politics: February 2008 Archives

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars. 

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – American drug users are paying ruthless Mexican kingpins nearly $14 billion annually for their meth, heroin, cocaine and especially marijuana – monies that are helping fund an unprecedented bloody turf war that's threatening Mexican institutions, the White House drug czar said. 

John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said marijuana, not heroin or cocaine, is the "bread and butter," "the center of gravity" for Mexican drug cartels that every year smuggle tons of it through the porous U.S.-Mexico border. 

Of the $13.8 billion that Americans contributed to Mexican drug traffickers in 2004-05, about 62 percent, or $8.6 billion, comes from marijuana consumption.

"That is our finding in a nutshell," said Laura Hickman, an assistant professor with the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute at Portland State University and a researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization based in Santa Monica. "We set out to test a real straightforward question. It was a question about whether deportable aliens are cycling through the local criminal justice system." 

The study compared deportable immigrants, people who entered the United States illegally, overstayed their student or other visas or committed other violations, with non-deportable immigrants - those with legal documents or those who have become naturalized. 

The study examined nearly 1,300 male immigrants released from jail during a 30-day period. It watched them for a year to see who returned to jail and whether they were deportable or non-deportable immigrants. Hickman said the common belief is that illegal immigrants are more likely to engage in crime than legal immigrants. 

"We wanted to just compare Advertisement their arrest records to see if those that were deportable were more likely to get arrested at least once and how quickly," Hickman said. The study followed 517 men who were eligible for deportation and 780 who were not after they were released from the county jail system from Aug. 4, 2002, to Sept. 2, 2002. 

Hickman said the numbers might show more deportable immigrants were arrested than legalized immigrants, but a statistical analysis that considered other factors showed it wasn't that simple. 

"Something else is causing the difference between the two groups," Hickman said. "Deportability is a red herring." Researchers examined more than the men's legal status, factoring in age, ethnicity, criminal histories and offenses and found that the differences in the deportable and non-deportable immigrants disappeared, Hickman said. 

Other research has shown that younger people and drug offenders are more likely to repeat their crimes, and the statistical study determined that played a role, Hickman said. The study is one of the first to consider if the fear that illegal immigrants increase crime in a community is legitimate. 

"I think our bottom line is there is so much untested rhetoric out there," Hickman said. "I think people are just spouting off their mouths without any basis in data."

In a report to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, which is examining how the death penalty is applied in California, Pepperdine law school professors Harry M. Caldwell, Carol Chase and Christine Goodman said only 14 of the state's 58 counties agreed to provide detailed answers to questions about the selection process. 

Richard was speaking at the BioMed Central Open Access Colloquium, alongside other "abolitionists," including my colleague Ginny Barbour, Senior Editor at PLoS Medicine. The talks have all been archived on the colloquium website. 

In his slavery analogy, Richard recalled the famous George Yard meeting. On 22nd May 1787, 12 men met in a printing shop at 2 George Yard in the City of London determined to end slavery. At that time, said Richard, more people were slaves than were free and the British economy depended on slavery. Yet by March 1807 slave trading was abolished in the British Empire. 

Today's traditional publishers, he argued, are the slave traders. The research articles and many of the academics who write them are the slaves. "And the shock troops of open access—Paul Ginsparg, Harold Varmus, Vitek Tracz, Pat Brown, Mike Eisen, Stevan Harnad—are the abolitionists," he said.

About 6 percent of the inmates were supervisors or leaders of drug rings, and about 5 percent were convicted of obstructing justice, generally by trying to get rid of their drugs as they were being arrested or contacting witnesses or co-defendants before trial, according to the analysis being circulated on Capitol Hill by the commission to counter Bush administration assertions that the guidelines would prompt the release of thousands of dangerous criminals.

There is a glaring discontinuity between the lived experience of Americans and the drug policies of their governments. Nearly a hundred million of us—forty per cent of the adult population, including pillars of the nation’s political, financial, academic, and media élites—have smoked (and, therefore, possessed) marijuana at some point, thereby committing an offense that, with a bit of bad luck, could have resulted in humiliation, the loss of benefits such as college loans and scholarships, or worse. More than forty thousand people are in jail for marijuana offenses, and some seven hundred thousand are arrested annually merely for possession. Meanwhile, the percentage of high-school seniors who have used pot has remained steady, between forty and fifty per cent. Nor have the prices of illicit drugs—which would rise sharply if the drug war were having any success—changed appreciably. Indeed, according to the government’s “National Drug Threat Assessment” for 2008, increases in domestic pot production, combined with the continued flow from abroad, point to a future of “market saturation,” which “could reduce the price of the drug significantly.” Meanwhile, potency has “reached its highest recorded level.” 

Of all our country’s ongoing wars—poverty, cancer, Iraq, Afghanistan—none is a more comprehensive disaster than the war on drugs. Unlike McCain, Obama and Clinton have at least promised to stop the feds from harassing medical marijuana patients and dispensaries in the dozen states whose laws permit marijuana to be used for medical purposes. But neither has given any indication of a willingness to rescue us from the larger disgrace of the drug war—the billions wasted, the millions harmed, the utter futility of it. On this point, hesitancy trumps hope, and expedience trumps experience.

The American College of Physicians, the nation's largest organization of doctors of internal medicine, with 124,000 members, contends that the long and rancorous debate over marijuana legalization has obscured good science that has demonstrated the benefits and medicinal promise of cannabis. 

In a 13-page position paper approved by the college's governing board of regents and posted Thursday on the group's website, the group calls on the government to drop marijuana from Schedule I, a classification it shares with illegal drugs such as heroin and LSD that are considered to have no medicinal value and a high likelihood of abuse.

Hundreds of professors voted unanimously for the change at a faculty meeting that culminated several months of meetings debating the move. 

While some say academic research should be widely available to people worldwide, academic journal officials said that bypassing their publications might hurt the peer review process. 

Stuart Shieber, a computer science professor who sponsored the motion, said some journals are run like monopolies, charging exorbitant prices for subscriptions. He said the journal Brain Research, for example, charges $21,000 a year. 

"This can be the first step in the process of increasing access to Harvard faculty's writings," Shieber said in a phone interview after the meeting. "That's really the goal. It isn't to reduce prices or put journals out of business." 

Under the plan, Harvard officials will create an office and repository for professors' finished papers run by the university's library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. It would probably be called the Office for Scholarly Communication. 

Academics often sign over the copyright to a journal before publication, and university libraries then buy back the work by subscribing to the publication. Under the new system, academics would retain copyright to their work, allowing the university to post it unless they opt out by filing a waiver. Faculty would then be allowed to publish their work in an academic journal.

Dr. Charles Tittle writes:

Most criminologists endorse the scientific model. They recognize that knowledge is built bit by bit, as regularities are identified, tentative explanations constructed, hypotheses tested, bodies of empirical findings compiled, and theories developed and modified. Though partly routine, this process relies heavily on creativity and innovation, and it absolutely requires sharing, evaluation, and integration of information. Moreover, knowledge construction is enhanced when numerous scholars address the subject matter and share their findings in a timely manner. Yet, the culture surrounding contemporary dissemination of criminological work in many ways inhibits rather than enhances the scientific enterprise. My objective here is to identify some of those obstructive elements and to suggest an approach that might minimize their impact.

The process is clear enough: scholars conduct research and submit reports of it to journals for anonymous review by other scholars who presumably evaluate how well the submitted papers contribute to the scientific enterprise. Most of the time reviewers recommend against publication, sometimes with dismissive statements but usually with advice about modifications they think might make the paper publishable. In the few instances when reviewers do find merit, they almost always recommend revision. Anticipating this, would-be authors usually devote substantial time that might otherwise be spent in actual research in trying to write their papers to meet potential reviewer requirements or in revising for re-submission to the same or a different journal. As a result the scientific process has become distorted by efforts to hit upon advance formulas for satisfying critics who often disagree among themselves.

The conventional rationale--that the quality of research is enhanced as “experts” offer unencumbered advice in an anonymous framework that protects them from interpersonal backlash-- is not accepted by all. Some question whether, on balance, “revisionism” leads to the best possible outcome. I am somewhat uneasy about the process, myself. During a 43 year career in which I have followed and endorsed conventional practice, I have read no fewer than 5000 reviews, along with the papers they were evaluating. During a six year term as editor of Criminology, I processed over 800 manuscripts, involving three or more reviews each. In addition, I have acted as a selected reviewer for hundreds of papers submitted to various journals, ultimately, of course, examining the other reviews for those manuscripts. I have also received literally hundreds of outside reviews of my own papers.

Based on that experience I wonder whether the process by which knowledge is currently disseminated through journals is as productive to the scientific enterprise as it should be. The apparatus of publication sometimes seems to obstruct accumulation of knowledge rather than enhancing it; it often discourages creativity and innovation rather than encouraging it; it frequently hinders sharing of information rather than facilitating it; it thins rather than enlarges the work force of scholars; and it may not necessarily lead to the highest quality work.

Simple standards of fairness call for the attorney general to support the recommendations of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which reduce the disparity of sentences and make the changes retroactive. 

Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently implied that America's streets will be flooded with violent felons if the Sentencing Commission proceeds with its plans to retroactively apply amended sentencing guidelines to individuals convicted of using crack cocaine. In testimony last week before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Mukasey said, "Unless Congress acts by the March 3 deadline, nearly 1,600 convicted crack dealers, many of them violent gang members, will be eligible for immediate release into communities nationwide." This ignores reality and fairness. 

Unfortunately, the attorney general failed to consider the process that is in place to protect the public. First, the federal courts will be required to review each case and determine whether the offender should be released. Individuals convicted of violent crimes will not have their sentences reduced, regardless of whether they are in prison for a crack-related offense. Second, we do recognize that some individuals convicted only of drug charges may have simply plea-bargained down their cases from more serious and violent crimes. However, anybody who may pose a threat to society should not be released; and anybody released will have served his mandatory-minimum sentence. 

Congress created a federal criminal penalty structure for the possession and distribution of crack cocaine that is 100 times more severe than the penalty structure relating to powder cocaine. African Americans comprise more than 80 percent of federal crack cocaine offenders. That statistic does not make sense given that two-thirds of all users of crack are white or Hispanic. The disparity in the arrest, prosecution and treatment has led to inordinately harsh sentences disproportionately meted out to African American defendants that are far more severe than sentences for comparable offenses by white defendants. Indeed, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported that revising this one sentencing rule would do more to reduce the sentencing gap between blacks and whites "than any other single policy change."

That is what happened to a detailed study of the planning for postwar Iraq prepared for the Army by the RAND Corporation, a federally financed center that conducts research for the military. 

Matthew McKay, a stock analyst at Jeffries & Co. in San Francisco, cites a simple cause: news that the Toronto Police Services Board plans to buy 3,000 new Taser electroshock weapons, at a cost of $8.6 million for gear and training. If the deal goes ahead, tasers would become standard issue weaponry for all of Toronto’s frontline officers, right next to their handcuffs and batons. 

On Wednesday night, I participated in a public forum about the prospect of a fully taser-armed police force, organized by the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition. One speaker, who had a history of psychiatric illness, told the room: “We’re worried because we’re the people who are going to get shocked.” 

It’s a concern grounded in experience. According to Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair’s own analysis, in 2006, city cops deployed the devices in 156 incidents. In all but nine, the subject appeared “to have a mental disorder” or was in some sort of “crisis.” 

Several speakers at the forum pointed out that $8.6 million would be better spent keeping people out of crisis - by opening more beds and providing better mental health and addiction services. Instead, four homeless shelters were closed last year, at a loss of 258 beds. 

But the most troubling remark of the evening was this: “Why is this happening now?” The timing is indeed baffling. It was only three months ago that video of the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver International Airport caused an international furor. The tragedy exposed the most prevalent misconception about tasers: that they are used primarily as an alternative to guns. As former Toronto mayor John Sewell told me, “the taser is not the thing that replaces the gun, it’s what replaces all the other things that police might do other than use a gun, like talk to you.”

InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm. 

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats. 

“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years. 

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members. 

“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing. 

“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.” 

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”