IN MEMORIAM

Ronald Dworkin

1931 – 2013

“Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But

if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something

more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our

lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.”</blockquote>

*********************

Excerpted from Ronald Dworkin’s final masterpiece, JUSTICE FOR HEDGEHOGS

Public mass shootings like the slaughter of schoolchildren and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary have left 547 people dead and 476 more injured in the U.S. since 1983, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service.

The CRS study—which was made public by the Federation of American Scientists—does not weigh in on whether restricting access to guns or ammunition would prevent future incidents, a cause President Barack Obama has championed since the December tragedy in Newtown, Conn.

The CRS study—which counts only the deaths of people other than the shooter or shooters—shows that mass shootings represent a relatively small portion of overall deaths by firearms in the United States. FBI figures show that guns were used to kill 8,583 people in 2011 alone.

“While tragic and shocking, public mass shootings account for few of the murders or non-negligent homicides related to firearms that occur annually in the United States,” the CRS study said.

What qualifies as a public mass shooting? CRS defined such incidents as “occurring in relatively public places, involving four or more deaths—not including the shooter(s)—and gunmen who select victims somewhat indiscriminately.The violence in these cases is not a means to an end—the gunmen do not pursue criminal profit or kill in the name of terrorist ideologies, for example.”

The CRS definition excludes drug trafficking and gang activity as well.
The massacre of children 7 years old and younger at Sandy Hook sparked a fresh national debate about ways to prevent gun violence. But CRS found that workplaces, not schools, are the most common site for public mass shootings.

Of the 78 mass shootings CRS identified since 1983, 26 occurred “at workplaces where the shooter was employed either at the time of the incident or prior to it.” Twelve public mass shootings occurred in an educational setting, CRS found. [SG: The latter statistic means about one episode per every two and a half years.]

Obama has called for steps like a ban on assault weapons and limits on the number of rounds in ammunition magazines as part of a package of policies in response to Sandy Hook. Vice President Joe Biden, who has spearheaded the White House gun-control efforts, met on Thursday with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to discuss gun safety.

Would such measures work? CRS won’t say. “This report does not discuss gun control and does not systematically address the broader issue of gun violence,” the agency notes high up in the report. “Also, it is not intended as an exhaustive review of federal programs addressing the issue of mass shooting.”

I can no longer remember a time when New York City’s police force was not informally referred to by NY politicians as “OUR FINEST.” Understandably, they never told us Finest What. Surely, they could not have meant NY’s finest citizens, thereby putting down the firefighters, emergency ambulance squads, and the people themselves. In truth, they had nothing in mind. It was a slogan that the public willingly accepted – a deep insult that New Yorkers had been battered into accepting uncomplainingly and unthinkingly.

If we must have a catchphrase for NY’s cops, it ought to be this: OUR WORST. I have argued for years that police everywhere are, institutionally, a disaster. Now and then we are glad for their interventions but on the whole they do more harm than good and, it may even be maintained, that they exist for the purpose of making ordinary people miserable. Outlandish as that sounds, there is some evidence for it.

We all know the horror stories concerning police brutality but few of us know how systemic it is and most of us would be reluctant to do away with police altogether because we have no grasp of what alternatives there can be. Philosopher Robert Nozick, arguing on the basis of libertarian principles, once upon a time, proposed neighborhood security teams in lieu of government-sponsored police. On its face, this proposal seems to leave lot to be desired but, while Nozick himself never elaborated, there are ways to make it practical. That is not my concern in this essay. I want to document our decline into a police state, a frightful state that foolish champions of police fail to fully appreciate. I am not going to explore the depth of police corruption nor even the extent of police brutality. These matters have been investigated hundreds of times, and more fully than I can hope to emulate. Reports have been issued dozens of times and to some extent they do good. The most famous is the Knapp Commission Report on Corruption. For starters, but by no means finishers, take a look at the laconic article about the Knapp Commission in Wikipedia.

Far less publicized than corruption and overt instances of brutality, is the militarization of police forces everywhere. This has been an insidious encroachment into our lives for decades beginning in the 1960s when Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates first conceived the idea of the SWAT team in response to the Watts riots and a few mass shooting incidents for which he thought the police were unprepared.

Gates’ idea quickly grew popular in law enforcement circles, particularly in cities worried about rioting and domestic terrorism. From Gates’ lone team in LA, the number of SWAT teams in the U.S. grew to 500 by 1975. By 1982, nearly 60 percent of American cities with 50,000 or more people had a SWAT team. By 1995, nearly 90 percent of cities with 50,000 or more people had a SWAT team. According to Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University, the total number of SWAT raids in America jumped from just a few hundred per year in the 1970s, to a few thousand by the early 1980s, to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s.

Police no longer reserve SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics for events that present an immediate threat to the public. They now use them mostly as an investigative tool in drug cases, creating violent confrontations with people suspected of nonviolent, consensual crimes. In 1988, Congress created the Byrne grant program, which gives money to local police departments and prosecutors for a number of different criminal justice purposes. A large portion of Byrne grant money over the years has been earmarked for anti-drug policing. Competition among police agencies for the pool of cash has made anti-drug policing a high priority. And once there was federal cash available for drug busts, drug raids became more common. Politicians love the Byrne grant program. Congressmen get to put out press releases announcing the new half-million dollar grant they’ve just secured for the hometown police department. Everyone gets to look tough on crime. The old lady on the street is thrilled because, through it all, “the nice officer on the beat” stops to help her cross the busy intersection. (Three miles away, her son is being harassed by a cop wearing dark glasses. Her son’s crime? Dirty license plate and being disrespectful.)

Roving bands of drug cops are often entirely funded with asset forfeiture, and usually don’t report to any single police agency. Lack of real accountability has produced catastrophic results, like the mass drug raid debacles in Tulia and Hearne, Texas, in the late 1990s. In Hearne, for example, police raids were nothing else than a crackdown on black Americans because black Americans were black Americans. It remains one of the great scandals of criminal “justice” in America. Dozens of African Americans were rounded up in para-military drug sweeps and dozens of others were harassed and injured as “collateral, unintended damage.” The ACLU got nowhere in seeking a court order to prevent the Task Force and local law enforcement from conducting drug “sweeps” targeting African-American residents in Hearne and the unlawful arrest, detention, and prosecution of residents based solely on their race.

During the Clinton years, Congress passed what’s now known as the “1033 Program,” which formalized and streamlined the Reagan administration’s directive to the Pentagon to share surplus military gear with domestic police agencies. Since then, millions of pieces of military equipment designed for use on a battlefield have been transferred to local SWAT teams — machine guns, tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, bayonets, and weapons that shoot .50-caliber ammunition. Clinton also created the “Troops to Cops” program, which offered grants to police departments who hired soldiers returning from battle, contributing even further to the militarization of the police force.

The ACLU is, for now, not trying to do more than gather information about the extent of militarization but its efforts are being blocked. In 2009, Maryland passed a SWAT transparency law. It requires every police agency in the state with a SWAT team to provide data twice per year on the number of times the SWAT team is deployed, the reason for the deployment, whether any shots were fired, and whether the raid resulted in criminal charges. The effort to get the law passed was led by Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md., who was the victim of a highly publicized mistaken raid on his home in which a Prince George’s County SWAT team shot and killed his two black Labradors. The bill puts no restrictions on SWAT teams or how they’re used. Its only purpose is transparency. Still, it was vigorously opposed by every police agency in the state. The National Sheriffs Association and the National Association of Chiefs of Police do not respond to requests for data. Why should they? As Stalin asked about the Pope, “How many divisions does he command?” That question may also be put to the ACLU.

The great champion of civil rights, Barack Obama, has expanded the Byrne and Community-Oriented Policing Services program (COPS) by giving them $1.55 billion, a 250 percent increase over its 2008 budget under Bush. (For that much money, Obama can inveigle me into wearing a good pair of storm trooper boots, good for kicking doors down.)

ACLU spokesperson Kara Dansky, senior counsel at the ACLU’s Center for Justice, is only seeking information. Once it gets the information, Dansky said the organization will analyze the figures and recommend policies to minimize the effects of police militarization on civil liberties. “We’re also concerned that these tactics are disproportionately used against poor people, and in communities of color,” Dansky said. “SWAT is really only part of it. The effects of militarization also happen beyond and outside of just an increase in SWAT deployments.”

“I wish the ACLU success,” abused mayor Cheye Calvo said. “And I suspect that once they force the police agencies to cooperate, they’ll find that this problem is even more dramatic and pronounced than most people know. But then the question is, now what? Even if you can show that people are being victimized and terrorized by these tactics — and to no good end — if no one cares, then what does it matter?”

Yes, now what? So far as I am concerned, the first step to end police viciousness does not lie with the ACLU but with the public’s quitting the nonsense of thinking the police are our friends. And if nobody cares, as Calvo suspects, what does it all matter? We get the treatment we deserve and beg for.

*********************
A solid lead for this article was provided by Dr. Ted Drange.

Punishment theorists confront dozens of issues but the most fundamental issue is simple. Should we put people in prisons because we are mad at them for the crimes they have committed or to deter them from future crimes perhaps by rehabilitating them?

Those who hate criminals will hate this photo. It seems to suggest that the life of a prisoner is much better than the life most people on the outside even dream of having. http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/2/22/1361556948753/An-inmate-sunbathes-on-th-010.jpg

On Bastoy prison island in Norway, the prisoners, some of whom are murderers and rapists, live in conditions that critics brand ‘cushy’ and ‘luxurious’. Yet it has by far the lowest reoffending rate in Europe and the fact is that most prisoners eagerly look forward to the day they are released. We may put the Bastoy thesis this way: criminals are sent to prisons AS a punishment, not FOR PUNISHMENT. If that is true, then it doesn’t matter that prison life may be soft because it is the deprivation of freedom that matters.

There is growing evidence that treating prisoners humanely is not an incentive towards further criminality upon their release. To the contrary, it encourages them to try to live decent lives. Skeptics will say that Norway is not a good model for a country like ours. Maybe, maybe not but resistance to the Bastoy prison experiment (which is no longer really an experiment) is not based on skepticism but on hostility to “bad guys.” You cannot really argue against that kind of hatred because hostility and hatred don’t depend on facts and figures. Millions of people would be furious if it could be proved in some strange way that if Charles Manson was given free ice cream and cherry pie for the rest of his life upon being released from prison he would then become a very productive citizen. WHO CARES?! would be the majority reaction. He doesn’t deserve such luxury. Better to keep him in a dungeon even if nothing good came of that.

We are a confused people and our judges are confused. Witness the wild all-over-the-place sentences they dole out. Depending on jurisdiction (and in some cases what side of the bed the judge woke up on) the same crime can be treated with suspended sentence or with maximum hellhole severity. What should the rest of us think as compassionate but not nonsensically sentimental people trying to get a grip on what criminality is all about? One good starting point is to read the article to which I am providing a link.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people

Ronald Dworkin has just died. A great blow to me personally and a severe loss to all right-thinking people throughout the world. For 45 years I have been influenced by this thinker and I don’t expect his like to come along again in my lifetime.
*********************
Reprinted from The NY Review of Books

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013)

John Earle
Ronald Dworkin, Martha’s Vineyard, August 2005

Ronald Dworkin, who died on February 14 at the age of eighty-one, published over one hundred articles, reviews, and letters on legal and philosophical issues in The New York Review, from his 1968 defense of conscientious objectors to the draft during the Vietnam War to his 2012 argument against color-blind college admissions policies. Over more than four decades he took up some of the most important controversies in American public life, including affirmative action, abortion, assisted suicide, pornography, health care, civil liberties and the war on terror, and what he called the “embarrassingly bad decisions” of the Supreme Court’s “right-wing phalanx.” Throughout his career he worked to elaborate what he called “the moral reading of the Constitution”: the idea that “we all—judges, lawyers, citizens—interpret and apply [its] abstract clauses on the understanding that they invoke moral principles about political decency and justice.”

As we mourn the loss of a long-standing contributor and friend, we present the following (very abbreviated) selections of his writings from The New York Review.

On Not Prosecuting Civil Disobedience
JUNE 6, 1968
How should the government deal with those who disobey the draft laws out of conscience? Many people think the answer is obvious: the government must prosecute the dissenters, and if they are convicted it must punish them. Some people reach this conclusion easily, because they hold the mindless view that conscientious disobedience is the same as lawlessness. They think that the dissenters are anarchists who must be punished before their corruption spreads. Many lawyers and intellectuals come to the same conclusion, however, on what looks like a more sophisticated argument. They recognize that disobedience to law may be morally justified, but they insist that it cannot be legally justified, and they think that it follows from this truism that the law must be enforced.… But the argument that, because the government believes a man has committed a crime, it must prosecute him is much weaker than it seems. Society “cannot endure” if it tolerates all disobedience; it does not follow, however, nor is there evidence, that it will collapse if it tolerates some.

Why Bakke Has No Case
NOVEMBER 10, 1977
It is the worst possible misunderstanding to suppose that affirmative action programs are designed to produce a balkanized America, divided into racial and ethnic subnations. They use strong measures because weaker ones will fail; but their ultimate goal is to lessen not to increase the importance of race in American social and professional life.

The Bork Nomination
AUGUST 13, 1987
President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to succeed Justice Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court presents the Senate with an unusual problem. For Bork’s views do not lie within the scope of the longstanding debate between liberals and conservatives about the proper role of the Supreme Court. Bork is a constitutional radical who rejects a requirement of the rule of law that all sides in that debate had previously accepted. He rejects the view that the Supreme Court must test its interpretations of the Constitution against the principles latent in its own past decisions as well as other aspects of the nation’s constitutional history. He regards central parts of settled constitutional doctrine as mistakes now open to repeal by a right-wing court; and conservative as well as liberal senators should be troubled by the fact that, as I shall argue here, he has so far offered no coherent justifications for this radical, antilegal position.

The Moral Reading of the Constitution
MARCH 21, 1996
There is a particular way of reading and enforcing a political constitution, which I call the moral reading. Most contemporary constitutions declare individual rights against the government in very broad and abstract language, like the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which provides that Congress shall make no law abridging “the freedom of speech.” The moral reading proposes that we all—judges, lawyers, citizens—interpret and apply these abstract clauses on the understanding that they invoke moral principles about political decency and justice. The First Amendment, for example, recognizes a moral principle—that it is wrong for government to censor or control what individual citizens say or publish—and incorporates it into American law. So when some novel or controversial constitutional issue arises—about whether, for instance, the First Amendment permits laws against pornography—people who form an opinion must decide how an abstract moral principle is best understood. They must decide whether the true ground of the moral principle that condemns censorship, in the form in which this principle has been incorporated into American law, extends to the case of pornography. The moral reading therefore brings political morality into the heart of constitutional law.

What the Court Really Said
AUGUST 12, 2004
The Supreme Court has finally and decisively rejected the Bush administration’s outrageous claim that the President has the power to jail people he accuses of terrorist connections without access to lawyers or the outside world and without any possibility of significant review by courts or other judicial bodies.… [T]he justices’ arguments provide the legal basis for a much more powerful conclusion than the Court itself drew—that the Constitution does not permit the government to hold suspected enemy combatants or terrorists indefinitely without charging and convicting them of crimes, according them all the traditional protections of our criminal law process, unless they are treated in effect as prisoners of war.

The Decision That Threatens Democracy
MAY 13, 2010
If a nation capped permissible electoral expenditure at a very low level, it would achieve the greatest possible financial equality. But it would damage the quality of political debate by not permitting enough discussion and by preventing advocates of novel or unfamiliar opinion from spending enough funds to attract any public attention. Delicate judgment is needed to determine how much inequality must be permitted in order to ensure robust debate and an informed population. But allowing corporations to spend their corporate treasure on television ads conspicuously fails that test. Judged from the perspective of this theory of the First Amendment’s purpose—that it aims at a better-educated populace—the conservatives’ decision is all loss and no gain.

******************************
Printed in The NYR onFebruary 14, 2013, 7:15 p.m.

That wizard of deep thought, Caspar Weinberger, preached that when assassination is forbidden in the law of armed conflict, what is meant is “murder by treacherous means,” and that therefore there is nothing wrong with assassination per se, so long as it does not involve “treachery.” Now, it is time to hear from Caspar, The Friendly Ghost. Who doubts he can do better?

Caspar, the friendly ghost, thinks this: While there may be an additional moral constraint against the use of treachery, it is clear that the central moral concern about assassination is not the presence of a betrayal of trust, but rather the morality of premeditated, extrajudicial killing of specific individuals, typically those in leadership positions.

For some people (I don’t know where to stand on this one),the assassination target must a person in a military command position, not a political post. Others think it should be other way around. In some cases, political leaders are the military leaders and that nicely conflates the issue so we don’t have to choose.

For some people, assassination is a Just Punishment in virtue of violation of Just War Theory. For others, Just War Theory does not sanction retribution. Assassination is only justifiable consequentially. That sounds pretty good to me but I hate to find myself on Donal Rumsfeld’s side on any issue. Don said “the US would be acting in self-defense” in carrying out missions to assassinate bin Laden and other terrorists. Don has a broad notion of “self-defense.” Ordinarily it refers to imminent threats of danger. If you had sneaked up on Charles Manson while he was sleeping, you might have shot him or you might have had the chance to put cuffs on him. You would have to have a Rumsfeldian sense of “self-defense”or “imminence” to argue you shot Charley in self-defense.

Ari Fleischer, former White House Secretary, and like Rumsfeld, part-time genius, told us the cost of one bullet to save the lives of tens of thousands is worth it. I don’t know where Ari buys his bullets. One thing I am sure Ari doesn’t do is worry about the distinction between extreme duress and self-defense.

Many people want to exonerate Obama’s assassination order on bin Laden because they don’t bother to distinguish the need to perform a necessary evil and the curious satisfaction one gets from celebrating the death of an evil person.

Fans of the Bible should remember “not [to] gloat when your enemy falls” (Pr 24:17). Mr. Obama, [you remember him, don't you - the Nobel Peace Prize recipient in 2009?], a man who boasts of his love for Christianity, made it a central part of his 2012 re-election campaign, to remind us repeatedly that under his watch, we “took out bin Laden.” That expression “took out” chilled me to the bone and could not be much more vulgar, sounding as it does like a Rambo call to action.

Article 23b of the Hague Regulations, adopted by the U.S. and other nations in 1907, prohibits “assassination, proscription, or outlawry of an enemy, or putting a price upon an enemy’s head, as well as offering a reward for an enemy ‘dead or alive’.” In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning assassination. Mr. Obama, famous for his service as a law professor at University of Chicago, was out to lunch when his own law professor taught Ford’s reaffirmation of the Hague regulation to his students.

With his jaundiced eye on a dead sparrow, Mr. Obama is not able to see that Osama bin Laden was just one man – a terrible man, to be sure, but we have seen worse whom we have not been tempted to assassinate. Consider the non-vegetarian, Jeffrey Dahmer or the maniacal Ted Bundy or that practitioner of senseless killings, Charles Manson. What separates these men from bin Laden is that they had less opportunity to wreak evil. Bin Laden may have had a distorted sense of right and wrong but he did have a sense of right and wrong. Is a thirst for killing, a la Manson, to be chalked up merely as a distorted sense of right and wrong? Does Mr. Obama envision a deescalation of war because bin Laden is dead? If so, he couldn’t be more wrong.

I was disgusted by the bloodlust and cheering responses that Barack Obama kindled with his joyous proclamations: “the Madman is dead; long live the smiling President.” I hope some of you were, too.

The majority of Americans believe that however awful federal agencies may be, we must not exaggerate. While corruption may be widespread, it must surely be true that, on the whole, government agencies like the CIA, FBI, DEA, CBF, and ATF do more good than harm. This we may take as an article of faith because these agencies were created for the explicit purpose of doing good. That being the case, it would be incredible for each of them to fail, and fail alarmingly.

I have done a poor job over the many years I have been interested in corruption to persuade people how naive they are. First, it is unlikely that any of these agencies were created with noble intent. I admit that proving this is a bigger job than I have heart to take on. However, it is not a great task to argue that, as they are constituted, these agencies exist for ignoble purposes. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles are out there for perusal by those of you who have the strength (and indignation) to find out for yourselves.

One small but well documented and highly readable essay that should prove very disheartening to you (if you believe America is the greatest country on Earth) is Michael Levine’s account of his life as an officer for decades in the DEA, directly and closely involved in many of the biggest drug busts in history. The amazingly depressing story of the DEA is American corruption writ small and it would be a blunder to suppose that it is only an exception to the largely good work other agencies do.

Please read http://www.expertwitnessradio.org/site/mainstream-media-the-drug-war-shills/

An easy way to abuse prisoners that few of us have ever thought about is not to recognize where they live. There is something called The PRISON GERRYMANDERING PROJECT we should all know about. Moreover, there is something we can do to reduce abuse.
*********************************
February 14, 2013

Thomas Mesenbourg, Acting Director, U.S. Census Bureau
4600 Silver Hill Road, Washington, DC 20233

Dear Acting Director Mesenbourg,

We are writing about the consequences of the Census Bureau’s policy of tabulating incarcerated people as residents of prison locations, rather than at their home addresses. We write as organizations with an interest in ensuring fair and equitable representation for all people and communities.

We are concerned that the Census Bureau’s tabulation procedures distort the redistricting process, giving extra political influence to people who live near prisons while diluting the votes of residents in every other legislative district. This practice skews democracy on both the state and local levels and is especially problematic for county and city governments, where a single prison can easily make up the majority of a district.

We know that even though the next census is seven years away, planning is already underway. For that reason, we urge the Bureau to conduct the research necessary at this early point in the planning process to ensure that the 2020 census can count incarcerated people at their home addresses.

As you know, the Census Bureau’s current “residence rules” instruct the Bureau to tabulate incarcerated people as residents of the prison location, even though incarcerated people are not considered residents of the prison location for other purposes. At the time of the nation’s first census, the question of where incarcerated people were counted was of little importance because very few people were behind bars. Today, nearly 1 percent of the U.S. adult population is incarcerated. By designating a prison cell as a residence, the Census Bureau concentrates a population that is disproportionately male, urban, and African-American or Latino in approximately 1,500 federal and state prisons that are far from their home communities.

Failing to count incarcerated people at home for redistricting purposes undermines the constitutional guarantee of “one person, one vote”, with critical implications for the health of our democracy. When the Census Bureau counts incarcerated people at the location of the facility, state or local governments that use “unadjusted” census data for redistricting grant extra weight to the votes of residents who live near the prison and dilute the votes of residents who do not. As the National Research Council of the National Academies reported in 2006, “[t]he evidence of political inequities in redistricting that can arise due to the counting of prisoners at the prison location is compelling.”[1]

Over the past decade, a growing number of stakeholders have urged the Bureau to update the “usual residence rule” to allow incarcerated persons to be tabulated as residents of their home addresses. Although much of this feedback was received too late to influence 2010 census planning, we commend the Bureau for making a useful change in the short time available: creating the Advance Group Quarters Summary File, which was released early in order to allow jurisdictions to identify and remove incarcerated populations for the purposes of drawing their new districts.

The overwhelming national trend is towards adjusting the census data used for redistricting purposes, but more progress is necessary. Four states, containing 21 percent of the U.S. population, passed legislation to adjust census data on their own. Both Maryland and New York passed legislation in time to reallocate incarcerated people to their home addresses for the most recent round of redistricting, and Maryland’s law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.[2] Similarly, more than 200 counties and municipalities that contain prisons made their own adjustments to avoid drawing districts that give extra influence to those who live near prisons.

As former Census Bureau Director Robert Groves explained, the Bureau “re-evaluate[s] our ‘residence rules’ after each census, to keep pace with changes in the society. We’ll do that again after the 2010 Census.”[3] The interim measures taken by the Census Bureau and by individual state and local governments exhibit variety and creativity, but now the time is ripe for the Bureau to enact a national solution by changing how it tabulates incarcerated people.

We recognize that the Census Bureau seeks to conduct the fairest, most accurate, and most efficient census possible, and we understand that this undertaking requires decade-long preparations. We therefore urge you, in your research and planning for the 2020 census, to make developing a methodology to tabulate incarcerated people at their home addresses a near-term priority.

Such a change would provide a standardized national solution to the problem of redistricting distortion due to the tabulation of incarcerated populations, and would relieve state and local governments alike from undertaking piecemeal adjustments on their own. We urge you to take this window of opportunity when procedures for the next Census are being developed to ensure that the 2010 census will be the last to tabulate two million people outside their home communities.

We thank you for your careful consideration of this issue.

Sincerely,

This letter was signed by 200 organizations, among them are:

American Civil Liberties Union
American Federation of Teachers
American Friends Service Committee, Healing Justice
Center For Law And Social Justice, Medgar Evers College, CUNY
Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice
Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc.
Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers (CLAIM)
Citizen Action of NY
Citizens Against Recidivism, Inc.
Common Cause
Formerly Incarcerated & Convicted People’s Movement
Human Rights Defense Center
League of Women Voters of the United States
Legal Action Center
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
NAACP
NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Prisoners Are People Too, Inc.
StopPrisonAbuse.org
StoptheDrugWar.org
Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
WATCHINGPOLITICS That’s us, folks.

The Prison Policy Initiative depends on the support of the people who receive this newsletter. If you can help support our work with a tax-deductible contribution via credit card, or with a paper check sent to the address below, please do so today.

Prison Policy Initiative
PO Box 127
Northampton, Mass. 01027

***************************
This information first provided to me by our prison specialist, Nick Medvecky, a.k.a. Dr. Publius and editor-chief of AMERICAN TRIBUNE (which you can easily link to with a simple click on the right side of this page.) You know where.

Suppose a burglar arrives home one day after a hard night’s burglarizing to discover that the loot in his thievery box has been stolen. He can brood over his loss but if he has no way to account for his money he will not call the police.

Singapore police are helping European authorities in their investigation of an international criminal syndicate alleged to have fixed soccer matches around the world. Some 680 matches across 15 nations involving 425 people are being scrutinized. Who was hurt by the fixing? In general, betting and gambling are illegal and those who lose money betting can only brood over their losses. They will not complain to the police because, all along, they have been trying to hide their assets from tax collectors. Presumably, they want to protect their losses, too, because they don’t want to call attention to their nefarious lifestyle. Gambling money is filthy lucre unless it is obtained under the auspices of a government that takes its cut, thereby legitimizing, after a certain fashion, a dubious activity.

Betting and gambling are time-honored ways of exchanging ill-begotten gains and losses. So far as I can tell, the government is the only loser if it hasn’t been allowed into the game, if it hasn’t been given a chance to take filthy lucre. Yet, for some hard-to-penetrate reason, casual observers of the sporting scene are angered when they discover gambling and fixing have been going on even in a sport in which they have not got a financial stake. Soccer fans are furious about the fact that matches have been fixed and bicycle enthusiasts are blind with fury to learn that Lance Armstrong cheated. As the level of play is ordinarily unaffected by gambling, (or the entire business would have collapsed centuries ago), even the aesthetics of games are unaffected. We are saddened and shocked to learn that our favorite basketball team has been “dumping” points, but we learn about this only weeks or months after the fact. Why, then, the impassioned outcry against cheating? Suppose team X is a 7 points favorite but the cheaters make sure to win by no more than 6 points. Whose ox got gored? The players make money and the bettors are about evenly divided between those who bet on the right side and those who bet on the wrong side. Who, then, is entitled to cry “Foul! I’ve been cheated.”? No one, so far as I can tell, because no one should have been betting on the game in the first place.

Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, said yesterday that the use of drones is legal, ethical and wise. He may be right but, in the great tradition of press secretaries, refused to be drawn into a discussion of the pro and cons of this position.

The most common defense of the use of drones is that they save lives — American lives. A collateral benefit is that, since they are very accurate, drones do not target the innocent and kill only Bad Guys and destroy their hiding places.

As substitutes for “boots on the ground,” it can hardly be questioned that drones save American lives. The collateral benefit is disputable. American estimates of the harm drones do is not close to what Afghanistan estimates are. Who to believe? We, the public, are not in a position to resolve the matter and we can only go with our gut feelings. I won’t dare to take that one on.

Let us look briefly at JUST WAR TRADITION. That doctrine commands us to kill proportionately to the harm that is visited upon us and do no more harm than is needed to bring hostilities to an end. JWT also demands that we examine whether our cause is just. Just War theorists distinguish between jus ad bellum and jus post bello. Jus ad bellum sets out a set of criteria that purport to tell us whether entering into war is permissible at all. Thus defined, it seems that if a nation fails the jus ad bellum test and has no legitimate grounds for warring, it is pointless to ask whether it can pass the jus post bello criterion. The United Nations Charter binds nations to seek resolution of disputes via principles of jus post bello: peaceful means and requires authorization by the United Nations before a nation may initiate any use of force against another, beyond the inherent right of self-defense against an armed attack. That being the case, we may say with some certainty, that drones or no drones, the USA is not engaged in a just war.

Jus post bello may be summarized thus: the principle of discrimination should be employed to avoid imposing punishment on innocents or non-combatants; the rights or traditions of the defeated deserve respect; the claims of victory should be proportional to the war’s character; compensatory claims should be tempered by the principles of discrimination and proportionality; and, the need to rehabilitate or re-educate an aggressor should also be considered. Unfortunately, this does not tell us much about how war should be conducted but mainly how it ought to be ended.

That is not easy because justice, like history, is written by the victors. A defeated army and indeed the civilian body from which the army stems should thus be prepared to subject itself to the imposition of rules and forms of punishments, humiliation, and even retributions that it would not otherwise agree to. Of course, as things now stand, we can only guess when the current dragged-out war will end, notwithstanding bold predictions and announcement of intentions by our President. It seems to be that neither jus ad bellum nor jus post bello provides us with sufficient ways determine the legality, ethics or wisdom that Jay Carney tells us we have. Are we not in a tertium quid because we don’t know when the war will end and what are the best ways to hasten the conflict along so that we may enter the jus post bello stage?

Of course, Mr. Carney does not mean well but he does treat the press as though they are very dense.