Blog Aug 6, 2009
San Francisco: The “Selma” of Drug Policing
In any given year over the last two decades, San Francisco Police Department arrests for simple possession of marijuana have varied by up to 300% over other years. After a 1999 peak (946 arrests), numbers plunged to 357 in 2007, then nearly doubled to 609 in 2008. Why? Who knows? Nobody seriously contends pot smoking varies that radically over time, if the streets’ sweet haze densities are any indicator. What has changed, and radically, is who’s getting arrested. In the peak year of 1999,…
Blog Jul 14, 2009
New California Crime Stats: The Good-Bad News
Just released Criminal Justice Statistics Center 2008 crime numbers and Center for Health Statistics 2007 death figures deal a double whammy to three decades of California’s criminal justice failure. But first, the ironies. The 2008 figures show California’s crime index (key offenses reported to police) stands at its lowest level since 1963, including the lowest rates of homicide in 40 years. Among youth, 2008 arrest rates continue the trend of the last seven years, with felony rates at their…
Blog Jun 23, 2009
Now the hard part of prison reform…
Last month, CJCJ released a detailed study documenting the feasibility, benefits, and cost savings of closing California’s juvenile prison system and transferring its dwindling roster of inmates to county detention facilities. The main obstacle now is to convince counties and traditionalists that the state will provide sufficient funding, which would be a fraction of the annual $250,000 per ward, $400 million total cost of state lockup. Juveniles are the easy part of deincarceration reform,…
Jun 22, 2009
School safety programs that work
School safety programs that work Examiner.com, June 15, 2009
Jun 22, 2009
Save the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office
Save the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office BeyondChron, June 22, 2009
Blog Jun 22, 2009
Save the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office
Few events better reflect the priorities of elected officials more vividly than a budget crisis. It is during a budget crisis that policy-makers are forced to choose between the interests of powerful or popular constituencies and the needs of the less powerful and most vulnerable citizens. Presently, this drama is being played out in San Francisco where social and legal services to the poor are being slashed while Police and Fire Department budgets are being protected. This Faustian bargain…
Jun 22, 2009
Daniel Macallair writes on the question of budget cuts for the SF Public Defender’s office
Though many wish to see the public defender’s budget cut due to the current economic conditions, Daniel Macallair explains how this would be detrimental to the city in an article published on BeyondChron .
Blog Jun 11, 2009
Prison Industry
I’m sure not too many people noticed but a brief news report from a newspaper in Chattanooga, Tennessee called attention once again to the perils of the privatization of prisons. This story involves the settling of a lawsuit filed against Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the leading private prison company in the world. (Here’s the story , which has a link to the actual lawsuit that you can download). Although the case centered around one prison in Hamilton County, it was a national…
Blog Jun 9, 2009
The Return of the Chain Gang
In my previous blog I referenced a recent book by Douglas Blackmon on the subject of convict leasing. One of the enduring offshoots of this system has been the “chain gang,” popularized by the film “Cool Hand Luke” (with Paul Newman, which carefully tried to make it seem as if it were mostly white) and memorialized in several books (e.g., “I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang” — also made into a movie, again trying to be race-neutral). Chain gangs began in the South around the turn of…
Blog Jun 8, 2009
Race and the Drug War, Part II
After more than 20 years, even with the heightened awareness of the impact of the drug war on blacks and other minorities, Congress still does nothing. The drug war’s impact has reached directly into minority neighborhoods with devastating results. A recent book by Todd Clear documents the impact of mass incarceration (brought about mostly by the drug war) on these communities. He shows that “get tough on crime” polices in recent years have actually contributed to higher crime rates in these…
Blog Jun 7, 2009
Race and the Drug War, Part I
The “war on drugs” must be seen as a concerted effort (whether this has been intended is irrelevant) to keep the black population in a secondary status. Such an effort can be traced to the days of slavery and even for about 100 years after slavery officially ended, at least in the South (see Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name ; Anchor Books, 2009). Consider the following data: Overall incarceration rates (2006): White male = 736; Black male = 4,789; lifetime chances of going to prison…
(ISSN 1530 – 3012) From the editor The Myth of a Fair Criminal Justice System The Imprisonment Insights of Female Inmates: Identity & Cognitive Shifts for Exiting a Criminal Lifestyle Predictors of recidivism across major age groups of parolees in Texas Incentives and Obstacles to Drug Court Implementation: Observations of Drug Court Judges and Administrators Criminal Record Policies and Private Employers From the editor By Elizabeth Brown, Ph.D., and Randall G. Shelden,…