One of the ideas that Ward Stone suggested some time ago was a requirement that anybody involved in the criminal justice system be tested for lead poisoning. ☠️ I think this is a very good idea, especially if treatment for lead exposure was a standard part of criminal justice system. It could save a lot of money in the long run, by reducing criminal recidivism.👮
Criminal Justice
I Was a Cop for 18 Years. I Witnessed and Participated in Abuses of Power.
Prepping for Parole | The New Yorker
NPR
How Misdemeanors Turn Innocent People Into Criminals
Misdemeanors have always been the chump change of the American criminal system. We call them “petty.” We call them “minor.” They are the way that we punish people when we think that their offenses are not serious enough to warrant felony treatment. Not only felony punishment, but also the due process and attention that goes with prosecuting and adjudicating serious crimes. In writing this book, it was shocking to me how little attention we have paid to this vast swath of criminal justice work that the state engages in.
This Company Hired Anyone Who Applied. Now It’s Starting a Movement.
Currently, 5.4 million people in the U.S. want a job but can’t secure one; according to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, around 75 percent of formerly incarcerated people struggle to find work. Lack of access to employment and incarceration in the U.S. go hand in hand, but Brady believes that open hiring proves they do not have to. In a sense, it comes down to pure math: It costs around $30,000 a year to incarcerate a single person. Imagine if that money was used instead to pay someone a living wage?
Especially in places like Yonkers, which is struggling with disinvestment after its textiles industry went under several decades ago, the idea is transformative. Greyston has employed 176 people from the poorest neighborhood in the city over its history, and, in doing so, it’s equipping people with the resources to remain in place and contribute to the local economy.
Gun violence and crime fears are tone death
I think the left wing’s push for gun control and the right wings push back against crime and the war on cops is kind of tone deaf.
While the media is highlighting crime and gun violence, the opposite is true in most people’s lives – crime is going down, neighborhoods are the safest they’ve been in half a century. Murders have fallen to historically low levels, indeed much of the reason why suicides have increased in the country is because murder has fallen so much. Murder after all is suicide by other means.
Indeed, if you look at the push by the left to loosen criminal penalties and legalize marijuana, much of it comes from the realization crime has fallen dramatically. Likewise, right wing gun advocates can legitimately say that fears of gun violence are overblown when crime and murder has fallen so much in recent decades.
Television news brings violence into one’s home every night. It shows sad relatives and friends of the dead, it shows the drama of the courtroom as mostly the colored and poor are brought to what the television calls justice. But despite what indigestion television is causing to folks eating TV dinners, and the cheers and jeers of the politician class, it’s distant from the everyday reality folks are living.