I was in a cab yesterday, and my driver pointed out a drug arrest happening across the street in the Jersey City Heights. He was more interested in the bust than I was. “There, see?” he asked. “Three guys in handcuffs. Seven cops and three unmarked cars pinning in the white car. That was an undercover horse bust. Big one. You won’t see those guys on the street again.”
The great state of Nebraska is learning the hard way — in vicious examples — of the dire importance of precision in the law. The Cornhusker State is dealing with the humiliating dumping of teenagers under their new “Safe Haven” — a law written so broadly that any minor child is eligible for abandonment into state care — without any legal or financial repercussion for the parent or custodian.
The ugly internal machinations of a university system only pretends to protect the accused — let alone the not-guilty and innocent — and these policies policing behavior usually end up fettering away the accused so as not to do further damage to the university.
Sometimes technology expands just enough to cogently clear the way for expanded communication opportunities.
When Janna and I created sosASL.com as a portal for emergency communication between the Deaf and fire, police and EMT first responders, we realized it would not have been possible to create the site without the rise of technology and its seeping into every niche of the American psyche.
There is no substitution for being clearly understood in an emergency situation. It is honoring that truth that led Janna and me to invent sosASL.com as a free online portal for urgent, living and dying, communication between first responders and the Deaf.
In the early lives of cities, having “eyes on the street” was the prime way neighborhood crime was policed and thwarted. The classic, semiotic, image of that early neighborhood watch was the old woman leaning out the window, delicately balancing her elbows in a feather pillow on the windowsill as she watched the activity on the street below.
Continue reading → Eyes on the Street in the Early Lives of Cities
Is the purpose of prison to punish or to reform?
There are disturbing trends across the world that suggests prisons have become warehouses of punishment and despair that violate the basic terms of human dignity. Not a lot of good is coming into prisons or leaving prisons on parole.
Continue reading → Disturbing Prison Trends Against Human Dignity
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