As strange as its sounds, American history repeatedly shows that legalization of certain drugs leads to expanded, not reduced, “wars on drugs”: In the late 1800s, the crisis of middle-Americans’ addiction to new, legal patent medicines saturated with opiates, cocaine, and alcohol was buried under vicious official crusades vilifying the Chinese and opium and black men and cocaine. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the explosion in drunk driving and abuse of newly legalized alcohol by…
Blog Mar 19, 2009
Marijuana bill is wrong vehicle for legalization
At first glance, AB 390 by Assembly Member Tom Ammiano (D‑San Francisco) to legalize the cultivation, sale, and use of marijuana under a regulation and taxation system similar to that applied to alcoholic beverages would seem to epitomize the sensible, humane policies for which he is known. By nearly every standard, marijuana is less troublesome than alcohol, better use can be made of law enforcement resources than to arrest and prosecute 70,000-plus Californians for marijuana every year, and…
Mar 9, 2009
Daniel Macallair and Catherine McCracken educate California state Judges on juvenile dispositional options
Daniel Macallair and Catherine McCracken educate California state Judges on juvenile dispositional options Executive Director Daniel Macallair, MPA and Sentencing Service Program Director Catherine McCracken, M.S., are leading experts in the development of presentence investigation reports for youthful offenders. Recently Mr. Macallair and Ms. McCracken educated California state Judges on juvenile dispositional options at the exclusive 2009 Juvenile Law Institute.
Executive Director Daniel Macallair, MPA is the leading national expert on juvenile institutional mitigation. He draws on his twenty-years experience in the development and analysis of youth and adult correctional policy. Recently, he presented on “Juvenile Incarceration as Mitigation” at the annual CACJ/CPDA capital case defense seminar. Their website is www.cacj.org .
Executive Director Daniel Macallair coauthored expert testimony at sentencing- “Proof of Facts” Daniel Macallair, Executive Director coauthored recent updated version of G. Thomas Gitchoff’s “Proof of Facts: Expert Testimony at Sentencing” for the American Jurisprudence encyclopedia of US law. Please contact
CJCJ’s Sentencing Service Program releases the 2008⁄09 Juvenile Placement Manual The Sentencing Service Program first released its Juvenile Placement Manual in 2002 to assist individuals in the…
For the past 20 years the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice has critically examined the control exercised by special interests group over California’s prison policy — especially the state’s prison guards union. With their ability to spend millions of dollars to defeat political enemies, the guards union has achieved unprecedented success in promoting their agenda and resisting reform efforts. In her recent editorial, Sacramento Bee editor, Pia Lopez, analyzes the historical influence…
Blog Jan 21, 2009
Will Obama confront 21st Century crime realities?
Barack Obama ascends to the presidency today to be greeted by yet another little-mentioned paradox (detailed more in future blogs) of keen interest to criminal justice groups: he inherits record-high levels of drug abuse and imprisonment and record-low levels of serious crime. If any president has an eye for complexity and contradiction, it’s the student and community-activist Obama revealed in the first half of his first book, Dreams for My Father. That Obama amiably chatted with city boys…
Blog Jan 21, 2009
Another troubling juvenile court case
Statements by prosecutors following the January 16 ruling by a San Francisco Juvenile Court judge that four “Potrero Hill gang members” committed first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, and gang-related crimes in the 2007 shooting death of a 17-year-old woman and wounding of another teen outside a community center raise troubling questions about juvenile justice. According to prosecutors and the judge’s ruling, one of the youths, now an adult, used a gun to murder…
Two statements-and some huge omissions-sum up the obsolete thinking that plagues development of a 21st century crime policy for San Francisco, an issue receiving more attention after new police reports show homicides have increased. “Nothing that I have tried to resolve has been more frustrating and vexing than solving the issue of why a 14-year-old would take the life of a 15-year-old with a weapon of war,” Mayor Gavin Newsom told the Chronicle on January 1. And unnamed community…
Blog Jan 6, 2009
Dreams from the Monster Factory
Sunny Schwartz writes about her extraordinary work transforming the San Francisco jails from “monster factories” that foster violence, rage, and better criminals, into places that could change criminals for the better.
Blog Jan 5, 2009
The Trouble in Antioch
As more and more black renters began moving into this mostly white San Francisco Bay Area suburb a few years ago, neighbors started complaining about loud parties, mean pit bulls, blaring car radios, prostitution, drug dealing and muggings of schoolchildren, the Associated Press reported on December 30. As Antioch’s black population escalated sharply over the last decade to 16% of the city’s 101,000 residents in 2007, “longtime homeowners complained that the new arrivals brought crime and…