The Biggest Overlooked Trend of 2013

And this is a real positive trend, for a change --

"After three decades of steep increases in total incarceration and incarceration rates, the last three years have seen the total incarcerated population in the United States decrease, as well as the incarceration rate. At the same time, some disparities between blacks and whites in the criminal justice system have also been reduced. The politics of crime, which used to know only one register—“tough on crime”—and used to be dominated by mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws and elimination of parole, has changed. In recent years, half of all U.S. states have enacted legislation designed to reduce reliance on incarceration, shorten sentences, reintroduce parole and generally shrink the size of our incarcerated population. We still lead the world in incarceration rates, but these trends are encouraging. Moreover, none of these changes has led to any significant increase in crime. We can, it turns out, be smart on crime." - David Cole, Professor, Georgetown University Law School 

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/12/overlooked-trends-of-2013-101491.html#ixzz2pwfiqjhW

Tweet    Follow @johnmpoole

North Florida's rural economy: Tourism, Farming, Prisons

Tourism, farming, and prisons? What's wrong with this picture? Sad to say, it's not just Florida, most U.S. states have used "incarceration" as a "jobs program" in rural areas where good jobs are hard to come by--no wonder the U.S. today has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Shameful.

Tourism, farming, prisons power North Florida's rural economy | Gainesville.com: "Tourism is a big business in Florida, employing more than a million people, accounting for a fifth of state sales tax revenues and drawing $67.2 billion in tourist spending annually, according to Visit Florida. But agriculture is right behind with nearly a million jobs, $20 million in tax revenues and the creation of $67.3 billion in wages and benefits, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The combination of tourism and agriculture — along with state prisons — is what powers North Florida." 

When you read that prisons "power" a region's economy--one thing for sure--you don't want to live there.

Tweet    Follow @johnmpoole

The Parsimony Principle - How "justice" becomes unjust

The following is the most profound thing I have ever read in the legal/judicial subject area, and I just came across it recently:

Occam's razor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Penal ethics - In penal theory and the philosophy of punishment, parsimony refers specifically to taking care in the distribution of punishment in order to avoid excessive punishment. In the utilitarian approach to the philosophy of punishment, Jeremy Bentham's "parsimony principle" states that any punishment greater than is required to achieve its end is unjust. The concept is related but not identical to the legal concept of proportionality. Parsimony is a key consideration of the modern restorative justice, and is a component of utilitarian approaches to punishment, as well as the prison abolition movement. Bentham believed that true parsimony would require punishment to be individualised to take account of the sensibility of the individual—an individual more sensitive to punishment should be given a proportionately lesser one, since otherwise needless pain would be inflicted. Later utilitarian writers have tended to abandon this idea, in large part due to the impracticality of determining each alleged criminal's relative sensitivity to specific punishments."

By any civilized standard, and in view of the parsimony principle above, the American "justice system" has become unjust -- see Incarceration in the United States.

Tweet    Follow @johnmpoole