Saint of the Day & Liberals Hopelessly Conflicted About Crime

Today, November 3, 2018, is the feast day of St. Hubert, Bishop, according to the Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year), read about this day at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots341.htm

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives they lived, such an army, the Church Triumphant, who has our back in heaven.

Liberals Hopelessly Conflicted About Crime

They just do not understand—or accept—the reality of evil and this recent case in California as reported in City Journal is a case in point.

An excerpt.

On September 30, 2018, California governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1391, which bars prosecution of those as young as 14 as adults, whatever the gravity of their crimes. The next day, in Yolo County juvenile court, public defender Andrea Pelochino requested that Judge Samuel McAdam advance case JD-18-332—that of Daniel Marsh—to January 1, 2019, when SB 1391 would take effect. The request was unusual in that the offender was not on trial, because Marsh, 21, had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced for torturing, murdering, and mutilating Oliver Northup, 87, and his wife Claudia Maupin, 76, in their Davis home in April 2013. Marsh drew a sentence of 52 years to life, but with a possibility of parole in his early forties.

Two years into his sentence, Marsh caught a break. In November 2016, California voters passed Proposition 57, also championed by Brown, which barred prosecutors from filing juvenile cases in adult courts. California’s Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 57 could be applied retroactively, and California’s Third Court of Appeals “conditionally reversed” Marsh’s conviction pending a “transfer hearing” to determine if he was suitable for adult court. If not, he would be released when he was 25, a prospect that Northup and Maupin’s surviving families found chilling. As Northup’s daughter Mary noted, that would amount to only nine years served, for two murders.

At the Donovan Correctional Center near San Diego, Marsh began to prepare for what amounted to a new trial, with no new exculpatory evidence. The burden of proof would be on the prosecution to show that he was suitable for adult court. “I see myself as a resilient, loyal and kind-hearted individual who may not always say the right thing but always means well,” Marsh said in a TED talk put up on YouTube in May, but since removed. He showed no remorse for the murders and portrayed himself as a victim of sexual abuse. “There is no such thing as evil people in this world,” Marsh explained, “only damaged people.” In effect, this was advance testimony for his hearing, with no possibility of cross-examination.

In a surprise move, attorneys put Marsh on the stand. “I’m not who I used to be,” the convicted killer claimed. Asked if he had anything to say to the families of the victims present in the courtroom, Marsh protested that “nothing I can say will be enough.” He continued: “I’m sorry I took them away from you. I’m sorry for the pain I caused you. I can’t give you the apology you deserve. I can’t look at you.” Indeed, he didn’t look at them, and the words came out as mechanical and soulless as those uttered by the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Marsh grew more animated when grilled on details of the crime. Asked if he identified as a murderer, he said “I did,” adding, “I tried to kill more people.” Did he research psychopaths? “I wanted to be one,” he answered. Did he research serial killers? “I wanted to be one. I admired them for killing people.” His testimony recalled the first police report, which said that the murders had been committed with “exceptional depravity.”

Last week, McAdam ruled Marsh suitable for adult court, reinstated the original conviction, and sent him back to prison.

Retrieved November 1, 2018 from https://www.city-journal.org/prosecution-of-juveniles-as-adults

Saint of the Day & Mass Incarceration Propaganda

Today, October 18, 2018, is the feast day of St. Luke according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year), read at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots324.htm and a more detailed story from Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j150sd_Luke_10-18.html

Reading about these saints is a wonderful daily reflection; such marvelous lives they lived, such an army who has our back in heaven.

Mass Incarceration Propaganda

In the ongoing argument over mass incarceration the propagandistic claim is made that the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.

Lampstand’s position has long been that many of the Communist/Socialist countries incarcerate far more but hide the fact, as this story from the Wall Street Journal reveals.

An excerpt.

BEIJING—A senior Chinese official offered the government’s fullest defense so far of its mass detention program for Muslims in China’s far west, saying it formed a bulwark for social stability and suggesting the detentions are voluntary.

In a lengthy interview published Tuesday by the government’s Xinhua News Agency, the chairman of China’s Xinjiang region, Shohrat Zakir, portrayed the camps as generously equipped vocational schools that are vital to a crackdown on religious extremism. He said the clampdown helped bring an end to terrorism and a drop in crime in the region.

“Facts have proven that vocational education and training fits the reality of current efforts in countering terrorism, maintaining stability and eradicating extremism in Xinjiang,” he said, according to Xinhua.

The interview, published in Chinese and English, is part of an evolving strategy by China to explain the campaign. U.S. officials and United Nations experts estimate hundreds of thousands of Muslims, mostly from the Uighur ethnic group, have been detained in the past two years. While the detentions initially attracted little attention, criticism—from the U.S., Europe and some Muslim groups—has been building in recent months.

Chinese officials equivocated over the mass detentions before a United Nations panel in August, saying minor criminals in Xinjiang had been sent to vocational schools to learn how to reintegrate into society. Revisions to Xinjiang’s counterterrorism regulations, made public last week, acknowledged for the first time that the vocational training centers were being used for “deradicalization” work.

“They clearly want to get out in front of the story after a year of trying to deny it,” said James Leibold, an expert on Chinese ethnic policies at La Trobe University in Australia. Part of the current effort, he said, is likely aimed at pre-empting further criticism at a U.N. review of China’s human-rights record, scheduled for November.

Reporting by scholars outside China and interviews with former detainees and their relatives by foreign media, including The Wall Street Journal, have documented the expansion of the detention program and the intense political indoctrination those held are subjected to. They described being held against their will, forced to sing patriotic songs and prohibited from praying.

In the Xinhua interview, Mr. Zakir contradicted those accounts, suggesting enrollment in the institutions is voluntary. He said the facilities sign “training agreements” with each trainee.

Chinese law doesn’t allow for indefinite detention without trial, so Xinjiang’s camps can only be legal if they are voluntary, according to Jeremy Daum, a senior research fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. If they are, he said, independent experts should be allowed to inspect the facilities—something that authorities have refused to allow thus far.

Offices with Xinjiang’s Communist Party Committee either declined to comment or didn’t respond to a faxed request for comment.

China’s resort to mass detentions comes after a yearslong government campaign to suffocate an occasionally violent Uighur separatist movement that Beijing says has links to extremist religious groups abroad. Islamic State has produced videos aimed at recruiting Uighurs, some of whom have left China to fight with the organization in Iraq and Syria.

Human-rights groups and Uighur activists living abroad say the violence is driven by extreme restrictions on Uighur religious and cultural activities and by state-sanctioned policies that ultimately benefit Han Chinese at the expense of minorities in Xinjiang.

In the interview, Mr. Zakir cited several laws and regulations he said justified the campaign. He reiterated earlier government statements that the centers are intended to rehabilitate minor criminals.

He described the vocational centers as resort-like facilities equipped with volleyball courts, ping-pong tables and film-screening rooms, where ethnic customs are respected, nutritious meals are provided “free of charge” and each air-conditioned room comes with its own TV.

According to interviews with former detainees and their family members, conditions in the centers vary widely. While some resemble vocational schools, others seen by the Journal look more like prisons, surrounded by thick walls topped with razor wire and watched over by armed police in guard towers.

Several former detainees told the Journal they were subjected to hours of political indoctrination daily and forced to denounce Islam. One said he was strapped to a chair for hours with his hands shackled behind his back and interrogated about ties to religious groups abroad, which he denied having. Authorities declined to comment.

Retrieved October 17, 2018 from https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-ending-denials-defends-muslim-detentions-as-vital-for-stability-1539691263

Saint of the Day & Cops Deserve a Fighting Chance

Today, October 8, 2018, is the feast day of St. Bridget of Sweden, according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year) read about this saint at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots314.htm

Cops Deserve a Fighting Chance

This story from American Greatness explains.

An excerpt.

Seven police officers were shot in Florence, South Carolina last week. One of them, Sgt. Terrence Carraway, was fatally wounded. The suspect, a troubled Vietnam veteran, apparently had set up an ambush when the police arrived to serve a search warrant. He barricaded himself and rained down rifle fire upon the responding officers. A heavily armored MRAP obtained from the Department of Defense was critical in evacuating the wounded from the scene.

The Myth of Militarized Police

The Florence County Sheriff Department obtained its MRAP through the Pentagon’s 1033 Program. The program provides surplus military equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies. This is how the Los Angeles Police Department obtained M-16s after the infamous North Hollywood Shootout, and it’s why Humvees, MRAPs, bullet proof vests, medical supplies, ammunition, batteries, and other surplus material has migrated from military warehouses into the armories of SWAT teams and ordinary patrol officers across the country.

The 1033 Program is an island of fiscal sanity amid an ocean of government waste. MRAPs are not, contrary to media hyperbole, tanks. But they are both bulletproof and intimidating, a testament to their birth on the battlefield. Even so, they are similar in technology and function to the familiar Brinks truck and the armored vans SWAT teams have used for decades.

Both the far Left and the libertarian right have warned about the specter of “militarized police” since the mid-2000s. The Cato Institute’s Radley Balko made this a central focus for many years, culminating in his book, The Warrior Cop. The argument is that police increasingly see themselves as more military than civilian, inflaming tensions and decreasing empathy with the communities that they police. While the focus varies from training and gear to uniforms and department culture, we are told that we are facing an epidemic of police violence against blameless civilians, which is fueled by the police’s increasing militarization.

The militarization critique became particularly pronounced after the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri. Commentators at the time marveled at the appearance of well-armed riot police and armored vehicles. But the criticism was, frankly, really stupid. It reversed causation, blaming militarized police for the rioting, even though the controversy began with the shooting death of Michael Brown, which came at the hands of an ordinary patrol officer.

More important, the rioting occurred before the riot police showed up. Even if someone is angry at a grand jury decision—or the sight of armored cars on the streets—none of those things naturally cause the burning down of businesses, assaults on whites, and generalized mayhem.

After the events in Ferguson, Obama severely restricted the donation of surplus military vehicles to police, explaining that military equipment can “alienate and intimidate local residents and may send the wrong message.”

Obama has never seen a strawman he’s not willing to dispatch and, in this case, he recycled the old 1960s-era trope about “oppression by the Man” as the chief cause of lawlessness in our cities. This trend was not caused by militarized police; it’s been around at least 40 years. Rather, militarized policing was a response to communities that had de facto already been militarized into a guerrilla warfare atmosphere, where the most dysfunctional members of the community waged war on police and law abiding citizens, and found support among deeply alienated and dysfunctional communities, where snitching is a worse offense than rape and murder.

Before Militarized Police, a Society at War With Itself
America was once very safe, orderly, and had low rates of crime. Police were respected, even in a sense by criminals, and this respect reduced the need for violence to curb crime.

Then, in the 1960s, the lid came off.

Liberal judges imposed rules that resulted in the mass-release of prisoners and made convictions harder to obtain. Mental institutions were depopulated. Families broke apart, and welfare participation increased. Newly integrated schools led to increasingly segregated cities, as whites fled to the suburbs in places like Boston, New York, and Chicago. Drug use and the drug trade exploded. Terrorist organizations, including Obama’s friends in the Weather Underground, deliberately targeted police for political violence, killing a San Francisco officer in one notorious bombing.

The 1960s also gave birth to the civil rights and anti-war movements. The movements’ criticisms of particular injustices expanded into a criticism of all authority, which was seen as tainted by the evils of racism at home and abroad. This remains the foundational view of leftism today.

As Thomas Sowell observed, “Collective guilt is one of the legacies of the 1960s that is still with us. We are still seeing a guilt trip for slavery being laid on people who never owned a slave in their lives, and who would be repelled by the very idea of owning a slave.”

Diversity probably always breeds a certain amount of intrinsic distrust, but such manageable friction is made worse by the broader leftist critique of all authority as tainted. This is, literally speaking, demoralizing. The tail end of the Obama Administration exposed an increasingly divided and low trust society, with brazen assassinations of police carried out in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Brooklyn.

High trust and low trust societies differ in many ways. High trust societies are safer not primarily because of the actions of police, but because of a web of internal restraints, the fear of shame, the watchful eyes of parents and neighbors, and an intrinsic sense of law-abidingness. As Edmund Burke observed, “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Our militarized police, to the extent they exist, are a consequence, not a cause, of increasing distrust and disorder.

Retrieved October 7, 2018 from https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/06/cops-deserve-a-fighting-chance/

Saint of the Day & Freed After Wrongful Conviction

Today, October 6, 2018, is the feast day of St. Bruno, founder of the Carthusians, according to Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler (first published in 1887 under the title Lives of the Saints–With Reflections for Every Day in the Year) read about this saint at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots312.htm and a much more detailed account from Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j041sdBruno10-3.htm

Freed After Wrongful Conviction

Good and very tragic story of a man freed after 27 years imprisoned for a murder he should not have been convicted for, as reported by the New York Times.

An excerpt.

Larry McKee’s eyes lost their glimmer the second he stepped out of a car on a recent morning and recognized the Bronx corner where a street fight derailed his life more than 20 years ago.

Mr. McKee had returned to the corner in Morris Heights to make peace with his past, he said somberly, but most importantly to embrace his future. A laundromat had been replaced by a delicatessen, but other than that the corner retained the same bustling feel.

“This is where I was taken from,” he said, almost in a whisper. “It’s a hurt feeling, but I’ve got to move on.”

Mr. McKee spent two decades in prison for a murder he has long maintained he did not commit. Eight months ago, a state judge threw out his conviction on the recommendation of the Bronx district attorney’s office, which determined important evidence had never been given to the defense.

Ever since his release from the Adirondack Correctional Facility in Ray Brook, N.Y., Mr. McKee, now 47, has been learning to live in a very different world than the one he left in 1997. It is a difficult adjustment that parallels the experiences of many others who have been released in recent years after serving time for wrongful convictions.

“Technology’s changed,” he said, holding his iPhone 8 curiously. “The phone. I’ve still got problems with it, with emails and texts.”

A jury found Mr. McKee guilty of murder after a 16-year-old witness testified that he saw Mr. McKee shoot Theodore Vance, 29, after a fight on the corner, at 176th Street and University Avenue. The fight turned into an all-out brawl in which brickbats and other debris became weapons.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers agree Mr. Vance struck Mr. McKee with a pipelike object during the melee, and then was shot by someone. Mr. McKee insists he ran away before the shot was fired. The gun was never recovered.

Mr. McKee was released after a new witness came forward last year and gave a different description of the killer. The Bronx district attorney’s office, after a six-month investigation, also determined important grand jury testimony was never shared with the defense. A person who knew the victim told the grand jury that in his last moments, the man had described his killer as a “Spanish guy.” Mr. McKee is black.

In January, the Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, asked Justice Robert E. Torres to throw out the conviction, which he did. Ms. Clark’s office also dismissed the indictment.

Mr. McKee’s lawyers argue the grand jury testimony alone would had been enough to clear him of the murder charge in the 1990s.

“He would have never gotten convicted if the jury heard the victim’s last words,” said one of the defense lawyers, Oscar Michelen. “Here the prosecutor intentionally withheld evidence that could have proven that Larry was innocent. There is no excuse.”

Retrieved October 6, 2018 from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/nyregion/wrongful-conviction-larry-mckee.html

Saint of the Day & Editorial on Congressional Prison Reform

Today is the Feast Day of St. Cloud, Confessor, according to the traditional Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler, read about this Saint at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots281.htm

Reading about these saints regulalry is a wonderful daily reflection.

Editorial on Congressional Prison Reform

The must-read article in their current newsletter by the president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation is entitled : Congressional Prison Reform = Jail Break , (page 2), read at https://www.cjlf.org/publications/newsletters/currentAdvisory.pdf

Reducing Sentences Increases Crime

Today is the Feast Day of St. Augustine of Hippo, according to the traditional Lives of the Saints by Fr. Alban Butler, read about this Saint at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots270.htm 

It is also the Feast Day of the great criminal saint, St. Moses the Black, read about him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_the_Black

Reducing Sentences Increases Crime

Continuing along its ill-informed path to change the criminal justice system, as reported by the Sacramento Bee, this latest California measure—in a time of rehabilitation programs largely failing across the board (see our post at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

—all that is accomplished is increasing criminals on the streets.

Tough on crime measures reduce crime, soft on crime measures increase it.

An excerpt.

California’s approach to crime and punishment is complicated enough that a state watchdog agency once referred to it as a “chaotic labyrinth of laws with no cohesive philosophy or strategy.”

The penal code covers thousands of different offenses, each carrying three terms of varying lengths that may be applied depending on mitigating or aggravating circumstances. Convictions for multiple charges can be served concurrently or consecutively, while hundreds of possible enhancements sometimes add more time to an inmate’s sentence than the underlying crime.

Lawmakers are moving to change that this month with Senate Bill 1279, which would largely limit the maximum term of imprisonment for felony convictions to twice the length of the base term. California adopted a similar cap in 1976, according to a legislative analysis, but it was ultimately repealed in 1997, after more and more exceptions were added to the law.

Supporters say SB 1279, which is awaiting a vote in the Assembly after passing the Senate in May, will “refine” California’s complex approach to sentencing, providing a greater balance between felonies and enhancements. Sen. Steven Bradford, a Gardena Democrat who is carrying the measure, said in a written statement that decades of a “tough on crime” mentality devastated communities of color in the state.

“Until we can prove that longer sentences are an effective deterrent to crime and increase public safety, there is absolutely no reason we should dole out extreme and harsh sentences for all cases, which research has widely proven to disproportionately impact black and brown people,” he said.

But law enforcement groups are raising alarm that the bill imposes an arbitrary cap, removing a judge’s ability to sentence someone appropriately for their crimes.

Sean Hoffman, director of legislation for the California District Attorneys Association, pointed to the two men who have been charged with 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths in the 2016 Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland. They are set to go to trial next year, after a judge rejected a plea deal in which they would have been sentenced to nine years and six years, respectively, in county jail.

If convicted of all 36 counts, the two men face up to 39 years in state prison — a maximum term of four years for the principal offense, and one additional year, or a third of the middle term for involuntary manslaughter, for each of the remaining 35 charges. Under SB 1279, the limit would be eight years.

“At some point, you will have certain crimes that go unpunished or certain victims who don’t receive justice,” Hoffman said.

Retrieved August 22, 2018 from https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article217041010.html

Needle Exchange Programs

Costa Mesa, acting intelligently, has banned these programs, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.

It is against common sense to provide addicts the means to continue their addiction.

An excerpt.

Needle-exchange programs are now banned in Costa Mesa — for the time being, at least — after the City Council adopted an urgency ordinance Tuesday prohibiting the establishment and operation of such services anywhere in the city.

The vote is meant to give city staff additional time to study issues related to such programs and examine potential new regulations governing where and how they can operate.

The moratorium is effective for 45 days, but can be extended with a future council vote.

“The first thing we have to do is identify, A, whether there’s a problem and, B, if there is a problem, what’s the scope of the problem and … what are some possible solutions,” Councilman John Stephens said.

The urgency ordinance is part of Costa Mesa’s double-barreled response to a California Department of Public Health decision last week to OK a proposal from the Orange County Needle Exchange Program to distribute syringes and other supplies in the city’s Westside, as well as in parts of Anaheim, Orange and Santa Ana, for the next two years.

The council also voted last week to join Orange County in a lawsuit seeking to stop the mobile needle-exchange service, which would operate in Costa Mesa on West 17th Street between Whittier Avenue and the city boundary from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays.

Supporters of such programs say they are intended to help prevent the spread of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C among intravenous drug users by providing clean needles. But city officials say the proposed operating area in Costa Mesa is inappropriate, especially given its proximity to homes, businesses and schools.

After learning of the proposal earlier this year, Costa Mesa police, city staff and council members sent letters and made comments detailing their concerns that the program could attract drug users to the community, potentially compromise the recovery of those living in local sober-living homes and pose a threat to public safety.

Retrieved August 9, 2018 from http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-needle-exchange-20180808-story.html#

Liberal Narrative Causes Chaos

People paying attention already know this but, with a focus on immigration and criminal justice, our favorite thinker on all law enforcement related issues, Heather MacDonald, writes about the chaos in City Journal.

An excerpt.

So it was a ruse. The hysteria over the separation of illegal-alien asylum-seekers from their children (or their purported children) was in large part pretextual. The real target of rage was the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting all illegal border-crossers for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry.

In April, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal entry. Henceforth, virtually all aliens caught entering the country illegally would be held for prosecution, rather than being released on their own recognizance for a later noncriminal deportation proceeding, to which few ever showed up. (This new enforcement policy would have come as a surprise to anyone who had fallen for the advocates’ decades-long lie that illegal entry is not a crime.) Under the new policy, even if the adult had brought a child with him across the border—the usual accoutrement of an asylum-seeker, for reasons explained below—the adult would still be prosecuted. The adult would be held in a U.S. marshal’s facility pending trial, while the child would be placed in a dormitory run by the U.S. Health and Human Services department, since children cannot be held in criminal lockups.

Images of child border-crossers, separated from their adult companion and crying or looking upset—and the experience would undoubtedly be traumatic for most young children—triggered nonstop coverage of Trump administration cruelty. MSNBC and CNN set up border encampments from which reporters and pundits pontificated on the child-separation crisis. Nazi and Holocaust analogies flew around the Internet; faculty petitions invoked the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Mexico and four other Latin American countries filed a human rights complaint against the U.S. Politicians and religious leaders lined up to denounce White House racism and anti-immigrant hatred.

On Wednesday, Trump called their bluff. He signed an executive order that would house illegal-alien adults with minors in Department of Homeland Security or other government facilities. The zero-tolerance policy, however, would continue. Democratic politicians and illegal alien advocates immediately cried foul. “Make no mistake: the President is doubling down on his ‘zero tolerance’ policy,” Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, said in a statement Wednesday. “His new Executive Order criminalizes asylum-seekers . . . . Locking up whole families is no solution at all—the Trump Administration must reverse its policy of prosecuting vulnerable people fleeing three of the most dangerous countries on earth.”

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Juliette Kayyem told CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday night: “The real problem is Sessions’ decision to prosecute [illegal border crossers] 100 percent.” A CNN anchor on Thursday morning asked U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, if his position was: don’t criminally charge each person who illegally crosses the border. Schiff responded: “We don’t have to criminalize everyone that’s coming here seeking asylum.” NPR interviewed the director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, Michelle Brané. “Families will be just as traumatized, children will be just as traumatized” under the executive order, she said on Thursday morning. “Exchanging one form of trauma for another is not the solution”; getting rid of the prosecutorial mandate is.

And the open-borders lobby possesses a powerful weapon for doing just that. The extraordinarily complex thicket of interpolated rules and rights that govern U.S. immigration policy (the result of decades of nonstop litigation by the immigration bar) contains a series of judicial mandates that defeated even the Obama administration’s tepid efforts to bring some semblance of lawfulness to the border. A long-running class-action lawsuit in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, originally styled Flores v. Reno, has held that alien minors cannot be confined by the government for longer than 20 days. This 20-day cap contributed to the flood of Central American child-toting asylum seekers that picked up steam during President Obama’s second term. Asylum petitions typically take months, if not years, to adjudicate, given the long backlog of such cases in the immigration courts. If an adult crosses the border alone and utters the magic asylum words—a fear of persecution in his home country—he could in theory be held in detention until his asylum claim was adjudicated. If, however, he brings a child with him and makes an asylum pitch, he puts the government to a choice: detain the adult separately until his claim is heard and release the child after 20 days, or release both adult and child together.

The Obama administration usually chose the second option. Word coursed through Mexico and Central America that taking a child across the border was a get-out-of-jail-free card that would exempt its holder from both criminal prosecution and detention. This child-release lever, coupled with Obama’s announcement in 2012 that he would grant amnesty to the so-called Dreamers, meant that Obama soon had his own family border crisis on his hands. In 2014, 70,000 adult-child units and 70,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended illegally crossing into the U.S. The administration tried building large family detention centers to hold the children and their accompanying adults, but the same Flores decree that has bedeviled the Trump White House stymied that effort. In 2015, a federal trial judge, Holly Gee, herself appointed by Obama and the very definition of an activist jurist, vastly expanded the scope of the original decree and ordered the administration to release the detained minors. The Department of Homeland Security warned that ending family detention would trigger another border surge. Judge Gee dismissed this concern as “fear-mongering,” according to the Associated Press….

Obeying the law, however, is something that must never be demanded of politically correct victims. If lawbreaking carries negative consequences, the fault lies with the legal system, not with an individual’s decision to break the law in the first place.

This principle is at work in the ongoing attacks on the criminal-justice system as well: the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is attributed to allegedly racist actors and institutions, not to lawbreaking by the criminals. Non-legal forms of distress are also covered by the no-agency rule. If single mothers experience elevated rates of poverty, the fault lies with a heartless welfare system, not with their decision to conceive a child out-of-wedlock. The father, of course, is as good as nonexistent, in the eyes of the single-mother welfare lobby. If teen mothers are stressed out, the problem lies in the absence of daycare centers in high schools.

Retrieved June 23, 2018 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/whos-really-blame-border-15986.html

Bringing Back the Asylum

Long overdue, as this article in the Wall Street Journal reports.

An excerpt.

When Richard Quintero broke into a Pizza Hut in High Point, N.C., early one morning in late March, he called 911 himself to let the police know. “Yes, this is Jesus Christ and I just broke into the Pizza Hut,” he said, according to a recording of the call. He then told the dispatcher that he was schizophrenic and kept getting kicked out of homes. When the police arrived, Mr. Quintero was cooperative but was still arrested on charges of felony breaking and entering and felony larceny. He spent time at a state prison before being found incompetent to stand trial and sent for a short-term stay at a state mental hospital.

Many in his situation, unfortunately, tend to stay behind bars: In the U.S. today, jails and prisons have become our mental asylums. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that some 365,000 American adults with serious mental illness are behind bars and an additional 770,000 are on probation or parole. A 2017 Justice Department study estimates that some 37% of all prison inmates suffer some mental illness and that 26.4% of jail inmates suffer from a psychosis.

They are behind bars because, too often, they have nowhere to go. Two generations of policy have led to the mass closing of state mental hospitals. The extent of the resulting problems—for the seriously mentally ill in general, not just those in jails or prisons—is so widespread that a case is building to bring back the asylum, especially for those who pose a risk to others or themselves. But proponents aren’t advocating for a return of the inhumane places of the past. What’s needed is a new generation of flexible and varied institutions.

To understand the problem, it helps to look back at the history of asylums. In 1840, Dorothea Dix, the former headmistress of a Boston school for girls, had completed a trip to England meant to help recover her health. Influenced by Quaker reformers there, she was exposed to the cause then known as “lunacy reform”—the idea that government had an obligation to care for the mentally ill.

Back in the U.S., Dix went on to survey and expose what was quickly understood to be a scandal: the confinement of the mentally ill in prisons. Dix successfully convinced states to invest in large-scale asylums, where those suffering from mental illness would be well cared for in impressive and expensive facilities. The construction and staffing of those state hospitals—which, in the early days, were often lofty, light-filled buildings with communal dining halls and sprawling grounds for outdoor exercise—became major state expenses.

By the mid-20th century, the system had grown into a vast network of 322 state and county hospitals holding more than 550,000 beds. But they had grown to encompass much more than housing the mentally ill. In an era before Social Security or long-term nursing care, they served as housing of last resort for those suffering with dementia, sexually transmitted diseases and other ills. “By becoming the dumping ground for all manner of people who could not care for themselves, the once-grand asylums deteriorated into snake pits and hellholes worthy of exposes,” says Jeffrey Geller, medical director of the Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital, one of the last surviving hospitals for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in Massachusetts. Overcrowding and less oversight created a much lower quality of care for patients. Work opportunities that taught valuable social skills disappeared under the guise of patient rights.

Today, we face the same problem that Dix found: that treatment for mental illness is fundamentally inconsistent with imprisonment. As Dominic Sisti, Andrea Segal and Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania argue in a 2015 essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “It is difficult to imagine how ethically sound treatment of mentally ill prisoners can be delivered.” Many such prisoners are so difficult that they are held in solitary confinement. One advantage we have today is that mental illness can often be successfully treated with medication—but that may require supervision to ensure the patient is following the regimen.

As one option on a spectrum of possible settings, state hospitals would not require a huge number of facilities. In his 2013 book “American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System,” E. Fuller Torrey of the Treatment Advocacy Center, citing data from the National Institute of Mental Health, estimates that only 1% of the approximately 12.3 million people suffering from serious mental illness are a threat to themselves or others. That would mean facilities adequate to house a maximum of 123,000 people.

Nor would they have to be large, isolated institutions filled with beds. Experiments with new models have begun to emerge, including those modeled after Massachusetts’ Gould Farm, a “therapeutic community” operating since 1913 that is based in farming, where its 40-some residents feed animals, prepare meals, participate in fitness activities, maintain walking trails and run the farm’s cafe and bakery. “There are many different modalities,” says Dr. Sisti, who has promoted the asylum idea as part of a broader continuum of care in a series of panels and papers for the American Psychiatric Association. “Therapeutic communities, farmsteads, recovery campus settings. There should be a range of hospitals, as well, both public and private—but they should be within reach and affordable.” Not every patient would need a long-term stay.

Retrieved May 21, 2018 from https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-to-bring-back-the-asylum-1526658277?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

Classical Music & Crime

The impact is marvelous as this story from the LA Review of Books reports.

An excerpt.

AT THE CORNER of 8th and Market in San Francisco, by a shuttered subway escalator outside a Burger King, an unusual soundtrack plays. A beige speaker, mounted atop a tall window, blasts Baroque harpsichord at deafening volumes. The music never stops. Night and day, Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi rain down from Burger King rooftops onto empty streets.

Empty streets, however, are the target audience for this concert. The playlist has been selected to repel sidewalk listeners — specifically, the mid-Market homeless who once congregated outside the restaurant doors that served as a neighborhood hub for the indigent. Outside the BART escalator, an encampment of grocery carts, sleeping bags, and plastic tarmacs had evolved into a sidewalk shantytown attracting throngs of squatters and street denizens. “There used to be a mob that would hang out there,” remarked local resident David Allen, “and now there may be just one or two people.” When I passed the corner, the only sign of life I found was a trembling woman crouched on the pavement, head in hand, as classical harpsichord besieged her ears.

This tactic was suggested by a cryptic organization called the Central Market Community Benefit District, a nonprofit collective of neighborhood property owners whose mission statement strikes an Orwellian note: “The CMCBD makes the Central Market area a safer, more attractive, more desirable place to work, live, shop, locate a business and own property by delivering services beyond those the City of San Francisco can provide.” These supra-civic services seem to consist primarily of finding tasteful ways to displace the destitute.

The inspiration for the Burger King plan, a CMCBD official commented, came from the London Underground. In 2005, the metro system started playing orchestral soundtracks in 65 tube stations as part of a scheme to deter “anti-social” behavior, after the surprising success of a 2003 pilot program. The pilot’s remarkable results — seeing train robberies fall 33 percent, verbal assaults on staff drop 25 percent, and vandalism decrease 37 percent after just 18 months of classical music — caught the eye of the global law-enforcement community. Thus, an international phenomenon was born. Since then, weaponized classical music has spread throughout England and the world: police units across the planet now deploy the string quartet as the latest addition to their crime-fighting arsenal, recruiting Officer Johann Sebastian as the newest member of the force.

Experts trace the practice’s origins back to a drowsy 7-Eleven in British Columbia in 1985, where some clever Canadian manager played Mozart outside the store to repel parking-lot loiterers. Mozart-in-the-Parking-Lot was so successful at discouraging teenage reprobates that 7-Eleven implemented the program at over 150 stores, becoming the first company to battle vandalism with the viola. Then the idea spread to West Palm Beach, Florida, where in 2001 the police confronted a drug-ridden street corner by installing a loudspeaker booming Beethoven and Mozart. “The officers were amazed when at 10 o’clock at night there was not a soul on the corner,” remarked Detective Dena Kimberlin. Soon other police departments “started calling.” From that point, the tactic — now codified as an official maneuver in the Polite Policeman’s Handbook — exploded in popularity for both private companies and public institutions. Over the last decade, symphonic security has swept across the globe as a standard procedure from Australia to Alaska.

Retrieved May 19, 2018 from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bach-at-the-burger-king/#