Watch the Watchmen
I believe in the right to privacy.Yet I can think of someone who deserves very little privacy—a policeman making an arrest. Unfortunately, in some states it's a crime to make a video of a policeman...
View ArticleHow Long Before Someone Dies Because of an Unsecured Wireless Router?
According to an AP story out of Buffalo, N.Y., federal agents armed with assault weapons stormed a residence in the early morning hours last month looking for child porn on a home PC. The homeowner,...
View ArticleFalse Forbearance
Two weeks ago, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire vetoed a bill that would have clarified the rules for supplying medical marijuana in her state. She cited an April 14 letter in which Jenny Durkan and...
View ArticleHome Insecurity
A few years ago, two police officers were chasing a crack dealer at a Lexington, Kentucky, apartment complex when they lost sight of him as he ducked into one of two units at the end of a breezeway....
View ArticleBig Brother Is Watching You
In 1991, George Holliday filmed the LAPD’s arrest and beating of Rodney King. The videotape provoked national controversy. If a similar incident happened today, it might provoke something else: the...
View ArticleWhen Punishment Is a Crime
In his magisterial book The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn recited in gruesome detail the mistreatment of inmates in prison camps in the Soviet Union. "As many as 54 prisoners may share a...
View ArticleThe Ends Didnt Justify the Means
At the first presidential debate of the 2012 campaign, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson implored Republican voters to conduct a “cost-benefit analysis” of the criminal justice system. “Half of what...
View ArticleLocked Up, Locked Out
Do prisons make us safer? By taking would-be offenders off the streets, prisons clearly have reduced crime in the short run. In the long run, though, imprisonment erodes the bonds of work, family, and...
View ArticleDeclare Defeat and Go Home
"The war on drugs has failed," declared the editors of National Review in 1996, back when the nation’s foremost conservative periodical promoted ideas more intellectually rigorous than cheerleading for...
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Wrongful Convictions
When Paul House was finally released from prison in 2008, he was a specter of the man who had been sentenced to death more than 22 years earlier. When I visit his home in Crossville, Tennessee, in...
View ArticlePrison Math
In 2009, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 1,524,513 prisoners in state and federal prisons. When local jails are included, the total climbs to 2,284,913. These numbers are not...
View ArticleThe Guilt Market
Criminal snitches are a pervasive feature of the justice system that the public rarely sees. Every year thousands of offenders offer information to the government on street corners, in the back of...
View ArticleThe Price of Prohibition
Forty years ago this Friday, President Richard Nixon announced that "public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse." Declaring that "the problem has assumed the dimensions of a national...
View ArticleThe Crime Rate Puzzle
“Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling.” Conservative pundits have been poking fun at that headline ever since it appeared in The New York Times in 1997. For the law-and-order right, it...
View ArticleRape Factories
In 1984 the photographer Tom Cahill smashed a plate-glass door in a fit of fury at the San Francisco Chronicle. He had just unsuccessfully attempted to get the paper’s reporters to write about rape in...
View ArticleIndefensible
The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to counsel, but that does not mean all defendants receive good representation. Too often, their defense is not even minimally...
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Bad Boys
You might think that putting an innocent person in prison for a major crime like rape or murder would end or at least impede a prosecutor’s career. But prosecutors are rarely sanctioned for mistakes,...
View ArticleCollars for Dollars
When I was a police officer in Baltimore, one sergeant would sometimes motivate his troops in the middle of a shift change by joyfully shouting, “All right, you maggots! Let’s lock people up! They...
View ArticleKeeping Kids Outside the System
Rashad never took his eyes off his mother. While his public defender questioned him, Rashad clenched and unclenched his hands, answering in staccato bursts, his large brown eyes imploring or...
View ArticleThe Devils Bargain
Most Americans are under the mistaken impression that when the government accuses someone of a crime, the case typically proceeds to trial, where a jury of laypeople hears arguments from the...
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