As you surely know, riots have broken out in Baltimore after years of police killing people in America at a rate of over a thousand a year, with many of the victims of police violence being unarmed children, with the deaths most often as a result NOT of efforts to protect people from violent crime… Read More
Author Archive
Cogito Ergo Sum Liber
I am currently reading The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom by Michael Shermer. While the book is of course about a much broader topic, a part I recently read relates to the kind of prison reform I have often wrote about for this blog. Shermer writes: Working… Read More
So Many Good People In Prison: Inmates Rescue Guard
In a previous post, Man Facing Life For Pot Brownies, we looked at the absurdity of the massive amounts of non-violent people thrown in prison for various victimless crimes. In fact, as cited with sources in that article, only 8% of inmates in the United States are incarcerated for violent offenses. In the vast majority… Read More
Autopsy: Ezell Ford Shot in Back at Very Close Range
The Time’s article reports: Authorities claim that Ford, 25, was involved in an altercation with two officers and was shot as he struggled with them and attempted to reach for one of their weapons. But, the Los Angeles Times reports, a family friend who saw part of the encounter alleges there was no struggle. Ford… Read More
The Names of The Dead – Killed by Police in 2014
In my previous post, I gave a list of 6 unarmed people who were killed by the police with factual accounts of the circumstances around their deaths. However, that was only 6 people. Over a thousand others are killed by the police each year. Below is a list of the names of over a thousand… Read More
Justice For All – Unarmed People Killed by Police
Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s names ring through our society right now as the names of the black men killed by police. The lost lives of these men symbolize the source of this incredible protest movement getting so much media coverage. However, the movement did not start with just those two killings. The mainstream corporate-controlled… Read More
We Could All Do A Lot Better
On a site like this that’s entire focus is opposing aggressive violence, either through prevention or self-defense, the issue of violence committed by police is so relevant yet so difficult and complicated to address. Frankly, that’s why I do not want to say anything else except watch this video which addresses that topic amazingly: Download… Read More
#SchoolsNotPrisons
This breaks my heart. Over 2 million people in the United States are in prison. Most are in there for non-violent, consensual crimes such as marijuana possession. Even if we consider only the violent offenders, the fact remains that spending vast effort and money locking people up after they have hurt someone is more inefficient… Read More
Is CT DCF Doing More Harm Than Good?
The Connecticut Department of Children and Families (CT DCF) is given about a billion taxpayer dollars a year. CT DCF has roughly 4,300 children in its custody on any given day. CT DCF is touted as an institution whose job it is to protect children and be a parent for children without parents, namely children… Read More
Man Facing Life For Pot Brownies
I just read a disturbing news article about a Texas man, Jacob Lavoro, who has been arrested for making and selling pot brownies and cookies. If convicted he is facing the same sentence as many convicted murderers because both crimes are first degree felonies in Texas. That’s 5 years to life for selling pot brownies.… Read More
Best of #mynypd
In case you’ve been living in a cave this week and haven’t heard, the NYPD tried to dive into social networking promotions with the hashtag #mynypd. They asked citizens to post pictures of themselves with the state’s armed soldiers in the war on drugs, prostitution, permitless business, just being brown or black, and–maybe the biggest… Read More
Privacy: How Much Do They Know about You
Over the last week there has been a huge uproar over the revelation of the depths to which the NSA has been spying on American citizens without probable cause. Namely, people learned how Verizon turned over all its records to NSA, meaning the government has kept records of all your phone calls and text messages… Read More