A blog-tastic news round-up

The transition to law school has been tough - logistically (notebooks, binders, classes), mentally (losing job responsibilities and purpose), and socially (leaving a city I love). I have not (so far?) found soulmates in Ann Arbor, as I have been lucky to find elsewhere in this meandering life.

So that leaves time to blog the news:

Google announced that it will compensate gay and lesbian employees for the higher fees they pay on domestic partners' health benefits, proving again that queer people get all the perks. (h/t Hope)

The UN, reviewing Israel's assault on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara, found that one victim, Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, "was filming with a small video camera on the top deck ... when he was shot twice in the head ... while lying on the ground." No mainstream news coverage or US response, but it's not like he was killed by terrorists. Oh, wait. (h/t Sushil)

Georgia killed prisoner Brandon Rhode on Monday by lethal injection, just one week after rushing the 31-year-old to the hospital for attempting suicide.  So much for "You can't fire me, I quit."

The supposedly liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers nine Western states, tossed out the Fourth Amendment ruled that police can secretly place a GPS device on a person's car without a warrant. I'm sure the police will only use their new power to track really serious offenders, like pot-heads. Because of a circuit split, the case could reach the Supremes.

In Vaughan v. Menlove, an 1837 English case that I read today, the court held that being stupid is no excuse. Should the defendant be responsible "for the misfortune of not possessing the highest order of intelligence"?  The defense argued that the court should judge only if the defendant acted "to the best of his judgment."  The court disagreed and invented the ideal "reasonable person."

So that's all the obnoxiousness that's fit to print tonight.  That was fun. I'm always trying to take myself less seriously in discussing politics, law, war, etc.  Moving to a new town is a great time to remember that no one wants to hang out with the fellow who's too obsessed with "justice" to smile.

I'm still alive!

Yes, I've been quiet. I've left the computer to attend weddings or explore historic cemeteries or idle on famous bridges on cool summer nights. I still follow the news - Israel continues to evict Palestinians from their homes, meaningful health care reform hovers near the brink, poor women die in childbirth because men don't have uteruses, and children get tried as adults. But there's hopeful news, too: despite the economic slump, 13 states have expanded children's health insurance, and just yesterday, North Carolina legislators passed the Racial Justice Act, which allows death row convicts to challenge their death sentences on the basis of racial disparities.

I've also been writing at Waging Nonviolence - an inspiring blog about nonviolent movements to rectify social injustice. "Waging nonviolence is anything but passive," the About section states. "It’s an intensely active struggle for justice by the only means worthy of the goal." I've written about reducing the number of prisoners to combat overcrowding, about organizing to oppose the racist abuses of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and about the psychological scars of war on soldiers.

Finally, I wrote about the Ohio legislature's "insane budgeting decisions" for Streetvibes, the bimonthly newspaper of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless. The article looks at the dire impact of Ohio's budget cuts to our community mental health system. As one parent advocate told me, "There is so much outrage when a severely mentally ill person commits a crime, but few resources to help them day-to-day so a crime doesn't get committed."

So it's been a busy summer, and I'm thankful.

News Round-Up: Incarceration

Since last October, I’ve been tutoring inmates who are studying for a G.E.D. Some want it to impress their parole boards, some to get work upon their release, some as a personal goal. My time in this maximum-security prison, which amounts to 2.5 hours a week, has spawned a general interest in incarceration and the so-called “criminal justice” system. It may be odd to think of "convicts" or "felons" as vulnerable people, but I think they deserve our attention as such. Throughout these snippets, I hear "structural violence" beating like a tell-tale heart. 1. The United States, “the land of the free,” will have 1.7 million people (1 in every 178) behind bars in 2011 (an increase of 192,000 from 2006 numbers). Altogether, there are currently 2.2 million people in the U.S. criminal justice system. This increase will cost $27.5 billion more than what the system currently costs. For details, see the 52-page report of the Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts. It doesn’t take much imagination to wonder whether we’d need to build additional prisons if we spent the money on poverty relief and education. 2. Treating violent juvenile offenders as adults actually increases the odds they’ll be back in prison. A special Task Force on Community Preventive Services found that juvenile offenders tried and imprisoned in the adult system are re-arrested 34 percent more frequently than their peers in juvenile courts and facilities. The full report of the task force was published in the April issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. At least one organization, The Campaign for Youth Justice, is trying to reform this system that turns juvenile delinquents into life-long inmates. 3. Dozens of prisoners kill themselves every year, and mentally ill prisoners held in segregated cells are especially at risk. Several of the inmates I tutor report spending as long as a year in these segregated cells – what the correction officers call the “special housing unit” and what the inmates call “the box.” As one might imagine, being locked up for 23 hours a day can have horrific effects. In Michigan last August, a “floridly psychotic” inmate “died in his segregation cell, naked, shackled to a concrete slab, lying in his own urine, scheduled for a mental health transfer that never happened.” A 2006 study from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 56 percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners report mental health problems. Proposed regulations in New York would expand inmates' access to mental health services. 4. The Federal Bureau of Prisons claims to house its inmates in “facilities that are safe, humane, cost-efficient, and appropriately secure.” But that doesn't always happen. Some inmates in Philadelphia sleep on concrete, their heads next to the toilets. On the west coast, California faces similar problems of overcrowding. From 1980 to 2006, its prison population increased 600 percent. The state’s 33 prisons were designed to hold 81,000 inmates, but hold 174,000. 16,000 of them have to sleep in hallways and classrooms. California’s “tough-on-crime” laws, combined with the system’s poor success at rehabilitation, generates a constant flow of young men. About 70 percent of the 120,000 California inmates released each year return within two years. 5. A new bill (HR 1943) before Congress would require federal prisons to offer HIV testing to inmates at the beginning and end of their sentences. Inmates could opt-out. Unlike some state prisons, federal prisons do not test for HIV unless such testing is specifically requested. Another new bill (HR 178) would allow community organizations to provide condoms and HIV prevention education in federal prisons. With some 20,000 to 40,000 inmates raped each year (on lower-end estimates), transparency about HIV - and active prevention - is all the more important. 6. A 2007 study (NEJM 356(2)) of 30,237 former inmates found that they have a higher risk of death than the average person, 3.5 times in the first two years and 12.7 times in the first two weeks. The leading causes of death were drug overdose, cardiovascular disease, homicide, and suicide. 7. A 2007 study (PLoS Med 4(4)) questions whether lethal injection is as painless as it's purported to be. The authors found that some executed inmates suffocated while still conscious, rather than first being sedated by the anesthetic. They noted that the protocol for lethal injection does not account for the inmate’s weight, sometimes requiring repeated doses. Lethal injection is legal in 37 states, and was used in 52 of the U.S.’s 53 executions in 2006. On a different note, because I can't resist editorializing: Killing people because they've killed people is, at best, bizarre. 8. A riot took over Indiana’s New Castle Correctional Facility last month, involving 500 of the facility's 1,668 inmates. The riot lasted several hours while fires raged in the prison yard. A group of inmates sparked the riot by taking off their shirts to defy orders. I don't think it's a coincidence that the instigating inmates came from Arizona - way out-of-state, far from family and friends. The inmates I tutor regularly lament that their families can’t afford the five-hour bus-ride from New York City (ten hours round-trip) to visit. Arizona contracted with Indiana to relieve its overcrowded prisons. Indiana in turn contracted with a company based out of Florida. Public reaction to the riot was as interesting as riot itself. The news reported that inmates “commandeered radios and key controls that open doors and fences but never broke through the outer fence.” In response, a county prosecutor commented, “The point is, the system worked.” The system worked? When 500 inmates riot (imagine! these guys aren’t small!), it's hard to say that the system is working. In the riot's wake, (Democratic) legislators blamed Indiana's (Republican) governor for privatizing the system. The governor, Mitch Daniels, defended the state’s contract with the Florida company: “This (idea) is not particularly new. Lots of states do it.” 9. Also on prison violence, Philip Zimbardo revisits the “the power of situation” and hierarchies in the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment he conducted three decades ago.

News Round-Up: Global Health

Are these news round-ups helpful? On one hand, I think that blogging is a more refined art than simply regurgitating the news with pithy commentary – fun as that may be. On the other hand, I'm often overwhelmed by the news and these collections help me reflect. Also, before I started bookmarking these articles, I hadn’t realized how much I was actually reading about heath, human rights, and international development. So in an implicit way, these round-ups don’t just disseminate news, but help identify life projects. If you find them a bore, though, let me know.

The “global health” theme is indicative of a recent shift for me. I spent my undergraduate years studying philosophy and ethics. I don't regret it, not even the long 18th century treatises, but I’ve found that the ethics of the most pressing global issues have already been addressed. No one debates whether nuclear war is just. Same thing with health inequalities. With this realization, my academic concerns have become activist ones as well. I decided that if I care about rights, responsibilities, duties, and obligations – the familiar jargon of the philosophy seminar room - then I had to learn more about public health, humanitarian aid, and the global economy.

So, without further ado… and in no particular order.

Human rights are under siege in Burma. Daring reporting from the Guardian explains how the Burmese regime has thwarted political activism, shut down the free press, and expelled the Red Cross. It continues to terrorize village groups with forced labor and gang rape. Perhaps the UN could do something about it – if only Russia, which supplies arms to and buys oils from the Burmese regime, hadn’t voted to keep the situation in Burma off the Security Council agenda.

People subsisting in refugee camps in northern Thailand have no birth certificates, no citizenship, no schooling, no health care, no property, and no recourse to a better life.

War, unsurprisingly, is bad for health, and Palestine – with the regular bloodshed and economic deprivation from the intifada – is no exception. Meanwhile, the Western suspension of aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian government has hurt everyday Palestinians. It doesn’t help that 60% of Gaza’s 1.5 million people are under the age of eighteen. That makes me quite angry, actually.

A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that climate change will severely and negatively impact poor countries – that is, the people least responsible for it. I’ve written before about the ethics of global warming. Not only do the rich have the duty to aid those who will suffer, but far more importantly in this case, we have a duty not to harm.

The African Union hopes to produce its own medicines and reduce its reliance on the West.

The life expectancy in Zimbabwe has fallen from 60 in 1990 to 34 (for women) today.

In neighboring Zambia, rations provided the United Nations World Food Program may soon run out. Even though there is ample corn stored in Lusaka, U.S. regulations stipulate that the food it donates be grown and shipped from America. For that, we can thank American “agribusiness” and its powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. Bucking the trend, the Bush Administration has proposed that a quarter of the donated food originate in developing counties. Doing so would not only help generate business in these countries, but “could annually feed at least a million more people for six months and save 50,000 more lives,” according to USAID (NYT). For all the trouble in the world, it’s heartening to see Oxfam supporting a Bush Administration proposal.

President Bush may have allocated $15 billion to fight AIDS globally, but his administration and Congress have imposed absurd limitations on the distribution of those funds. They require that AIDS drugs already approved by the WHO be re-approved by the FDA, that a third of all prevention money be spent on abstinence education (which doesn’t work anyway), and that no money go toward supplying drug addicts with clean needles. These restrictions are sometimes called “earmarks or budget allocations”; bioethicist Ruth Macklin calls them “shackles.”

News Round-Up: Health & Feminism

Email is a distraction from work, blogging from email, newspapers from blogging. I read dozens of newspaper articles a day. I've decided to combine these various distractions by sharing some of these news stories in the form of a “news round-up.” Over the last month or so, I’ve collected enough links to sort these stories by theme. Welcome to the health & feminism edition.

Almost two million children in the U.S. don’t have health insurance.

The U.S. will make it easier for children of illegal immigrants to get Medicaid.

South Carolina officially banned gay marriage with a constitutional amendment. Sigh.

There’s more to sex-ed than putting a condom on a banana. There’s communication and consent and dynamics of power, too. High school and college students ought to learn about it.

Circumcision limits transmission of HIV. But a few words of caution are in order.

People who sell fake drugs to developing countries should be prosecuted for murder.

Strange as it sounds, approximately 46% of rural women of India haven't even heard of HIV/AIDS. Nationwide, only 57% of women and 80% of men have heard of the disease. Illiteracy is a big cause of this ignorance, seeing how only 54% of women and 76% of men in India can read. So far, HIV/AIDS prevention efforts have focused on commercial sex workers, injection drug users, and other high-risk groups; but the government says the general population is next on the list.

Facing a looming gender imbalance crisis, the government of India has proposed that couples put their unwanted female children in government-funded orphanages, rather than aborting them in utero. In some areas, the imbalance is now as skewed as 800 girls per 1000 boys. I’m glad the government is concerned about the demographic problem, but this proposal just "solves" one problem by creating another. Now India will have lots of girls without parents.

A Colorado court ruled against “Ladies’ Night,” a practice where clubs charge women lower entrance fees and drink prices. The court’s rationale – that Ladies’ Night discriminates against men – generated lots of sarcastic commentary on feminist blogs, which tended to fault the practice of “Ladies’ Night” for encouraging women to drink and increasing the incidence of rape.

I was floored by the hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich, who pursued Clinton over the immorality of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while Gingrich himself was cheating on his wife. Yuck.

It seems that many presidential contenders have slept around... Among the three Republican front-runners — thrice-married former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, twice-married Sen. John McCain, and Gingrich — there are eight current and past wives. The point was underlined by the wife of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who said, “The biggest difference between Mitt Romney and the other candidates,” is that the Mormon candidate has “only had one wife.”