Tuesday, January 30, 2007

News and Blogs Together, Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Quick hits this evening:
  • An update on what's happening here with our corrections budget in OK. We're up to asking for $380 m. just for prison expansion and other necessary things (like raises for dedicated, hard-working researchers). That's for next year. Just to get through this year, we're asking for $47 m. To start.
  • More on the "serious crisis" in prison overcrowding hitting Britain. Not the Home Secretary this time as we've been detailing. This time it's the Chief Inspector of Prisons saying they've gotten to the point at which rehab efforts are starting to decline. Unlike most American states, which have been there for years, the British seem to feel it's self-defeating to send offenders back home with little reform and to just keep building cells in a never-ending cycle. Silly foreigners. Check out this quote about the need for and past lack of long-term planning: "It is normally considered good practice to build an ark before a flood not during it." I like the planning aspect, though. This is what is missing from so much of corr sent, the setting of plans with goals and objectives with measurable outcomes—here’s how much public safety and crime prevention we can expect spending this amount of dollars on alternatives from prisons to community. Then let's base our debates and discussions on that, not the usual horror stories and the claims of infinite resources.
  • Prevention Works has a nice post up on an effort in TN to get female offenders into campus classes to work on degrees. Their first class? "A study of the judicial process." Is that for their edification or just to twist the knife a little?
  • This headline should cause some nightmares for the soldiers in the "War on (Some) Drugs," not to mention the administrative troubles: "Drugmaker to test fat-fighting marijuana drug"
  • Not sure what to make of this. Gangster types in S. Korea survey as more satisfied in their work than the cops there. Not sure I'd have wanted to be the surveyer, either.

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