Hat tip to Alfonso: Deborah J. Saunders on the role the death penalty plays in Life-Without-Parole cases.
The hunger strikes at several California prisons this summer may have seemed like spontaneous uprisings against torturous conditions. That’s how many incurious souls in the fourth estate are portraying them. To wit, this hand-wringing Washington Post editorial highlighting the “tragic modesty” of prisoner demands:
DOZENS OF INMATES at California’s Pelican Bay facility went on hunger strikes for several weeks this summer for what seemed like pitifully modest demands: “Allow one photo per year. Allow one phone call per week. Allow wall calendars.” What would prompt such drastic measures in the quest for such modest goals? Answer: The protest was an exasperated and understandable reaction to the invisible brutality that is solitary confinement. Some of the Pelican Bay inmates have been held in “security housing units” for years; those tagged as gang members can expect to stay there for six years, with no certainty that they will be reintegrated into the general population even if they renounce gang membership. When an inmate is holed up alone in a cell for up to 23 hours a day with no meaningful human contact, a photograph of a loved one or a weekly telephone call can help to forge a connection with the outside world. With little or no exposure to natural light, a calendar can help forestall losing all track of time, all sense of reality. These simple privileges, in short, can help ward off insanity. ...
According to a new report by the American Bar Association, both civil and criminal courts are unable to enforce justice due to budget cuts and inadequate funding.
The courts of our country are in crisis. The failure of state and local legislatures to provide adequate funding is effectively — at times quite literally — closing the doors of our justice system. At the same time, Congress has reduced its support for both the federal courts and other programs that directly and indirectly support our justice system at the state, county and municipal levels. . . Our courts, already short-staffed, have thus been forced to lay off judges, clerks and other personnel just as they are being inundated with hundreds of thousands of new foreclosures, personal and small business bankruptcies, credit card and other collection matters, domestic fractures, and the many other lawsuits resulting from the Recession. . . ...
Thanks to cost-cutting, or rather, thanks to the fact that there are lots of criminals in California, Los Angeles County is going to have to provide jail beds and parole supervision for 7,000 additional inmates a year who would have otherwise been sent to state prisons.
In the L.A. Times, County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich had this to say: ...
I drove up to Atlanta last week and entered through the southeast side, to see the old neighborhood. It’s been two years since I’ve been in that part of the city.
Atlanta Federal Prison, near my old house ...
The New York Times is the Baron von Munchhausen of news sources.
People’s Temple Agricultural Project (Jonestown) Massacre, 1978 ...
It’s a little known irony that crime victims often have to fight for the “right” merely to be considered victims in the eyes of the court.
It’s different for criminals. When someone commits a crime, their rights expand exponentially. The worse the crime, the more legal protection the offender receives. Foremost among the special rights granted only to offenders is the right to relentlessly appeal one’s case, a right that swells to parodic dimensions, subsidized in nearly every case by the taxpayers. If the victim or their survivors are taxpayers, they pay for it, too. ...
Tina Fey: hypocritical, thoughtless bitch
I don’t normally commit slurs to the page: I just think them. My non-slur caption for this photo was “Tina Fey: Not Derrida.” But I can commit the word “bitch” to the page because calling someone a “bitch” doesn’t count as “hate speech” by Fey’s lights. Unless, of course, it’s said about a man. Otherwise it’s just banter. It certainly isn’t something that summons images of men calling women “bitches” as they stomp their faces into gravel, or abandon their broken bodies on the tall grass side of the road, or boil the skin off their bones on the kitchen stove. ...