For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.
Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing
it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails.
The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in
every 99.1 adults is behind bars.
Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36
Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for
2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men
between the ages of 20 and 34.
The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only
one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 is behind bars,
but that one in 100 black women is.
The report’s methodology differed from that used by the Justice
Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total
population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using
the department’s methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind
bars.
Either way, said Susan Urahn, the center’s managing director, “we
aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of
incarceration.”
“We tend to be a country in which incarceration is an easy response
to crime,” Ms. Urahn continued. “Being tough on crime is an easy
position to take, particularly if you have the money. And we did have
the money in the ’80s and ’90s.”
Now, with fewer resources available to the states, the report said,
“prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets.” On average, states
spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only
healthcare, education and transportation.
In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting
Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That
is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for
inflation. With money from bond issues and from the federal government
included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49
billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an
additional $25 billion.
It cost an average of $23,876 to imprison someone in 2005, the most
recent year for which data is available. But state spending varies
widely, from $45,000 a year for each inmate in Rhode Island to just
$13,000 in Louisiana.
The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the
report said, a rate that will accelerate as the prison population ages.
About one in nine state government employees works in corrections,
and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California
spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006.
The number of prisoners in California dropped by 4,000 last year,
making Texas’s prison system the nation’s largest, at about 172,000
inmates. But the Texas legislature approved broad changes to the
state’s corrections system, including expansions of drug treatment
programs and drug courts and revisions to parole practices.
“Our violent offenders, we lock them up for a very long time —
rapists, murderers, child molestors,” said John Whitmire, a Democratic
state senator from Houston and the chairman of the state senate’s
criminal justice committee. “The problem was that we weren’t smart
about nonviolent offenders. The legislature finally caught up with the
public.”
He gave an example.
“We have 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison,” he said, including people
caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident.
“They’re in the general population. As serious as drinking and driving
is, we should segregate them and give them treatment.”
The Pew report recommended diverting nonviolent offenders away from
prison and using punishments short of reincarceration for minor or
technical violations of probation or parole. It also urged states to
consider earlier release of some prisoners.
Before the recent changes in Texas, Mr. Whitmire said, “we were recycling nonviolent offenders.”
There is an especially interesting and important post over at dotCommonweal--a post that could not be more relevant to us here at MOJ in the political season now upon us. I've pasted it below. (The author of the post is an associate editor of Commonweal.) After you've finished reading the post, be sure to go to dotCommonweal to read all the interesting comments that the post is now eliciting/provoking! (Here.)
[This is a revised and somewhat shortened version of a letter I wrote to
Deal Hudson last
week; he has posted his own summary of the letter on the InsideCatholic website
and promises to respond.]
Dear Deal,
I just read your latest response
to Douglas Kmiec’s article in
Slate about the possible appeal of Barack Obama to Catholics. You argue
that Obama’s position on abortion should keep all faithful prolife Catholics
from supporting his candidacy, even if they agree with other parts of his
platform. You write that it is a mistake for Kmiec to suggest that voting for
Obama is even an option.
I agree with you that the church’s position on the morality of abortion is
non-negotiable, and that this fact should have some bearing on every Catholic
voter’s deliberations. But in your rebuke of Kmiec–and more generally in your
dogged defense of the Republican party–I think you are making a serious
category mistake. If this were merely a matter of logic, I wouldn’t mention it,
but I think it has important consequences for the way we think and talk about
politics.
You lean hard on the legitimate distinction between the church’s
non-prudential, non-optional teachings, and prudential political judgments.
This is a real and important distinction, which has been invoked and helpfully
developed by many Catholic theorists and pundits.
But those who insist on this distinction need to be very careful about it;
they should not push it further than it really goes. The distinction between
non-prudential and prudential is the distinction between what is simple and
unconditional and what is complicated and contingent. It is not the
distinction between the more important and the less important. Clarity and
gravity are not the same thing. This is why the predicament of Catholic voters
in the U.S.is
not as easy to resolve as you seem to think. One can make a strong (but not
unanswerable) argument that a Catholic should not vote for a prochoice
Presidential candidate–at least not now, when the reversal of Roe v. Wade
seems to be within reach. (For what it’s worth, I don’t plan to vote for a
prochoice candidate until Roe v. Wade is reversed, or until there
seems no immediate chance of its being reversed.)
You write as if the priority of the abortion issue should mean the same
thing for all Catholics no matter what they think about other issues. Your easy
confidence on this point would be more persuasive if you did not happen to
agree with the Republican Party on most other issues as well. This is not a
trivial coincidence. If your only options were, say, a rigidly prochoice
Republican and a prolife socialist who believed that the United States should
give up its national sovereignty and join a world government, I suspect your
abortion-trumps-all rhetoric would change somewhat. As it is, your position
involves few trade-offs. This is not the way it is for many, perhaps most
American Catholics. If you believe, as I do, that the invasion of Iraq was a
terrible mistake and also a grave injustice, and that universal,
state-sponsored health care is not only the most efficient and rational medical
system but also an obligation for a society as rich as ours, then you will not
find it so easy to settle for a Republican presidential candidate
just because he says he is prolife. (Here, too, we face prudential questions,
questions that require us to calculate consequences. We must ask ourselves how
prolife a self-described prolife politician really is–how willing is he to
invest real political capital in this cause? We must also ask
ourselves about circumstances: What possible–or likely–effect will a
politician have on abortion law now? His opinion, merely as an opinion, is of
little political consequence until it is translated into legislation or
judicial appointments. And these may have no consequence, or the wrong
consequence, in a democratic society that refuses to accept the prolife
premise. Kick it back to the states. Good. Then what?)
Of course the church has no non-prudential teaching about the details of
health-care reform or this or that particular war, but that tells us
nothing about the importance of the Iraq war or health-care reform as political issues. The church says nothing about
the priority of the U.S. Constitution or the viability of nation states in the
twenty-first century, but I doubt you consider these things to be of marginal
importance.
Since both of us consider ourselves prolife, and since both of us
acknowledge that the profile cause is, among other things, an important
political movement, you may think the rest is hair-splitting. It is not. Your
position–or, at least, the rhetoric in which it is couched–entails a terrible
constriction of the political imagination. And it gives American Catholics a
way to let themselves off the hook: they do not have to question the GOP’s
economic and foreign-policy positions because the church offers no official
pronouncement on these positions–those issues are up for grabs and
therefore relatively unimportant. That kind of sectarian minimalism is really
not a very Catholic way to think about politics. If the church’s social
teachings are about any one thing, they’re about solidarity: solidarity between
the born and the unborn, but also between the rich and the poor, the healthy
and the sick, the powerful and the powerless. Not every part of the “seamless
garment” is of equal importance, and not every stitch is clear, but we make a
terrible mistake in clutching at one sleeve and forgetting about the rest.
Prohibiting abortion is an important goal of the pro-life movement, but it is
not the only goal. We want to prevent as many abortions as possible.
To do this we will have to persuade our non-Catholic neighbors, people
whose opinions are not changed by appeals to the church’s authority, and that
will mean persuading them to think differently about what we owe the most
vulnerable members of our community.
According to an interesting piece in today's New York Times, "[m]ore than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their
childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new
survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public
Life."
Well, some of us leave the faith of our childhood without ever leaving the faith of our childhood, if you know what I mean.
Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds By NEELA BANERJEE
More than a
quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to
join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of
religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The report, titled âU.S. Religious Landscape Survey,â depicts a
highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among
Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent
of Americans have switched religious affiliations.
For at least a generation, scholars have noted that more Americans
are moving among faiths, as denominational loyalty erodes. But the
survey, based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans, offers one
of the clearest views yet of that trend, scholars said. The United
States Census does not track religious affiliation.
The report shows, for example, that every religion is losing and gaining members, but that the Roman Catholic Church has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation
changes.
The survey also indicates that the group that had the
greatest net gain was the unaffiliated. More than 16 percent of
American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which
makes the unaffiliated the country's fourth largest religious group.
...
The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held
steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous
decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by
the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the
survey found.
The Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group:
about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer
identified as such. Based on the data, the survey showed, “this means
that roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.”
My colleague John Witte, who directs Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion, had a terrific op-ed in yesterday's Atlanta Journal Constitution. Many MOJ readers will be interested. The future of marriage State
laws and religious laws cannot co-exist . . . can they?
Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams set off an international firestorm this
month by suggesting that some accommodation of Muslim family law was
"unavoidable" in England.
His suggestion, though tentative, has already prompted more than 250 articles
in the world press, the vast majority denouncing it. England will be beset by
"licensed polygamy," "barbaric procedures" and "brutal violence" against women
and children, his critics argued, all administered by "legally ghettoized"
Muslim courts immune from civil appeal or constitutional challenge. Consider
Nigeria, Pakistan and other former English colonies that have sought to balance
Muslim Sharia with the common law, other critics added. The horrific excesses of
their religious courts —- even calling the faithful to stone innocent rape
victims for dishonoring their families —- prove that religious laws and state
laws on the family simply cannot coexist. Case closed.
This case won't stay closed for long, however. The archbishop was not calling
for the establishment of independent Muslim courts in England, let alone the
enforcement of Sharia law by state courts. He instead wanted his nation to have
a full and frank debate about what it means to be married in a growing
multicultural society. What forms of marriage should citizens be able to choose,
and what forms of religious marriage law should government be required to
respect? These are "unavoidable" questions for any modern society dedicated to
protecting both the civil and religious liberties of all its citizens.
These are quickly becoming "unavoidable" questions for America, too. We
already have a lot more marital pluralism than a generation ago —- with a number
of legal options now available. Massachusetts offers traditional marriage and
same-sex marriage to its citizens. Several more states will likely follow suit.
Vermont leads four states in offering straight couples marriage and gay couples
civil union, with comparable rules governing each form. A dozen more states are
considering this two-tier system. Six states, including California, offer
domestic partner registration status, providing straight and gay couples with
some of the benefits and protections of marriage. Louisiana, Arkansas and
Arizona offer couples either a simple contract marriage or a covenant marriage
with more traditional and rigorous rules of entrance and exit.
While these marital options remain firmly under state law, other options now
draw in religious law, too, implicitly or explicitly. Utah and surrounding
states, for example, house some 30,000 polygamous families. These families and
the fundamentalist Mormon churches that govern them are openly breaking state
criminal laws against bigamy, but the states will not prosecute unless minors
are forced into marriage.
In New York, Orthodox Jewish couples cannot get a state divorce without first
obtaining a rabbinic divorce. This privileges Jewish family law over all other
religious laws, and it forces some New York citizens to discharge a religious
duty to gain a civil right to divorce. In more than 20 states, marriages
arranged by Hindu, Muslim and Unification Church officials have been upheld,
with divorce the only option left for parties who claim coercion or
surprise.
A number of religious couples now choose to arbitrate their marital and
family disputes before religious courts and tribunals rather than litigate them
in state courts. Courts generally uphold the judgments of Jewish and Christian
tribunals in these cases. Muslims, Hindus and other religious minorities are now
pressing for equal treatment for their systems of religious arbitration of
marriage and family disputes.
Granting Muslims and others equal treatment in these cases does seem
"unavoidable" if the parties have freely consented to this method of dispute
resolution. To deny Muslims divorce arbitration while granting it to Jews and
Christians is patently discriminatory.
A LEADING theologian and key critic of Pope Benedict has rushed to the defence of the Dominicans’ Dutch province after it was silenced by the order for suggesting that lay ministers be allowed to celebrate the Eucharist if no priest is available, writes Tom Heneghan.
Professor Hermann Häring, a German theologian known in Germany as a ferocious critic of Joseph Ratzinger and who taught at the Catholic University in Nijmegen in The Netherlands for 25 years, called the analysis of the Dutch Dominicans’ booklet “Church and Ministry” by the French Dominican theologian Fr Hervé Legrand “a sword that stops all arguments”.'
In his analysis Fr Legrand warned the Dutch Dominicans not to risk schism by promoting the booklet, which he dismissed as a one-sided and theologically unfounded document (The Tablet, 2 February).
The Dutch Dominicans, who stressed in the booklet that congregations should be able to appoint lay inisters only in emergency situations, have posted a Dutch translation of Fr Legrand’s French-language analysis on their website. In an open letter in German Professor Häring accused Fr Legrand of misrepresenting the Dutch Dominicans’ arguments and not understanding the Dutch Church. Professor Häring also rejected Fr Legrand’s charge that the Dutch Dominicans tried to overturn the Church’s ierarchical pyramid, placing the laity over the bishops.
“Don’t forget that you are dealing with a completely democratic people. Wherever they are, the Dutch prefer to speak openly and directly. Opportunism is abhorrent to them, also in the Catholic Church. That’s what creates so many problems for Rome,” wrote Professor Häring, an associate of Swiss theologian Fr Hans Küng.
Abstract:
Although every lawyer,
law teacher, and law student recognizes that the United States government is
involved in every federal criminal case, fewer appreciate that the federal
government is a party, as plaintiff or defendant, to between one-fifth and
one-quarter of all civil cases in the federal courts. Moreover, the United
States is hardly a typical litigant, as it benefits from a plethora of special
procedures, defenses, and limitations on liability not available to others.
Indeed, the federal government may not be subjected to suit at all absent its
own express consent - a concept of federal sovereign immunity that rests
somewhat uneasily within the jurisprudence of a democratic society. The United
States Supreme Court and the federal courts continue to devote substantial
attention to recurring questions of sovereign immunity, the distinctive
jurisdictional statutes governing litigation with the United States, special
forums for adjudication of particular types of governmental disputes, the
limitations on governmental liability in tort and contract, and the availability
of and standards for awards of attorney's fees against the government and its
agencies. We can learn much about a system of government by examining when and
how that government responds (or does not respond) to injuries that its agents
or activities have caused to its citizens. Accordingly, any student of federal
litigation or of our system of government should develop a critical
understanding of the unique principles and statutes that govern when the federal
sovereign becomes a party to a civil action.
In this casebook, Professor
Sisk collects the leading cases, pertinent statutory texts, and scholarly
commentary, together with substantial accompanying notes and questions. The book
examines the federal government as a civil litigator, including the role of the
Department of Justice, ethical expectations for government attorneys, and the
procedural rules for litigation and resolution of claims against the government;
the persistent question of federal sovereign immunity; federal governmental
liability in tort, contract, and other areas; specialized tribunals for federal
government cases; suits against federal officers; and awards of attorney's fees
against the government and its agencies.
The legal battle over same-sex marriage in California is also a clash of religions.
As the state Supreme Court prepares for a three-hour hearing March 4
on the constitutionality of a state law allowing only opposite-sex
couples to marry, the justices have been flooded with written arguments
from advocates on both sides - including two large contingents of
religious organizations with sharply differing views.
On one side are the Mormon church, the California Catholic
Conference, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Union of
Orthodox Jewish Congregations. They describe marriage between a man and
a woman as "the lifeblood of community, society and the state" and say
any attempt by the courts to change that would create "deep tensions
between civil and religious understandings of that institution."
On the other side are the Unitarians, the United Church of Christ,
the Union for Reform Judaism, the Soka Gakkai branch of Buddhism, and
dissident groups of Mormons, Catholics and Muslims. Saying their faiths
and a wide range of historical traditions honor same-sex unions, they
argue that the current law puts the state's stamp of approval on "the
religious orthodoxy of some sects concerning who may marry."
Those groups won't be represented at next month's oral arguments,
when the court will hear from the parties in the case: same-sex couples
and the city of San Francisco, challenging the marriage law, and the
attorney general's and governor's offices, defending the law. Also
participating will be lawyers seeking to intervene on behalf of two
organizations opposing gay rights.
The religious groups' written arguments, known as
friend-of-the-court briefs, play the less-visible but important role of
advising the justices how their ruling could affect society. Courts at
all levels sometimes cite those arguments to buttress their legal
reasoning.
Fifty such briefs have been filed in this case, representing
hundreds of organizations and individuals - professional associations
of psychologists and anthropologists, city and county governments, law
professors, businesses, civil rights organizations, one former state
Supreme Court justice, and advocates of "alternatives to homosexuality."
The religious coalitions have enlisted legal heavyweights: for
opponents of same-sex marriage, Kenneth Starr, the former U.S.
solicitor general, federal judge and impeachment prosecutor of former
President Bill Clinton; and for their adversaries, Raoul Kennedy, a
prominent San Francisco attorney.
Catholic Church Chief Stirs Controversy With Celibacy Comments
Barely a week since taking office, the head of the German Catholic
Church, Robert Zollitsch, has raised eyebrows with comments that
clerical celibacy is not "theologically necessary."
In an interview with German newsmagazine Der Spiegel,
69-year-old archbishop of Freiburg, Robert Zollitsch, who is now head
of the German Catholic Church, said that celibacy and the unmarried
lives of priests were a "gift," but not essential.
Furthermore, he said it would be a "revolution" if the celibacy tradition within the Catholic Church were dissolved.
This week's publication of the interview prompted a swift response from Regensburg's bishop, Gerhard-Ludwig Müller.
"All of the specifics
of being a priest and the corresponding rules of celibacy could not be
expanded upon, as a theological context would require, in a quick
interview," he said in a press release.
"The Second Vatican Council made clear in Article 16 --"Decree
on the Ministry and Life of Priests" -- what the decisive requirements
are," Müller added. "That is and will remain the policy of the Catholic
Church."
Müller maintained that no one should presume that the celibacy rules of the Catholic Church would be abolished.
Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung
daily pointed out in its Tuesday edition that such a refutation of
Zollitsch's stance reflects the displeasure it caused among the more
conservative bishops in the German Bishops' Conference, an assembly
of the bishops and archbishops of all the German dioceses.
Yet the majority of bishops within the conference voted for Zollitsch last week as the new head of the German Catholic Church.
The archbishop of
Freiburg is not only known for his more liberal views on celibacy, he
has also professed his support for day-care nurseries for children (as
opposed to the more traditional view that mothers should stay at home).
He has also said that
if the German government can draw up legal guidelines for gay and
lesbian relationships and marriages, he can do the same -- a view
strongly opposed by Pope Benedict XVI.
