Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
March 7th, 2015
“The growing unpopularity of the War on Drugs and the number of bipartisan moves to, supposedly, roll back mass incarceration have led some leftists to believe that, finally, the prison-state is about to be cut down to size.
“Yet a new book by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, makes it clear that the problem is far worse than commonly suspected, and that the reforms on the table are unlikely to even make a dent in the forces that keep millions behind bars.”
Read the interview with Marie Gottshalk in Jacobin.
Posted in Prisons | Comments Off on It’s Not Just the Drug War
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
March 5th, 2015
9 Social Panics That Gripped the Nation, Were Totally False, and Did Horrible Lasting Damage.
Read the article by Janet Allon and Kali Hollway in Alternet.
Posted in Sex Panic | Comments Off on Nine Horrible Social Panics
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
March 3rd, 2015
“You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre. I suspect you can barely throw a stone on most campuses around the country without hitting a few of these neo-miscreants. Who knows what coercions they deployed back in the day to corral those students into submission; at least that’s the fear evinced by today’s new campus dating policies. And think how their kids must feel! A friend of mine is the offspring of such a coupling—does she look at her father a little differently now, I wonder.”
Read the article by Laura Kipnis in Chronicles of Higher Education.
Posted in Sex Panic | Comments Off on Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
February 23rd, 2015
“Unsafe? These days, when students talk about threats to their safety and demand access to “safe spaces,” they’re often talking about the threat of unwelcome speech and demanding protection from the emotional disturbances sparked by unsettling ideas. It’s not just rape that some women on campus fear: It’s discussions of rape.”
Read Wendy Kaminer’s op-ed in the Washington Post.
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
February 22nd, 2015
EMILY COOPER FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
“The situation on college campuses has become so dire that civil libertarians are calling for sexual assault investigations to be left to police and prosecutors. Despite the fact that conviction in a criminal court carries severe sentences and other harsh ramifications, frustrated and fearful students, parents, and lawyers seem prepared to risk criminal convictions in their search for investigatory and prosecutorial fairness.
“If the past is prologue, it is almost certain that the current campus sexual assault madness will burn itself out, leaving in its wake the wreckage of many young lives. My concern is how long it will be before sanity and decency return.”
Read the op-ed in the Boston Globe by NCRJ Advisor Harvey Silverglate.
Posted in Innocents, Sex Panic | Comments Off on The new panic: campus sex assaults
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
February 15th, 2015
“It was only for a moment, but on January 20, 2015, this country’s criminal punishment system got a general call for reform in President Obama’s state of the union address. With 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated people, it’s about time we heard this from our president. But what we didn’t hear was an analysis of exactly what we can do to shrink this massive system.”
Jean Trounstine in Truthout. Read more…
Posted in Prisons | 2 Comments »
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
February 15th, 2015
“But backlash was brewing both among conservatives and feminists who were discovering, and already exaggerating, a scourge of child sexual abuse. By 1977, a paradigmatic pair, LA vice cop Lloyd Martin and feminist psychologist Judianne Densen-Gerber, was traveling the land stoking the claim that 1.2 million children were victimized annually in child prostitution and pornography. Martin told a Christian TV host that pedophiles hang around maternity wards in order to ‘grab the post-fetuses and sexually victimize them.’”
Read Judith Levine’s article in Boston Review.
Posted in Sex Panic | 2 Comments »
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
February 12th, 2015
Bob Halsey turns 86 on February 18th. I am surprised he is still alive. He has been in bad health for years.
Bob is an innocent man who has been in prison since September of 1993. He will die in prison. And even if by some miracle he were to be released, he has nowhere to go and no one to take him in.
Bob was railroaded by many of the same characters who sent Bernard Baran to prison. Baran’s prosecutor, Dan Ford, was the trial judge. Jane Satullo was the chief interrogator of the children.
You can learn more about his case.
Here is the address for cards:
Robert C. Halsey
W-55045
POB 1218
Shirley MA 01464
Posted in Innocents, Sex Panic | 2 Comments »
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
February 9th, 2015
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
“From the beginning, the case was deeply flawed. The only evidence that Jesse and his father, Arnold, had abused anyone consisted of statements to the police by children and one of Jesse’s friends. Many of the statements were made after repeated or hourslong visits from detectives who would not leave until they heard what they wanted. None of the children had previously complained to anyone of any abuse.
Read the full op-ed from the New York Times.
Posted in Innocents, Sex Panic | 3 Comments »
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
February 8th, 2015
This is a “ritual abuse” case in Buffalo that never received any national publicity. There may be many more cases like this one. Even experts in the history of ritual abuse have no idea how many innocent people were accused, and how many still might be imprisoned. Read the full story in The Buffalo News.
Posted in Innocents, Sex Panic | Comments Off on Three people spent years in prison over a horrible crime against children – that never happened
