Justice/Jails

If you are struggling to get your head around how racism works you will probably find it helpful to have a general framework as a guide. This one hour lecture from 2017 features an overview by Brown University Professor Tricia Rose of the structure of racism and how it works --->> read more -->>

Kristof and WuDunn’s book, Tightrope – Americans Reaching for Hope, spent some weeks on bestseller lists. Kristof is a well known reporter and writer for the NYTimes. It centers around the town of Yamhill OR and the people that Kristof grew up among. The stories of industrial decline, increasing inequality, --->> read more -->>

Once again we return to our comedians for information about what is going on in the world. This time more on the fraud that is our judicial system. Turns out that one of our regular sources, John Oliver, has really made a demi-career out of just this topic.  

We read Evicted – poverty and profit in the American city by Matthew Desmond last year in our local library book group. Recently on a visit to Washington DC to the National Building Museum (401 F St. NW – Judiciary Square Metro stop) we came on an exhibit based on --->> read more -->>

The Louisiana Project: A Study of the Louisiana Defender System and Attorney Workload Standards – February 2017 by Postlethwaite & Netterville, APAC and the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants provides a startling example of the gigantic fraud that is the American legal system. Using standards for the number --->> read more -->>

It is not often that one can make a judgement that is nearly absolute in its accuracy. Most things in life are complicated, complicated by circumstance, money, class, family, just plain errors in judgement, execution, and on… But, when it comes to the American justice system you come face to --->> read more -->>

We have written earlier about the fact that effective legal representation and trial by jury is a rarity making one of our cultural icons a complete sham. As Jed Rakoff has noted: In actuality, our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors --->> read more -->>

Hudson NY and Its SWAT Team Even here in our little city of Hudson NY (population ~ 7,000) we have a police SWAT team, benignly referred to officially as the Columbia County Shared Services Team. There has been plenty of concern over its use here in the last couple of years, --->> read more -->>

Gun Regulation, the 2nd Amendment, and Scalia’s Majority Opinion Fire arms proponents make much of the  2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller in which the Supreme Court absolutely affirmed the right to bear arms as a constitutionally guaranteed right. Lost in this rhetoric is the fact that no rights --->> read more -->>

Mass Incarceration – The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander (download a PDF of this article here) It is well known and frequently cited that the US leads the world in jailing its citizens. In this case we win this standing not by a nose but by a mile. Within --->> read more -->>

Opioids and White Privilege The arrival of opioids as a national concern might focus your attention on the role of drug companies, doctors, and hospitals in creating this new addiction path. In the October 30 New Yorker Patrick Radden Keefe provides a through introduction to this in his piece, “The --->> read more -->>