Category: reason

A new report released this week from the Bureau
of Justice Statistics indicates that slightly more than
three-quarters of released prisoners will end up arrested again
within five years.

The report has not gotten a whole lot of attention, though
Caitlin Dickson delves into the stats over at The Daily
Beast and tries to draw out some meaning. After noting that
rearrest doesn’t mean these people end up back in prison (that
number is much more modest, less than 30 percent),
she spoke with some college experts:

CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Deborah
Koetzle … hopes that the drastic numbers will spark more
conversation about the need for rehabilitation and re-entry
programs to combat recidivism.

“In a lot of ways we set people up because we put them in
prisons, which are are coercive, violent environments that can have
psychological impacts, and when they come out we put up a lot of
barriers,” Koetzle told The Daily Beast. “We make it difficult for
them to get jobs, to find housing. We put them back in an
environment where there’s a lot of temptations without a lot of
support.”

Koetzle argues that most correctional facilities are not
equipped with the types of psychological or substance abuse
treatment programs many inmates need, making it unsurprising when
people come home and get into trouble again.

“We spend a lot of money incarcerating people and it’s not a
very efficient way of doing things unless we’re providing
treatment,” Koetzle said. “We should to look at these figures and
think, there is a reason for this. We need to do a better job.”

Having lived in and run a newspaper in a small
town for a decade and having watched regular “probation sweeps”
from law enforcement agencies looking for any reason to drag
ex-offenders back to jail, I immediately wondered exactly what
kinds of crimes were getting these people rearrested. I thumbed
through the full 31-page
report (pdf) and found what I was looking further in. Fully a
quarter of rearrests included probation or parole violations. More
than 38 percent were rearrested for drug-related violations. The
chart on the right shows the distribution of charges for
recidivists.

Because arrests may involve several different charges, the
totals add up to more than 100 percent and we can’t really
determine the number of people arrested for “public order” or
probation violations who were also charged with violent or property
crimes from the chart. We can see, though, that the majority of
rearrests involve these public order violations, the greatest
percentage falling under the “other” category. The report
classifies these crimes as “those that violate the peace or order
of the community or threaten the public health or safety through
unacceptable conduct, interference with governmental authority, or
the violation of civil rights or liberties. The category also
includes probation or parole violation, escape, obstruction of
justice, court offenses, nonviolent sex offenses, commercialized
vice, family offenses, liquor law violations, bribery, invasion of
privacy, disorderly conduct, contributing to the delinquency of a
minor, and other miscellaneous and unspecified categories.”

What does it say about our criminal justice system when only 28
percent of our repeat criminals are committing violent crimes, only
38 percent are committing property crimes, but 40 percent of them
are falling in this catch-all category of “other” crimes that are
so extensive that even a report full of statistics for recidivism
isn’t able to account for them all?

One hundred and fifty American
paratroopers from the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat
Team landed in Poland today and an additional 450 soldiers are
set to arrive and begin conducting military exercises in Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania by next Monday.

“It’s a very tangible representation of our commitment to our
security obligations in Europe, and the message is to the people of
those countries and to the alliance that we do take it seriously,”

said Defense Department Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby.
“We’re looking at trying to keep this rotational presence
persistent throughout the rest of this year.”

According to Politico, the White House is considering
piling on even more sanctions against Russia for its role in
destabilizing Ukraine. 

A group of diplomats including Secretary of State John Kerry met
in Geneva last week and hammered out an agreement to “de-escalate”
the crisis in Ukraine. Six days later, the situation has only
gotten worse.

Yesterday, a Ukrainian politician, Vladimir Rybak, and another
man were found dead near the separatist-occupied city of Sloviansk.
The Ukrainian government alleges that
separatists “tortured to death” the two men, prompting
the government to resume the “anti-terrorist” operation it was
conducting before the Geneva agreement.

And, there’s a growing list of people being taken hostage by
militant separatists. Simon Ostrovosky, an American journalist with
Vice was briefly
detained after a press conference with a self-proclaimed
“people’s mayor” of Sloviansk.

Several pro-Russian separatist leaders have previously said that
they will not back down until there is a referendum on the
secession of eastern regions of Ukraine.

Read more Reason coverage of Ukraine here.

Over at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg takes
a tour through Hollywood’s pre-Code era, recommending movies
left and right—some of them because they’re good, some of them
because they’re weird and interesting even if they aren’t exactly
“good” in any normal aesthetic sense. To give you the flavor,
here’s her list of “Less Well-Known Remakes”:

The Letter, 1929—SLUTTIER
THAN THE BETTE DAVIS REMAKE.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1931—SLUTTIER
THAN THE SPENCER TRACY REMAKE.

Mädchen in Uniform, 1931—LESBIANER THAN
THE 1970S REMAKE.

The Maltese Falcon, 1931—GAYER AND
SLUTTIER THAN THE HUMPHREY BOGART REMAKE (Obviously not as
good, though. I mean, it doesn’t ask us to believe that
Mary Astor is a femme fatale who has had sex, so that gives it a
leg up on the John Huston version, but still. Only worth watching
as a comparison to the classic. And I don’t think being as overt
about sexual matters makes much of a difference—it’s still
incredibly clear that Bogart and Astor bone, that Joel
Cairo is super-mega gay, and that Gutman is giving it to poor
Wilmer in the 1941 remake.)

The Broadway Melody, 1929—Really, really
bad production values, but a lot of fun if you’re a Singin’ in
the Rain completist and want to hear the full version of “The
Wedding of the Painted Doll.”

The pre-Code era came to an end for a few reasons, the most
underappreciated of which is the threat of federal censorship.
Thomas Doherty described that process in this
classic Reason article (and I’ve touched on the topic a
time
or two
myself); it’s a still-relevant lesson in the ways busybodies can
clamp down on eccentric creativity.

For more on this chapter of Hollywood history, check out
Doherty’s book
Pre-Code Hollywood, which is a great read. And since I
was writing about the Army-McCarthy hearings
yesterday, lemme add that one of the best discussions I’ve seen
of that soap opera is in another Doherty book,
Cold War, Cool Medium. Check that one out too.

[Via
bOING bOING.]

It’s always a bit entertaining to watch misguided social media
moves backfire. But there’s a particular poetic justice when the
moves are made by conceiveable villains like politicians or J.P.
Morgan or…the New
York City Police Department (NYPD). On Tuesday, the @NYPDnews
asked people on Twitter to post photos of themselves with
officers, using the hashtag #MyNYPD. You can probably imagine how
this went …. 

After a few friendly posts, the response quickly shifted to
folks using the #MyNYPD
hashtag to highlight police brutality and abuse. 

@MoreAndAgain: You might not have known this, but the NYPD
can help you with that kink in your neck. #MyNYPD

@OCongress:
50 years of #NYPD brutality on minority youth. Bet you won’t
feature this on your Facebook. #myNYPD @NYPDnews

NYPD Deputy Chief Kim Y. Royster tried to put a positive spin on
things. “The NYPD is creating new ways to communicate effectively
with the community,” she said in a short statement. “Twitter
provides an open forum for an uncensored exchange and this is an
open dialogue good for our city.”  

@TORYRVGXR: No
problem, I have a photo wit 4! RT @NYPDnews Do you have a photo w/
a member of the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD

For a while on Tuesday the #MyNYPD hashtag was among the top 10
trending topics on Twitter, not just for New York City but around
the world, according to
The New York Times. 

@NYSpanish: The
way they are trained to twist your neck!! : This lady #MyNYPD is
stronger than Superman

An unnamed “law enforcement source”
told the New York Post that the department
didn’t think it through, because “who uses Twitter? The younger
generation who have had bad interactions with the Police
Department.” Yes, clearly only those pesky millenials have had bad
run-ins with the cops … 

@CassandraRules: How
about featuring this one of the #NYPD with the 84yo man they
brutalized for jay walking? #myNYPD @NYPDnews

@OccupySPb: @OccupyWallStNYC
Arresting the old man for writing “Peace to the World” against
Russian invasion in Ukraine #MyNYPD 

When liberals and conservatives argue they
often talk past each other, deploying arguments that seem like
winning ones to them but that the other side views as irrelevant or
unimportant. So the Cato Institute has done a great service by
filing a brief in Virginia’s gay marriage case that makes a
conservative argument for the liberal position. What’s the
argument? In short, writes A. Barton Hinkle, the Constitution’s
Equal Protection Clause demands equal treatment for same-sex
couples.

View this article.

Neil Patrick Harris hurls himself into the title
role in the new Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry
Inch, which opened last night at the Belasco Theatre in New
York City on West 44^th Street. As the “internationally
ignored song stylist” Hedwig—also an intersexual train wreck—he
flounces across the stage in wild spangly drag-wear, high-kicking
his gold platform boots, wisecracking through a face full of
glittery makeup. He also, writes Kurt Loder. wears a big feathery
Farrah Fawcett-style wig very well.

View this article.

• U.S. troops arrived in
  Poland for multi-country military exercises scheduled after the
  Russian annexation of Crimea. An American journalist with
  
  Vice, meanwhile, is being held hostage by pro-Russian
  forces in eastern Ukraine.
• President Obama’s attempt at an “Asia pivot” received a
  response from China in
  the way of a massive military buildup.
• A million dollars in bonuses have been awarded by the
  Internal Revenue Service to employees who owe back taxes.
• A study by
  Verizon found that 34 percent of all data breaches in the
  public sector are due to “miscellaneous error.”
• Cheerleaders for the
  Buffalo Bills are suing the team over labor practices. They
  allege micro-management included directions on how they should wash
  their “intimate areas” and a “jiggle test” to evaluate their
  “physique.”
• Data collected by the Comprehensive
  Test Ban Treaty Organization reveals 26 major explosions on
  Earth since 2000, all caused by asteroids and not clandestine
  atomic bomb tests. 

 

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Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has a sharp column up
at
USA Today. It’s about out-of-control administrators who
outnumber full-time faculty at most colleges and universities and
are largely responsible for the climate of close-mindedness and
repressive policies. Reynolds runs through several recent,
high-profile examples of Dean Wormer-level stupidity
before 

In his book, The Fall of the Faculty, Johns
Hopkins Professor Benjamin Ginsberg talks about the
profusion of “deanlets” that has overtaken higher education. But
it’s even worse when those deanlets not only eat up the substance
of institutions, but also command armed force. It’s extremely
doubtful that any outside law enforcement agency would have
responded to any of the “threats” listed above, but campus police,
called in by insecure deanlets, have little choice. This sort of
behavior, though, is unfair, bad for morale, and likely to spur
expensive and embarrassing litigation…. 

Full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty.
And when times get tough, schools have a disturbing tendency to
shrink faculty numbers while keeping
administrators on the payroll. Teaching gets done by
low-paid, nontenured adjuncts, but nobody ever heard of an “adjunct
administrator.”… 

 With college
enrollment falling and budgets
under pressure, legislatures, donors and alumni will
be looking at ways to restructure schools in the future. The
profusion of self-important deanlets and the abuse of campus police
forces ought to be looked at as part of this process. It’s just
another symptom of the now-imploding higher education
bubble.

More here.

I support the move toward “adjunct administrators.” It
used to be widely understood that a college or university travels
on the quality of its faculty, not its climbing walls, dining
halls, or number of administrators. The University
of Arkansas’ Jay Greene found that between 1993 and 2007, the
number of administrators at research universities grew by 39
percent per 100 students while the number of employees directly
involved in research and teaching grew by just 18 percent. More
damning, spending on administration grew 50 percent faster than
spending on instruction. Administrators don’t just add to the
open-air prison climate on many campuses, they directly add to
rising costs.

Reason TV‘s Alexis Garcia interviewed Reynolds a
few weeks back about his important book The New School and
many other topics. Watch below or
go here for downloadable versions, full text, and
links.

Earlier this month, University of Northern Carolina senior Liz
Hawryluk took offense when a DJ at a local spot, Fitzgerald’s Irish
Pub, began playing Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”—a song feminists
have blasted as pro-rape because of such lyrics as “I know you want
it.” Hawryluk marched into the DJ’s box and demanded that the song
be stopped; in response, she claims she was ejected from the pub
(according to the management, she was merely asked to leave the
DJ’s area). Unbowed, she went on the social media warpath and found
numerous supporters who mobbed the pub’s Facebook page. A few days
later, a spokeswoman for Fitzgerald’s not only issued a public
apology to Hawryluk but pledged that the popular song was forever
banned from Fitzgerald’s, along with the visiting DJ who had played
it.

The feminist crusade against “the rape culture,” whose
aggressive zealotry has long eclipsed what positive contributions
it may have made to tackling real problems, writes Cathy Young, has
now descended into outright silliness with a war on a hit song. But
it’s silliness with a nasty authoritarian edge.

View this article.

Last week Michael Bloomberg told The
New York Times he had secured a spot in heaven through
his efforts to restrict guns, soda, and cigarettes. If so, asks
Jacob Sullum, “does that mean I am going to hell?” Sullum says he
and the former New York City mayor do not agree about much,
especially when it comes to Bloomberg’s two biggest passions, both
of which involve restricting people’s freedom for no legitimate
reason.

View this article.