With gay marriage decided, what will be the next big left-led social change?

The obvious solution is to build more charter prisons and give vouchers to convicts.

 

To get to the other side?

 

I actually made this proposal to a State Bar Association committee on Criminal Justice.
It works like this, many criminals have mental health issues and substance abuse issues, they often coincide with this group. After sentencing it can be computed at a present value, the cost of incarcerating that person. Since the prison system is usually funded closer to its needs than the mental health and substance abuse in-patient programs, if a prisoner can get treatment , the variable cost of his incarceration goes with him or her to the treatment facility.
I know what you are going to say, if we let the good prisoners out with vouchers the ones that get left behind will suffer. You're right.

 

Better evaluation and more referrals to modernized mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities is a big part of the answer.

 

I think it's so YF can call them Pookie.

 

New York Times on this:

Trouble began early in the life of Alexander Williams, the son of a city correction officer from Brownsville, Brooklyn. His first arrest came at age 11. When he was 14, a close cousin was stabbed to death with a barbecue fork outside the Williams family home.

Serious charges started piling up: four arrests on weapons charges, and in April, a charge of attempted murder. The next month, he was shot in the shoulder. Days later, officers arrested him outside a baby shower and charged him with possession of a .25-caliber handgun.

In the eyes of police leaders, a small number of teenagers and young men — often familiar faces to police officers on the street — are behind the rise in shootings in New York City over the last two years. They are also frequently the victims of gun violence.

The life of Mr. Williams, now 19 and indicted by a grand jury on the most recent gun charge, is emblematic of that perspective. But his experiences also represent some of the tensions that have surfaced: the difference between what police officers and detectives believe they know and what can be proved in court; the challenge presented by focusing enforcement on the most hardened young people; and questions raised by numerous arrests that do not result in convictions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/n...ice-focus-on-a-small-number-of-young-men.html

 

Hey, that's almost funny, but you and I both know that "Pookie" is President Obama's affectionate term for what he perceives to be the stereotypical, lazy, black guy who sleeps away most of the day, and sits on the couch all of his waking hours.

It's his name. It's his perception of young black males.

 

You mean it's his perception of a subset of young black males, don't you? Otherwise, that would make Obama and anyone who thinks that racist.

 

How do people square that kind of a deal -- clearly someone who should have been locked away LONG ago -- with the narrative that young black men are just a sneeze away from doing serious time?

 

I think that both can be true. There are hard boys who are career violent criminals. There are black kids who are basically are not much different from me at that age who run into the wrong cop at the wrong time.

The one being true does not mean that the other cannot be.

 

Thanks, Goober.

 

What? Nuance? Context? Balderdash!