News and Blogs Together, Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Training nailed me today. Not much insight, although I've been learning enough about reentry from people in the field to give me more hot air in the future. In the meantime, here are some links you might want to try out:

• Four reasons teens drink. Experiment, thrill, relax--those probably aren't problematical. It's the fourth, drinking to get away from problems, to deal with anger and frustration, that may be the pointer to serious drinking problems later.
• More crime in Second Life, according to Prevention Works, where you hear about identity theft and simulated lives and avatars all in one post. As I repeatedly say here, if crime can go sim, then so can law enforcement and trials, and why can't we then run simulations of our theories and hypotheses there? Eh, you computer-genius criminologist types?
• Never been sure what I thought completely about peremptory challenges, basically preferring the "let judge whack the whackos" concept since the players can use the challenges to game the system, meaning the result is less the result of the case than of the skill of the players. Looks like those challenges may be effectively challenged here at Deliberations. And here's the Christian Science Monitor's take on the subject.
• Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy lends his thoughtful and much more influential voice to the concerns being expressed about the potential uses and abuses of TECHNOCORRECTIONS, especially when it can be applied to the latest social satans, like sex offenders today, probably some new kind of drug tomorrow.
• Finally, Stateline gives its typically thorough coverage to the activity on the state and federal levels to do something sensible about crack sentence disparities after these years of hysteria. I'm still of the "I'll see it when I believe it" stripe at this point.

More training tomorrow, but I'll try to be a little more scintillating. Thanks for hanging in.