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  • What is wrong the C.J. system

    What is wrong the C.J. system

    There’s very little that strikes me as more absurd than offering or accepting a guilty plea for time served. It represents so much about what’s wrong with the criminal justice system. And that’s a lot.

    If you’re guilty, then it’s a travesty of justice because you get to go home.

    If you’re innocent, it’s an even worse travesty. But you get to go home.

    Snoop from “The Wire” just took such a plea. From the Sun:

    She was sentenced to seven years in prison [for heroin dealing], with all of the time suspended except for the five months she has already served while awaiting trial, most of it spent at home, under electronic monitoring.
    …
    Pearson, 31, explaining her decision to take a deal. She repeatedly said she would have been found “not guilty” at trial, but that she couldn’t wait for the proceeding, which could have been years in coming.

    Now I don’t think she innocent. But that doesn’t matter. Why offer this plea? Because the Office of the State’s Attorney has its own issues. And they want their caseload reduced. And they judge their own stats on guilty pleas.

    What would it take to have a justice system where the accused actually had a timely trial and the guilty actually get punished? We’d need more courtrooms, judges, and lawyers on both sides. That would take money. Lot’s of money. And that’s not going to happen any time soon.

    So we continue with a criminal justice that is dedicated to processing the maximum number of people with as little use of court resources as possible. Mostly it means thousand of people getting caught up in its slow wheels until they accept a plea. Call it what you will, it’s not justice.

  • Twin Cities?

    The current and first issue of the new food magazine Lucky Peach has an article about yakamee in New Orleans. This further supports my belief that Baltimore and New Orleans were siblings separated at birth.

    Yakamee is a crappy Chinese take-out noodle dish. I ordered it once, to the amazement of the woman behind the plexiglas and pretty much every white cop I worked with. It happens to be very soupy, so not good for eating in a cop car. It also just happens to not be very good.

    But yakamee is part of all the various foods in Baltimore that I had never heard of or eaten before I was a cop. In order of deliciousness.

    1) Blue crabs, both steamed and as crab cakes. Now technically I hadheard of crabs, but I’m still including they because they’re so good in Baltimore and such a part of their culture.

    2) Pit beef. Like roast beef, but smoked. If it’s hinting of pink it’s called “rare.”

    3) Lake trout. Famously neither lake nor trout. Also a bit ghetto, but I make no apologies for loving me some fried whiting with hot sauce on white bread.

    4) Yakamee. It’s not good, but interesting in that it can also be the generic name for Chinese take-out. Took me awhile to figure out what the hell the word was and a bit longer what it meant (and I spell it like it sounds, not like it’s written).

    All these go well with Boh.

    And Bull and Oyster Roasts deserve very special mention.

    And I should also point out that Lexington Market has the largest chicken wings I’ve every seen. I think they’re all on steroids.

    Can you tell the annual crab feast is coming up? Cause I’m thinking about food.

  • Sometimes there is a cop when you need one!

    Suspect runs into police, gets arrested.

  • “I’m expressin’ with my full capabilities…”

    The Timesand a grim read about a boy with mental problems, gone bad. It’s interesting but in all-too-many ways nothing new.

    But what struck me was this great example of doublespeak:

    Mr. Clergeau was discharged … with the expectation that he would be imprisoned. Hospital authorities told the state police that he was “not a psych patient,” which appears to reflect a medical opinion that he belonged in a correctional setting.

    Okay… So once we give up on you, once we determine you are cannot be helped with treatment, when it’s all over and we simply lock you up because we’re afraid your going to hurt somebody… … that’s when we put you in a “correctional” setting. Got it? Now try explaining that to the Martians when they land.

  • “Outraging the Modesty”

    From the Singapore Straits Times:

    A Briton on a visit here was charged on Friday with outraging the modesty of a 30-year-old woman in a Clarke Quay club.

    Austin Charles Arnold Cowburn, 34, is alleged to have grabbed her buttock in the China One pub at 4am on April 3 2011.

    AOL Travel adds:

    The maximum sentence for the crime is two years in prison coupled with a fine and a lashing across the bare butt with a rattan cane. The penalties can (and likely will) be changed if the judge feels like avoiding an international incident.

    The groping occurred at the luxurious China One nightclub where Cowburn, a recruitment specialist currently working in Qatar, proved to not be so great at his job after all.
    …
    A notoriously rule-bound country, Singapore has the tendency to treat its citizens like unruly school kids. To wit, anyone convicted of littering three time is forced to clean the streets while wearing a bib saying: “I am a litterer.”

    Flogging for a minor offense. How barbaric! How un-American!!! I mean, here, when somebody grabs a girl’s ass at a club, you start a fight and shoot and kill the guy. That’sthe American way. I love civilized progress.

    Now excuse me while I go “outrage” my wife’s modesty. Hmmm, that might just be a new catchphrase here at home.

  • In Defense of Tenure

    Three cheers for actor Matt Damon!

    You know, Matt and I have a lot in common.

    Both our mothers are retired school teachers.

    Both of us went to school in Cambridge, Mass.

    And both of us are devilishly good looking!

    But seriously, both of us know that the answer to bad teaching is not job insecurity.

    You go, Matt! While you’re watching the video, I’m going to be “assessing” papers from other people’s classes according to a “grading rubric” in which I must judge each paper on 1) Responsiveness to instructions, 2) Use of terms and concepts, 3) Organization, 4) Integration of different sources, 5) Using appropriate reference and citation, and 6) Conclusion. This is the type of shit teachers do during their so-called “vacation” time.

    I don’t mention this to complain. I mention this to say that if you want me to teach well, let me teach. But pile on administrative B.S.? Give teachers make-work hoops to jump through? Take away time that could spend researching, writing, preparing for class, and grading papers? Analyze, assess, and prod me one too many times… and you’ll get what what pay for. But no more.

    I didn’t go into this racket for the money. But without tenure, I neverwould have gone into teaching. Given my education, I could have made much more money as a consultant or investment banker or even a professor at a private university. But don’t we want more overqualified teachers at public schools? Besides, I like my job.

    Some want teachers to exchange job security for “incentive-based” pay. Well I don’t know how you would “incentivise” me in my senior seminar. Some say pay should be based on student evaluations. Not a good idea. Granted I’ddo OK because I get very good student evaluations. But it’s still a bad idea. I do believe that bad evaluations are a sign of a bad teacher, I’m not so certain about the opposite. I like to think I get good student evaluations because I’m a good teacher. But I could also get good evaluations simply by being easy.

    Pay me a fair wage (I make $74,000 a year in case you were wondering) and give me job security and enough time off, and I’ll put my heart into the job. Make teaching a game–especially a game refereed by administrators and other non-teachers–and I’ll play it like a game. Oh yes, I’d win that game! But my students wouldn’t.

    Trying to weed out bad teachers is like trying to weed out corruption. It’s a noble goal and needs to be done, but you have to make sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease. When you place rules and regulations on everybody in order to catch a few, you make things worse for everybody.

    Teacher unions aren’t perfect. But for teachers and students alike, they’re more good than bad. They’re also fighting on the front line against those who want to destroy unions and public education on ideological grounds.

    Bad teachers need to be let go beforethey get tenure. And that would be easier if more good teachers were attracted to the profession. And that would be easier if there were not such teacher burnout, especially in schools most in need. Making the job less appealing is not the answer.

    Matt Damon is right: Job insecurity would not make me work harder and MBA-style thinking is not the answer. A teacher wants to teach.

  • …Stop Digging!

    From the AP:

    The number of homicides in Mexico rose by nearly a quarter in 2010 compared to the year before as the drug war intensified across the country, Mexican statisticians said Thursday.

    The National Institute of Statistics and Geography recorded 24,374 homicides over the course of last year, a 23 percent increase from 19,803 in 2009. Last year’s figure represented 22 killings for every 100,000 residents in the country.

    Another way to look at this: Mexico’s homicide rate is still about half of Baltimore’s.

  • “Justice? Vengeance? You Need Both”

    Thoughtful piece by Thane Rosenbaum in today’s New York Times:

    It’s difficult to have honest conversations about revenge. Seeing someone receive his just deserts often feels righteous and richly deserved, and yet society regards vengeance as primitive and barbaric. Governments warn citizens not to take justice into their own hands, insisting that the state alone has the duty and right to punish wrongdoers — pursuant to the social contract.

    …statements of unvarnished revenge make many uncomfortable. But how different is revenge from justice, really? Every legal system, however dispassionate and procedural, must still pass the gut test of seeming morally just; and revenge must always be just and proportionate.

  • The Real Life Omar

    Omar from The Wire, that is. The story from the Balto Sun.

    [thanks to a reader]

  • Ways to Fix Prison

    USA Today has five ways to fix our prison system. I have a sixth.