Violent Crimes - LA Progressive

What Part of Rape “Victim” Don’t These Sociopaths Get?

Julie Driscoll: Kids yucked it up, snickered and giggled and guffawed and made light of this young woman’s violation, all while Ms. Parsons’ life, full of misery and pain and despair, was ultimately too much to bear – and she ended it.

Our Very Own Settler Problem: America’s Culture of Gun Deaths

By Rich Broderick

Rick Broderick: The pro-life people are correct when they say there is a culture of death in this country; they are wrong in thinking that the locus of this culture is Planned Parenthood. It is a culture of death that prevails on Wall Street, K-Street, Hollywood, and our ever expanding Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.

ACLU Asks, More Jails or Better Sentencing?

By Dick and Sharon

Dick Price & Sharon Kyle: California’s 58 counties must deal with a sudden influx of state prison inmates, straining their jails and requiring innovative sentencing and supervisory programs.

Santorum, Romney Square Off on Felon Disenfranchisement

By Bruce Reilly

Bruce Reilly: Romney, at first, beat around the bush. “I don’t believe people who have committed violent crimes should be given their right to vote.”

U.S-Mexico Border Residents Feel Safe

By Michele Waslin

Michele Waslin: As residents who live along the U.S. side of the border have known for years, the border is actually a very safe place, and reports of “spillover” violence from Mexico are unfounded.

Mass Immigration Sweeps Flood Federal Pens

By Andrea Christina Nill

Andrea Nill Sanchez: Statistics released this week revealed that Hispanics now comprise nearly half of all people sentenced for federal felony crimes, a number swollen by immigration offenses.

Special US Prisons for Muslim Prisoners

By Sherwood Ross

Sherwood Ross: If you think the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) couldn’t possibly make its prisons more inhumane no matter how hard it tried, you are wrong. It has created CMUs, or Communications Management Units, where the “management” part consists of denying inmates virtually all communication with their families and the outside world.

Victims’ Rights in California: On Paper, in Practice

By Diane Lefer

Diane Lefer: The restorative justice model is able to keep the compassionate focus on those who have suffered most from violent crime–the victims, while still addressing the factors that drive crime and recidivism and without denying the humanity of the imprisoned.

A Lopsided Approach to Border Violence Doesn’t Solve Anything

By Seth Hoy

Seth Hoy: while advocating for the allocation of more money and manpower to “secure the border” may make for good campaigning in an election year, experts find that beefing up the border actually does little to curb border violence. In fact, these “get tough” border initiatives—more troops, fencing and operations that target non-violent border crossers—pull valuable resources away from solving violent crimes.

How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

By Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander: The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs.

800,000 Americans Busted Annually for Pot

By Sherwood Ross

The drug war has also unleashed a torrent of racism in the form of unjust sentencing, which confines crack-cocaine users who are mostly black to prison for longer terms than powder snorters, who are mostly white.

Prisons: Two Opposing Views

By Ron Wolff

Suppose, hypothetically, you had to be in the same room for a couple of hours with a politician who can’t use the word “liberal” without combining it with character-assassination-style insults or a guy who stole a pair of socks worth $2.50. With whom would you feel safer?

Is Obama Serious About Ending Failed War on Drugs?

By Sherwood Ross

Efforts by President Obama to put an end to the nation’s failed “War on Drugs” can’t come an hour too soon—if that’s his intent. From his actions, it’s hard to know. Drug offenses account for about half the 200,000 Federal prison inmates behind bars, compared to just 15% of prisoners convicted of violent crimes involving [...]

Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons Making Thousands Psychotic

By Sherwood Ross

The United States today is housing tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement, a form of numbing mental torture that drives about one-third of them psychotic, induces irrational anger in 90%, and ups the likelihood they will commit violent crimes upon release. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” U.S. Senator John McCain once wrote [...]