by jpitney | Jan 6, 2026 | Civil Rights, Crime, Higher Education
At National Affairs, Jon Shields and Stephanie Muravchik examine college syllabi on the “Open Syllabus” (OS) database. Few issues have vexed American politics more than the question of whether — and to what extent — the criminal-justice system is biased...
by jpitney | Jan 2, 2026 | Crime, Police
Michael Fortner at The Washington Monthly: Peter Moskos’s Back from the Brink is both oral history and urban epic—a ground-level account of New York’s astonishing, world-historical crime decline, narrated by the cops, commissioners, city officials, and civic leaders...
by jpitney | Dec 24, 2025 | California Politics, Crime, Law
Anat Rubin at CalMatters: Nearly half of California counties pay private lawyers and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and most of them, like San Benito, do it through what’s known as a “flat-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount, regardless...
by jpitney | Sep 12, 2025 | Crime, Public Service, Violence
Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona and Kyle Stewart at NBC: The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk is sending shock waves through Capitol Hill, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle expressing fears for their own safety and taking greater security...
by jpitney | Apr 15, 2025 | California Politics, Crime, Transportation
Robert Leiwis at CaMatters: Because California has no centralized court system and records aren’t online, we then traveled to courthouses up and down the state to read through tens of thousands of pages of files. Once we had defendants’ names and other information, we...
by jpitney | Mar 30, 2025 | California Politics, Crime
Summer Lin at LAT: The family of a a woman who was strangled to death last year during a conjugal visit with her husband at a Northern California prison has called for reforms after a second woman was killed in a similar manner. Tania Thomas, 47, was killed in July...
