Saturday morning reading material

Here are a few odds and ends that didn't make it into full blog posts in the last few days:

• Melissa del Bosque at the Texas Observer visits "the deadliest place in Mexico" outside of Juarez and it sounds like the aftermath of Sherman's march.
• The Burnet County Sheriff wants to reclaim managerial control of the county jail, currently operated by LaSalle Corrections, in the wake of a recent escape.
• See an interview with often-media shy (at least with the locals) Dallas DA Craig Watkins.
• Dallas PD wants to add 300 surveillance cameras, both public and "covert," in 27 parts of town.
• In Abilene, a young man was sentenced to complete college as a condition of probation. 
• The Denton Record Chronicle has an article discussing how jails came to replace asylums as the government's method of choice for dealing with the mentally ill, and where to go from here.
• Leaving aside hypertechnical arguments over its legality which have not been affirmed by any court, Big Jolly says Harris County's DIVERT program works more or less as advertised to reduce the number of defendants choosing incarceration over treatment and probation.
• In a plea deal in El Paso, Barrio Azteca prison gang members "admitted that they participated in the collection of extortion fees from drug dealers operating on BA turf, and that this money was sent to jailed BA leaders" via their prison commissary accounts.
• Can the police spy on us?
• Prison evangelist Pat Nolan says mandatory minimums are "unjust and unbiblical."