Here’s What’s Bringing Bernie Sanders Voters to the Polls in Nevada

Early results from today’s Democratic caucus in Nevada show a very close race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, in a state that the Clinton campaign had long considered a sure thing. 

But Sanders has pulled the race close to a tie thanks to a wave of support and backing from labor groups like National Nurses United, which endorsed Sanders all the way back in August. 

The nurses union has pretty high expectations of Sanders. Here’s a picture of a flyer the group is apparently passing around in Nevada today making the case for their preferred candidate (via Nancy Cordes of CBS News). 

It’s certainly ambitious.

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Sex-Trafficking Arrests on the Rise, But Conviction Numbers Are Still Small

In the first part of a new Department of Justice-funded study, we learned that state laws ratcheting up criminal penalties for human trafficking have no impact on the number of trafficking arrests or prosecutions in the state. The second part of the study looks at what happens to those who are arrested under state or federal anti-trafficking laws—a population that included 3,225 people from 2003 through 2012. 

Sex-Trafficking Arrests Rise While Labor-Trafficking Arrests Fall

During this period, researchers noted “a strong upward trend in the number of arrests for human trafficking” in the U.S., with arrests for sex trafficking far outnumbering labor-trafficking arrests. The combined number of federal and state arrests for (all) human-trafficking offenses skyrocketed over this period, from 41 arrests in 2003 to 686 in 2012.

Labor-trafficking arrests actually rose and then dropped dramatically over these years, according to researchers, going from nine arrests in 2003 to a peak of 88 arrests in 2009, then down to just 24 by 2012. The number of sex-trafficking arrests, however, jumped from 17 in 2003 to 226 arrests in 2009 and then continued steadily upward, with 567 arrests for sex-trafficking offenses in 2012.

Arrests Far Outpace Prosecutions

Throughout the study period, the number of arrests for human trafficking of any kind far outpaced the number of human trafficking prosecutions by state or federal law enforcement.

Of the 686 trafficking suspects arrested in 2012, for instance, 52 percent had all trafficking-related charges dismissed prior to adjudication. Of the 579 people arrested in 2010, 48 percent had all trafficking-related charges dismissed. In 2008, it was 68 percent.

In 2003, just seven human trafficking suspects wound up prosecuted on human trafficking charges, although 90 percent were ultimately prosecuted for some other offense. 

State Data on Traffickers

Researchers looked in more detail at state-level human trafficking suspects from 2003 through 2012. To identify these suspects, they relied on their own searching and a survey of state attorneys general, 90 percent of whom replied. A majority of the attorneys general reported that no human trafficking cases had been prosecuted in their state. 

Ultimately, 589 people charged with a state human trafficking offense were identified, representing about 18 percent of all human trafficking charges over the 10-year period. 

Researchers were able to obtain court records for 479 suspects. Fully half had been charged under a state law regarding both labor and commercial sex, and most of the others were charged under sex-trafficking specific statutes. Only two percent were charged under a law specifically addressing labor trafficking. Thirty-three percent of the cases involved suspects charged under laws specific to sex trafficking of a minor, while 14 percent were under laws regarding sex trafficking of an adult. 

More than three-quarters of all trafficking suspects were male, while 21 percent of those arrested were female. The gender imbalance was slightly more pronounced for labor trafficking, where just 10 percent of suspects were women. The average age of all suspects was 32 years old. 

After the Arrest

In the 409 cases where final info was available, 52 percent of those arrested on state human trafficking charges subsequently saw these charges dismissed. Thirty-five percent of state suspects ultimately pled guilty, while 13 percent took their chances at trial. 

Broken down by charge: 

  • Labor-trafficking specific charges—a group that included just 10 suspects—were dismissed 70 percent of the time. Two suspects pled guilty, and one was found guilty at trial. 
  • General human trafficking charges—a group that included 224 suspects—were dismissed 63 percent of the time. Twenty-seven of these cases resulted in guilty pleas. Seven percent of suspects were found guilty at trial, and three percent were found not guilty at trial. 
  • Juvenile sex-trafficking charges—a group that included 150 suspects—were dismissed 48 percent of the time. Thirty-nine percent of suspects plead guilty, 11 percent were found guilty at trial, and two percent were found not guilty at trial. 
  • Sex-trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion charges—a group that included 51 suspects—were dismissed 41 percent of the time. Thirty-five percent of suspects plead guilty, 18 percent were found guilty at trial, and six percent were found not guilty at trial. 

“When cases do go to trial,” researchers noted, “defendants face significantly more severe penalties than when cases are adjudicated through a guilty plea.”

The average prison sentence for those who plead guilty to any human trafficking offense was about five years and four months, but the average sentence for those found guilty at trial was nearly 23 years (both totals include time sentenced under human trafficking and any corresponding charges). Those who plead guilty to sex trafficking a minor got an average of four years and six months in prison, while those found guilty at trial were sentenced to an average of 29 years.

In cases where the information was available, 67 percent of human trafficking suspects were represented by public defenders. Those represented by public counsel were more likely to be convicted on trafficking charges than those who had private counsel (47 percent versus 34 percent). 

Pimping and Prostitution Charges Common

Although human trafficking suspects were convicted of trafficking charges just 45 percent of the time, they were convicted of some state crime in 72 percent of the cases studied. This is because human trafficking suspects were initially charged with an average of five state offenses. The offenses most likely to accompany human-trafficking charges were pimping and prostitution. 

Forty-one percent of those charged with human trafficking were also charged with pimping. Thirty-two percent were also charged with prostitution, and 29 percent were also charged with sexual abuse. 

Other accompanying charges included kidnapping (in 18 percent of cases), compelling prostitution (8 percent) assault (six percent), false imprisonment (5 percent), conspiracy (5 percent), child abuse (3 percent), and drug possession or distribution (3 percent).

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How to Fix ‘One of the Most Segregated Public School Systems In the Nation’

International Charter School of New York |||

New York is “home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation,” noted an influential 2014 report from UCLA’s Civil Right’s Project. New York City’s Department of Education, which serves about a million kids, has been experimenting with different strategies to bring more diversity to its system, including a new pilot program that will allow seven schools to set aside seats for English learners, low-income students, and children whose families are on welfare.

A story about the new program that appeared in The New York Times on Tuesday included the mixed reaction of one parent who fears these set asides could take a spot away from his child:

The idea of keeping the school diverse “totally jibes with my politics,” said Mark Schwartz, the owner of a liquor store in Prospect-Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn, who also has a kindergartner at the school. “But what if it means we lose out on this opportunity?”

What the story doesn’t mention is that there are a growing number of charter schools that have made diversity part of their core mission. These schools specifically recruit and weight their admissions processes to ensure a mix of kids from different backgrounds. An advantage to this approach is that charters aren’t assigned to a geographical area, so parents who moved to a neighborhood for access to a local school are less likely to feel resentful.

And if parents make the choice to send their kids to diverse schools, they’re more likely to be on board with that mission. “Diversity is something that everybody should value, but if you force parents to value it then they don’t,” says Matthew Levey, who’s the executive director of the International Charter School of New York (ICS), which specifically targets diversity in its recruitment process.

I recently profiled ICS for Reason TV and looked at how rezoning traditional district schools to promote diversity can stoke resentment. Watch that video below:

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Did Twitter’s Orwellian ‘Trust and Safety’ Council Get Robert Stacy McCain Banned?

Robert Stacy McCainRemember a few days ago, when Twitter elevated anti-GamerGate leader Anita Sarkeesian to its “Trust and Safety Council,” an imperious-sounding committee with Robespierre-esque powers to police discussion on the social media platform? The goal, according to Twitter, was to make it easier for users to express themselves freely and safely.

One user who won’t be expressing himself at all is Robert Stacy McCain: a conservative journalist, blogger, self-described anti-feminist, and prominent GamerGate figure who was banned from Twitter on Friday night. Clicking on his page redirects to this “account suspended” message that encourages users to re-read Twitter’s policies on abusive behavior.

But as with other Twitter suspensions, it’s impossible to tell which specific policy McCain is accused of violating, or which of his tweets were flagged as abusive. McCain is an animated and uncompromising opponent of leftist views. His statements are extreme, and I don’t often agree with them, but I would be reluctant to label them as abusive (at least the ones I’ve seen).

In a response to his banning that is in many ways emblematic of his worldview and behavior, McCain explicitly blamed Sarkeesian and her crew:

This is why you can’t even state FACTS about these people on Twitter without being accused of “harassment.” Facts are harassment and truth is hate and Oceania Has Always Been at War With Eastasia. Sarkesian is anti-freedom because she is anti-truth. She and her little squad of soi-disant “feminists” are just hustlers looking for a free ride, and the only way they can get that ride is to silence anyone who speaks the truth about them and calls them out as the cheap bullshit artists they actually are.

McCain did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He concluded the above post with a statement, “fuck ‘social justice’.” He despises leftists and feminists, and doesn’t hold back his hate.

But there’s a difference between using strong language to disagree with people, and abusing them. If McCain has crossed that line, I’m not aware of it.

Twitter is a private company, of course, and if it wants to outlaw strong language, it can. In fact, it’s well within its rights to have one set of rules for Robert Stacy McCain, and another set of rules for everyone else. It’s allowed to ban McCain for no reason other than its bosses don’t like him. If Twitter wants to take a side in the online culture war, it can. It can confiscate Milo Yiannopoulos’s blue checkmark. This is not about the First Amendment.

But if that’s what Twitter is doing, it’s certainly not being honest about it—and its many, many customers who value the ethos of free speech would certainly object. In constructing its Trust and Safety Council, the social media platform explicitly claimed it was trying to strike a balance between allowing free speech and prohibiting harassment and abuse. But its selections for this committee were entirely one-sided—there’s not a single uncompromising anti-censorship figure or group on the list. It looks like Twitter gave control of its harassment policy to a bunch of ideologues, and now their enemies are being excluded from the platform.

Banning McCain wasn’t even Twitter’s only questionable activity last night. It seems that Twitter also suppressed the pro-McCain hashtag subsequently created by his supporters, #FreeStacy. After it started trending, Twitter made it so that the hashtag wouldn’t autocomplete when people typed it. “The #FreeStacy tag would be in the US top 10 now, but Twitter has scrubbed it,” wrote Popehat’s Patrick on Twitter.

Another Popehat author, Ken White, has been skeptical that Twitter’s censorship of certain conservative figures is actually coming from a place of malice. In response to Yiannopoulos getting de-verified, he wrote:

Big companies, even when run by ideologues, tend to make decisions like big companies, not like individuals. The decision-making looks less cinematic and more cynical. The focus tends to be on branding, but mostly on money-making, avoidance of unpleasantness, reduction of cost, and ease of use. Twitter’s line employees are almost certainly disproportionately liberal, and by assigning command-and-control of individual account decisions to them, the impact is probably that evaluations of abuse complaints will have a liberal bias. Similarly, if you make a corporate decision to police harassment (or at least pretend to), and the people doing the policing have a bias, then the results will have a bias. But that’s not the same as a deliberate decision to take sides; it’s a cost-driven, practicality-driven decision.

If Twitter wants to go full-on Ministry of Truth, it can. But its user have the right to raise hell about it—to call out the platform for punishing dissident alt-right figures while empowering their adversaries. I’m not convinced that’s what’s happening, but the exclusion of Robert Stacy McCain—a mere 10 days after the Trust and Safety council came into existence—is cause for concern.

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If You Don’t Approve of Success Academy, Don’t Send Your Kids There

Success Academy |||A secretly recorded minute-long video clip of a Success Academy teacher scolding her first-grade students led to a public outcry when it was published in The New York Times last week, but will the incident result in fewer parents vying to get their kids into one of the network’s 34 schools? I doubt it.

Success Academy schools are charters, so parents get to decide if they want to apply or take their business elsewhere. And charters aren’t part of the traditional public school district, which helps insulate them from the kind of district-level interference that can be easily provoked by attention-grabbing articles in The New York Times.

The charter network’s founder and CEO, Eva Moskowitz, says that the video clip, in which a first-grade teacher scolds her class and rips up a student’s work, depicted an isolated moment. Parents interviewed by the Times described the teacher as unusually loving and nurturing towards her students.

“Nobody would ever argue the video displayed that teacher’s finest hour, but she’s there, swinging away, trying to get the kids to strain for something a bit higher and more rigorous,” writes Belinda Luscombe in Time. “But is misdirected passion worse than teaching by the books?”

The answer, Luscombe concludes, is that the approach may be right for some kids but not others. My guess is that Success Academy will continue to get at least five applications for every kindergarten spot because there are enough parents who think that its intense approach to teaching and learning is right for their kids.

How about all the rest? In a column at The Seventy Four, Derrell Bradford, who’s the executive director of the New York Campaign for Achievement Now (NYCAN) and a Success Academy board member, has some sage advice for the “haters:”

If you want Success, or other “no excuses” schools to go away because you think your own brand of education is superior, because you don’t respect that other parents like it and seek it out, you don’t value the structure, or you want your kid to be a grass-fed open-range child, then you just have to, counterintuitively, do one thing: open more charter schools.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie recently sat down with Robert Pondiscio from The Thomas B. Fordham Institute to discuss how Success Academy and other charters are helping to dispel the myth that every schools must be designed to serve every type of kid. Click below to watch:

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The FDA’s Menu-Labeling Mandate Should Be Trashed: New at Reason

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 266-144 in favor of the Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act of 2015. The bill now heads to the Senate for consideration.

If passed, the bill would amend a host of menu-labeling rules that were adopted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as Obamacare).

While the Obamacare labeling mandate had been envisioned to apply to chain restaurants with 20 or more locations in the United States, including McDonald’s, TGI Fridays, and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, the FDA rules cast a far wider net. Those rules the FDA drafted cover seemingly every sort of chain that serves food. As Baylen Linnekin explains, the implementation of the rules has been a complete mess. Congress should just scrap it entirely, but it won’t.

View this article.

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Why Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Are the Equivalent of “Sick Building Syndrome”

Former political consultant and current ABC News analyst Matthew Dowd writes that the two leading candidates in the GOP and Democratic primaries are awful—and setting up a major transformation in partisan politics.

Is what Donald Trump says and how he acts where the vast majority of our country wants to go? Of course not. He is a bully, and appeals to some of the worst instincts of America.

But he has highlighted and is accelerating the disruption our politics so badly needs. Should he be president of the United States? I certainly hope not, but if his emergence helps destroy the sick building so many of us try to enter, then he has served a valuable purpose.

Is turning to Hillary and the status quo where the country wants to go? I don’t think so because the majority of American’s distrust and dislike her and she would be one of the most polarizing people ever elected, if she were to win. But she has served a laudable purpose in helping give rise to incredible disruption on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Dowd likens the current situation with the major parties to “sick building syndrome.” That is, each party is a toxic environment that can’t be salvaged or rehabbed, only destroyed:

The structure and the building of our politics are sick. You can be a very healthy person and if you walk into a house that is mold-ridden with no circulation and has lead pipes, you are going to get sick. The question becomes how sick do you get.

Good and healthy people can’t go in a sick building and hope to paint the walls and think the building is better. It needs to be torn down. Good, well-intentioned people will become ill entering into the status quo of our political system, and it is time we admit that….

It is just time we quit thinking we can fix the problem from within the current party structure. It may take some time, and will take much effort and creativity, but we, as a nation, are worth it.

Read the whole thing here.

Dowd is short on specifics in his op-ed. Part of that is because of the short length of the format but part of it is what he openly admits: He doesn’t have set answers. But as the co-author (with Matt Welch) of a book called The Declaration of Independents, I heartily agree with Dowd that the Democratic and Republican Parties, in their current configurations, are salvageable. They have painted themselves into bizarre ideological corners where each is at or near historic lows in terms of voter identification and each looks likely to nominate a presidential candidate who is genuinely unappealing to most Americans (and that’s whether it’s Trump or Cruz for the GOP, or Clinton or Sanders for the Dems).

Call it epistemic closure or echo-chamber syndrome or whatever you want, but the major parties have rigged their games so perfectly that they speak only to smaller and smaller groups of hard-core zealots who are further and further removed from what any of us actually give a shit about. Hence, Republicans are constantly harping on illegal immigrants (who are actually leaving the country due to our lackluster economy) and the $500 million in federal funding for Planned Parenthood (money that can’t be spent on abortion-related services) and the Democrats can’t stop yapping about income inequality and, well, Planned Parenthood. Neither party seems capable or willing to talk about actually putting forth agendas that might allow the economy to restart itself in a big way, or how to fix entitlement spending, or have a serious conversation about foreign policy.

As Dowd points out, Trump and Clinton represent not the start of anything new or exciting in politics. They are instead the pothole-ridden cul de sac of the the past 15 years or more of instensely partisan and genuinely awful governing.

The challenge for libertarians—who bear no responsibility for the debacles of either the Bush or Obama years—is how to take advantage of our surging popularity (see Gallup on this!) among voters and parlay into party platforms that promise less but deliver results effectively, and in a way that increases not just economic growth but cultural and social freedom. Which is of course is what this website is all about.

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Death of the Anti-War Candidate

I have a student in one of my classes who told me the other day he had to finish the semester early because he was being deployed to Afghanistan for a second time. The class is about the history of American journalism, so the final lectures cover the media’s role in pushing wars like the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, and even the war on drugs. I hope I get to cover that with him before he leaves.

The war to which the student is being sent ended in 2014, according to President Obama, who said the Afghanistan effort was over even though he had left 10,000 U.S. troops there. The withdrawal of those troops has been postponed a number of times, often at the behest of the weak Afghan government.

In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned on the idea that he would end the unpopular Iraq War and focus on prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, which he argued President Bush had ignored by starting a second war in Iraq. Today, the Obama administration has been engaged in the war in Afghanistan longer than the Bush administration prosecuted the Iraq War. There are few pronouncements anymore explaining why the U.S. is in Afghanistan, other than to train Afghan troops and support counterterrorism operations, the mission for many years now.

Obama launched his presidential campaign as one of the few candidates who had opposed the Iraq war from the beginning (he was a state senator representing Hyde Park in Chicago in 2003). The introduction of positions on the war in Afghanistan complicated the anti-war narrative, but did not dispel all his supporters of it, as Obama apologists argued when President Obama’s Afghanistan surge was being announced.

Of course there were authentically anti-war candidates in 2008, on the Democratic and Republican side. The most successful of them was Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R), who also ran in 2012, winning six state primaries. The anti-war candidates on the 2008 Democratic side, like Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, were relegated to the fringes quickly.

Paul’s position on non-intervention and war was unique among Republicans, whose foreign policy platform was captured in the 2000s entirely by philosophies of interventionism. In a 2007 debate, Ron Paul reminded his fellow candidates that George W. Bush ran in 2000 on a platform of “no nation building” and “no policing of the world.” There’s an even longer tradition of anti-war and non-interventionist sentiments on the right. Yet by the 2008 election, supporters of interventionism argued that “9/11 changed everything.”

Eight years later, the stalking horse of interventionists is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a terrorist group that metastasized out of terror groups like Al-Qaeda that were able to operate in the region in large part because of the instability and power vacuums the Iraq War created. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Ron Paul’s son, brought up this important critique in the 2016 election cycle, but dropped out after a poor showing in Iowa. Of the remaining candidates, the one who suggested he’d like to find out whether sand glowed by carpet bombing Iraq is trying to sell himself as least interventionist to non-interventionists.

Paul’s critique—the acknowledgement that interventionist U.S. foreign policy contributed to the rise of ISIS—is lost to most of the remaining Republican field because it includes an indictment of the policies of a Republican president.

Democrats aren’t as shy, and also have no shame. While Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have blamed the rise of ISIS on Bush policies, ISIS now operates in Libya as well, a country in chaos, one long crime against humanity. Libya was destabilized by a U.S.-led intervention under President Obama—one championed by Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, and which did not receive any kind of Congressional authorization in advance. Hillary Clinton has faced little criticism for her role in what’s happening in Libya today.

Bernie Sanders continues to use his no vote on the Iraq war, now 14-years-old, as an indicator of his foreign policy. Yet at debates he often finds himself agreeing with Clinton on foreign policy. In the last Democratic debate, Sanders engaged the idea of the unintended consequences of Clinton’s interventionist policies more directly than he ever had before. He talked about the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and how his replacement by the shah contributed to the 1979 Islamic revolution. He finally lambasted Clinton for boasting of her relationship with Henry Kissinger, who was Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and is a leading interventionist thinker in the foreign policy establishment.

Yet Sanders’ understanding of unintended consequences isn’t just limited to foreign policy (he never considers the unintended consequences of his economic proposals): it’s also limited within the foreign policy domain. At the same debate where he promised to “look very carefully about unintended consequences,” he endorsed the idea of taking a more aggressive stance vis a vis Russia and endorsed continuing U.S. involvement in the fight against ISIS.

At a previous debate, he called ISIS a “war for the soul of Islam,” supporting a campaign of Muslim troops on the ground supported by major powers including the U.S. That’s a position not far off from what many Republican candidates have said they support, although Republicans will usually refer to Arab troops, not Muslim troops. And Sanders’ formulation of the struggle against ISIS as having to do with “the soul of Islam” falls closer to the “call it radical Islam” rhetoric of Republican interventionists than the “ISIS isn’t Islamic” rhetoric of the Democratic interventionists.

Meanwhile, at the most recent Republican debate, in South Carolina, Donald Trump received among his loudest boos of the election cycle for pointing out that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, happened under George W. Bush’s watch. Trump has repeatedly trumpeted comments he made in 2003 calling the Iraq War a mistake, and gave the equivalent of the “Bush lied, people died” argument about the war, pointing out that the Bush administration said there were weapons of mass destruction but that there were no WMDs found.

But Donald Trump is no anti-war politician. In a recently uncovered 2002 interview, Trump was found to have supported the Iraq War. “I wish the first time it was done correctly,” he told radio host Howard Stern back then. Trump doesn’t necessarily oppose wars, he just thinks he can do a better job prosecuting them.

Most importantly, the critiques of the Bush and Obama-Clinton policies are incomplete without each other—both have contributed to regional instability that is now used to justify even more intervention. And both are responsible for normalizing (or, if you’re a pessimist, maintaining the normality of) pro-war politics in America. Four years ago, Glenn Greenwald pointed to polls that showed deep support among Democrats for the use of drones to kill suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens not given due process, and for keeping Guantanamo Bay open.

At the last Democratic debate in New Hampshire, Afghanistan got two mentions from the candidates. Sanders said it wouldn’t be possible to withdraw “tomorrow” and then pivoted to talking about Iraqi army gains over ISIS in that country. Clinton re-iterated Obama’s decision to keep troops longer at the request of the Afghan president, and argued any decision on withdrawal would have to consider how much the Afghan government “continues to need.” She even mentioned ISIS outposts in the country as a potential reason to stay longer.

There are no candidates left who can offer a substantive engagement of the effect of U.S. intervention on creating the conditions that are then used to justify even more intervention. It’s not an issue voters appear to care about—certainly not one they’ve appeared to press their candidates on. The occassional bromide that suggests some understanding of the role of interventionism in contributing to foreign policy problems from someone like Sanders or Trump is usually decontextualized and left unapplied to the kinds of decisions the remaining candidates might be asked to make in the future. Issues like U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen are almost completely absent from the debate.

The fate of former Sen. Jim Webb in the Democratic presidential race illustrates the damage done by the imposition of bipartisan support (rhetoric aside) for the actual workings of U.S. foreign policy. Webb was a critic of U.S. intervention in Iraq as well as Libya, and called for Congress to reclaim its role in decisions about war-making. He also happened to be an early proponent of criminal justice reform (in a way, the effort to limit the wars the U.S. wages on its own people). But at his only debate appearance, he defended the rights of poor and middle class people to defend themselves with guns, pointing to the hypocrisy of well-guarded elites pushing to abrogate the rights of everyday people. He eventually announced he was dropping out of the race, and the Democratic Party.

Democrats made a big deal out of issues of war and peace during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration has continued many of the same policies, and innovated new ones along the same ideological lines.

At that one Democratic debate with Jim Webb, the candidates were asked what enemy they were proudest of. Hillary Clinton mentioned Republicans. Webb mentioned an enemy soldier he had killed while serving in Vietnam. The crowd wasn’t amused. The line from Clinton indicating she considered her political opponents to be her greatest enemies got applause. A line that reminded the audience of what war on the ground actually means provoked discomfort.

Notably, Clinton, the candidate who laughed about the sodomy and killing of Col. Qaddafi at the tail end of the U.S. intervention in Libya. “We came, we saw, he died,” she joked, even as the Obama administration insisted officially that protecting the Libyan people, and not regime change, was the mission. It failed, and voters fail to care, content instead to accept any position coming from their partisan team because they’ve been convinced the other side is that much more awful, even as their foreign policy differences are increasingly only rhetorical.

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RIP: Harper Lee, DOJ Bosses Apple Around, Jeb Stumbles: P.M. Links

  • To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee has died. Her recently-released follow-up novel, Go Set a Watchman, is controversial—in part because it’s not clear she actually wrote it.
  • The Department of Justice filed a motion to compel Apple to give the FBI what it wants.
  • Student activism is taking a mental and emotional toll on some of the activists.
  • Trump supporters: Do you still stand with him now that you know he orders the fish delight from McDonald’s?
  • Williams College overrode its students and prevented them from bringing a conservative speaker to college.
  • God, the Jeb Bush campaign is pitiful.

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Here’s What We Actually Know About Human Trafficking In America

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice quietly released a report they had commissioned on “legislative, legal, and public opinions strategies that work” to combat human trafficking in America. What emerges from it is an interesting portrait of a solution in search of a crisis. 

The comprehensive report was conducted by political science professors Vanessa Bouche and Dana Wittmer, of Texas Christian University and Colorado College respectively, and Northeastern University criminology professor Amy Farrell. It’s divided into three parts: evaluating how state counter-trafficking laws impact human trafficking arrests and prosecutions; analyzing state-level human trafficking cases; and understanding public opinion on human trafficking. I’m going to highlight the key results from each section in a series of three blog posts, starting with the relationship between state counter-trafficking measures and trafficking arrests and prosecutions. 

Looking at data between 2003 and 2012, researchers identified 3,225 human trafficking suspects in America, including state and federal cases. As I’ll explore more in the next section, human-trafficking charges were dismissed in more than half of these cases, although nearly three-quarters eventually led to a conviction on some charges—generally offenses related to prostitution, pimping, and pandering. 

Regarding various types of state counter-trafficking laws, the measures most connected with an increase in human-trafficking arrests were those mandating the posting of the National Human-Trafficking Hotline Number in various public places. Posting the hotline was not, however, associated with an increase in trafficking prosecutions, suggesting that many of the “tips” provided to the hotline were insufficient or wrong. 

Laws creating state human-trafficking task forces were most associated with an increase in prosecutions of human trafficking suspects, on either human trafficking charges or for other criminal offenses. 

Though criminaliation-centered laws have been “the dominant legislative response” by states, there was no evidence that increased penalties were linked to an increase in arrests or prosecutions. 

Nonetheless, many states increased minimum and maximum penalties for human trafficking offenses between 2003-2012. As of 2012, almost all states had set mandatory minimum prison sentences for at least some human trafficking offenses; only 17 had none. (Since that time, states have continued to rack up penalties and introduce new mandatory minimums; see more here.) In general, penalties were most stringent for sex trafficking of a minor and least stringent for labor trafficking an adult.

In some states, the minimum penalty for human trafficking is 20 years in prison, while in others the maximum is just five to 10 years. The states with the harshest mandatory minimum were…

For sex-trafficking a minor: Alaska, Vermont, and Virginia (20 years); Louisiana, New York, and Tennessee (15 years)

For sex-trafficking an adult: Virginia (20 years); Alaska and New York (15 years); Ohio and Georgia (10 years); Kansas (9 years)

For labor-trafficking a minor: Vermont (20 years); Kansas (12 years); Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania (10 years)

For labor-trafficking an adult: Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, and Ohio (10 years); Kansas (9 years), and Colorado (10 years)

“The severity of the criminal penalty is not significant in any of the models, indicating that the harshness of the criminal penalty has no impact on the number of arrests and prosecutions for human trafficking,” the researchers wrote. 

The 12 states with highest number of human trafficking arrests, combining both state and federal numbers, were: Texas (526 arrests), Florida (336), California (299), New York (227), Ohio (191), Washington (130), Georgia (105), Maryland (99), Oregon (84), Minnesota (83), New Mexico (78), and Massachusetts (72). 

The 12 states with the highest number of state-level human trafficking arrests were: California (58 arrests), Texas (41), Florida (29), Washington (27), Ohio (21), Massachusetts (20), Georgia (19), Illinois (18), Oklahoma (13), New Mexico (12), Michigan (11), and Minnesota (11)

The states with lowest number of human trafficking arrests overall (combining federal and state data) were: New Hampshire, with zero; West Virginia, with one; Idaho, with two; Arkansas, Montana, Delaware, and Wyoming with four; Alaska and Vermont with five; and Maine, Rhode Island, and North Dakota with eight. 

Fourteen states saw zero state-level human trafficking arrests between 2003-2012: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Another 19 states arrested less than 10 people for state human-trafficking offenses over the decade. South Dakota, Utah, and Vermont each made one human-trafficking arrest; Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, and Rhode Island each made two; Alabama and North Carolina each made three arrests; Connecticut, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Oregon, and Tennessee each made four arrests; and Maryland and New York each arrested five people for human trafficking.

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