Grits went to read an important new US Supreme Court opinion (pdf) out this week, Missouri v. Frye, related to whether a plea deal never submitted to a client by his attorney was grounds for post-conviction relief because of ineffective assistance of counsel. It's an interesting question, but I did a double, then a triple take when I read the opening lines describing the underlying case in the opinion, then couldn't get past it: "Respondent Frye was charged with driving with a revoked license. Because he had been convicted of the same offense three times before, he was charged, under Missouri law, with a felony carrying a maximum 4-year prison term."
Huh? A max four-year prison term for driving without a license? Even for the fourth offense, that seems extreme. According to this source, actually, in Missouri it's a felony on the third offense. That seems borderline totalitarian - "Show me your papers, comrade, or I'll slap you in prison for four years." Yikes! You can fill up a gulag pretty darn quickly that way! Even with that extreme penalty, though, one in ten Missouri drivers have no license.
This is overcriminalization run amok. With incarceration costs running in the $20,000 per year range, it'd be a lot cheaper to remove barriers to licensure and spend the money you would have spent on prosecution and incarceration to give out free bicycles and bus passes. The absurdist cost-benefit analysis behind making driving without a license a felony worthy of prison time boggles the mind.
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Jumat, 23 Maret 2012
Minggu, 05 Februari 2012
Demonizing pit bulls: Breed ban bad approach to dog-bite deaths
Among the criminal penalty enhancements and/or new crimes we can expect in the 83rd Texas Legislature in 2013, IMO we're almmost certain to see legislation proposed banning dog breeds - especially pit bulls and related variants - under the pretense of protecting children, old people, etc., from deadly dog bites. Witness a Houston Chronicle story from yesterday that frames the issue in precisely that way, decrying the fact that "In the past five months, a newborn, another toddler and a 71-year-old retired teacher have been attacked and killed by dogs in the Houston area." Reported the Chron's Cindy Horswell:
Meanwhile, while we all feel terrible for the 31 people killed in dog attacks last year (22 by pits and their mixes, according to the story), there are an estimated 3.5 million or so pits and pit mixes in the United States, making them one of the more popular breeds. Also, people get bitten by dogs a lot, and mostly not by pit-associated breeds. About 1.5% of the American public is bit by a dog each year, with one in six bites requiring medical attention. So in practice, a breed-specific ban won't address most dog bites, and most dogs subject to it would be unlikely to ever seriously harm anyone.
Americans are prone to demonize dog breeds almost as a fetish, and at any given point in time the folks who worry about dangerous dogs always seem to have some waxing bogeyman to critique. After WWII, German Shepherds were the most feared attack dog. In the '60s, a movie starring James Garner titled "They Always Kill Their Masters" helped shift that scare-focus to Dobermans. And in recent years, urban dog fighting culture, a la Michael Vick, has shifted similar concern to pits.
But most pits (or Dobermans, or German Shepherds) aren't a serious threat, while any dog that's mistreated, neglected, or afraid can become dangerous. I happen to own three dogs, two of which would be characterized as pit-mixes. All three came to us essentially through rescue type scenarios - the pits from a young, since-incarcerated idiot who had bought them, but never trained them, to fight. Of the three, the only one I worry about biting anybody is the much smaller, non-pit mutt (a mix of Chow, German Shepherd, and some sort of much-smaller terrier breed, at least). The bigger dogs are a greater danger to lick you to death. Moreover, when they're around anyone they don't know, small children, etc., I make sure I closely control them, in part because of the extreme prejudice aimed at pits. As a practical matter, they pose little risk to anyone.
By contrast, in my neighborhood in Central East Austin, there have always been people who chain aggressive dogs outside or in some cases train them to fight. (Until the area began to gentrify and white people began to complain, we didn't see animal enforcement here much.) Any one of those chained dogs - regardless of breed - is more dangerous than any of my animals. As "Dog Whisperer" Cesar Milan wrote recently on the subject, "a breed is like a suit of clothes, it doesn’t tell you anything about the dog inside." One of Michael Vick's fighting pits actually ended up being trained and certified as a therapy dog (for which, it merits mention, pits are temperamentally well-suited). In a proper environment, these are loyal and submissive animals with big hearts, while in the wrong environment, any dog can become a danger.
To me, the idea that the government would ban or euthanize my dogs based on such long odds of tragedy borders on demonical. My dogs are my friends, my family - like this poor fellow, I'd feel incredibly guilty and sad if I ever acted on such busy-body advice to kill them. Milan says that he rehabilitates animals but trains people, and IMO irresponsible humans (and perhaps increased rates of reporting) are the proximate cause for the rise in dog-bites, not pits in general, and certainly not mine. Legislators should seek methods besides breed bans and criminal enforcement to counter the problem, and encourage victims to avail themselves of the civil justice system. In the meantime, though, keep your paws off my dogs.
Jaimee Westfall, a trauma nurse at Texas Children's Hospital for 13 years, said serious dog- bite cases were unusual in years past but now are becoming increasingly common.
"Over and over, I hear the victims' families say that they never thought their dog could do this," Westfall said. "He just snapped."
Thousands of complaints about aggressive dogs also are pouring in to the Harris County Sheriff's Office.
"We had 4,130 calls this past year in the unincorporated area, which is 5 percent more than the year before," said sheriff's spokesman Thomas Gilliland.This is an area where victims are seeking to use sweeping criminal laws to effect deterrence that would be much better achieved through a more robust civil justice system. Owners of aggressive dogs that attack someone have no "mens rea," or criminal intent, which in generations past was the bright-line distinction dividing criminal law and civil liability. But by the 21st century, that distinction had been muddied through overcriminalization and the expansion of criminal law to supplant other types of regulation.
The dogs linked to the three recent deaths and many catastrophic injuries at Texas Children's were attributed to pit bull-type breeds that can include the American pit bull terrier, Staffordshire bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier as well as sometimes American bulldogs and presa canarios.
Colleen Lynn, who heads a national dog-bite victim group based in Austin, said 71 percent of the 31 dog-bite deaths recorded across the U.S. last year involved pit bull-type dogs.
Meanwhile, while we all feel terrible for the 31 people killed in dog attacks last year (22 by pits and their mixes, according to the story), there are an estimated 3.5 million or so pits and pit mixes in the United States, making them one of the more popular breeds. Also, people get bitten by dogs a lot, and mostly not by pit-associated breeds. About 1.5% of the American public is bit by a dog each year, with one in six bites requiring medical attention. So in practice, a breed-specific ban won't address most dog bites, and most dogs subject to it would be unlikely to ever seriously harm anyone.
Americans are prone to demonize dog breeds almost as a fetish, and at any given point in time the folks who worry about dangerous dogs always seem to have some waxing bogeyman to critique. After WWII, German Shepherds were the most feared attack dog. In the '60s, a movie starring James Garner titled "They Always Kill Their Masters" helped shift that scare-focus to Dobermans. And in recent years, urban dog fighting culture, a la Michael Vick, has shifted similar concern to pits.
But most pits (or Dobermans, or German Shepherds) aren't a serious threat, while any dog that's mistreated, neglected, or afraid can become dangerous. I happen to own three dogs, two of which would be characterized as pit-mixes. All three came to us essentially through rescue type scenarios - the pits from a young, since-incarcerated idiot who had bought them, but never trained them, to fight. Of the three, the only one I worry about biting anybody is the much smaller, non-pit mutt (a mix of Chow, German Shepherd, and some sort of much-smaller terrier breed, at least). The bigger dogs are a greater danger to lick you to death. Moreover, when they're around anyone they don't know, small children, etc., I make sure I closely control them, in part because of the extreme prejudice aimed at pits. As a practical matter, they pose little risk to anyone.
By contrast, in my neighborhood in Central East Austin, there have always been people who chain aggressive dogs outside or in some cases train them to fight. (Until the area began to gentrify and white people began to complain, we didn't see animal enforcement here much.) Any one of those chained dogs - regardless of breed - is more dangerous than any of my animals. As "Dog Whisperer" Cesar Milan wrote recently on the subject, "a breed is like a suit of clothes, it doesn’t tell you anything about the dog inside." One of Michael Vick's fighting pits actually ended up being trained and certified as a therapy dog (for which, it merits mention, pits are temperamentally well-suited). In a proper environment, these are loyal and submissive animals with big hearts, while in the wrong environment, any dog can become a danger.
To me, the idea that the government would ban or euthanize my dogs based on such long odds of tragedy borders on demonical. My dogs are my friends, my family - like this poor fellow, I'd feel incredibly guilty and sad if I ever acted on such busy-body advice to kill them. Milan says that he rehabilitates animals but trains people, and IMO irresponsible humans (and perhaps increased rates of reporting) are the proximate cause for the rise in dog-bites, not pits in general, and certainly not mine. Legislators should seek methods besides breed bans and criminal enforcement to counter the problem, and encourage victims to avail themselves of the civil justice system. In the meantime, though, keep your paws off my dogs.
Selasa, 03 Januari 2012
Georgia latest southern state pushing de-incarceration reforms
Georgia is the latest conservative, southern state to embark on a path of reducing incarceration to reduce the corrections budget, and some of their leaders are citing Texas among their inspirations, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ("Georgia rethinks its prison stance," Jan. 3). Here's a notable excerpt:
As a southerner (it ain't "Grits" for nothing), I'm glad to see this happening in the South: Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and now Georgia (at least) have witnessed conservative champions rise up to denounce mass incarceration as too costly and unnecessary.
The Texas Legislature, of course, as Grits readers know, this year regrettably departed from its reformist path, allowing our prisons to fill up again (they're projected to be beyond capacity by 2013) and reducing their funding without doing much to reduce the numbers of prisoners. Next session, for a variety of reasons, I doubt it will be nearly so easy to punt on these questions, forcing Texas to once again confront the economic costs of its tuff-on-crime self image and seek ways to reduce the expense. The only other option is to raise taxes to build more prisons, creating a tension between fiscal conservatives and the tuff-on-crime crowd, particularly prosecutors, whose political stance invariably is that, when it comes to their own budgets and prisons, money should be no object (and you're "soft on crime" if you say otherwise). By 2013, with prison health over budget, line-staff employment churning, and more prisoners entering TDCJ by the day, that tension will force Texas to either double down on de-incarceration reforms, following our southern brethren, or else tax-and-spend is the only way out of the mess we're in, which is exactly the reason Georgia is acting now.
RELATED: Via Sentencing Law & Policy, from The Crime Report, "Getting prison numbers down for good." From the Kansas City Star, "Tougher sentences boost cost of justice in Kansas." And from The Oregonian, "Bring on the debate on corrections."
The General Assembly this winter will debate a shift in emphasis toward alternatives to prison time for nonviolent offenders, as suggested by a special council appointed last year to study the state’s prison population and criminal code. The effect of its recommendations would be to send fewer people to jail for property and drug crimes and boost alternative punishments.Among the recommendations that will be taken up in the Peach State legislature:
That shift has the firm backing of Gov. Nathan Deal, who said it is time for Georgia to follow the lead of Texas, South Carolina and other Southern states and take a more effective approach to punishment.
He said Georgia, which now spends more than $1 billion a year on state prisons and has seen its inmate population double in the past 20 years, simply cannot afford to keep the current sentencing regime.
“We’re at a point in time where the necessity for doing something has gotten so big that to turn our head and pretend the problem does not exist is not responsible government,” Deal said in an interview.
“If we don’t make some changes, we’ll see an ever-increasing percentage of our state budget having to be allocated to our correction system. That takes away funding for things like education and other areas where many think the money is better spent.”
Changes to the criminal code proved to be more controversial among those on the special council, especially when it came to drug offenses. But the group reached consensus on some changes, including:More controversial in Georgia has been a measure Texas approved in 2003 mandating probation on the first offense for the lowest level drug offenses (in Texas' case, possession of less than a gram of a controlled substance, which is a state jail felony). A prosecutor on the panel argued that "To give only probation for having small quantities of illegal drugs in effect 'decriminalizes drug possession.'" This view fails to recognize that probation for many offenders can be a more difficult punishment than incarceration, particularly if it requires them to change their lifestyle. Jail or prison time can be waited out; fighting addiction, earning a living, providing for a family, etc. ... those things are a lot harder than prison for many offenders, particularly addicts. Or at least that's the premise on which Texas' 2003, '05, and '07 probation reforms were based.
- Increasing the threshold that makes a theft a felony to $1,500 -- up from the current $500 which was established in 1982 -- and increasing the felony threshold of theft by shoplifting from $300 to $750.
- Adjusting sentencing ranges for burglaries, with more serious punishment reserved for break-ins of homes and less severe sentences for burglaries of unoccupied structures, such as tool sheds, barns and other buildings.
- Giving judges a “safety value” that would allow them, after making certain findings, to depart from mandatory sentences in the current law for drug trafficking.
As a southerner (it ain't "Grits" for nothing), I'm glad to see this happening in the South: Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and now Georgia (at least) have witnessed conservative champions rise up to denounce mass incarceration as too costly and unnecessary.
The Texas Legislature, of course, as Grits readers know, this year regrettably departed from its reformist path, allowing our prisons to fill up again (they're projected to be beyond capacity by 2013) and reducing their funding without doing much to reduce the numbers of prisoners. Next session, for a variety of reasons, I doubt it will be nearly so easy to punt on these questions, forcing Texas to once again confront the economic costs of its tuff-on-crime self image and seek ways to reduce the expense. The only other option is to raise taxes to build more prisons, creating a tension between fiscal conservatives and the tuff-on-crime crowd, particularly prosecutors, whose political stance invariably is that, when it comes to their own budgets and prisons, money should be no object (and you're "soft on crime" if you say otherwise). By 2013, with prison health over budget, line-staff employment churning, and more prisoners entering TDCJ by the day, that tension will force Texas to either double down on de-incarceration reforms, following our southern brethren, or else tax-and-spend is the only way out of the mess we're in, which is exactly the reason Georgia is acting now.
RELATED: Via Sentencing Law & Policy, from The Crime Report, "Getting prison numbers down for good." From the Kansas City Star, "Tougher sentences boost cost of justice in Kansas." And from The Oregonian, "Bring on the debate on corrections."
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