Archive

Posts Tagged ‘criminal justice’

Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?

August 9th, 2009 Mentor No comments
Street Sleeper 2 by David Shankbone
Image via Wikipedia

IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

via Op-Ed Contributor – Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor? – NYTimes.com.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Categories: crime, law, policy, politics Tags: , , , , ,

Drug czar says U.S. use fueling Mexico violence

February 27th, 2008 Mentor No comments

Full article

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – American drug users are paying ruthless Mexican kingpins nearly $14 billion annually for their meth, heroin, cocaine and especially marijuana – monies that are helping fund an unprecedented bloody turf war that’s threatening Mexican institutions, the White House drug czar said. 

John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said marijuana, not heroin or cocaine, is the “bread and butter,” “the center of gravity” for Mexican drug cartels that every year smuggle tons of it through the porous U.S.-Mexico border. 

Of the $13.8 billion that Americans contributed to Mexican drug traffickers in 2004-05, about 62 percent, or $8.6 billion, comes from marijuana consumption.
Categories: crime, law, policy, politics Tags: ,