Does he need help?
Sen. Hillary Clinton has proposed putting 100,000 new police officers on the streets of America, part of a $4 billion anti-crime package reminiscent of her husband's similar efforts during the 1990s.
At a campaign stop in Philadelphia today, Hillary Clinton proposed an anti-crime package that would put 100,000 more cops on the streets of the U.S.
It’s a good thing, too: Another part of her package calls for letting imprisoned crack users back out on the streets to mix it up with the extra cops. According to the Los Angeles Times, this is all part of a plan to reduce recidivism and achieve fair treatment for blacks and whites under the law. Crack users “are disproportionately black,” and “the law punishes them more harshly than powder cocaine users, who are predominantly white.”
What’s wrong with stiffer penalties all around? Wouldn’t that take care of the imbalance and encourage less recidivism, at least in theory? The problem is, though, it wouldn’t help Hillary achieve her real goal—which is, as always, taking every position so that everyone approves. She wants more cops walking the beat to show she’s tough on crime, but she wants to reduce crack-related sentences to show she’s sympathetic to certain segments of the criminal population. This isn’t about anti-recidivism. It’s about a return to the big house. Another Clinton wants to be president and is employing Clintonian triangulation to get there.
Hillary Clinton's anti-crime plan, rolled out today in Philadelphia, smacks of the 1990s. As Ben Smith notes, "In a way, domestic terrorism -- for political purposes -- has replaced crime as a focus of policy statements and posturing." Indeed, concern about urban violence and policing just isn't on the national radar these days, although the criminal justice reform movement and anti-prison work are actually gaining in prominence on the progressive left. Clinton tips her hat to those communities by promising to invest $1 billion in programs to decrease the number of offenders in prisons and juvenile detention facilities, as well as prevent recidivism.
Once again, even this late in the game, here's a domestic issue on which Clinton has managed to out-flank Barack Obama. But no mainstream candidate has really taken any big risk on criminal justice issues. That would entail, I think, speaking honestly about the failed drug war.
An artist's rendering of Tuesday's oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Washington D.C.'s handgun ban.
If it goes without saying that the nation is divided over gun laws, the Supreme Court certainly seemed to mirror that split during arguments today challenging the District of Columbia's stringent gun control law. Though many justices appeared to lean in favor of an individual right under the Second Amendment, they diverged over whether such a decision would still allow D.C.'s handgun ban to stay in place.
Is gun control constitutional? Should the justices affirm the individual right to own guns? Or should cities have the power to ban guns in order to fight crime?
Although the implications of striking down the D.C. gun ban are limited, a decision upholding an unqualified individual right in Heller would still be a significant victory for individual rights and constitutionalism. To shrink from enforcing a clear mandate of the Constitution -- as, sadly, the Supreme Court has often done in the past -- would create a new precedent that would be far more dangerous to liberty than any weapon in the hands of a citizen.
It is true that some liberal scholars like me, having studied the text and history closely, have concluded, against our political instincts, that the Second Amendment protects more than a collective right to own and use guns in the service of state militias and national guard units. Opponents of the District’s flat ban on handgun possession have cited my words to the court and in newspaper editorials in their support.
But nothing I have discovered or written supports an absolute right to possess the weapons of one’s choice. The lower court’s decision in this case -- the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals found the District’s ban on concealable handguns in a densely populated area to be unconstitutional -- went overboard. Under any plausible standard of review, a legislature’s choice to limit the citizenry to rifles, shotguns and other weapons less likely to augment urban violence need not, and should not, be viewed as an unconstitutional abridgment of the right of the people to keep or bear arms.
Harvard students demonstrate in 1999 following a sexual assault case on campus.
Rape is the touchiest of topics, but it's a topic that is predominant on many university campuses. Rapes on America's college campuses are among the least reported crimes. According to some experts, as many as 85 percent of college rapes and assaults go unreported.
Eighty percent would be an enormous figure, but it's a difficult estimate to confirm. Could college rapes be overstated? Could the numbers be inflated for ideological reasons? Is it possible to diagnose a problem without accurate data? Or is the horrific nature of the crime of rape impossible to quantify?
Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults -- the law does not require their confirmation -- usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses, and maybe two to three times that at large public universities. So what reality does lie behind the rape hype? I believe that it's the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the '60s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora's box of boorish, promiscuous behavior that gets cruder each year.
Sexual violence remains as much a dirty secret on our campuses as it is in the larger society. It flourishes because to confront it, an institution must be willing to shine a bright light on aspects of itself that are both ugly and painful. One of the most important steps that must be taken is a comprehensive, led-from-the-top campaign to change the community climate such that victims of sexual violence feel comfortable to report attacks to authorities.
Paradoxically then, the first indication that an institution is courageously moving to end sexual violence is almost inevitably an increase in the official tally of that violence. This is not the kind of publicity that most college administrators strive to create.
Was it wrong to hospitalize Britney Spears?
A Los Angeles judge orders pop star Britney Spears into psychiatric treatment. A lawyer says Spears is an adult and she's being denied her rights. A graduate student in Illinois goes off his medication and goes on a shooting spree. A judge in Virginia says a Virginia Tech student poses a danger to himself and others, but the law cannot hold him.
How society should treat its mentally ill citizens is once again at the fore of public debate. The sideshow surrounding Spears and the tragedy of Northern Illinois are two sides of the same question: Should mentally ill people be confined and treated against their will? Should states invest more in mental health programs? Should mental patients have different rights than everybody else?
The emptying of our public psychiatric hospitals has been the second-largest social experiment in twentieth-century America, exceeded only by the New Deal. The experiment, undertaken upon remarkably little data and a multitude of flawed assumptions, has received virtually no formal evaluation or assessment to ascertain whether it has worked. Once the spring of deinstitutionalization was wound, it just kept going and going and going. And it continues today -- disastrously.
In many states the laws regulating commitment to a psychiatric hospital requires that the individual is at a strong, fairly imminent risk of harming himself or others or to use a more popular phrase, is "a clear and present danger" to one's self or others. Perhaps to be even more direct, there has to be a very high suspicion that not placing a person in the hospital would result in suicidal or homicidal actions in the very near future. Consistent with our core beliefs as Americans, the law protects the rights of the individual, as it should be.
In the process of preserving one's basic rights, how far can we intervene to help preserve his or her very life?
Do these signs stop bullets?
Another shooting on an American campus, this time at Northern Illinois University. News reports confirm that at least five people are dead, including the gunman.
But the question that always arises after such tragedies is what can be done? Illinois has strict gun control laws. NIU is, in fact, a "gun-free" zone. So was Virginia Tech, where last April a mentally disturbed student murdered 32 people and wounded dozens more.
Are "gun-free" zones invitations to shooters? Should states allow more people to carry guns for self-defense? Should colleges and universities allow professors and students to arm themselves?
In many states, "gun-free schools" legislation was enacted hastily in the late 1980s or early 1990s due to concerns about juvenile crime. Aimed at juvenile gangsters, the poorly written and overbroad statutes had the disastrous consequence of rendering teachers unable to protect their students.
Reasonable advocates of gun control can still press for a wide variety of items on their agenda, while helping to reform the "gun-free zones" that have become attractive havens for mass killers. If legislators or administrators want to require extensive additional training for armed faculty and other adults, that's fine. Better that some victims be armed than none at all.
Our moral vision on guns reflects one simple principle: that gun laws should guarantee the freedom and safety of all law-abiding Americans. We stand with the majority of Americans who believe in the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns to hunt and protect their families.
And we stand with that same majority of Americans who believe that felons, terrorists, and troubled teenagers don't have the right to bear arms that threaten the safety of our children. We therefore support the right to bear arms, but not to bear arms designed for no other purpose than to take another person's life.
