Blog Dec 7, 2009
War on Drugs Update
It’s time for another one of my end of the year drug war updates. I haven’t done this in a while, so it is overdue. To start with, as of December 7, 2009, we have spent more than $47 billion ($18.7 billion at the federal level and about $28.7 billion at the state level). These figures come from an excellent web site called the War on Drugs Clock , which is published by a web site called Drug Sense . The War on Drugs Clock also reports that so far this year more than 1.7 million…
Blog Nov 12, 2009
Life for kids: a follow-up
My previous blog concerned the current Supreme Court case about juveniles serving life without the possibility of parole. I neglected to mention that there are two cases being considered: Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida. When I wrote this blog I was not aware of a two-part report in AlterNet by Liliana Segura. I also was not aware of a report by Human Rights Watch and how both of these reports highlighted both the racial disparities of these sentences and the details of some…
Blog Nov 11, 2009
Life sentences for kids?
The U.S. Supreme Court will once again take on the issue of excessive punishment for juvenile offenders. In 2005 they ruled that the death penalty for those under 18 was unconstitutional. This was the case of Roper v. Simmons where the court ruled that both the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments “forbid imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed.” In the case before the court two juveniles — Joe Sullivan, who raped a…
Blog Oct 12, 2009
Kids Die all but invisibly
I thought that after studying and writing about juvenile justice for more than 30 years nothing would shock me, that I had seen and heard everything. I was wrong. The title of a recent story in the Los Angeles Times gives a hint to what it is about: “Flawed county system lets kids die invisibly.” The story begins with the death of 17-year-old Miguel Padilla, who had run away from a “licensed group home” (Leroy Haynes Center in La Verne, CA) in April 2008. He didn’t get very far. “Unknown…
Blog Sep 24, 2009
Dropping Out and Crime
It has become a truism that there is a close connection between school failure and juvenile crime, as demonstrated by literally hundreds of studies over the past 100 years. As if to remind us once again, here comes yet another study, this one by the California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara. As reported in today’s Los Angeles Times , dropping out of school costs the state $1.1 billion each year and if we decreased the number of dropouts by half it would save $550 million per…