-Eapen Thampy

Thought this discussion on Quora was worth flagging, excerpts:

High-speed chases look like fun because they are.

Take away alcohol and stupid, and the world would require about 90% fewer cops.

Once you become a cop, very few of your non-cop friends will ever again treat you the same way.

-Eapen Thampy

Innovative and insightful work from Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham. Hard to excerpt, read the whole thing:

What do we mean by a political-economy of police and law enforcement? Over the last decade there have been numerous excellent studies of the prison-industrial complex, especially here in California where prisons have rapidly grown in their budgets, employment, and numbers of persons incarcerated. With the growth of prisons into a major branch of the state, an entire industry of small and large corporations that profit from contracting with prisons has been created, replete with trade associations, lobbyists, and powerful employee unions. Finally, a pro-prisons political constituency comprised of the local, mostly rural, cities and counties where carceral facilities have become major employers, and local tax revenue generators, has completed the complex. It’s a powerful political machine, now a significant sector of California’s economy that through its redistribution of resources to lock up hundreds of thousands of mostly men of color produces obvious winners and losers.

Surprisingly, police departments have been subject to much less study along these lines, even though  policing consumes more public revenues than prisons, and in spite of the ubiquitous presence of police in every city.

Oakland’s position within the Bay Area’s police and law enforcement economy is characterized by extraction. Because of decades of white flight, capital flight, and the devastating impact of state tax cuts and disinvestment in public schools, Oakland today is wracked by unemployment, poverty, and suffers from a lack of meaningful social and economic mobility for its flatlands residents, conditions that are synonymous with crime within these same communities.

Due to Oakland’s unique history and current political dynamics, harsh law-and-order approaches are most often advocated as the solution to the city’s crime problem. Parsing out the different constituencies that advocate the ‘more cops’ approach is a task that awaits much further study, but we can generally sketch out a picture of who wins and who loses because of Oakland’s unusually large allocation of city tax dollars to policing.

The short answer is that the surrounding majority white and middle class suburban cities of the East Bay benefit from Oakland’s massive spending on cops via the redistribution of tax dollars from Oakland to other municipalities.

Oakland spends roughly 40 percent of its general fund budget on cops. Police services is the single largest expenditure for the city. Compared to other cities of similar size in California, Oakland’s spending on police is much, much higher. For example, Sacramento spent about 23% of its general fund on cops in the 2011-2012 Fiscal year, this in spite of the fact that Sacramento and Oakland actually have comparable crime rates (Oakland has outpaced Sacramento in violent crime, while Sacramento has had more property crimes than Oakland in recent years, according to the most recent FBI crime statistics).

Oakland’s FY 2012-2013 budget appropriates 40% of the general fund for police services, far and away the largest focus of city government. Few other cities, even those with comparable rates of crime, spend proportionally as much on their police. (Source: “Oakland FY2011-13 Adopted Policy Budget”, p. vii.)

What Oakland obtains from its large commitment of tax dollars to policing is debatable. As the department’s budget has fluctuated over the years crime rates have also fluctuated, but not necessarily in a pattern suggesting a causal link. Oakland does, however, lose considerable tax dollars to surrounding suburban cities in the form of officer salaries. Most of Oakland’s cops don’t live in the city, meaning that their salaries and other compensation are spent on mortgages, consumer purchases, healthcare, and other forms of taxed consumption where they live. Thus, by our rough calculations, based on data provided by OPD and assembled from a database of public employee pay for 2010, at least $126 million left the city in 2010 in the form of officer compensation.

OPD’s highest paid staff, nearly all sworn officers, live outside the city, while the department’s lowest paid staff, including administrative workers, are far more likely to live in Oakland. None of OPD’s command staff live in Oakland. In a sense this means that the local jobs sustained by OPD, which recycle Oakland tax dollars into the city’s economy, are the lowest paid positions, giving the city very little bang for its police bucks.

• Ugh.
• Ugh.
• Ugh.

Have a good weekend everyone!

–Radley

Hi Folks — Lenore from Free-Range Kids. Have you seen this story? I hadn’t. Two schools in Texas appear ready to make their students wear identification cards with an RFID tracking chip in them. Supposedly this is for the students’ safety.

Except…I”m not even a predator and I know that if I ever kidnapped a kid, the first thing I’d do would be to throw their i.d. card out the window. Better still, I’d pull a DaVinci Code and throw it onto a truck going the other way.

Clearly the real point is to keep track of the kids the way Walmart keeps track of palettes of Prell. And yet, here’s the encouraging news: The kids and their parents are rebelling! They’re particularly appalled because the chips keep right on tracking, even after school hours. Big Brother go home!

And speaking of going home, that is what I am doing, too. I really want to thank Radley for inviting me to guest-post here for August.  I loved hearing from you, readers, and I also loved reading what all the other August-bloggers had to say. Eye-opening! I shall continue to read them and I hope to continue to hear from some of you, too. When it comes to fighting stupidity and rigidity, we’re all in this together. – L.

-Eapen Thampy

From the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition:

I will say as my time on this blog nears the end that I do become very discouraged with what I see in the American justice system, as it seems to produce liars and glorify the worst lies while denigrating truth. Nor does it matter if the players are atheists, Christians, or something else: the lie always seems to win.

At the same time, I am heartened by the mix of people I find who stand up against lies and promote truth, even if it places a personal cost upon them. That is why I so much appreciate reading posts by people like Radley Balko, Eapen Thampy, Lenore Skenazy, and more. These are folks who have a moral compass, despite their different backgrounds, and are not afraid to stand up and be counted. And I would rather be associated these people I have mentioned than a thousand people in Washington who have a hold on power.

I don’t wear my religious beliefs on my sleeve, but I am a Christian (of the conservative variety) and take seriously the admonition of Jesus who told his disciples not to seek power over others but rather to serve and have a servant’s heart. I cannot say that I am a very good servant or could be mistaken for a true Christian servant of others, but I do wish to be like that.

(And, yes, I am libertarian in my political views, and much of what Radley and others have said on this page also speaks for me.)

In closing out my posts, I wish to call attention to yet another wrongful conviction, that of Brad Cooper, but also call attention to a wonderful woman who has stood up for him, someone who is beyond special, a true hero (or heroine) for our day, Lynne Blanchard, who has defended a man she does not even know simply because she knows it is the right thing to do.

Cooper was convicted of murder in the killing of his wife in Cary, North Carolina, two years ago. The police misconduct in the case was awful from the beginning, and it was clear that Brad was the target of their investigation and that nothing — NOTHING — would get in the way of a conviction.

When I first read about the case, I had no opinion as to guilt or innocence. It would not have been the first time a husband had murdered his wife, and wrongful convictions in murders, I admit, are fairly rare, although they do happen.

There were others who had doubts, however, and one of them was Lynne Blanchard, who also lives in that area. After the conviction, she set up a blog, Justice for Brad Cooper. She has set up a very impressive site that looks in detail at how police lied, manipulated evidence, and how the judge constantly did everything he could to block Brad’s attempt at a defense.

The evidence that Cooper is innocent is compelling and Lynne has done a very good job in bringing that evidence to the fore. I would urge you to take a look. She writes:

For starters, there were serious discovery violations. The State used National Security as a reason not to share information about how computer evidence was handled, how files were retrieved and the master file table itself. It was a clear Brady violation and Judge Gessner permitted it. They were able to hide behind national security because the computer was analyzed by the FBI and the state submitted an affidavit stating that sharing the data could jeopardize national security. This should never be allowed and it basically prevented the defense from having the ability to properly address the computer evidence.

Brad Cooper was convicted based on the computer evidence, a Google search. The Cary police did not follow proper protocols in the handling of this evidence. They left the computer on for 27 hours and during that time files were altered, passwords were changed, email archives were accessed and the computer was not hashed until several weeks later. Protocols are crucial because it preserves the evidence so that it can not be tampered with. As it turns out, the defense experts did indeed find evidence of tampering. They found several indications of tampering that could not be explained by the State witnesses. However, the judge would not allow the jury to hear from the defense witnesses. He was clearly biased throughout the trial and the defense team’s inability to address the computer evidence put them at an enormously unfair disadvantage. The alleged Google search was never verified by a 3rd party, even though the FBI told Cary police to do this. It was never proven that the search was conducted on Brad’s computer and in fact the defense experts found evidence that the files were planted.

There is more, much more, and it is worth reading. If Brad Cooper’s wrongful conviction is overturned, it will be because Lynne Blanchard cared enough to fight for someone she did not know because she knew it was the right thing to do.

Yes, I wish there were more Lynne Blanchards in the world, just as I wish for more Lenore Skenazys, more Radley Balkos, and more Eapen Thampys. There are never enough, but I am thankful that these people are here, and I am thankful that Radley has permitted me to put my few inadequate words on a blog that has done so much good for so many people who had nowhere else to turn and who had no one else to fight for them. These are the people who temper my hardened views and who remind me that it really is a good thing to keep fighting, even if it really does seem that the bad guys are winning.

Hi Folks! It’s Lenore Skenazy from Free-Range Kids, where one of the issues we visit often is the corruption of the Sex Offender Registry, and how many of the people on it pose no risk to children, yet have their lives ruined. Recently I heard from a mom whose slow-witted 19-year-old son (still a high school sophomore) was convicted of possession of kiddie porn because he was looking at kids his same mental age — under 18. Then I heard from another mom whose son is on the list, too. When young men date women a little younger than them who are legally minors, this is legally considered statutory rape. If it’s consensual sex, I consider it a relationship. Here’s a letter I just got that makes me believe we have to revisit and reform the sex offender laws. It is the perfect companion piece to the post  by William Anderson, about how sex crimes get treated in the media and the courts. Any ideas about how to change all this — fast! — are most welcome. – L.

I know the registry is a joke. I live it first hand, as my husband is on it for a false accusation from his ex-wife falsely who manipulated her 13-year-old daughter into signing her name to an email that the mother wrote lying about him touching her. The reason the ex wanted retaliation was because he was given custody of the kids during a divorce because she is mentally unstable and a drunk. She showed him! He would not get custody anymore because of the accusations which she is now trying to do with her next oldest daughter in line…who told us what was going on and that she refuses to go along with it, because it’s not true. She now wants to live with us, but guess what? Se can’t, because her dad is on the registry and the courts will not allow it.

The older daughter that originally went along with the false accusations is now 18 and wants to see her dad. But she has told the next-oldest daughter that she can not come forward and tell the truth because she would “lose everything” she has. She doesn’t understand that she was a minor at the time and nothing would happen to her. Though it would possibly put her mother away for perjury.

My husband had a great job of 7 years and when they found out he was on the registry they canned him. He has not been able to find a job since. It’s been 8 months. No one will hire him because he is on the registry. He is not in the same category as a rapist, but is treated as if he is. The registry needs to be revamped.

I used to think the same as the general public: “Oh, he’s on the registry. He must be a child molester.” I no long believe that. There are many men and women on the registry that are harmless and should not be in the same category as a violent sex criminal.  - Stacie in Nebraska

Standing by her man.

Whenever I read articles dealing with prosecutorial misconduct, I invariably find a statement similar to this: “Most U.S. prosecutors are ethical and try to do the right thing, but there are a few who engage in unethical behavior.” In other words, every barrel has a few rotten apples, but most are just fine.

I used to believe that myself, but no longer. In fact, given what we know about human nature and the functions of boundaries, when prosecutors know that they face no consequences for their own behavior no matter how illegal or despicable it might be, we can expect stories like what recently was posted on this blog.

A bit of history is instructive here. For all of the talk of 1776 and the Constitution, the intellectuals, politicians, and voters of the United States essentially abandoned the constitutional republic that had existed since 1787 and embraced what this country is today: a Progressive democracy. One cannot understand modern law (and especially federal criminal law) and the role of bureaucrats and elected officials without understanding the tenets of Progressivism.

The U.S. Constitution and its Declaration of Independence were written on the premise that individuals are flawed characters that need any number of boundaries in order to keep baser instincts in check. Call it Original Sin or just the way things are, but deep down, most of us realize that we are capable of doing a lot of evil if no one or no thing stops us. Furthermore, there seems to be no limit to the human capacity of excusing or justifying the wrongness of our deeds.

Many of our original institutions were built upon this notion. On the “private” side, we have markets in which consumers can put even the most powerful companies out of business (i.e. General Motors) by refusing to purchase their products. Because government institutions are not consumer-driven entities (voters are not the same as consumers), they have to face different constraints, since governments are given a monopoly on deadly force. Because government agents can do an immense amount of harm to others while acting under the “color of law,” it is imperative that those agents be given consistent boundaries in order to keep them from using their legal positions to deny rights to others.

Progressives, on the other hand, believed that people were advancing through the evolutionary process, and that formal education and the “professionalizing” of various occupations would help create individuals who not only would be able to identify what was the “public good,” but also would carry out actions that would promote public welfare. Not only did they embrace legal institutions that would empower people who worked within government to impose their will whenever they believed it necessary to do so, but they also dismantled many of the boundaries that the law had created to keep government in check because, after all, educated and professional people did not need such constraints.

Living in an age where many, if not most, occupations require a license or some sort of formal training in order for people to engage in providing such services, we forget that occupational licensing and the establishment of credentials a “proof” of expertise and, more important, professional competence, really was a product of the Progressive Era. For example, before law schools became the powerful and influential and prestigious entities that they are today, at one time many lawyers did not even go to law school. Instead, people who wished to practice law would work as apprentices under practicing lawyers to learn their occupation.

Such a state of affairs would seem foreign to us, given that in our political economy, one cannot even cut hair without approval from a state-run agency.The bureaucratic hoops that exist for nearly every occupation might be formidable, but to many of us, they also are the New Normal. In fact, many people could not imagine a political economy in which many people from whom they purchase goods and services were NOT state licensed or approved by an official agency.

There are some among us who are True Believers in this system, those who believe that state-empowered agents, when given proper training and guidance, generally will do the right thing. Furthermore, because individuals outside of the legal system lack the expertise and good sense to be able to understand the law and how to apply it, society then must depend upon the “professionals” who will be well-trained and will have the proper educational and occupational credentials.

In other words, the people in the system really don’t need constraints because their professionalism and their training will ensure that they already know beforehand where the edge of the cliff might be. Such a system of selection, I have seen it argued, ensures that most of the people who become prosecutors are competent (they passed law school and the BAR exam) and ethical (they took at least one ethics class in law school), so nothing else is needed.

Obviously, we are dealing with a huge clash in how people regard human nature. On one side, we have the “good people” (prosecutors) going after the “bad people” (anyone arrested and charged with a crime). Because the “bad people” are so bad, we must give extraordinary tools to those who are performing the public service. Yes, it is true that every once in a while, a public servant becomes overzealous in a good cause and either stretches the law or takes some liberty with the truth.

Like many others, I would like to believe that the rash of prosecutorial misconduct that infects our courts today is just the product of overzealous people who sometimes get carried away going after the bad guys. However, I would be believing a lie if I were to say that is what is happening.

No, what is happening is much darker. First, it is true that most people in the system are guilty, and I would not dispute that point. Second, the actual number of truly innocent people is relatively small compared to the truly guilty, and I have no doubt that the “I am a hammer and you are a nail” syndrome takes effect in prosecutorial circles as it would elsewhere in a bureaucratic system.

But the cynicism I have witnessed in cases of actual innocence, from Janet Reno’s false child molestation prosecutions of 30 years ago to Mike Nifong’s cynical pursuit of rape charges against three Duke lacrosse players, charges he knew were false, to what I witnessed in Tonya Craft’s trial in 2010, tells me that something much deeper is happening. Don’t forget that Reno was rewarded by being named U.S. Attorney General (from where she touched off the biggest U.S. Government domestic massacre since Wounded Knee in 1890). Furthermore, when Nifong was spouting off in his interviews and when he was declaring he had no doubt of the players’ guilt, prosecutors across the country lined up in support of him. The forsook him only after he was caught red-handed in a lie during a December 15, 2006, hearing.

The Duke case was one in which the falsity of the charges was transparent from the beginning. We were expected to believe that three young men could beat a woman for thirty minutes, rape her, ejaculate on her, force her to have oral sex, and then not leave on speck of DNA? And U.S. prosecutors went along with that nonsense? Are we dealing with people who are so stupid that they cannot even understand the basic laws of time and space?

For that matter, was Janet Reno so utterly dense that she actually could believe that an adult could stick knives and even swords into the rectums of little children and not leave even a solitary mark? That adults in day care centers could be molesting children literally all day and no one who came into the place actually witnessed these terrible acts. And no one was missing the proverbial child who had been microwaved to death?

That a person who could believe this nonsense would be named the Attorney General of the United States tells us more about the state of American politicians than anything else. (Hillary Clinton claimed that Reno was good on “children’s issues.” Reno was so good that she managed to massacre a number of youngsters just a couple months after taking office.)

Furthermore, if Michael Nifong was a “rogue prosecutor,” then why did so many prosecutors speak on his behalf in the early days of the case? As Jonathan Turley noted in a column in the Washington Post, why in the world is someone like Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor who now is a legal commentator, become respected for her views on the law? He writes:

Consider the career of Nancy Grace. Before becoming a CNN and Court TV anchor, she was a notorious prosecutor in Alabama. In a blistering 2005 federal appeals opinion, Judge William H. Pryor Jr., a conservative former Alabama attorney general, found that Grace had “played fast and loose” with core ethical rules in a 1990 triple-murder case. Like Nifong, Grace was accused of not disclosing critical evidence (the existence of other suspects) as well as knowingly permitting a detective to testify falsely under oath. The Georgia Supreme Court also reprimanded her for withholding evidence and for making improper statements in a 1997 arson and murder case. The court overturned the conviction in that case and found that Grace’s behavior “demonstrated her disregard of the notions of due process and fairness and was inexcusable.” She faced similar claims in other cases.

You might have expected Grace to suffer the same fate as Nifong. Instead, she has her own show on CNN, and the network celebrates her as “one of television’s most respected legal analysts.” On TV, she displays the same style she had in the courtroom. (In the Duke case, her presumed-guilty approach was evident early on, when she declared: “I’m so glad they didn’t miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape.”)

The Grace effect is not lost on aspiring young prosecutors who struggle to outdo one another as camera-ready, take-no-prisoners avengers of justice. Grace’s controversial career also shows how prosecutors can routinely push the envelope without fear of any professional consequences. Often this does not mean violating an ethics rule, but using legally valid charges toward unjust ends.

So, why do they do it? They do it because they can, and because no one tells them they can’t. Nancy Grace is exposed as a liar and a cheat, so she gets her own TV show and lots of wealth. If Grace had been honest, does anyone think she would be a celebrity?

Indeed, for most prosecutors, crime pays and it pays quite well. Robert Frost, in “Mending Wall,” writes of his neighbor who says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Good fences also would make for better police and prosecutors. Unfortunately, they don’t exist and the walls that are there constantly are torn down by people who claim we don’t need them at all.

Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform

Sarah Stillman has an excellent article on the use of confidential informants in drug cases in the United States this week in the New Yorker:

Informants are the foot soldiers in the government’s war on drugs. By some estimates, up to eighty per cent of all drug cases in America involve them, often in active roles like Hoffman’s. For police departments facing budget woes, untrained C.I.s provide an inexpensive way to outsource the work of undercover officers. “The system makes it cheap and easy to use informants, as opposed to other, less risky but more cumbersome approaches,” says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a leading expert on informants. “There are fewer procedures in place and fewer institutional checks on their use.” Often, deploying informants involves no paperwork and no institutional oversight, let alone lawyers, judges, or public scrutiny; their use is necessarily shrouded in secrecy.

“They can get us into the places we can’t go,” says Brian Sallee, a police officer who is the president of B.B.S. Narcotics Enforcement Training and Consulting, a firm that instructs officers around the country in drug-bust procedures. “Without them, narcotics operations would practically cease to function.”

Every day, offenders are sent out to perform high-risk police operations with few legal protections. Some are juveniles, occasionally as young as fourteen or fifteen. Some operate through the haze of addiction; others, like Hoffman, are enrolled in state-mandated treatment programs that prohibit their association with illegal drugs of any kind. Many have been given false assurances by the police, used without regard for their safety, and treated as disposable pawns of the criminal-justice system.

In Vancouver, Washington, Jeremy McLean was roped into being a confidential informant after selling a friend eight methadone pills. Fourteen undercover stings later, Jeremy would become the murder victim of a heroin trafficker he’d helped set up:

Mitchell McLean has come to see his son’s death as the result of an equally cynical and utilitarian calculation. “The cops, they get federal funding by the number of arrests they make—to get the money, you need the numbers,” he explained, alluding to, among other things, asset-forfeiture laws that allow police departments to keep a hefty portion of cash and other resources seized during drug busts. “It’s a commercial enterprise,” he went on, citing a view shared by many legal scholars and policy critics. “That’s how they pay for their vans, for their prosecutors—they get money from the war on drugs. They put zero dent in the supply. They just focus on small-town, small-time arrests.” He continued, “I understand using C.I.s to get information on who is a mid-level dealer, or to go after the big guys. That’s the information that I, as a taxpayer, would love to see them do—cases that have some significance. I still remember the big busts from the eighties and nineties, where they’d nail a heroin kingpin.”

Read the whole thing.

Nathan Jones writes in Small Wars Journal about the evolution of the Mexican drug war:

There has been a dominant narrative in the study of Mexican drug trafficking which argues that violence goes down when one dominant trafficking organization monopolizes a locale.  This has been used to explain the reductions in violence in Tijuana and now Ciudad Juarez.  There is just one problem with the explanation, it isn’t empirically valid.  In both cities the deeply entrenched local “cartels” continue to operate, though in a more low-profile fashion, while the Sinaloa cartel has entered both cities and has been proclaimed by government officials in the US and Mexico as dominant.  The dominance of the Sinaloa cartel has been credited with the relative drops in violence.  There is another explanation that better fits reality.

In violent conflicts with the state and rival drug traffickers, the most violent cells of larger networks (those that focus on kidnapping and extortion) are more likely to be killed or captured because they draw state and rival trafficker attention.  As they are wiped out, the remaining cells focus on trafficking, money laundering and maintaining a “low profile.”  Key to maintaining a low profile is reducing violence with other organizations to avoid state attention.  This requires some level of negotiation with rivals or a tacit “live and let live” policy.  While we have little direct evidence of these negotiations save for statements from arrested traffickers, we have the low levels of violence and the continued presence of multiple trafficking groups in shared territories as circumstantial evidence that the monopoly of violence explanation does not explain these relative peace periods.

Recent articles, including one in Proceso by Victor Clark, have demonstrated the continued presence and operation of the Arellano Felix Organization in Tijuana.  Clark points out that the AFO operates in a very different fashion following its internecine conflict with El Teo a violent lieutenant who splintered from the AFO in 2008.  Following his arrest and the arrest of his top cell leaders in early 2010, violence in the city has declined, particularly as measured by kidnap rates.  This is despite the fact that the Sinaloa cartel established an important presence in Tijuana by annexing cells from the AFO in the same period.  Many argued the Sinaloa cartel was dominant by 2010 and that the AFO was either “a shadow of its former self” or even that it was on the verge of collapse.  Yet its leadership was never captured (Fernando Sanchez Arellano AKA El Ingeniero) and cell leaders such as El Ruedas continued to be arrested, all of which stated that the AFO had regenerated and is far stronger than observers thought.    What has changed for the AFO has been the business model and procedures.  Former enforcer cell leaders have transitioned to low profile trafficking.  In the words of Clark they are now more “entrepreneurial.”

Solving for the equilibrium:

This process suggests that there may be multiple processes at play, which will create a less violent equilibrium in Mexican trafficking.  First, state institutional security capacity is increasing and is likely to continue its increase in Mexico with increased spending, democratic/rule of law norms, and training from the United States via the “new Merida Initiative” which now emphasizes capacity building over military equipment. Second, trafficking networks are experiencing changes in their internal composition.  Territorial and extortion based-cells are being removed by state and rival traffickers while trafficking cells survive.  Local state actors such as former Tijuana Police Chief Leyzaola (current chief of Juarez) are also targeting the most violent actors in these networks, as was the case with the El Teo faction in Tijuana.  These are not rational decisions made by monolithic actors, but structurally determined strategies from illicit networks whose capabilities, skills and predispositions change based on which members and cells in their illicit networks are arrested or killed.  Thus, the illicit network evolutionary process favors traffickers over extorters; which in turn allows for peaceful coexistence in cities like Tijuana.

(By Eric E. Sterling, Guest Blogger)

The New York Times reports on August 29, 2012 on the life and death of DeAndre McCullough in Baltimore on August 1, 2012 at age 35 of an apparent heroin overdose.

DeAndre’s youth had been chronicled in the non-fiction book and HBO mini-series, The Corner, A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (New York, Broadway Books, 1997), by David Simon and Edward Burns.  DeAndre’s parents, both Baltimore residents addicted to drugs are central figures in the book and miniseries. The book and mini-series were sort of a scholarly prelude by Simon and Burns to the HBO smash hit series, The Wire, about contemporary urban life, policing,urban politics, drug trafficking, drug use in Baltimore.

The Times reports that DeAndre, addicted to drugs as a teenager, was able to get treatment and begin a life of recovery, obtain a high school G.E.D. (graduate equivalency diploma), and attend community college. He had employment, and had roles in HBO’s The Corner and The Wire. But he had great success as a drug treatment counselor in Baltimore at Mountain Manor, a few miles west of the corners where he grew up. But after several years, he resumed his drug use, lost his job, and was in and out of treatment and in and out of various jobs for the past seven years.

Why does someone who seems to have overcome a childhood and life of risk factors succumb? Is it changed brain chemistry, the “lure” of the high of opiates, an inadequate, stunted self-love, the “environment of the neighborhood,” bad choice of friends, lack of education, lack of good jobs — some or all of the above? Or was it badly manufactured drugs, poor education about drug use, inadequate harm reduction, continued stigmatization of addicts and those in recovery? I don’t think The Times story tells us enough to answer, but no doubt there will be many who will insist that Mr. McCullough’s death supports one of their talking points.

Perhaps before International Drug Overdose Awareness Day on August 31, further details of Mr. McCullough’s life and death might be published that might be the honest basis for drawing some lessons from his tragic death.

“If we were highly idealistic, we might say rising living standards are not enough: A child’s background should have nothing to do with where the child ends up,” suggests David Schmidtz in Elements of Justice, p 126. It’s an idea he ultimately does not endorse.

And he shouldn’t. Every feasible method of achieving the goal is also perfectly repugnant. We could ensure that background and outcome were entirely unrelated by making everyone exactly equal, or by distributing wealth and social station by lottery, or by empowering some sort of vast wealth-confiscation bureau that was only permitted to act at random. But I can’t think of too many other ways to do it.

So why does it seem intuitive to call this an “idealistic” project? Why does it have the appeal, however momentary, that it does? Why, when we want to exclude certain forms of person-stunting, to do we so often reach for the ideal of equality of opportunity?

–Jason Kuznicki

Via the ACLU of Mississippi:

– Eapen Thampy

-Eapen Thampy

I have had occasion at many times and in many contexts over the years to go back and read the immortal words of William Faulkner accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, who feels more relevant today than ever:

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Over at the Americans for Forfeiture Reform blog, AFR policy analyst Scott Meiner reports:

Attorney General Eric Holder has granted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) authority, for a one-year trial period, to seize and administratively forfeit property allegedly involved in controlled substance offenses pursuant to United States Code Title 21 › Chapter 13 › Subchapter I › Part E › § 881.

21 U.S.C. § 881 is, among other things, often invoked to seize and forfeit bulk currency, where no drugs are found, on theories that the currency was furnished, or intended to be furnished, in exchange for a controlled substance.

AG Holder’s rulemaking announcement declared that such changes are exempt from the general notice and comment requirements because the department determined that the change does not affect individual rights and obligations.

AG Holder also declared that this rule change lacks sufficient federalism implications to warrant the preparation of a federalism summary impact statement.

Notice and comment rulemaking is not required for this final rule. Under the APA, “rules of agency organization, procedure or practice,”5 U.S.C. 553(b)(A), that do not “affect[] individual rights and obligations,”Morton v. Ruiz, 415 U.S. 199, 232 (1974), are exempt from the general notice and comment requirements of section 553 of title 5 of the United States Code.

The American Bar Association Journal reports:

Folks — It’s Lenore from Free-Range Kids where one of our objectives is to make society LESS STUPID — especially when it comes to wildly inflating threats to our children’s safety. If you wonder just how inflated those threats can get, here’s a letter I received yesterday. Read it and gnash:

A Deaf child named Hunter is not allowed to use his name sign because the sign for “Hunter” (a dictionary word) uses the thumb and first two fingers in a gun shape and suggests a shooting motion. Here’s the story.

These school officials have lost their ability to reason if they believe stripping a child of his name is necessary for safety under a weapons policy. Educators who are unable to use logic and critical thinking have no business educating.

I just sent a letter to the school board expressing my outrage. Everyone else can too at  http://www.gips.org/contact_us

Thanks, Rachel 

Lenore here again: The video link is beyond belief. The situation is beyond belief. But apparently the idea that a pre-schooler’s fingers are as dangerous as a REAL GUN is NOT beyond belief to some school bureaucrats.

Southern Coast K9 Inc is a company that trains drug sniffing dogs:

Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform

Brian Miller, former chairman of the Pima, Arizona, GOP, sends me this picture of police at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, with the comment:

I remember when I got kicked out of the Pima GOP how one of their biggest beefs was that I used the term “shock troops” when referring to the Pima SWAT…

-Eapen Thampy

Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform

Over at the Americans for Forfeiture Reform website, policy analyst Scott Meiner reports on the federal civil asset forfeiture complaint in the matter of United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton. This is an unusual case as the government’s case nakedly asserts, with no supporting evidence, that Eric Prokopi, owner of this particular dinosaur skeleton illegally imported the skeleton from Mongolia (Prokopi has manifests indicating he imported the skeleton from Great Britain). Additionally, the US government’s legal argument is premised on the impossibility of anyone in Mongolia owning fossils as private property, a claim that stems from the Communist-era First Mongolian Constitution, which prohibits the ownership of private property. Prokopi’s motion to dismiss notes:

“However, the Soviet-era constitution and regulations have been superseded by other laws that  recognize private property and the wording of the later laws fall short of what is required to establish state ownership under applicable case law. While the Complaint relies upon a 1924 Soviet era constitution to establish state  ownership over fossils, it fails to mention that this constitution and its communist era successors were superseded in 1992 by another constitution that recognizes private property rights and which sees the State as a protector—not sole owner—of cultural objects.

In particular, the Government cites Article Three, Section One of the First Mongolian constitution, enacted in 1924 for the proposition that “all assets and resources…shall be under the possession of the people, thus making private property of them prohibited.” (Complaint ¶ 10.) On the other hand, Article Sixteen, Section Three of Mongolia’s post-communist 1992 constitution explicitly protects “[r]ight to fair acquisition, possession and inheritance of movable and immovable property.” 1992 Constitution Art. 16 (3), Tompa Decl.Ex. B. And while “mineral wealth” shall be the “property of the state” nothing is said of paleontological objects found on or in the soil.”

In case this isn’t all clear, the US Government thinks it can seize and forfeit your property, if it believes that said property has been illegally imported, without evidence, and can rely on defunct Communist laws of other nations to substantiate claims of illegal importation. As Meiner notes:

“One is left to wonder whether the prosecution believes in property rights-at all. The argument seems to be that the property is forfeitable to the government, at the want of the government, if the government says so.”

“Could Alcohol-Regulation Policies Tame US Obesity Epidemic?” is the title of this story published over at Newsworks. It does not disappoint (emphasis mine):

What if candy stores were closed on Sundays? What if you needed a license to open a doughnut shop?

As America’s weight problem gets bigger, some health researchers say instead of relying on individual willpower alone, it may be time for some new community-level policies.

Deborah Cohen, a physician and public health researcher with the RAND Corporation, suggests that some of the policies we use to control alcohol consumption could help beat back obesity.

“People realized this a couple hundred years ago, that alcohol was a problem,” Cohen said. “So they developed all kinds of regulations to make it less convenient and reduce the odds that people will drink all the time and get drunk.”

Perhaps now it’s time to rein in our easy access to food, Cohen said.

“Choices and decision making are influenced by the context,” she said. “It’s the environment that really determines our behavior and we just don’t appreciate that enough.”

Shaping the environment to discourage overeating could include warning labels for foods high in fat and sugar, or maybe restrictions on where in the grocery store foods are displayed to curb impulse buying.

There could be unintended consequences, warns Jeff Stier, an analyst with the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Ushering in another Prohibition?

“I don’t want to sound extreme, but these are Prohibition-style interventions. I mean do we really need to create a black market for burgers and fries?” Stier said.

“I think we need to teach young people how to enjoy fun foods responsibly, not to teach people that fun foods are bad,” Stier said.

Cohen said education is not enough.

“What we underestimate is the power of food, of it being there and easily accessible to trigger our desires and cravings,” she said.

Stier acknowledges the obesity problem but says some people are crying “obesity emergency” to justify the roll-out of untested laws and taxes.

He reviewed Cohen’s analysis, which appears in the journal Preventing Chronic Diseases.

“I think we have to be clear this was not a scientific study, this was kind of a mind exercise, and in her mind these types of interventions would be a good idea,” Stier said.

When asked the effectiveness of the control policies to fight obesity, Cohen said, “We have to start trying them and see if they work or not.”

-Eapen Thampy

By Eric E. Sterling (Criminal Justice Policy Foundation and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)), Guest Blogger

Texas is holding more than 350 prostitutes in state prisons at a cost of more than $6.5 million per year, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

Oh how stupid. In 2001, it seems, Texans were upset with prostitution at truck-stops and on Dallas streets. The legislature provided that after three misdemeanor convictions (or guilty pleas, most likely), acts of prostitution would be punished as felonies.

Consider the utterly unseemly entrapment of women by members of a vice squad. Think of the state of mind of the undercover police officer doing this work. Actually don’t think on this too long, it is disgusting.

Consider the attraction of the work:

“I thought life was a big party,” said [Beatryce] Hall, 42, a mother of two daughters. “I started out dancing, got on drugs, went to the streets where I could make $300-400 a night. I wanted to, but couldn’t get out of that cycle.”

Certainly there are many people who don’t find this idea at all attractive. But at $300 per night, working 5 nights a week for 50 weeks, this work would generate a gross income of $75,000 annually. That’s pretty good pay. I suspect that all of that was cash and that much of it was not reported on a Form 1040 to IRS. Sure the work is may be hard  in many ways, and may often be unpleasant and dangerous — lots of work is. Does the work interfere with other priorities? Yes, like so many other jobs. Was it hard to quit the unpleasant job that paid $75,000? Yes, just as it is hard to quit any good paying but unpleasant job.

Assume that many prostitutes don’t like the work. So what? I know lots of lawyers who don’t like the work, too — renting their mind for thousands of hours a year for clients they find disgusting. They are highly demoralized (in a couple of senses of the term).

Why do we judge this work to be illegal, other than on the basis of legal tradition?

How are these women benefited by being arrested or by going to prison? How are the families of prostitutes benefited by sending a family member to prison? How is society benefited by sending prostitutes to prison? How are their legitimate employment prospects improved by arresting them?

Prostitution in brothels should be legal as it is in parts of Nevada. Prostitution by escort service should be legal. If street walkers are disturbing your neighborhood, legal brothels in commercial districts and legal escorts would be an efficient way to solve the problem.

And perhaps the rest of us might not have our taxes wasted on the pointless costs of enforcement.

Hi! Lenore here from Free-Range Kids. And yes, you read the headline right: A school in Australia has decided that kids can only do cartwheels (and handstands and headstands) if they are  under the direct supervision of a gymnastics teacher, on an appropriately safe surface.

God forbid kids should spontaneously get some exercise — and joy — in their lives. Just think of the lives ruined by cartwheels and you’d understand the school’s concern.

Oh wait… Actually, the principal is NOT concerned about lives being ruined. She’s concerned about following the RULES, as she interprets them, laid out by the Dept of Education over there. According to the Telegraph in Sydney:

A spokesman for the Department of Education and Communities said school playground rules were set at school level, based on Work Health and Safety considerations, the terrain and layout of the school and the level of supervision.

And speaking of terrain: The school in question was recently outfitted with new, soft ground cover to make the playground even more safe. But safe is never safe enough. You knew that. Here is  an ADORABLE RE-ENACTMENT OF THE BAN! 38 seconds of fun! – L.

Randy Barnett has a new paper out, this one titled “From Antislavery Lawyer to Chief Justice:  The Remarkable But Forgotten Career of Salmon P. Chase” (SSRN download), abstract:

Salmon P. Chase was as responsible as any single person for the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. Yet his name is barely known and his career is largely forgotten. In this paper, the author seeks to revive his memory by tracing the arc of his career from antislavery lawyer, to antislavery politician, to Chief Justice of the United States. In addition to explaining why this is a career worth both remembering and honoring, the author offers some possible reasons why his remarkable achievements have largely been forgotten.

Worth the read.

-Eapen Thampy

This story is a year-and-a-half old, but I missed it when it came out.

I’ve posted about Nashville’s News 5 before. They’ve been all over the forfeiture story. Can’t praise them enough for bucking the local news cliche and performing real, relevant acts of journalism.