Jim Webb’s heroic speech on the need for prison reform

In reading Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon, I learned the extent to which Senator Jim Webb has heroically spoken out on the need for prison reform. Webb certainly hits the nail on the head. Our current prison system is dehumanizing and it drains the public treasury. We can do much much better. Here are Webb's words:

Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world's population; we have 25% of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .

In many cases these issues involve people’s ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .

Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons. . . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.

Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy - the whole area of drug policy in this country?

And how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives that we might look at?

Greenwald picks up where Webb's quote (above) stops. This is a critical issue that needs immediate attention, for all of our good. We can do a lot better than arguing to lock up all the "bad" guys but then defining the "bad" guys simplistically and then making it all worse with the way we treat those "bad" guys.

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Prison reform on the radar

New story from The Raw Story:

"America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace," [Senator Jim] Webb said, noting that the United States has five percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

According to a document released by Sen. Webb's office, "Its task will be to propose concrete, wide-ranging reforms to responsibly reduce the overall incarceration rate; improve federal and local responses to international and domestic gang violence; restructure our approach to drug policy; improve the treatment of mental illness; improve prison administration, and establish a system for reintegrating ex-offenders."

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As If We Didn’t Know

Politics dictated FDA policy? Say it isn't so! According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda. What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call. The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue. I mean, really---it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them. You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one's own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one's life free from government meddling. Handing both men and women the tools---provided by the free market, to boot---to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives. They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger. What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism. Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol' fashion American Values! It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children. How did this happen?

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How to weed out junk science when discussing climate change.

George Will's recent journalistic malpractice has inspired much discussion by many people concerned about climate change. It's a critically important issue given that 41% of Americans currently think that the threat of global warming is being exaggerated by the media. The intellectual energy runs even deeper than criticism of George Will, though, leading us to the fundamental issue of how journalists and readers can distinguish legitimate science from sham (or politicized) science. The Washington Post recently agreed to publish a precisely-worded response to Will by Christopher Mooney. Here's Mooney's opener:

A recent controversy over claims about climate science by Post op-ed columnist George F. Will raises a critical question: Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?

Mooney methodically takes Will to task on point after point. For instance, weather is not the same thing as the climate. The state of the art in 1970s climate science has been superseded by 2007 climate science. You can't determine long-term trends in Arctic ice by comparing ice thickness only on two strategically picked days. The bottom line is not surprising. If you want to do science well you have to do it with precision, measuring repeatedly, crunching the numbers every which way and then drawing your conclusions self-critically. What is not allowed is cherry picking.

Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever.

Mooney has given considerable thought to these topics. His byline indicates that he is the author of "The Republican War on Science" and co-author of the forthcoming "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future." I would supplement Mooney's well-written points, borrowing from our federal courts. They have long been faced with the struggle to determine what is real science and what is junk science, and they have settled on what is now called the "Daubert" test, (named after the case first applying the test, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579 (1993)). The Daubert analysis is applied many times every day in all federal courts (and many state courts) all across America. The problem facing judges is that the parties to law suits often produce experts who express scientific theories and explanations that are never heard outside of courtrooms. This justifiably makes judges suspicious. Is the witness doing "real" science or his he/she doing sham science to further the interests of the party paying his/her bills? The Daubert test asks the judge to serve as gatekeeper, to make sure that only legitimate science sees the light of day in courtrooms. Here are the relevant factors:
  • Does the method involve empirical testing (is the theory or technique falsifiable, refutable, and testable)?
  • Has the method been subjected to peer review and publication?
  • Do we know the error rate of the method and the existence and maintenance of standards concerning its operation?
  • Is the theory and technique generally accepted by a relevant scientific community?
Positive answers to each of these factors suggests that the witness is doing real science. Astrology would fail this test miserably. Applied to climate science, the Daubert test would require that we listen carefully to what the scientists talk about with each other, in person and in their peer-reviewed journals. Daubert would require that we know enough about the techniques of climate science to know how it makes its measurements and conclusions. Daubert would certainly require that we know the difference between the weather and the climate. Applying Daubert is not simply a matter of listening to the scientists. Quite often, the scientists are bought and paid for (e.g., scientists working for tobacco companies and corrupt pharmaceutical companies). Applying Daubert requires taking the time to understand how the science works to solve real-world questions and problems and then taking the time to see that its methodology is being used with rigor in this application. There are no shortcuts, expecially for outsider non-scientists. No shortcuts. No cherry-picking.

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The big problem with legalized usury

In his recent article called "Infinite Debt" (in the April 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine), Thomas Geoghegan connects the dots to point out the terrible consequences of having a nation devoid of interest caps. First of all, this situation is something extraordinarily new. The law against usury had "existed in some form and every civilization from the time of the Babylonian empire to the end of Jimmy Carter's term." In many ways, however, it no longer exists in the United States.

Here's what happened: the financial sector bloats up. With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that Capitol rushes out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25% to 30% on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from the honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing. Sure, GM is awful. Sure, it doesn't innovate. But the people who could have saved GM and Ford went off to work at AIG, or Merrill Lynch, or even Goldman Sachs. All of this used to be so obvious as not to merit comment. What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor and the banks? In the United States, we got rid of manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it's just the banks.

Geoghegan explains that this is why the middle-class is shrinking. In 2003, financial firms accounted for 40% of the profits that accrue to US corporations. Geoghegan points out that this is more than double the share of the financial industry (18%) when Ronald Reagan left office. As Geoghegan explains, "we use our credit cards to help liquidate our own jobs, the kind we used to have in Michigan and Ohio. By little teaspoons, the people who go into debt for kitty litter pull a bit more capital out of one sector and pour it into another." Geoghegan correctly explains that the dam broke when the United States Supreme Court issued its opinion in Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha Service Corporation, a decision issued in 1978. In that case, the Court held that Minnesota could not cap the credit card of a Nebraska bank because that bank was subject to the National Banking Act of 1864. Therefore, only the state where the bank is located (headquartered) can set the interest rates charged by that bank. In other words, all you need is a few disreputable states (such as Nebraska) for there to be effectively no interest cap on any bank in the United States willing to set up its headquarters in that state. Given that banks can now charge all kinds of hidden fees and penalties, in addition to interest rates at 25 to 50% (or even 500% for payday lenders), they no longer really want us to pay off those loans. Rather, "they want us to be irresponsible, or at least to have a certain amount of bad character." To put this on perspective, think of the terrible old banker, Mr. Potter, featured in the Christmas classic, It's a Wonderful Life. Mr. Potter drove a very hard bargain. He wanted everyone to actually ay off their loans. What's fascinating is that Mr. Potter was lending out money at the exorbitant rate of 2%. But now Mr. Potter would have more choices. If you could charge 35%, he might not necessarily think, "the law must be repaid"-at least not right away. And if he can charge 200%, he actually may not want the loan ever to be repaid. Therefore, we have a terribly bloated financial sector that employs immense numbers of people to do... what do they do? I do remember only about 1/3 as many people working in the financial sector 30 years ago (or so it seemed). It didn't seem like we needed these kinds of folks back then, certainly not so many of them. I really wonder whether most of these people are adding any value to society by doing what they do, or whether they are simply participating in an insane "arms race," by which they fight to get ahead of each other in order to suck vast amounts of money out of the lives of regular folks. Sounds like it's time to starve the beast by putting a 20% cap on all interest rates. That's what Geoghegan recommends.

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