Tag Archives: Crime

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. GiveWell’s latest charity recommendations add a new one, “No Lean Season,” which helps hungry rural farmers (so far in Bangladesh) get to cities to find their own employment while they wait for their crops to come in. You can hear the audio of Yale’s Mushfiq Mobarak describing how it went from an idea to one of the most cost-effective charities here. It’s “best of” time of the year: Jobs!: IPA, J-PAL and a bunch of affiliated...

Here’s is a PBS commentary by law professor Ekow Yankah: That Kroger, the Midwestern grocery chain, has decided to make the heroin overdose drug naloxone available without a prescription is a sign of how ominous the current epidemic has grown. Faced with a rising wave of addiction, misery, crime and death, our nation has linked arms to save souls. Senators and CEOs, Midwestern pharmacies and even tough-on-crime Republican presidential candidates now speak...

The abstract of an article in Molecular Psychiatry entitled Genetic background of extreme violent behavior reads as follows: In developed countries, the majority of all violent crime is committed by a small group of antisocial recidivistic offenders, but no genes have been shown to contribute to recidivistic violent offending or severe violent behavior, such as homicide. Our results, from two independent cohorts of Finnish prisoners, revealed that a...

Russian ex-pat Leonid Bershidsky is blowing holes through Western narratives that are out of touch with Russian reality and heavily influenced by Western russophobia. This raises the question of whether the current Western sanctions against Russia strike at the heart of the Russian system or merely pretend to do so. Since the sanctions were introduced, no Western government has made a meaningful effort to investigate the provenance of hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian offshore...

I stumbled on a recent paper in the Police Quarterly entitled “Quick on the Draw: Assessing the Relationship Between Low Self-Control and Officer-Involved Police Shootings.” The authors are Christopher M. Donner, Jon Maskaly, Alex R. Piquero, and Wesley G. Jennings from Loyola, U of Texas at Dallas, U of Texas at Dallas and U of South Florida, respectively. Quoting from the paper: While the extant literature on police use of deadly force is voluminous, it is...

I was bouncing around my twitter feed and landed on this tweet which in turn took me to a paper entiteld Childhood family income, adolescent violent criminality and substance misuse: quasi-experimental total population study. The paper appeared in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2014. Here’s the basic summary: Background Low socioeconomic status in childhood is a well-known predictor of subsequent criminal and substance misuse behaviours but the causal...

You probably never heard of SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program.  But I expect it will be showing up in the news a lot pretty soon. This is what it does: The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, administers SCAAP, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). SCAAP provides federal payments to states and localities that incurred correctional officer salary costs for...

Part 6 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing William K. BlackAugust 7, 2016     Bloomington, MN Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani made a series of comments on race, crime, and policing on when he was interviewed recently on “Face the Nation.”  I am a strong critic of Giuliani’s approach to the intersection of race, crime, and policing.  Giuliani said several objectionable things in his interview that he could not defend.  The mystery is why his critics keep ignoring those comments and...

Part 5 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing William K. BlackAugust 5, 2016     Bloomington, MN I explained in my two prior columns the blood libels against “whites” as a race and law enforcement officers (LEOs) made by the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson.  Dyson was particularly vitriolic in complaining that whites refused to “condemn” LEOs who shot blacks until they knew whether the LEOs had acted criminally or even improperly.  Dyson portrays this adherence to due process and the rule...

Part 4 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing William K. BlackAugust 2, 2016     Bloomington, MN Part 3 of this series began the explanation of the hypocrisy of the New York Times in its treatment of the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson’s blood libels against police and whites as a race.  Part 3 focused on the terrible timing of Dyson’s op ed in the NYT.  The ambush murders of Dallas law enforcement officers (LEOs) falsified Dyson’s blood libels while the ink was still figuratively wet on...