Monday Map: We Trust Our Police

by Matt Kelley

Published December 01, 2008 @ 09:56AM PST

The U.S. trusts its police more than any other country on Earth.  It's a surprising number, considering that countries like France and Sweden come in so low.

See the chart below for rankings among countries where data was collected (these numbers come from the United Nations Crime Victims' Survey in 2000, asking random households whether police in their country do a good job of controlling crime.)

Monday Map: We Trust Our Police

by Matt Kelley

Published December 01, 2008 @ 09:56AM PST

The U.S. trusts its police more than any other country on Earth.  It's a surprising number, considering that countries like France and Sweden come in so low.

See the chart below for rankings among countries where data was collected (these numbers come from the United Nations Crime Victims' Survey in 2000, asking random households whether police in their country do a good job of controlling crime.)

California's Prisons Go to Court

by Matt Kelley

Published December 01, 2008 @ 04:56AM PST

A special panel of three federal judges will reconvene tomorrow to continue hearing testimony in a class action case brought by thousands of inmates against the California prison system. The inmates argue that the state's prisons are so overcrowded that inmates cannot receive proper medical care. Federal courts have already ruled that the prison health care system contributes to inmate deaths, and this panel could take the ruling a step further by ordering the release of as many as 50,000 inmates.

California incarcerates 156,330 people in 33 facilities built to hold 100,000. The prisons are so crowded that inmates are using buckets to shower. Mentally ill prisoners sometimes wait a year for a bed in a treatment facility.

At the root of the problem is the appearance of mandatory minimum sentences and stricter laws without any increase in prison beds.

Jeffrey Beard, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, blamed California's adoption of tough drug laws and three-strikes sentencing laws since the 1970s. The state has added more than 1,000 felony sentencing laws during the past 30 years, and its criminal code gives judges little leeway in deciding punishments.

"They went from being one of the most progressive systems in the country to one of the most overcrowded," Beard testified. "California has this problem that has just been going on for years and years and years, and nobody seems to be willing to step up to the plate and fix the problem."

Read more.

A Mom's Sting Operation

by Matt Kelley

Published November 29, 2008 @ 10:09AM PST

The New York Times today has the fascinating story of a mother's quest to clear her son of a murder he says he didn't commit. John Giuca was convicted in 2005 of a murder in New York. His mom, believing her son to be wrongfully convicted, decided he needed a new trial in order to show the truth, and she didn't bet on getting that chance through appeals. She decided to take matters into her own hands.

At 46, Doreen Giuliano reinvented herself. She dyed her hair blond and tanned at a salon. She left her white seven-bedroom, colonial-style house for a spare basement apartment three miles away. She took on a new name, and for about a year, she said, she rode her bicycle around her new neighborhood, trying to attract the gaze of a young man whom she badly wanted to get close to.

Having assumed the role of a 30-year-old research analyst from California who wore six-inch heels and push-up bras, she set out to meet a man named Jason Allo, a contractor who lived in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He was a juror in her son’s trial.

She succeeded, becoming friendly with Allo. And her hunch to focus on him was right - he had known some witnesses in the trial and had not admitted them during voir dire. She taped his statements and Giuca's lawyers plan to file for a new trial this week.

Read the full story here - it's a good spy tale for a Saturday afternoon.

Another Saturday in the Drug War

by Matt Kelley

Published November 29, 2008 @ 09:51AM PST

Some news this week from our wonderful War on Drugs:

A Brookings Institution report guided by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo outlined broad strategies for reform in Latin America, and didn't mince words on the drug war.

"Current U.S. counter- narcotics policies are failing by most objective standards," the report says. "The only long-run solution to the problem of illegal narcotics is to reduce the demand for drugs in the major consuming countries, including the United States."

And an October report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office in October outlined clearly the failure of Plan Columbia to reduce cocaine production in the war-torn country. While security in Columbia has improved in recent years, cocaine production has increased. Here are four reasons to scrap our focus on reducing supply - it's a waste of money, crop eradication harms the environment, we anger our friends in countries like Ecuador, Columbia and Bolivia, and - as the GAO now points out - it's not effective.

A new study this week showed that methadone is effective in treating cocaine addictions.

I've written about (Attorney General nominee) Eric Holder's support for mandatory minimum sentences. U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad's name is still being tossed around as a possible drug czar, and while Ramstad has taken progressive positions on treatment and alternatives to incarceration, for some reason he's against needle exchanges proven to prevent the spread of HIV and other diseases.

MySpace Verdict: Lying on the Web Is a Crime

by Matt Kelley

Published November 28, 2008 @ 08:53AM PST

Lori Drew, a Missouri mom accused of creating a fake MySpace profile to torment her daughter's frenemy, was convicted in federal court this week of accessing a computer without authorization, a misdemeanor that carries up to a year in prison but is usually met with probation. She was acquitted of the felony charge of intentionally inflicting emotional distress.

Orin Kerr, one of Drew's lawyers, wrote on the Volokh Conspiracy that that this verdict essentially means the jury decided it is a federal crime to violate a website's terms of service.

This verdict probes an interesting area of law - one that is surely still developing - and it has raised objections from lawyers across the country. If lying about your identity online is a crime, aren't most of us guilty? From the NY Times:

“It will be interesting to see if issues of safety and security will eventually trump the hallmark ideology of free, largely anonymous or pseudonymous participation in cyberspace,” said Sameer Hinduja, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University.

Andrew M. Grossman, senior legal policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, said the possibility of being prosecuted for online misrepresentation, while remote, should worry users nonetheless.

“If this verdict stands,” Mr. Grossman said, “it means that every site on the Internet gets to define the criminal law. That’s a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions.”

More from Wired Magazine's Threat Level blog.

A Thanksgiving Letter from Prison

by Matt Kelley

Published November 27, 2008 @ 09:03AM PST

On this happy holiday, when I'm lucky enough to spend time with family, I'm thinking about those who aren't with their loved ones today. Hamedah Hasan (left, with filmmaker Melissa Mummert), who has been in prison since the early 1990s for a first-time, non-violent drug offense, wrote a moving Thanksgiving letter about the drug war that's keeping her from her daughters today. She writes:

While I am responsible for my own criminal behavior, being a first time, non-violent offender makes my sentence of decades in prison impossible to accept quietly.

A short film about Hasan's case, "Perversion of Justice," won the Changemakers award at this year's Media Matters Film Festival. Watch the moving 7-minute short after the jump.

And on this Thanksgiving Day, I'm thinking about another letter, a blog post written last year by my friend Brandon Moon about spending this holiday, year after year, in Texas prison for a crime he didn't commit. He writes about listening to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant in the craft shop of a Texas prison, and the cameraderie he found there. Read his post here.

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