WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

The Heavy Price Families And Communities Pay For Incarceration

“Our research demonstrates that incarceration reinforces economic stress on impoverished families,” the authors write, “and limits the economic mobility of both formerly incarcerated people and their families.” … Stress is often too much for families to hold together. 47% of respondents to the survey said members of their family separated, divorced or dissolved partnerships as a result of incarceration. The average child support payment among participants was $427 per month, and 73% of respondents said former prisoners struggled to make consistent payments… “It is not enough to reform the criminal justice system without considering its purpose and impact on communities,” the report states. “Institutions with power must acknowledge the disproportionate impacts the current system has on women, low-income communities, and communities of color, and address and redress the policies that got us here.”   More

 

 

In Virtually Every State, the Poverty Rate is Still Higher than Before the Recession

Between 2013 and 2014, the poverty rate in most states was largely unchanged, according to yesterday’s release of state poverty statistics from the American Community Survey (ACS). While the poverty rate fell slightly for the country as a whole, most of the changes at the state level were too small to signify a meaningful difference. As of 2014, only two states—North Dakota and Colorado—have poverty rates at or below their 2007 values, before the Great Recession.   More

 

The accompanying photo shows a group of Black men. . .

Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

The use of computer models by local law enforcement agencies to forecast crime is part of a larger trend by governments and corporations that are increasingly turning to predictive analytics and data mining in looking at behaviors. Typically financed by the federal government, the strategy is being used by dozens of police departments — including Los Angeles, Miami and Nashville — and district attorneys’ offices in Manhattan and Philadelphia.  At a time when many police departments are under fire for aggressive tactics, particularly in minority neighborhoods, advocates say predictive policing can help improve police-community relations by focusing on the people most likely to become involved in violent crime. Civil liberties groups take a dim view of the strategy, questioning its legality and efficacy, and asserting that it may actually worsen the rapport between the police and civilians.   More

 

KRUGMAN: Dewey, Cheatem & Howe

There are, it turns out, people in the corporate world who will do whatever it takes, including fraud that kills people, in order to make a buck. And we need effective regulation to police that kind of bad behavior, not least so that ethical businesspeople aren’t at a disadvantage when competing with less scrupulous types. But we knew that, right?  Well, we used to know it, thanks to the muckrakers and reformers of the Progressive Era. But Ronald Reagan insisted that government is always the problem, never the solution, and this has become dogma on the right.  As a result, an important part of America’s political class has declared war on even the most obviously necessary regulations. Too many important players now argue, in effect, that business can do no wrong and that government has no role to play in limiting misbehavior.   More

 

What it looks like when a bank goes out of its way to avoid minorities

According to federal prosecutors, Hudson City Savings Bank opened few branches in black and Hispanic neighborhoods around the New York and Philadelphia regions where it does much of its mortgage business. It placed few of its loan officers in these communities. It worked with hardly any mortgage brokers there, either. And its marketing was mostly elsewhere, too. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau jointly ordered the bank to pay about $33 million to make amends for these patterns, in one of the largest "redlining" settlements the government has ever reached.   More