News and Blogs Together, Tuesday, April 10, 2007

• Sex Crimes Blog has a new poster, Niki Delson, who has gotten off to an interesting start with a series on the role of the media in creating the environment in which sex crimes, particularly child sex offenses, occur. Definitely will provoke your thoughts.
• Steven Smith is having second thoughts about the name of his blog and is soliciting thoughts about whether to change it and, if so, to what. What do you think? SexCrimeDefender a help or hindrance?
• CrimProfBlog links you to an audio on the War on (Some) Drugs and how communities are collapsing under the offenders now returning.
• Mind Hacks alerts us to a study linking the number of patients with violence-related injuries and the price of beer. The cheaper it is, the more violence, which probably doesn't shock you. A doctor apparently started noticing glass in his patients' faces. Hmm. Also related to increased violence: poverty, unemployment, ethnic diversity of surrounding population, summer (yes, summer), and major sporting events. Can you imagine the frat houses that would discover political activism if we tried to do something about this?
• Grits for Breakfast runs a typically good post on another counter-productive effort of TX legislators pulling opportunities for higher ed away from inmates. And yes, we know that higher ed is very strongly linked to reduced recidivism. But then, we're not really concerned about stopping crime and victims that much, are we? We have other fish we're frying.
• A 94-year-old man in CA who poses such a threat to society that he needs tens of thousands of dollars spent on him every new year he makes it. Did I mention he's in a wheelchair? His family accepts responsibility for him? He costs around three times the usual inmate. Did I mention CA thinks it's going to get its house in order?
• A new reentry program in AL (Alabama, not Alaska), a partnership between the DOC and Dept of Public Health. And in WV, where prison projections are showing major increases on top of what's already hitting the fan there, a great depiction of the little Gordian Knots that non-CA states are tying themselves into. Think AL would mind sending some help up North to some Yankees?
• Via Doug Berman, I dare you not to have a tear at the end of this MO article on a victim's family finding mercy in their hearts for the young man whose stupid mistake killed their son . . . and his best friend. I've said it before, as an observer and as a survivor of the Oklahoma City bombing. The voices we hear so loudly in most corrections sentencing are not the only victims' voices that should be sought out and listened to. Our sometimes poster Russell Butler and his mentor Roberta Roper in MD can get you to them. They're much more diverse and their needs are so much greater than what gets stereotyped and truncated in our policy debates. The next time you hear someone blaring about "the victims" and "what they want," please remember this extraordinary family.