So it turns out that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren’t bullied, just psychotic. Now we can gather up all the blame that’s been spread out among the victims and society at large and deposit it firmly where it belongs: on the killers.
Will the well-funded anti-bullying industry, which has been profiting from Harris and Klebold’s murders for a decade now, edit their workbooks and return the money now? ...
I am traveling to Atlanta this week, so I will stick to a subject that comes painfully easy: recidivism. ...
I realize I beat this like a dead horse the other day, but the experts are beating it like two dead horses, as evinced by this article in the Washington Post: “Some Link Economy With Spate of Killings.” The “some” mentioned here is the same “some” mentioned in the Christian Science Monitor, noted criminologist Jack Levin, along with fellow noted Northwestern criminologist James Alan Fox. But being noted doesn’t mean that you can’t be wrong. It’s utterly risible to lump together these 57 murders and attribute them to the economic crash. In fairness, it’s the journalist here who makes this claim, but Levin and Fox eagerly embroider on it:
Comparative statistics are difficult to come by, but during the past month alone, at least eight mass homicides in this country have claimed the lives of 57 people. Just yesterday, four people were discovered shot to death in a modest wood-frame home in a remote Alabama town. ...
(Many criminologists don’t have far to go if they want to study the habits of domestic terrorists and other convicted felons. A quick stroll to the faculty lounge is all that’s needed. Students with criminal records probably have a harder time gaining access to the university than professors with the same.)
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Yesterday, I wrote about some media reactions to the Binghamton mass killer. Today, I want to take a closer look at the ways expert opinions play out in one article about recent mass killings from The Christian Science Monitor.
In “Shootings, Murder-Suicide Raise Broader Question: Is Violence Linked to Recession?”, writer Patrik Jonsson posits the theory that the recent economic downturn may be responsible for the following crimes: ...
The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and other American papers with international readership frequently package stories about the horrors of America to feed the America-bashing appetites of their international audiences. They are generously abetted in this mission by academic criminologists who stand at the ready to paint a dystopic picture of an America peopled with violent, bloated drones dragging their automatic weapons behind them as they traverse the soul-less space between their pickup cabs and the big box store.
Such stories are morality tales — the moral being that virtually everybody — except real criminals — are the real crime problem in America. We are bad; gun-toting offenders are merely impulsive creatures channeling our rage. ...
In merely the latest of an endless series of proclamations that we must do something to get our prison population in line with other countries’, Republican Senator Arlen Specter and Democratic Senator Jim Webb have teamed up to create a blue-ribbon panel to rehash the usual themes: reducing levels of drug criminalization, freeing the mentally ill from jails, exploring alternatives to sentencing, and enhancing prisoner re-entry services. Their goal is to reduce the prevalence of prosecutions so that our incarceration statistics come to resemble statistics in European nations. Of course, crime, especially violent crime, is vastly more prevalent here; thus, higher rates of incarceration. But that subject is verboten. Efforts to avoid acknowledging crime in a discussion about responses to crime lead to convoluted statements like the following:
We are doing something drastically wrong,” said Webb, whose plan also aims to improve the US response to armed gangs, especially drug-related groups, as it seeks to bring the prison population down from about 2.4 million people. ...
Under the guise of news, the nation’s “Paper of Record,” The New York Times, is reporting on controversial efforts to release more offenders early or to not imprison them at all — as if there is no controversy and everybody simply agrees that letting recidivists loose early will save money, not cost money and endanger the public.
In an article titled, “To Cut Costs, States Relax Prison Policies,” the Times uncritically quotes both the Pew Center for the States and the Center for Effective Public Policy — and nobody else. But these organizations fail to count in their analyses the added costs of crimes committed by offenders who would otherwise be incarcerated at the time they re-offend. ...
As some in Berkley/Oakland and Austin, Texas celebrate the murders of four police officers by child-rapist Lovelle Mixon, the recent release of Sarah Jane Olson, fugitive, murderer, attempted cop killer and Weather Underground activist should remind us of the origins of the sentiment “kill the pigs.”
Well-off radicals like Olson descended on poor communities in Oakland in the late Sixties, when it was hip to do so, and fomented violence there in the name of “revolution.” When the wretched stakes for real community members wore out their welcome, these itinerant revolutionaries trotted back to their to upper-class enclaves, leaving conditions in the impoverished, urban, minority neighborhoods much worse than they found them. ...
On Tuesday, I wrote about the debate that’s raging over incarcerating convicts or releasing them to “community sentencing” programs of one type or another. Proponents of community or alternative sentencing argue that we save tax dollars when people convicted of crimes get to stay at home for therapeutic or rehabilitative interventions instead of being removed from the community and sentenced to prison terms. ...
A really interesting article in U.S.A. Today on the national push to get prisoners out of jail and into community programs.
In a hushed conference room overlooking the town’s main drag, eight convicted felons, including an aspiring amateur fighter, brandish bright Crayola markers.Their goal is to match their personalities to one of four colors. Tim Witte, 27, on probation for evading arrest, eyes the task as if sizing up a fellow middle-weight on Kansas’ gritty cage-fighting circuit. Witte and two drug offenders settle on orange. ...
From The Tennessean:
A college student is kidnapped, brutalized and murdered. A mother looks up from changing her baby’s diaper to find a gun pointing in her face. A 62-year-old man is bludgeoned with a baseball bat in a mall parking lot. ...
In today’s St. Petersburg Times, on a double murder in Masaryktown, Florida:
The feet belonged to Patrick DePalma Sr., 84. He lay on his stomach, head and torso halfway into the den, a mess of blood by his head. He wore a blue sweat suit; his slippers were astray nearby. ...
From the Bradenton Herald, in Bradenton, Florida:
...
Following is a list of the books convicts might read in Boston’s “Changing Lives Through Literature” program to avoid incarceration for their crimes.
I have a hard time imagining convicts settling down to read Anne Tyler, or Sylvia Plath, or Annie Proulx (maybe this is punishment), or Anna Quindlan, or Jane Hamilton, or Anita Shreve. Yet the thought of car thieves settling in with Edith Wharton is weirdly . . . comforting. ...
The people over at “Changing Lives Through Literature” in Boston want you to read their blog. They feel it will offer insight into the significance of running book clubs for people who commit crimes and have had their prison sentences deferred or reduced by participating in a book club or other taxpayer-funded, higher-education initiatives.
I think it’s a great idea to take a hard look at their blog. After all, your federal Education Department dollars and Justice Department dollars doubtlessly support this reading experiment, either directly or indirectly (never believe anybody who says that their prisoner outreach is “funded exclusively by private resources”: the Justice Department and the states pony up tax dollars to support every prisoner initiative in some way. Many of these programs would not exist without funding from the Justice Department’s Weed and Seed grants — federal tax dollars that are spread among the states. All of these programs require oversight from corrections departments. And public universities are public entities, as are the courts — it’s all on your dime, one way or another). ...
An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice — which it would be a further injustice to punish — has engendered a prolonged and so far unfinished experiment in leniency that has debased the quality of life of millions of people, especially the poor.
Theodore Dalrymple, in Not With A Bang But A Whimper ...
(I will get to “Recommendations for the Courts” later in the week.)
Events are moving quickly for activists in Atlanta, a place where a weird confluence of crime, organizing against crime, and Internet connections have torn away the media curtain that ordinarily hangs between the public and public individuals’ experiences of crime and the courts — revealing the abject failure of those courts and our top elected officials to act on public safety. ...