By Neal Peirce For Release Sunday, August 15, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
The rest of the world is starting to notice the United States’ incarceration follies.
Case in point: “Why America locks up so many people,” the cover story of the British-based Economist magazine, showing the face of a forlorn Statue of Liberty behind bars.
The grim statistics noted: some 2.3 million people, more than the population of 15 of our states, are now incarcerated — one in 100 Americans. That’s quadruple our 1970 imprisonment rate. For hard-to-defend reasons, and at staggering fiscal cost, we incarcerate people at a rate five times Great Britain’s, nine times Germany’s, 12 times Japan’s.
Congress is on the brink of our first national reassessment in many decades. Sen. James Webb of Virginia is proposing a National Criminal Justice Commission instructed to take an 18-month, stem-to-stern look at the system, its shortcomings and alternatives. The bill recently passed the House without opposition; now the question is whether the Senate (where the measure has a 38 cosponsors) can avoid a procedural objection by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and bring it to a vote.
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By Jay Walljasper For Release Sunday, August 15, 2010
Citiwire.net
As the son of a geography teacher, who spent endless hours of my youth poring over maps, I’ve always been fascinated with border lines. As a kid I imagined that crossing from, say, Nevada into California, would offer an immediate change of scenery from desert to Redwood trees.
I later discovered that off the map, the world is not so dramatic. At least that’s what I thought until recently when I visited Detroit with a team of seasoned urban observers from the Citistates Group. We were meeting with the Kresge Foundation about its ambitious plans for revitalizing the city, and two Kresge program officers — Wendy Jackson and Benjamin Kennedy — graciously offered to give us a tour. Despite big hopes for the Detroit, the two of them — who both live right in the city — did not spare us the sight of utterly devastated neighborhoods where most of the houses and people are long gone.
Stretches of Detroit look like an urban ghost town, with only two or three houses remaining on a block. But we also saw neighborhoods alive with people and well-kept businesses or homes: downtown, the midtown area around Wayne State University, the Indian Village historic district, Northwest Detroit, Lafayette Park and others.
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