Some of the 143 jailed bikers no doubt played a guilty role in a spectacular motorcycle club shootout that left nine dead at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco. Some say they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, including a 30 year old volunteer firefighter who says he has no criminal record and tried to hide during the violence. In either event, no one important seems to care, although some defense-lawyer and civil-liberties types grouse about an “unprecedented…wholesale roundup of people” for “being at the scene of a crime” under a principle of “Let’s arrest them all and sort it out later.” Bail for many has been set at a prohibitive $1 million apiece, and no formal charges have been brought. “Under Texas law, a grand jury has 90 days to indict those in custody before they are entitled to reduced bonds.” Police say they consider the matter to be one of organized crime and that an investigation is ongoing. [Molly Hennessy-Fiske, L.A. Times] More: Scott Greenfield. Update: Texas Tribune (bail process crawls forward, more commentators raising questions about process).
Posts Tagged ‘crime and punishment’
Jailed for missing school: the problem with truancy laws
My new piece at Reason begins:
We’ve seen it happen again and again: libertarians are derided over some supposedly crazy or esoteric position, years pass, and eventually others start to see why our position made sense. It’s happened with asset forfeiture, with occupational licensure, with the Drug War, and soon, perhaps, with libertarians’ once-lonely critique of school truancy laws.
In his 1980 book Free To Choose, economist Milton Friedman argued that compulsory school attendance laws do more harm than good, a prescient view considering what’s come since: both Democratic and Republican lawmakers around the country, prodded by the education lobby, have toughened truancy laws with serious civil and even criminal penalties for both students and parents. Now the horror stories pile up: the mom arrested and shackled because her honor-roll son had a few unexcused sick days too many, the teenagers managing chaotic home lives who are threatened with juvenile detention for their pains, the mother who died in jail after being imprisoned for truancy fines. It’s been called carceral liberalism: we’re jailing you, your child, or both, but don’t worry because it’s for your own good. Not getting enough classroom time could really ruin a kid’s life.
My article also mentions that a bill to reform Texas’s super-punitive truancy laws has reached Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, following the reported success of an experiment in San Antonio and pressure from a Marshall Project report. Finally, truancy-law reform is looking to become an issue across the political spectrum — but libertarians were there first. (cross-posted from Cato at Liberty).
Evading the government’s gaze
What if it were a crime to walk down city streets taking roundabout paths so as not to be filmed by official surveillance cameras? Compare the state of “structuring” laws that make it an offense in itself to arrange transactions so they’re not subject to the filing of reports [Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic; earlier]
Banking and finance roundup
- Home-court advantage: SEC wins against defendants 90 percent of the time when it litigates before its own judges [Jean Eaglesham/W$J, Thaya Knight/Cato, earlier]
- Oops! “Corporate Inversions Increase U.S. Tax Revenues” [Rita Nevada Gunn and Thomas Lys/SSRN via Paul Caron/TaxProf, related, earlier]
- “How U.S. rules on conflict minerals are making life worse for desperately poor people in war-torn Congo” [Politico, earlier]
- “Lock up the banksters.” “Lock up the drug dealers.” Dara Lind spots some populist parallels [Vox]
- Should bank boards owe fiduciary duty to regulatory as well as investor interests? [Marc Hodak]
- “Nobody’s Worried About ‘Too Big to Jail’ Any More” [Matt Levine/Bloomberg View] “Hunting Whales: The Problem With Prosecuting SIFIS” [Thaya Knight/Cato]
- Luigi Zingales: market economists need to address question of when and how finance sector goes wrong, or others will do it for them [“Does Finance Benefit Society?“, presidential address to American Finance Association, Buttonwood/Economist, Arnold Kling]
More riot notes
From Twitter, some further thoughts on the Baltimore riots and their implications:
Why – paradoxically – the poor need property rights even more than the rich. http://t.co/iTsoz2Atip
— Jason Kuznicki (@JasonKuznicki) April 30, 2015
In response, Twitter user @hamilt0n cites this NBER paper by William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo on the (very harmful) labor market effects of the 1960s riots, adds: “Riots=more spending, higher taxation, rich are mobile and flee, poor get stuck with the bill”
Sweetness and light in a New York Times “Crips and Bloods gangs come together to save Baltimore” story:
uh hold up a sec guys http://t.co/zQfYc6Ndrq pic.twitter.com/OaEtsVSfiK
— Matt Bors (@MattBors) April 28, 2015
More from Liz Mair on how the rights just go to show what you already believed; Cathy Young (arguing, inter alia, that any system is going to accord police suspected of wrongdoing some advantages over other citizens in those circumstances and we might just as well accept this). Meanwhile, the seven-day 10 p.m. curfew threatens the livelihoods of thousands of Baltimoreans and small businesses [New York Times, Baltimore Sun]
The economics of rioting
Following the outbreak of serious riots on the streets of Baltimore, I wrote a post yesterday at Cato:
…More than twenty years ago in the Cato Journal, distinguished law and economics scholars David Haddock and Daniel Polsby published a paper entitled “Understanding Riots” that’s still highly relevant in making sense of events like these. Employing familiar economic concepts such as opportunity cost, coordination problems, and free-rider issues, Haddock and Polsby help explain why riots cluster around sports wins as well as assassinations, funerals, and jury verdicts; the group psychology of rioting, and why most crowds never turn riotous; the important role of focal points (often lightly policed commercial areas) and rock-throwing “entrepreneurs” of disorder; the tenuous relationship between riots and root causes or contemporary grievances; and why when a riot occurs the police (at least those in places like the United States and United Kingdom) seldom manage to be in enough places at once, more or less by definition.
I conclude that pundits and the news media are continuing to get the story wrong about riots like those in Baltimore, and link to the Haddock and Polsby article itself. The post is here.
P.S.: This is neat: Jack Shafer at Politico takes and runs with some of the paper’s analysis about prevention strategies and the spread of information about riot locations. And Jesse Walker looks further at the role of “outside agitators.”
Update: jury acquits man charged with sex with demented wife
Updating our earlier report: “A jury found a longtime Iowa state lawmaker not guilty of sexually abusing his wife who suffered from dementia, in an unusual case that centered on when a person is no longer mentally capable of consenting to sex.” [KWWL] More: NYT Room for Debate.
Miss child support payment, go to jail
And good luck making those payments once you’ve lost your job or license. The Walter Scott shooting in South Carolina has focused belated attention on the “deadbeat-dad” rules crafted variously to please budget hawks, women’s rights advocates, and conservatives, which in practice can pile hopelessly large obligations on low-earning fathers, enforced in some states not only by jailing but also by deprivation of drivers’ and occupational licenses instrumental in earning a living. I’ve got more at Cato at Liberty, following up on New York Times coverage.
Prosecution roundup
- Florida court blocks drug-related seizure of house as violation of Constitution’s Excessive Fines Clause [Orlando Weekly, opinion in Agresta v. Maitland]
- Deferred- and non-prosecution agreements (DPAs/NPAs) have ushered in a little-scrutinized “shadow regulatory state” [Jim Copland and Isaac Gorodetski, “Without Law or Limits: The Continued Growth of the Shadow Regulatory State,” Manhattan Institute report]
- Politicized prosecution: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman throws book at bankers for not lending in Buffalo [Conrad Black via Tim Lynch, Cato]
- Would it improve prosecutors’ incentives if localities rather than state governments paid for incarceration? [Leon Neyfakh, Slate, via David Henderson]
- Andrew Pincus on the growing danger of enforcement slush funds [U.S. Chamber, more]
- “The Department of Justice, if it succeeds on its new theory, may have criminalized many instances of dull employee misconduct.” [Matt Kaiser, Above the Law; Peter Henning, N.Y. Times “DealBook”]
- A Brooklyn mess: new D.A. looking into 70 convictions obtained with evidence from retired detective Louis Scarcella [Radley Balko]
Our carceral child support system and the Walter Scott case
“In South Carolina, at least one in eight people in jail are there on contempt-of-court charges related to late or unpaid child-support orders.” [Marshall Project; Christopher Mathias/Huffington Post] For decades elected officials of right and left alike have backed punitive handling of “deadbeat dads,” with results that include repeated jail terms levied over arrears unlikely ever to be paid, as well as the denial of drivers’ licenses and other basics of participation in the aboveground economy. Earlier on child support issues.
Some writings from my Cato Institute colleagues on the Walter Scott case: Tim Lynch, Jonathan Blanks, Matthew Feeney. And a New York Times “Room for Debate” roundtable on police use of deadly force featuring Walter Katz, Prof. Seth Stoughton and others.