The young man handed me a piece of notebook paper, fragile at the creases where it had been folded and unfold many times. Kept in a pocket, taken out often to be reviewed and studied, it was a handwritten bibliography of works he was required to read as a new member of the Black Guerrilla […]
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Gang Talk
Saturday, January 26, 2013Baltimore’s new police commissioner Anthony Batts says the city has a new gang problem and gangs are responsible for the recent increases in crime. “I was told,” the Baltimore Sun quotes him as saying, “that what [Black Guerilla Family is] doing is expanding and taxing other gangs, basically franchising out. If [those gangs] don’t want […]
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Death, Life Without Parole & Legislating Extreme Punishment
Saturday, January 19, 2013Maryland lawmakers have a real chance this legislative session to vote to abolish the state’s death penalty. This makes it an opportune time to examine the growing body of research and reflection on America’s increasing use of sentences of “life without parole”(LWOP) and their relationship to the broad national trend toward capital punishment abolition. Nowhere […]
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No new youth jail for Baltimore but we must end the practice of charging youth as adults
Friday, January 18, 2013This week, Governor O’Malley’s administration announced that it will not build a $70 million 120-bed jail for youth who are charged as adults. Instead, it proposes spending $30 million to renovate an existing adult correctional facility that will be downsized to house up to 60 youth while they await their trials. Taking advantage of these savings, the administration also plans to build a treatment center for young people who are committed to the juvenile justice system and in need of residential treatment services. The total cost of these two ventures is estimated to be $73 million.
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A Beginning: The Goucher Prison Education Partnership
Sunday, January 13, 2013“Just because one blind hog may occasionally find an acorn does not mean many other blind hogs will,” Rep. Bart Gordon (R-Tenn.) famously observed on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in April 1994. “The same principle applies to giving Federal Pell grants to prisoners.” Gordon and a majority of both Democrats and […]
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Prostitution and Policing: A Model
Sunday, January 06, 2013“Prostitution and gambling have, like heroin and cocaine, generated enormous illegal markets in the past, been the source of corruption and the centerpiece of moralistic debates about prohibition,” writes University of Maryland professor Peter Rueter in Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places. “Prostitution,” Rueter and his co-author Robert MacCoun–professor at the […]
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Baltimore and the “Enduring Neighborhood Effect”
Saturday, December 29, 2012In 2012 the concepts of “neighborhood” and “community” have made a big comeback in the language of law enforcement in Baltimore. January saw Baltimore State’s Attorney roll out his plan for “community prosecutors.” Instead of having prosecutors take cases from across the city, district attorneys would now focus only on specific “zones” in Baltimore, with […]
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New Year’s Resolution: Moving Beyond “Broken on All Sides”
Sunday, December 23, 20122012 may be remembered as the year that America’s massive reliance on incarceration broke into public and political consciousness in a way that signals the possibility of change. January saw the publication of a revised edition of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness that had become a […]
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Condemnation of Blackness: Crime, Numbers and Baltimore
Sunday, December 02, 2012December always brings an accounting. In the last month of the calendar year we sum our various categories of crime and we look for meaning in the numbers. We look to have the numbers speak for themselves. Policymakers, journalists, advocates, and law enforcement will point to the numbers to make their various arguments for what […]
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Second Chance Education
Monday, November 26, 2012A young man I have tutored for a few years recently got his GED. He left Baltimore City public schools in the fifth-grade. “Dropout” is not an appropriate description for a fifth-grader. Over a number of years he has spent time in juvenile detention, group homes, and the Baltimore City Detention Center. When I met […]
