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August 6, 2012
In the midst of the ongoing Chick-fil-A mess, now seems like a good time to take a look at hate and bias crime. If you haven’t already read it, you really should start with last week’s post about Chick-fil-A. It deals with some of the free speech issues. To reiterate: hate speech is generally, […]
August 3, 2012
Even vegetarians who don’t own televisions and live on Mars are, by now, aware of the Chick-fil-A brouhaha. Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick-fil-A, made public, anti-gay statements. And then it turned out that Chick-fil-A funnels buckets of money to anti-gay organizations. The fight since then is about two things: gay rights and free speech. Let’s […]
August 2, 2012
Apparently, the Supreme Court has some sense when it comes to DNA testing. Maybe. We hope. Because, no foolin’, super serial you guys, DNA is the future of criminal justice. We can absolutely transform our entire criminal justice system with some policy changes on DNA. Chief Justice Roberts issued an opinion on Monday that effectively […]
August 1, 2012
I’ll admit: I got sucked in to some sensationalist coverage about changes to school discipline. Alarmist “journalists” described the new policies as imposing racially based quotas on school discipline. I didn’t read carefully – it was just a passing skim on my smartphone – and not everything that shows up in the google news reader […]
July 26, 2012
“Words can get you killed,” explains Ameena. She is one of the violence interrupters who walk through Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. She and the other interrupters walk through a world that is as foreign to middle class America as any passport destination. They cool down arguments, insert themselves into brewing storms. Billed as a documentary […]
July 24, 2012
Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, has been a phenomenal success in a way that few academic works ever achieve. It has had a steady presence on the arbiter of successful books – the New York Times bestseller list. Why is it so popular? Because it tells the […]
July 23, 2012
Conspicuously absent from all of the Muffingate coverage was a basic understanding of how hotel conference costs work. Hotels negotiate Package deals that typically include room blocks, catering, and meeting room space. Paying for these features a la carte is just not done. So when Laurie Robinson handed down the food and beverage prohibition, agencies […]
July 19, 2012
At the recent NIJ conference, Joan Petersilia served as the keynote speaker. Petersilia’s work is well known throughout the field, and her long experience as a criminologist makes her uniquely suited to comment on the issue of reducing incarceration. Petersilia, who was given free reign in her discussion topic, contextualized the current move to reduce […]
August 7, 2012
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