So one of the sites we hit in our trip to Philly last month was Eastern State Penitentiary, a 180-year old prison that closed in the early 1970s. For much of its existence, Eastern State was the most famous, most copied prison in the world. It was started in part by Benjamin Franklin, and up until the middle-20th century took a Quakerish, redemptive approach to punishment. In an odd way, it was both more cruel and more hopeful than other prisons. Its purpose was to rehabilitate prisoners, but it did so by completely isolating them. Even those incarcerated for minor offenses had almost no contact with other human beings for the length of their stay. Not for meals, recreation, or fellowship. The one exception was to learn a trade (which each inmate was expected to do over the course of his sentence). But the purpose of the isolation wasn’t retribution, but rehabilitation. The thinking was that isolation was what it took for the convicted to get right with God–note the cathedral ceilings in several of the photos.

It’s not quite accurate to say the place is abandoned. A private preservation group has rehabilitated parts of the building and now runs tours through it. They also invite local artists to stage exhibits around the prison grounds. But the building’s slow, beautiful decay is part of the attraction, so the renovations mainly consist of making sure the tour-guided parts are safe to walk through, and that’s about it. Click the photo for a slide show.

One of the charming little gifts the Bush administration left for the American people before vacating the White House was to slap a fat tariff on several popular European products, including Irish steel-cut oatmeal, French truffles, foie gras, Italian sparkling water, and a whopping 300 percent tariff on Roquefort cheese. The official line from the Bush administration was that the tariffs were retaliation for the EU’s rejection of hormone-fed beef (don’t mess with Texas!).

That’s a pretty lame excuse. Even accepting the flawed premise that there’s much to be gained from retaliatory tariffs, the combined cost of the new tariffs isn’t nearly enough to offset the EU’s position on beef, and isn’t going to persuade anyone in Europe to change it. Let’s call this what it is: a big middle finger to the arugula-eating, Whole Foods crowd the Bush administration so despises. The aim here wasn’t to punish Europe, it was to punish the Bush administration’s vision of the typical Obama voter.

Anyway, there’s a wonderful little cheese shop just down the road from me called the Cheesetique. Owner Jill Erber was pissed off enough about the Roquefort tariff to let loose with a righteous Jeffersonian free-trade rant on the Cheesetique blog. If there’s one thing I love more than a quarter pound of St. Andre triple creme, it’s a few paragraphs of anti-government fury from an unlikely source.

Think I’ll patronize the Cheesetique this afternoon. If you live in the area, aside from the enormous selection of cheese, I also highly recommend their store-roasted tomatoes, which they preserve in olive oil. They’re delicious on just about everything.

Derek Copp’s father speaks to the press, and says his son was shot when he moved his arm to cover his eyes from the police flashlights as they came into his apartment. That would be consistent with the police account that Copp was unarmed, and that there was no confrontation.

It was also be another piece of evidence showing the idiocy of using such violent, confrontational police tactics for nonviolent offenses. These raids have a low margin for error, for cops and the people they’re targeting. I feel like we just keep rehashing the same story on this site, over and over.

The bullet apparently broke Copp’s rips, ruptured his right lung, and punctured his liver. The Copp family didn’t hear about the shooting until six hours after it happened. Even then they were told by hospital staff, not police. The police also still haven’t released why they raided Copp’s apartment, what if any illegal substances they found, or why one deputy felt the need to shoot the guy.

It seems pretty clear by now that Copp was a recreational pot smoker, though there’s no indication thus far that he was dealing (not the evidence of either would justify shooting an unarmed man). Meanwhile, the Grand Rapids Press apparently thought it would be a good idea to browse Copp’s Facebook account for drug references.

Here’s the first part of Friday night’s 20/20 special with John Stossel and Reason.tv.

…who will stop the scourge of “animal husbandry”?

“Drunken Poet’s Dream,” by Hayes Carll.

The album version is even better, but I can’t seem to find it online.

A Chicago police officer who has won praise for having among the most DWI arrests in the city is now under investigation for lying about one of his stops.

The video from top DUI cop Joe D. Parker’s squad car shows a man walking a straight line, without stumbling or flailing his arms.

But Parker, a Chicago Police officer who has won acclaim for being among the leading DUI enforcers in the state, told a different story in his police report.

He wrote that Raymond L. Bell lost his balance and used his arms to steady himself. And he arrested the 33-year-old Oak Lawn man on charges of driving under the influence, speeding and negligent driving.

Now, after reviewing the squad-car video, Cook County prosecutors have dropped the July 2008 charges against Bell.

Parker is the second top Chicago DWI cop to get caught lying. The city had to drop 156 DWI cases after Officer John Haleas was caught lying about one of them. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Parker himself was arrested for drunk driving in 1996. The charge was later dropped.

I’ve written before about the problems with the use of boilerplate on DWI reports. The story also reinforces the importance of video to check against police misconduct.

The 20-year-old is Derek Copp, a film and video major. He’s in serious but stable condition. The police say he was unarmed, and there appeared to be no struggle. Which makes you wonder why the hell they shot him. They also still haven’t said if they found any illicit drugs.

I particularly like this comment left on the Grand Rapids Press website:

As an officer, I can tell you that they would only serve a warrant after some lengthy investigation, including buys from that subject from an undercover officer.

And as someone who has reviewed well over 1,000 of these raids over the last few years, I can tell you that this comment simply isn’t true.

So we now know that the 20-year-old Grand Valley State student shot in the chest during a drug raid last night was shot by a raiding police officer, and that that the student was unarmed.

The police haven’t yet said what if any drugs they found, or why the officer fired his weapon.

A police spokesman did assure the community that this was an “isolated incident.”

No, I’m not kidding.

(Thanks to Nick Cheolas for the tip.)

Good for Virginia for conducting this review:

DNA tests in two more decades-old cases being reviewed as part of a massive state project to clear the wrongfully convicted do not match the individuals convicted of the crimes.

The Virginia Department of Forensic Science and the Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office confirmed Wednesday that one of the cases was in that city. The department would only say that the other case was in the Tidewater region.

Authorities would not give details of either case.

The tests were part of a review of cases from 1973 to 1988 ordered after five men were exonerated of rape charges from biological evidence preserved long before DNA testing was commonly done.

Last week, authorities confirmed that a 2006 DNA test determined a Richmond man who spent eight years in prison for a 1979 rape was not the source of biological evidence in that case.

Little in the way of details right now, other than that the woman appears to be okay.

Headline shamelessly stolen from Jason Talley.

My favorite quote from the article:

“Why should we be afraid to test our worldview against reality?” asked Bill Jack, a Christian leadership instructor who leads groups across the country for a company called Biblically Correct Tours.

Given that in the past, we’ve seen these field testing units deliver positive results on pool chalk, chocolate, and soap, this isn’t terribly surprising:

According to a new report (PDF) sponsored by the Marijuana Policy Project, field tests commonly used by police to identify marijuana and other drugs yield false positives in response to a variety of legal substances, resulting in the arrest and detention of innocent people. Worse, “millions of people have been, and continue to be, prosecuted and convicted of marijuana charges without proof that they possessed marijuana.” The author, forensic drug expert John Kelly, says an investigation he conducted in collaboration with former FBI scientist Frederic Whitehurst “reveals a drug testing regime of fraudulent forensics used by police, prosecutors, and judges which abrogates every American’s Constitutional rights”…

According to Kelly, “millions of people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of marijuana charges on the basis of the Duquenois-Levine (D-L) color chemical test, both with and without a microscopic exam.” Experiments with the D-L test described at the end of the report found that ”patchouli, spearmint, and eucalyptus tested positive for marijuana, while lavender, cypress, and oregano (which previous studies showed produced false positives with the D-L test) gave inconclusive results.” In tests using just the NarcoPouch KN Reagent kit, 33 of 42 substances—including vanilla, anise, chicory, and peppermint—tested positive for cannabis.

By the time lab results come back, you could have spent thousands of dollars you won’t get back, been locked up, and had your property seized. These field units don’t just have a high margin for error, they’re essentially useless. Well, at least at testing for illicit drugs. If your goal is to get a positive match so you can make an arrest on the spot, they’re pretty darned useful.

Why is it that the Democrats are all about government programs to reduce inequality . . . except when it comes to letting poor people send their kids to the same schools the kids of politicians attend?

The standardized testing data on the D.C. voucher program is inconclusive. But parents are overwhelmingly happy with the program. Which frankly is a hell of a lot better measure of its effectiveness.

I should add here that I favor tax credits for vouchers and voucher contributions over direct government subsidies. But the Democrats’ opposition to the D.C. voucher program is completely disingenuous. The program didn’t take a dime from the District’s public schools. Only New York and New Jersey spend more money per pupil than D.C. And D.C.’s public schools are horrible. Something isn’t right. And the solution isn’t to trap as many kids in those chronically failing schools as possible.

Wish I had time to write more. But have at it in the comments section. Also, while I didn’t expect to hear “Going Back to Indiana,” I was surprised there weren’t more Jackson 5 selections. And no Billie Jean?

Here’s how I’d rank ‘em tonight:

Top Five:
Adam Lambert
Lil Rounds
Matt Giraud
Danny Gokly
Allison Iraheta

Bottom Three:
Anoop Desai
Megan Joy
Jorge Nunez

Here’s a first-hand account over at Metafilter.

Right now, I have no more details other than what’s in the post. The guy seems to want little more than an apology and explanation of what went wrong.

The new nationalized CitiBank.

This Friday at 10pm ET, ABC’s 20/20 will air a John Stossel special called “Bailouts, Big Spending, and Bull.”

The special will consist of several videos my colleagues have been producing over at Reason.tv.

Most retail outfits catch on to the “be courteous to your customers” thing pretty early on. But most retail outlets don’t have a government-enforced monopoly on what they sell. So in Pennsylvania, where all liquor and wine must be sold in state-run stores…

The state’s Liquor Control Board is spending more than $173,000 to try to make workers friendlier and more well-mannered at the nearly 650 stores it operates. The board says it wants to make sure clerks are saying “hello,” “thank you” and “come again” to customers shopping for wine and spirits.

It has hired Pittsburgh-based consulting firm Solutions 21 to help coach store managers so they can instruct their clerks on issues such as how to greet customers and where to stand. Training begins this month.

Last week, the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee held hearings on a new bill that would require every police agency in the state with a SWAT team to issue quarterly reports on how often the teams are deployed, why they were deployed, what happened during the warrant service, and what was found. It is a small but vital step toward allowing for a proper assessment of just how often paramilitary-style tactics are being used in Maryland, how often things go wrong, and whether they’re being used as advertised.

Several witnesses at the hearing described yet more terrifying wrong-door raids, in cases never before reported.

Karen Thomas told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee that she heard Howard County police shoot and kill her dog in her Ellicott City living room in September 2007, while she lay upstairs on the floor, surrounded by police who had not identified themselves.

“In my mind, terrorists had just killed my son and they were going to kill me next,” she told committee members.

Thomas said that police were searching for drugs, but none were found…

Choking back tears, Boyd Petit told committee members that during an April 2008 raid on his Highland home, a police tactical team had handcuffed him and his family outside his home, at gunpoint and in front of his neighbors, while other officers searched his house.

“Our collective lives flashed before our eyes,” he said.

Petit claimed the raid on his house was prompted by a former customer, who made false allegations about him to police. He said police were searching for a specific weapon, but it was not found.

Right now, it looks like the bill will get through committee. It’s being pushed by Cheye Calvo, the Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor who was subjected to a particularly violent but mistaken raid on his home.