Exciting criminal justice reforms?

Increasingly, in the face of tight state and federal budgets, governments are considering major criminal justice reforms.

Two examples discussed in an op-ed in the New York Times:

The Smarter Sentencing Act — introduced in the Senate last year by Richard Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, and Mike Lee, the Utah Republican — would halve mandatory minimum sentences for certain nonviolent drug crimes, which currently stand at five, 10 and 20 years. It would also give judges more discretion to sentence below the mandatory minimum in some cases, and it would provide a chance at early release for thousands of inmates sentenced under an older law that disproportionately punished crack cocaine offenders.

 

The Recidivism Reduction and Public Safety Act, introduced by Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, would allow low-risk prisoners to earn credit for early release by participating in education, job training and drug treatment programs.

 

The op-ed has also generated some interesting letters to the editor in response.

 

We discussed this issue yesterday on the campus of Appalachian State University as part of its amazing series of social justice week events. My take? It's great we're discussing reforms, no matter the motivation. But, given that much of the motivation is financial in nature, I fear we'll lose focus once the budget situation turns around, if it ever does.

 

In fact, it is the conservative political ideology promoted by state and federal legislators since the 1960s that has gotten us into this mess, an ideology that says individual criminals are solely responsible for their crimes and only a get tough on crime response will stop them. This has not only led to massive disparities in criminal justice practice but also broken the bank.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fox distorts research on anti-bullying program ....

.... for a purely partisan purpose to create, yet again, the impression that conservative views are being repressed by liberal establishments. Like schools (lol).

From this article:

Fox News attacked efforts to restrict school bullying by describing them as attempts to limit conservative free speech and misrepresenting a study on the effectiveness of certain anti-bullying programs.

During the October 20 edition of America's News HQ, Fox's resident pro-discrimination crusader Shannon Bream invited Fox News contributor David Webb and radio host Mark Levine to discuss whether efforts to combat school bullying "suppress" conservative students' right to free speech:

As Levine points out, both Bream and Webb fail to distinguish between acts of bullying - which typically target an individual and involve personal attacks - and purely political speech. It's unclear how a student speaking in favor of the Second Amendment would be punished under a school's anti-bullying policy so long as he or she avoided making threats of violence against other students.
Bream also grossly mischaracterizes a recent University of Texas, Arlington study, which found that certain school programs to combat bullying might backfire by teaching students new ways to bully their peers. Both Bream and Webb cite the study as proof that anti-bullying policies are cumbersome and generally ineffective.

In reality, however, the authors of the UT Arlington study stated that their findings should be used to develop more aggressive and sophisticated anti-bullying efforts:

The study suggested that future direction should focus on more sophisticated strategies rather than just implementation of bullying prevention programs along with school security measures such as guards, bag and locker searches or metal detectors. Furthermore, given that bullying is a relationship problem, researchers need to better identify the bully-victim dynamics in order to develop prevention policies accordingly, [Seokjin Jeong, lead author of the study,] said.

The study also found that a lack of supportive involvement from teachers increased the risk of bullying victimization, further highlighting the importance of school involvement in efforts to combat bullying.

Fox's segment comes just days after the network appeared to participate in Spirit Day, an event meant to show support for victims of anti-LGBT bullying. The network has a history of downplaying or ignoring the impact of bullying against LGBT youth and mocking attempts to protect students from harassment at school.

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This reminds me of the stories Fox runs each and every year about the war on Christmas.

Yet, each and every year, we have another Christmas. And people freely celebrate it without any interference whatsoever from the government, or the media, or even private for-profit businesses who choose to say "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas" just to be inclusive (as Presidents Obama, and Bush, and hell even the sainted President Reagan, did on their holiday cards).

Shoot, look what Fox News says about putting a dog on the front of a holiday card!

I, for one, see what is going on here. Fox News has a delusion of persecution. And they're just trying to suck the rest of us into it.