Given that I’ve given up on the idea of prison as rehabilitative, what does it mean when someone actually is rehabilitated in prison? That’s my takeaway after reading yesterday’s NY Times article about Donnie Andrews and Fran Boyd, he a former felon who served 17 years for killing a drug dealer and she a former […]
Category: criminal justice
I can’t think of a less sympathetic group to defend than sex offenders. But here I go. TalkLeft had a post up the other day about the predicament in which many former sex offenders find themselv
As you – loyal readers – now know (because I write about it ad nauseum), the criminal justice system’s reliance on eyewitness testimony has led to many many (many) false convictions.
The UK once used New South Wales – now Australia – as its penal colony, shipping its convicts to the ends of the earth instead of making space for and warehousing them on its own precious soil. And it’s happening again. Only this time it’s the U.S. who is sending incarcerated men and women far […]
The title of this post sounds crazy, huh? Unfortunately, for some women around the country who are mourning their stillbirths or miscarriages it’s all too applicable. There’s news today th
I may have found the answer to the question I posed to you all over the weekend about what kind of weekly fill-in-the-blank blogging you’d like to see. The answer might be weekly Liptak love blo
There’s been a lot of fanfare recently — and in many ways, rightly so — over the over 200 people who have been exonerated by DNA evidence. Many of these people served upwards of fifteen years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit (many of them for rape or rape & murder, crimes for which […]
The live free or die state isn’t so good to those who aren’t free, it turns out. Via Feministing, I found an article about overcrowding in women’s prisons in New Hampshire. It’
Sometimes I am appalled at the roadblocks that courts set up in the way of justice. Ironic, isn’t it? The NY Times has the story today of Troy A. Davis, a 38-year-old man who has been on Georgia
I wrote last night about what I thought was the most glaring irony of the Libby commutation. I should have thought, when Scott brought Karla Faye Tucker into the discussion, to look back at Bush’s Texas record for greater irony and disgust. A letter to the editor in today’s NY Times did it for me. […]
A lot of ink (or e-ink) has been spilled today about Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence. Scott touched on Bush’s consistency when it comes to pardons — loyalty is t
Janet Jackson had her Rhythm Nation. We have our Prison Nation. The numbers are in, and it turns out that the U.S. prison population grew more in 2005-2006 than in any other year since 2000 (via TalkL