November 2007 Archives
A Long Road Back After Exoneration, and Justice Is Slow to Make Amends - New York Times
Christopher Ochoa graduated from law school five years out of prison and started his own practice in Madison, Wis. He has a girlfriend and is looking to buy a house.
Michael Anthony Williams, who entered prison as a 16-year-old boy and left more than two years ago as a 40-year-old man, has lived in a homeless shelter and had a series of jobs, none lasting more than six months.
Gene Bibbins worked a series of temporary factory jobs, got engaged, but fell into drug addiction. Four and a half years after walking out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, he landed in jail in East Baton Rouge, accused of cocaine possession and battery.
The stories are not unusual for men who have spent many years in prison. What makes these three men different is that there are serious questions about whether they should have been in prison in the first place.
The men are among the more than 200 prisoners exonerated since 1989 by DNA evidence — almost all of whom had been incarcerated for murder or rape.
EU ministers agree plan to widen access to research�|�Breaking City News�|�Reuters.co.uk
BRUSSELS, Nov 23 (Reuters) - European Union ministers adopted a plan on Friday to make it easier for people to access scientific research and to help spread innovation more quickly across the 27-nation bloc.
Research ministers also approved four "joint technology initiatives" to carry out research in medicines, computing systems, nano-electronic technologies and aeronautics, due to be launched next year with billions of euros from the EU budget.
The plan is expected to raise concern among publishers of scientific journals, who fear losing revenue if research is made available free on the Internet -- but to be widely welcomed by librarians, researchers and funding bodies. EU Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik said publishers should not be concerned, but the benefits of digital technology should be used to the full.
"It's nobody's idea to destroy the publishing industry," Potocnik told a news conference.
European researchers publish 43 percent of the world's research and scientific publishing houses in the EU employ 36,000 full-time staff and 10,000 freelancers.
Mariano Gago, science and technology minister for EU president Portugal, said many of the scientific journals were owned by not-for-profit scientific societies and federations.
Arrests for sex crimes falling
At a time when public awareness of child molesters and rapists has never been more acute, arrests for sex offenses have been dropping steadily for almost a decade.
FBI reports show that arrests are down across the country, including Arizona, where the numbers have fallen from more than 2,000 in 1997 to 1,500 last year. Criminal-justice experts are uncertain about the reason.
At the same time, new federal and state laws are cracking down on convicted offenders like never before.
Trying to Break Cycle of Prison at Street Level - New York Times
HOUSTON — Corey Taylor, a convicted drug dealer, recently got out of prison and moved into his grandmother’s house in Sunnyside, a south central Houston neighborhood of small, tidy yards. During his first days home, Mr. Taylor, 26, got a sharp reminder of the neighborhood’s chronic problems.
“Out of 10 of my partners, only one is doing anything different,” he said, referring to his former drug-dealing companions. “I have some friends I haven’t seen for 10 years because either I was locked up or they were locked up.”
Last year, 32,585 prisoners were released on state parole in Texas, and many of them returned to neighborhoods where they live among thousands of other parolees and probationers.
AlterNet: Sex and Relationships: Is Pornography Really Harmful?
Pornography is a mirror that shows us how men see women, writes Robert Jensen in his latest book, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. And with mainstream porn becoming increasingly degrading and violent toward women, looking into that mirror can be unsettling.
That's the theme running through Jensen's book, which AlterNet excerpted in late September. The excerpt, viewable here, stirred a fiery debate among readers, with dozens of commenters defending pornography as a healthy form of sexual expression and dozens more condemning it as dangerous. For all the discussion, a lot of questions remain: Can men who view violent pornography separate fantasy from reality? Do men who are aroused by this type of porn want to hurt women? What influence does porn have on the people who view it? Under what conditions can it be healthy? Harmful?
Rapture Rescue 911: Disaster Response for the Chosen
I used to worry that the United States was in the grip of extremists who sincerely believed that the Apocalypse was coming and that they and their friends would be airlifted to heavenly safety. I have since reconsidered. The country is indeed in the grip of extremists who are determined to act out the biblical climax--the saving of the chosen and the burning of the masses--but without any divine intervention. Heaven can wait. Thanks to the booming business of privatized disaster services, we're getting the Rapture right here on earth.
AlterNet: Whatever Happened to the Good Life?
Since we're accustomed to thinking of young people and students as the shock troops of social change, explaining youthful inertia has become a national preoccupation (sadly, we expect impassivity from the middle aged). Many point to the absence of a draft as a motivating factor. Others cite the lack of contemporary examples of successful collective action to inspire faith in the efficacy of protest. But more often than not, the problem is conceived as cultural. The emerging generation, of which I am part, is post-Watergate, post-Monica Lewinsky, and weaned on irony and satire. We expect the government to deceive us and are hardly surprised, let alone outraged, when these expectations are met. Others argue that young people aren't particularly self-absorbed or apathetic; they're overworked and indebted. Today's twenty- and thirty-somethings are so busy struggling to make ends meet, they simply don't have time to take to the streets.
