A report released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation explores the impact of juvenile corrections on American youth and brings to light many of the flaws in the U.S. juvenile justice system.
Mass incarceration is not just a problem faced by adults in the system. Juveniles face similar rates of over-incarceration with over 60,000 American youth being held in correctional facilities. In addition, mirroring the adult justice system, youth of color are significantly over-represented in the juvenile justice system.
Interestingly, the mass incarceration of youth is largely a U.S. problem. Although many other developed countries are similar to the US in their rates of youth arrests, they have substantially lower youth incarceration rates:
“A recently published international comparison found that America’s youth custody rate (including youth in both detention and correctional custody) was 336 of every 100,000 youth in 2002 —nearly five times the rate of the next highest nation (69 per 100,000 in South Africa).”
There are many alternatives to incarceration that are more effective in rehabilitating youth and reducing overall crime rates, and the findings in this report suggest that other countries have found ways (other than mass incarceration) to address juvenile delinquency.
If this is so, why does the U.S. continue to lock up juveniles at such alarming rates? (more…)
How refreshing to read a piece about the Christian Right written by someone who once inhabited this world and retains an ear for nuance. According the The Guardian website, “Karl Giberson is a science and religion scholar, speaker and writer. He is also a fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation.”
Giberson came of age in the world of egghead evangelicalism.
So did I. Well, sort of. As far as I can recall, I never heard sermons about creationism or any of the “alternative universe” constructions Giberson details below. That stuff wasn’t as prevalent in my native country of Canada as it was in the American heartland. Still, to the extent that Canadians take their intellectual cues from Great Britain or the United States, I couldn’t avoid the likes of Francis Schaeffer when I got to university.
I wasn’t impressed.
When I arrived at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1975, Schaeffer was regarded as a theological lightweight posing as an evangelical Renaissance Man. As Giberson realizes (mercifully), not all evangelicals live in a tightly woven “alternative universe”.
But millions do, and these are the folks Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann are currently courting. In this parallel world, “scientists” preach an innerant Bible and assure the faithful that the world was created by the God of the Bible very, very recently. Evolution is a myth, homosexuality is a disease and Christians are God’s chosen people.
So long as you never stray outside the carefully patrolled borders of this parallel universe, you are never forced to wrestle with opposing arguments or to consider alternative views. But ishould you ever venture outside the fold, you will find yourself intellectually defenseless and intimidated.
Which is why hardcore evangelicalism works so hard to construct a social world offering cradle-to-grave protection from the demons of the secular world.
The word “demons” in the previous sentence is not metaphorical–folks like C. Peter Wagner inhabit a demon (and angel) filled universe. If old-school fundamentalists like J. Gresham Machen and William Bell Riley were steeped in the rationalistic canons of the modernism they opposed, this new breed of Christian soldiers are distinctly pre-modern. In fact, they’re downright medieval, and proud of it.
Thinking evangelicals are an endangered species, but there are plenty of them still out there. In 1994, evangelical historian Mark Knoll wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. It has all been downhill since then.
Millions of evangelicals, including GOP candidates, are trapped in an alternative ‘parallel culture’ with its own standards of truth
Michele Bachmann and I grew up in the same evangelical world. We heard similar sermons, read similar books – most importantly the Bible – and we followed the same anointed leaders.
By the time we were in college our generation of evangelicals had been educated into a profoundly different worldview than that of the secular, anti-Christian, Satan-following Ivy League elites we had been taught to fear. We understood the world to be a spiritual battleground with forces of good pitted against forces of evil. Real angels and real demons hovered about us as we prepared to wage these wars. We sang songs like Onward, Christian Soldiers in our churches. At summer camps and vacation Bible schools we stamped our feet, and waved our arms as we sang with good Christian gusto I’m in the Lord’s Army. We knew which side we were on.
Our religious literature was filled with the ideas of people like Francis Schaeffer, a fundamentalist Pennsylvania pastor who transformed himself into a guru by moving to the Swiss Alps, making himself look like Heidi‘s grandfather, and turning his home into a refuge for troubled pilgrims called “L’Abri“. Schaeffer, the intellectual architect of the religious right in America, helped a generation of young evangelicals understand that the corrosive forces of secular humanism were eating away at the foundations of the Christian west. We were heartened that such an impressive intellectual – a fundamentalist counter to Jacob Bronowski or Carl Sagan – was on our side.
Schaeffer’s 1976 bestseller, How Should We Then Live?, chronicled the decline of the Christian west, which had flourished with God’s blessing for centuries, but was now in decline. With broad brushstrokes, our alpine sage showed us how the west had sold its soul for a mess of secular pottage and sham materialism. Schaeffer’s million-selling manifesto was made into an impressive film series, narrated by Schaeffer. Clad in his iconic Swiss leggings, with a flowing mane of white hair and trademark goatee, Schaffer took viewers to all the great cultural spots in the west to help us understand what had gone wrong. The book and film series were widely used at evangelical colleges and universities across the country.
Michele Bachmann told the New Yorker recently that Schaeffer had a “profound influence” on her developing worldview as a young person. Millions of evangelicals would murmur “amen” to that. I read Schaeffer and watched his film series at Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts in 1979 as part of a capstone general education course required of all students.
Schaeffer was the most charismatic of the evangelical experts that shaped the world views of believers in the 1970s. There were many more with different specialities. We learned that evolution had no scientific support from young-Earth creationists like Henry Morris and Ken Ham. When Bachmann says that “evolution has never been proven” she is simply repeating what our generation has heard from evangelical leaders as we were growing. I enrolled at Eastern Nazarene College seeking credentials that would enable me to join the creationists in their fight against evolution.
We learned that homosexuality is a choice made by people to live in sin, under Satan’s influence. The reparative therapy – “pray away the gay” – used at the clinic run by Bachmann’s husband was something we all endorsed, under the influence of evangelical social scientists like James Dobson, who had a PhD in child development and thus knew what he was talking about. We grew up hearing about the “gay agenda” and how it was being used by Satan to destroy traditional morality and faith in the Bible.
Christian “historians” like Peter Marshall and David Barton helped us understand that America was a “Christian nation” and that recent travails, like the social upheaval of the 1960s that gave us drug abuse, promiscuity, and the homosexual agenda, were the result of abandoning America’s religious roots.
Many evangelicals, myself included, were fortunate enough to study under Christian scholars, like my professors at Eastern Nazarene College in the 1970s or my colleagues today at Gordon College, who see through the nonsensical claims of people like James Dobson, David Barton, Francis Schaeffer, and Ken Ham – who runs the preposterous Creation Museum in Kentucky. Even as a college student I recall Schaeffer being examined rather critically and young-Earth creationism dismissed out of hand.
There are, fortunately, many evangelical scholars – National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins and historian Mark Noll come to mind – who are quietly raising alarms about all this dangerous anti-intellectualism, warning us about populist gurus who are marketing a “Christianised” version of knowledge that, on closer examination, turns out to be neither Christian nor knowledge.
Unfortunately, millions of evangelicals – and this would include much of the political base being courted by the GOP presidential candidates as well as the candidates themselves – are trapped in an alternative “parallel culture” with its own standards of truth. The intellectual authorities mentioned above – with the exception of Schaeffer who died in 1984 – all have media empires that spread their particular version of the gospel. Millions of dollars every year support the production of books, DVDs, radio shows, school curricula, and other educational materials. Very few evangelicals grow up without hearing some trusted authority – perhaps even with a PhD – tell them that the age of the Earth is an “open question”. Or that scientists are questioning evolution. Or that gays are getting spiritual help and becoming straight. Or that secular historians are taking religion out of US history.
Historian Randall Stephens and I have been interested in this alternative knowledge world for years. We grew up in it and emerged from it unscathed – as near as we can tell – but many of our evangelical students over the years have arrived at college with “truths” from this alternative knowledge world written on their hearts. Harvard University Press has just published our sympathetic insiders’ analysis of the parallel culture of American evangelicalism. Titled The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, we look at how evangelical knowledge structures are exploited by media savvy authorities like those mentioned above.
And, as we watch the GOP candidates enthusiastically promote discredited ideas from this alternative knowledge world, we worry.
The following story, produced in collaboration with PBS “Frontline” and NPR, is based on the investigations of dozens of cases in which flimsy evidence was used to wrongfully accuse and convict individuals in cases where children were killed. Child death cases are never easy. Often, the desire to “get to the bottom of the case” and obtain justice for the victim can cloud the judgement of those involved in researching and investigating the case. The stories of the individuals below highlight the need for more thorough investigations and stricter regulations around the use of forensic pathology to ensure a fair and just criminal justice system. MW
Her name was Isis Charm Vas and at 6 months old she was a slight child — fifth percentile in height and weight.
When the ambulance sped her to Northwest Texas Hospital on a Saturday morning in October 2000, doctors and nurses feared that someone had done something awful to her delicate little body.
A constellation of bruises stretched across her pale skin. CT scans showed blood pooling on her brain and swelling. Her vagina was bleeding, as well. The damage was so severe that her body’s vital organs were shutting down.
Less than 24 hours later, Isis died.
An autopsy bolstered the initial suspicions that she’d been abused. Dr. Joni McClain, a forensic pathologist, ruled Isis’ death a homicide and said the baby had been sexually violated. McClain would later describe it as a “classic” case of blunt force trauma, the type of damage often done by a beating.
The police investigation that followed was constructed almost entirely from medical evidence. In the end, prosecutors indicted one of the child’s babysitters: Ernie Lopez.
Today, Lopez is serving a 60-year prison term for sexual assault and is still facing capital murder charges.
But in the years since Lopez was sent to the penitentiary, a growing body of evidence has emerged suggesting that McClain and the hospital staffers were wrong about what happened to Isis — and that her death was not the result of a criminal attack. (more…)
A federal judge has upheld key portions of an Alabama immigration law that will likely drive thousands of Latino students out of the public school system. Under the new law, public schools can now determine the immigration status of students. Police can also question residents suspected of being undocumented and hold them without bond.
The Alabama law, as originally passed, was designed to make it impossible for undocumented residents to live in Alabama. Judge Sharon Blackburn has temporarily blocked provisions that would:
_ Make it a crime for an undocumented immigrant to solicit work.
_ Make it a crime to transport or harbor an undocumented immigrant.
_ Allow discrimination lawsuits against companies that dismiss legal workers while hiring undocumented immigrants.
_ Forbid businesses from taking tax deductions for wages paid to workers who are in the country illegally.
_ Bar undocumented immigrants from attending public colleges.
_ Bar drivers from stopping along a road to hire temporary workers.
_ Make federal verification the only way in court to determine if someone is here legally.
Since the Hispanic population of Alabama is 3.9 percent, one wonders why state politicians are suddenly so exercised about immigration. It’s simple. Conservative politicians got elected by promising to clamp down on illegal immigration. (more…)
Tougher sentencing laws over the last several decades have resulted in fewer criminal cases going to trial. Instead, defendants are choosing plea bargains, rather than going to court and facing the possibility of harsher, lengthier sentences. The New York Times article below gives a good overview of the sentencing shift since the 1980s and how this shift gives “new leverage to prosecutors.” MW
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — After decades of new laws to toughen sentencing for criminals, prosecutors have gained greater leverage to extract guilty pleas from defendants and reduce the number of cases that go to trial, often by using the threat of more serious charges with mandatory sentences or other harsher penalties.
Some experts say the process has become coercive in many state and federal jurisdictions, forcing defendants to weigh their options based on the relative risks of facing a judge and jury rather
than simple matters of guilt or innocence. In effect, prosecutors are giving defendants more reasons to avoid having their day in court.
“We now have an incredible concentration of power in the hands of prosecutors,” said Richard E. Myers II, a former assistant United States attorney who is now an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina. He said that so much influence now resides with prosecutors that “in the wrong hands, the criminal justice system can be held hostage.”
One crucial, if unheralded, effect of this shift is now coming into sharper view, according to academics who study the issue. Growing prosecutorial power is a significant reason that the percentage of felony cases that go to trial has dropped sharply in many places.
Plea bargains have been common for more than a century, but lately they have begun to put the trial system out of business in some courtrooms. By one count, fewer than one in 40 felony cases now make it to trial, according to data from nine states that have published such records since the 1970s, when the ratio was about one in 12. The decline has been even steeper in federal district courts. (more…)
Most American students know nothing of substance about the civil rights movement. When Julian Bond talked to school kids twenty years ago, no one could even tell him who George Wallace was (see article below). For much the same reason, younger readers may not realize that my title was inspired by an old Sam Cooke song. George Wallace was Governor of Alabama in the early 60s. Sam Cooke released his famous song in the late 50s. But I bet students know much more about the evolution of pop music than they know about civil rights history.
How can Americans have a conversation about race relations when most of us know next to nothing about Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, the evolution of the urban ghetto or any other matter germane to the subject?
Although Black Americans probably know a bit more about the civil rights era than white Americans, ignorance abounds on every square of the American crazy quilt. We won’t get anywhere until these depressing trends change, but first we must ask how much we want to learn about an era that makes white America look really, really bad?
Southern states, a new study by the Southern Poverty Law Center finds, actually do a better job of teaching civil rights history than their northern and western counterparts. In Mississippi, for instance, the trauma of the civil rights era was far too intense to be forgotten. The movie The Help is a step in the right direction, but if any person, white or black, had tried to publish a book about black domestics and their white employers in the real Mississippi of 1962, the White Citizens Councils and the State Sovereignty Commission would have kept the book from appearing on book shelves. A book that incendiary would have been delivered in a plain brown wrapper, in the dead of night. There were things that simply could not be discussed back then; how much has changed?
Mississippi has mandated a K-12 civil rights curriculum. If you don’t know about Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle, you can’t possibly understand present conditions in the Magnolia State. The subject could be ignored for a while, but not forever. In Colorado, it seems, the issue is far less pressing.
When Julian Bond, the former Georgia lawmaker and civil rights activist, turned to teaching two decades ago, he often quizzed his college students to gauge their awareness of the civil rights movement. He did not want to underestimate their grasp of the topic or talk down to them, he said. (more…)
Although crime rates have been falling for decades, most Americans think crime is getting worse. We have always felt this way regardless of whether crime rates are rising or falling. The Gallup poll featured below offers a few explanations. AGB
Two-thirds say crime increasing in U.S., 49% in their local area
November 18, 2010
by Jeffrey M. Jones
PRINCETON, NJ — Two-thirds of Americans say there is more crime in the United States than there was a year ago, reflecting Americans’ general tendency to perceive crime as increasing. Still, the percentage perceiving an increase in crime is below what Gallup measured in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but is higher than the levels from the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Americans are somewhat more positive about the trend in crime in their local area, but still are more likely to see it going up than going down.
These trends, based on Gallup’s annual Crime survey, come at a time when both the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics recently reported drops in property and violent crime from 2008 to 2009 in separate studies, as well as documenting longer-term declines in both types of crime. Though the latest Gallup estimates, from an Oct. 7-10, 2010, survey, would reflect a more up-to-date assessment of the crime situation than those reports do, Americans were also likely to perceive crime as increasing both locally and nationally in the 2009 Gallup Crime survey.
The apparent contradiction in assessments of the crime situation stems from Americans’ general tendency to view crime as increasing. That said, the percentage holding this view appears to be higher when crime actually is increasing, as in the late 1980s and early 1990s, than when it is not.
Americans’ perceptions of crime may also be influenced by their general assessments of how things are going in the country. Americans generally believe the crime situation to be better when their satisfaction with national conditions is high, as in the late 1990s, when the economy was strong, and in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, when patriotism and support for political leaders surged. Thus, the current estimates of increasing crime may to some degree be inflated due to widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the U.S. today.
Apart from whether the crime rate is increasing, 60% of Americans believe the crime problem in the U.S. is “extremely” or “very serious,” up from 55% in 2009 and tied for the highest Gallup has measured since 2000. A majority of Americans have typically rated the U.S. crime problem as extremely or very serious in the 11-year history of this question.
As is usually the case, Americans are much less concerned about the crime problem in their local area, as 13% say the crime problem is extremely or very serious where they live.
Americans who have been victimized by crime in the past 12 months are about twice as likely as those who have not been victimized to describe the crime problem in their local area as very serious (18% to 10%). Crime victims are also substantially more likely to perceive crime as increasing in their local area (62% to 43%). However, being a victim of crime bears little relationship to the way one perceives the crime situation in the U.S.
Survey MethodsResults for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Oct. 7-10, 2010, with a random sample of 1,025 adults, aged 18 and older, living in the continental U.S., selected using random-digit-dial sampling.For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones (for respondents with a landline telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell phone-only). Each sample includes a minimum quota of 150 cell phone-only respondents and 850 landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas among landline respondents for gender within region. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.
Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, education, region, and phone lines. Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2009 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older non-institutionalized population living in continental U.S. telephone households. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting and sample design.
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
It has long been the conventional wisdom on both sides of the death penalty debate that if a state or the federal government were ever shown to have executed an innocent person, we’d see a dramatic drop in support for state executions. In the 2006 case Kansas v. Marsh, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a death penalty supporter, called the search for a wrongly executed person the “Holy Grail” of death penalty opponents.
But a little less than two years after David Grann made a convincing argument in The New Yorker that the state of Texas had done just that, public support for capital punishment hasn’t wavered. In October 2009, Grann wrote about Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004 for setting the fire that killed his three young children. Willingham was convicted because of forensic testimony from fire officials that arson experts call junk science. (more…)
Take a moment to check out this video of an interview with Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” and hear her response to the recent execution of Troy Davis. MW
“What I hope is that the passion and the energy and momentum that was generated to save Troy’s life…won’t just fade away, won’t be one of these episodic spurts that we’ve seen in the past, but will actually signal a new phase in the movement to end the death penalty. [I hope] that we’ll be able to look back and see Troy Davis’ death as the day when the movement to end the death penalty and the movement to end mass incarceration gained new steam.” -Michelle Alexander
The case against Troy Davis hinged on the eyewitness testimony of several individuals who claimed that Davis shot police officer Mark MacPhail. Many began to have serious doubts about Davis’ guilt, however, after several witnesses recanted their original testimony. Despite witness recantations, hundreds of thousands of petitions, and international protests against Troy’s execution, the state of Georgia remained steadfast in its belief that Davis was guilty and, ultimately, executed him.
In a recent Associated Press article, Michael Tarm and Eric Tucker highlight how the controversy around Troy Davis’ execution has sparked debate about the accuracy of eyewitness identifications.
Davis’ execution came at a time in which the reliability of eyewitness identifications was increasingly questioned. Studies on the fallibility of human memory as well as a host of recent DNA exonerations have contributed to the doubt surrounding the accuracy of eyewitness ID, and increased concerns that these identifications may lead to wrongful convictions.
Just last month, we reported that the New Jersey Supreme Court decided to reform rules around eyewitness ID, requiring more rigorous evaluations of eyewitness identifications and making it easier for defendants to challenge eyewitness testimony. Several other states have recently attempted to reduce the reliance on eyewitness identification as well.
As Tarm and Tucker point out, the doubt surrounding Davis’ conviction and subsequent execution will likely “fuel the eyewitness ID debate” and will hopefully lead to more sound rules and regulations regarding the use of eyewitness identification. Check out what they have to say in their article below.
(AP) SAVANNAH, Ga. — When Georgia executed Troy Davis last week, it brushed aside international protests that too many witnesses had recanted trial testimony that he was the gunman who killed a police officer in 1989.
The issue raised in Davis’s case, however, is getting harder to ignore. With scientific studies showing the human memory can be surprisingly faulty, the once-damning weight of eyewitness testimony has come under question in courts and state legislatures. (more…)
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
Take a moment to check out 
by Melanie Wilmoth
Friends of Justice 