Archive for the ‘Crime & Punishment’ Category

Spitting on the Stripper

Tuesday, April 16th, 2013

I haven’t written anything on the blog for ten days. Its not for want of subject matter. The depredations of Boston certainly call for comment but the last post is all I feel compelled to say on the subject. There’s been another story that has caused me deep reflection and its about a much more common crime. Its the news of a young girl named Audrie Pott who committed suicide after several friends raped her when she got drunk. I should add the perfunctory adjective “allegedly.” The details that have been in the news are still being sorted out but they remind me of people I know and have known. (more…)

Boston

Monday, April 15th, 2013

One of the top women finishers at Boston today used to run by my house every day in high school as she practiced for her cross country team. Kara Goucher came in sixth among the women contestants. Her efforts like those of all of the other competitors were overshadowed by the bombs which blew up killing those rooting the finishers on.

And yet the murderer/s who if caught will gain some long lasting infamy will never be of as much consequence as the many unknown bystanders who rushed to the aid of the victims. Others have put it much more eloquently for instance this person quoted on the Daily Dish.

North Dakota’s blankety blank Republicans

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

North Dakota’s GOP has taken the lead on fighting abortion having made it illegal from six weeks after conception.

That’s one part of their recent legislative action.

The law that really cranked my chain was the one the forbade the abortion of any fetus because of a disability. Its supposed to be a high minded Godly law, proof that the GOP cares about children. Tosh. The GOP doesn’t give a shit about children or their parents. The story I was sent about the state of Minnesota doing its best not to fund special education proves my point.

North Dakota Women carrying disabled babies must now give birth to them but can expect no help from taxpayers to help them raise or educate their disabled children. That’s the GOP today. Its a party of no-nothings, hypocrites and assholes. They’ll spend tax money like Indiana to give well-heeled parents a way to avoid public schools that are stuck teaching the disabled children that Republicans are unwilling to levy taxes to educate. Or like in Nebraska they will refuse to fund neo-natal care if there is the smallest chance some wet back from Mexico might have her fetus examined at public expense.

Don’t worry I haven’t offended by Buddy. He told me he stopped reading my blog because I was so unfair to Republicans.

If I do go to the next GOP precinct caucuses I’ll have a couple questions.

BTW. If I do run for the School Board I hope someone throws my line about no-nothings, hypocrites and assholes at me. Its just the kind of thing I would expect from an asshole.

Oh, and how can I resist mentioning the efforts of the GOP to protect children from their Gay parents. The GOP may no longer want to be tagged with that public stand but there is little doubt the protesters against gay marriage out in front of the Supreme Court today are all Republicans, Senator Portman be damned.

Speedy justice is less expensive justice

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

My Church’s men’s group had the St. Louis County Sheriff Ross Litman drop by and talk to us last week. He spent a fair amount of time talking about the housing of prisoners at the jails and for good reason. The Trib reports that St. Louis County spent one and a half million extra last year paying for prisoner’s upkeep when the courts should have been finished with them. I presume that waste is sprinkled throughout the state in all 87 counties.

The Courts, which have been underfunded by the legislature simply don’t have the manpower. I should know. I had a civil procedure drag out for a couple years due to under staffing despite having some of the best paid and most competent lawyers bird dogging the case.

And this doesn’t even count prisoners who were incarcerated because of police dishonesty.

Could your local police force be as corrupt as this?

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

Courtesy of the New York Times by way of my Buddy:

“The fact that our legal system has become so tolerant of police lying indicates how corrupted our criminal justice system has become by declarations of war, “get tough” mantras, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for locking up and locking out the poorest and darkest among us.”

This echos the disturbing testimony of NY cop Adrian Schoolcraft who seems allergic to lies. I heard this on This American Life a couple year’s back. Listen to the podcast here its Act 2.

This helps explain the reasons why our prisons are bloated and bankrupting us while condemning many to the dustbin of life.

The pernicious effects of the GOP getting all Dixiecrat on the nation.

Friday, February 15th, 2013

After inviting Southern Whites into the Party leading them to take it over and kick out distastful Republicans its worth pondering the results. The last post pointed out the new more war like GOP. This one is about one of the worst domestic mistakes the inflicted on the nation.

I used to call myself a Rockefeller Republican. Certainly in 1964 when he fell to Barry Goldwater I supported the New Yorker. Then 1968 happened and Tricky Dick Nixon ran a campaign to peel southern voters away from George Wallace. He did it by promoting “law and order.” To notherners it was a message to keep the drug addled college kids from rioting in the streets and to Southerners it meant keeping blacks out of sight. Rocky, who never gave up his wish to be President, became a hardliner in 1973 as this NPR story today relates.

It was a good liberal who took us from a nation of 300,000 convicts to a nation with 2 million largely non threatening druggies in costly prisons. He did it because that’s what Nixon and Reagan’s new southern strategy called for. Million of blacks have been put in prison and no longer can vote. It costs us a ton to keep them there. Its more expensive than putting them through public school but it keeps millions of blacks a few steps behind the rest of us law abiding white folks.

How Ironic that Rocky would have left the nation this inheritance. Experts saw its uselessness early on. Political operatives (especially GOP operatives) saw its political usefulness early on too. Guess which set of folks prevailed?

For profit racism

Friday, February 1st, 2013

in America’s prisons. Nothing personal though:

Our own Jim Fetzer has some good company

Friday, January 18th, 2013

Conspiracies about Sandy Hook are running amok.

Note to Jim. Even Glenn Beck is trying to debunk them.

Time for a new abolition movement

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

Re: my enthusiasm for American Experience

“For profit” prisons

Prison labor has long been banned in various states from competing on the free market since it violates numerous labor laws and essentially amounts to a slave workforce who can be paid subminimum wages and have little recourse against harsh working conditions. The for-profit prison industry is determined to change that.

Another Dixiecrat/Republican innovation. Chain gangs anyone?

The first beneficiaries of the Second Amendment…

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

…owned muskets and guns that had to be reloaded after a single shot and had to make their own bullets.

“I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors,” – Thomas Jefferson

When God abets rape

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

The GOP purges centrists like Senator Dick Lugar and replaces them with creatures like this guy:

GOP Senate candidate Mourdock: When rape results in pregnancy, ‘that’s something God intended’

America’s “holocaust in slow motion”

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

For those eager, too eager perhaps, to close done the Last Place on Earth a sobering documentary is coming your way.

Vast and spurious…

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

…The GOP Assault on the “Fast and Furious” scandal.

At least the police are protecting blacks from white people now.

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Last night’s PBS program on “Slavery by Another Name” was very good and a coup for the Minnesotan’s who produced it. We are far removed from those times. As this story makes clear the police, however ham handed, are getting closer to even handed justice.

But boy howdy, were they ever ham handed when a white Grandfather was walking his black granddaughter home:

As soon as we crossed the street, just two blocks from my house as the crow flies, the police car that just passed us hit its lights and wheeled around, with five others appearing almost immediately, all with lights flashing. The officers got out with tasers drawn demanding I raise my hands and step away from the child. I complied, and they roughly cuffed me, jerking my arms up behind me needlessly. Meanwhile, Ty edged up the hill away from the officers, crying. One of them called out in a comforting tone that they weren’t there to hurt her, but another officer blew up any good will that might have garnered by brusquely snatching her up and scuttling her off to the back seat of one of the police cars. (By this time more cars had joined them; they maxxed out at 9 or 10 police vehicles.)

I think our police would be well advised to learn the making art of genuine apologies. Everyone would be well advised to learn the art. Newspaper editors for instance.

A criminal business

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

In the good old days the government simply hired prisoners out to perform salary free hard labor for quarries, mines and other dangerous businesses especially black men convicted of such lethal crimes as “vagrancy.”

More here.

Rape and Order

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

In case you ever wondered why there is so much body building equipment in American prisons:

After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted [raped] multiple times over the course of the year.

The Republican Party is hell-bent-for-leather eager to privatize prisons. The private business prisons are hell-bent-for-leather eager to send more criminals to private prison.

Twelve years ago, back when I was still a Republican I asked This American Life if I could have a copy of their Broadcast on prison life to reproduce and send out to my fellow Republicans before the next Republican precinct caucus. They gave me a thumbs up and sent me the tape but I never reproduced it or followed through. I’d recommend listening to it here. The segment on Cablock is so funny you’ll get a hernia laughing at it. You’ll also get excellent advice about how to prepare to be gang raped in prison. Its quite graphic.

Hot Dam! I should be elected to Congress for a couple years.

To hell with incarceration…

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

From Ezra Klein:

On Saturday’s edition of “Up With Chris Hayes,” Gary Johnson brought up an old Newt Gingrich idea I hadn’t heard before: Putting individuals who brought more than two ounces of marijuana into the United States to death. That sounded extreme, even for Gingrich. So I looked it up. And sure enough, there it is: “The Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996.”

What makes the bill even more amazing is that Gingrich himself is a confessed pot smoker. When he was young, he said, experimenting with drugs “was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era.”

Off with their heads

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Is our War on Drugs an echo of our war on coffee?

Actually the first link to the NPR story isn’t the one I was looking for. There was another story on the War on Crime that Richard Nixon got started to appeal to George Wallace voters that pointed out he originally emphasized treatment to incarceration. Incarceration was more popular. Considering the slow evolution of the Republican party to being a pet of the Dixiecrats the results or the Drug War don’t seem so coincidental……..Nor the call of Republicans today to make sure ex-cons can never be readmitted to the voting booth.

I have to give some credit to Rick Santorum on that score. In his last debate he actually talked about prisoners serving their sentence as though that should be the end of a criminal’s punishment allowing for a return of citizenship.

After watching the GOP pathologies in SC…

Friday, January 20th, 2012

…its refreshing to hear something sane and uplifting from a Republican in New Jersey.

Priorities by spending

Monday, November 7th, 2011

More here.