For like 3 months. Still waiting for one of our conservative legal eagles to explain why a rich white guy who invited a 5 year old to his house and raped her only gets house arrest.
That’s the thing about privilege. Even the asshole conservatives who don’t plan to rape a kid one day want to keep the system working in their favor just in case.
A Google search will show that Pastor Kenneth Glasgow first made news in 2001 as the former crack addict and prison inmate who was fretted over by his older half brother, the Rev. Al Sharpton Jr.
The local media in Dothan, a small, unprepossessing city in Alabama’s Wiregrass region, have long followed his story of reinvention from felon to do-gooder who hand-delivered meals, organized unity marches and — in a place where few were willing to speak out — crusaded against brutality and racism.
During the Senate race between Roy S. Moore and Doug Jones last year, Mr. Glasgow gained attention with his effort to register as voters thousands of people with felony records, a campaign that thrilled left-wing groups while outraging Breitbart News.
In March, Mr. Glasgow was charged with capital murder.
The day before the fatal shooting took place, he spoke at the local March for Our Lives for gun control. To an East Coast journalist who has been visiting Dothan for a decade, the idea that this man could be facing death row seemed, if not Shakespearean (tragic and predestined), then perhaps Faulknerian (grotesque and confounding).
First, there were so many people in Dothan who would revel in his downfall. In a place known for the excesses of its criminal justice system, Mr. Glasgow has been the critic in chief of the police, prosecutors and jailers.
And then there is the fact that he did not actually kill anyone.
The police say that a passenger in a car that Mr. Glasgow was driving got out and fatally shot another motorist. Under Alabama’s complicity law, also known as the “aiding and abetting” statute, an accomplice to a crime is just as guilty as the main actor. To make their case against Mr. Glasgow, prosecutors must prove that he knew, or reasonably should have known, that violence was going to occur. He says he had no idea.
But what if the authors—and the policymakers who heeded them—had taken another tack? What if vacant property had received the attention that, for thirty years, was instead showered on petty criminals?
Compelling theories, as critics of broken-windows policing know all too well, are often betrayed by evidence. That’s why Branas was so surprised by the findings from their first study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, which showed a thirty-nine-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated abandoned buildings and a smaller—but still meaningful—five-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated lots. These are extraordinary numbers, at a level of impact one rarely sees in a social-science experiment.
Equally powerful, Branas said, was that there was no evidence that the violence had simply shifted to nearby places. The declines were real. And they lasted from one to nearly four years, making the benefit far more sustainable than those of other crime-reduction programs. “Honestly, it was a bigger effect than we’d expected to find,” he said.
What the Philadelphia studies suggest is that place-based interventions are far more likely to succeed than people-based ones. “Tens of millions of vacant and abandoned properties exist in the United States,” Branas and his team wrote. Remediating those properties is simple, cheap, and easily reproducible. What’s more, the programs impose few demands on local residents, and they appear to pay for themselves. “Simple treatments of abandoned buildings and vacant lots returned conservative estimates of between $5.00 and $26.00 in net benefits to taxpayers and between $79.00 and $333.00 to society at large, for every dollar invested,” the team wrote. It’s not only more dangerous to leave the properties untended—it’s more expensive.
The evidence is clear, Farley said. In countries that have opened supervised injection sites, overdose deaths have dropped.
“Nobody likes the idea of watching someone who is addicted just inject drugs. We want to get all of those people into treatment, but we all have to recognize that, despite all of our efforts, many people are not going to drug treatment.
“In a crisis like this, with as many people dying as we have, it’s worth a try,” he said.
For like 3 months. Still waiting for one of our conservative legal eagles to explain why a rich white guy who invited a 5 year old to his house and raped her only gets house arrest.
That’s the thing about privilege. Even the asshole conservatives who don’t plan to rape a kid one day want to keep the system working in their favor just in case.
Is that a serious question or just some whatabout trolling?
How do you figure conservative reforms would lessen the influence of money and race in criminal justice? If they did that, they wouldn't be conservative.
Sure. There are conservative who favor such policies but they break from the vast majority of conservatives and those policies themselves aren’t in line with modern conservatism. Modern conservatives are more interested in making money off prisons than reducing the prison population.[/QUOTE/]
Hilldawg took a lot of cash from private prison companies, so spare me the blame republican tirade.