Quote for the day

"But maybe keep in mind that moving inequality around isn’t exactly the same as addressing inequality."

Love it! From an article doing a great public service to keep us thinking about the harms of for-profit education and reminding us of the link between that and poverty.

Read: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/09/17/64171/

brilliance on capital punishment

Stephen Colbert on the lethal injection drug shortage:  he suggests new methods of execution. He says we can use gravity to execute those on death row.

"Just shove the condemned off the Sears tower. If he survives the drop, remember he'll land in Chicago and someone will shoot him."

Also, he says, don't worry about it being cruel and unusual punishment. "If we are cruel often enough, it won't be unusual."

catch 22

Steven Staley is on death row in TX and has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.   he cannot be forcibly medicated for the purpose of making him competent for execution and without medication, he is not competent to be executed.  

Staley fatally shot Fort Worth Steak and Ale restaurant manager Robert Read in the course of a 1989 robbery that came at the end of a four-state crime spree with two accomplices. He was sentenced to death in 1991. ... "He believes there is a big conspiracy orchestrated by the state and that everybody, everybody, is part of the conspiracy," his attorney, John Stickels, said in May 2012. "He believes that he was wrongfully convicted because of the conspiracy."  ...  In February 2006, Staley's execution was stayed after the court found him mentally incompetent. In 2006, he told psychologist Mark Cunningham that the jury found him guilty because the judge was trying to steal his one-of-a-kind faded red 1958 Pontiac pickup, which he said had a $1.5 million street value, and because Oprah Winfrey paid off the jury.

    via The Texas Tribune

how much for a wrongful conviction?

Louisiana paying wrongfully convicted, but is it enough?

"While nearly two dozen states don’t compensate exonerees at all, Louisiana has a statute that entitles people like Thompson to $25,000 per year of wrongful incarceration — capped at $250,000 — plus up to $80,000 for “loss of life opportunities.”

drunk tank pink

The university of Iowa had painted the lockerroom of the visiting football team pink as a way to calm/weaken their opponents.

For real.

Pink Paint Used to Win Football Games and Calm Prison Inmates

a teacher rapes a student and gets 30 days

A sad story on all sides. The 14 year old girl committed suicide. It sounds as if the judge said the girl was asking for it.

In Montana: Former Senior High teacher gets 30 days for rape of student

the new education for prisoners

Would this work?  IPads for inmates to curb recidivism: Baltimore Sun - Gansler proposes tablet computers for inmates

keep calm and hit her

are you kidding me?

amazon is in trouble for selling t-shirts that "included slogans were spun off the phrase, "Keep Calm and Carry On", a famous British propaganda slogan and included shirts that read: "Keep Calm and Hit Her", "Keep Calm and Rape a Lot" and "Keep Calm and Rape Them" for $23–$26."

but this is not made by amazon, but an australian company. the owner apologizes,

'No words can express how I feel about what has occurred and in no way do I condone or promote this serious issue ... This was a computer error of my creation and I accept my responsibility in the matter." ...Fowler further explained that the shirts were merely a result of a computer glitch, saying they were created by an “automated process” that “relied on both computer based dictionaries and online educational resources ie. verb lists” to generate a parody of “Keep Calm.”

are you kidding me?! i don't believe this for a second.

actual question from the test in my social welfare class

I was looking at the test statistics and noticed something interesting on this test question:

Despite widespread distaste for the word _________________, virtually all public functions are handled by this type of organization.

Correct		Percent Answered
	President	0%
	Bureaucracy	91.304%
	Republican	8.696%
	Economy	0%

haha, 9% of my students answered that there was widespread distaste for the word republican!

banning gay kids in GA

more than 100 schools in georgia do not allow gay kids to attend.  you guessed it, these are private schools.  they have specific, written policies against the admittance of homosexuals.

on one hand:  "As a result, his report says, public money is being spent by private educational institutions that “punish, denounce and even demonize students in the name of religion solely because they are gay, state that they are homosexual, happen to have same-sex parents or guardians, or express support or tolerance for gay students at school, away from school or at home.”"  

this is public money though a tax credit program.  "$170 million in tax credits have been given to people who donated to the nonprofit organizations that funnel money to private schools."

on the other:  "And, they argue, the scholarship program is not discriminatory because it is open to all kinds of schools that might have different philosophical foundations than state-run public schools. It is a matter of choice and religious freedom, they say.

“You can be a Jewish school. You can be a Muslim school. It’s the same as a Catholic school or if I wanted to go to an all-girls school or a homosexual school,” said Claudia Hunt, who runs admissions for the Providence Christian Academy, a kindergarten-through-12th-grade school in Lilburn.

“That is why we are independent schools,” she said. “We all have different missions.""

criminalizing homelessness

jobs are no longer plentiful and homes are no longer affordable.  sad.

criminalizing poverty:  "Twenty years ago, a federal court in Miami ruled that the city could not arrest homeless individuals for engaging in life sustaining activities in public, when they had no other place to do these things.


The court's decision led the community to build a homeless shelter, but the recent economic downturn and foreclosure crisis have resulted in so many people losing their income and housing, that there is now no room at any established homeless shelters in Miami. So once again, both in Miami and throughout the country, there are efforts to pass local ordinances that would make the innocent everyday actions of individuals experiencing homelessness criminal. These proposals sound awfully similar to considering people criminals because they are too poor to afford a home.  ....

The face of homelessness has changed dramatically over the past few years. Many today become homeless when they suddenly fall behind in their rent or mortgage payments due to a medical or economic emergency, and find themselves unable to catch up because wages today are often not sufficient to meet basic needs. Government figures show that since the 1950's, residential rents have more than doubled even after taking inflation into account. During the same time period, minimum wage has actually decreased after adjusting for inflation!"

DNA databases

real life may be catching up to TV technology.

in chicago, they are adding the DNA profiles of some convicted killers, even executed serial killers such as john wayne gacy, to a database in hopes of solving cold cases.

marvelous. read more here.

so far, there are no hits.

five year old hero

"Boy Violated Dress Code By Wearing Shirt For Out-Of-State Team."

Cooper Barton was asked to turn his T-shirt inside-out because it violated Oklahoma City Public Schools' dress code, KWTV reports. The boy was wearing a University of Michigan shirt.

the dress code was created as part of an anti-gang task initiative.  the school board says they are going to review the policy.  i personally doubt any changes will be made.

the truth about guns

sometimes i forget that not everyone knows this.
and speaking of guns, i signed the petition at wearebetterthanthis.org. of course.

updated: to fix broken link.

progress

Virginia ranks highest in U.S. for black-white marriages

they say northern virginia/DC area and the military are contributing factors as they are increasingly multi-ethnic.

this is good.  after all, there are 4.2 million multiracial people in the US.

oh no, not a hoodie!

i'm sick about this, just like everyone else.

people do awful things everyday that doesn't blow up this much.  i think the larger issue is that of the “Stand Your Ground” law.  it seems the law allows anyone to use force to defend themselves against those who appear threatening (this essentially could be anyone).  so where was Trayvon Martin's ground to stand on?  he would have had the same  rights to stand his ground when he was being chased by Zimmerman.  even if he did fight back, as some are reporting, the law gave him the right to do so.  Zimmerman is still in the wrong.

tragic nonsense.

the bad boys of sports

I should stop referring to the killers and woman-beaters on the ravens team and the pedophiles on the steelers team if I don't want to hear back about the dog killer on my team (the eagles). However, the way I see it, the difference is that our player actually paid his debt to society through the conventional means (the criminal justice system).

It has been suggested the NFL is full of criminals, found on any team. While this is true, I don't see it as a reflection of professional sports, but of society as a whole. Criminality is found everywhere, even among those you wouldn't suspect.

one in a thousand

great quote:

"The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break."

from:  Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America : The New Yorker

let us be clear: capital punishment is more expensive than life in prison sentences

just saw this article ("Jury finds Laurence Lovette guilty in murder of UNC student body president Eve Carson") and then a post on facebook is about the case.  the creator of the post and the commenters are happy the guy is caught, but want to see him fry (this is not a death penalty case because he was a minor at the time the crime was committed.).

one of the comments:
Bring back the firing squads! Bullets are cheaper than housing scum bags per year in prison! You kill...you die!

this argument for the death penalty gets me fired up every time.  regardless of being a proponent or opponent of capital punishment, it costs more than life in prison every time! i hate it when people argue this, it just isn't true.

these are the basic facts, from "Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis.":

• The death penalty in the U.S. is an enormously expensive and wasteful program with no clear benefits. All of the studies on the cost of capital punishment conclude it is much more expensive than a system with life sentences as the maximum penalty. In a time of painful budget cutbacks, states are pouring money into a system that results in a declining number of death sentences and executions that are almost exclusively carried out in just one area of the country. As many states face further deficits, it is an appropriate time to consider whether maintaining the costly death penalty system is being smart on crime.
• The nation’s police chiefs rank the death penalty last in their priorities for effective crime reduction. The officers do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder, and they rate it as one of most inefficient uses of taxpayer dollars in fighting crime. Criminologists concur that the death penalty does not effectively reduce the number of murders.
• Around the country, death sentences have declined 60% since 2000 and executions have declined almost as much. Yet maintaining a system with 3,300 people on death row and supporting new prosecutions for death sentences that likely will never be carried out is becoming increasingly expensive and harder to justify. The money spent to preserve this failing system could be directed to effective programs that make society safer.

bits

i can't believe it. in florida (of course), a 12 year old is charged as an adult with capital murder and facing life in prison.  read this, the details are shocking.

a new study suggests women are choosing lower heeled shoes and flats. Researchers say it's because of the economy. IBM researchers say usually when the economy is bad, skirts get shorter and heels get higher. They say it's because women turn to them as a means of fantasy and escape. Over the last 100 years high heels soared during the worst recessions. But now they say ladies are moving towards shorter heels because of a simpler style evolution.
good, now maybe i will fit in.

it's no surprise that virginia schools start after labor day. it's so theme parks can make more money. 

 i'll leave you with this awesome video.