…coldest day of the year and the furnace goes out. It’s going to be a chilly night.
It’s that time again:
A record 7 million people — or one in every 32 American adults — were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.
Normally shortly after the release we get an article in the NYT or LAT bemoaning the rise in the prison population, particularly given the drop in crime. Then conservatives respond with the causal argument, pointing out that it’s more likely that crime is dropping *because* more criminals are incarcerated.
This is typical for these discussions: liberal commenters are concerned about fairness and equity in society and in the justice system, while conservatives are concerned about the execution of justice and public safety and order. Steven Levitt’s controversial theory that abortions are the cause of reduced crime has been about the only interesting innovation in the debate in the last decade. But I’d prefer not to get into that here; besides, I have yet to unpack the box with Freakonomics in it.
Reformation of the Conservative Agenda. What I *would* like to discuss is the desirability of modifying the conservative approach to the justice system. As I mentioned to a commenter a few weeks ago, one of my themes going forward is addressing the necessary reformations of the conservative agenda. I touched on the subject of reformation in the Is health care a “right?” post, but I’ll be more explicit and thorough in this and future posts.
From ABC News:
A mental patient who threatened to castrate President Bush was sentenced to federal prison…
He should have just waited until January, when Pelosi will do it for him.
From the Washington Post:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has lost track of 111,000 files in 14 of the agency’s busiest district offices and processed as many as 30,000 citizenship applications last year without the necessary files, congressional investigators reported yesterday.
…
“It only takes one missing file of somebody with links to a terrorist organization to become an American citizen,” said Grassley, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
But wait, there’s hope:
An agency official said workers probably checked most of the files but failed to make note of it.
They’re talking here about the 30,000 applications which have no record of primary file access. Very comforting. Until you find out why they were checking in the first place:
The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s audit arm, conducted the review at the request of Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) after U.S. authorities granted citizenship in 2002 to a man without checking his primary file. The file, which was lost, indicated ties to the militant Islamic group Hezbollah.
