Monday, December 24, 2007

Surfing So You Won't Have To

A few sites to check out over this holiday to keep you warm:
  • Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy has some good catches as always. This one alerts us to the new Federal Sentencing Reporter issue on reentry, including the note familiar to those involved in the process that reentry is NOT rehab. Rehab deals solely with the individual offender; reentry focuses on the networking within which the released offender will try to succeed and make that rehab work. (And, yes, to the commenter there--one of the best way to screw up reentry and guarantee recidivism is determinate sentencing with little incentive to do your pre-release programming.) This link will get you to yet another article, this one focusing on OH, pointing out how untenable the continued prison buildups are fiscally long-term. In the short term they mean more nationalization and distribution of prisoners to privatized facilities across the country. In the long term it reiterates again the inevitable temptation and probable adoption of all the areas of TECHNOCORRECTIONS. Finally, this one raises the issue of what happens to true Christian candidates who take seriously Jesus' requirements that prisoners be carefully tended to, that transgressors who truly repent must be forgiven and welcomed back with banquets regardless of their prior actions, and that whatever you do the the least of us, you do to Jesus. The candidates who take that seriously have found trouble in our Christian [sic] nation. Brownback's already gone, and Huckabee's now having to renounce his past actions along that line. And of course, no Democrat could be caught dead exhibiting compassion or sense. It will be one of Bill Clinton's well-deserved legacies that George W. Bush was better on corrections sentencing issues than he was (and than his wife will be, or that black guy). It's always ironic to me that Jefferson, the president who wrote his own version of the New Testament, was the one who most meaningfully raised the fear that God might just be just.
  • The Real Cost of Prisons gives you comfort this holiday season with stories purporting that prisons might be overcrowded but that's okay (I worked for a commissioner once who seriously believed that, because he had served on a submarine that triple-bunked sailors, there was no problem with triple celling inmates) and that the food in prisons is nutritional despite its log-like composition and sometimes the source of rioting.
  • Think Outside the Cage reminds us exactly how hard reentry is for offenders trying to go straight in this Christian [sic] nation and how ignorant teens are about the laws that we claim are to protect them but often get them felony sex offense convictions.
  • Finally, The Situationist has a couple of its always thought-provoking posts up, this one on the age-old message that we get when we give and this one on that amazing recent replay of the Milgram experiment and another experiment that shows, once again, that the only lesson of history is that we never learn the lessons of history. Both good messages for corrections sentencing folks, especially as we have a little time to ponder what we want our own legacies to be at this time of year.

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