The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/)
State corrections authorities spend more than $8 billion a year on health care programs for prisoners, but are they cost-effective? A study by Pew Charitable Trusts says the aging of America’s prison population adds renewed urgency to monitoring—and improving—efforts to treat prisoners’ special health needs both during and after incarceration.
Often missing in the gun control debate is the perspective of those who worry that a loved one might catalyze the next American tragedy. In the aftermath of Las Vegas, one of our regular columnists provides a poignant example.
Slightly over half of U.S. violent victimizations between 2012 and 2015 involved people of the same race, or both were Hispanic, says the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Among black victims, 11 percent of violent incidents were committed by whites; among whites, 15 percent were committed by blacks.
Street gangs in Indiana are silencing eyewitnesses to their violent activities, as well as informants, say local prosecutors and police. A lack of witness cooperation is a major reason the arrest rate in Indianapolis criminal homicide cases has sunk to near 35 percent.
The National Rifle Association is offering insurance for people who shoot someone. Gun-control advocates say the offer could lead to more violence and give gun owners a false sense of security to shoot first and ask questions later.
University of Florida president Kent Fuchs said white nationalist Richard Spencer wants the speech he will deliver Thursday to provoke violence that will gain sympathy for the alternative right movement he represents.
Speaking for five hours before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized former FBI director James Comey and said the U.S. probably is not doing enough to protect against future meddling by Russia in U.S. elections.
The driver of a tractor trailer that transported scores of undocumented immigrants to a San Antonio Walmart in July — leading to 10 deaths — pleaded guilty two charges. Appearing before a federal judge, James Matthew Bradley, 61, admitted his role in the lethal smuggling operation, the deadliest of its kind in more than a decade.
U.S. District Court Judge Theodore Chuang says the Trump administration had “not shown that national security cannot be maintained without an unprecedented eight-country travel ban.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions tells senators, “The order is lawful, necessary and we are proud to defend it.”
In what could be Philadelphia’s last death penalty case, prosecutors are seeking an execution for Robert Lark in a 1979 killing. Some 120 death penalty cases have been overturned in Pennsylvania. Of those, only three people have been returned to death row. No one has been executed in the state since 1999.
Houston serial killer Anthony Shore was about to be executed when a prosecutor asked for a delay based on reports that Shore would confess to a murder, for which another death row inmate was already convicted.
Tiny Moran, Texas, where ‘bump stocks” are made, complains that it is a scapegoat in the Las Vegas massacre. “Everyone out there thinks we’re killers, and that’s very far from the truth,” says Mayor Steven Taggart.
Fraternal Order of Police objects to Chicago Sun-Times reporters’ knocking on officers’ home doors to interview them. Newspaper’s editor said the two sides essentially have agreed to disagree.
George Perrot was convicted of raping a 78-year-old woman in 1985 based in part on one strand of hair. Perrot had a beard, and the victim described her attacker as a man without any facial hair.
A bipartisan coalition of police leaders, prosecutors and former justice officials called for ‘modern strategies’ and ‘innovative solutions,’ in a letter to President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, released ahead of Wednesday’s summit in Wash. DC. The Justice Department responded that “Americans voted for President Trump’s brand of law and order.”