On Feb. 26, 1963, Ben Lewis, the first Black elected official from Chicago’s West Side, won what was set to be his second full term on the City Council -- perhaps next stop Congress. Two days later, Lewis was found shot to death in his ward office.
By 2010, the evidence about how interrogations can go wrong had become so compelling that Kassin and several colleagues from the U.S. and U.K. wrote an American Psychological Association white paper warning about the risk of coercion.
Freedom of speech vs freedom from fear?
This new book highlights the technology at the heart of what reviewer Jill Leovy calls "surveillance-driven policing," and the heightened dangers this new set of law enforcement tools pose to democracy.
Money laundering "cleans" money of its criminal origins. But how does it actually work?
If anyone doubted Black Americans still today suffer unfairly from incarceration rates and other horrific inequities out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, the case was closed by Michelle Alexander in her masterly The New Jim Crow (2010). Comes now James Forman Jr., to argue convincingly that key sections of the black community themselves abetted the criminalizing of black youths in a misguided effort to make so-called law and order work for them.
Analyzing offender data on roughly 1.5 million US prisoners, researchers from the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that for one in four, drug treatment, community service, probation or a fine would have been a more effective sentence than incarceration. The study also concluded that another 14% of incarcerated individuals had already served an appropriate sentence. These people could be released within the next year “with little risk to public safety”.
Black Lives Matter activists are concerned about intra-racial violence. But they don’t see police and prisons as the solution.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions. Police alone cannot stop urban violence; it requires action on every front. Rising poverty in the nation's capital has been experienced primarily by black and Latino residents. The average white family's income is $110,757, according to Census estimates. For black families it's $39,081. There's a growing income gap nationwide. This kind of disparity breeds hopelessness, which drives people to acts of desperation and violence.
The latest findings from the FBI provide further evidence that states can reduce incarceration rates without compromising public safety.
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