You can come out from under the bed now.

Who would want to live under Soviet-style communism? I certainly wouldn't. Supposedly that was "socialism": USSR = Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It would be more accurate, however, to describe the Soviet system as one of state-governed feudalism. The brutality and deprivation suffered by citizens of the USSR is one of the main reasons that "socialism" has become such an effective scare-word for many. Continue...

Most mainstream Americans favor equal rights between women and men, at least in theory. In practice, however, some long-standing prejudices still hold. For example, a promiscuous boy is likely to be considered a "stud," while an equally promiscuous girl risks being branded a "slut."

Legal process should always be above such knee-jerk biases. Yet in some instances a particular sex offense committed by a male may be treated as a horrendous crime, while the same offense committed by a female is considered only slightly worse than jaywalking.

For example, take some cases from a west Texas county. Continue...

This study has been around for more than ten years, but its lessons are always current, always important. A well-designed program of early invention with at-risk children produced long-term benefits of nearly thirteen times the cost. The effects were dramatic in fewer high school dropouts, better work records, fewer teenage pregnancies, and most dramatic of all, less criminal behavior.

The study is available on my other website. You can access it immediately with this link:

Pre-schoolIntervention

To access other articles about crime, recidivism, and rehabilitation, go to this page:

Articles

It's no secret that we spend fortunes on incarceration. Continue...

The audience booed during the movie Network when Ned Beatty, as the character Arthur Jensen, proclaimed that business was more important than nationhood:

"...There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies... The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business..."

Repugnant thought. While Americans wouldn't approve a system like that of the former Soviet Union, where the government could wield absolute power, I fear that we don't recognize an equal threat, a system in which megacorporations wield the absolute power. That threat is a lot closer. Continue...

Both news stories appeared under the "odd" heading. In one, a defendant got a 10-year sentence for stealing an $80 slab of meat. In the other, a driver was fined $290,000 for speeding. "WTF?!" you ask. As the late Paul Harvey would have said, here's the rest of the story: Continue...

You know about Maurice Clemmons gunning down four police officers, without warning, in a coffee shop, and you know about Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and Baptist preacher, making it possible for him to be free. Clemmons had been deservedly sentenced to 95 years behind bars. You know how to use search engines, so I won't tell you all the reasons that any behavioral scientist, in fact, any reasonable person, should have known it would take many years, if ever, for the violent, vicious, raging animal that was Clemmons to become someone fit to walk among free human beings. Judges, prosecutors, corrections officials, were horrified at the idea of commuting his sentence, but to radical cleric Huckabee, Clemmons had the Get Out Of Jail Free card: Jesus. Continue...

When you witness a police officer committing a crime, who do you call? In Chicago and other big cities, it's too easy to be brushed off. If there are officers on the scene, well, what's the problem? B-b-b-b-but it's the officers who are robbing this place. It's a police sergeant who's punching and kicking a barmaid who thought he'd had enough to drink. It's the officers who are shaking down a motorist. Are you sure? Well, you can file a report maybe, or hope other officers will be sent. If you file a report and you happen to live in Chicago, you may as well plan to move. Having the Fraternal Order of Police mad at you isn't much better than pissing off the Mafia. If other officers are sent, the guilty ones may just say "We have this under control" and the new guys will dutifully leave. Maybe have a laugh about it at a favorite cop bar later, I suspect.

Now I happen to believe that most police officers are rightly motivated. They want to uphold the law, and they're not just thugs with guns and badges. Unfortunately, some are just that, thugs with guns and badges, and even more unfortunate, the code of silence prevents other officers from cleaning up their own house. At the end of the day, it's almost part of a police officer's job description to become a silent accessory to police crime. The officer who breaks that rule may simply get the cold shoulder, or may be framed for an offense of which he or she is innocent. In the worst case, the officer who tries to do the right thing may be rewarded by being set up to be injured or killed in the line of duty. How? Easy enough. "Murphy, you're just in time. Check out the garage while we go around the house." (Failing to mention that an armed offender was just seen entering the garage.)

Over time, organized civilians can and have successfully combatted police corruption, but in a condensed period of time, when you're the witness to a crime being committed by an officer, or the victim, you're close to helpless. If you try to intervene, you're taking your life in your hands, not to mention risking a charge of interfering with an officer performing his or her duties.

Of course it can happen everywhere. Police misconduct just happens to be one of many areas in which Chicago often excels. But remember the Forensic Files episode of the officer who got a warrant to arrest his former girlfriend on the basis of completely false accusations against her 15-year-old son? This happened in a non-metropolitan area (if memory serves me correctly). The woman had begged police authorities to keep him away from her home, but he pulled off this ruse and, during a raid on her home, went immediately to her bedroom. Knowing he was there to kill her, she made a dive for a night stand where she kept a gun, and an analysis of his first shot proved that he had not acted in self defense as he claimed. It took years to bring him to trial because of the reluctance of other officers to pursue justice in the case.

So what's the answer?

Obviously we could make police officers' careers more rewarding, pay them better, and do a lot better job of recruiting. Officers who show any sign of thinking their primary responsibility is to protect their own under all circumstances rather than serving and protecting the public should be re-evaluated and, if warranted, discharged. That's a long process, and it won't happen next year or in the next five years.

What can be done is to create, in each state, a division of the state police whose primary responsibility is to police the police. If I am being abused in some way by a police officer, a witness can call an alternative to 911. Say 811 or 922 or whatever. That goes immediately to this state police division which then dispatches officers on an emergency basis. If the local police or sheriff's deputies say "there's no problem," the state officers remain, observe, and make a report.

Will people abuse it? Some will of course. Someone who did so knowingly and maliciously should face charges for making a false police report. Perhaps at times it will be a matter of opinion. If I'm drunk and obnoxious, the police may think they're only restraining me, and my wife may think they've gone beyond necessary force and are committing aggravated battery. Sorry, but justice isn't always simple. Some will say this would tie the police's hands and prevent them from doing their jobs. I say it might make them think how much blood they want investigating officers from a different jurisdiction to find on me and my clothes, and officers who tend to act out of anger and frustration might decide to take a deep breath instead. Don't we have a right to expect as much of them as the law expects of the rest of us?

It would also help to pass a federal law against police abuse, making it a crime for one officer to cover the misdeeds of another or to fail to report a crime permitted by another officer. Drastic? Not in my opinion. Isn't respect for the law something America needs more of, at all levels?

And you see, fear of police and respect for the law are not the same thing. In fact, they work against each other.

If you disagree, please feel free to tell me. With what I've written here, I might have just made a lot of police officers hate my guts. But call me an idealist if you will, I think a lot more people who wear badges will think it's high time somebody got serious about this.

It happened in Florida recently. A strong and violent inmate jumped the 64-year-old security officer who was on duty alone at the jail and locked him in a strangle hold. In a few seconds, the guard could have been dead. Three other inmates came to his aid, saving his life. Some people will read that story and say "they just wanted to catch a break for themselves; they didn't give a good flying f---- about the guard's life." If that's what you assume automatically, you're part of the problem. Others will quickly say "it just shows that most people behind bars aren't bad at all, they're just victims of an unjust society." If that's your knee-jerk reaction, you're also part of the problem. When we stop looking for simplistic explanations and solutions, maybe we can start fixing some of America's serious problems.

Crime and how we deal with it is one of those serious problems. We have a violent crime rate that is shameful for an advanced, wealthy nation. We have more of our citizens behind bars than any other nation. About one in a hundred. Take everyone waiting for trial, and on probation or parole, and the portion jumps to one in thirty-seven. The average American household spends between $400 and $500 a year to keep people behind bars.

I believe the inmates-save-guard story demonstrates that not all offenders are cut out of the same cloth. Is that so difficult to understand? You'd think it's advanced rocket science considering that we let hard-core gang-bangers plea-bargain brutally violent crimes down to misdemeanors, that we are only beginning to apply everything behavioral science has taught us about rehabilitation programs, that we listen to pundits who say "rehabilitation doesn't work" but then elevate to hero status scumbags like Jack Abbott and Steve Stanko who happen to be slick and glib enough to charm gullible talking heads, that we lock out of jobs and educational programs people with long-past records of petty offenses . . .

A petty thief who steals to support a drug habit is not the same as a hard-core criminal who enjoys taking drugs, along with an occasional rape. A child molester is not the same as a shoplifter. A professional hot check artist who dislikes violence has little in common with the nine-to-five worker with a hot temper who periodically gets in brawls that put lives in danger, including his own. None of the preceding are necessarily similar to the flag-waving American who exercises his second amendment rights by keeping an arsenal in his bedroom, then blasts away the life of a neighbor he caught playing hoochy-koo with his wife.

We tend to paint all criminals with the same brush because it's easier and simpler, and cheaper in the short term, but it's much more expensive in the long term. We also tend to believe that anyone suspected of a crime is guilty, just like during the Inquisition. Too many police officers hold that belief and act on it, and we let them get by with it.

Acting as though all offenders and even accused offenders are stamped out of the same mold isn't just unfair. It helps keep our costs of incarceration so high, and our streets so dangerous.

Would we not all like to change that? What do you think? 

It shouldn't be a joking matter. Medicare fraud hits all of us in the pocketbook, and distracts us from streamlining and modernizing our decrepit healthcare system. Ironically, I remember when Medicare was first proposed, and there were those who screamed about "socialized medicine" then as now, who predicted that millions of larcenous seniors were going to abuse the system. Maybe they meant getting five more minutes with a physician than they were entitled to, but there was always that hint that somehow Grandpa would turn his physician's bills into a condo on the Riviera.

Sorry. It's not those cagey old codgers. It's physicians and other healthcare providers. I haven't heard recently of any hospital corporations defrauding Medicare, but since I know from personal experience that some routinely defraud their patients, I won't be shocked to learn that they victimize the taxpayers as well.

So, why shouldn't they? It's easy money, with very little risk. Just recently an Arizona man got two and a half years behind bars for stealing a quarter million. He had to pay it back, and after he serves his thirty months with however much time off for good behavior, he'll have a few years of probation. Still, when you compare that with the twenty years you can get for stealing $100 with a gun, or the life sentence you could get for a drug offense, it's a pretty high-profit low-risk business.

Another example from some years ago: A certain psychiatrist, who worked part-time in the same court-support agency with me, used to spend a few hours a week doing his private practice billing on his county payroll job. No problem, since it was during downtime. Then it turned out that some of that billing was to Medicare, and over $300,000 of it was fraudulent. Federal charges were filed and he was fired immediately by the circuit court, but it wasn't a great job anyway. I'm sure he had to pay back what he stole, and let's say he was fined a half million bucks (I don't know), but to my knowledge, he never spent a day behind bars.

To other successful psychiatrists whose total honest incomes might be a half million a year or more, that might not seem like a terrible risk. Just like, to the kid in the ghetto, a little time in prison might not seem so much worse than life on the streets.

Truthfully, I wouldn't do it, no matter what. A few years back I got a couple of louvred glass storm doors from a home center, without having paid more than a small deposit. I took the trouble to go to the store, insist they find the record of the sale, and let me pay what I owed. There was a time in my distant past when I certainly would have done no such thing! If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out my other website, going-straight.com For the last fifty years I don't take things that aren't mine, I don't steal from people, and I consider paying what I owe in taxes a patriotic duty. I hope that's true of you as well. But for anyone who is easily tempted, who just happens to have an MD or Psy.D. or RN after his or her name, or happens to own a hospital or medical supply company, or for any other reason submits charges to Medicare, the risk is too low.

I liked the guy down the hall, and it would be hard to think of him in a cell, but logically, I know that's what he deserved. When politicians talk about getting tough on crime, they usually mean getting tough on poor people who hurt rich people. I say it's time to get tough, very tough, on rich people who hurt all of us. Maybe in China they'd get a bullet to the back of the head. I don't advocate that. I do advocate giving them seriously long vacations at the Crossbars Resort.

There was a local bus stop by the train station in Des Plaines, IL, and there was a bus that went a couple of blocks from my house. The train I usually took from my job in downtown Chicago was one of the most popular, and dozens of commuters got off at that station. Cleverly, the last bus of the day was scheduled to leave, typically almost empty, just as that train was approaching. It would have been a long walk to my house, but not impossible, if there had just been sidewalks.

Many years later, my wife and I were destined to become apartment dwellers for a while. We briefly considered a nice complex, located, I believe, in Hillary Clinton's home town, Park Ridge. I still commuted to downtown Chicago frequently, and those apartments were located a healthy one-mile walk from the nearest Rapid Transit station. Or maybe not so healthy, since there was no sidewalk on either side of the road, a heavily travelled four-lane. Walking in the roadway would have suicidal. The option of walking to the train could have motivated us to choose an apartment there.

We're now residents of beautiful southwest Michigan, where we're known affectionately as FIP's, or "fxxxing Illinois people," but have a very modest second home in Chicago's northwest suburbs. When we're there, we often attend worship services at a location 1.83 miles away. Reasonably "walkable," and certainly "bikable," if there were sidewalks or a bike path all the way. Getting across the intersection of Highway 83 and Lake Cook Road on foot, especially after dark, is the stuff of action movies.

Chicago has now invested in "bike lanes." Ha! A yellow stripe in the right lane marks off a strip wide enough for a bicyclist, maybe even wide enough for one bicyclist to pass another. No barrier between cyclists and cars, only an occasional yellow symbol on the pavement supposedly reminding motorists that this lane is for bikes. In some areas cars have to drive across the bike lane to get to parking places, and at intersections it's a virtual open season on cyclists. Drivers regularly occupy bike lanes with impunity. Yet some brave souls do use them, mostly physically fit serious bicylists. There's little incentive for those who regularly go by car to switch to pedal power.

I'm talking specifically about Chicago and its suburbs because that's the part of the world I've known best since 1967, but I've observed similar situations in other parts of the country I've visited. Bicycling for fun is commonplace, but rare for practical purposes. In too many communities, sidewalks are unheard of. Intersections are friendly to neither cyclists or pedestrians.

I'm all for wind, solar, hydrogen power, electric cars, you name it. It will take many years and lots of money before we're ready to take full advantage of all of them. By comparison, making it practical, safe, and inviting to use the legs nature gave us is nickle and dime stuff. As a bonus, many of us would shed some of our blubber and thus spend less on healthcare.

This should be one of the priorities in our energy-independence efforts.