justice

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn’t do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn’t used to define us. But now it’s becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a “war profiteer” was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves ­– like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason –­ who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you’re going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that’s where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That’s why America has the world;s largest prison population ­– because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite’s day. I thought, “Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.”

via Bill Maher: New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit.

Epilogue by Walter Cronkite at the close of “”The Drug Dilemma: War or Peace,” The Cronkite Report, June 20, 1995:

Every American was shocked when Robert McNamara, one of the master architects of the Vietnam war, acknowledged that not only did he believe the war was, “wrong, terribly wrong,” but that he thought so at the very time he was helping to wage it. That’s a mistake we must not make in this 10th year of America’s all-out War on Drugs.

It’s surely time for this nation to stop flying blind, stop accepting the assurances of politicians and other officials, that if we only keep doing what we are doing, add a little more cash, break down a few more doors, lock up a few more Jan Warrens and Nicole Richardsons, then we will see the light at the end of the tunnel. Victory will be ours.

Tonight we have seen a war that in its broad outline is not working. And we’ve seen some less war-like ideas that appear to hold promise. We’ve raised more questions than we’ve answered, because that’s where the Drug War stands today. We’re a confused people, desperately in need of answers and leadership. Legalization seems to many like too dangerous an experiment; to others, the War on Drugs, as it is now conducted, seems inhumane and too costly. Is there a middle ground?

Well, it seems to this reporter that the time has come for President Clinton to do what President Hoover did when prohibition was tearing the nation apart: appoint a bi-partisan commission of distinguished citizens, perhaps including some of the people we heard tonight, a blue-ribbon panel to re-appraise our drug policy right down to its very core, a commission with full investigative authority and the prestige and power to override bureaucratic concerns and political considerations.

Such a commission could help us focus our thinking, escape the cliches of the Drug War in favor of scientific fact, and more rationally analyze the real scope of the problem, answer the questions that bedevil us, and present a comprehensive drug policy for the future.

We cannot go into tomorrow with the same formulas that are failing today. We must not blindly add to the body count and the terrible cost of the War on Drugs, only to learn from another Robert McNamara 30 years from now that what we’ve been doing is, “wrong, terribly wrong.”

Goodnight.

via Walter Cronkite on the Drug War | Stop the Drug War (DRCNet).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Walter Cronkite: A Voice That Defined an Era (themoderatevoice.com)

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that our criminal system often convicts the innocent. Criminal informants, or “snitches,” play a prominent role in this wrongful conviction phenomenon. The criminal system, however, is heavily dependent on snitches, particularly in connection with the investigation and prosecution of drug offenses, and police and prosecutors are often not well-positioned to know when their informants are lying. This Comment, which was prepared in connection with the ACLU of Northern California’s conference on wrongful convictions, describes the institutional relationships between snitches, police, and prosecutors that makes snitch falsehoods so pervasive and difficult to discern with the traditional tools of the adversarial process. It offers a litigation suggestion for providing a judicial check on the use of unreliable informant witnesses, namely, a Daubert-style pre-trial reliability hearing. The Appendix provides a sample motion requesting and justifying such a hearing.

via SSRN-Beyond Unreliable: How Snitches Contribute to Wrongful Convictions by Alexandra Natapoff.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Time to Legalize Drugs? (kristof.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Drug War Quiz in Mother Jones (boingboing.net)
• DNA Test=FAIL (meganmcardle.theatlantic.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Full article

Over the last few weeks, I’ve written columns about the drug war and the demise of journalism, and I cited David Simon, the Baltimore Sun reporter turned creator of HBO’s “The Wire.” This week, Bill Moyers had Simon on his PBS show to expand on this topic, and it was one of those rare must-watch interviews that you see on television. You can watch it here, and I highly recommend you do.