The Carpetbagger Can't Stop Criming

You almost get the impression he has no more respect for Kentucky laws and Kentucky courts than he does for Kentucky voters.

From the AP:

Gov. Matt Bevin's office was ordered Monday to pay Planned Parenthood for its expenses after the Republican's representatives were a no-show for a deposition in an abortion case.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Dave Whalin told Bevin's office to reimburse Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky for travel and legal expenses incurred for the deposition that had been scheduled Aug. 18.

Planned Parenthood's legal team wanted to question someone from Bevin's office about his administration's denial of a license to the organization to provide abortions in Louisville.

The deposition was rescheduled ahead of a trial held in September in the abortion case. Another federal judge has not yet ruled on the abortion licensing dispute.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article181768156.html#storylink=cp Gov. Matt Bevin’s office violated Kentucky’s Open Records Act when it refused to provide an Arizona attorney with some of the emails it exchanged with the White House, according to a new ruling by Attorney General Andy Beshear’s office.
Spencer Scharff, a civil rights attorney in Phoenix who previously served as voter protection director of the Arizona Democratic Party, said in a telephone interview Monday that he has been seeking similar information from other governors and state officeholders across the country “in the name of transparency and to help journalism.”
Amanda Stamper, a spokeswoman for Bevin, accused Beshear of abusing his power for political gain.
“Just last year, a long-time employee in his office accused Attorney General Beshear of politicizing open records decisions,” Stamper said Monday. “Simply put, we will not be a part of Attorney General Beshear’s abuse of the Open Records Act.”

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article181721956.html#storylink=cpy

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

Gov. Matt Bevin’s office violated Kentucky’s Open Records Act when it refused to provide an Arizona attorney with some of the emails it exchanged with the White House, according to a new ruling by Attorney General Andy Beshear’s office.

Spencer Scharff, a civil rights attorney in Phoenix who previously served as voter protection director of the Arizona Democratic Party, said in a telephone interview Monday that he has been seeking similar information from other governors and state officeholders across the country “in the name of transparency and to help journalism.” 

Amanda Stamper, a spokeswoman for Bevin, accused Beshear of abusing his power for political gain.

“Just last year, a long-time employee in his office accused Attorney General Beshear of politicizing open records decisions,” Stamper said Monday. “Simply put, we will not be a part of Attorney General Beshear’s abuse of the Open Records Act.”

Another non-denial denial from Governor Smirky.  They don't deny they violated the law; they just attack the elected official for doing his job.

But who cares about Kentucky? To Governor I Got Mine Fuck You, Kentucky's just a bunch of unsophisticated rubes and rednecks barely sufficient to serve as a political stepping stone to the White House. 

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article181721956.html#storylink=cpy

Gov. Bevin's New Anti-Crime Program: Pray It Away

And of course this is not just a cynical ploy to exploit African-American religiousness to put black community activists in the path of black criminals.  No, of course not.

This is not about race, because nothing is ever about race.

Juanita Jean:

The Republican Governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, has a solution to crime in his capital city: “Volunteer patrols that will not report or stop criminal activity, but pray it away.”

 

He appears to be serious.

Bevin suggested at a community meeting that volunteer groups of between three and 10 people would adopt specific blocks and walk around them while praying, according to WHAS, the Louisville ABC station.

“You know, you walk to a corner, pray for the people, talk to people along the way,” Bevin said, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. “No songs, no singing, no bullhorn, no T-shirts, no chanting. Be pleasant, talk to the people, that’s it.”

That’s it, y’all.

We will meet at the south gate of the White House and pray like the dickens that God shoves Donald Trump out so we can change the locks.  Apparently, that’s all there is to it.

A couple of points:  Frankfort, population 27,557, is the third-smallest capitol city in the nation.  While it boasts a couple of sketchy neighborhoods, one just a few blocks from the Capitol where Bevin works and Governor's Mansion where he does not live, it ain't the kind of urban core Bevin and his conservative buddies like to terrify the suburban white folks about.

"Pray Away the Crime" is bullshit and Bevin knows it.  I just hope the people he's really targeting figure it out and tell him to pray his own damn crimes away.

A Real Crime and Actual Grounds for Impeachment

Every time we let this pass without screaming bloody murder normalizes it and brings closer the day when all "elected" officials will be expected to take bribes and do what the highest bidders demand.

Digby: 

On New Years Eve (Trump) held a party where people paid for the privilege of spending time with him. It wasn't a charity or a fundraiser. It was for Mar-a-lago his own club. The money went into his own pockets. People are paying to be in his presence. Like he's Kim Kardashian.

And some of his "guests" were foreign business partners. They are undoubtedly very excited to have the president of the United States doing business with them. It's likely going to be quite profitable for all concerned:

SNIP

He is going to be running the business out of the white house. That is completely obvious. He's simply unable to extricate himself from it and the temptation to swing his clout around as president to "do deals" for the family business is much to great for him to resist.

And, short of impeachment, I don't think there's anything to be done. The Republicans are fine with it, his own voters think it's terrific for the president to pillage the country as long as it's their president and the people who are normally up in arms about "elite" corruption seem to be rather blase about this. Lord knows, the FBI couldn't care less. So here we are. Just making note of it and moving on.

This Culture of Crime Will Be Stopped Only With the Death Penalty

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Corporations simply cannot be trusted to self-regulate. It will never work because all the incentive is there for them to cheat. They want to profit and if the government isn’t watching, they will cut corners to do so. The auto industry has shown this for decades. Only sticks will work. You have to punish corporations–and specifically corporate executives with massive fines and jail time if you want corporations to obey the law and take safety and pollution seriously. One estimate has the Volkswagen emissions leading to approximately 106 deaths in the United States. VW will be punished for this, but if we want to stop other companies and other industries from similar evasion of regulations, we simply have to beef up our regulatory powers and funding for regulatory agencies significantly. Otherwise, other versions of this will happen again and again.

KY Clerks Association Caves to the Freakazoid Bullies

A grand total of three - count 'em, three - out of 120 County Clerks in Kentucky are disobeying the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court and Kentucky law by refusing to do their jobs.

And instead of echoing Governor Beshear and telling these criminal morons to do their fucking jobs or resign, the association that represents 117 County Clerks who are doing their jobs without being morons is instead proposing ways that the three criminals can get away with breaking the law without suffering legal consequences.  How about we just throw the motherfuckers in prison, where they belong?

From WFPL:

The Kentucky County Clerks Association is proposing to amend the state’s marriage laws so county clerks don’t have to personally endorse marriage licenses.

The group is crafting legislation it says would ensure clerks who oppose signing off on same-sex marriages wouldn’t have to.

Leslie County Clerk James Lewis, chair of the association’s elections committee, said on Tuesday the organization is confident the bill would be a solution for clerks who have religious objections to same-sex marriage.

“We would just like to — if there are misgivings, it does create a difficult choice for them sometimes — then this change would eliminate the need for that choice,” Lewis said.

A: The criminal morons are not going to fall for it.  They will take this bill as proof they are right and demand that Kentucky outlaw not just same-sex marriage and homosexuality itself, but that the Commonwealth institute Dominionism immediately and make the three of them emperors for life.

B.  The purpose of this legislation is not to "resolve" a question the U.S. Supreme Court has already resolved, or even to make babby jeebus stop crying.  The purpose is to force Democratic members of the state House into a vote that will either rally repug voters for their opponents or disgust dem voters into staying home.  Either way, repugs take back the state House and with the repug Senate and repug guv Matt Bevin turn Kentucky into Kansas on the path to turning it into Haiti.

"Consicence" has nothing to do with it.

C.  Shame on you, Leslie County Clerk James Lewis, shame on you, Kentucky Association of County Clerks, and shame on any and every Democratic state legislator who lets this piece of shit bill even come to a vote.

AynRandy, Tax Deadbeat

Yep, the Tribble-Toupeed One has good reasons to eliminate the tax code.

Sam Youngman at the Herald:

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul paid a delinquent property tax bill in Florida on Tuesday, only hours after the Republican presidential candidate said he wants to use fire, a wood chipper or a chain saw to "kill" the U.S. tax code.

SNIP

In the video, titled "How would you kill the tax code?," Paul says he is "trying to kill the tax code, all 70,000 pages of it."

Meanwhile, records show that Paul, through a company he created, owns a half-interest in a condominium in Destin, Fla., that had $2,489 in delinquent property taxes as of Tuesday morning. The original $2,159.14 tax bill on the condo, which has an assessed value of $161,000, was due March 31.

A few hours after the Herald-Leader asked Paul's presidential campaign about the tax bill, a representative of the Okaloosa County tax collector's office confirmed that the past-due bill had been paid Tuesday afternoon.

Death Penalty for "Walking With Purpose"

When did police officers become spun-sugar snowflakes terrified of their own shadows?

 

I don't care if this guy was running toward the patrol car screaming "die, bitch, die."  He was UNARMED.

karoli at Crooks and Liars:

What does "walking with purpose" even mean? I was always taught to walk briskly with good posture and as though I had somewhere to go when I walked to avoid being targeted by rapists and things.

But for Ryan Keith Bolinger, that meant being shot dead by a cop.

A veteran police officer shot and killed an unarmed man this week in Des Moines, Iowa, after firing through the rolled-up window of her patrol car. Police say the man, identified as 28-year-old Ryan Keith Bolinger, “walked with purpose” toward officer Vanessa Miller’s vehicle when she fired the fatal shot.

How Locking People Up Destroys the Economy

Since mass incarceration has been a miserable failure for decades, let's try this: release every jail and prison inmate whose crime did not involve actual physical injury or death to another human being. If it's not murder, rape or aggravated assault, out they go.  Purge their records so they can get a job and a place to live. Assign them wrap-around services to reintegrate them into the community.

Then stand back and watch as the economy accelerates.

Nancy LeTourneau, at Political Animal, on how ruining the ability of millions of people to get jobs keeps the whole country impoverished. 

 

Just the way the plutocrats want it.

7. One recent study finds that our nation’s poverty rate would have dropped by 20 percent between 1980 and 2004 if not for mass incarceration and the subsequent criminal records that haunt people for years after they have paid their debt to society.

It is clear from this data that - if we are ever going to tackle the issue of (Labor Force Participation Rate) LFPR and the disparities in unemployment for people of color - it is critical that we address this issue. Also, as #7 suggests, doing so would have a dramatic affect on the current rate of poverty in this country.

Vallas and Dietrich provide pages of important actions that can be taken address this issue. But as Dietrich explains in another article, passage of the REDEEM Act - which would allow for the expungement of federal criminal records - is perhaps the most important step that could be taken immediately.

The next time a politician/candidate brings up the LFPR as a sign that our economy is still struggling (as Jeb Bush did just this week), I hope someone will ask them what their position is on the REDEEM Act.

You Can't Fix the Police Until You Fix the Laws

I was wrong; training cops to more respectfully arrest poor and minority people for minor offenses won't solve the problem.

Only ending the War on (some people who use some categories of) Drugs (tm Lawyers, Guns and Money) and de-criminalizing being poor, minority or homeless will do that.

From The Nation:

What is not discussed in the report is dialing back in any meaningful way the war on drugs, police militarization or the widespread use of “broken windows” policing that has led to the unnecessary criminalization of millions of mostly black and brown people. Well-trained police, following proper procedure, are still going to be engaged in the process of arresting people for mostly low-level offenses, and the burden of that will continue to fall primarily on communities of color, because that is how the system is designed to operate—not because of the bias or misunderstandings of officers. A more respectful and legally justified arrest for marijuana possession is still an arrest that could result in unemployment, loss of federal benefits and the stigma of a drug arrest.

SNIP

We cannot produce true justice by reforming police procedures. Instead, we need to call into question why we have come to rely so heavily on the police to manage social problems in a time of growing racial and economic inequality.

Crime Rates Down Permanently; That's Why We Have to Arrest So Many Minorities for Nothing

Seriously, not even Exxon-Mobil and the Kochs have the stranglehold on public policy in this country that the private prison industry has.

Kevin Drum:

(Last month) the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the latest numbers on incarceration rates, and the headline news is that we're sending fewer people to prison. But there's an interesting wrinkle in the numbers that few news outlets have picked up on, even though it's a trend that's been obvious in the numbers for a long time. Here it is:

That's from Rick Nevin, and you know what's coming next, don't you? Lead. It explains a lot of what's going on here.

The US started phasing out gasoline lead in 1975, which means that children born after 1975 were exposed to steadily less lead. And the effect was cumulative: the later they were born, the less lead they were exposed to and the less crime they committed when they grew up. However, children born before 1975 were unaffected by all this. They were born in a high-lead era, and since all that matters is exposure during early childhood, the damage had already been done.

In 2013, this means that the statistics show a reduction in crime rates in adults under the age of 40, and the younger the cohort the lower the crime rate. Unsurprisingly, this also means they're incarcerated at lower rates. The chart above shows this fairly dramatically.

But it also shows that incarceration rates have stayed steady or increased for older men. Those over the age of 40 had their lives ruined by lead when they were children, and the effect was permanent. They're still committing crimes and being sent to prison at the same rate as ever. It's hard to explain both these trends—lower prison rates for kids, higher prison rates for the middle-aged—without taking lead into account.

This is one of the reasons that the lead-crime hypothesis is important. In one sense, it's little more than a historical curio. It explains the rise and fall of crime between 1960 and 2010, but by now most environmental lead has been cleaned up and there's only a limited amount left to worry about. So it's interesting, but nothing more.

But here's why it matters: if the hypothesis is true, it means that violent crime rates aren't down because of transient factors like drug use or poverty or harsh penal codes. The reduction is permanent. Our children are just flatly less violent than the lead-addled kids who grew up in the years after World War II. And that in turn means that the decline in incarceration rates is permanent. We don't need as much prison space as we used to, and we don't need punitive penal codes designed to toss kids behind bars for 20 years at the first sign of danger.

In other words, we can ease up. Our kids are less violent and our streets are less dangerous. Nor is that likely to change. The lead is mostly gone, and it's going to stay gone. We're safer today not because of broken windows or three-strikes laws or 20-year sentences for dealing cocaine. We're safer because we're no longer poisoning our children in ways that turn them into hair-trigger thugs. And guess what? If we cleaned up the ambient lead that still remains, we'd be even safer 20 years from now.

"Good Guy" Gets Shot With Own Gun

I wouldn't call this news, because this is by far the likeliest outcome of people thinking they have to be their own police force.

Mark Boxley at the Courier:

A man attempting to break into a Bullitt County home shot a woman with her own gun Monday after she confronted him at her back door, Bullitt County Sheriff’s Detective Scotty McGaha said.

The incident happened at about 4 a.m. in the 300 block of Smith Lane in Hillview when the woman got up to let her dogs out, he said.



The woman told investigators she heard a noise and grabbed her 9mm handgun. When she opened her back door she was face to face with the suspect, police said.


The man — described as being about 35 years old, white with no facial hair and wearing a red baseball cap — was able to take the gun away from the woman and shot her once in the shoulder, McGaha said.

Stay Away From White Folks - They Are Fucking Dangerous

And Domestic Terrorism. Especially the murder-doctors-who-help-women variety of Domestic Terrorism. White people. Every fucking time.

PZ Myers:

Tim Wise reposts an essay from 15 years ago; it’s remarkable for how nothing has changed since. It’s about this peculiar asymmetry in which, when a black person commits a crime, most people are quick to generalize the behavior to their race; when a when a white person commits a crime, blame falls on the individual. I thought it was enlightening to see the litany of crimes primarily committed by white people.

It’s amazing how many crazy whites there are, none of whom feel the wrath of the racial pathology police as a result of their depravity. Killing parents is among our specialties. So in 1994, a white guy in New York killed his mom for serving the wrong pizza; last year, a white kid in Alabama killed his parents with an axe and sledgehammer; and in 1996, Rod Ferrell, leader of a “vampire cult” in Murray, Kentucky, bludgeoned another member’s parents to death and along with the victims’ daughter, drank their blood so as to “cross over to the gates of hell.

Which brings me to rule number one for identifying the race of criminals. If the crime involved vampirism, Satan worship, or cannibalism, you can bet your ass the perp was white. Never fails. But you’ll never hear anyone ask what it is about white parents that makes their children want to cut off their heads and boil them in soup pots.

Ditto for infanticide. When Susan Smith drowned her boys in South Carolina, she had hundreds of people looking for a mythical Black male carjacker, because that’s what danger looks like in the white imagination. We should have known better, especially when you consider how many white folks off their kids: like Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg, in Delaware, who dumped their newborn in the garbage; or the New Jersey girl at her prom who did the same in the school bathroom; or Brian Stewart, from St. Louis who injected his son with the AIDS virus to avoid paying child support; or the Pittsburgh father who bludgeoned his 5-year old twins to death when they couldn’t find their Power Ranger masks, and were late for day care; or the white babysitter outside Chicago who bound two kids with duct tape, before shooting them and turning the gun on himself. None of these folks’ race was offered as a possible factor in their crimes. No one is writing books about the genetic or white cultural causes of such behavior. In 1995, when a poor Latina killed her daughter in New York by smashing her head against a wall, every major news source in America covered the tragedy, and focused on her “underclass” status. But when a white Arizona man the same month decapitated his son because he was convinced the child was possessed by the devil, coverage was sparse, and mention of race or cultural background was nowhere to be found.

Or consider thrill killing, spree killing, and animal mutilation: three other white favorites that occur without racial identification of the persons involved. In October 1997, a white male teen obsessed with Jeffrey Dahmer killed a 13-year old to “see what it feels like.” In New Jersey, a 15-year old white male killed an 11-year old selling candy door-to-door, but only after sexually assaulting him. Late last year, a white couple in California was arrested for “hunting women,” and torturing and mutilating them in the back of their van. At Indiana University, a white male burned four cats alive in a lab, while in Martin, Tennessee, two white teens set a duck on fire at the city’s recreational complex, and in Missouri, two white teens killed 23 cats for fun, prompting their white neighbors to say, not that there’s something wrong with white kids today, but rather, “boys will be boys.”

So all that’s what my genes predispose me to do…good to know. If people are going to assign genetic causes to black people’s behavior, it’s equally legitimate to do the same to use white people, right?

His prescription for what we ought to do about it did make me cringe a bit, though.

And the next time you hear about some flesh-eating, Satan-worshiping teenager who just pickled his grandma, you’ll know his race before you even see his face on the nightly news, and you’ll know that if he’d just spent a little more time in church with the Black folks, none of this might ever have had to happen.

The Godless and Society

No wonder the freakazoids scream so hysterically that without god means without morals. They're frantic to prevent people from noticing that all the evidence is to the contrary.

From Divine Irony:

According to Federal Bureau of Prisons data, the number of responding people in prison acknowledging they were Catholic was 39 percent; Protestant, 35 percent; Muslim, 7 percent; Jewish, 2 percent; and godless, 0.2 percent (20 percent did not respond).

Since the number of godless is estimated to be 10 percent of the general population, all things being equal you would expect their prison population to be 10 percent.

If, as many people assume, the godless do not lead moral lives, you would expect the number to be greater than 10 percent. The fact that the actual number is 50 times less than expected can lead to only one of two conclusions: either the godless commit less crime than the religious or they’re too smart to get caught very often.

According to a Barna Research Group report, fundamentalist Christians have the highest divorce rate, followed by Jews and Baptists. The godless are tied with Catholics and Lutherans for the lowest divorce rate. It seems that some groups that claim to follow the Bible most strictly are not putting their money where their mouths are. The godless who are thought to be without morals seem to take their vows more seriously.

According to a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Survey, the least-educated Americans are Jehovah’s Witnesses, followed by black Protestants and fundamentalist Christians. The most highly educated are reformed Jews, followed by Unitarian Universalists and the godless.

Some groups seem to like their flocks ignorant so that pastors’ interpretations of God’s edicts are not questioned. Other groups prize scholarship and achieve more in their lives here on Earth.

In fact, a review of worldwide studies found that criminality and religion go hand in hand. The countries with the most religious people have the highest crime rates, highest sexually transmitted diseases and the highest teen pregnancy rates.

This is also true in the United States. The more religious a state’s population, the higher the crime, STD and teen pregnancy rates. The report does say that the religious are happier than the secular but posits that the ostracism of the latter may be a major cause.

So what conclusion can be reached? It is obvious that you do not have to believe in a higher power in order to live a moral and successful life. Quite the opposite.

I won’t attempt to claim a correlation of religion with crime, infidelity and ignorance. However, it is total hypocrisy for those in such groups to claim that the godless are not and cannot be moral. Yet in a recent study atheists were believed to be no more trustworthy than rapists.

In spite of this easily obtained information, the groups with the highest crime rate, the poorest marriages and the lowest education continually strive to force their beliefs on the nonreligious. And the politicians pander to them. Why else would they pass laws to put religion in the schools and on courthouse facades? And then they wonder why the godless could possibly be upset.

Source

Just Cops Was All It Needed, and Just Cops Was All It Took

Not Terrorists.  Criminals.  Not Supervillains.  Criminals.  Not Existential Threats.  Criminals.

Charlie Pierce, who was there:

The one thing we should all remember about this is that it was always a police action. There was no need for Patriot Acts, or for warrantless wiretapping, or for "enhanced interrogation techniques," or for anything else out that bag of horrors the previous administration filled so fatly after the attacks of 9/11. The waterboard was left in the closet. This was cops being cops, albeit with some fairly impressive modern-day technology. (I didn't know police helicopters had thermal-imaging capabilities. I will now respect more those signs in New Hampshire that say, "Speed Monitored by Aircraft.") There has been grinding forensic work ever since the bombs went off. There was all that basic shoe-leather detective work yesterday, house after house, block after block. And that's not even to get into the horrific events of Thursday night, which nonetheless did not require a military response. Just cops being cops.

And now there should be a trial. And not just a trial, but the greatest, fairest trial in the history of trials. The defendant should get the best possible legal assistance money can buy. The "public safety exception" to Miranda should be allowed to expire. He should get the best jury we can empanel and, if we have to move the trial to Guam on account of pre-trial publicity, then godspeed. And then he should be tried and, if convicted, in the greatest, fairest trial in history, he should get shipped off forever to federal prison, never to be heard from again. We should ignore all the predictable howling from John McCain, and from his maiden aunt, Lindsey Graham. This guy is accused of being a multiple murderer. He committed his crimes against the people of Suffolk and Middlesex Counties in Massachusetts. These were not acts of war. They were crimes, more garish than most. This was a day for cops, not for grandstanding celebrity politicians who were not here this week.

Arrogant Motherfuckers

Yes, of course I'm talking about that most arrogant subset of the rich: Wall Street banksters.

Digby:

Thank you Bernie

.... for saying it:

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein came to Capitol Hill this week to call for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As Congress and the White House are negotiating a year-end deficit deal, Blankfein sought to “lower people’s expectations” about their retirement and health care. He spoke with all the sympathy for someone struggling to get by on $14,000-a-year retirement that you’d expect from a Wall Street banker paid $16 million last year.

“Think about the arrogance of these guys on Wall Street who were bailed out by the middle class of this country when their greed and recklessness nearly destroyed the financial system and now they come to Capitol Hill to lecture Congress and the American people about the need to cut programs for working families,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a Senate floor speech.

How Religion Justifies Crimes

I think there is more empirical evidence of this phenomenon in pre-action decision-making rather than post-action justification, and it always boils down to the same thing: "god loves me, therefore everything I want to do is what god wants me to do."

Via Divine Irony:

A new study in the academic journal Theoretical Criminology (hat tip to the Vancouver Sun) suggests that, far from causing offenders to repent of their sins, religious instruction might actually encourage crime. The authors surveyed 48 “hardcore street offenders” in and around Atlanta, in hopes of determining what effect, if any, religion has on their behavior.

While the vast majority of those surveyed (45 out of 48 people) claimed to be religious, the authors found that the interviewees “seemed to go out of their way to reconcile their belief in God with their serious predatory offending. They frequently employed elaborate and creative rationalizations in the process and actively exploit religious doctrine to justify their crimes.”

First of all, many interviewees had only a vague notion of the central tenets of their faiths.[…]
Often, the authors found, these knowledge gaps were self-serving. “God has to forgive everyone, even if they don’t believe in him,” insisted one 33-year-old enforcer for a drug gang, with a vested interest in avoiding damnation for the murders he had committed.

A 23-year-old robber called Young Stunna suggested that the circumstances of his upbringing would absolve him of his crimes: “Jesus knows I ain’t have no choice, you know? He know I got a decent heart. He know I’m stuck in the hood and just doing what I gotta do to survive.”

Indeed, many of those surveyed used their understandings of faith to justify their own criminal behavior. A 25-year-old drug dealer called Cool suggested that God doesn’t mind when you do bad things to bad people:

“Also another thing is this; if you doing some wrong to another bad person, like if I go rob a dope dealer or a molester or something, then it don’t count against me because it’s like I’m giving punishment to them for Jesus. That’s God’s will. Oh you molested some kids? Well now I’m [God] sending Cool over your house to get your ass.”

In the end, the authors found, “there is reason to believe that these rationalizations and justifications may play a criminogenic role in their decision making.”

 

Broken Windows on Wall Street

Great idea from Steve M:

IF RIGHT-WINGERS LIKE THE "BROKEN WINDOWS" THEORY SO MUCH, WHY NOT TAKE IT FROM THE STREETS TO THE SUITES?

James Q. Wilson died this past week. I mentioned Wilson and his "broken windows" theory in my last post, but I wanted to add one more point. Here's David Frum eulogizing Wilson:

James Q. Wilson is perhaps most famous for his work (with George Kelling and Catherine Coles) of the "broken windows" theory of law enforcement.

... In the 1960s and 1970s, law-enforcement had tended to shrug off minor urban disorder: street-corner drinking, graffiti. Those were years of rising crime, and law-enforcement officials thought it most rational to focus resources on the most dangerous offenses....

Wilson, Kelling, and Coles debunked these ideas. The disregard of petty disorder created an environment that invited major offenses. And a crackdown on minor offenses would ease the work of police in suppressing major crime.

If this approach is as powerful and effective as right-wingers say it is, why do we limits its application to the streets? Shouldn't we also apply it to white-collar crime?

Everyone across the political spectrum wants to prevent another financial catastrophe like the housing crash (or the dot-com crash, or the S&L crisis, or the '87 crash). When fiscal calamity happens, we inevitably find that laws were broken -- so shouldn't we drastically ratchet up enforcement of securities laws, arresting all sorts of financial-world employees for even the slightest of infractions? Doesn't it follow from the brilliant work of Wilson and his colleagues that if we let minor SEC offenses go -- if, as Frum puts it, we have "a disregard of petty disorder" on Wall Street -- the financial world will conclude that its employees can cheat and finagle and manipulate with impunity, which will "invite major offenses," and thus cause or threaten a global financial collapse every few years or so?

Shouldn't we get these small-time violators and lock them up en masse in periodic sweeps, just to send a message that society won't tolerate financial crime? Wouldn't a few days in the pokey get that across to any low-level Wall Streeter who wants to bend the rules? Doesn't the very survival of our society demand that we do no less?

But that would mean disregarding the primary principle of the last 35 years: the wealthy are above the law.

They're Stupd; That's Why They're Criminals

I'm starting to think "social media" is a new mechanism for weeding the incompetent out of the gene pool.

From the Courier:

Convicted of possessing methamphetamine and Ecstasy, Scott W. Roby learned that the hard way. The Louisville man had his probation revoked this month — and was sentenced to two years in prison — in part for violating conditions that required him to stay alcohol-free and out of bars and liquor stores.

Roby had invited his probation officer to be his friend on Facebook, then Roby posted pictures of himself drinking — including one in which he was holding a beer while posed next to “Buddy Bat,” the mascot for the Louisville Bats, said prosecutor Dinah Koehler.

In another Facebook post, according to court records, Roby asked: “Anyone wanna go get smashed tonight one last time before the end of the Earth?”

Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and the Kentucky Department of Corrections say that with increasing regularity, offenders on probation are losing their freedom or incurring other sanctions after posting pictures online of themselves clubbing, using “beer bongs,” posing with firearms or bragging about out-of-town trips they've made without their probation officer's permission.

Liberals are all in favor of any legal, constitutional means to enhance law enforcement.

A Little Reality for Your Post-Equinox*Pleasure

Via Kevin Drum at Political Animal, a few facts to stiffen your spine as the any-excuse-to-be-racist hordes gear up for the general election.

CRIMINAL INJUSTICE....Harvard law professor Bill Stuntz, after noting that the black murder rate is 7x hgher than the white murder rate, writes about the criminal justice system in the black community:

According to the best available data, blacks are 20% more likely than whites to use illegal drugs. But blacks are an incredible thirteen times more likely to be imprisoned for drug crime. (Data source here). In effect, Americans live under two sets of drug laws: the forgiving set of rules that mostly white suburbanites know, and the unfathomably severe rules that govern urban blacks.

If drug crime is overpunished in black neighborhoods, violent crime is underpunished....The bottom line is as simple as it is awful: When whites are robbed, raped, beaten, and killed, their victimizers are usually punished. When the same crimes happen to blacks, the usual result is: nothing. No arrest, no prosecution, no conviction. That is one reason why black neighborhoods are so much more violent than white ones.

In other words, the kinds of criminal punishment that do the most good are undersupplied in black America, and the kinds that do the LEAST good — so far as I know, there is no evidence that the level of drug punishment has any appreciable effect on the level of drug crime — are oversupplied. African Americans live with the worst of both worlds: unfathomably high crime rates, coupled with truly horrifying levels of criminal punishment.

But it's all good, because it has nothing to do with white racism!

What comes next, though, is odd. Stuntz takes a crack at explaining this state of affairs and says "two points are key — and neither of them flows from white racism." Here's point #1: policing in urban neighborhoods is underfunded. And point #2: these same neighborhoods have lost the local control they used to have. "On every front, the power of poor city neighborhoods has declined, and the power of middle- and upper-class suburbs has risen."

This seems to take an awfully narrow view of "white racism." Granted, these things are the results of long-term trends, not examples of individual whites mistreating individual blacks. But these long-term trends have been largely driven by, at best, white neglect, and at worst, active white hostility. Black migration to northern cities, white flight to the suburbs, underfunded urban police forces, and drug laws that are far harsher toward blacks than whites — if these things aren't at least partly the result of white racism, surely the term has lost all meaning? I'm not proposing sackcloth and ashes forever, but at least an acknowledgment that these aren't impersonal forces that just appeared out of nowhere.

In any case, Stuntz ends strong: "The sum of those trends is a system that produces large-scale racial injustice, and that deprives urban black communities of the power to remedy that injustice. One way or another, Americans of all races need to grapple with those facts, and soon."

I'm not as forgiving as Kevin - that last sentence is the same inexcusable hand-wringing mush that's been blathered by liberals for decades. Why not just Call For A (nother) Blue-Ribbon Study?

Whites blaming blacks for the seemingly intractable crime, violence and despair of black neighborhoods are like the kid who hits a littler kid, then when the littler kid bites back in retaliation, the first kid starts screaming bloody murder and forces the nearest adult to punish the littler kid.

Here's an idea: Enforce the same laws for everybody; put the cops where the crime is, and put your money where your lying, hypocritical, closet-racist mouth is.

* Equinox, not solstice.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.