JPI Daily News Digest 10/15/2012
Published: October 15, 2012
National: U.S. Jails More People Than Any Other Country: Chart of the Day (Bloomberg Businessweek)
The U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate, with Department of Justice data showing more than 2.2 million people are behind bars, equal to a city the size of Houston.
WA: Northwest Detention Center safety talks get started (The News Tribune)
The private prison contractor that operates one of the nation’s largest immigration detention centers on Tacoma’s Tideflats has agreed to negotiate a long-neglected agreement with the City of Tacoma that would spell out public safety responsibilities should disaster ever strike the lock-down facility.
CA: Pariahs among us: Sex offender laws in the 21st century (Aljazeera)
Maybe it is not so surprising that all we can think to do with a subject we are simultaneously obsessed with and repulsed by is to shout our alarm about it at every opportunity.
Sex crimes: The only kind of offence in the United States that compels all convicted perpetrators to register their name, address, date of birth, fingerprints and a photograph on a public website.
NH: NH State should reject for-profit prisons (Corrections.com)
A consulting report is due Oct. 15 on four competing offers to build and manage a for-profit, co-ed prison or rent it back to the state. Linda Hodgdon, the commissioner of Administrative Services, promised July 11 to release this study. If one of the vendors wins a contract, this state would be the first to substantially privatize its corrections system. That would be a tragic mistake.
MS: DOJ Quiet on Mississippi Ultimatum to Respond to School-to-Jailhouse Pipeline Allegations (JJIE)
A key deadline has passed in the federal investigation of an alleged “school-to-prison” pipeline in Meridian, Miss., without the U.S. Department of Justice taking any visible action.
National: Supreme Court ruling may give those sentenced to life as juveniles a chance at freedom (Detroit Free Press)
Sixteen-year-old Keith Maxey was in an abandoned house on Detroit's east side about 2 p.m. Dec. 24, 2007, when his friends, both in their 20s, tried to rob four young men who went there to sell them a pound of marijuana.
International News
Canada: Female native inmates on rise (Winnipeg Free Press)
The rising number of aboriginal women behind bars in Canada is "nothing short of a crisis," yet Ottawa pays little more than lip service to public calls for change, concludes a new study prepared for Public Safety Canada.
The highly critical finding surfaced Thursday in news reports about the study titled Marginalized, the Aboriginal Women's Experience in Federal Prisons.
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