In the last few years, America’s out-of-control incarceration boom has finally started to get the sustained public scrutiny, and condemnation, that it deserves. But one key element of the story still receives too little attention: the number of women in the nation’s prisons and jails.
Category: crime
DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Actually Worked
If you went to grade school in the 1980s or 90s, chances are good you were publicly offered drugs at school by a uniformed police officer.
“Hey,” he might have said, “Want to meet up behind the gym after school and get high?”
Luckily for you, you were savvy enough to understand that this wasn’t an earnest offer. It was an exercise in resistance.
“No thanks!” you’d say. “I have homework to go do.”
“Come on,” he’d retort. Impressed with your delivery, he’d decided to step up the simulated peer pressure. “I thought you were cool.”
“Not doing drugs is cool,” was your reply.
Your classmates might have applauded, at the officer/teacher’s prompting. Then you went back to your seat, and the officer would go over the things you did well in the exercise, so the class could learn by your example. In addition to teaching the other students, the officer was also building up your self esteem.
Self esteem and resistance were two major cornerstones of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program, also known as DARE. Through the 1980s and the 1990s, DARE swelled from a tiny local program to a massive, and massively expensive, national campaign against drugs in schools. At its peak, DARE was practiced in 75% of American schools, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run. It had spiffy, 90s branded swag, and a baritone-voiced mascot, “Daren the Lion.”
There was just one problem: DARE didn’t work.
Online Dating Made This Woman a Pawn In a Global Crime Plot
AUDREY ELAINE ELROD was in rough financial shape as the 2012 holiday season drew near. She’d been out of work for a year, ever since quitting her longtime clerical job at the county public health department in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 45-year-old divorcée and junior-college dropout now lived in Bluefield, West Virginia, a fading town near the Appalachian coalfields where she’d been raised. In addition to collecting $344 in unemployment benefits each week, Elrod made ends meet by hustling: She resold packages of discount toilet paper and peddled small quantities of prescription drugs. She scraped together just enough to rent a 676-square-foot garage apartment that she shared with a roommate, a gangly buffet cook a dozen years her junior.
On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Elrod opened a checking account at a First Community Bank branch located just across the state line in the twin town of Bluefield, Virginia. Despite her hand-to-mouth circumstances, Elrod’s new account soon began to receive a series of sizable wire transfers, many of which originated abroad. Over the course of one December week, for example, almost $30,000 arrived from Norway; on January 2, someone in France sent $16,977. Elrod never let this money linger: She always showed up at the bank a few hours after a transfer cleared, to withdraw as much as $9,500 in cash. She would then return on subsequent days to make additional four-figure withdrawals until the account was nearly empty.
What the Hell Is Wrong With America? 7 Myths That Prop Up Mass Shooting Culture
When is America going to wake up and realize that as long as we as a society allow easy access to guns, we are complicit in mass killings?
Tragedies like the Umpqua Community College carnage are not inevitable facts of life in America.They are a consequence of a society that doesn’t want to take a hard look at the roots and causes of violence, and understands that you don’t make deadly force widely and readily available to human beings.
Another gun-wielding young guy has left a trail of death, mayhem, injuries and maimed lives in a murderous spree, this time at a rural community college. The unfolding media coverage has featured residents of Roseburg, Ore., saying they didn’t think that could happen there. Others have replied that violence in America is just like violence anywhere else. Pro-gun advocates say the tragedy could have been stopped if students were armed. (Some were nearby but said they didn’t want to intervene because they feared getting shot by SWAT teams.) On the political front, almost everyone has expressed sympathy for victims but predicted that, yet again, Congress will not act to end easy access to guns.
These reactions reveal what is deeply wrong with America, from myths about where violence occurs to ignoring the ways in which traumatized people act out. Let’s start with the myths that perpetuate the cycle of gun violence:
One Simple Idea That Could Reduce Domestic Violence
A report released Tuesday is proposing a simple way to reduce domestic violence: Give victims free lawyers.
Lawyers are expensive, and women who need them often can’t afford them. Without legal counsel, it can be harder for women to get protective orders, leave their abusive partners and escape the cycle of violence. And women stuck in violent relationships tend to miss work because of injury or rack up hospital bills they can never pay off, according to the report by The Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank.
With one in four women in the U.S. estimated to become victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime, this dynamic has major economic repercussions. As the report notes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that domestic violence costs the U.S. at least $9.05 billion each year.
Providing free or subsidized legal representation to victims, the report concludes, may reduce domestic violence and would be cost-effective as it would likely result in lower associated health care and legal costs.
In Germany, they treat paedophiles as victims… not offenders
Project Dunkelfeld (which translates as “Darkfield”), allows individuals to anonymously contact therapists who help them control their sexual urges towards children.
‘I woke up. He was in the room. I didn’t know who he was.’
After The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a poll of more than 1,000 current and recent college students from around the country, a team of Post reporters interviewed more than 50 people who responded that they had, at some point during their time in college, experienced unwanted sexual contact.
The Great Paper Caper
Years of running drugs and boosting cars left FRANK BOURASSA thinking: There’s got to be an easier way to earn a dishonest living. That’s when he nerved up the idea to make his fortune. (Literally.) Which is how Frank became the most prolific counterfeiter in American history—a guy with more than $200 million in nearly flawless fake twenties stuffed in a garage. How he got away with it all, well, that’s even crazier.
GQ