The state of New Jersey is poised to repeal the death penalty and replace it with a sentence of life in prison without parole. Read the New York Times article and CBS News report for more information.
Wanted to draw your attention to an article by Dr. Phil Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo is a psychologist at Stanford University who is perhaps most famous for running the Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. The Stanford Prison Experiment, along with Stanley Milgram’s obedience study, which is also mentioned in the article, are both fascinating and disturbing studies which demonstrate, ala Lord of the Flies, that we are far more deeply affected by, and vulnerable to, the influence of our environments and of authority than we would like to imagine, and that this vulnerability means that any one of us could relatively quickly be led to engage in criminal and inhumane behaviours which are against our deepest held beliefs, ethics, or morals. You can watch a great 51 minute documentary which was produced about the Stanford Prison Experiment, called “Quiet Rage, The Stanford Prison Experiment” on Google Video.
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I rewatched Frank Darabont’s Shawshank Redemption this week. I found that I watched it a lot more cynically than I did the last time. The movie certainly managed to force me to ponder the opposing forces of hope and fear, life and death. Red, one of the main characters, talked a bit about how after 40 or 50 years in prison, one becomes institutionalized, and finds it hard to live on “the outside”. It seems to me that one can kind of become institutionalized in the world at large, and find it difficult to maintain hope, compassion, love. Previously, when I watched Shawshank, I focused on the astoundingly redemptive and hopeful story of Red and Andy, who both manage to avoid the grey horror of prison seeping into them too much, and who both have happy endings. This time, however, I found myself more focused on Warden Norton and Brooks, who both in their own ways get trapped by that same grey horror, and never do escape.
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Been pondering the whole Michael Vick story quite a bit. I find I have lots of questions and few answers.
Did you know that the name of Vick’s dogfighting operation, Bad Newz Kennels, is taken from a slang name for the very poor neighborhood in east Newport News where Vick grew up? Reporter David Ress decribed the area in 2007 for the Richmond Times Dispatch this way
950-plus units of public-housing projects crammed into an area of about a dozen blocks. Row after row of aging two-story apartment buildings, pressed close to the Interstate 664 bridge and looming black piles of coal. Close enough to the water for a whiff from the seafood packing plants but not for a fresh breeze. Just enough space for a walkway and clotheslines between the buildings, but not for a basketball court…not a dog in sight.
If I were George Bush, I would pardon Mr. Vick today.
Posted in Animal Rights, Criminal Justice, News Reports | 10 Comments »New York Times — In April, Jerry Miller, an Illinois man who served 24 years for a rape he did not commit, became the 200th American prisoner cleared by DNA evidence. His case, like the 199 others, represented a catastrophic failure of the criminal justice system.
When an airplane crashes, investigators pore over the wreckage to discover what went wrong and to learn from the experience. The justice system has not done anything similar.
But a new study does. Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false - yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.
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