After exam week is done, I will post my write-up from ASC -- including detailed notes from the panel featuring John Laub, Laurie Robinson, and others.
For now, though, I wanted to share two quick items:
First, a student sent me this link to a video, produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, designed to inform law enforcement agencies about the dangers of the so-called "Sovereign Citizens" movement:
Crimes committed by adherents of the so-called “sovereign citizens” movement — men and women who believe they are exempt from most laws, regulations and tax codes — continue to spread like a prairie fire.(A SPLC report on the sovereign citizens movement is here.)
In places as disparate as Georgia, Indiana, Nevada and Virginia, law enforcement officers are coming up against sovereigns allegedly scheming to steal houses, pry loose money from the government that isn’t theirs, and harass their enemies with crippling property liens and other forms of “paper terrorism.”
I'm wondering how much our policing scholars know about this movement, and/or about the extent to which local law enforcement agencies are receiving training on this group.
Second, one of my favorite bloggers, Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, posted this brief but striking analysis yesterday of the U.S. prison population:
FYI for those who are interested in incarceration issues.There are roughly 2.3 million people in jails and prisons in America, more than any country in the world.The United States has 756 people in jail per 100,000 people. No other country has more than 700, and only two are over 600 Russia (629) and Rwanda (604).Of the 2.3 million people in American jails, 806,000 are black males. African-Americans--males and females--make up .6 percent of the entire world's population, but African-American males--alone--make up 8 percent of the entire world's prison population. I know there are people who think some kind of demon culture could create a world where a group that makes up roughly one in 200 citizens of the world, comprises one in 12 of its prisoners. But I kind of doubt it.One final thought: If you released every black male in prison, our prison population would stand at 1.5 million, leaving us, still, with the second largest prison population in the world. Only China--a country with four times as many people--would have more (and barely--1.57 million). Russia would be a distant third with 890,000.
Happy grading/exam-giving to those of you wrapping up your semesters!
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1 comments:
I take one real exception with this video. Maybe I am overly sensitive to the term, but it makes my skin crawl when the police officer interviewed refers to these nut cases as "right wing extremists." That is like calling anarchists "left wing extremists." I have a real problem when we confuse and interchange these sort of terms. There is nothing that these criminals have in common with nearly any other form of conservatism - yes, even the wonderful Tea Party folks.
Ok, got that out of my system. I think this threat is likely very geographically specifically. I have never heard this identified as a local or even state criminal justice issue. I guess this ties into the Obama Administration's focus on this in recent years in terms of domestic terrorism. I find it hard to believe, however, that this is such a dominant problem when there is little to no discussion nationally about it. I think there is a tendency for many to assume that all limited government groups=these sort of nuts. WHile I know very little about the militia movement in Michigan, I even suspect most of those groups do not support these sort of views. None of this is new...Thus, I suspect this is a small but notable problem and really don’t know what to make of it.
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