Most Americans honestly don’t want to spend much time, energy or emotion thinking about people in jail or prison—unless, by chance they have a family member who is locked up.

We harp on the issue here at WitnessLA since criminal justice is, after all, central to the mission of the site. But if the topic comes up in a social setting, I see eyes starting to glaze over, even among friends who try to be interested.

That’s why the article by Adam Gopnick in the current New Yorker, The Caging of America, is so heartening.

Gopnick is a critic and commentator with no particular expertise in criminal justice matters. But he’s also a very smart guy and clear headed thinker. Somehow the topic grabbed his interest, and he dove deeply.

The result is part think piece, part book review. (He examines the new book by Berkeley criminologist, Frank Zimring, The City that Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control.)

In any case, it shouldn’t be missed.

I won’t try to summarize Gopnick’s work here. The essay is carefully crafted, thought by thought, and should be read in it’s totality. But some clips will give you an idea of what he’s on about.

To wit:

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.

Conservatives and other law and order types insist that the nationwide 40 percent drop in crime we’ve seen in the past few years can be laid at the feet of all this incarcerating. But, as Gopnick, channeling Zimring, points out, that assumption falls apart when one looks at New York’s crime stats, which happen to be another 40 percent lower still than the rest of the nation—the lowest since 1900—while its incarceration rate, rather than rising, has also dropped precipitously.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

And still we go on locking people up at a ferocious clip—even though, in terms of our incarceration rates, we increasingly stand alone in the world.

To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent….

So how do we go about ending this plague of imprisoning? Gopnick suggests that we must start thinking and acting sanely—in a thousand small ways.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime….

Anyway, read the thing. It’s worth it.

HOUSE PANEL QUESTIONS US ATTORNEY GENERAL ABOUT PARDONS OFFICE AFTER PROPUBLICA INVESTIGATION ON RACIAL DISPARITIES IN PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS

In December of this past year, in an investigation co-published by the Washington Post, ProPublica reporters Dafna Linzer and Jennifer LaFleur found that, in the past ten years of presidential pardons, white criminals seeking pardons were nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities pardon seekers. Black pardon seekers had the lowest chance of all.

Here’s a clip:

Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered.

“I’m just astounded by those numbers,” said Roger Adams, who served as head of the Justice Department’s pardons office from 1998 to 2008. He said he could think of nothing in the office’s practices that would have skewed the recommendations. “I can recall several African Americans getting pardons.’’

The review of applications for pardons is conducted almost entirely in secret, with the government releasing scant information about those it rejects.

The facts uncovered by the reporters’ investigation caused the House Judiciary Committee to pose a series of probing questions to Attorney General Eric Holder about what he was doing to look into this issue.

A WOMAN RELIVES THE TRAUMA OF FORCED STERILIZATION AND THE NIGHTMARE OF EUGENICS

This LA Times Column One story story by David Zucchino is dizzyingly painful to read, but also essential.

Here’s how it opens:

Elaine Riddick was a confused and frightened 14-year-old. She was poor and black, the daughter of alcoholic parents in a segregated North Carolina town. And she was pregnant after being raped by a man from her neighborhood.

Riddick’s miserable circumstances attracted the attention of social workers, who referred her case to the state’s Eugenics Board. In an office building in Raleigh, five men met to consider her fate — among them the state health director and a lawyer from the attorney general’s office.

Board members concluded that the girl was “feebleminded” and doomed to “promiscuity.” They recommended sterilization. Riddick’s illiterate grandmother, Maggie Woodard, known as “Miss Peaches,” marked an “X” on a consent form.

Hours after Riddick gave birth to a son in Edenton, N.C., on March 5, 1968, a doctor sliced through her fallopian tubes and cauterized them.

“They butchered me like a hog,” recalls Riddick, now a poised and determined woman of 57.

Between the years of 1929 and 1974, reports Zuccinno, close to 7,600 people were sterilized under orders from North Carolina’s Eugenics Board. Nearly 85% were women or girls, some as young as 10…

Read on.

Photo by Steve Liss for the New Yorker

SCOTUS REVERSES MURDER 1995 CONVICTION OF NEW ORLEANS MAN—ANOTHER CASE OF BAD PROSECUTOR BEHAVIOR

NY Times’ Adam Liptak has the story involving another Deputy DA who decided it wasn’t all that necessary to turn over all the evidence in the then-high profile murder case.

Here’s a clip:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday reversed the conviction of a New Orleans man, saying prosecutors there had withheld important evidence that his lawyers could have used in his defense.

The decision, by an 8-to-1 vote, was the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions suggesting a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct in the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.

Tuesday’s case concerned Juan Smith, who was convicted of killing five people in 1995, when a group of men burst into a house in search of money and drugs. They ordered the occupants to lie down and opened fire.

Mr. Smith was the only person tried for the killings. He was convicted based solely on the eyewitness testimony of a survivor, Larry Boatner. Prosecutors presented no DNA, fingerprints, weapons or other physical evidence.

But Mr. Boatner’s testimony proved sufficient.

“He’s right there,” Mr. Boatner said at Mr. Smith’s trial, pointing at the defendant. “I’ll never forget him.”

It later emerged that prosecutors had failed to disclose reports of interviews with Mr. Boatner. In one, hours after the killings, Mr. Boatner said he could not describe the intruders except to say they were black men. Five days later, he said he had not seen the intruders’ faces and could not identify them.

Leave it to Clarence Thomas to be the only person dissenting in a 17-page masterpiece of illogic.

Law professor Brandon Garrett looks at Thomas’s maddening—and scary—dissent in an essay for Slate.

Here’s a clip:

A “single witness” linked Juan Smith to the five murders for which he was convicted in New Orleans in 1995. The Supreme Court reversed Smith’s conviction yesterday, dwelling on that single witness in the 8-1 opinion it handed down. The justices had been “incredulous” at oral arguments at the conduct of New Orleans prosecutors. So it was an easy case, decided early in the season, with seven justices joining Chief Justice Roberts’ short and sweet three-and-a-half page opinion. But sometimes it is the easy decision that disguises insidious problems. The head prosecutor in New Orleans at the time, Harry Connick Sr., was nowhere to be found in the court’s opinion.

Before we get to him however, it is noteworthy that the court nowhere called the single witness who identified the culprit in this case the “single eyewitness.” Was he even really an eyewitness? At trial, the witness said he saw the attacker face to face and was sure Smith was the one. He said he had “[n]o doubt.” That sure sounds like the testimony of an eyewitness.

Everything in this case hinged on that single witness. The police explained that “[a]s amazing as it may seem,” no fingerprints matching Smith were found. And jurors place great stock in the testimony of a confident eyewitness. This was a terrible mass murder, where men stormed into an apartment, demanded money and marijuana, told everyone inside to lie on the floor, then shot five people. Smith was sentenced to life without parole.

The problems in the case emerged only during state habeas proceedings. That’s when Smith obtained for the first time notes from the detective stating that the eyewitness said on the night of the murder that he “could not … supply a description of the perpetrators other then [sic] they were black males.” Again, five days after the crime, the ostensible eyewitness said he “could not ID anyone because [he] couldn’t see faces” and “would not know them if [he] saw them.” The detective wrote these statements down—and then wrote down “Could not ID.” It’s understandable that the eyewitness was, as he later said, “too scared to look at anybody” under the circumstances. But usually police know that a person who didn’t see a face is not an eyewitness at all.

There’s more, so if the case—and the issue—interests you, click through as Garrett’s points are worth reading.

MISSISSIPPI GOV. HALEY BARBOUR AND THE MATTER OF THE 215-ISH PARDONS

So….in the last few days, outgoing Republican Governor of the state of Mississippi Haley Barbour has caused a massive uproar with his 200 or so 11th hour pardons, a bunch of them given to people who were convicted of murder or manslaughter. (Everyone seems to have a different total for the Barbour pardons because, in the last few days, )

Some of the pardons he issued leave even bleeding hearts like me muttering in dismay.

Barbour’s Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat, was appalled at the pardoning frenzy and asked for an injunction against the inmates’ releases, telling reporters he thinks some of the pardons may have violated the state constitution in that Barbour began madly issuing the things without giving adequate public notice, particularly to the families of some of those killed by those whom Barbour has now pardoned.

A whole host of folks have the story, but you can start with this ABC report and go from there.

AMENDING 3 STRIKES WOULD SAVE STATE $100 MILLION, SAYS LEGE ANALYST REPORT

Ryan Gabrielson from California Watch has the story.

Here’s a clip:

Prisoners serving long sentences under California’s “three strikes” law are so expensive that legislative analysts say releasing some of them early could eventually save the state $100 million.

A proposed ballot measure, called the Three Strikes Reform Act of 2012 , would amend the landmark sentencing law that brought jail terms of 25 years to life to criminals convicted of three offenses.

Major savings to California taxpayers are central to proponents’ pitch for the measure. But if it passes, the big reduction in state prison spending is not guaranteed.

The measure would narrow courts’ authority to sentence “third-strikers” to 25 years or more in prison unless their new offense is serious or violent in nature. Secondly, it would allow a select group of third-strikers serving a decades-long sentence for a minor crime to apply for a reduced term.

MONTEREY COUNTY RANKS #1 IN CALIFORNIA FOR YOUTH HOMICIDE RATE

Monterey County’s young are victims of murder at a rate that leads all California counties and is nearly three times the overall state rate for the same age range (10-24), according to “Lost Youth: A County-by-County Analysis of 2010 California Homicide Victims Ages 10 to 24.” The study, released this week by the Violence Policy Center (VPC), and funded by The California Wellness Foundation, offers a wealth of information about the sad business of the affect of violence on California kids.

NOTE: LIGHT POSTING TODAY—DUE (HAPPILY) TO HOLIDAY SLOWDOWN….BUT….

ANYBODY GOT EARLY SIGN POSTS ON CRIME AND REALIGNMENT?

KPPC’S Julie Small reports that California’s prison population has dropped by 8000, mostly in response to California’s realignment strategy that began on Oct 1 and has resulted in the transfer of thousands of prisoners from state lock-up facilities to California’s counties.

Here’s a clip from Small’s report:

The number of inmates in California prisons has dropped by 8,000 since “realignment” took effect Oct. 1. Court papers state officials filed Thursday indicate the change. Officials reported the new numbers Thursday under a federal court order to reduce crowding in the prisons.

In its monthly status report to the court, officials said the state prison population dropped by 8,218 between Oct. 5 and Dec. 7.

California prison officials say the transfer of low-level felons to county officials that began in October will allow the state to meet a court-ordered reduction a month after a Dec. 27 deadline.

The state’s prison population has declined from a record high of 173,000 in 2006 to the current population of 135,000. But many prisons remain packed with almost twice the number of inmates they were designed to hold….

University of Ohio Law prof Doug Berman, of Sentencing, Law and Policy, also noted the drop and wondered in a post, if California was experiencing a “big new crime wave in California in recent months?”

The court order resulting in these prison reductions is the one upheld by the Supreme Courtin Plata earlier this year despite strenuous objections and dire warnings of Justices Alito and Scalia and others about a likely spike in crime as a result. I am thus wondering, given that it appears that California is going to be soon complying with this court order, if there is developing evidence of a new crime wave.

The question is particularly relevant in Los Angeles where approximately 40 percent of the “realigned” prisoners have landed, and will continue to land, causing a list of city officials like DA Steve Cooley and others to predict that crime will go up.

Admittedly, it hasn’t been all that long—nevertheless, do we have any early indications, one way or the other?

(NOTE: I can tell you that, far, overall crime is down this year over 2010, but I don’t, as yet, have a month by month breakdown for these past few months.

As Berman points out, nuanced analysis of crime stats would likely tell us a lot, because not every county and/or municipality is handling realignment the same way.

I sincerely hope that there is an on-going effort to track the public safety impact of the prison population reductions in California, especially because it seems that different localities are responding to the influx of former prisoners in different ways. The process of prison realignment is thus creating a kind of post-prison community reentry natural experiment, and I would expect spikes in crime to vary in different localities based on both the nature of the offenders returning to the community and also how the communities are responding to the return of these offenders.

Only a few months into the realignment plan, it is surely to early to have clear or conclusive evidence on the public safety consequences of Plata and its aftermath. Still I am very eager to hear any early reports, especially from anyone actively working on these issues, about what we might know on this front so far.

Yep. Me too.

60 MINUTES OCCUPIES THE BANKS AND THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

In the past months, CBS’s 60 Minutes has done a couple of excellent, aggressive and utterly enraging reports by Scott Pelley on the banking business, the mortgage crisis, and the like—asking repeatedly why the Justice Department hasn’t filed charges one any of these folks.

The most recent such report was this past Sunday.

The Occupy movement could do worse than to study these segments for talking points.

TEXAS MAN CONVICTED OF MURDERING WIFE, FREED AFTER 25 YEARS – PROSECUTORS WITHHELD CRUCIAL EVIDENCE

The LA Times Molly Hennessy-Fiske and David G. Savage have the story. Here’s how it opens:

The case of a grocery store clerk wrongly convicted of murdering his wife has rocked the legal system across Texas, and not just because an innocent man served 25 years of a life sentence.

Supporters of Michael Morton, who was set free in October, say he might never been convicted if a prominent prosecutor had shared significant evidence with the defense at the time of the trial.

“Mr. Morton was the victim of serious prosecutorial misconduct that … completely ripped apart his family,” said Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project in New York, which represented Morton in his appeal.

On Monday, Morton and his lawyers plan to ask District Judge Sid Harle to take action against the lead prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, now a county judge.

The case highlights what critics say has become a recurring problem in Texas and across the nation: prosecutors concealing evidence that could undercut their cases.

Yeah. Sign me on as one of those “critics.”

Eighteen years ago, three West Memphis teenagers were falsely accused of the 1993 murders of a trio of 8-year-old boys, even though there was no physical evidence to tie them to the killings. All the prosecution had was a coerced then recanted confession from one teen, Jessie Misskelley, a trailer park boy with an IQ of 70—and the fact that another of the teens, Damien Echols, listened to heavy metal music and was considered weird by the grown-ups. Nevertheless, the three were convicted a year later, and Echols, supposedly the Satan-worshiping ringleader, was sentenced to death.

Then, through an extremely unlikely confluence of events that involves two flukey HBO documentaries that, in turn, drew to the case a string of determined advocates, some of them famous, the so-called West Memphis 3 were released this summer. However, in order for their increasingly obvious innocence to recognized, they had to plead guilty to the killings they didn’t commit.

The story of the three—Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols—appears in the December issue of GQ magazine, written by GQ correspondent, Sean Flynn.

It is a deeply troubling tale of justice miscarried, made even more disturbing because the confluence of events that needed to produce freedom for the threesome was so unlikely.

Here’s a clip—but do be sure to read the rest of this exceptionally well-written story:

Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers disappeared on the evening of Wednesday, May 5, 1993. The next afternoon, their bodies, naked and bound ankle-to-wrist with shoelaces in the same way a hunter ties a dead deer, were found submerged in a drainage ditch in a patch of woods bordered by the boys’ neighborhood, an interstate highway, and a twenty-four-hour truck wash. All of the boys had been beaten. Byers’s penis was missing.

Weeks passed. Terror of a sadistic sex killer quickly spiraled into panic. By early June, under enormous pressure to make an arrest, the West Memphis Police picked up Jessie, Jason, and Damien. They would seem to have been unlikely suspects. To begin with, though they became known as the West Memphis Three, they weren’t all really friends. Jessie, a short and wiry high school dropout with stripes shaved into the side of his head, knew Damien but didn’t spend any time with him. “I like to go out in the sun and stuff, and he don’t,” Jessie told me. “He likes to come out at night, when I want to go to bed. I don’t like to go out at night. That’s where the trouble is.” He was friendlier with Jason, whom he’d known since Jason moved to Marion in the sixth grade, but not much. “The first time I met Jessie,” Jason told me in September, “he tried to beat me up.”

Jason and Damien, on the other hand, were best friends, though in some ways a mismatched pair. Damien was a high school dropout with a history of mental illness and minor delinquency. But he was also intelligent and shy, the kid who read books other people in his Bible Belt town didn’t and listened to music other kids didn’t like and wore clothes other people found odd. “He looked like one of the slasher-movie-type guys—boots, coat, long stringy black hair, though he cut it short sometimes,” the local juvenile officer told Mara Leveritt, an Arkansas journalist, for her 2002 book, Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three.Jason, a slight boy of 112 pounds with small, crooked teeth and matchstick arms, went to school every day, got good grades, was a talented artist, and never did anything more sinister than shoplift a bag of chips. “I had a mullet,” he jokes now, as if to confess the worst of his sins.

There was no physical evidence connecting any of the three to the killings. At the time of the arrests, the police had only Jessie’s rambling statement and the general consensus that Damien was a weirdo. So in order to paper over the lack of reputable facts in their case, the police and prosecutors created a motive: satanic worship.

Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky made the 1996 documentary Paradise Lost and a 2000 sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. Without these films, the three men would never have gained their supporters, never have been released. The filmmakers’ third documentary on the case, Paradise Lost: Purgatory, is scheduled to debut on HBO on January 12

Nearly 20 years ago The California Wellness Foundation was one of the first organizations of consequence to promote the recognition that violence was not merely a crime problem. It was a serious public health issue.

As part of their focus on the topic, every year Wellness puts on a Violence Prevention Conference at which around 300 people drawn from all over the state gather to discuss the myriad complex facets of this problem that so deeply affects the health and well being of California’s communities.

Among those who attend are directors of programs that address some aspect of the issue, a smattering of law enforcement (This year Deputy Chief Pat Gannon, head of LAPD’s South Bureau, was on a panel), academics, researchers, and other experts in the field.

Each year at the conference, Wellness presents three Peace Prizes, which honor three people with a $25,000 cash award….”in recognition of his or her outstanding efforts to prevent violence and promote peace in their local communities.” The 2011 winners were Ray Balberan, Priscilla Carrasquilla, Manuel Jimenez, all of whom work in different capacities with former gang members and/or kids who are headed that direction. (You can read more about the winners here).

The topics vary from year to year. This year, the subject of realignment came up frequently in public discussions and in private conversation. Another big conference topic was juvenile probation. The Chiefs of Probation for Alameda and Yolo counties were both on a panel. In fact, Alameda County’s Chief of Probation, David Muhammad, was one of the conference’s two keynote speakers and his straight talk about what works and what doesn’t for lawbreaking kids had direct and urgent implications for LA County’s troubled juvenile camps. (I’ll have much more to say about David Muhammad in a later post.)

The other keynote speaker—the one who opened the conference—was LA’s own Father Greg Boyle.

I’ve posted some (very) rough iPhone video snippets from his speech. Please ignore the recurring hand-held jiggles and the less than felicitous framing, and just give yourself and treat and watch. As speakers go, they don’t get any better than Fr. Greg.

As the first clip below opens, Greg is talking about an encounter with a particular Homeboy Industries staffer. He also covers why he may title his next book “Barking with the Choir,” and why we must stand with the despised and the easily thrown away.

This next clip, #2, contains a story about homeboys and texting.

(NOTE: I turned off the video before the story of texting homeboys was over, so quickly switched it back on for the 55 second tag to the tale that you’ll find below.)

You’ll find one more instructive (and funny) homeboy story here in clip #4.

This next video opens with a short talke featuring the actress Diane Keaton at the Homegirl Cafe, and ends with…well…..just watch it.

Even for some reason you don’t want to watch to all six videos, do watch this last one, # 6. It’s only a little over five minutes long. I’ve heard Greg tell the story encased in the clip many times, but I still can’t hear it without crying off all my eye makeup. Thursday night was no exception.

Truth be told, I lived this story along with Greg. I was very close to the kid in the tale known as “Puppet,” and even closer to his girlfriend. I remember that Greg was out of state when all this happened. Thus I was the one who rushed to the hospital to hold down the fort, emotionally speaking, in those first hours.

Despite the pain of it, this story is—as are all Greg’s stories—about hope, and about why the issues talked about at last week’s conference matter so very much.

ONE OF THE FIRST 24 INMATES RELEASED ON SO-CALLED MEDICAL PAROLE MAY HAVE PAROLE REVOKED DUE TO LEWD GESTURING

Three-striker Peter Post was a burglar who unwisely kept burgling and kept getting caught. After convictions in 1992 and 2000, his conviction in 2002 got him a third strike and 31 years to life.

He would have remained locked up for at least those 31 years, but earlier this year Post was found to be eligible for parole under California’s brand new medical parole law. Consequently, he was released from prison and into a state medical facility.

Last week, however, Mr. Post likely blew his parole status when he reportedly brandished at nurses parts of his person that are generally best kept out of site in polite company. (He then made matters worse by becoming inappropriately amorous with himself.)

To be eligible for consideration for the medical parole program which began on January 1, 2011, an inmate must be so medically incapacitated that he or she is rendered “permanently unable to perform activities of basic daily living,” and thus needs 24-hour care.

The idea behind the program is that if an inmate is so incapacitated and/or ill that he or she is longer a threat to public safety, why not give him a “medical parole,”—and allow the California taxpayers save a pile of costs that keeping such an inmate in prison would require?

Why not indeed?

Since January 1 of this year, twenty-four such medical parolees have been approved and released into outside care. “But they are still on parole,” said the CDCR’s Terry Thornton. “And if the situation changes and they pose a risk, their parole can be revoked.”

That is nearly certain to happen to Mr. Post. He will have a medical exam to determine whether all this brandishing means that his condition has changed to the extent that he no longer qualifies as in incapacitated and/or a non-threat. The Board of Parole Hearings will make the final decision as to Mr. Post’s fate.

“But what’s important to note with this whole thing, is that the system is working,” said Thornton. “If you pose a risk, you’ll go back to prison. But if you don’t, there’s no reason the tax payers need to keep paying your hotel bill.”

Thornton could not tell me why Post was incapacitated, because of California’s medical privacy laws. But she said he needed 24-hour care—or at least he did, up until recently.

IS INTELLIGENCE A GATEWAY DRUG?

A new study links high IQs—and actually being female— to drug use. CNN has the story. Here’s how it opens:

The “Just Say No” generation was often told by parents and teachers that intelligent people didn’t use drugs. Turns out, the adults may have been wrong.

A new British study finds children with high IQs are more likely to use drugs as adults than people who score low on IQ tests as children. The data come from the 1970 British Cohort Study, which has been following thousands of people over decades. The kids’ IQs were tested at the ages of 5, 10 and 16. The study also asked about drug use and looked at education and other socioeconomic factors. Then when participants turned 30, they were asked whether they had used drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin in the past year.

Researchers discovered men with high childhood IQs were up to two times more likely to use illegal drugs than their lower-scoring counterparts. Girls with high IQs were up to three times more likely to use drugs as adults. [My ital.] A high IQ is defined as a score between 107 and 158. An average IQ is 100.

CONTROLLING CRIME: HOW TO DO MORE WITH LESS

A story about an outstanding new study is posted at The Crime Report. Here’s a clip:

The unprecedented surge in incarceration since 1980 has stimulated a national debate between those who claim that locking up over 2 million people is necessitated by public safety concerns, and those who say the human and financial burden of imprisoning so many of our citizens is intolerable.

Recent declines in some state prison populations do not reflect a “win” for prison-reduction advocates so much as the extraordinary stringency of state budgets resulting from the Great Recession. The issue will remain after the recession finally recedes and state revenues pick up.

Then what? How should we determine how large a prison population is “right”?

One danger is that we may all get drawn into a debate that is much too narrow. The question of more versus less imprisonment emphasizes the division between those who worry about crime and those who worry about the costs of controlling crime; and it distracts from areas of potential agreement that arise when the focus instead is on the full range of policy choices that affect the crime rate.

If the primary purpose of imprisonment is indeed crime control, then what are the alternatives and what are their social costs? Are there ways to re-allocate our society’s resources to reduce the burden on society from both crime and crime control?

Then authors Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig go on to present some very smart answers to some of these very thorny questions.

CALIFORNIA WOMAN FORCED TO PAY HER ABUSIVE HUSBAND SPOUSAL SUPPORT? REALLY?

What is this judge thinking? ABC news has the report. Here are the details:

She was forced to have sex with him, and now she’s being forced to pay his bills.

Crystal Harris of Carlsbad, Calif., had been financially supporting her unemployed, abusive husband Shawn Harris for years. But after he sexually assaulted her in 2008, she took him to court.

The jury heard a damning audiotape of the attack secretly recorded by Crystal Harris, and her husband was convicted of forced oral copulation.

Even so, in 2010, the year their divorce became finalized, he requested spousal support. The judge awarded him $1,000 a month, and also asked Crystal Harris to pay $47,000 of her ex-husband’s legal fees from the divorce proceedings.

JAIL OVERCROWDING PLUS REALIGNMENT MAY FORCE INCARCERATION ALTERNATIVES

Sheriff Baca says the County’s Jails could be full in a month, so some prisoners may serve half sentences. He also said he will look at community-based alternatives to incarceration for some offenders (a strategy that other states have employed successfully, and CA should have embraced years ago).

The LA Times Andrew Blankstein and Robert Faturechi have the story.

Here’s a clip:

The state’s new prison law, which establishes a practice known as realignment, is expected to send as many as 8,000 offenders who would normally go to state prisons into the L.A. County Jail system in the next year.

Currently, defendants awaiting trial account for 70% of the jail population, but Sheriff Lee Baca said that might need to drop to 50%. The department is studying a major expansion of its electronic monitoring and home detention programs to keep track of inmates who are released.

Baca said the department is also developing a new risk-assessment system designed to better identify which inmates are the best candidates to leave the jails.

Additionally, the department is looking at ways to channel more offenders into education and substance abuse programs rather than jail.

In the panic over releasing inmates, did anyone notice the small, interesting fact embedded in this story: namely that 70 percent of those in jail are not there because of convictions, but because they are awaiting trial. And a big chunk of the folks who make up that 70 percent are locked up, not because they’re a hideous threat to public safety or a ghastly flight risk, but simply because they don’t have the money or the collateral to make bail. In other words, the issue isn’t so much criminogenic as it is fiscal.

So-o-oooo, instead, of keeping all those economically-challenged folks in the county lock-up, for those who qualify, we could use electronic monitoring or some related ATI (alternatives to incarceration) system, which other jurisdictions have been employing with good results. (But, hell, why be logical and forward thinking when hysteria is SO much more fun!)

WHERE ARE REPUBLICANS ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Steve Yoder writing for the Crime Report suggests that some Republicans have come farther on sentencing reform and other criminal justice reforms than Democrats.

Here’s a clip:

To understand the distance that the Republican Party has traveled on criminal justice, observe the record of Texas’ longest-serving governor.

In 2001, just after Rick Perry assumed the job, he vetoed a bill that would have ended the practice of arresting those suspected of class C misdemeanors—fine-only crimes that don’t require jail time, such as traffic offenses.

But fast-forward to 2007. That year, he signed a law allowing police officers to issue citations instead of making arrests for certain class A and B misdemeanors, including marijuana possession. Perry’s reversal came about in part because the state faced a projected shortfall of 17,000 inmate beds.

In Texas and other red states, formerly law-and-order GOP lawmakers are taking the lead in reforming criminal justice systems.

In other words, yes, California’s Democratic legislature does lag behind Rick Perry’s Texas (among other states) in terms of many criminal justice reforms. Explain that one, Sacramento!

Not that the public, the press and the local officials are any better: Just notice the ongoing freakout that realignment is causing. (See above.) I mean, realignment may force us to have to back into some much-needed sentencing and pre-trial systems reform. OMG!!! The horror!!!

“CRIME AFTER CRIME” – THE STRUGGLE TO FREE BATTERED WOMAN, DEBORAH PEAGLER

The feature-length documentary film, “Crime After Crime,” traces the legal battle to free Deborah Peagler from a California prison 20 years after she was connected to the murder of the man who had abused her and forced her into prostitution.

It premiered Thursday night on OWN, the Oprah Winfrey network, but it will encore, so power up your DVRs. It’s an incredible California criminal justice story and points beyond itself to a discussion we should be having about whom we incarcerate.

Here’s what WitnessLA posted about the case of Deborah Peagler two years ago.

And here’s an interview with Yoav Potash, the film’s director.

ICE SHATTERED FAMILIES

In the first six months of 2011, the US government removed more than 46,000 mothers and fathers of U.S.-citizen children.

Some of those kids stayed with other family members. But, many end up in the foster care system.

In a new study, the Applied Research Center estimates that there are approximately 5,100 children living in foster care whose parents have been either detained or deported.. If the same rate holds true for new cases, writes ARC in their report, in the next five years, 15,000 more children will land in the foster care system when their moms and/or dads are detained or deported.

Here’s what ARC recommends:

Federal, state and local governments must create explicit policies to protect families from separation. These polices should stop the clock on the child welfare process and the immigration enforcement process to ensure that families can stay together and allow parents to make the best decisions for the care and custody of their children.

The whole study is a worthwhile read.

CAMERAS, COPS AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

Journalists and activists and citizens have the Constitutional right to photograph or video officers making an arrest as long as the picture taking doesn’t interfere with the police. But a lot of law enforcement see the matter otherwise.

The Crime Report has an interesting story by Jeremy Kohler about the conflict over this right that is being played out on many streets in the U.S.

Here’s a clip:

Walking by the Boston Common one afternoon in October 2007, Simon Glik saw three police officers forcing a young man face down on a park bench and heard a bystander say, “You’re hurting him.”

Concerned that officers were using unreasonable force to arrest the man, Glik, a young lawyer, used his cell phone to film the incident from 10 feet away.

After placing the suspect in handcuffs, an officer told him he’d taken enough pictures. Glik responded, “I am recording this. I saw you punch him.”

An officer asked Glik if his cell phone recorded audio. Glik said yes. The officer cuffed Glik, and arrested him on a charge of violating Massachusetts’s wiretap law, aiding in the escape of a prisoner, and disorderly conduct.

They also erased some of the recording, according to news accounts.

Glik was part of a trend that is riling journalists and activists…..

Read the rest.