Saints of the Day & Community Policing

Here’s the saint’s calendar for February 15, 2019, and some versions, each focusing on individual saints, all wonderful; for they are the Church Triumphant.

The Catholic Church has many saints and reading about their lives has been a spiritual journey Catholics have been on since the publication of the Golden Legend, http://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/

From Butler’s Calendar of the Saints listing all of the saints of today. https://web.archive.org/web/20060816084721/http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/day0215.htm

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints, St. Faustinus & St. Jovita, Martyrs.                   http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots058.htm

From Franciscan Media, St. Claude de la Colombière, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-claude-de-la-colombi-egrave-re/

From a most lovely site, really a daily devotional site offering much more than just saint of the day, Anastpaul https://anastpaul.wordpress.com/

One of my personal favorites, Tradition in Action, Blessed Jordan of Saxony, https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j168sd_JordanSaxony_2-15.html

Here is what the 1962 Roman Missal says about St. Faustinus & St. Jovita: “SS. Faustinus and Jovita were brothers, of noble origin. After having suffered various tortures, they were beheaded at Brescia A. D. 117.” (p. 1189) The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual. (2004). Baronius Press: London. To get this for your library, go to the source: https://www.baroniuspress.com/book.php?wid=56&bid=4#tab=tab-1

Community Policing

Superb article from City Journal by one of the founders of the Broken Windows Theory, a cornerstone of modern community policing.

Over the last quarter of a century, the United States has seen historic drops in crime—most famously in New York. These gains, once thought impossible, were achieved largely through dramatic innovations in policing, especially the adoption of an approach that stressed order maintenance in communities, data- and intelligence-gathering, and a problem-solving approach to crime and disorder.

In recent years, however, antipolice sentiment has risen in the U.S., sparked in part by a series of tragic, high-profile police-involved killings in major cities but also by the work of critics, mostly on the left but also on the libertarian right, who argue that targeted policing aimed at public disorder is coercive, hostile to community life, and often racist. These critics see such policing as the antithesis to what they call community policing. The arguments that have gained popular currency among police critics have essentially blinded them from seeing that the sort of aggressive policing that they object to can actually be an element of a community-policing model.

The increasingly widespread view that community policing and order-maintenance efforts are at odds represents a fundamental misunderstanding. In reality, the proactive policing that New York first undertook in its subway system under then–transit police chief William J. Bratton in the early 1990s—informed in significant part by Broken Windows theory—was a core element of community policing. Indeed, the very behaviors that residents wanted more heavily policed called for exactly the sort of approach that many modern community-policing advocates now decry.

For decades prior, the prevailing model saw the role of police as responding to serious crime, and it relied on traditional measures of enforcement actions such as arrests and response time to gauge whether they were accomplishing their mission. Call it the law-enforcement model. Policing and criminal-justice policy were, as I wrote in City Journal back in 1992, driven by “the official crime problem as defined in crime, response, and arrest statistics.” But a shift was already under way; soon, police forces would begin to focus their attention on what community members perceived to be the most serious problems that their neighborhoods faced.

Origins of the paradigm began to emerge around the country during the 1980s, when some of its basic ideas began to be implemented in programs such as team policing, increased foot patrol, and improved community relations. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that there was, in the Big Apple, a full-scale reorientation of policing around the community; and that development constituted a once-in-a-generation paradigm shift, setting an example that would be followed by urban police departments across the country. Integral to this move was Bratton, at the time a young police chief from Boston. He would serve first as chief of the transit police in New York City, from 1990 to 1993, and then as NYPD commissioner from 1994 to 1996. He returned for a second stint as New York’s police chief, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, in 2014, serving until 2016. I worked with him as a consultant during both periods.

Community policing is often portrayed as being soft on crime. A Google search of the phrase turns up images of smiling police officers allowing children to sit on top of motorcycles, posing for pictures, playing touch football, and making presentations to schoolchildren. This risks making community policing seem like a publicity stunt, an insincere attempt by cops to foster a gentler image—what some law-and-order critics mock as “hug-a-thug” enforcement. Community policing, rightly understood, can be, and often is, aggressive and even intrusive, depending on the community’s concerns.

It’s important to understand the context in which the new policing model emerged; today’s police critics fail to appreciate that context. In essence, they can’t help but see the efforts of New York City cops in the 1990s through 2019 eyes. Compared with today, the New York of the 1990s was a very different world—and residents’ worries were different, too. The decay of public spaces was at the forefront of many New Yorkers’ minds. People wanted to use public parks, ride public transportation, and walk in their neighborhoods without fear of being victimized by an aggressive beggar, mentally disturbed street person, or young gangbanger.

Crime was then a daily fear for New Yorkers. In 1990, New York saw 2,262 murders, along with more than 100,000 robberies; in 2017, by sharp contrast, there were 292 murders and 14,000 robberies in the city. Yet, scary as crime was, community fear has always been more closely correlated with public disorder. And by the early 1990s, as City Journal readers know well, New York City was two decades into a meteoric rise in visible disorder. Subway trains were covered in graffiti. Times Square was overrun by prostitutes, pimps, and drug dealers. A drive through the Bronx would reveal whole blocks on which only one structure—if any—remained standing. A trip to the corner store would often require cutting through a group of youngsters dealing drugs, drinking, playing loud music, or catcalling young women.

As this kind of disorder worsened, law-abiding residents began to feel increasingly vulnerable to more serious street crime. The disorder made people feel that no one was in charge, and if no one was in charge, anything could happen. More and more New Yorkers began to avoid many public spaces. And the absence of law-abiding citizens from public spaces allowed those spaces, and the surrounding neighborhoods, to fall further into disorder. Eventually, this breakdown encouraged more serious criminal behavior. My colleague James Q. Wilson and I explained the phenomenon in a 1982 article for The Atlantic. I saw my role as a consultant working with Bratton in the 1990s as helping police to incorporate this reality into how they approached their jobs.

The only way to give law-abiding citizens the confidence to begin taking back public spaces from those ruining them—with litter, noise pollution, overaggressive panhandling, drug dealing, boorish behavior such as public urination, and more serious criminal acts—was to respond to their concerns. Police needed to make clear that the problems that the community identified as priorities would be addressed. This focus on the community was an all-important first step in turning New York City around.

Though there is a popular conception today of what “community policing” means, it was actually a concrete idea that my colleague Mark Moore and I described in great detail in a 1988 paper published as part of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Session on Policing. In short, the various forms of policing are best understood as integrated organizational strategies with seven essential elements: the function of police in society; how police departments are organized; how police manage demand for their services; how police interact with the external environment; how police measure success; the sources from which police obtain their legitimacy and authority; and the tactics that police adopt to perform their function. Community policing, properly understood, reflects a department’s reorientation around public concerns with respect to each of those elements. Though some police department officials had been paying lip service to community policing for nearly a decade, it had never truly and fully been done until Bratton and his colleagues ushered in a new approach with respect to each of these elements. This process involved considerable trial and error.

Retrieved February 14, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/community-policing

Saints of the Day & Crime & Race

Here’s the saint’s calendar for February 10, 2019, and some versions, each focusing on individual saints, all wonderful; for they are the Church Triumphant.

The Catholic Church has many saints and reading about their lives has been a spiritual journey Catholics have been on since the publication of the Golden Legend, http://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/

From Butler’s Calendar of the Saints listing all of the saints of today. https://web.archive.org/web/20061015024208/http://www.catholic-forum.com/Saints/day0210.htm

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints, St. Scholastica, Virgin: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots053.htm

From Franciscan Media, also St. Scholastica, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-scholastica/

From a most lovely site, really a daily devotional site offering much more than just saint of the day, Anastpaul https://anastpaul.wordpress.com/

One of my personal favorites, Tradition in Action, also St. Scholastica, she reigns today, https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j009sdScholastica2-10.htm

Here is what the 1962 Roman Missal says about St. Scholastica: “St. Scholastica was the sister of St. Benedict. Embracing the rule of her brother, she founded the Order of Benedictine Nuns. She died A. D. 543.” (p. 1181) The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual. (2004). Baronius Press: London. To get this for your library, go to the source: https://www.baroniuspress.com/book.php?wid=56&bid=4#tab=tab-1

Crime & Race

An excellent summary of the truth of the matter in the United States by Heather MacDonald, the best writer on criminal justice issues in our country today, in City Journal.

An excerpt.

President Trump maligned the criminal-justice system in his State of the Union speech last night. Touting a recent federal law that gives federal judges greater discretion in sentencing violent criminals and drug traffickers, Trump claimed that the previous sentencing regime “wrongly and disproportionately harmed the African-American community.”

The claim that the criminal-justice system is racist is the mantra of left-wing activists the country over. Adopting it for the State of the Union was an unfortunate attempt to score bipartisan political points. The effort has already proven unavailing: Trump and his supporters continue to be charged with racism, while the legitimacy of law enforcement has been undermined.

It is crime, not the punishment of crime, that disproportionately harms the black community. And the demand for strict drug enforcement has always originated most forcefully in the black community. In 1959, Harlem’s New York Age newspaper called for “no leniency for the criminals, the recidivists, the junkies, dope pushers, muggers, prostitutes, or pimps. Clean out this scum—and put them away as long as the law will allow.” New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, now reviled by the elites, were passed in the 1970s because of activism in the black community, as Michael Fortner shows in Black Silent Majority.

The infamous federal crack penalties followed a similar trajectory. It was New York congressman Charles Rangel who initiated the federal crack legislation in 1986 by pointing out crack’s effect on urban youth. Other members of the Congressional Black Caucus agreed. New York congressman Alton Waldon called on his colleagues to increase federal crack penalties: “For those of us who are black this self-inflicted pain is the worst oppression we have known since slavery.”

If those 1986 federal crack-trafficking penalties were anti-black, then the meth-trafficking penalties are anti-white. The same weight of meth—5 grams—netted a five-year minimum sentence, the identical ratio as the original crack penalties. The majority of federal meth defendants are white; only about 2 percent are black. Somehow, this racial injustice has escaped the attention of activists and the media.

Drug enforcement is not responsible for black overrepresentation in prison. In 2016, if all drug convicts had been released from federal and state lockups, the black share of the prison population would have fallen from 37.4 percent to 37.2 percent. In other words, drug convictions have no effect on the proportion of black prisoners; that proportion is driven by violent-crime rates.

Retrieved February 7, 2019 from https://www.city-journal.org/trump-racial-bias-criminal-justice-system

Saints of the Day & Turning Broken Windows Upside Down

Here is the saint’s calendar for January 12, 2019 and several versions, each focusing on individual saints, all wonderful.

From Butler’s Calendar of the Saints listing all of the saints of today, (so many). https://web.archive.org/web/20060926004114/http://catholic-forum.com:80/saints/day0112.htm

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints, highlighting one, http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots022.htm

From Franciscan Media https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-marguerite-bourgeoys/

From a most lovely site, really a daily devotional site offering much more than just saint of the day, Anastpaul https://anastpaul.wordpress.com/

One of my personal favorites, Tradition in Action https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j002sdSt.BenedictBiscop.htm

And a great resource for further exploration of individual saints, The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/index.html

Turning Broken Windows Upside Down

The essence of survival crime theory is that if you need to steal to survive it is okay to steal, and this article from City Journal explains.

An excerpt.

The latest fad in criminal-justice activism is the concept of “survival crime.”

The theory holds that the homeless, the poor, and people of color commit property crimes and low-level infractions in order to secure their basic survival. Any enforcement of these laws is thus a violation of their basic human rights and should be relaxed—that is, local governments should stop enforcing any laws that “criminalize homelessness” and “criminalize poverty.”

Survival crime theory is the flipside of Broken Windows theory. They deal with the same class of offenses—mainly property crime, drug possession, and public nuisances—in precisely the opposite way. Broken Windows theory argues that everyone is responsible for their own behavior and that, if we permit low-level crimes, it will lead to a general breakdown in law and order. Survival-crime theory, by contrast, argues that local governments should decriminalize these offenses because vulnerable individuals have been compelled by social conditions to commit them.

The idea of “survival crime” is not new, and has floated around in academic circles for decades. And for people living in a slum in Caracas, Peshawar, or Khartoum, there might be a moral argument that stealing food for oneself or one’s family is a justified “survival crime.” But the United States isn’t Venezuela, Pakistan, or Sudan. The federal government currently spends more than $1 trillion a year on anti-poverty programs, including general assistance, food stamps, housing vouchers, SSI, and WIC. Every city in America has a network of churches, food banks, and charities that offer direct assistance. And, more broadly, we’re living in an era of record-low unemployment and, in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Seattle, record-high minimum wages.

The problem is that cities like Seattle and San Francisco have not just “decriminalized homelessness” or “decriminalized poverty”—they have increasingly decriminalized crime. Over the past five years, the classification of survival crime has expanded well beyond stealing the proverbial loaf of bread. In California, for instance, Proposition 47 downgraded theft of property valued at less than $950 to a misdemeanor, meaning that the police are unlikely to pursue even habitual shoplifters and thieves. The predictable result: a statewide rise in petty theft. Seattle and King County recently released new guidelines calling on police officers to stop arresting individuals for all “homelessness-related crimes,” with the goal of “eliminating racial disproportionality” and ensuring that policies “do not penalize homelessness and poverty.” Meantime, city and county prosecutors have dropped thousands of misdemeanor cases against “vulnerable populations.” All this has caused widespread frustration among residents and law enforcement officers. As one veteran Seattle cop told me: “We have basically stopped enforcing the law against the homeless population. Political leaders don’t want it and prosecutors won’t pursue charges. It’s a waste of time.” In New York City, the NYPD has backed off from arresting people for subway fare evasion, on the grounds that enforcement has a disparate impact on the poor; farebeating has risen sharply since the new policy was enacted.

While concern is growing that these permissive policies have led to an increase in property crime, the greatest risk of survival crime theory is that we are slowly creating a parallel justice system: one for average citizens and another for politically-favored identity groups. Activists have successfully made the case that we must sacrifice equality under the law to address wider social inequalities. They are effectively arguing that our bedrock principle of “equality protection of the laws” is simply a mechanism of state oppression against the homeless, the poor, and people of color—a radical reversal of its original constitutional meaning.

From https://www.city-journal.org/survival-crimes

Saint of the Day & Proposed Criminal Justice Legislation is Bad

Today, December 6, 2018, is the feast day of St. Nicholas of Bari (270 AD-343 AD) 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 here http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots375.htm and a more detailed article from Tradition in Action at https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j050sdNicholas12-6.htm

The definitive article though is at the Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11063b.htm and here is the Wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas

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

Proposed Criminal Justice Legislation is Bad

Following up on Tuesday’s post, this article from the Wall Street Journal furthers the case.

An excerpt.

First, do no harm” is a well-known motto of medical professionals. If only our politicians followed it as well.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress are eager to pass something this year under the banner of “criminal-justice reform.” But bipartisan support isn’t an automatic Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Members on both sides of the aisle can, and sometimes do, team up to pass bad bills, and the so-called First Step Act is a good example. The more we learn about it, the worse it looks.

By a vote of 360-59 in May, the House passed a version of the legislation designed to curb recidivism by helping inmates return to society. It provides for more rehabilitation programs and vocational training, for example. Prison conditions also would improve under the bill: Inmates would be placed in facilities located closer to their families, and women would no longer be shackled during childbirth. So far, so good.

But once the First Step Act moved to the upper chamber for consideration, what had been a federal prison-reform measure morphed into a sentencing-reduction bill. For starters, the Senate bill eliminates mandatory life-without-parole penalties for repeat drug offenders and reduces mandatory-minimum sentences for other serious drug offenses.

On Monday, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard pointed out that the bill would give prison wardens the authority to deem violent criminals no longer dangerous and make them eligible for early release. “At the very least,” he writes, “this loophole undercuts the claim by supporters of the bill that ‘violent criminals and sex offenders’ would not qualify for shortened sentences.”

Among those supporters are President Trump and many Republicans in Congress who have made common cause with Barack Obama, Eric Holder and others on the activist left in denouncing “mass incarceration.” Some on the right believe that locking arms with liberal criminal-justice crusaders will help Republicans win minority votes. Others, like libertarian-leaning Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, point to the high costs of locking people up. But you do not help minority communities by going easy on the very people who prey on them. It is black and brown people who benefit the most when violent crime drops.

The costs of incarceration should be measured against the cost of letting criminals go free. The relevant comparison is not between, say, schooling and a prison cell. Rather, it’s between the cost of imprisonment and the cost of criminal activity. What are the costs of stolen or damaged property, lives lost, or families living in fear after dope pushers take over a housing project? And what price will unelected judges and prison wardens pay when their decisions backfire?

Also lost in this debate is sympathy for the law-abiding residents of violence-plagued ghettos who believe that these criminals are not so much victims of “society” or “institutional racism” as they are victims of their own character flaws. The left-wing Sentencing Project reported in 2014 that when Americans were surveyed on whether courts “deal too harshly or not harshly enough with criminals,” 73% of whites and 64% of blacks responded, “not harshly enough.” If nearly two-thirds of black respondents feel that the criminal-justice system goes too easy on lawbreakers, perhaps the mass-incarceration activists aren’t speaking for those in the black community after all.

Until recently, the most vocal opponent of the First Step Act was GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. But the more Republicans learn about the sentencing provisions in the measure—and how different it is from the version that passed the House—the less they like it. I’m told that Republican critics now include, among others, Sens. John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marco Rubio of Florida, Ben Sasse and Deb Fischer of Nebraska, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Ted Cruz of Texas, Richard Shelby of Alabama and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Law-enforcement agencies like the National Sheriffs’ Association also are pressing for changes to the bill. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has kept his opinion to himself, but his staff has disseminated articles critical of the legislation.

Retrieved December 5, 2018 from https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-senate-surrender-on-criminal-justice-1543966360

Saint of the Day & Releasing Prisoners

Today, December 4, 2018, is the feast day of St. Barbara, Virgin, Martyr (Third Century) 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 here http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots373.htm

There is a more detailed article from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Barbara

The definitive article though is at the Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02284d.htm

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

Releasing Prisoners

Ann Coulter nails the untenable logic included in the latest proposed criminal justice reform.

An excerpt.

In the systematic dismantling of common sense in America, Jared Kushner’s “sentencing reform” bill is the coup de grace — a Mack Truck hurtling down the highway about to take out thousands of Americans. The Idiot Army is already in place to fight and win this battle.

Jared and the hip-hop artists currently advising him have decided that too many people are in prison. If you think you’ve heard this before, you have: Genius insights of this sort have preceded nearly every major crime wave this country has experienced, from Philadelphia to California to a bloody period known as “the Warren Court.”

As anyone with an amoeba’s understanding of recent history knows, beginning in the early ’60s, assorted heads-up-their-asses liberals jettisoned logic, common sense and a basic understanding of human nature by releasing criminals from the prisons where they belonged.

Instead of punishing criminals, we would give them social services, education and job training — with the implied understanding that they wouldn’t move next door to any of the reformers. The experts assured a disbelieving public that these policies would reduce crime.

As Thomas Sowell writes in The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, the stage was set. Liberal criminologists’ soft-on-crime policies were in place. We only needed empirical evidence.

“THE RESULTS: Crime rates skyrocketed. Murder rates suddenly shot up until the murder rate in 1974 was more than twice as high as in 1961. Between 1960 and 1976, a citizen’s chances of becoming a victim of a major violent crime tripled.”

Prior to this period, crime had been declining for three decades.

Thousands of Americans were murdered, raped, assaulted, disfigured and robbed as a direct result of the exact same policies that Jared and his assistant, Donald Trump, are trying to foist on the country right now.

Then-Princeton professor John DiIulio Jr. looked at the consequences of a single order by a Carter-appointed judge, Norma Shapiro, that put a population cap on Philadelphia prisons in the 1990s. In an 18-month period between 1993 and 1994, 9,732 prisoners released as a result of Judge Shapiro’s order were re-arrested for committing 79 murders, 90 rapes, 701 burglaries, 959 robberies, 1,113 assaults, 2,215 drug offenses and 2,748 thefts.

It took more than a decade of Reagan and Bush judges, Republican mayors and governors, and the endless complaints of ordinary people to produce the low crime rates we have today. Their formula was: Do the precise opposite of whatever the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice and The New York Times recommend.

In New York City alone, at least 10,000 people — mostly minorities — are not dead because Rudy Giuliani revived the idea of punishment for criminals, in lieu of understanding them.

Progressive young hipsters living in Brooklyn today have no concept that their trendy neighborhoods would be uninhabitable war zones but for Mayor Giuliani. If you don’t have order and safety in big cities, you can’t have anything else.

In 1991 the U.S. murder rate was well over twice what it is today.

Normal person: Thank God we started putting criminals in prison again!

Jared: LET’S RELEASE THEM.

A 2014 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that, within five years of release, 82 percent of property offenders, 77 percent of drug offenders, 74 percent of public order offenders and 71 percent of violent offenders were arrested for a new crime — after not getting caught committing God knows how many others.

This is not rocket science. Lock up criminals and they can’t commit any more crimes. As a New York Times headline put it in 2004 with characteristic cluelessness: “Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates.”

Retrieved November 23, 2018 from http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2018-11-21.html#read_more

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