J. R. Woodgates
Tag Archives: criminal justice
The full story is in Gene McGuire’s book, UNSHACKLED, which I have added to my Recommended Readings in Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path.
New York’s Seventies-era “Rockefeller Drug Laws” were among the most punitive anti-crime, anti-drug legislation ever passed.
Today in many parts of the USA, civil rights advocates condemn overly-aggressive practices used by police to enforce similar laws, saying they too often target poor and inner-city blacks for punishment.
In his book, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, political scientist Michael Javen Fortner uncovers the inconvenient truth that the impetus behind the adoption of those harsh Rockefeller laws came mostly from black residents, themselves, in Harlem and other black and minority inner-city neighborhoods where rehabilitation-oriented policies of the day were often seen as being too soft on drug pushers and other neighborhood criminals.
Fortner…is hoping to complicate the story that the Rockefeller laws, and others like them, were foisted on black people by white people.
If moral imperatives aren’t enough to restrain you, then Microsoft’s stealthy detection software might curb your enthusiasm (I sure hope so).
Once it detects such photos, it can immediately remove them and report them to law enforcement, then remove the user’s account.
Christianity Today tackles that question in its latest edition.
After being wrongly convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s parents more than 30 years ago, he became a Christian. He has written several brilliant books about prison life, biblical justice and the criminal justice system – some of which I recommend in Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path.
Coming Soon: The Soering Movie, The Promise
We know without doubt that the vast majority of innocent defendants who are convicted of crimes are never identified and cleared.
Most prisoners are guilty. What about the innocent who deserve a break?
It was two-and-a-half years between the one time I was interviewed by the FBI in late 2002 about my Internet activities at work and when I received notification from my lawyer that I would face a single charge for possession of child pornography. It was another year after that before I actually stood before a federal judge in Washington, DC and pled guilty to that charge.
Unbeknownst to anyone but a few prayer partners, clergy and family, I had spent those three-and-a-half years going through a rigorous process of church discipline, clinical examination and personal restoration. By the time I stood before the judge, I was a different man from the one who had been engaging in such disordered behavior in 2002. Nevertheless, he convicted me of my crime.
In the fall of 2006, just as I began a nine-month stay in a federal low security correctional institution in North Carolina, I divulged my situation in the parish magazine of my large suburban Episcopal church.* I was overwhelmed by the loving response it elicited. Six months later, I followed up that article with an epistle from prison.
Read both articles now to gain a better understanding of my full story…and the discoveries that inspired me to write Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path:
* In 2009, having left The Episcopal Church, it became a founding parish of the Anglican Church in North America.
Black defendants are 15% more likely than white defendants to be imprisoned for misdemeanor offenses and drug offenses, and 14% more likely than their white counterparts to be imprisoned for felony drug offenses, according to a July 2014 study.
New York City’s police chief says so many young blacks have arrest records, it’s hard to find qualified recruits for the NYPD. Others fault the chief’s own stop-and-frisk procedures that criminalized harmless behavior:
Judge Bennett [considered] the weight of 10 years: one more nonviolent offender packed into an overcrowded prison; another $300,000 in government money spent. ‘I would have given him a year in rehab if I could,’ he told his assistant. ‘How does 10 years make anything better? What good are we doing?’
Nearly half of all federal prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders. Many federal judges who sentence them feel coerced by the congressionally mandated sentencing laws that lock away so many men and women.
This is a long read about one Iowa judge but it’s worth your time:
The voices of the more than 12 million people who annually pass through one (or more) of the nation’s 3,000 jails seem absent from this process. So too are the voices of their loved ones and most dedicated advocates.
Is it really good news that Koch Industries and the MacArthur Foundation, among other deep-pocket entities, are financing prison reform initiatives? Or are they big-footing grass roots reformers?