copy: June 2011

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Black IQ testing snag

The differences were greatest in measures of abstract reasoning, not so great in measures of verbal skill, smallest of all in memory and rote learning.

Here Is Dr. Shockley's Answer

There are many different intelligence levels in the vaarious races including species within the same racial groups. An examination of the I.Q.s of African tribes found that the Bushmen were the lowest with an I.Q. of 50 and the highest were the Ndau and Wakaranga of Rhodesia with I.Q.s of 80. This is still lower than the average I.Q. of the California negro which is 90. (The average White I.Q. is 105).

VSBP stands for the Voluntary Sterilization Bonus Plan. This is Dr. Shockley's solution to the racial problem which is eroding the very foundations of White American civilization. He would give a cash bonus to all low I.Q. people who would undergo a voluntary sterilization. Dr. Shockley suggests a figure of $1,000 for every I.Q. point under 100. That would mean $30,000 to a welfare mother with an I.Q. of 70. But this is insignificant when one considers that for the state to take care of one of her mentally retarded children for a lifetime would cost over $300,000!

Dr. Shockley says that Southern states which carried out sterilization programs for the mentally retarded should not be condemned because they acted in a humanitarian way for the benefit of those who suffer the most from a low I.Q. Shockley believes that a great many blacks would accept the money and civilization could yet be saved.

Dr. Shockley has risked life and limb by addressing college audiences all across this land on the scientific thesis he has developed. Shockley is 71 years of age and of slight build. Yet, he has faced open attack by Marxists and black extremists. He says that at his age he has nothing to lose in spending the later years of his life reaching the people with the truth. Shockley quotes Herbert Spencer: "The profoundest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad!"

Dr. Shockley says that his work is made possible by the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the right of "FREEDOM OF SPEECH!" He describes this as "the most important words put on paper by man."

When asked why he has sacrificed his privacy and placed his very life on the line to bring the truth to the people he replies that:

"I take this stand because I might well instill one man to take action - to get a proposition on a ballot or organize a demonstration. I don't know who it might be."

Shockley

Mr. Saturday Night

Buddy Young, Jr.: For me, my family was like, uh, Dances With Jews. Oh sure, we had names for our relatives like they had in that movie.
Reporter: What do you mean?
Buddy Young, Jr.: Well, we had "Eats With His Hands," "Spits When He Talks," "Makes Noise When He Bends," "Sweats Like a Pig," "Whines In a Cab," "Never Buys Retail," "Shaves His Back."

Bell Curve

"Now, at long last, Herrnstein and Murray let it all hang out: "affirmative action, in education and the workplace alike, is leaking a poison into the American soul." Having examined the American condition at the close of the twentieth century, these two philosopher-kings conclude, "It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived...." This kind of sentiment, I imagine, lay behind the conclusion of New York Times columnist Bob Herbert that "the book is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger."

The Bell Curve

The Bell Curve is a strange work. Some of the analysis and a good deal of the tone are reasonable. Yet the science in the book was questionable when it was proposed a century ago, and it has now been completely supplanted by the development of the cognitive sciences and neurosciences. The policy recommendations of the book are also exotic, neither following from the analyses nor justified on their own. (p. 61)

TOP | OUTLINE | CONTENT | CRITICISMS
Scholarly brinkmanship:
... I became increasingly disturbed as I read and reread this 800 page work. I gradually realized I was encountering a style of thought previously unknown to me: scholarly brinkmanship. Whether concerning an issue of science, policy, or rhetoric, the authors come dangerously close to embracing the most extreme positions, yet in the end shy away from doing so. Discussing scientific work on intelligence, they never quite say that intelligence is all important and tied to one's genes; yet they signal that this is their belief and that readers ought to embrace the same conclusions. Discussing policy, they never quite say that affirmative action should be totally abandoned or that childbearing or immigration by those with low IQs should be curbed; yet they signal their sympathy for these options and intimate that readers ought to consider these possibilities. Finally, the rhetoric of the book encourages readers to identify with the IQ elite and to distance themselves from the dispossessed in what amounts to an invitation to class warfare. Scholarly brinkmanship encourages the reader to draw the strongest conclusions, while allowing the authors to disavow this intention. (p. 63)
TOP | OUTLINE | CONTENT | CRITICISMS
On divisive arguments:
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the book is its rhetorical stance. This is one of the most stylistically divisive books that I have ever read. Despite occasional avowals of regret and the few utopian pages at the end, Herrnstein and Murray set up an us/them dichotomy that eventually culminates in an us-against-them opposition. (p. 70)
Who are "we" ? Well, we are the people who went to Harvard (as the jacket credits both of the authors) or attended similar colleges and read books like this. We are the smart, the rich, the powerful, the worriers. (p. 70)

Why is this so singularly off-putting? I would have thought it unnecessary to say, but if people as psychometrically smart as Messrs. Herrnstein and Murray did not "get it," it is safer to be explicit. High IQ doesn't make a person one whit better than anybody else. And if we are to have any chance of a civil and humane society, we had better avoid the smug self-satisfaction of an elite that reeks of arrogance and condescension. (p. 71)

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Come Together lyrics

Come Together lyrics
Songwriters: Mccartney, Paul; Lennon, John;

Here come old flattop
He come groovin' up slowly
He got joo-joo eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knees
Got to be a joker
He just do what he please

He wear no shoeshine
He got toe jam football
He got monkey finger
He shoot Coca Cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is
You got to be free

Come together, right now
Over me

He back production
He got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard
He one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knees

Hold you in his armchair
You can feel his disease

Come together, right now
Over me

He roller coaster
He got early warning
He got muddy water
He one mojo filter
He say one and one and one is three
Got to be good looking
'Cause he's so hard to see

Come together, right now
Over me

© SONY/ATV TUNES LLC; SONY BEATLES LTD;

these lyrics are last corrected by PrincessC

Come Together lyrics

Come Together lyrics
Songwriters: Mccartney, Paul; Lennon, John;

Here come old flattop
He come groovin' up slowly
He got joo-joo eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knees
Got to be a joker
He just do what he please

He wear no shoeshine
He got toe jam football
He got monkey finger
He shoot Coca Cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is
You got to be free

Come together, right now
Over me

He bag production
He got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard
He one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knees

Hold you in his armchair
You can feel his disease

Come together, right now
Over me

He roller coaster
He got early warning
He got muddy water
He one mojo filter
He say one and one and one is three
Got to be good looking
'Cause he's so hard to see

Come together, right now
Over me

© SONY/ATV TUNES LLC; SONY BEATLES LTD;

these lyrics are last corrected by PrincessC

Come Together lyrics

Come Together lyrics
Songwriters: Mccartney, Paul; Lennon, John;

Here come old flattop
He come groovin' up slowly
He got joo-joo eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knees
Got to be a joker
He just do what he please

He wear no shoeshine
He got toe jam football
He got monkey finger
He shoot Coca Cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is
You got to be free

Come together, right now
Over me

He bag production
He got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard
He one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knees

Hold you in his armchair
You can feel his disease

Come together, right now
Over me

He roller coaster
He got early warning
He got muddy water
He one mojo filter
He say one and one and one is three
Got to be good looking
'Cause he's so hard to see

Come together, right now
Over me

© SONY/ATV TUNES LLC; SONY BEATLES LTD;

these lyrics are last corrected by PrincessC

Founding fathers less racist than Lincoln

Benjamin Franklin: "Slavery is ... an atrocious debasement of human nature." Franklin, after visiting a black school, also said, "I ... have conceived a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black race than I had ever before entertained."
Alexander Hamilton's judgment was the same: "Their natural faculties are probably as good as ours."

Lincoln a racist
"I am not now nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."

Slavery and the founding fathers

Other Founders condemned slavery. George Washington said, "There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it."
John Adams: "Every measure of prudence ... ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States. ... I have, throughout my whole life, held the practice of slavery in ... abhorrence."
James Madison: "We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man." James Otis said, "The colonists are by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black."
Benjamin Franklin: "Slavery is ... an atrocious debasement of human nature." Franklin, after visiting a black school, also said, "I ... have conceived a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black race than I had ever before entertained."
Alexander Hamilton's judgment was the same: "Their natural faculties are probably as good as ours." John Jay wrote: "It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused."

Censorship 2011

The U.S. Supreme Court, accepting a case that will reshape the speech rights of broadcasters, agreed to decide whether federal regulators are violating the Constitution by imposing fines for on-air profanities and nudity.
The justices today said they will review a lower court’s conclusion that the Federal Communications Commission’s indecency policy is unconstitutionally vague. The dispute stems from expletives uttered on two Fox network award shows and from a scene with a naked woman on ABC’s “NYPD Blue.”
Two appeals court rulings “preclude the commission from effectively implementing statutory restrictions on broadcast indecency that the agency has enforced since its creation in 1934,” the Justice Department said in its appeal.
The case gives the high court a chance to issue a sweeping decision. News Corp. (NWSA)’s Fox and Walt Disney Co. (DIS)’s ABC say the court should overturn decades-old rulings that give the FCC more authority to regulate programming on broadcast stations than on cable or satellite.
“We are hopeful that the court will affirm the commission’s exercise of its statutory responsibility to protect children and families from indecent broadcast programming,” Neil Grace, an FCC spokesman, said in an e-mail.
Speech Rights
“We are hopeful that the court will ultimately agree that the FCC’s indecency enforcement practices trample on the First Amendment rights of broadcasters,” Scott Grogin, a Fox spokesman, said in an interview.
The lower court “correctly decided that the FCC’s current indecency enforcement policies are unconstitutional” and the episode of NYPD Blue was not indecent, Julie Hoover, a spokeswoman for ABC, said in an interview.
One of the Supreme Court rulings the networks are attacking is a 1978 decision that said the FCC could take action against a radio station for airing comedian George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” monologue during the afternoon. The court said FCC regulation was warranted because broadcast television and radio had a “uniquely pervasive presence in the lives of all Americans” and were “uniquely accessible to children.”
The justices announced they will hear the case as they took the bench to issue the final opinions of their current nine- month term. They will consider the FCC case in the term that starts in October.
Temporarily Revived
The case centers on First Amendment issues that the high court opted not to resolve when it temporarily revived the FCC’s anti-expletive policy in 2009. Justices in both the majority and dissent in that case pointed to free-speech concerns about the crackdown.
The agency began cracking down on broadcasters after celebrities used vulgar language on three live awards shows in 2002 and 2003. Regulators said in 2004 that for the first time they would punish broadcasters for so-called fleeting expletives.
Two of the incidents involved Fox. In one, at the 2002 Billboard Music Awards, Cher referred to critics of her work by saying, “F-- ‘em. I still have a job and they don’t.”
Nicole Richie used expletives as a presenter on the same show a year later. “Have you ever tried to get cow s--- out of a Prada purse?” she said. “It’s not so f---ing simple.”
Indecency Rules
The FCC concluded that the broadcasts violated its indecency regulations, though the agency said it wouldn’t impose a fine because the incidents took place before the change in policy. Federal law lets the FCC impose fines of $325,000 on each station that airs indecent material between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said last year that the FCC had been inconsistent in the way it applied its rules. The panel pointed to the FCC’s decision not to take action over ABC’s airing of “Saving Private Ryan,” a movie that repeatedly uses the same words.
The appeals court said broadcasters “are left to guess” whether the use of an expletive will be permitted.
In the “NYPD Blue” case, the FCC is attempting to impose penalties totaling $1.2 million on more than 40 ABC-affiliated stations. The disputed episode showed a woman’s buttocks while she was in the bathroom and then, when a young boy inadvertently walked in, a frontal view as she covered her breasts and pubic area.
The 2nd Circuit voided the ABC fine in a separate ruling in January.
The case is Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, 10-1293.
To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net; Todd Shields in Washington at tshields3@bloomberg.net.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Lincoln Douglas Debates 1858

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone.[24]

Lincoln a racist

"I am not now nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."

Abraham Lincoln, Sept. 18, 1858, at Charleston, Illinois.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Crime and Punishment in America

CHAPTER ONE
Crime and Punishment in America

By ELLIOTT CURRIE
Metropolitan Books
Read the Review

Assessing the Prison Experiment
Just as violent crime has become part of the accepted backdrop of life in the United States, so too has the growth of the system we've established to contain it. A huge and constantly expanding penal system seems to us like a normal and inevitable feature of modern life. But what we have witnessed in the past quarter century is nothing less than a revolution in our justice system--a transformation unprecedented in our own history, or in that of any other industrial democracy.

I
In 1971 there were fewer than 200,000 inmates in our state and federal prisons. By the end of 1996 we were approaching 1.2 million. The prison population, in short, has nearly sextupled in the course of twenty-five years. Adding in local jails brings the total to nearly 1.7 million. To put the figure of 1.7 million into perspective, consider that it is roughly equal to the population of Houston Texas, the fourth-largest city in the nation, and more than twice that of San Francisco. Our overall national population has grown, too, of course, but the prison population has grown much faster: as a proportion of the American population, the number behind bars has more than quadrupled. During the entire period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, the nation's prison incarceration rate--the number of inmates in state and federal prisons per 100,000 population--fluctuated in a narrow band between a low of 93 (in 1972) and a high of 119 (in 1961). By 1996 it had reached 427 per 100,000.

Bear in mind that these figures are averages for the country as a whole. In many states, the transformation has been even more startling. The increase in the number of prisoners in the state of Texas from 1991 to 1996 alone--about 80,000--is far larger than the total prison population of France or the United Kingdom, and roughly equal to the total prison population of Germany, a nation of over 80 million people (Texas has about 18 million). Within a few years, if current rates of increase continue, Texas's prison population (as well as California's) should surpass that of the entire country at the start of the 1970s. In California, nearly one in six state employees works in the prison system.

The effect of this explosion on some communities is by now well known, thanks to the work of the Washington-based Sentencing Project, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, and others. By the mid-1990s roughly one in three young black men were under the "supervision" of the criminal-justice system--that is, in a jail or prison, on probation or parole, or under pretrial release. The figure was two out of five in California, and over half in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. In California today, four times as many black men are "enrolled" in state prison as are enrolled in public colleges and universities. Nationally, there are twice as many black men in state and federal prison today as there were men of all races twenty years ago. More than anything else, it is the war on drugs that has caused this dramatic increase: between 1985 and 1995, the number of black state prison inmates sentenced for drug offenses rose by more than 700 percent. Less discussed, but even more startling, is the enormous increase in the number of Hispanic prisoners, which has more than quintupled since 1980 alone.

Equally dramatic changes have taken place for women. In 1970 there were slightly more than 5,600 women in state and federal prisons across the United States. By 1996 there were nearly 75,000--a thirteenfold increase. For most of the period after World War II, the female incarceration rate hovered at around 8 per 100,000; it did not reach double digits until 1977. Today it is 51 per 100,000. Women's incarceration rates in Texas, Oklahoma, and the District of Columbia now surpass the overall rates for both sexes that prevailed nationally in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At current rates of increase, there will be more women in America's prisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates of both sexes in 1970. When we combine the effects of race and gender, the nature of these shifts in the prison population is even clearer. The prison incarceration rate for black women today exceeds that for white men as recently as 1980.

These extraordinary increases do not simply reflect a rising crime rate that has strained the capacity of a besieged justice system. Crime did rise during this period, as we'll see; but the main reason for the stunning growth in prison populations was that the courts and legislatures did indeed get "tougher" on offenders. The National Research Council calculated in 1993 that the average prison time served per violent crime in the United States roughly tripled between 1975 and 1989 (and it has increased even further since)--mainly because offenders were more likely to be imprisoned at all once convicted, partly because many of them stayed behind bars longer once sentenced.

II
Seen in the context of a single country; even these extraordinary figures on the "boom" in imprisonment lose meaning. But when we place the American experience in international perspective its uniqueness becomes clear. The simplest way to do this is to compare different countries incarceration rates--the number of people behind bars as a proportion of the population. In 1995, the most recent year we can use for comparative purposes, the overall incarceration rate for the United States was 600 per 100,000 population, including local jails (but not juvenile institutions). Around the world, the only country with a higher rate was Russia, at 690 per 100,000. Several other countries of the former Soviet bloc also had high rates--270 per 100,000 in Estonia, for example, and 200 in Romania--as did, among others, Singapore (229) and South Africa (368). But most industrial democracies clustered far below us, at around 55 to 120 per 100,000, with a few--notably Japan, at 36--lower still. Spain and the United Kingdom, our closest "competitors" among the major nations of western Europe, imprison their citizens at a rate roughly one-sixth of ours; Holland and Scandinavia, about one-tenth.

Such is the magnitude of these differences that they often override one of the most powerful and universal influences on both crime and punishment--gender. Throughout the world, women make up a relatively small proportion of the prison population--less than 7 percent in the United States--and accordingly have far lower incarceration rates than men. But the incarceration rate for women in some American states is greater than the overall rate in most western European countries; the state of Oklahoma, at this writing, imprisons its female population at a rate higher than that for women and men in England or France.

The trends in the use of imprisonment over time also differ strikingly between the United States and most other advanced societies. We've seen that the American incarceration rate roughly quadrupled--that is, rose by about 300 percent--from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. Between 1968 and 1987, the imprisonment rate rose by 45 percent in England and Wales, 34 percent in France, and 16 percent in the Netherlands; it fell in Western Germany by about 4 percent and in Sweden by a remarkable 26 percent (rates of imprisonment have gone up significantly in England and the Netherlands in the 1990s, but not enough to match the escalation in the United States).

These comparative incarceration rates, not surprisingly, are often taken as evidence that the United States is a more punitive country than other industrial democracies. But some people argue that this kind of comparison is intrinsically misleading. Comparing different countries' use of imprisonment, in this view, is meaningless unless we also take into account the underlying crime rate. If the United States has more crime--or more serious crime--than other countries, then of course we'll have more imprisonment, other things being equal. This is an important point, if it is not taken too far. Unfortunately, it often is. There is a tendency among some commentators to want to downplay America's unusual prominence when it comes to crime and punishment, despite what the figures would seem to show. Some even want to have it both ways--arguing, almost in one breath, that the United States does not have an unusually severe crime problem and that it is not noticeably more punitive than other industrial countries. Obviously, however, that can't be true; our high incarceration rate relative to those of other countries must mean either than we have more (or worse) crime to begin with or that we are more severe with the criminals we have, or some combination of both. It cannot come from nowhere.

In fact, the best evidence shows that America's "exceptionalism" is indeed a combination of both factors. As we'll see in detail later, crime is worse in the United States--especially major crimes of violence, but also some less serious offenses, including drug crimes. And though comparing sentencing practices across different countries is a very tricky enterprise, the best research suggests that we are tougher on many kinds of offenders than other industrial countries for which we have comparable data. In fact, sentences in the United States tend to be longer for all but the most serious offenses, notably homicide--a crime for which social or cultural differences are least likely to affect sentencing policy. Every country puts away murderers, usually for a long time. Hence we would not expect large differences among countries in the way murderers are sentenced (though it is curious that those who argue that the United States isn't especially punitive generally fail to mention that we are the only industrial democracy that still makes significant use of the death penalty for homicide). But there is likely to be more variation in the way countries treat property and drug crimes--as well as robbery, which is usually classified as a violent crime, and here the United States stands out, often dramatically.

The differences appear whether we look at the likelihood of being sent to prison at all for given offenses (what criminologists sometimes call the "propensity to incarcerate") or the length of time offenders will spend behind bars once incarcerated (the severity of the sentences). On the first count, research suggests that compared, for example, with England and Wales, the United States is about equally likely to put someone behind bars for murder but considerably more likely to do so for burglary. That was true even back in the mid-1980s, when, according to an analysis by David Farrington of Cambridge University and Patrick Langan of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the likelihood of someone found guilty of burglary going behind bars was 40 percent in England and Wales but 74 percent in the United States. The difference is even greater now, after many years of tougher treatment of property offenders in the U.S. Robbery presents a somewhat more complex picture. In the mid-1980s, the United States was about as likely to imprison convicted robbers as England but considerably more likely to do so than West Germany. And these figures overstate the similarities between the United States and other countries because they focus on a handful of countries that are among the tougher European nations: Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and Holland, among others, use prison far more sparingly than Great Britain. (In 1987, for example, the Swedes imprisoned their population per violent crime at less than one-fourth the English rate.)

Especially for property crime, then, the United States sweeps considerably more offenders who come before the courts into jail or prison. Once behind bars, moreover, Americans tend to stay longer, which is the second reason our imprisoned population is so large. Farrington and Langan also found that average sentences imposed in the U.S. in the mid-1980s were far harsher than in England--roughly three times as long for robbery and burglary, twice as long for rape, and half again as long for homicide, leading them to conclude that "the belief that America is more punitive than England in its treatment of offenders is correct." To be sure, the sentence initially imposed by a court is rarely what an offender actually serves behind bars, since in most countries there are a variety of ways offenders can be released before the official sentence is up, through some form of parole or "good time' (which some countries call "remission"). But Farrington and Langan found similar disparities in actual time served: Americans convicted of robbery spent about twice as long behind bars as their British counterparts, and those convicted of burglary and assault well over twice as long. Even murderers averaged about 7 percent longer in custody in the United States, though homicide is one offense where the British stood out as relatively tough. (In Sweden, life sentences for homicide are rare, and as of the late 1980s most murderers were released after eight years.) Similarly, the criminologist James Lynch, of American University, while rejecting the contention that the United States is particularly punitive, nevertheless provides useful figures showing that when it comes to crimes other than murder, it is. As of the early to mid-1980s, for example, American robbers were likely to serve about forty-five months behind bars, versus twenty-seven in England and twenty-four in Australia. The disparities are similar for burglary and even greater for theft: American burglars averaged twice as much time in custody as Canadian burglars; American thieves, 3 1/2 times their Canadian counterparts.

A similar pattern holds for drug offenders, the fastest-growing segment of the American prison population since the mid-1980s. In 1990 British drug offenders were half as likely to go to jail or prison as Americans, and when they did go they were likely to stay for shorter periods (and they were far less likely to be sentenced to the extraordinary long terms that have become emblematic of the American drug war). According to Lynch, the proportion of American drug offenders sentenced to over ten years was more than triple that in England and Wales.

As Lynch points out, untangling the precise implications of these figures is not easy. The unusually long sentences for some crimes in the United States could mean that the crimes Americans commit within a given category are typically more serious--that our robberies may, for example, more often involve aggravating conditions, like the use of a gun. But that doesn't explain our unusual harshness toward offenses that by definition are not very serious and do not involve guns, like larceny. Another explanation might be that Americans are more likely to have prior offenses, making them candidates for harsher penalties. But in fact the opposite seems to be true, at least for England; British offenders are more likely than Americans to have prior offenses, or, put another way, America appears to be more inclined than England to imprison first-time offenders. Again, most of these comparisons considerably understate the international differences, since they are mainly based on figures that are by now well behind the times; Lynch's American figures, for example, are from 1983. After nearly a decade and a half of relentlessly stiffening sentences--a trend unmatched in most other countries, some of which have actually gone in the other direction--our comparative severity has increased substantially.

An interesting study done under the auspices of the International Bar Association and analyzed by the British criminologist Ken Pease sheds more light on international differences in the propensity to punish. One of the reasons it is difficult to pin down cross-national differences in sentencing is that countries often classify crimes differently, so that what counts as a "robbery" in one country may be called something else in another. This study got around the problem by describing specific offenses and then asking judges and other criminal justice practitioners to predict the sentence the offenders would receive in their own jurisdictions. The results confirmed that there are enormous differences in national attitudes toward punishment. At the low end of the scale are nations like Norway, which remain fairly reluctant to impose any prison time, especially for less serious offenses; at the high end, there is the state of Texas, which on Pease's scale of punitiveness ranked between the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria.

No matter how we approach the question, then, the United States does turn out to be relatively punitive in its treatment of offenders, and very much so for less serious crimes. Yet in an important sense, this way of looking at the issue of "punitiveness" sidesteps the deeper implications of the huge international differences in incarceration. For it is arguably the incarceration rate itself, not the rate per offense, that tells us the most important things about a nation's approach to crime and punishment. An incarceration rate that is many times higher than that of comparable countries is a signal that something is very wrong. Either the country is punishing offenders with a severity far in excess of what is considered normal in otherwise similar societies, or it is breeding a far higher level of serious crime, or both. In the case of the U.S., it is indeed both. As we've seen, the evidence suggests that we are more punitive when it comes to property and drug crimes, but not as far from the norm in punishing violent crimes. We have an unusually high incarceration rate, then, partly because of our relatively punitive approach to nonviolent offenses, and partly because of our high level of serious violent crime. On both counts, the fact that we imprison our population at a rate six to ten times higher than that of other advanced societies means that we rely far more on our penal system to maintain social order--to enforce the rules of our common social life--than other industrial nations do. In a very real sense, we have been engaged in an experiment, testing the degree to which a modern industrial society can maintain public order through the threat of punishment. That is the more profound meaning of the charge that America is an unusually punitive country. We now need to ask how well the experiment has worked.

III
The prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparallelled in our history--or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time. And as with other government programs, it is reasonable to ask what we have gotten in return.

Let me be clear: there is legitimate dispute about the effects of imprisonment on crime, and people of goodwill can and do argue about the precise impact of the incarceration boom of the past twenty-five years. But the legitimate dispute takes place within very narrow boundaries, and the available evidence cannot be comforting to those who put great hopes on the prison experiment. Nor do we have reason to expect better results in the future; indeed, if anything, just the opposite.

Here, in a nutshell, is where we stand after more than two decades of the prison boom. The good news is that reported violent crime has declined in the country as a whole since about 1992--quite sharply in some cities--suggesting that, at least in most places, the worst of the epidemic of violence that rocked the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s has passed. But the bad news is extensive and troubling. First, most of the recent decline represents a leveling off from unprecedented rises in the preceding several years--and therefore a longer time frame reveals no significant decline at all. Second, even that return to the norm has been disturbingly uneven, disproportionately accounted for by the experience of a few large cities, notably New York. Third, even in those cities violent crime often remains higher, and rarely more than fractionally lower, than it was before our massive investment in incarceration began. Fourth, violence has risen dramatically over the past twenty-five years in many other cities, despite the prison boom and despite several other developments that should have reduced violence. Fifth, the overall figures on trends in violent crime conceal a tragic explosion of violence among the young and poor, which has yet to return to the already intolerably high levels of the mid-1980s. Finally, there is nothing in these patterns to reassure us that an epidemic of violence won't erupt again.

Let's consider this picture in greater detail. Nationally, violent crime rates peaked in 1991. Since then, through 1996, the number of homicides fell by about 22 percent. But that decline followed a rise of 32 percent from 1984--its recent low--through 1991, one of the fastest increases in lethal violence in recent history. Reported robberies have also fallen about 22 percent since 1991, but that followed a 42 percent rise from 1984 to the 1991 peak. Reported rapes have fallen less sharply, by about 12 percent, following a rapid 27 percent rise from 1984 to 1991. To be sure, the recent improvements are welcome; in the real world, the cold numbers translate into lives saved and tragedies averted. But though where we are today is certainly better than where we were a few years ago, it is not a good place to be. To borrow the language of public health, we suffered a particularly virulent epidemic of violence from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. The numbers tell us that the worst of that epidemic has apparently passed. But violent crime remains endemic in our society at shockingly high levels. It is crucial to keep these trends in historical perspective. When it comes to crime, as with many other social problems, our collective memory is short. We were said to be "winning the war on crime" once before in recent years, in the early 1980s, when the level of murder and robbery also dropped sharply--and just before we suffered one of the fastest rises in criminal violence in our national history.

Though the recent declines in violent crime have occurred in many cities across the country, moreover, a handful of cities account for a considerable proportion of the overall trend. There were about 137,000 fewer robberies in the United States in 1996 than in 1992; New York City alone contributed 41,000 of that total, or about 30 percent, and if we look back further in time, the picture appears considerably grimmer. An examination of homicide rates over the past quarter century in the hardest-hit American cities is a particularly sobering exercise. Again, there is some good news. Boston's homicide rate, for example, fell by about 3 percent between 1970 and 1995; San Francisco's, by about 13 percent. (New York--where the most notable recent declines in homicide have taken place--actually suffered an overall slight rise over this longer period, though it has fallen further since.) But there is also a great deal of bad news. Murder was up about 70 percent in Los Angeles, over 80 percent in Phoenix, over 90 percent in Oakland and Memphis. It more than doubled in Washington, Birmingham, Richmond, and Jackson, Mississippi. In Milwaukee and Rochester (N.Y.), homicide rates exploded by more than 200 percent in these years; in Minneapolis, by over 300 percent. In New Orleans, the homicide rate rose by a stunning 329 percent.

Let's pause on that last figure for a moment. Louisiana was always a tough state, and by 1995 it led every state in the nation, except Texas, in its incarceration rate--which was five times higher in the mid-1990s than it was in the early 1970s. But the unfortunate citizens of New Orleans, its largest city, were more than four times as likely to die by violence at the end of the period than at the beginning (it is perhaps no wonder that in the early 1990s, according to news reports, at least one New Orleans neighborhood held voodoo ceremonies imploring the spirits to do something about crime, since clearly no one else was).

Moreover, those explosive rises in homicide, in the face of even more rapid increases in incarceration, took place despite improvements in the medical response to injury that should--other things being equal--have lowered death rates from violence (by 1995 most major cities had advanced trauma units capable of providing state-of-the-art care to victims of serious assaults), and despite the often-cited decline in the proportion of youth in the population that should also--other things being equal--have dampened them.

But other things were not equal, and instead we had both fewer young people and far more youth violence. Indeed, the epidemic of violence that began in the mid-1980s was concentrated among the young, who were both its main instigators and its main victims. Violence among the young has, at this writing, fallen off from its early-1990s peak; but outside of a handful of cities--Boston is a notable example--it remains higher than it was before the sharp recent rises, which brought many cities the worst levels of youth violence in their history. Juvenile arrests for violent crimes fell by 4 percent during 1995, but that followed a 64 percent rise in the previous seven years.

As with incarceration, it is only when we look overseas that we can grasp the full meaning of the trends in youth violence in America. In 1987, the homicide death rate among American men aged fifteen to twenty-four, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), was 22 per 100,000. By 1994 it had risen by two-thirds--to 37 per 100,000. To put those quite abstract numbers into some perspective, consider that the comparable rate for British youth in 1994 was 1.0 per 100,000. By the mid-1990s, in other words, a young American male was 37 times as likely to die by deliberate violence as his English counterpart--and 12 times as likely as a Canadian youth, 20 times as likely as a Swede, 26 times as likely as a young Frenchman, and over 60 times as likely as a Japanese.

It's well known that young men of color have been the worst victims of this crisis; the homicide death rate for young black men more than doubled from 1985 to 1993, to 167 per 100,000 (it was 46 in 1960). But lest it be thought that America's grisly dominance in youth homicide is entirely a matter of race, bear in mind that the homicide death rate for non-Hispanic white youth in the early 1990s was roughly 6 times that for French youth--of all races combined--and 20 times that for Japanese youth.

Some of the most chilling numbers on the magnitude of this crisis--and its concentration among the young and poor--come from a study of injuries in inner-city Philadelphia by Donald Schwartz and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania medical school. Over the course of four years, 1987 through 1990, fully 40 percent of young black men from these neighborhoods suffered a violent assault serious enough to send them to a hospital emergency room.

Although the numbers on youth violence have improved somewhat since the early 1990s, they would have to improve enormously to bring American levels of youth violence even close to those of other industrial societies. And some of the reasons for the improvement provide small comfort. To some extent, the epidemic of violence among such a concentrated segment of the youth and young adult population was probably self-limiting. Put bluntly, part of the reason for the falling off of violence from its recent peak may be that a significant number of those at highest risk of being either perpetrators or victims have been removed from the picture--through death, disease, or disability.

Recall that the homicide death rate among black men aged fifteen to twenty-four reached 167 per 100,000 in 1993 (in New York City, it reached 247 per 100,000). At the same time, the death rate from HIV infection among black men aged twenty-five to thirty-four reached 117 per 100,000, and it hit 200 per 100,000 for those thirty-five to forty-four, almost tripling since 1987 alone. The numbers mount still higher if we add in drug-related deaths and serious illnesses. Overall, young black men aged fifteen to twenty-four were 66 percent more likely to die in 1993 than in 1985--a stunning reversal of decades of general improvement in life expectancy. And these general figures, grim as they are, understate the depth of the disaster that struck black men in particular in the hardest-hit urban areas. In the Philadelphia study; an astonishing 94 percent of inner-city men in their twenties had been to an emergency room at least once for a serious injury during a four-year period. And a study of HIV prevalence among black men in their thirties in central Harlem, conducted by Ann Brunswick and her colleagues at Columbia University's School of Public Health, turned up a rate of infection of almost 14 percent--nearly one in seven.

If we concentrate on the young people who are most likely to commit violent crime, this pattern--what we might euphemistically call the attrition of the at-risk population--appears even more starkly. In a study of youthful offenders released from the California Youth Authority in the early 1980s, Pamela Lattimore and her colleagues at the National Institute of Justice discovered that almost 6 percent had died by the early 1990s--most before the age of thirty. (To put the 6 percent figure in perspective, note that it is roughly thirteen times the death rate for black men aged twenty-five to thirty-four in the general population.) Almost half of the deaths were due to homicide; accidents, suicide, drugs, HIV and "legal intervention"--being killed by the authorities--accounted for most of the rest. The proportions were even higher for black youths living in Los Angeles. "In public health terms," the researchers write, "the morbidity among these young subjects ... is astonishing."

We usually miss the full dimensions of the combined effects of incarceration, HIV infection, violence, accidents, and substance abuse on this population because we typically add up the costs of each of these ills on separate ledgers. When we put them together on the same ledger, what we see is nothing less than a social and demographic catastrophe--and one that, tragically, may help explain the recent decline in violent crime in the most affected communities.

IV
This, then, is the state of violence in America's inner cities--after more than two decades of the most intensive investment in the incarceration of criminals, violent and otherwise, that anyone, anywhere, has ever seen.

Indeed, what is most striking about these numbers is that they show not only that our national prison experiment had far less impact than its promoters expected but even less than its critics did. As far back as the 1970s, many criminologists argued that we could never incarcerate our way out of the crime problem--that imprisonment, however justified in individual cases, was inherently limited as an overall strategy of controlling crime. But they never suggested that massive increases in imprisonment would have no effect whatsoever on the crime rate. Most of them believed, in particular, that there was indeed such a thing as an "incapacitation" effect.

Criminologists have long distinguished several ways in which putting people in prison might reduce the crime rate. One is "deterrence"--meaning that people who are sent to prison may be less inclined to commit crimes when they get out because they don't want to go back and/or that potential offenders generally will be inhibited by the threat of being put behind bars. Another is "rehabilitation": if we provide schooling, job training, drug treatment, or other services in prison, offenders may be better able to avoid returning to crime when released. Then there is the simplest mechanism, "incapacitation," which means that as long as offenders are behind bars they cannot commit crimes--at least, not against people on the outside (though they can still commit them against one another and against prison personnel). When the conservative columnist Ben Wattenberg told readers of the Wall Street Journal that prisons were effective in controlling crime because "a thug in prison can't shoot your sister," he was making a simple (and, as we'll see, sadly simplistic) statement of the fundamental principle of incapacitation.

Though most criminologists would probably agree that imprisonment has some deterrent effect, its magnitude has proved very difficult to pin down. It seems clear that the deterrent effect of marginal increases in imprisonment is neither as large nor as predictable as many people reflexively believe. But incapacitation is a somewhat different story. Most criminologists, of various ideological persuasions, have granted the existence of a significant incapacitation effect, assuming that if enough offenders went to prison there would, other things being equal, be a drop in at least some crimes--especially so-called high-rate offenses, such as robbery and burglary. But most experts also believed that the effect would be disturbingly small relative to the investment. At best, as David Farrington and Patrick Langan put it cautiously in the early 1990s, "the existing evidence suggests that incapacitative effects are modest but not negligible."

During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of studies attempted to calculate the potential incapacitation effect of large increases in imprisonment. The results were not encouraging a typical estimate was that doubling the prison population might reduce serious reported crimes by 10 percent--somewhat more in the case of burglaries and robberies, less for homicides and rapes And what is startlingly clear today is that if anything the research erred on the optimistic side. The incarceration rate has risen much more than anyone imagined. But there has been no overall decrease in serious criminal violence, and there have been sharp increases in many places--including many of the places that incarcerated the most or increased their rates of imprisonment the fastest. The national incarceration rate doubled between 1985 and 1995 alone, and every major reported violent crime increased--driven upward by the horrifying surge in youth violence, which turned our cities into killing fields for the young and poor just when more and more of the young and poor were already behind bars.

A simple numerical exercise illustrates the gap between the fairly bleak predictions of the experts and the even bleaker historical reality. In the 1970s and 1980s some criminologists calculated that doubling the prison population might reduce reported robberies by about 15 to 18 percent (more recent estimates are essentially the same). Suppose we apply that prediction to the real-world changes over the past twenty years--a period in which we actually quadrupled the prison population. Had we in fact achieved an 18 percent decline in the reported robbery rate every time we doubled the 1976 prison population, the nation's robbery rate would have fallen from about 199 per 100,000 in 1976 to about 110 per 100,000 in 1995. Instead it rose to 221 per 100,000, or about twice what the research on incapacitation had predicted.

But why did we see so little impact from the extraordinary increases in imprisonment? We do not know all of the reasons, but some of them seem clear. To begin with, as criminologists have noted for many years, incapacitation has several inherent limitations as a crime-control strategy. One is that imprisoning offenders cannot, by definition, prevent the crimes that got them convicted in the first place. (This is one reason why the remark that "a thug in prison can't shoot your sister" is so shortsighted; obviously, the "thug" had to shoot someone's sister--or otherwise do harm--in order to get into prison in the first place.) For some offenses, especially murder, that first serious crime may be the only one that an offender is likely to commit. Hence the incapacitation effect in such cases is essentially zero. Another well-documented limitation of incapacitation is the "replacement effect"--putting a drug dealer or gang leader in prison may simply open up a position for someone else in an ongoing enterprise. The replacement effect is especially strong for drug offenses, but is also important in the case of much juvenile crime, which often takes place in groups. Putting one member of a gang of young muggers behind bars may have little impact, if any, on the gang's overall rate of crime.

More broadly, the fact that the offenders caught and imprisoned represent only a fraction of a much larger "pool" of offenders, most of whom are not caught, greatly limits incapacitation's effect on crime rates. In addition, our failure to match the increasing rates of imprisonment with corresponding increases in programs to reintegrate offenders into productive life means that we are steadily producing ever-larger armies of ex-offenders whose chances of success in the legitimate world have been diminished by their prison experience. We are "incapacitating" them in the traditional sense of the word--reducing their capacity to function normally--with altogether predictable results.

But there is an even more profound reason for the limited impact of the vast increases in imprisonment: they coincided with a sharp deterioration in the social conditions of the people and communities most at risk of violent crime.

Thus, while we were busily jamming our prisons to the rafters with young, poor men, we were simultaneously generating the fastest rise in income inequality in recent history. We were tolerating the descent of several million Americans, most of them children, into poverty--a kind of poverty that, as study after study showed, became both deeper and more difficult to escape as time went on. An American child under eighteen was half again as likely to be poor in 1994 as twenty years earlier, and more and more poor children were spending a long stretch of their childhood, or all of it, below the poverty line. The poor, moreover, became increasingly isolated, spatially and economically, during these years--trapped in ever more impoverished and often chaotic neighborhoods, without the support of kin or friends, and surrounded by others in the same circumstances. At the same time, successive administrations cut many of the public supports--from income benefits to child protective services--that could have cushioned the impact of worsening economic deprivation and community fragmentation. And they also removed some of the rungs on our already wobbly ladders out of poverty: federal spending on jobs and job training for low-income people dropped by half during the 1980s. Meanwhile, between 1980 and 1993, federal spending on "correctional activities" rose, in current dollars, by 521 percent.

The results of these policies have been documented over and over again communities without stable jobs, without preventive health care, without school guidance counselors or recreation facilities, with staggeringly inadequate mental health and child welfare services. Meanwhile, other less quantifiable changes in American civic culture magnified the effects of these more tangible shifts in material life. Just as the most vulnerable communities were being depleted of both legitimate opportunities and social supports, they were also being bombarded by a particularly virulent ethic of consumption and instant gratification--one that was not confined to the inner cities but swept the country as a whole, from Wall Street to Watts. Although the spread of that ethos is not as easy to measure as, say, the rising numbers of children in poverty; scholars looking closely at the culture of drugs and violence in American cities in the 1980s and 1990s have been able to document it convincingly. The criminologist Jeffrey Fagan and his colleagues, for example, have described the emergence of what they call a "hypermaterialist" culture in some urban neighborhoods, a culture fueled by the massive growth of consumer advertising and marketing and celebrated on television, on movie screens, and in popular music.

All of these changes were enormously exacerbated by the twin scourges of crack and guns--and indeed the waning of the crack epidemic almost certainly helps explain the recent declines in violent crime in many cities, just as its rise helps explain the increases in violence in the preceding several years. Exactly how much crack contributed to those sharp rises is difficult to pinpoint precisely and varies from city to city--in New York, for example, we know that crack had a rapid and massive impact on violent crime rates in the 1980s, more than it did in many other cities. It is beyond question, however, that the drug epidemic played an important role in boosting levels of violence nationwide. But the rise of violence in the late 1980s cannot be blamed on crack and guns in isolation--as if these plagues were unconnected to the social context that brought them into being. The crack and gun explosions didn't come from nowhere; they were generated by the same declining opportunities, the same withering of agencies of socialization and support, and the same shattering of hope and community that led to other kinds of violence as well.

We will examine the connections between violence and social deterioration more closely in chapter 4. For now, it is sufficient to note that the social policies we were pursuing were ones that any student of Criminology 101 could have predicted would increase violent crime. And that helps explain why the prison experiment has had less impact than even its critics anticipated. We were, in effect, using the prisons to contain a growing social crisis concentrated in the bottom quarter of our population. The prisons became, in a very real sense, a substitute for the more constructive social policies we were avoiding. A growing prison system was what we had instead of an antipoverty policy, instead of an employment policy, instead of a comprehensive drug-treatment or mental health policy. Or, to put it even more starkly, the prison became our employment policy, our drug policy, our mental health policy, in the vacuum left by the absence of more constructive efforts.

This is not just a metaphor. The role of the prison as a default "solution" to many American social problems is apparent when we juxtapose some common statistics that are rarely viewed in combination. We've seen, for example, that by the end of 1996 there were almost 1.7 million inmates--mostly poor and male--confined in American jails and prisons. Officially, those inmates are not counted as part of the country's labor force, and accordingly they are also not counted as unemployed. If they were, our official jobless rate would be much higher, and our much-vaunted record of controlling unemployment, as compared with other countries, would look considerably less impressive. Thus, in 1996 there was an average of about 3.9 million men officially unemployed in the United States, and about 1.1 million in state or federal prison. Adding the imprisoned to the officially unemployed would boost the male unemployment rate in that year by more than a fourth, from 5.4 to 6.9 percent. And that national average obscures the social implications of the huge increases in incarceration in some states. In Texas, there were about 120,000 men in prison in 1995, and 300,000 officially unemployed. Adding the imprisoned to the jobless count raises the state's male unemployment rate by well over a third, from 5.6 to 7.8 percent. If we conduct the same exercise for black men, the figures are even more thought-provoking. In 1995, there were 762,000 black men officially counted as unemployed, and another 511,000 in state or federal prison. Combining these numbers raises the jobless rate for black men by two-thirds, from just under 11 to almost 18 percent.

Consider also the growing role of the jails and prisons as a de facto alternative to a functioning system of mental health care. In California, an estimated 8 to 20 percent of state prison inmates and 7 to 15 percent of jail inmates are seriously mentally ill. Research shows, moreover, that the vast majority of the mentally ill who go behind bars are not being treated by the mental health system at the time of their arrest; for many, the criminal justice system is likely to be the first place they receive serious attention or even medication. The number of seriously mentally ill inmates in the jails and prisons may be twice that in state mental hospitals on any given day. In the San Diego County jail, 14 percent of male and 25 percent of female inmates were on psychiatric medication in the mid-1990s: The Los Angeles County jail system, where over 3,000 of the more than 20,000 inmates were receiving psychiatric services, is now said to be the largest mental institution in the United States--and also, according to some accounts, the largest homeless shelter.

Prison, then, has increasingly become America's social agency of first resort for coping with the deepening problems of a society in perennial crisis. And it is important to understand that, to some extent, the process has been self-perpetuating. Growing social disintegration has produced more violent crime; in turn, the fear of crime (often whipped up by careless and self-serving political rhetoric) has led the public and the legislatures to call for "tough" responses; the diversion of resources to the correctional system has aggravated the deterioration of troubled communities and narrowed the economic prospects for low-income people, who have maintained high levels of crime despite huge increases in incarceration; the persistence of violent crime paradoxically leads to calls for more of the same. And so the cycle continues.

The process has gone farther in some states than in others, but the consequences of these increasingly skewed patterns of public spending are starkly evident in many of them. Consider the state of Louisiana, one of the poorest in America, which saw one of the fastest rises in incarceration during the 1970s and 1980s and today maintains a rate of imprisonment exceeded only by Texas and the District of Columbia--615 per 100,000 in 1996, excluding local jails. Louisiana also boasts the highest homicide rate in the fifty states. As it was achieving this distinction, the state was simultaneously starving its public schools. Here is what a 1995 report from the U.S. General Accounting Office had to say about schooling in New Orleans, the biggest city in Louisiana and one of the most violent places in the United States

New Orleans' schools are rotting away.... New Orleans students attend schools suffering from hundreds of millions of dollars worth of uncorrected water and termite damage. Fire code violations are so numerous that school officials told us, "We don't count them--we weigh them." [In one elementary school] termites even ate the books on the library shelves as well as the shelves themselves.
These realities may help explain why 85 percent of Louisiana's fourth-graders, according to a recent national survey, read below their grade level. The GAO report goes on to describe schools in Alabama where defective plumbing caused raw sewage to back up onto the lawn, and high schools in Chicago where floors were broken and buckling so badly that students couldn't walk through some parts of the schools at all and where exit doors have been chained shut for years to prevent students from falling on broken stairs.

The money spent on prisons in the 1980s and 1990s, then, was money taken from the parts of the public sector that educate, train, socialize, treat, nurture, and house the population--particularly the children of the poor. This trade-off surely helps explain one of the most distinctive characteristics of the pattern of violent crime in recent years its changing age distribution. We've seen that the explosion of violence in the late 1980s was concentrated among the young. At the same time, violent crime by older adults was stable and in some places declining. And that pattern is precisely what was predicted by many critics of our growing reliance on an "incapacitative" strategy of crime control. Since incapacitation is a reactive rather than preventive strategy, one that cannot have any effect until violent criminals have been caught, it tends to "work," to the extent that it works at all, at relatively later stages of an offender's "career." If we do enough of it, we will surely reduce, to some degree, the amount of crime committed by older offenders. But we will have done nothing to prevent the early crimes committed by younger offenders. And to the extent that the resources poured into incarcerating older offenders are diverted from efforts to prevent younger people from embarking on criminal careers in the first place, a strategy based on incapacitation may even contribute to rising youth violence. Taken to the extreme, in other words, such an approach forces us into a self-defeating trade-off, as the gains from incarcerating older offenders (who may be nearing the end of their "careers" in crime in any case) are offset by the losses from the failure to mount preventive efforts for children or for high-risk youths (just when their rate of offending is highest).

By the early 1990s, these skewed priorities had brought us what was arguably the worst of all possible worlds when it came to crime and punishment. We had attained a level of violent crime that, in some places, was the highest in this century and that threatened to destroy the social fabric of many American communities. At the same time, we had created a bloated penal system whose uncontrolled growth had helped deprive our most vulnerable communities of urgently needed social investment. It seemed painfully clear to most who studied these problems that the experiment was not working.

(C) 1998 Elliott Currie All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-8050-4835-9

Goodfellas

I'm funny how, I mean funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I'm here to amuse you? What do you mean funny, funny how? How am I funny?

The Kurzweil Diet

Mr. Kurzweil, however, recommends far more than the standard preventative counsel to eat a healthier diet and get more exercise. Moderation is not his counsel for the radical reprogramming of the body. For example, Mr. Kurzweil and Dr. Grossman advocate taking large doses of vitamins and minerals and letting your body sort out what it needs - an approach that some experts say is extreme and perhaps risky.

"They have totally bought into mega-dosing on vitamins by accepting scanty evidence too early, before it's been properly evaluated," said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor in the school of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Mr. Olshansky points to a recent study, by an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, that found taking high doses of vitamin E may slightly increase the risks of dying earlier. "Mega-dosing could be mutagenic; it could cause problems," Mr. Olshansky said. "If you follow Ray and Terry's advice, you could die sooner. Kurzweil is asking people to be guinea pigs."

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

law and Neuropsychology

Wired.com: You argue that brain science could improve our legal system. How would that work?

Eagleman: As part of my day job I direct the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. What I’m asking is, given the situation that much of what we do and think and act and believe is all generated by parts of our brain that we have no access to, what does this mean when we think about responsibility and blameworthiness when people are bad actors in society?

I’ve been working on this topic for years and it’s become clear to me that our legal system as it stands now is so broken and outdated. It essentially rests on this myth of equality, which says all brains are created equal. As long as you’re over 18 and you’re over an IQ of 70, then all brains are treated as though they have an equal capacity for decision making, for simulating possible futures for understanding consequences and so on. And it’s simply not true.

Along any axis that we measure brains, they are very different. There’s as much variation neurally as there is with people’s external physical characteristics. So an enlightened legal system, and one that’s also more humane and more cost effective, will instead of treating everybody equally and treating incarceration as a one-size-fits-all solution, will do customized sentencing and customized rehabilitation. It will try to understand people better, in terms of what can be done with them and for them. It can have better risk assessment to understand, “How dangerous is this person?”

We still have to take people who break the law off the streets to have a good society, so this doesn’t forgive anybody. But what it means is we have a forward-looking legal system that just worries about the probability of recidivism, or in other words, what is the probability that this person’s behavior will transfer to other future situations? That makes a forward-looking legal system instead of a backward-looking one like we have now, which is just a matter of blame and saying, “How blameworthy are you and we’re going to punish you for that.”

What’s happening more and more in courtrooms is defense lawyers will argue that their client has bad genes, that he was sexually abused as a child or he had in utero cocaine poisoning, so it wasn’t really his fault. It turns out that’s the wrong question to ask, because the interaction of genes and environment is so complex that we will never be able to say how somebody came to be who he is now and whether he had any real choice in the matter of whether he behaved this way or that way. So the only logical thing is to have a forward-looking system that says, “We can’t know the answer to that, all we need to know is how dangerous is this person into the future?”

Beyond that there’s this issue that our prison system has become our de facto mental health care system. The estimates now are that 30 percent of the prison population suffers from some sort of mental illness. It’s much more humane and enlightened and cost effective to have a system that deals with the mentally ill separately, deals with drug addicts separately. and so on. Incarceration is the right solution for some people because it will be a deterrent. But it doesn’t work if your brain’s not functioning properly. If you’re suffering from a psychosis, for example, putting you in prison isn’t going to fix that.

Wired.com: So do we need, next to the jury of your peers, a jury of brain experts?

Eagleman: So here’s what I think. Trials have two phases. There’s the guilt phase, or the fact finding phase, and of course that should always remain with a jury of your peers, there are many reasons for that. But the sentencing phase should be done with statistics and sophisticated risk assessment instruments. And I should mention, these are already underway.

For example, with sex offenders, people have done very good studies where they have followed tens of thousands of sex offenders for years after they are released form prison, and they find out who recidivates and who doesn’t. Then they correlate that with all of these things they can measure about the person. And it turns out that that gives really good predictive power about who’s likely to recidivate and who’s not.

Now I need to specify here that we will never be able to know whether any individual will commit a crime again or not, because life’s too complicated and crime is often circumstantial. Nonetheless, it is the case that some people are more dangerous than others. And these statistical tests are incredibly powerful tools for understanding who on average is going to be more dangerous than whom and thereby how long we should sentence them for.

The Brain

When people go through marriage registries, they find that people are more likely to marry other people whose first name begins with the first letter of their own first name, so Alex and Amy, Joel and Jenny, Donny and Daisy, these kind of things. And if your name is Dennis or Denise you’re statistically more likely to become a dentist. This can be verified by looking in the dentist professional registries.

Also, people whose birthday is Feb. 2, are disproportionately more likely to move to cities with the number two in their name, like Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. And people born on 3/3 are statistically overrepresented in places like Three Forks, Montana, and so on.

Anyway, the point of all this is that it’s a crazy reason to choose a life mate or a city to live in or a profession, and if you ask people about why they made these choices, that probably would not be included in their conscious narrative. And yet it’s statistically provable that these things do have an influence in very subtle ways on our choices. People like brands, for example, that begin with the the same first letters as their first names, and they’ll be more likely to choose that brand just based on that, even though they’re not consciously aware they’re doing that.

Mexican Gangsters

The elderly are killed. Young women are raped. And able-bodied men are given hammers, machetes and sticks and forced to fight to the death.
In one of the most chilling revelations yet about the violence in Mexico, a drug cartel-connected trafficker claims fellow gangsters have kidnapped highway bus passengers and forced them into gladiatorlike fights to groom fresh assassins.
In an in-person interview arranged by intermediaries on the condition that neither his name nor the location of his Texas visit be published, the trafficker also admitted to helping push cocaine worth $5 million to $10 million a month into the United States.
Law enforcement sources confirm he is a cartel operative but not a fugitive from pending charges.
His words are not those of a federal agent or drawn from a news conference or court papers.
Instead, he offers a voice from inside Mexico's mayhem — a mafioso who mingles among crime bosses and foot soldiers in a protracted war between drug cartels as well as against the government.
If what he says is true, gangsters who make commonplace beheadings, hangings and quartering bodies have managed an even crueler twist to their barbarity.
Members of the Zetas cartel, he says, have pushed passengers into an ancient Rome-like blood sport with a modern Mexico twist that they call, "Who is going to be the next hit man?"
"They cut guys to pieces," he said.
The victims are likely among the hundreds of people found in mass graves in recent months, he said.
In the vicinity of the Mexican city of San Fernando, nearly 200 bodies were unearthed from pits, and authorities said most appeared to have died of blunt force head trauma.
Many are believed to have been dragged off buses traveling through Mexico, but little has been said about the circumstances of their deaths.
The trafficker said those who survive are taken captive and eventually given suicide missions, such as riding into a town controlled by rivals and shooting up the place.
The trafficker said he did not see the clashes, but his fellow criminals have boasted to him of their exploits.
Killing 'for amusement'
Former and current federal law-enforcement officers in the U.S. said that while they knew Mexican bus passengers had been targeted for violence, they'd never before heard of forcing passengers into death matches.
But given the level of violence in Mexico — nearly 40,000 killed in gangland warfare over the past several years — they didn't find it tough to believe.
Borderland Beat, a blog specializing in drug cartels, reported an account in April of bus passengers brutalized by Zeta thugs and taunted into fighting.
"The stuff you would not think possible a few years ago is now commonplace," said Peter Hanna, a retired FBI agent who built his career focusing on Mexico's cartels. "It used to be you'd find dead bodies in drums with acid; now there are beheadings."
Even so, Hanna noted, killing people this way would be time-consuming and inefficient. "It would be more for amusement," he suggested. "I don't see it as intimidation or a successful way to recruit people."
Hidden behind designer sunglasses and a whisper of a beard, the trafficker interviewed by the Houston Chronicle talked at a restaurant's back table. He had silver shopping bags filled at Nordstrom, but seemed anything but a typical wealthy Mexican on a Texas shopping trip.
As a condition of the interview, he asked that he be referred to only as Juan.
He has worked as a drug-trafficker in Northern Mexico for more than a decade, he said, but has grown tired of gangsters running roughshod over each other and innocent civilians.
Juan, who has worked with the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, the two major drug organizations that control territory along the South Texas-Mexico border, said that back home, he sleeps with a semiautomatic rifle by his bed and a handgun under his pillow.
"It is like the Wild West. You can carry a gun and you are Superman," he said of gangsters and killing at will. "Like everybody says, it is out of control now. We have to put a stop to it."
A recent U.S. Senate report contends the Zetas are the most violent of Mexico's cartels. Its members are believed to be responsible for the recent killing of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who was shot on a Mexican highway.
'They brag about it'
Just on Thursday, authorities in Mexico said they arrested members of the Zetas and seized 201 automatic weapons, 600 camouflage uniforms and 30,000 rounds of ammunition.
"I am not defending the Sinaloa or the Gulf Cartel," Juan said of the Zetas' main rivals. "I earn more money with the Zetas, but I know the (crap) they do," he said. "They brag about it."
With the recent killing of the ICE agent and perhaps other attacks, the Zetas also are breaking the golden rule for Mexican traffickers: Don't kill Americans, he said. It brings too much heat.
If the Zetas are crushed, violence will lessen, he said, and Mexico's older cartels will go back to the older way of doing business - dividing up territory and agreeing not to clash with each other.
Death toll has exploded
Mike Vigil, a retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was the chief of international operations, said Mexican gangsters used to understand that violence should be used sparingly.
"They love brutality," Vigil said of the Zetas. "They do not care whether you are a police officer, a trafficker or an innocent bystander.
"The drug-trafficking organizations are eventually going to have to deal with the Zetas."
The death toll has exploded since Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006 and dispersed military troops throughout the country to fight the cartels. The resulting battles have wrought carnage among local politicians, soldiers, gangsters and civilians alike.
As for the military, Juan said, "They are not helping," noting that the soldiers, like the gangsters, seem to kill whoever they want.
He also discussed some of the finer points of drug trafficking.
Checkpoints no problem
"We don't hide it," he said, telling stories of openly off-loading tractor-trailer rigs of cocaine in parking lots. "These are not lies. Everybody in Mexico knows it."
Even the checkpoints Mexican officials operate along the highways between Central Mexico and the border do not pose much of a problem, Juan said.
The trick, he confided, is to send someone in advance to bribe a commander so a drug load won't be bothered.
"It is better to tell them," he said. "It will cost you more if they catch it."
Tries not to be flashy
As for how he's been able to survive a decade, Juan said the secret is not being greedy or flashy enough to draw attention from other gangsters, who these days show no hesitation to cut down rivals.
He said he can quickly size up in a bar or cafe who is likely to be a trafficker, from the money they spend to the way they talk, sit or eat.
"You can tell in a restaurant or anywhere - that guy is moving dope," Juan said.
Other keys to longevity in the business: knowing your place in the Mexican under world's hierarchy and not giving the impression you are making more money or interested in taking a chunk out of another gangster's livelihood.
"You keep doing the work you do," Juan said. "Stay at your level."
dane.schiller@chron.com

Clinton is a pig

"Now if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true."

Monday, June 13, 2011

The Racial Gap in Education

"America's educational woes reflect our demographic mix of students. Today's schools are filled with millions of youngsters, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants struggling with English plus millions of others of mediocre intellectual ability disdaining academic achievement."

"To be grossly politically incorrect, most of America's educational woes vanish if these indifferent, troublesome students left when they had absorbed as much as they were going to learn.

The Racial Gap in Education

80 percent of a school's success depends on two factors: the cognitive ability of the child and the disposition he brings to class – not on texts, teachers or classroom size.

If the brains and the will to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter.

Education

The racial gap in education

The gap between the test scores of East Asian and European nations and those of Latin America and African nations mirrors the gap between Asian and white students in the U.S. and black and Hispanic students in the U.S.

Which brings us to "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools," a new book in which Dr. Robert Weissberg contends that U.S. educational experts deliberately "refuse to confront the obvious truth."

"America's educational woes reflect our demographic mix of students. Today's schools are filled with millions of youngsters, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants struggling with English plus millions of others of mediocre intellectual ability disdaining academic achievement."

In the public and parochial schools of the 1940s and 1950s, kids were pushed to the limits of their ability, then pushed harder. And when they stopped learning, they were pushed out the door.

Writes Weissberg: "To be grossly politically incorrect, most of America's educational woes vanish if these indifferent, troublesome students left when they had absorbed as much as they were going to learn and were replaced by learning-hungry students from Korea, Japan, India, Russia, Africa and the Caribbean."

Weissberg contends that 80 percent of a school's success depends on two factors: the cognitive ability of the child and the disposition he brings to class – not on texts, teachers or classroom size.

If the brains and the will to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter.

A nation weary of wasting billions on unctuous educators who never deliver what they promise may be ready to hear some hard truths.

Bill Clinton. Mr. Sleaze

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true."

Clinton, the meaning of "is"

Years from now, when we look back on Bill Clinton's presidency, its defining moment may well be Clinton's rationalization to the grand jury about why he wasn't lying when he said to his top aides that with respect to Monica Lewinsky, "there's nothing going on between us." How can this be? Here's what Clinton told the grand jury (according to footnote 1,128 in Starr's report):

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true."

Bin Ladin

‎"It seems to me that with the character of our society, it might have been more consistent with American values to have at least ordered his capture with rules of engagement,"
13 hours ago · Like ·

Friday, June 10, 2011

Weiner's fatal carelessness

That is why it is, sad to say, a matter of legitimate interest that Weiner’s wife was pregnant when he sent those tweets. It widens our sense of just how careless he is with the lives of others, particularly those of people who are more vulnerable than he is. That is good to know about a politician; it is distinct from the question of whether someone who lies to his wife will lie to the public and, I’d argue, is more important.

Anthony Weiner

The Times reports that Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner’s wife, is expecting a child. The happiness of that news is entirely a question for her—her baby, her body, her luck—and for her badly behaved husband. For the rest of us, it’s a reminder of how destructive Weiner’s actions were, even if they are a source of humor. (Jon Stewart—whose show Weiner evoked in mortifyingly graphic terms in texts with one woman—at least got some material out of it.) He hurt people who thought he might be a strong voice in Congress, college students on Twitter, and even those he accused of hacking him; that he also compromised his family, in such a public way, is almost, but not quite, incidental. It's something to factor into calculations of his political worth.

It’s also a measure of Weiner’s recklessness: at the juncture in his life when he was called on to be the most protective of himself and his family, he was the least so. This is not about judging him as a husband—really, we know too much about his intimate life already—but judging him as a rater of risk. He is not a very good one.

Measuring risk is what politicians do for a living—from when they decide to run, to voting to hire policemen or teachers or to go to war. One doesn’t want them to be completely, or even mostly cautious: politicians who never say anything that causes anyone to cringe, and never take a political risk, are useless. (That kind of risk can become routinized, of course; Ron Paul would probably make people angry if he made a safe vote.) There has to be some idiocy in idealism, as well as self-delusion. But that brand of bet is as different from what Weiner did as the gambit of putting up a Facebook page calling on people to come to Tahrir Square is different from spending hours hunched over an online-poker site. Not all hungers are alike, and courage shouldn’t be confused with mindless greed, or self-sacrifice with self-immolation, particularly because other people can easily get burned. (Did Weiner, in putting his political future in the hands of a twenty-six-year-old in Texas whom he had never met, congratulate himself for being brave?)

That is why it is, sad to say, a matter of legitimate interest that Weiner’s wife was pregnant when he sent those tweets. It widens our sense of just how careless he is with the lives of others, particularly those of people who are more vulnerable than he is. That is good to know about a politician; it is distinct from the question of whether someone who lies to his wife will lie to the public and, I’d argue, is more important.

Not everything about this is our business: Weiner, in his press conference, let everyone know that Abedin said she loved him, but that isn’t really useful information. We all deserve some privacy, and yet we all, just by walking through the world, put ourselves and even our children on display, to one extent or another. We have a choice about how ridiculous we will appear to ourselves and to others. Abedin works in politics, too—for Hillary Clinton, of all people. One can say that this is private, and all unfair, but a public life is part of a politician’s job, and anyone who doesn’t realize that is not paying attention. And anyway Weiner seems to have found these women through his political persona and not in a bar or at his college reunion.

The children who matter most to Weiner’s future may be the ones who are being born in other families, or who aren’t being born, at least not in this state. Nate Silver has a good piece in the Times about how the Democrats may solve their Weiner problem through the post-census redrawing of district lines—sending in the movers to carry his seat away, without worrying about how to get him out of it. Because of population losses, two New York congressman have to go, and Weiner may be as good a choice as any. Redistricting has its risks, too.

Tracy Morgan trashes his career

"He said if his son was gay he better come home and talk to him like a man or he would pull out a knife and stab that little N to death."

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Pat Buchanin

Bush II's compulsive interventionism has proven as great a disaster for his country as it did for his party.

What explains the shift in political and public sentiment away from military interventionism?

First, the length and cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the first in its 10th year, the latter in its eighth -- with their endless bleedings of American blood and treasure for inconclusive results.

Over 6,000 dead, 40,000 wounded and $1 trillion sunk, with a real possibility a U.S. pullout from Iraq in December could result in civil war, and a fear that the Afghan War, where the Taliban now conduct jailbreaks of 500 men in Kandahar and fight on the Af-Pak border in battalion strength, may ultimately be lost.

A second cause is our fiscal crisis. America cannot afford any more wars, or more billions in foreign aid to balance budgets of Arab countries whose treasuries have been looted by departing despots.

Third, there is the sense in Congress that it has let itself be steadily stripped of its constitutional power to declare war.

Harry Truman conducted America's first undeclared war in Korea, calling it a "police action."

Historians now believe Congress was misled or lied to when it approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing LBJ to attack North Vietnam.

While George H.W. Bush got the support of both houses for Desert Storm, Bill Clinton launched his war on Serbia in defiance of a House vote not to authorize it.

George W. Bush got congressional approval for the invasion of Iraq by declaring that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction it did not have. We went to war for nothing.

Finally, the Libyan war Obama entered, egged on by Britain and France, but without the support of Congress, makes little sense.

Though Gadhafi is a repellent figure, the architect of the Lockerbie massacre, we have no vital interest in who rules Libya. Yet when Gadhafi falls, it will now be up to us to see to it that Libya is united and repaired and has a democratic government.

Obama has already committed us to take the lead in a $40 billion rescue of Egypt and Tunisia. Can we also afford to rescue a Yemen that is in terrible shape and a Libya that has been at war for months?

The return of the anti-interventionist right is welcome news. It may assure a real debate on foreign policy in the Republican primaries of 2012.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) declared in a press conference today, "We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States." In several tense back and forths with reporters, Reid said he opposes imprisoning detainees on U.S. soil, saying flatly, "We don't want them around the United States":
REID: I'm saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That's very clear.

QUESTION: No one's talking about releasing them. We're talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.

REID: Can't put them in prison unless you release them.

QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? ...

REID: I can't make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.

Later, Reid repeated that he would not support Guantanamo detainees being transferred to U.S prisons:

QUESTION: But Senator, Senator, it's not that you're not being clear when you say you don't want them released. But could you say -- would you be all right with them being transferred to an American prison?

REID: Not in the United States.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Lady GaGa

Compare that to Adele, who “21″ album was only off 4% last week. That album continues to sell and sell. One reason is that Adele’s album is strong all the way through. It’s unclear what kind of”legs” the Lady Gaga collection really has: so far it’s spawned just one real hit, the title track. The rest of the album is monotonous. Watching Anderson Cooper’s piece on “60 Minutes” this past Sunday didn’t help.
While Stefani Germanotta is confident and smart, she is also overbearing. The costumes. the pretense, the posing to be more Madonna than Madonna–it’s too much. Gaga believes more is more. This may play her out very quickly. She’s reinventing herself at the speed of ADD. Quite clearly, the songs don’t matter-it’s the statement, the look, the attitude. Her supporters argue that she sings and actually plays the piano and writes songs. But that’s getting lost. If sales drop again next week by huge numbers, Lady Gaga may have to lose the egg.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Monday, June 13, 2011

Friday, June 10, 2011

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

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