The Editorial Board at The New York Times concludes that Kids and Jails, a Bad Combination:
There are few bright spots in America’s four-decade-long incarceration boom, but one enduring success — amid all the wasted money and ruined lives — has been the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, the landmark law passed by Congress in 1974. […]
The results speak for themselves. Even as the nation’s prison population has skyrocketed eightfold since 1970, to 2.4 million, the number of juveniles involved in the justice system has dropped by 30 percent since 2002.
Some judges, however, still put far too many kids behind bars by relying on an exception to the status offense rule that allows them to lock up juveniles who have been warned not to reoffend. In 2011, about 8,800 juveniles were detained for status offenses. This continues even though the evidence is clear that young people are less likely to commit future crimes if earlier interventions are based in their communities.
Now the law may be getting a long-overdue upgrade to address these and other issues. On Dec. 11, Senators Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, introduced a bill to reauthorize the act for the first time in more than a decade.
That's good. But as the
Times board surely knows since the newspaper recently wrote about the hideous situation for juveniles at the Rikers Island prison complex, it's more than just the numbers of juveniles in the slam—and hallelujah that those numbers are down—it's what these minors endure while they locked up. It's also the fact that some 2,500 people now serving sentences of life without parole are doing so for crimes committed before they were adults. This despite the Supreme Court's 2012 ruling in
Miller v. Alabama and
Jackson v. Hobbs that mandatory LWOP sentences for juveniles unconstitutional and even discretionary LWOPs for juveniles can only be used in cases of homicide. Sadly, the Court failed to make the ruling retroactive and several states (Pennsylvania and Minnesota, for instance) have not reduced the terms of juveniles sentenced before those rulings. Seventy-three of these inmates were 13 or 14 years old when they committed their crimes.
Below the fold are more pundit excerpts.
Rhea Suh at the Los Angeles Times reminds everyone that Oil isn't cheap—at any price:
world oil prices have slumped below $60 a barrel, tumbling nearly 50% since June to a five-year low, analysts have scrambled to discern the economic and political fallout.
The big picture, though, hasn't changed: Oil is not cheap, at any price. What we're charged at the pump for gasoline is just a down payment on the far larger tab we're running to support our national oil habit. Rather than allow a temporary price reprieve to mask those costs, we should use this moment to take stock and change course. […]
The greatest burden we're imposing on the next generation comes from the environmental damage we're doing by consuming this fuel.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
The Obama Recovery:
Suppose that for some reason you decided to start hitting yourself in the head, repeatedly, with a baseball bat. You’d feel pretty bad. Correspondingly, you’d probably feel a lot better if and when you finally stopped. What would that improvement in your condition tell you?
It certainly wouldn’t imply that hitting yourself in the head was a good idea. It would, however, be an indication that the pain you were experiencing wasn’t a reflection of anything fundamentally wrong with your health. Your head wasn’t hurting because you were sick; it was hurting because you kept hitting it with that baseball bat.
And now you understand the basics of what has been happening to several major economies, including the United States, over the past few years. In fact, you understand these basics better than many politicians and commentators.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
To a healthier democracy:
Meg Greenfield, the late Post editorial page editor, counseled against writing in “High C” all the time. By this she meant that an editorialist or columnist who expressed equally noisy levels of indignation about everything would lack credibility when something truly outrageous came along that merited a well-crafted high-pitched scream.
We now seem to be living in the Age of High C, a period when every fight is Armageddon, every foe is a monster, and every issue is either the key to national survival or the doorway to ruin.
This habit seems especially pronounced in the way President Obama’s adversaries treat him. It’s odd that so many continue to see Obama as a radical and a socialist even as the Dow hits record levels and the wealthy continue to do very nicely. If he is a socialist, he is surely the most incompetent practitioner in the history of Marxism.
Sonia Sodha at
The Guardian laments that
Social policies are lagging way behind our changing lives:
Futurology is a discipline rarely characterised by consensus and this area is no exception. The Pew Center recently canvassed the opinion of 2,000 technology experts, who were divided on whether we will ever reach a tipping point where technology starts to replace more jobs than it creates. But there was consensus that developments in artificial intelligence will have a huge impact on future employment, with growing numbers of jobs reliant on human characteristics artificial intelligence can’t replicate, such as caring and empathy, and creativity and imagination. This will profoundly affect societal structures and identity politics, further shifting economic power towards those able to develop the skills that will complement the machines of the future.
The way we feel these impacts will of course depend on how we respond as a society. In the past, societies have adapted to disruptive innovation through radical social reforms: the establishment of compulsory primary education and friendly societies in response to the demands of the Industrial Revolution; the creation of the National Health Service and the welfare state after the Second World War. […]
Scientific progress has been a huge force for good, but it brings risks as well as opportunities; dangers as well as freedoms. We rely on politics to mediate some of those impacts through social reform. But contemporary political debate sometimes feels stretched talking about the challenges of the here and now, let alone those of the future. The solutions being proffered do not scratch much deeper than building more care homes or tacking coding on to the national curriculum.
Patrick Cockburn at
The Independent writes
War with Isis: The West needs more than a White Knight:
A strange aspect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that there has been so little criticism of the failure of expensively equipped Western armies to defeat lightly armed and self-trained insurgents. This is in sharp contrast to the aftermath of the US Army's failure to win the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. The question is of more than historic interest because the US, UK and other allies are re-entering the wars in Iraq and Syria where they are seeking to "degrade and ultimately destroy" the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis).
Perhaps the military are not being blamed for lack of success in Iraq and Afghanistan because the failure there is seen as political, rather than military. There is some truth in this, but it is also true that army commanders have been agile in avoiding responsibility for what went wrong. A senior US diplomat asked me in exasperation in Baghdad five or six years ago: "Whatever happened to the healthy belief the American public had after Vietnam that our generals seldom tell the truth?" […]
The 3,000 American soldiers President Obama has sent back into Iraq are to start training the remaining 26 brigades of the Iraqi Army all over again, without anybody asking what went wrong between 2003 and 2014. Why is it that Isis recruits can fight effectively after two weeks' military training and two weeks' religious instruction, but the Iraqi Army cannot? Maybe the very fact of being foreign-trained delegitimises them in their own eyes and that of their people.
David Sirota at
In These Times writes
States Are Redistributing Wealth! Where’s the Republican Outrage?:
In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was lambasted for supposedly endorsing policies of wealth redistribution. The Right feared that under an Obama presidency, Washington would use federal power to take money from some Americans and give it to others. Yet, only a few years later, the most explicit examples of such redistribution are happening in the states, and often at the urging of Republicans.
The most illustrative example began in 2012, when Kansas' Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a landmark bill that delivered big tax cuts to high-income earners and businesses. Less than two years after that tax cut, the state's income tax revenues plummeted by a quarter-billion dollarss—and now Brownback is pushing to use money for public employees’ pensions to instead cover the state's ensuing budget shortfalls.
Brownback's proposal: Slash the state’s required pension contribution by $40 million to balance the state budget, even though Kansas already has one of the worst-funded pension systems in the nation.
Chris Rhomberg at
In These Times writes
Poverty remains at record highs. Is that because welfare reform failed, or because it succeeded all too well?:
The cornerstone of ["welfare reform"] is the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The law eliminated the previous Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and replaced
it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which imposed work requirements on recipients, set strict time limits
on eligibility for cash benefits, and sanctioned families for failing to comply with program rules.
The effect was dramatic. Welfare rolls fell by around half in the first few years, and employment among
poor single mothers increased amid a strong late-1990s economy. “The debate is over,” said President Bill Clinton a year after signing the law. “Welfare reform works.” Conservatives agree: In 2012, Representative Paul Ryan called the program “an unprecedented success,” and now Republicans want to make similar changes to Medicaid and food stamps.
As a social safety net and pathway out of poverty, however, TANF cannot now be regarded as anything but a dismal failure.
Deirdre Fulton at
Common Dreams writes
After 13 Years, US-Led Afghanistan War is Officially Over but Nightmare Goes On:
Stars and Stripes set the scene in Kabul: "During an hour-long ceremony in a drab gymnasium at the headquarters of the military coalition that has battled against insurgents for 13 years, generals hailed the end of a mission, while struggling to explain the parameters of what will still be a substantial military operation in Afghanistan."
There will still be roughly 11,000 American troops in Afghanistan next year as part of the Resolute Support mission to train, advise and assist Afghanistan’s roughly 350,000 security forces. ISAF spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Belcher told Stars and Stripes that there would be a total of roughly 17,500 foreign troops in Afghanistan next year, which the publication notes is "far more than the 12,000-13,000 U.S. and NATO officials have been saying would be part of Resolute Support. Belcher could not say where those additional troops would be coming from nor when or why the decision was made to increase their number."
Victoria Law at
The Nation writes
As governors mull clemency, battered women should be at the top of the list.:
For twenty-five years, Sheehan was terrorized by her husband, Raymond. The terror included physical beatings and frequent threats to kill her and their two children. In February 2008, when her husband pointed a gun at her, Sheehan shot him first. Acquitted of murder, she was convicted of firearms possession and sentenced to five years in prison. Now she is petitioning for clemency.
State governors have the power to grant clemency to people in prison. Clemency can take the form of a pardon, which allows a conviction to be set aside, or a commutation, which allows a person to be considered for parole earlier than the date imposed by their sentence. Christmas is traditionally when governors demonstrate compassion by granting clemency to people whose cases or circumstances they find compelling—and many of the battered women behind bars have compelling cases. Many suffered years of escalating violence at the hands of their loved ones before the moment when it was kill or be killed. Then, they find themselves attacked by a legal system that questions, downplays or outright denies their experiences, the same system that often failed to come to their aid during those years of abuse. For all too many, the end of their partner abuse means the start of a lengthy prison sentence.