Around the Blogs, Tuesday, July 3, 2007

• STEPHEN SMITH SIGHTING!!! At Sex Crime Defender. (And it’s good to have Corey Rayburn Yung back, too.)
• Real Cost of Prisons notes that CCA is building a new prison in MS. No comment on good or bad from me here, just a note that CCA doesn’t have any current clients for that prison but is confident that some will be found. I am, too. I bring this up more to point out again that the availability of private prisons makes it possible that all the states that are having prison space problems will be able to “farm out” their production for a considerable period of time to localities eager for the inmates and the accompanying jobs. They can avoid the construction costs that put the initial scary price tag on proposals to increase prisoners and defer Judgment Day on the operating costs that will eventually come due, after the politicians who vote for it have gone away. We truly are nationalizing the problems of the CAs, COs, and AZs, and it’s not hard to imagine a national network of prisons operating outside fed or state control on a much larger scale than we even have today. Not hard for me anyway, but you already know some of my problems. Again, not being judgmental here, just wondering if anyone is seriously thinking about the implications of all this. Besides CCA and its investors, I mean.
• Some thought-provokers up over at Crime and Consequences. Stephen Erickson has this post on women offenders in domestic violence cases and Kent Scheidegger has this comment on the crack-powder distinction.
• Prevention Works has a very good post up on the use and effectiveness of youth peer courts as a mechanism to prevent juvenile recidivism and, with its lead-in of the Genarlow Wilson case, indicates that teens are better at prescribing justice than our “professionals.” Not hard to believe that.
• As a sort of follow-up to my whack at Bill Clinton and his responsibility for our prison budget woes the other day, Jonathan Simon at Governing Through Crime gets right down to it: “I've been saying for sometime that we cannot look to the Democratic Party to lead us out of Governing through Crime. Indeed, I'm not even convinced Democrats represent the more changeable of the two parties on crime.” Yowsa.