Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca wants to teach criminals a lesson — literally. The top cop of America's most populous county is launching a new initiative aimed at offering education to every one of the 160,000 inmates who pass through his lockups each year. Liberal reformers have long advocated such a course, citing studies showing lower recidivism rates among prisoners who learn while locked up. But it's extraordinary talk coming from the man who runs America's biggest jail system. Baca's Education-Based Incarceration initiative officially launched last year but is still in the ... Read More
Cybercop Fights Organized Internet Crime
March 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It was August 2005, and Steve Santorelli had recently left Scotland Yard to join Microsoft's Internet Crimes Investigation Team. He was camping in the forest near Redmond, Wash., with some of his team members, trying to escape their technology-dominated existence, when a call came in from the Microsoft lab. Other team members had just cracked the code to the notorious Zotob computer virus. "At the campsite, I overheard one of the guys mention the nickname C0der, and uniquely spelled C-Zero-D-E-R, being identified as the author of this virus. I almost choked on my coffee," Santorelli says. ... Read More
David Onek — Law Enforcement Facilitator
March 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Improving the juvenile justice system has been the focus of David Onek's professional life for some 20 years. He uses an innovative approach that might seem obvious but has been underutilized: He gets everyone in the field talking to each other. Onek's experience in influential policy, governmental and academic positions in the San Francisco Bay Area has led him to believe that because of sharp disagreements dividing them, law enforcement officers, members of community groups, prisoners and corrections officers are unable to bridge much smaller gaps on many issues — or even to realize how ... Read More
The Invisible Hate Crime
March 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In February 2010, Jennifer Daugherty, a 30-year-old, mentally challenged woman from Greensburg, Pa., was brutally murdered by six people pretending to be her good friends. Holding her hostage for days, the perpetrators allegedly tortured Daugherty, shaving her head, binding her with Christmas decorations, beating her with a towel rack and vacuum cleaner, feeding her detergent, urine and various medications and then forcing her to write a suicide note, before stabbing her to death. The sadistic attack on Daugherty was anything but unique. Still, few Americans are aware of the special ... Read More
Life in Prison Begins at 16
February 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It's difficult to choose the most heartbreaking scene in Dan Birman's documentary Me Facing Life: Cyntoia's Story. But a case can be made for one in which the 16-year-old central character, who is awaiting trial for murder in a Nashville, Tenn., criminal court, shows us her "sex list." It's a handwritten rundown, scribbled on a lined piece of notebook paper, of the dozens and dozens of people she had sexual relationships with during her troubled adolescence. In a detached, analytical tone, she proceeds to sort them by category: rapes (there were many), consensual encounters, those that ... Read More
Convict Commodification
December 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Like corn and computers, convicts have become commodities in America, produced en masse in concentrated locations. But America hasn't always produced bumper crops of inmates, sociologist Bruce Western explained last summer at the annual American Sociological Association convention, speaking with fellow Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson to highlight a special issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The issue presented the work of 15 scholars — and two poets — who examined America's culture of mass incarceration and its effects on neighborhoods that ... Read More
Why Victims Face the Criminals Who Hurt Them
December 20, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Diana Owen knows the standard crime-victim revenge fantasy, the one in which you confront, even hurt or kill, the criminal who preyed on you. A sly grin crosses her face as the self-proclaimed "badass" jokes about what she would do to the man who molested her when she was 10: "Put me in an alley with him, you know what I mean?" The paranoia that tortured Owen for a dozen years after the crime was hardly a joke. From adolescence through her troubled teens and into young adulthood, the scenarios changed, but the anxiety and fear were constants. "I would think about what if he tried to kill me ... Read More
Book Seeks True Justice for Crime Victims
December 20, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Susan Herman has nothing against victim-offender dialogue or other restorative-justice techniques. She just wants to start a broader — much, much broader — national conversation about true justice for victims because, she says, "our collective failure to respond to their needs is a national disgrace." Herman, a criminal justice professor at Pace University, lays out her ideas in the new book Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime, an outgrowth of her work as executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. In the book, the veteran victims' rights advocate asks: What would ... Read More
Alternative Sentencing Gaining Acceptance
October 4, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Five years ago, when R. Seth Williams first ran for Philadelphia district attorney under the slogan "Smart On Crime, Not Just Tough," more than 50 percent of the city's felony cases were being thrown out because the DA's office simply wasn't prepared to prosecute them. Because of this, Philadelphia had the lowest conviction rate among the top 40 urban areas. "I was looking for ways to help us reduce recidivism and use our limited resources better," Williams says, "and that doesn't mean being soft on criminals." Williams lost that election, but last year he won on his second try, and upon ... Read More
The Barricades of Michoacán’s Bandito Alley
July 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Location: At Rio Nexpa, in the southern end of Michoacán, where muddy water from recent rainstorms dirties the turbulent ocean. Under coconut trees, palm thatch huts line the perimeter of the riverbank. Conditions: The northerly breeze covers everything in salt spray. The air is pleasantly cool after the sporadic downpours. Discussion: As I drove south, the landscape kept changing in surprising ways. Around Puerto Vallarta, the dense jungle and verdant coastal mountains rising out of Banderas Bay is like a perfect capsule of the tropics. It inspired Hollywood producers to shoot movies ... Read More
