I. Youth Sex Offenders
A ten-year-old girl pulled down the pants of a classmate at her public elementary school. She was prosecuted for "indecency with a child" and added to the state's online offender database for the next ten years. The treatment of the young girl was not a singularly rare happening, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that one of every four girls and one out of every six boys have experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of eighteen; also, in a third of such cases, the National Center on the Sexual Behavior of Youth says that the offenses were committed by other juveniles -- "Kids who sexually harm other kids seldom target strangers."
The Adam Walsh Act broadened the scope of the sexual-offender registry, mandating the full disclosure of a former offender's address, along with at least a photograph; promulgated a
form of indefinite detention, known as "civil commitment;" and, in a late addition to the legislation, required children as young as fourteen, who had committed certain sex offenses, be placed in the public registry. Researchers had already observed that most youths who are charged with a sex offense -- upward of ninety-five percent, according to Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau -- don't re-offend sexually.
In her travels around the country, reporter Sarah Stillman found a cottage industry of court-authorized but poorly regulated therapy providers subjecting kids and teens to widely debunked interventions or controversial technologies. In a study of more than a thousand male juveniles with sex crime convictions, Dr. Letourneau and colleagues found that public registration did not reduce repeat-offense rates. [1]
Nearly every other nation in the world does not have a public sex-offender registry. We need to learn from other countries that placing a long-term, or even a lifetime literal mark of Cain on young people, whose offense may be as inconsequential as pulling down the pants of someone, is very harmful public policy.
II. Father Mike in Chicago
In his St. Sabina church base of operations, Father Mike Plager has outlasted three cardinals and five mayors. During his long tenure at St.Sabina, Father Mike has witnessed and tried to ameliorate Chicago innovations that Ta-Nehisi Coates has described as "segregationist social engineering:" the erection of isolated, homogeneous public housing; the racial panic fanned by real-estate agents who flipped houses for a profit; the covenants that barred white homeowners from selling to blacks; and the practice of "redlining" by means of which banks refused home loans to blacks.
Father Mike has embraced the black-liberation theology developed by James K. Cane after the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit. Cane was seeking to reconcile the black nationalism of Malcolm X with the Christian civil disobedience of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and he emphasized the obligation of the Church to relieve the oppression of African Americans, especially through political action.
One of the most notable campaigns of Father Mike was to try to reduce the number of alcohol and tobacco advertisements in black neighborhoods. He acted after a study found that Chicago's minority communities contained five times the number of alcohol ads and three times the number of tobacco ads.
Fifty years after King's visit to Marquette Park, Chicago remains one of the country's most racially segregated large cities. Homicides in Chicago's black neighborhoods are thirteen times higher, on average, than in better-off white areas. Nearly forty-seven percent of all black men in Chicago between the ages of twenty and twenty-four are neither in school nor working -- the highest percentage of any big city. (Nationwide, the figure is thirty-two percent). [2]
The furor over the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald, a young black male shot after actually moving away from the shooting officer, exposed deep problems in the Chicago Police Department's responses to citizen complaints; its rare punishment of problematic officers; and city hall's tacit cooperation. Since 2004, Chicago's city government has quietly approved more than $500 million in settlements for police misconduct. [3]
III. Some Proposed Military Spending Cuts
Peace Action, the nation's largest grassroots peace and justice organization, has proposed some military spending cuts to puncture a bloated Pentagon:
1.) Significantly reduce the approximately 1,000 military bases around the world and the roughly 5,000 bases in the U.S.
2.) Flush the slush fund, known as the Overseas Contingency Operations fund (OCO), designed to fund current wars and occupations, but there is no requirement for the Pentagon to report on how they spent it.
3.) Reduce the number of F-35s, distinguished by the nearly seventy percent in cost overruns since 2001 and numerous technical glitches.
4.) Reduce nuclear weapons and delivery systems - Senator Markey's SANE Act would reduce nuclear stockpiles and cut spending for the nuclear modernization program.
5.) Press President Obama on his promise for a world free of nuclear weapons.
6.) Use diplomacy, not war, by ending the forward positioning of troops and weapons to Russia's borders and launching a military buildup in the Pacific to "contain China." Instead, the U.S. should pursue diplomatic efforts that forward U.S. interests without igniting an arms race or military conflict.
7.) Stop selling death, as reflected in the U.S. being the number one in weapons sales, going back to the Cold War years. Also, controls need to be strengthened over the export of weapons to war zones and human rights abusers.
8.) Support the Syrian peace process, as there is no substitute for it. The humanitarian crisis must also be addressed.
9.) Oppose permanent military bases in Afghanistan and oppose plans for expanding the U.S.-led war on the so-called Islamic State into Libya and other countries.
ADDENDUM:
*Decline in Journalists - In 2007, there were 55,000 full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily newspapers; there are now 32,000, according to a census by the American Society of News Editors and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Florida International University. "[The] tale of today's discarded journalists is, at its core, a parable of the way our economy, our whole American way of being, sucks people dry and throws them away as their cultural and economic currency wanes." "We have a lot of anecdotal information that indicates newspaper newsrooms have reverted back to older, whiter, and male-dominated [workplaces]," said Melissa Nelson, director of collective bargaining for the Newspaper Guild. [4]
Footnotes
[1] Sarah Stillman, "The List," The New Yorker, March 14, 2016.
[2] Evan Osnos, "Father Mike," The New Yorker, February 29, 2016.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Dale Maharidge, "Written Off," The Nation, March 21, 2016.
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