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  • The California Prisoner Hunger Strike…

    …enters it’s second week. From the S.F. Weekly:

    Activists and inmates say the strike is meant to call attention to inhumane conditions in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit (SHU), where dangerous prisoners are lodged in small, windowless cells, often without access to other people or open space for extended periods. Critics of the SHU say that solitary confinement is equivalent to psychological torture, a position that is buttressed by recent scientific research.

    Here’s a more current update from The Nation.

    Or, as Johann Koehler relates it to In Defense of Flogging in a thoughtful blog post:

    The question of whether you’d prefer flogging instead of prison is nowhere near as grotesque as whether you’d prefer to starve yourself to raise awareness than tolerate another day of institutionally sanctioned torture. One is a fanciful thought experiment. It’s fiction. For 400 people, the other is acutely real.

  • We got another kingpin!

    Those Mexican drug kingpins are dropping like flies. By my count thismakes eight! Let me know when the violence stops.

  • Flogging in CT

    Gregory Hladky of the Hartford Advocate writes one of the better pieces on In Defense of Flogging (not that I like to pick favorites, because like the children I don’t have, I love them all). But this one ismore interesting than many.

  • While I’m out…

    Play with these census data.

    In the past, to gather data like this (change in neighborhood population and demographics over 10 years) used to be so much work and take so long.

    From 1990 to 2000, the Eastern District lost about 30% of its population. (In 2002 it took me days of work to figure that out.)

    Between 2000 and 2010 the population of the Eastern decreased another 18%, bringing its population to roughly 37,750. (In 2011, it took me about an hour to figure that out.) With 39 homicides in 2010, the Eastern has a homicide rate of 103 per 100,000. Some things never change.

    (And it seems worth pointing out that there were another 7 murders just south of the Eastern in the Southeast, north of Patterson Park and south of Monument Street.)

  • Vacation

    I’m off to New Mexico for a few days. Don’t expect much action here till next weekend.

    Happy 4th! Don’t forget to read the Declaration of Independence.

  • “A bargain like that is a bargain for me!”

    The good people at Basic Books have been kind (or clever) enough to put the first part of In Defense of Floggingup on the book’s website…

    For free!

    “Free,” you ask, “why would they do that?” Duh… So you love the start, get the cliffhanging end, and buy the book!

    Download the pdf file. Link to it. Email it to friends. Seed illegal downloads with the file. Print out the pages and scatter them from planes on the 4th of July weekend. Staple the pages to trees. Paste them to lampposts. Go guerrilla and project the images onto large urban walls. The possibilities are endless.

  • Police Lay Offs

    I still find it a bit shocking that cities big and small are laying-off police officers. The latest is San Jose, which laid-off 66 police officers with the least seniority:

    In addition to the cops let go, the city cut nearly 100 police positions left vacant by recent retirements and departures The police force shrunk from 1,271 to 1,106 officers, fewer cops than the city had two decades ago,http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif when San Jose had 200,000 fewer people. Police Chief Chris Moore called it “one of the saddest days I’ve had in my career.”

  • Collar for Dollars

    My article is in the July issue of Reason is available online:

    When I was a police officer in Baltimore, one sergeant would sometimes motivate his troops in the middle of a shift change by joyfully shouting, “All right, you maggots! Let’s lock people up! They don’t pay you to stand around. I want production! I want lockups!” He said this while standing in front of a small sign he most likely authored: “Unlike the citizens of the Eastern District, you are required to work for your government check.”

    In the police world, there are good arrests and better arrests, but there is no such thing as a bad arrest. In recent years, measures of “productivity” have achieved an almost totemic significance. And because they are so easy to count, arrests have come to outweigh more important but harder-to-quantify variables such as crimes prevented, fights mitigated, or public fears assuaged.
    …
    The drug war, because it can’t be won, encourages outward signs of police effectiveness at the expense of good old-fashioned policing. Hard-working cops, especially those who ask for little more than a middle-class income in return for the dangerous work they do, turn to drug arrests to make ends meet. The Baltimore sergeant was right: Police officers do need to work for their government check. It’s a shame “collars for dollars” has become the easiest way to do it.

    Read the rest here.

  • New York closes seven prisons

    This is noteworthy in its rarity. Keep in mind that New York is one of the few states that has de-carcertaed over that past decades (and no, crime has not gone up).

    Notice too how most of the article is about jobs and the economy, not crime.

    Notably, Mr. Cuomo spared several large prisons in the northernmost section of the state, where lawmakers had warned of possible economic ruin if the prisons were closed, and he did not shut down any maximum-security prisons, which have no surplus of beds.
    …
    Over all, the closings will allow the prison system, which currently houses about 56,000 inmates, to shed about 3,800 of its 64,000 beds.

    The governor’s office said closing the seven prisons, which together operate at about 70 percent capacity, and moving the inmates to other facilities would save $184 million over the next two years.

  • Today on CNN

    Me. At 2:45pm Eastern Time. Stream Team with Fredricka Whitfield. A mega 5-minute segment.