Under a consent decree in 1992 brought by female prison guards who claimed they were denied hiring and promotional opportunity offered males, Delaware opened its guard positions without regard to the gender of prisoners.  It didn’t just result in women guarding men, but men guarding women as well.  A disaster ensued.

Martelli and current union president Geoff Klopp said guards are often the prey of convicted criminals who covet sex with captors to use it as leverage for prison jobs, extra food or other benefits.

Martelli said male guards, many whom are “23 or 24 years old and have never had sex,” are vulnerable in a women’s prison. “You’ve got a bunch of girls walking around buck naked or in towels, laying in bed with another girl. There was a lot of that going on.”

Some prisoners, he said, “find a way to manipulate these guys,” such as offering to perform oral sex in return for cigarettes or a phone. I’m surprised more girls haven’t come up pregnant.”

Doesn’t your heart just break at those young, virginal boy guards being enticed by those nasty criminal vixens? And no doubt, there was some of that, as people in prison tend to get imaginative to get favors and contraband.  Yet the problem of women prisoners seducing male guards is nothing compared to the problem of guards raping prisoners. Continue reading →

Shortly after the murder of Sam DuBose by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing, my pal Lee Pacchia went ballistic. Why do colleges have their own police forces?  Why do they need cops with guns? Fair questions, and because it’s Sunday and I’m an accommodating sort of guy, I will do my best to explain.

The New York Times has an article about this particular campus police department, which provides a piece of the answer, particularly the part about what a campus cop is doing ticketing a non-student driving off campus.

Six years ago, with crime creeping upward in the tree-lined, if slightly downtrodden, neighborhoods encircling the University of Cincinnati campus, the city and the university quietly signed an agreement giving the 72-member campus police force authority to patrol nearby residential streets.

The goal was “increased visibility,” university officials say, and the roughly 10,000 students who live in apartments and rowhouses off campus noticed a difference. Campus officers walked them home late at night or gave them rides. “I feel like crime has gotten pushed out,” said one senior, Jen Steiner, 21.

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It’s not just that we live in a time of nonjudgmental acceptance of diversity, but that liberal ideals preclude skepticism of alternative lifestyles.  So why not vampires?  A study (yes, there’s a study) addresses the dilemmas facing “real vampires.”

“Real vampires” are people who think they must feed on the energies of others, either physically or psychically, for their own wellbeing. Feeding takes a variety of forms. Some will drink blood from consenting human donors, others will rely on physical contact. For some, being in a crowded room is enough to recharge their batteries.

Okay. But as bizarre as this may seem, why is this any more bizarre a self-identification, or less worthy of acceptance, than any other?

The study’s authors identify two beliefs held by helping professionals that are central to a person’s reticence to “come out of the coffin” and disclose their “real vampirism”. Continue reading →

At Vox, Max Fisher did a number on the mob. No, not the mob that most people hate, but the other mob, the one born of righteous anger, and the occasional fun of destroying someone, on the internet.

It was putatively about the mob that went after Cecil the Lion killer Walter Palmer, but as the post fleshes out, it becomes clear that Palmer was just the hook.

This should look familiar: It is the same set of tactics that has been used in online harassment campaigns such as the “Gamergate” movement that targeted women in technology, or the seemingly endless online harassment conducted against female journalists. It is a growing trend of internet mob justice, one that often bleeds into real-world harassment with real-world consequences.

We as a society deemed campaigns such as Gamergate unacceptable and rejected their proponents as harassers who crossed the line.

I don’t know what “we as a society” Fisher thinks he’s entitled to speak for, but he’s as much of a flaming hypocrite as Jon Ronson, whom he naturally quotes deeper in.  Fisher laments: Continue reading →

The street name, Whispering Woods Lane, sounds quiet, calm and bucolic, though it’s a housing development in Sparta, New Jersey.  Even so, knocking at the front door at 2 in the morning is jarring.  That the three boys meant to knock at the door of the next house doesn’t make it less so.

The people inside don’t know that the boys made a stupid mistake. They know that there is an unanticipated knocking in the middle of the night, when they’re asleep dreaming of perfect suburban lawns.  They know that the knocking woke them up. They know that there is pretty much nothing good coming from the knocking, and potentially something pretty bad.  Memo to 18-year-old kids: make sure you knock on the front door to the correct house at 2 a.m., because otherwise somebody is going to be pretty pissed at you.

But then, the boys also didn’t know that the guy coming to the door to answer the knock was Kissinger Barreau, a New Jersey State Trooper, and he had his gun. Continue reading →

For reasons that oftentimes eludes me, I get pitched by new legal tech start-ups, seeking to gain my approval of their business and, gasp, write something nice about them.  Enthusiastic young people, sometimes lawyers, explain to me in glowing terms the fabulous benefits their concept offers, usually in terms of transparency, availability or time-savings. Sometimes, it’s just shiny.

Rarely does it go as well as they hope.  There tends to be a few reasons that keep getting in their way. First, they have no clue how lawyers work and what lawyers need. Many of these start-ups claim to solve problems that don’t exist.

Others address practice needs that are contrary to how lawyers practice. The pitch in theory kinda makes sense, except that’s not how it happens. They argue that lawyers should do it their way, but it’s flawed.  You see, if there isn’t any real substantive benefit to change, then there is no reason for it to happen. Worse yet, the change would cost money and produce no hard benefit, other than to the company selling the change. Continue reading →

In federal court, criminal cases are captioned as “United States of America against” whom (or what) ever.  The etiquette is to call the prosecution “the Government,” though I tend to spell it in written submissions with a lower case “g” while they use an upper case “G.” It’s my little way of tweaking them.

In New York State courts, on the other hand, criminal cases are styled as “The People of the State of New York against” somebody, and the prosecution calls itself “The People.” This offers the opportunity to use that against them, calling them the prosecution instead, and reminding the jury that they, not the prosecution, are “The People” and not to let the prosecution fool them. If done well, it can drive the point home.

Most other states have some similar variation on this theme, putting themselves in a throne of rhetorical righteousness while dumping the defendant in the hole of scorn. But apparently, Tennessee, the state got a bit twisted when the rhetoric game wasn’t going their way. From David French at the National Review:

Over in Williamson County, Tennessee…it’s apparently now a slur to call the government by its name.

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My tax dollars pay to maintain the streets in this city and I deserve to run down them without being sexually objectified or reduced to my biology. 

—Anna Aldridge

The video of an actress walking the “ethnic” streets of New York being catcalled, or “harassed” provided you adopt the word unburdened by definition, gave rise to yet another “right,” that of women to not have to endure the sound of undesired male utterances.  Most would categorize them as annoying, though some women contend that they cause them to fear . . . something. Like police, women seem to be afraid of everything lately.

But Anna Aldridge, an Austin woman, decided to go to the mattresses over catcalling.

“It’s usually just like ‘Woo hoo!’ or ‘Hey, baby!’ It’s disgusting. It’s horrible. I’ve had guys roll down the window and make these little kissy faces at me,” she said.

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I’ve said some unpleasant things about Bill Otis here from time to time, so it’s only fair that I note his profile by Mark Obbie at Slate, where he’s lauded as “the last man standing who thinks criminal justice reform is a terrible idea.”  Or, as I’ve mentioned in the past, a guy who thinks life for jaywalking sends an inadequate message.

Otis is portrayed in the post as someone with a “pugilistic” style, who is unafraid to take on anyone who challenges his simplistic view that if you lock all the criminals up forever, problem solved.  That’s not quite my experience with Bill, which is that he’s the typical schoolyard bully, picking only on people he knows he can push around.  When faced with someone who pushes back, he runs away. Typical coward.

But Bill Otis has two things I don’t have. The first is a profile in Slate. The second is Chuck Grassley’s ear. Continue reading →

Everybody has a story to tell, and most think their story is well worth your time.  There’s nothing unusual about that, except when they find out that other people yawn, make excuses to leave, run away to avoid having to hear your story. Only then do you realize that the story all about you isn’t nearly as fascinating to others as you think it should be.

But when the story is told for the sake of advocacy, and given a monstrously huge soapbox, it better be a damn good one.  An op-ed in the New York Times by Doug Deason, a Texas investor who did well enough to hang out with governors, is such a story.  It’s not a particularly good one; in fact, it’s a major yawner.

But Deason’s purposes are pure, not just to waste other people’s time with his pedestrian tale of woe, but to use his story to prove a point, that our “justice” system sucks and people need to be given a second chance.  Good intentions? Absolutely.  An op-ed we can all get behind because we, like Deason, believe the same thing?  Well, not exactly.

His story begins as a 17-year-old having a party at the neighbors’ house.  Except the neighbors weren’t home. Continue reading →