent crime arrest levels alone will double by the year 2010.

-- CHIEF DAVID G. WALCHAK, CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE, PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CHIEFS OF POLICE [8]

Myth 6: Juvenile offenders are committing more and more violent crimes at younger ages.

The federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) Study Group on Very Young Offenders concluded that there is no empirical evidence to support this claim (Loeber & Farrington, 2001a; see also Butts & Snyder, 1997; Snyder, 1998). The proportion of all juvenile violent arrests involving children ages 10–12 remained essentially constant in the 1980s and 1990s (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999, p. 121). Just 1% of all juvenile arrests involved youth under age 10 in 2004 (Snyder, 2001, 2006).

A comparison of national self-report studies showed that the proportion of child delinquents involved in serious and violent delinquency did not change from 1976 through 1999 (Espiritu, Huizinga, Crawford, & Loeber, 2001). Yet the number of arrested child delinquents increased from 1980 through 1996 (Snyder, 2001), and law enforcement agencies referred a larger percentage of the child delinquents they arrested to the juvenile courts in 1997 than in 1988. Thus child delinquents came to constitute a large proportion (10%) of all juvenile cases by the late 1990s (Butts & Snyder, 1997; Snyder, 2001).

To resolve the “superpredator” issue, the OJJDP, in the U.S. Department of Justice, undertook a program of research to determine the size and characteristics of the worst juvenile offenders, which was spearheaded by Snyder’s 1998 Maricopa County study described in Chapter 5. Snyder used that database to examine three key claims about juvenile violence that had been tied to the superpredator myth:

• That the relative proportion of serious and violent offenders among all juvenile delinquents is growing
• That juvenile offenders are becoming younger
• That juveniles are committing more and more violent crimes

None of these assumptions proved to be correct. An Arizona study (Snyder, 1998) showed that the proportion of chronic offender careers increased by only 4% from the 1980s to the 1990s. Moreover, the worst offenders in the latter period were not significantly more active, more serious, or more violent. Second, there was no evidence that the juveniles in his study were beginning their court careers at younger ages. Third, no increase was found in the numbers of crimes for which serious and violent offenders were charged. Rather, Snyder found that the juvenile justice system may be spreading its net wider, bringing in more juveniles, not more serious juvenile offenders. Other research shows that the proportion of children under 13 involved in delinquency has not changed much over the past two decades (Espiritu et al., 2001).

-- Chapter 1: Superpredators and other Myths about Juvenile Delinquency, by James C. Howell

A Philadelphia jury convicted three suburban teens of third-degree murder for beating an altar boy to death with baseball bats in front of his church. Eddie Polec, 16, suffered seven skull fractures on the steps of St. Cecilia's Catholic Church .... The killing followed a fight between youths in two Philadelphia-area neighborhoods after a rumored rape of a girl, which proved to be untrue .... All [the assailants] were from Abington Township, a group of mostly affluent suburbs north of Philadelphia. [17]

On October 13, 1994, 5-year-old Eric Morse and his 8-year-old brother, Derrick, ran into two of the toughest bullies their South Side Chicago neighborhood had to offer. The intimidating boys lured the brothers to a vacant 14th floor apartment. Twice, they dangled a terrified and wailing Eric -- who had refused to steal candy for them -- out the window. When Derrick tried to pull in his brother, the older bully bit his hand so hard he let go. Eric plunged to his death. Derrick ran downstairs, thinking he might catch his brother in time. It was a blood-curdling crime at any age. But these killers, whose names have not been released by officials, were all of 10 and 11. ... "It's 'Lord of the Flies' on a massive scale," says Cook County State's Attorney Jack O'Malley. "We've become a nation terrorized by our children." O'Malley recently reorganized his juvenile justice division because of the growing number of very young offenders. [21]

Americans believe something fundamental has changed in our patterns of crime. They are right. We were unhappy about having our property put at risk, but we adapted with the aid of locks, alarms, and security guards. But we are terrified by the prospect of innocent people being gunned down at random, without warning and almost without motive, by youngsters who afterwards show us the blank, unremorseful face of a feral, pre-social being.

-- PROFESSOR JAMES Q. WILSON [22]

America's beleaguered cities are about to be victimized anew by a paradigm-shattering wave of ultra-violent, morally vacuous young people some call "the super-predators."

At least that is the consensus emerging within precinct houses, university think tanks and living rooms across the country. Indeed, some of those who have become experts against their will can testify that in some places the super-predators have already arrived.

The trend should concern all Americans, wherever they live. Pathologies first sighted in cities rarely stay there for long.

-- BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE, MAY 19, 1996

The illogical nature of DiIulio’s projection is readily apparent. He assumed that 6% of babies and children as well as juveniles would be chronic offenders (see Zimring, 1996). If we were to apply the 6% figure to the 1996 population under age 18, according to DiIulio’s analysis, there already were 1.9 million superpredator juvenile offenders in the United States. This number is larger than the total number of children and adolescents referred to juvenile courts each year. Wilson and DiIulio were guilty of other errors in logic (see Zimring, 1998a, pp. 61–65).

In addition, DiIulio and Wilson apparently were not aware that the majority of the 6% “chronic” offenders in the Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study were never arrested for a serious violent crime (Weitekamp, Kerner, Schindler, & Schubert, 1995). The 6% figure was based on police contacts, not actual arrests. In fact, only one-third of the police contacts resulted in an arrest, and only half of this group’s police contacts resulted in a court adjudication of delinquency (Bernard & Ritti, 1991). This oversight exaggerated further the potential dangerousness of future juvenile offenders.

DiIulio, Fox, and Wilson also made the mistake of assuming a direct correlation between population size and crime rates. As Cook and Laub (1998) have shown, the size of the juvenile population “is of little help in predicting violence rates” (p. 59). In fact, they found a negative relationship between the size of the juvenile population and the number of homicides in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That is, the high juvenile homicide rates of this period occurred when the size of the adolescent population was low. Juvenile homicides and other violent crimes are decreasing, while the size of the juvenile population is increasing. In fact, the end of the period covered in the doomsday projections (1995–2010) of waves of juvenile violence is near, and juvenile violence decreased from 1994 to 2005 (Butts & Snyder, 2006; Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). For a decade (through 2004), juvenile Violent Crime Index offenses decreased, proving that DiIulio, Wilson, and Fox were seriously wrong in their forecasts (Butts & Snyder, 2006; Butts & Travis, 2002). Specifically, between 1994 and 2004, the juvenile arrest rate for Violent Crime Index offenses fell 49% (Snyder, 2006). As a result, the juvenile Violent Crime Index arrest rate in 2004 was at its lowest level since at least 1980. From its peak in 1993 to 2004, the juvenile arrest rate for murder fell 77% (Snyder, 2006).

-- Chapter 1: Superpredators and other Myths about Juvenile Delinquency, by James C. Howell

only two restraints on behavior -- morality, enforced by individual conscience or social rebuke, and law, enforced by police and courts .... As the costs of crime decline or the benefits increase, as drugs and guns become more available, as the glorification of violence becomes more commonplace, as families and neighborhoods lose some of their restraining power -- as all of these things happen, almost all of us will change our behavior to some degree. For the most law-abiding among us, the change will be modest. For the least law-abiding among us, the change will be dramatic. [24]

-- CIA: WE PUT THE COKE IN AMERICA

Debra Dickerson's brother, Johnny, was almost killed by another young man. In her intensely personal and gripping essay, "Who Shot Johnny?" she recounts how her brother was shot, paralyzed from the waist down, and left for dead. His crime? Waving hello at a car full of boys whom he mistakenly thought he knew. The assailant stood over her brother's barely conscious body and said, "Betch'ou won't be doin' nomo' wavin' motha'fucker." The vicious young attacker was never caught. [25]

Matt Inman's Personal Death Row
Matt Inman is Justified. Their sins were unforgivable; his sentence is immutable. (Sins: old age; bickering; eating ice cream; smiling; disagreeing; first in line.)
by Tara Carreon

There are gang death rhymes too. "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" is a Pint Blood rhyme recited, they say, after killing a Crip. The tale is that Bloods, driving through a Crip neighborhood, stop when they see a Crip. Leaning out the window one says, "Hey cuzz, yo cuzz, come on, cuzz, come here." The Crip, without thinking about the danger, walks over to the car and is shot to death. The Bloods then sing,

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,
It's all about the Crip thang.
Hah, Hah, fooled you.
Undercover Piru!

Gang members' tags often connote death. I asked Body Count how he got his name. "When da shootin's ova', das what I do, coun' da bodies."

-- PROFESSOR MARK S. FLEISHER [39]

SLAIN TEACHER RECORDED HER PLEAS TO ABDUCTOR

Prosecutor Charges Teen With Murder

Facing death at the hands of a teenage thief who wanted her new car to celebrate his 17th birthday, a Tinton Falls teacher left an extraordinary and chilling legacy: she secretly tape-recorded a conversation with her killer ... Michael LaSane, a student at Toms River South who turned 17 on the day after the killing and allegedly bragged to his friends that he was going to get a "brand new Toyota Camry" for his birthday .... The dramatic 24-minute recording gave investigators a clear picture of the attempts by Kathleen Stanfield Weinstein, 45 (a popular teacher, wife, and mother of a 6-year-old son), to not only save her life, but understand her abductor as she helped him empty her car of personal belongings near the wooded area in Berkeley Township where she was found bound and smothered with her own clothes ... It is clear from the transcript of the conversation released by the prosecutor that Weinstein tried to bargain for her life. She is heard saying: "Don't you understand, though, what kind of trouble you are going to get in? Don't you think they are going to find you?" and "You haven't done anything yet. All you have to do is let me go and take my car." ... LaSane is heard on the tape asking about the car's service record and lease arrangement. [45]

When first entering law school, Elaine never dreamed she would become a prosecutor. Like many of her peers, she presumed that the "black struggle" could be best pursued as a member of the defense bar. However, a summer in the public defender's office changed that. "I realized that all of our clients were guilty, some of the most heinous offenses." Shaken from her naivete, she applied for an assistant D.A. position upon graduation .... "They're just shooting each other, and we're sweeping up the mess," she says. . . . "I just don't know how long I can go on, staring into the vacant eyes of these children who have, without apparent remorse, done the most awful things." In one case, a 14-year-old child used a baseball bat to bludgeon a parent to death. In another, youngsters aged 13 and 14 collaborated in a robbery-cum-murder, masquerading as drug dealers to lure their prey out of his automobile .... Elaine constantly laments that "these little gang bangers have no fear, either of jailor of death, it seems."

-- PROFESSOR GLENN LOUR [51]

New Jersey's maverick former Superior Court Judge, Daniel R. Coburn, long ago earned a statewide reputation as a no-nonsense liberal and father of the Garden State's only highly successful adult and juvenile alternative-to-jail and victim restitution programs. Over the last few years, however, his close encounters with young street toughs have given him pause. He now declares: "Unlike post-Vietnam criminals, who feared prison, police and peers, and took care to avoid arrest and notoriety, this new teenage horde from hell kills, maims, and terrorizes merely to become known or even sometimes for no reason at all. These teens have no fear of dying and no concept of living." Whether many other judges share Coburn's acute awareness of the super-predator problem we do not know. But it is interesting to note that in a 1994 survey of judges conducted by a trade paper for lawyers, 93 percent agreed that juveniles should be fingerprinted, 85 percent said that juvenile records should be available to adult authorities, and 40 percent said that the minimum age for facing murder charges should be 14 or 15. [52]

Asked for an alternative to killing another drug dealer, young murderers in Washington, D.C., speculate only that they could have shot their rival once rather than six times, or could have stabbed instead of shot him. Their sole regret is that incarceration "took a lot of my life"; one went to his victims' funerals to assure himself that they were indeed dead. Most chillingly, some seem incapable of seeing the future as potentially different from the past; "when asked, 'what are your thoughts about the future?' several youth asked for an explanation of the question." One cannot be further removed from the ideology of the American dream than to be unable to imagine a future .... I know of no study that systematically examines the racial or class composition of unsocialized delinquents, or analyzes whether their number has changed over time. But a few such people, now armed with Uzis, are at the core of what Cornel West calls the "nihilistic threat to ... [the] very existence" of black America -- the "monumental eclipse of hope, the unprecedented collapse of meaning, the incredible disregard for human (especially black) life and property."

-- PROFESSOR JENNIFER L. HOCHSCHILD [53]

The root cause of crime, in this view, is poverty and deprivation, which can be ended by social programs. There is certainly more crime in most poor neighborhoods than in most well-off ones and most criminals are less prosperous than most law-abiding citizens .... [But] it is far from clear that giving more opportunities or higher incomes to offenders will lead them to commit fewer crimes, and it is even less clear that programs designed to make society as a whole better off will lower the crime rate. I make this point not to denigrate social progress, but to clarify our thinking. [56]

Statistics: Posted by admin — Tue Apr 26, 2016 11:55 pm