A woman makes a sandwich in a cell at the Los Angeles County women’s jail in Lynwood, California.
Credit: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Women held in local jails represent the fastest growing population of incarcerated people in the US, according to a new study. The researchers found that trauma, sexual violence and mental health issues were all closely wrapped up with the swelling numbers.
“While we started to see a decline in the incarceration and jailing of men, we haven’t seen a comparable kind of trend for women,” said Laurie Garduque, director of Justice Reform for the MacArthur Foundation, which co-published the report with the Vera Institute. Since 1970, the number of women in US jails has increased by 14 times, far outstripping the growth in the male prison population, even though in raw numbers there remain many more men locked up.
The majority of those women […]
If You Want to Know the Truth About the Criminal-Justice System, Talk to This Private Investigator
Credit: Reuters / Joshua Lott
Once upon a time, I was a journalist, covering war in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East. I made it my job to write about the victims of war, the “civilian casualties.” To me, they were hardly “collateral damage,” that bloodless term the military persuaded journalists to adopt. To me, they were the center of war. Now I work at home and I’m a private eye—or PI, to you. I work mostly on homicide cases for defense lawyers on the mean streets of Oakland, California, one of America’s murder capitals.
Some days, Oakland feels like Saigon, Tegucigalpa, or Gaza. There’s the deception of daily life and the silent routine of dread punctured by out-of-the blue mayhem. Oakland’s poor neighborhoods are a war zone whose violence can even explode onto streets made rich overnight by the tech boom. Any quiet day, you can drive down San Pablo Avenue past St. Columba Catholic Church, where a thicket of white crosses, […]
GREENVILLE, S.C. —When Greenville County deputies conducted an undercover sting at the strip club, Platinum Plus, Sheriff Steve Loftis said the operation was funded by $26,000 in seized drug assets.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office collected $336,932 last year through civil asset forfeitures.
The agency is not alone. In the last five years, law enforcement agencies in South Carolina have received $22.7 million in forfeiture revenues.
The limited government group, Institute for Justice, has given the state a D-minus for its high-rate of civil forfeiture cases.
“South Carolina is more focused on policing for profit, taking money off the streets, than it is for arresting bad guys and getting drugs off the street,” managing attorney Lee McGrath said.
McGrath said the state’s civil forfeiture laws offer little protection for property owners. He said when assets have been seized, […]
The Centers for Disease Control estimates that a full quarter of Puerto Rico’s residents will be infected with the Zika virus by the end of 2016. That dire warning was initially made in June, as health officials noted the disease was spreading at previously unexpected speeds. Late last week, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy reiterated that figure, stating that 25 percent of the country’s 3.5 million inhabitants will be infected by the end of the year, and expressed urgency in addressing the virus as infection rates threaten to reach epidemic levels.
“We cannot afford to wait much longer,” Murthy said, according to the report from the AP. “I am deeply concerned about how quickly the virus is spreading.”
Murthy’s remarks were quickly followed by the declaration of a public health emergency in Puerto Rico by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A statement issued by the agency indicates that officials are particularly concerned with the threat the virus poses to pregnant women, their children and all women of childbearing age.
“This Administration is committed to meeting the Zika outbreak […]
Conclave of cardinals
The reality of child molestation by the Roman Catholic Church has surfaced time and time again, and yet, somehow, it continues to happen. If you watched the movie Spotlight, perhaps you have an idea of just how things are going down. But let’s break it down to date.
While you can’t put a price on the innocence of a child, you can put a price on just how much the Roman Catholic Church has paid out in lawsuits over the never-ending epidemic of child molestation wreaking havoc in its ranks.
According to Jack and Diane Ruhl of the National Catholic Reporter, who decided to research this particular topic, since 1950, the Vatican has spent a disgusting $3,994,797,060.10. That’s nearly $4 billion to keep things hush hush. That number may even be a bit conservative, as we cannot know for sure the agreed upon “under the table” amount. (emphasis added)
The figure is based on a three-month investigation of data, which includes a review of over 7,800 articles from LexisNexis Academic and NCR databases […]
