Why didn't the predicted surge in teen crime happen?

Conservative criminologist John DiIulio called the fearsome horde "super-predators." He estimated that they'd number nearly 200,000 by now. Even unflappable Attorney General Janet Reno foresaw violent crime doubling among kids. . . . William Bennett, the former drug czar . . . wrote a 1996 book with DiIulio on the topic, titled "Body Count," which attributed the problem to moral decay. . . . It never happened. . . . Instead, Americans are experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history. . . .

[Why?]

Probably more important than tighter school security . . . were these factors:

In the decade of economic expansion that ended in 2000, the number of older teens who were neither in school nor at full-time jobs dropped by nearly a third. . . . Prosperity . . . gave teens more and better options to crime. . . .

The Latino population in central cities swelled as teen crime declined. . . . Their influx . . . brought more intact families, stronger values, higher religious participation - and lower crime rates. At the same time, many of the black families they replaced moved to suburbs where poverty was less concentrated. "Kids once confined to the inner city started seeing lifestyles other than the street." . . .

Criminologists decided in the `90s to track what worked and what didn't in dealing with teen crime. Boot camps didn't work. . . . Nor did trying juveniles in adult courts. Big Brother and Big Sister mentoring worked. Foster care for delinquents worked better than lock-ups if foster parents were well trained and the goal was to return the delinquents to well-coached biological parents. Suspending delinquent kids from school or leaving them back didn't work. . . . They found that if one parent is strong and consistent, the second isn't missed when it comes to preventing delinquency.

The incarceration rate rose from 1 per 1,000 adults to 4 from the `80s to today, and it has many foes. But . . . jailing more adults sharply reduced the number of teens who commit crimes with adult accomplices.

Economist Levitt attributes teen crime's sharp drop to a reduction in unwanted children, which began with the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Criminologist Zimring, among others, thinks it contributed but isn't as big a factor
as Levitt argues.

From here.

These gems come from a blog associated with The Atlantic magazine, linked to at Enik Rising.

It ties into a Denver Post rehash of a local think tank report on population growth in Denver neighborhoods that I saw today. Three of the top five: Green Valley Ranch, Stapleton, and Lowry, are unsurprising. They are neighborhoods that were previously uninhabited that have seen major residential development in recent years.

The other two, Five Points and Montbello, are cases that fit the dynamic described above in which neighborhoods that used to be predominantly black ghettos with dire poverty that have seen major influxes of Hispanics, as well as others, in a combination of ethnic shifts and gentrification as many black residents of these neighborhoods have moved to suburbs or to central city suburban style neighborhoods like multi-ethnic Green Valley Ranch.

Another place in the metro area that has seen a similar and rapid demographic shift is Old Town Aurora, once a center of blacks and lower income Korean immigrants, that is now increasingly Hispanic.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Denver Post also announced the inauguration of a major overhaul of eleven Northeast Denver schools, a move that has been heralded as positive by some, while arousing extreme controversy, skepticism and complaints about insufficient community consultation from others. FWIW, I haven't followed the overhaul efforts closely and don't have a strong opinion on their merits as a result.

Aurora, also perhaps not coincidentally, has also recently announced a major urban effort directed at the area between Stapleton and Old Town Aurora, although it has been overshadowed by a bid by Aurora to develop a complex that would compete heavily with the convention center complex in downtown Denver.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but, in each case, major governmental initiatives to improve city services in metro Denver neighborhoods have coincided with declining African American populations in those neighborhoods.

Certainly, nothing as crude as Jim Crow racism as it work in Denver, that just elected a second African-American mayor despite having a fairly modest African-American population percentage for a major American central city (Hancock this time around, Webb the last time around), or in Colorado, which recently had an African-American state house speaker (Terrance Carroll). Nor does metro Denver as a whole want for predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods that have been sorely neglected in the government services department. The cause and effect relationships here are more subtle and are not simple examples of racial or ethnic favoritism.

Northeast Denver, for example, has changed due to efforts like the Ballpark Neighborhood gentrification, the transformation of "North Capital Hill" into "Uptown" and the impact of the Stapleton and Lowry developments which sent middle class traffic through these formerly low income predominantly black neighborhoods and called attention to their potential to provide short commutes to downtown.

The housing bubble opened up a lot of affordable, quality suburban homes to people from Denver including families in Northeast Denver that have not been tainted by generations of covert and overt racial discrimination in the housing market that reached a critical mass that became self-sustaining where it has established itself.

Rising real estate values in Denver from a bubble collapsed low point in 1983 until an earlier than the rest of the nation slump, particularly in central Denver, transferred considerable wealth to inner city home owners.

As post from The Atlantic article that led me to the teen crime story that I quoted observed, underclass predominantly black dysfunctional ghettos are nothing to be nostalgic for, even if one is firmly committed to improving the well being of the people who lived in those communities a few decades ago and their children. The transformation of these dysfunctional neighborhoods wasn't a punishment inflicted on its residents; it was a reflection of the fact that the people who lived there have mostly found better alternatives and moved on when barriers to their exit from those neighborhoods became less steep. The neighborhoods weren't bad because they were non-white, they were bad because they had high crime, high truancy, governmental underinvestment, high teen pregnancy, few viable businesses, and high unemployment that had deep and obvious causes in American history.

Improving neighborhood well being makes neighborhoods tolerable to people who have any choice at all about where they live and has led to rapid population growth in these neighborhoods. Creating demand for housing in these neighborhoods boosts property values and makes life more tolerable for those who continue to live there. Even renters who are forced to leave due to rising rents in these neighborhoods spur the construction of newer and better rental housing in the metro area that if often better than what they left behind. The line between someone who is a slum lord who has received a windfall from the changes in these neighborhoods and someone who is a civic minded booster of a neighborhood is often a thin one.

Capitalism may not always seek out hard case situations to invest in for the long run, but it doesn't follow that it profits from large scale systemic socio-economic misery either. It encourages profitable mutual growth, it just sometimes has a hard time getting the ball rolling because not enough people have enough vision to bring the needed investment and suspicion abounds because it is hard to tell who gains and loses from the changes in advance. But, when your current neighborhood is one of the least desirable in the metro area, as was the case for a significant share of Northeast Denver in the 1980s and into the 1990s, it is hard for change, either to the neighborhood or for those who end up leaving the neighborhood as a result, to be a terrible thing or a case of downward mobility.

READ MORE - Why didn't the predicted surge in teen crime happen?

Too Many And Not Enough Drugs Are A Critical Factor In Insane Violence

Severe mental illness is greatly reduced as a risk factor for violence in people who are taking their meds, and greatly increased as a risk factor for violence in people who self-medicate with illegal drugs.

The severely mentally ill make up only a minor share of violent crime perpetrators (and are often victims themselves), so treatment of the severely mentally ill isn't a major driver of violent crime, but they do, overall, have an elevated risk of committing violent crimes living in a world that deals with several mental illness the way that our society does. Also, they do represent a population for whom there is a fairly clear path to reducing violent crime commission risk. Moreover, some of the most sensational and shocking crimes in our society involve instances where severely mentally ill individuals run amok, even though these crimes are very rare and are difficult to predict or prevent.

[S]everely mentally ill people account for only 3 to 5 percent of violent crimes in the general population. . . . we refer only to severe mental illness—meaning schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or psychotic depression. . . .

In a 2009 meta-analysis, or quantitative review, of 204 studies exploring this connection, psychologist Kevin S. Douglas of Simon Fraser University and his associates found a slightly greater likelihood of aggressive behaviors among those with severe mental illnesses. Yet this connection is much weaker than the public seems to believe it is and does not necessarily mean that these serious disorders cause violence. The causation could be in the reverse direction: engaging in chronic aggression (stemming from some other source) may create stress that triggers the illness in those predisposed to it. Alternatively, a third factor could spawn both a psychiatric condition and violence. . . .

[T]he MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study in 1998, sociologist Henry J. Steadman of Policy Research Associates and his colleagues reported that almost a third of severely mentally ill patients with substance abuse problems engaged in one or more violent acts in the year after they left the hospital. For discharged patients who did not abuse drugs, the corresponding figure was only 18 percent. . . .

In its meta-analysis, Douglas’s team also flagged drug abuse as one of several factors that contributed to the connection between mental illness and violence. In addition, it found the link was even stronger for patients who suffered from delusions, hallucinations or disorganized thinking. Thus, a mentally ill person is more at risk of committing an act of aggression when that individual is also abusing a drug and shows particular symptoms. . . .

In the MacArthur study, Steadman’s team found no difference in the prevalence of violence between the severely mentally ill who were on their medications and mentally healthy people, whereas unmedicated patients lashed out at significantly higher rates. . . . improving adherence to treatment may lessen the chances that severely ill people will behave violently.

From Scientific American.

I am not quite as optimist as Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, who are the authors of this Scientific American article. For instance, individuals who have been hospitalized for mental health conditions (generally, because someone determines that they pose a risk of bodily harm to themselves or others as a result of one or more prior specific incidents), clearly pose a much greater risk to the public than individuals who have received merely outpatient mental health treatment. An 18% risk of engaging in violent acts is on the same order of magnitude as the risk that a felon about two years out of prison without incident will do so and is fantastically elevated relative to someone who has neither a criminal record nor a record of commitment to an institution for a mental health condition. A 33% risk of engaging in violent acts is on the same order of magnitude as the risk that a felon just release from prison will commit a new crime.

The claim that "severely mentally ill people account for only 3 to 5 percent of violent crimes" also fails to reflect that a much larger percentage of people whom the criminal justice system deems it necessary to incarcerate have moderate to several mental health issues. The number of mentally ill people in jail and prison vastly outnumbers the number of mentally ill people who are in civil institutional settings.

This account also fails to dissect the overall problem of mental health issues adequately. There are multiple very different paths linking mental health issues and crime.

One common path links traits like impulsivity, novelty seeking, and weak anger management capacity with "heat of passion" crimes, often under the influence of alcohol and aggravated by the possession of weapons. These traits do not mitigate guilt in the criminal justice system but often are considered in mitigation of a sentence for a crime.

A second common path links the concept of psychopathic absence of conscience, with pre-meditated crimes like first degree murder, serial rapes and fraud. The violent crimes seem to usually involve a plus factor of impulsivity with pscyhopathy. The white collar crimes and immoral but not illegal business practices tend to fit psychopaths who are at the opposite end of the conscientious to impulsive dimension of personality. Psychopathic traits, rather than being mitigating circumstances, are generally aggravating circumstances in the criminal justice system and closely overlap with circumstances justifying the death penalty.

The third common path is the one focused on in the article - the delusional, and also manic or depressed individual who goes amok, a path where illegal substance abuse greatly elevates the risk and taking prescribed meds

Fourth, a significant share of people who commit serious crimes are not mentally ill, per se, but are developmentally disabled, i.e. they have IQs so low that they are considered mentally retarded. In the extreme, a low IQ can affect guilt in the criminal justice system, but more often it mitigates a sentence and heightens scrutiny of the veracity of the individual's confessions to law enforcement officers, their capacity to carry out the crime, and their vulnerability to being framed or participating ineffectively in the criminal justice system. 

Fifth, a certain share of people who commit serious crimes do so in response to traumatic circumstances, extreme stress, abuse and manipulation, in a form of extended self-defense, in the form of poor judgment in connection with the mental breakdown of a not congenitally mentally ill individual, or in the form of an inability to resist the pressure from a dominant person in their life to commit a crime. Criminal justice responses to these circumstances are all over the map, sometimes producing leniency from one district attorney or judge or jury, while producing draconian responses from another just a few miles away.

READ MORE - Too Many And Not Enough Drugs Are A Critical Factor In Insane Violence

Civility Absent At Wisconsin Supreme Court

Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley late Saturday accused fellow Justice David Prosser of putting her in a chokehold during a dispute in her office earlier this month.

"The facts are that I was demanding that he get out of my office and he put his hands around my neck in anger in a chokehold," Bradley told the Journal Sentinel. . . .

A source who spoke to several justices present during the incident told the Journal Sentinel that the confrontation occurred after 5:30 p.m. June 13, the day before the high court's release of a decision upholding a bill to curtail the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

Six of the court's seven justices - Justice N. Patrick Crooks was not present - had gathered in Bradley's chambers. Some were informally discussing the decision.

The conversation grew heated, and Bradley asked Prosser to leave. Bradley was bothered by disparaging remarks Prosser had made about Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, a source said.

Bradley felt Prosser "was attacking the chief justice," the source said.

Before leaving, Prosser "put his hands around her neck in what (Bradley) described as a chokehold," the source said.

"He did not exert any pressure, but his hands were around her neck," the source said.

The source said the act "was in no way playful." . . .

Infighting has plagued the court in recent years and often spilled into the public. The court's rancor became a campaign issue for Prosser this spring, but he insisted he was not the cause of the problem. He said during debates that he was confident the internal disputes on the court would fade quickly once he was re-elected.

Prosser acknowledged in March that he called Abrahamson a "bitch" and threatened to "destroy" her during a closed-door meeting.

At the time, Prosser told the Journal Sentinel that the outburst to Abrahamson came after the chief justice took steps to undermine him politically and to embarrass him and other court conservatives.

"In the context of this, I said, 'You are a total bitch,' " Prosser said. "I probably overreacted, but I think it was entirely . . . warranted. They (Abrahamson and Bradley) are masters at deliberately goading people into perhaps incautious statements. This is bullying and abuse of very, very long standing."

In a March interview, Bradley said Prosser had flashes of extreme anger on and off over the years.

"It's been going on for years off and on," she said.

After Prosser's outburst, Bradley sent an email to him and other justices saying the behavior was unacceptable. She said this March that from the time of her email until then there had been no incidents of similar magnitude.

From here.

Prosser, and apparently another Justice who was present, claim it was an act of self-defense and not a choking. Prosser was recently re-elected in an election so close that it required a recount.

READ MORE - Civility Absent At Wisconsin Supreme Court

Extortion and Insider Trading

There are at least two quite different crimes both involving securing personal gain from other people's secrets. One is a subtype of extortion, where one makes money by promising not to reveal someone else's secret. The other is insider trading, where one makes money by acting on someone else's secret before it is revealed.

Secrets that are the subject of extortion threats are frequently not a crime or even a civil wrong giving rise to liability to publicly disclose. And, revealing a secret from an insider that materially affects the value of its stock to the general public before trading on it is likewise often neither a crime nor a civil wrong. Indeed, in both cases, revealing the secret is often considered a public service and is constitutionally protected. If the person who receives the secret does not act improperly in obtaining it, that person is generally free to disclose it, and even when a secret is obtained illegally, the punishment for the crime is often unrelated to the disclosure or non-disclosure of the secret and is frequently a misdemeanor.

It also isn't necessarily a crime or even civil wrong to profit from revealing someone else's secrets. While it would be a crime to extort cash not to publish information that someone had an affair, making money by selling that story to a gossip magazine or working as a private investigator using only legal means is perfectly legitimate. While trading securities on insider information is illegal, revealing negative inside information about a company in order to get a superior fired so that you can have a shot at that job when the vacancy arises. So it revealing negative insider information about a company so that stock in a competitor of a company becomes more valuable, so long as you already owned the competitor's stock it when you learned the inside information.

Nor is it a profit to keep other people's secrets, even for profit. Lawyers, doctors, mental health professionals, priests, accountants and many government employees are legally required to keep other people's secrets and are paid to do so. However, in those cases, the secrecy is promised in exchange for trust from someone who needs to know the information for reasons that often benefit the person who is the source of the secret, and the profit generally is from the secret's source or from someone who is financially indifferent to whether or not the secret is revealed.

In contrast, extortion and insider trading involve either harm or threatened harm to the source of the secret from others. In the case of both extortion and insider trading, not revealing the secret may harm the public, either because they are denied important negative reputational information about someone, or because they are inaccurately valuing a security and being exploited by someone else as a result of that inaccurate valuation.

READ MORE - Extortion and Insider Trading

Crime Down In 2010 (Fifth Year In Row)

Crime levels fell across the board last year, extending a multiyear downward trend with a 5.5 percent drop in the number of violent crimes in 2010 and a 2.8 percent decline in the number of property crimes.

Year-to-year changes released Monday by the FBI in its preliminary figures on crimes reported to police in 2010 also showed declines in all four categories of violent crime in 2010. All categories for property crime went down as well. . . .

Violent crime last increased in 2005. Property crime last rose in 2002.

The FBI reported that violent crime fell in all four regions of the country last year — 7.5 percent in the South, 5.9 in the Midwest, 5.8 percent in the West and 0.4 percent in the Northeast.

From here.

Yesterday's new showed divorce rates down in Colorado. Teen pregnancy continues to hover near all time lows.

Also in the news, and possibly one explanation for the shift was the results of a new survey showing that the percentage of children ages 3-17 diagnosed with ADHD had increased from 5.7% for 1997-1999 to 7.6% for 2006-2008.

The economy can't explain the decline. The regional trends don't match immigration trends. Incarceration rates have been relatively stable in this time period. But, one thing that has changed and drives a disproportionate share of the year to year variation in crime, is the changing drug scene.

Domestic meth production is dramatically down. Illegal use of prescription drugs is up. A significant share of the illegal marijuana market has shifted to the legal medical marijuana market. Cocaine use isn't particularly high. There has been a pretty dramatic increase in legal use of drugs for mental health conditions.

One way to read the recent trend is that a lot of people who used to be self-medicating with illegal drugs supplied by a rough and tumble world of gangs and organized crime are finding chemicals to address their problems through distribution channels that don't drive street crime to nearly the same degree and provide a much more predictable product.

An alternative and not necessarily inconsistent possibility is that we are reaping the benefits of a long economic boom from the early 1980s until 2007, interrupted by only relatively brief and mild recessions. People may commit crimes on impulse, but a lifestyle that leads to commiting serious crime with little hesitation and routinely committing less serious crimes is decades in the making. A long period of relative plenty may have narrowed the pool of people who were in dire poverty as young children and became more predisposed towards crime as a result.

A third possibility is that technology is making it harder and less profitable to commit many crimes. People carry less cash. Cars have more anti-theft devices. Bank robbers and rapists are more likely to get caught. The decline in meth was driven by more strict control of the ingredients that go into it.

Whatever the reason, it is hard to deny that it is good news.

READ MORE - Crime Down In 2010 (Fifth Year In Row)

First Bank of Cherry Creek Has Friendly Employees

I've done business with a number of banks over the years. One of them is First Bank of Cherry Creek. They don't always have the best interest rates or easiest loan underwriting terms. Alpine Bank, in Western Colorado, is the hands down winner in Colorado for beautiful branch bank office architecture (and when I lived in Grand Junction, Colorado they also had awesome donuts on Saturday morning). But, one place that First Bank really excels is courtesy and customer service. Time and time again, even when I come to them cranky, the people who work there are friendly, stay cool, take the time to listen to my questions and concerns, and address them.

For example, yesterday, the ATM machine ate my First Bank ATM card. I had even taken a detour on the way to where I was going there to go to the ATM machine so that I could do my business before I started work. A day that starts like this is like the beginning of some mediocre independent film comedy. Needless to say, I was pretty cranky, and I was also more than a bit worried that some case of personalized identity theft had struck me - something I've seen more than enough of second hand representing clients trying to sort out resulting bad check prosecutions, inaccurate credit reports, and muddled bank balances.

But, when I got to my office, I had a letter on my desk from the previous day explaining that there had been a security breach at the bank, which I hadn't realized applied to me, and when I called a customer service representative (I spoke to "Rhonda," a real human being from Colorado!) for clarification, she calmly explained to me that indeed, someone had gotten my ATM card number making it necessary to replace it, reviewed my account to make sure that there wasn't anything else amiss, told me when to expect a new card (it arrived later the same day) and explained why I couldn't have received a replacement any sooner given the steps that the bank had to take first and the fact that the breach took place on a weekend. I wasn't exactly happy afterwards, but I was a lot less grumpy than I'd been when the ATM machine ate my ATM card, and I was comfortable that a criminal, rather than bad management at the bank, was responsible for my inconvenience.

In an ideal world, the letter I'd received telling me what was going on could have been more clear, and the ATM machine could have been more specific about the reason it was eating my card, rather than giving me an ominous "please contact your bank" message with no other explanation. But, a chance to speak to a human being who was nice and actually able to answer my questions and was able to explain what was going on made the difference between a mild "shit happens" annoyance and a fury that could easily have led me to change banks. Given how routine it is for customer service line service to be almost as bad as the events that inspired you to call in the first place, this is a real achievement. At least half the time, to get the help you need, even if you can get it, you need to ask for a manager. But, not this time.

I often tag instances of bad business management (the Burger King next door to its Cherry Creek branch office has earned at least couple of those for its parking nazi tactics, nasty bathrooms and notoriously slow front counter service), but excellence deserves recognition now and then as well.

Full disclosure: I am a First Bank of Cherry Creek customer, but receive no special deals and wasn't asked to prepare or compensated in any way for this blog post.

READ MORE - First Bank of Cherry Creek Has Friendly Employees

Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

The victim in a Washington state sex assault that is now linked to a 32-year-old Lakewood man was charged with false reporting and paid a $500 fine in 2008 because police didn't believe her story.

Authorities in Lynnwood, Wash., reopened their case and reimbursed the woman after Colorado detectives found pictures of the victim on a camera belonging to Marc O'Leary, an Army veteran charged in two similar cases in Golden and Westminster, Lynnwood police Cmdr. Steve Rider said.

From here.

Women are still raped in public view in places like Denver International Airport.

Drunk young women still disappear into the night after clubbing in LoDo, and go missing for weeks without explanation.

Coaches, and pastors still abuse positions of trust.

Little girls are still shot dead.

And, that is just in Colorado so far this month.

READ MORE - Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

Good News on Friday

Social Issues:


* Despite the failure of a civil unions bill in the Republican controlled Colorado House of Representatives (the bill probably would have passed a vote in the chamber as a whole), gay marriage is now supported by majorities of men, women, Democrats and independents in opinion polls and support has increased dramatically in every demographic in the last six years.

* Civil unions or gay marriage are available in many states.

* Restoration of gay marriage in California seems imminent.

* The federal government has decided to stop defending the constitutionality of part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court.

* Sodomy prosecutions remain unconstitutional.

* Teen pregnancy rates and teen birth rates are at near record lows.

* Abortion rates are at near record lows, but constitutional protections for a pro-choice position on abortion remain secure precedents.
* Interracial marriage has become much more common as the stigmas against it have fallen.

* Divorce rates have fallen for a number of years. The current generation is less likely to get divorced than there parent's generation.

* New York recently became the last state to permit "no fault" divorce in favor of its previous, deeply flawed, fault based divorce regime.

* The percentage of the population that identifies as having "no religion" is the fastest growing religious identification in the United States and the stigma associated with that religious identification is waning.

Public Health and Safety:

* Traffic accident deaths are at the lowest level since 1949, down 3% from 2009 to 2010 despite an increased number of passenger-miles traveled, and down 25% since 2005.  It has never been safer to drive a car per passenger-mile in the history of the world.

* Almost every kind of accidental death rate, other than deaths from overdoses of a select group of prescription drugs (mostly painkillers), are at near record lows.

* Public education campaigns have greatly reduced sudden infant death syndrome and traffic deaths of young children.  Those campaigns are also making a dent in shaken baby syndrome injuries.

* Smoking is down greatly and this is one public health area where the U.S. leads comparabhle nations in the Europe and Asia.  This has finally produced, this year, declining lung cancer death rates in women as well as men.

* Anti-scientific criticisms of vaccination of children have been definitively discredited.

* People with HIV/AIDS can now live much longer with effective treatments than they did a couple of decades ago and the infection rate for the epidemic has stablized or declined in a great many demographics. 

* A vaccine against HPV, one of the only sexually transmitted diseases not easily treatable with drugs and not effectively prevented with barrier contraception methods, has entered wide public use.

* Life expectencies are rising and infant mortality rates continue to fall.  Great gains have been made in treating cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Education:

* Colorado has significantly increased its high school graduation rate with a new mandatory attendance law.

* The United States has one of the highest rates of college graduation and high school graduation in the world.

* The scores of armed forces recruits on entrance exams has improved.


Crime and Punishment:

* Crime rates, including murder, are at near record lows.

* Incarceration rates are no longer surging up as state budgets have tightened and forced a more balance look at the necessity of mass incarceration.

* Medical marijuana has wide support and is legal in at least seventeen states, and the federal government has agreed to tolerate it despite the lack of a formal federal legislative exception permitting it. Support for legalization of marijuana is high, and support for the punitive war on drugs approach is weak.
* Excessive and racially discriminatory in practice federal punishments for possession of small amounts of crack cocaine based on bad scientific assumptions have been greatly reduced.

* Many states, including Colorado, have shifted sentencing laws for drug crimes to favor a treatment approach over incarceration for drug users (as opposed to drug dealers).

* Serious white collar crimes receive serious criminal sentences rather than "slap on the wrist" sentences that fail to reflect their seriousness, and prosecuters have been willing to prosecute serious white collar crime defendants.

* DNA evidence has produced exonerations of many wrongfully convicted or wrongfully charged criminal defendants (mostly in rape cases), and has produced convictions of many rapists who would never have been charged otherwise.

* Wider use of videotape technology has resulted in many more cases of successful sanctioning of improper police conduct and has reduced the amount of lying about alleged confessions by criminal defendants.
* Illinois ended the death penalty and commuted the sentences of everyone on death row to long or life prison sentences.


* The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the use of the death penalty for crimes committed by the mentally retarded and for crimes committed by offenders under the age of eighteen.

* The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the use of the death penalty for almost all crimes other than murder (a few crimes such as treason and espionage where murder is an inferred likely possibility but not certain to have occurred are also constitutionally subject to the death penalty).

* The U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited the imposition of life without possibility of parole for crimes other than murder committed by people while under the age of eighteen.

* Many states have ended the use of life without possibility of parole sentences for juveniles entirely.



Economics:


* Housing market fundamentals such as long term inflation adjusted prices and price/rent ratios suggest that the housing price bubble has come close to working its way out of the economy.  Since mortgage rates remain fairly low, housing is at its most affordable for more than a decade in many markets.

* Inflation is low, but we are not in deflation.

* We are experiencing some positive GDP growth on a consistent basis.

* Unlike Iceland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, we are not in or near a sovereign debt crisis.  The Irish have incurred government bailouts of its banks of $25,000 per person, which would be equivalent to $7.5 trillion if it has a population comparable to the United States.  The combined bailout cost in the United States is on track to be about 2% of that amount per capita and did not require foreign assistance or major austerity plans.

* The unemployment rate in the United States, at 8.8% for March, while not low, is the lowest it has been for two years.

* Subprime mortgage lending, which was exploitive to borrowers and unsound as a business model, has virtually vanished.

* Payday lending has been curtailed in many states including Colorado.

* Consumer debt levels have fallen, and increased credit card minimum payments systemically reduce the extent to which families can become overextended for the foreseeable future.

Military, Security and Foreign Affairs

* We are down to 50,000 troops in Iraq, none in front line combat positions, and there is some reasonable prospect that many of them will come home.

* Tunisia and Egypt have cast off dictatorships and on are a clear path towards democratic government.

* Significant democratic reforms or replacements of dictators are likely in Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Libya.

* A dictator in Pakistan was not so long ago forced out in favor of a democratically elected leader.

* An uprising in the Ivory Coast appears on track to depose a pretender to that country's Presidency whose election depended on election fraud in favor of the actual election winner.

* World powers organized to use economic sanctions and military force to prevent mass civilian killings and a restoration of totalitarrian rule in Libya.

* The Cold War is still over, more than a decade later, and Soviet style Communism lost.  Some former Soviet countries have joined the E.U., the Eurozone and NATO.

* Kosovo remains securely independent from Serbia and is widely recognized as a sovereign state.

* Nine and a half years later, 9/11 has not been repeated.  Foreign terrorism has not become a regular event in the U.S.  A new skyscraper and memorial are going up where the Twin Towers once stood.

* The U.S. military budget is being cut.

* China has started to move towards allowing the Yuan's value in foreign currency markets to float to market levels, reducing the importance a factor that has disfavored U.S. exports to China and favored China imports to the U.S.

* While China still accounts for about half of the world's executions, it has significantly curtailed its use of the death penalty and instituted new due process protections in that process.

READ MORE - Good News on Friday

Intensive Supervision Adult Probation in Colorado

A Denver Post story last Sunday noted that ten adult men on probation in Colorado have been charged with murder or attempted murder in the last nine months. Five of them were in adult intensive supervision probation, one was in sex offender intensive supervision probation, three were on ordinary adult probation (one for burglary, one for gang related burglary, and one for domestic violence and in each case producing an attempted murder rather than a successful one). Many of them were in violation of prrobation conditions but faced no consequences for their violations. The probation department is at 90% of authorized strength.

because they had been recognized as relatively high risk (and at least one of the ten who was not on intensive probation was guilty of attempted murder, but was not successful in completing his crime).

Is the program worth it? As their editorial today notes, this program is much less expensive than incarceration. But, the highest risk individuals on probation may belong in prison.

Felonies By Probationers

From a public safety perspective, the biggest concern is that probationers commit new felonies, particuarly serious new felonies. How common is this?

The number of felonies in 2010 by program participants divided by the program size is as follows:

Intensive Juvenile 44/452 (9.7%)
Intensive Adult 79/1,408 (5.6%)
Intensive Female 10/262 (3.8%)
Juvenile (ordinary) 135/5,946 (2.3%)
Intensive Sex Offender 22/1,301 (1.7%)
Adult (ordinary) 570/41,107 (1.4%)
Private Non-Drunk Driving 65/9,067 (0.7%)
State Monitored Drunk Driving 41/11,448 (0.4%)
Private Drunk Driving 34/14,126 (0.2%)

Total: 1,000/85,142 (1.2%)

People on probation commit about 3% of all felonies in the State of Colorado and make up about 1.7% of the state's population including children. Thus, overall, probationers (who are much more likely to be adults and much more likely to be non-elderly males) aren't particularly high risk as a whole compared to demographically similar non-probationers, particularly when the offense by high risk probationers are removed from the total. But, a subset of probationers, adult men in intensive supervision probation who make up about 3% of the total probation caseload, do appear to pose a considerably high risk to the general public.

Offenders who commit felonies while on probation are subject to sentences of at least the midpoint of the presumption range for the offense, and up to twice as much as the presumptive maximum for that offense, Section 18-1.3-401(8)(a)(III), Colorado Revised Statutes, in addition to having their probation revoked and facing a sentence of incarceration on the original crime. So, these offenses are committed despite an enhanced deterrent incentive not to commit them relative to an ordinary individual.

All of the murders and many of the attempted murders were committed by adults in the intensive adult and intensive sex offender program (6 out of 101 felonies compared to 4 out of the 570 felonies committed by ordinary adult probationers), suggesting that in addition to having a much higher felony termination rate than other probationers, that these offenders also commit, on average, more serious felonies than other probationers who have their probation revoked for felonies.

Policy Implications

This may mean that these high risk individuals simply need to receive even more intensive supervision than they already receive, or it may mean that they would be better incarcerated. Given the very high likelihood that an incarcerated felon will commit a new felony after being released, it isn't obvious that the public is safer with incarceration than it is with probation in intensive supervision cases. But, it may very well be that the public would be better protected by incarceration in this subset of cases.

More generally, if the reason to prefer probation to incarceration is that it reduces the risk that a convicted felon is less likely to commit a felony that harms a member of the general public, and to reduce the severity of the felonies that are committed by such people, it may make sense to put more of the high risk men who receive intensive supervision when on probation in prison, and to allow more low risk individuals to receive probation sentences.

In particular, many women, white collar offenders, and vice offenders in our prisons who aren't part of criminal gangs or organized crime enterprises may pose a lower risk to the general public than some of the more serious male "blue collar crime" offenders who receive probation in the current system. Even if the lower risk offenders do commit new felonies, these offenders are unlikely to commit the violent felonies that the public is most concerned about preventing.

It is also worth examining whether probation is too often imposed for minor offenses where the benefits resulting from the supervision element of the sentence is slight, because probation officers are spread so thin for low risk offenders. For example, it isn't obvious that the system has sufficient resources to adequately sanction the large number of offenders who abscond or commit technical violations in a consistent manner, or that even the minor probationers who do abscond or commit technical violations really do present a serious threat.

Perhaps the state needs an option in many cases that produce probation sentences today of imposing a significant fine and a sentence of "unsupervised probation" as all or part of the probation period for minor offenders, which is revoked only for new felonies or misdemeanors or non-payment of fines, which qualifies the individual for an enhanced sentence on the new offense and a sentence of incarceration on the old offense, if a new offense is committed within a certain time period, in addition to a fine, while not actually having the relatively elaborate conditions of probation with many opportunities for technical violations and absconding through mere flakiness, and the supervision costs, that are present in the typical probatioon case.

How common is probation?

At the end of the 2010 fiscal year, there were 3,423 people in an intensive supervision probation program in Colorado's state courts: 1,408 in the program for adult men, 1,301 in the program for sex offenders, 262 in a program for women, and 452 in a program for juveniles.

Other kinds of probation are much more common. There were 41,107 adults on regular probation, 5,946 on regular juvenile probation, 11,448 on state monitored probation for drunk driving offenses, 9,067 on private probation for non-drunk driving offenses, and 14,126 on private probation for drunk driving offenses.

The 41,107 adults on regular probation were further broken down as: 901 new probationers awaiting risk classification, 4,166 maximum risk, 10,173 medium risk, 8,911 miniumum risk, 5,758 adminstrative, 3,328 community corrections, 4,875 domestic violence, 1,137 sex offender, and 1,858 interstate transfers.

The 5,946 juveniles on regular probation were further broken down as: 176 new probationers awaiting risk classification, 920 (15%) maximum risk, 1,930 (32%) medium risk, 1,685 (28%) miniumum risk, 779 (13%) administrative, 20 in community corrections, 342 sex offenders, and 94 interstate transfers.

In all, there were 85,142 people on probation in Colorado on June 30, 2010. Probation includes community corrections.

Probation is a common sanction following a criminal conviction, indeed, it is the modal punishment for many offenses. There were 10,460 new felony probation sentences, 14,851 new misdemeanor probation sentences, 228 new petty misdemeanor probation sentences, 103 new traffic probation sentences, and 694 other new probation sentences (ordinance violations or lack of coding information) in the 2010 fiscal year. In all 26,336 new probation sentences were imposed in the 2010 fiscal year. Of completed probation sentences, 38% were for a year or less, 36% were for one to two years, 15% were for two to three years, and 11% were for more than three years.

There were 36,993 new felony offense prosecutions in 2010 in Colorado, 11,640 new juvenile delinquency prosecutions,, 69,695 new misdemeanor prosecutions (excluding traffic cases and drunk driving), and 28,429 drunk driving prosecutions.

How Often Is Probation Successfully Completed And Why Do Offenders Fail?

Of all people whose probation ended in 2010, 67% of adult regular probation sentences were completed successfully (including the 11% of the total who complete a community corrections sentence successfully), 15% of those on probation had their probation revoked for technical violation or a new crime while on probation, 13% absconded ("Absconded refers to probationers who became fugitives and are no longer compliant with probation supervision."), 3% were deported, 1% died, and 1% of cases were cloused out for administrative reasons. Of the 3,144 adult probation revocations in 2010, 570 (18%) were for new felonies, 756 (24%) were for new misdemeanors, and 1,818 (58%) were for technical violations of probation terms.

Of the 5,906 non-drunk driving private probation sentences terminated each year (a lower risk population), 4,590 are successful (78%), 614 are revoked (10%) (65 new felonies (11%), 146 new misdemeanors (24%), 66% technical violations) and 702 abscond (12%). For private probation related to drunk driving offenses, 82% complete their sentence successfully, 9% have their probation revoked (34 new felonies (4%), 288 new misdemeanors (31%), and 65% technical violations), and 9% abscond.

Among state monitored drunk driving probation cases, 73% complete successfully, 16% have their probation revoked (1,411) (41 which is 4% for new felonies, 136 which is 10% for new misdemeanors, and 87% for technical violations), and 11% abscond.

For regular juvenile probation, 73% successfully complete their sentences, 22% have probation revoked, and 5% abscond. Of the 989 juvenile revocations, 135 (14%) are for a new felony, 183 (18%) are for a new misdemeanor, and the remaining 68% are for technical violations.

In the adult intensive supervision program, 66% are successful terminations, 26% (317) are revoked, and 9% (108) abscond. Of the 317 revocations, 79 (25%) are for new felonies, 51 (16%) are for new misdemeanors, and 59% are for technical violations.

For sex offenders in intensive supervision, there are 22 new felonies (12% of revocations), 8 new misdemeanors (4% of revocations), and 158 revocations for technical violations (84%). Only 39% of sex offenders in intensive supervision successfully complete the program, while 53% have their probation revoked and 8% abscond.

In the female intensive supervision program, 69% of cases are successful, 22% (32) are revoked (10 which is 31% for new felonies, 3 which is 9% for new misdemeanors and 59% for technical violations), and 8% abscond.

For juveniles under intensive supervision, 46% are successful, 49% (232) have probation revoked, and 5% abscond. 44 juvenile intensive supervision revocations (19%) are for new felonies, 48 (21%) are for new misdemeanors and 60% are for technical violations.

After probation terms are completed there is considerable recidivism, although not nearly as much as that for offenders who complete prison terms.

Miscellaneous Background

When you are convicted of a crime in Colorado, a judge can fine you, a judge can sentence you to a period of incarceration, or a judge can put you on probation subject to a wide variety of conditions (there are a few other options as well, like community corrections and deferred judgments).

There are three main classes of people who are out in the community while involved in the criminal justice process. People on bond awaiting conviction, people on probation, and people on parole. The first two are supervised by the judicial branch, the last is supervised by the executive branch's parole system. (Incarceration prior to trial or after conviction for a misdemeanor is handled by the executive branch of county government, while incarceration after conviction for a felony is handled by the executive branch of state government together with parole). The probation department also does pre-sentence investigation of criminal defendants.

READ MORE - Intensive Supervision Adult Probation in Colorado

Bullies

Earlier this week, I went to my son's elementary school play. It was a series of skits put together by groups of several kids each in the drama class as part of the bullying prevention program at the school (with vocal and instrumental renditions of "Stand by me" as an intermezzo between each one).

A pattern illustrating the operational lesson that the children had learned from the program quickly emerged. A kid ("the target"), usually alone, gets bullied, sometimes by a bully alone, and sometimes by a ring leader and some henchmen. While alone, that kid can't win. But, another kid or group of kids intervenes on behalf of the kid being bullied and prevail - sometimes by force of numbers and sometimes combined with an appeal to authority (the principal or in a particularly overwhelming situation, a cell phone call to the cops).

The lesson seemed to be that you can't stop a bully alone, and when you are being bullied are often in a poor position to help yourself without assistance. After all, you were singled out when you were alone precisely because you were perceived in the first place, often accurately, as vulnerable. But, the program argues, you as a member of the school community have a moral obligation to help out your fellow students when they are in this kind of bind, because the secret to overcoming a bully is to have allies. The key ingredient that the program seeks to internalize in the kids and drill into their consciousness by repetition is that there is a moral duty to intervene on behalf of kids who are being bullied. Kids need to stand by each other to stay safe.

While the scenes weren't very realistic, the basic strategy that was proposed is plausible and the virtue of seeing a solution to the problem in terms of social context and personal obligation to others in the community is a refreshing and useful lesson for the kids that can extend far beyond the school yard.

As a practical matter, resorting to authority without peer support is often not very effective, and the old standby of the last generation - learning to box or do karate, reinstated into the debate by a Chinese setting remake of the Karate Kid movie, also doesn't work that well in real life. But, peer support does work, and the intervention of someone else on your behalf can make all the difference and resolve the problem in a stable way.

Moreover, this kind of strategy doesn't have to be completely successful to its full extent to work. As long as a small minority of kids in stronger positions than the target of the bullying are induced to intervene when necessary, and a great majority are induced to be less inclined to encourage or support the bullies, the strategy will work. A community in which a significant minority of kids who are in reasonably secure social positions feel a moral obligation to stand by isolated vulnerable kids who are being bullied and are ready to act on it is a community in which bullying is likely to become an undesirable option for would be bullies.

Bullies and Foreign Affairs

A natural analog to this view is what I see as an emerging conventional wisdom in foreign policy and military affairs. The single most decisive factor in determining the outcome of wars is who each side has as allies are in the conflict, and who watches without getting involved. Similarly, cops almost always win in individual confrontations with criminals because they can resort to the resources of a much larger and more cohesive team. Only when criminals band together into gangs, or organized crime families or cartels do they pose a serious challenge to police authority.

The protesters in Egypt and Tunisia couldn't have prevailed if the armed forces in those countries hadn't refused to back the current dictator. Protesters in Bahrain look doomed to failure because Saudi Arabia and other little Gulf monarchies have sent in troops to back that regime.

Protesters in Libya had a harder go of it because Gaddafi was able to utilize family ties and mercenaries to secure greater loyalty from his troops. The willingness of the French to stick out their neck and recognize the rebels in Libya as the legitimate government of Libya, an international consensus to freeze sovereign wealth and leadership group wealth, and yesterday's UN Security Council vote to authorize military force against Gaddafi (with usually anti-interventionist permanent members of the Security Council abstaining rather than vetoing the action) supported by the Arab League, British and French and American military might, and Qatar has changed that game, forcing Gaddafi to reverse his course of action by declaring a cease fire and probably insuring victory for the rebels, at least in the Eastern Benghazi area.

The Taliban were swiftly removed from power because they too found no international allies in the wake of 9-11. Serbia, in contrast, was able to maintain its control over Kosovo for much longer, with Russian backing, and Russian backing has been key to determining who prevails and who does not in conflicts over control in the Caucasus republics. Iraq's lack of allies against broad international coalitions in both the first Gulf War and the Iraq War, led to its defeat in each. Kuwait's ability to secure allies allowed it to resurface despite the fact that it had been crushed militarily and occupied by Iraq.

Tibet fell because no one inside our outside the Chinese government intervened on its behalf against China in 1959. Hungarian reformers in the 1950s, Czech reformers in the wake of the Prague Spring, and Chinese protesters in Beijing were defeated for the same reasons. Outside support from France was important to the success of the Americans in the American revolution. In World War II, decision of the United States to stop sitting on the sidelines was pivotal to the resolution of the conflict.

Until a couple of generations ago, the basic public policy stance on domestic violence was that "what happens in the home is not anyone else's business." And, the basic public policy stance on foreign affairs was that sovereignty provided local political leaders absolute authority to run their domestic affairs as they saw fit.

The attitude towards domestic violence has changed. Now, we arrest people who beat their wives and kids, and people who know about it feel some moral responsibility to summon outside intervention.

The attitude towards sovereignty has changed too, albeit more slowly. The Holocaust, reinforced by examples like genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and Cambodia, and the rediscovery of the Armenian genocide in Anatolia, have helped shape that attitude. In U.S. history, something akin to this view (i.e. that the Civil War was justified because it freed the slaves) legitimatizes the U.S. Civil War. We no longer trust that those in political power will show enough restraint to prevent epic catastrophes in the absence of outside intervention. Increasingly, the international community feels that political leaders for show excessive brutality towards their own people forfeit their sovereign immunity from outside intervention. The international community increasingly feels a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of nations that are being bullied by their neighbors and domestic populations that are being bullied by their leaders.

Even Russia and China have reached a point where they are not going to object to international military intervention when a leader who has lost the support of half of his own military and many of his senior civil servants starts attacking his own people with jet fighters, and promising to slaughter whole cities that have risen up against him. And, even now, this support comes only with the implicit understanding that the international community is intervening only to the extent necessary to prevent mass slaughter of civilians and level the playing field.

Sovereignty still trumps a wide panoply of repressions. Apartheid was sanctioned, but direct intervention wasn't taken; the international community waited for it to collapse from within. Isolated unjustified killings of individuals aren't enough to forfeit it. Very repressive regimes, like those of Burma and North Korea are tolerated. Disregard for electoral outcomes or electoral fraud don't provoke international intervention, nor do illegal coups. But, we have at least reached the point where large scale killings of one's own people crosses a line, after which outside intervention is viewed as acceptable if anyone can be found to volunteer to take on the task.

The citizens of nation that is repressed can secure meaningful international intervention only by taking to the streets or taking up arms, and producing a response from the leaders of that nation that crosses the line.

Still, the international community has advanced from a situation where there truly wasn't any authority beyond the sovereign to one a bit like Medieval Iceland, which had courts to adjudicate when someone's misdeeds rose to the level that justified action, because executing that order, once rendered, was a private affair to be organized and financed by those who show an interest in taking action. Similarly, off the coast of Somalia, the international community has reached a consensus that Somali pirates are legitimate targets, but this determination is being enforced by a loose knit collection of national naval assets.

Excessive isolationism and respect for sovereignty sends a message that greater misconduct by national leaders will be tolerated; while an international community in which some kinds of domestic conduct is viewed as unacceptable and likely to provoke international intervention with real consequences discourages this kind of misconduct by national leaders.

READ MORE - Bullies

Gun Violence Victimization Predictable

Risk of gunshot injuries in urban areas is more greatly concentrated than previously thought. While individual and neighborhood level risk factors contribute to the aggregate rates of violence, this study suggests that most of the actual risk of gun violence is concentrated in a small social network of identifiable individuals.

From here.

READ MORE - Gun Violence Victimization Predictable

Daylight savings time and other annoyances

* So, we're back on daylight savings time, which takes more of the year than standard time. Daylight savings time is like the ultimate popular kid stunt: "I can make the entire country pretend its an hour ealier than it really is, just because I can get everyone to agree with me." And, of course, once it takes off, you really have no choice but to go along. Still, losing an hour in the spring is brutal.

* Washington Park in Denver has a special magical glow that keeps it attractive regardless of what is going on in the outside world. But, I'm beginning to think that it may be a force field instead. I've been trying to stop paying $17 a month for free TV by setting up an antenna. Before I started getting basic cable, I'd tried it from a powered antenna inside my living room and get one or two channels. This weekend, after going to the trouble of setting a powered antenna up on the highest point on my roof, I got absolutely zero reception. Needless to say, I am not very impressed with the digital broadcast TV revolution, although it may simply be that Wash Park is as much of a TV dead zone as it has a reputation for being a cell phone dead zone.

* Another of the great mysteries of life is why old computers accumulate problems. They produce stray, seemingly meaningless error messages. They slow down. Virus scans and disk defragmentation stops helping. It might be possible to remove accumulated programs, but who knows what it is safe to remove. It reaches the point where you'd like to just run the restore disks and start over, but of course, by that point you've invested money in programs and misplaced the restore disks and the original programs with their access codes.

* Then, of course, there are the dreaded smart phones. I held out for the longest time. But, finally, about three years ago, I had to give in because it was expected that you have access to e-mail at all times for work. But, every now and then, you have to change phones, and the switch is painful. It takes weeks to get it back to the unsteady compromise that you have with the machine before you switched, when you knew how to work what you needed and it all worked smoothly.

* My daughter embarks on the brave new world of Home Economics (or whatever they call it these days), today. Rumor has it that the cooking agenda is full of things that we would never actually cook in our own house for want of nutritional value, but such is life. Hello Hamburger Helper(R)!

* The 8.9 magnitude Earthquake which initially seems to have spared Japan too much damage, now seems to have actually inflicted a Katrina class blow as more news reaches the world.

* The situation in Libya is getting ugly, as Kaddafi and the rebels civil war. (On the bright side, the monarch of Oman appears to be ready to convert from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in the next thirty days.)

* Japanese manga and anime make frequent use of images and scenes that draw on the characters of the real story, but rather than being blubs are just riffs on the concepts that aren't part of the story itself, something quite rare in American media (as is the habit of having the author reserving space to directly address the audience). Is there a general name for these extraneous sketches?

* Why do the Denver Assessor's office have a nice online interface for its records, while the Denver Clerk and Recorder's office, which is just as automated, does not have its grantor-grantee index and file images available online? Both are public records. I suspect it is so that the clerk's office can make us pay 25 cents a page for copies and make title companies pay for bulk downloads to escape that problem. But, I'd surely favor any candidate in the current clerk and recorder's race who would promise to put the grantor-grantee index online.

* Some days, you think humanity is on the right track. Some days, you read the news from Cleveland, Texas (mass child molestation of eleven year old in a small town capture on cell phone video), and you are rather less hopeful. Ironically, the crime of taking the video will probably garner stiffer sentences than the underlying crime itself.

* For reasons mysterious to me, a wave of male enhancement product spam is deluging this blog at the moment, I am trying to review new comments an delete the bad ones a rapidly as I can. I still don't see why it is so hard for regulators to determine who the vendors being advertised are, trace them with sample transactions, and use the vendor records to shut these people down. It really is just a handful of industries that leave the bulk of them, and apparently there are not that many spam purveyors out there comprising the bulk of the traffic. They money trail ought to be auditable. Maybe all those SEC employees who were using government computers to watch porn could do it as a form of community service.

* We are about to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day (indeed, many people did this past weekend), after the man famous for converting the pagans of Ireland to Catholicism. Garrison Keillor's show this weekend (part of the show, apparently originally from 1997 are here) explained why this makes quite a bit more sense than celebrating Saint Olaf's day, something riotously funny to a fellow ex-Lutheran. But, in an era of anti-imperialism and distrust of institutions, why not celebrate Saint Francis of Assisi Day instead? (He has a Saint's Day on October 4, but it isn't all that big a deal.) Perhaps Saint Francis Day could be substituted for ever more controversial Columbus Day (October 12), as a day of Italian-American pride.

* The newspaper comics this weekend also posed the ultimate elementary school boy query for March: In a battle between ancient Romans (associated with the Ides of March) and Lepricauns (associated with Saint Patrick's Day) who would win? The particularly frightening aspect of this query is that there is apparently now a television show devoted to such questions, asking in a recent episode with quasi-scientific rigor, who would win in a fight between the Musketeers and the Manchu warriors (whose ancestors apparently have formed an immigrant community to the north of Denver).

* Also, in hopeful news, the Denver Post has reiterated its support for abolishing or narrowing the scope of the death penalty in Colorado. Narrowing the scope of first degree murder to exclude neo-natal homicide by women in the throes of childbirth and felony murder that does not involve triggermen or people who have solicited a murder would be a good start, and if applied retroactively, would improve the state of the state budget and greatly reduce the ranks of juveniles serving life without parole in the state.

READ MORE - Daylight savings time and other annoyances

Neuroscience of Binge Drinking Better Understood

[M]anipulating two receptors in the brain, GABA receptors and toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), "caused profound reduction" of binge drinking for two weeks in rodents that had been bred and trained to drink excessively." The study was published online the week of Feb. 28 in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

About 30 percent of Americans who drink do so excessively, and about 75,000 people die each year from the effects of excessive drinking. Current treatments for excessive alcohol drinking include prescription drugs Revia and Campral for controlling cravings. To ease withdrawal symptoms, doctors often prescribe medications such as Valium and Librium that carry their own risks of addiction. Valium and Librium reduce the anxiety alcoholics feel when they stop drinking but do not reduce cravings for alcohol.

The new study found that treatments that manipulate both the GABA receptor and toll-like receptor 4 have the potential to reduce anxiety and control cravings, with little to no risk for addiction[.] . . .

GABA receptors are a class of receptors in the brain that react to the neurotransmitter GABA and act as inhibitory receptors, calming down or inhibiting the activity of neurons in the brain. GABA receptors react to alcohol, giving drinkers a calm and euphoric feeling and reinforcing excessive drinking behavior. . . . This is the first scientific study to document GABA receptors' key involvement in binge drinking specifically, though scientists already believed that the receptors had a role in excessive drinking in general. . . .

Science has traditionally considered TLR4 to be an innate immunity receptor involved with neuroinflammation in the brain. Scientists associated TLR4 with microglia, cells that support inflammatory responses in the brain. "What makes this finding particularly important for the field of neuroscience is that we're showing that TLR4 plays a significant role in neurons, specifically, the neurons that are connected to the GABA receptor," . . . . To establish the connection between the GABA receptors, TLR4 and alcohol, the scientists manipulated this pathway in the binge drinking rodents . . . [with] a herpes viral vector . . . to deliver a gene-modifying agent directly to the neurons in the brain, to target TLR4 and GABA receptors. The scientists found that when they artificially stimulated the GABA receptors and TLR4 in order to simulate the good feelings binge drinkers feel when drinking alcohol, the rats lost interest in alcohol for two weeks after the procedure.

Compounds exist that would stimulate the receptors in the same way the scientists did in the study. "It's very likely that, down the road, these compounds could become new therapies for binge drinking . . . These compounds would act like a substitute for alcohol, much like methadone acts as a substitute for heroin. They would help alcoholics stop drinking, giving them relief from their cravings and from the anxiety that they try to alleviate with drinking."

From here.

So, drugs to end a predisposition to binge drink may be on the horizon in our near future, and there is a methodological precedent for determining a cause and developing a treatment for other kinds of substance addictions.

Given the strong connection between alcoholism and other kinds of substance abuse, and a wide range of socially unacceptable behavior and crimes, the next question is whether these treatments promise a world in which those social ills are dramatically less of problem.

Also, if such drugs existed, what would it take to get binge drinkers to take it? Will drug testing for probationers cease to become a matter of seeing that they aren't taking illegal drugs and become a matter of confirming that they are taking drugs that treat their vulnerabilities?

Given the poor track record of science at observing ethical standards with vulnerable or institutionalized populations, there is also good reason to fear abuses along the same lines in the future.

There may also be an upside to the complexity of many polygenetic mental health traits. While it may take just a single disruption of one of thousands of genes that go into a health functioning brain, if dysfunctional processes are equally complex, a single way to disrupt that process may deal with problems that have a wide variety of causes. This seems to be the story of modern psychiatry. We have found drugs that can manipulate a handful of neurochemicals in the brain, but those drugs treat a large number of patients with neurochemical imbalances in the neurochemical systems that most commonly go awry.

Drugs that act on neurochemical receptors and reuptake channels seems to address a great many mental health conditions. This part of the brain seems particularly succeptable to treatment with drugs. There may be other parts of the brain that are equally important, perhaps miswired neurons, for example, but we don't understand how to treat them as well.

READ MORE - Neuroscience of Binge Drinking Better Understood

Science Shorts

Physics News

The news in the land of physics is one of tighter experimental boundaries on potential weird stuff a.k.a. "new physics" without actually finding any or ruling it out.

I've previously mentioned the closing parameter space of SUSY. The LIGO and VIRGO experiments designed to detect gravity waves have similarly not found them but have placed experimental limits on their magnitude (although still about tens times larger that their expected magnitude apparently). Our Secretary of Energy, who is also a practicing physicist, is a co-author of a recent paper putting experimental limits on any potential deviations from the general theory of relativity attributable to quantum gravity theories (any deviations are less than one part per million of a certain kind of atom interferometry measurement).

New measurements have increased with accuracy with which we can determine the distance of some of the farthest galaxies which allows more precision in estimating the amount of dark energy in the universe (or, more or less equivalently, the value of the cosmological constant in general relativity).

The Large Hadron Collider (same source) has also put limits on the maximum size of any preons that could be present if quarks were composite, rather than fundamental particles: "if quarks are made of smaller particles, the constituents are no larger than 60 trillionths of a billionth of a meter in diameter. That new limit, about 60 percent smaller than the previous estimate[.]"

In terms more familiar to most people who work with subatomic physics that is 10^-21 meters. Alternately, in terms of the Plank length, the new limit is about 10^12 Plank length units. The semi-classical diameter of an electron is 10^17 Plank length units, while the semi-classical diameter of a proton is 10^20 Plank length units. (I use the caveat semi-classical because it isn't obvious that it is real meaningful to think of fundamental particles like quarks and electrons as anything other than point-like for most purposes.) Thus, the Large Hadron Collider tells us that any component part of a quark has to be at least one hundred thousand times smaller than an electron. Data gathered but not yet analyzed from LHC should make it possible to probe limits half that size.

Many physicists expect that the "minimum length" called the Plank length, is 1.616252(81)×10^−35 meters, based on natural combinations of Plank's constant (which measures the minimum energy of photons of particular wave lengths), the gravitational constant and the speed of light. String theorists, likewise, often assume that the string of string theory are of lengths on the order of magnitude of the Plank length. Thus, the LHC findings, themselves aren't inconsistent with the possibility of composite quarks and electrons although there is really nothing to indicate that they exist either.

The bottom line from all of these studies is that the Standard Model and General Relativity continue to be accurate descriptions to the universe to remarkable levels of precision, despite some lingering concerns about unexpected CP violations in the Standard Model and some theoretical disconnects between the two fundamental theories that crop up only in domains we don't have a capacity to observe at this point.

The vast majority of physicists I'm aware of who study quantum mechanics and general relativity think that there is something beyond these theories to discover and I agree with them. But, whatever new physics are out there, it is also increasingly clear that it is very subtle. In the same way, one can still do a lot of very good science and engineering in a wide variety of useful areas using classical Newtonian mechanics and gravity, classical thermodynamics, Maxwell's Equations for electro-magnetism, a proton-neutron-electron model of the atom, and the Periodic table.

It isn't that modern physics is irrelevant. Every computer designer relies on quantum tunnelling to make the machines work. Every cell phone and GPS unit makes calculations that require the application of general relativity from moment to moment. Both general relativity and quantum mechanics provide insights critical to making nuclear power plants, nuclear bombs, cancer treatments and carbon dating work. But, the weird physics that goes into making these things work seems a lot less weird when broken down to the particular aspect of them that matters for an engineering application and the average person doesn't need to know the science behind these devices and can simply view them as "black boxes" that produce certain results when used in particular ways.

It isn't at all obvious that "new physics" will have any practical engineering applications at all, even if it would be an immense source of intellectual pride and accomplishment for our species.

Also (from the news link above):

Supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, previously estimated to range in mass between 10 million to 1 billion suns, may weigh about one-half to one-tenth as much. . . . The downsizing indicates that black holes in distant and nearby galaxies weigh about the same, eliminating what had been a puzzling mismatch.

One of the more interesting experimental facts from astronomy is the close relationship between the size of a black hole and the size of its surrounding matter, and the apparent maximum black hole size that is observed. A finding that black holes in distant galaxies (whose light started moving towards us more deeply in the past) are similar in size to black holds in galaxies that are closer (and hence sending light from a less distant part of the past) would seem to rule out a scenario in which the earliest black holes were very large and have steadily shrunk over time due to Hawking radiation, and also a scenario in which the earliest black holes were very small and have steadily grown over time due to the absorbtion of more surrounding material. Shrinkage and growth appear to be roughly balanced over a long span of the history of the universe.

Psychopathy Starts Young

Finallly, the evidence that psychopathy is an early onset condition that manifests as early as age seven (or even age three!) continues to mount, most recently from a study of 9,578 British school children evaluated by teachers and parents at ages 7, 9 and 12, for behavior problems and callous-unemotional traits. The researchers involved in the latest study on the point specifically disavow the loaded "psychopth" word, because research has not yet established a definitive link between callous-unemotional traits in children with behavior problems and psychopathic traits in adults, but another study found "that 3-year-olds who have difficulties learning to fear impending punishments in lab experiments — a key facet of callous-unemotional traits — commit criminal offenses at much higher rates than their peers by age 23."

When an unrelenting penchant for misbehaving joins forces with lack of emotion, guilt and empathy, 7-year-olds are headed for years of severe conduct problems. . . . Youngsters who regularly misbehave and get into trouble at age 7, and who also display so-called callous-unemotional traits, frequently stay on a troubled course until at least age 12. . . . 5 to 10 percent of schoolchildren persistently engage in antisocial behaviors such as fighting, lying and stealing. . . . A total of 4.4 percent of these children, mostly boys, exhibited high levels of both misbehavior and callous-unemotional traits throughout the study. Compared with their peers, this group of youngsters came from particularly chaotic families that used harsh forms of punishment. These kids also displayed many hyperactive symptoms and got along poorly with peers. Another 4 percent of kids in the study displayed consistent conduct problems with either increasing or decreasing levels of callous-unemotional traits from age 7 to 12. . .

[C]hildren with high levels of callous-unemotional traits almost always misbehaved regularly. In contrast, only about half of the kids who constantly misbehaved also lacked remorse, guilt and empathy, indicating that a variety of influences play into conduct problems. . . . callous-unemotional children respond best to interventions that reward them for good behavior rather than punishing them for misdeeds[.]

"Adult psychopaths similarly show no remorse for crimes and blunted emotional reactions, although they often possess considerable empathy that they use to prey on others." Adult psychopaths respond best to the same kinds of incentives.

An important reason to care is that the DSM-V definition of conduct disorder is being revisited and there is faction that thinks it should distinguish callous-unemotional conduct disorder as something distinct from mere chronic misbehavior.

“I’m not suggesting that these children are psychopaths, but callous-unemotional traits can be used to identify kids at risk of persistent, severe antisocial behavior,” said psychologist Nathalie Fontaine of Indiana University in Bloomington, who directed the study. These findings indicate that callous-unemotional traits should be factored into the definition of a particularly virulent form of childhood conduct disorder in the next manual of psychiatric disorders, Fontaine said. Chronic misbehavior alone defines conduct disorder in the current fourth edition of the psychiatric manual used by doctors to define mental ailments, now being revised.

There are about 3 million children born each year in the United States. About 150,000 to 300,000 of them will persistently engage in anti-social behavior. About 13,000 to 26,000 of them, one or two in every couple hundred, will have notable callous-unemotional streaks. These patterns of behavior, if not in place at birth, are at least in place by the time they are in elementary school.

The extent to which it is becoming clear that both future academic performance and future behavior is predictable in early elmentary school is remarkable. But, we don't really know what to do with this knowledge. The only career paths we seem to have in our society for callous-unemotional children is gang hitman and Ponzi scheme engineer, which aren't precisely the sort of paths we'd like to encourage. Similarly, we aren't really sure what to do in our society with mentally retarded children. We don't even have support groups for parents of children who do things like torture little animals, con teachers and bully peers, much to the consternation of the adults in their lives. Sometimes we try to hold those parents morally responsibile, but we don't offer them a lot of organized resources for coping.

Alas, psychopathy (and close cousins like "borderline personality disorder") isn't anything as simple as some particular gene with a simple inheritance pattern. They've looked. It isn't there. It may be hereditary, and almost certainly has a strong congenital component at the very least, although environmental factors may influence how it develops. But, the family histories that researchers have seen involve a variety of mental health issues in a fairly wide swath of cousins and uncles and aunts, as well as closer relations, rather than a simple parent to child pattern. It isn't uncommon for siblings to be very different in this regard - one typically empathetic, another calleous and unemotional. Apparently, there are a number of pieces of the puzzle, some of which are symptomatic even by themselves, that have to come together to produce a person who has this kind of emotional makeup that are relatively independent of each other. Nobody has found a drug that turns callous-unemotional children into loving empathetic ones either.

READ MORE - Science Shorts

Mexico Still Deep In Drug War

Police in drug violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, say more than 50 people have been killed in a three-day span. The El Paso Times reported Monday that the 53 victims, between Thursday and Saturday, included a police officer, a municipal patrolman and a state investigator.

From here.

12 taxi drivers have been killed in attacks in Acapulco, Mexico. Acapulco also recently saw four men bound and tossed off a six hundred foot bridge:

Four men with their hands and feet tied and heads covered in duct tape were thrown 600 feet to their deaths from a bridge Friday, authorities said as Mexico's increasingly bloody drug battles reached a new level of cruelty and intimidation.

The four were among 13 people slain Friday in Guerrero, which has seen a spike in violence since rival factions of the Beltran Leyva cartel began fighting over territory after leader Arturo Beltran Leyva died in a battle with Mexican marines in December 2009.

The other nine were killed in the resort city of Acapulco. In the most gruesome of those killings, police found a severed head that had been scalped and whose face had been skinned. . . .

Nationwide, nearly 35,000 people have been killed in drug-gang violence since President Felipe Calderon deployed troops and federal police four years ago to crush the cartels in their strongholds.

Just the thing to get you excited about a vacation in a Mexican resort on the beach, where an international tennis tournament is currently underway.

READ MORE - Mexico Still Deep In Drug War

Sexual Freedom v. Freedom From Exploitation

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows that I have strong opinions on a great many issues. But, now and then, a case comes along that is so hard to evaluate, that it is very hard to see a right answer. The case of the 41 year old British man with an IQ of 48 who was in a same sex relationship and banned from having sex is one such case. It presents hard issues that are worth grappling with in a situation that is unfamiliar to most of us.

The Facts

The facts, insofar as we know them are as follows:

The 41 year-old [man] had been in a relationship with a man with whom he lived and told officials "it would make me feel happy" for it to continue.

But his local council, which provides his accommodation, decided his "vigorous sex drive" was inappropriate and that with an IQ of 48 and a "moderate" learning disability, he did not understand what he was doing. . . . the man known as Alan was described as being physically able but "seriously challenged in all aspects of his mental functionality". He lived in a home provided by the council, where he developed a sexual relationship with a man called Kieron by the court. Alan was also accused of making lewd gestures at children in a dentists' surgery and on a bus, although no police action was taken.

An IQ of 48 is a level of intellectual functioning lower than 99.8% of the general population, and is commonly described as "moderate mental retardation" per the DSM-IV. It is roughly equivalent to having the mental abilities of an eight year old child.

The Law

The law in Britain gives the state broad powers in such a case: "Under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, [judges on Britain's Court of Protection] have the power to make life-or-death decisions for people deemed to lack the intelligence to make them for themselves - such as ordering that they undergo surgery, have forced abortions, have life-support switched off or be forced to use contraception."

In Colorado, and most U.S. states, an individual in this situation would probably have a legal guardian appointed for him under the supervision of a general jurisdiction or probate court or some other court with comparable equity jurisdiction (a type of jurisdiction named after the British courts that once, but no longer, have jurisdiction over these kinds of cases). In Colorado, a guardian's authority can vary from case to case as set forth in a judge's order, although at common law a guardian of an adult had rights comparable to the rights of a natural parent's rights when that parent's child is in the parent's custody.

In other words, while the issue would present itself somewhat differently, a U.S. court could probably grant a guardian of an adult with an IQ of 48 the right to decisions similar to the ones made by the Court in this British case.

Procedural History

The town hall began court proceedings in 2009 to restrict contact with Kieron on the grounds that he lacked mental capacity, and an interim order was made. . . . A psychiatrist involved in the case tried to prevent the man being given sex education, on the grounds that it would leave him "confused".

Mr Justice Mostyn said the case was "legally, intellectually and morally" complex as sex is "one of the most basic human functions" and the court must "tread especially carefully" when the state tries to curtail it.

But he agreed that the man, known only as Alan, should not be allowed to have intercourse with anyone on the grounds that he did not have the mental capacity to understand the health risks associated with his actions.

Under the judge's order, the man is now subject to "close supervision" by the local authority to ensure he does not break the highly unusual order. The judge concluded: "Alan does not have the capacity to consent to and engage in sexual relations.

"In such circumstances it is agreed that the present regime for Alan's supervision and for the prevention of future sexual activity is in his best interests."

"Since then Alan has been subjected to close supervision to prevent any further sexual activity on his part," said the judge.

Analysis

There are good reasons to be skeptical of this kind of court order. The eugenics movement sponsored movement in the 20th century to sterilize the mentally retarded is generally seen as a class historical instance of government exploitation of vulnerable individuals. There is also a history of government abusing its authority to punish gays in the name of mental hygiene. Some high profile cases in Britain involving prominent intellectuals are particularly notorious.

On the other hand, the exploitation, sexual and otherwise, of people who don't have the capacity to consent intelligently to what people ask of them is also a long standing problem. A central theme of Steig Larsson's Millennium Series (which starts with "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo") is that vulnerable people, such as wards with guardians appointed for them and illegal immigrant women are subject to a horrible injustice when they are sexually exploited. Sexual exploitation is sufficiently common in this situations that in the popular imagination, at least, at is seen as almost the unpleasant norm in prisons, foster care situations, and households where an impoverished single mother lives with a boyfriend unrelated to her children.

We have statutory rape laws that declare that children under a certain age are incapable of consenting to sex and that someone who does so has committed the crime of rape. While those laws can be controversial when applied to high schoolers who are past puberty and routine have sex with each other, there is a wide consensus that they are appropriate when applied to pre-pubescent children. Likewise, while there is intense controversy over the harsh sentences imposed for people who merely view child pornography, and over the near criminalization of innocent child nudity, there is widespread consensus that it is a serious crime to use pre-pubescent children to create pornography or to pimp out pre-pubescent child prostitutes, and that there is a genuine government interest in destroying the economic market that drives its creation.

Certainly, there would be a very wide consensus that is would be a serious crime for an adult to have sex with an eight year old, regardless of the sex of the parties involved.

But, there are many important ways that a 41 year old is different from an 8 year old, even if they have similar mental capacities. Adults routinely have sex for pleasure. Many adults men are gay or bisexual. Eight year olds have genuine opinions and feelings and are capable of engaging in surprisingly sophisticated relationship, of understanding differences between right and wrong to a considerable extent, and consenting to a variety of agreements. Most parents allow their eight year olds to make many choices about their clothes and room decor and food to eat when eating out, to largely choose their own friends at school, and to spend small amounts of money as they see fit. Eight year olds can play baseball and board games, can hug each other and family members in genuine expressions of love, and make many other decisions for themselves.

Even though statutory rape is often theorized as an incapacity to consent, there is really more to it. Pre-pubescent children aren't just intellectually incapable of consent, they are hormonally and physically not yet at a stage of development where their bodies are ready for sex.

Statutory rape laws for adolescents, which were almost universally adopted initially with the understanding that they would pertain to adolescent or adult men seeking to have sex with teenage girls, were also rooted in the concern that teenage girls due to their youth and adolescent impulsivity are especially vulnerable to making impulsive bad decisions that have the potential to carry with them the serious long term consequences of pregnancy, parenthood and quite possibly either a shotgun marriage for life or a lifetime in which one is unmarriagable and destitute as a result.

A different way to view statutory rape laws, that is gaining increasing credence, is to view statutory rape not as an incapacity to consent in the same class as a stranger drugging you and then having sex with you, but as a distinct subset of cases where someone in a position of trust (by virtue of being an adult in states where there is a Romeo and Juliet exception) abuses that position of trust. In this view, statutory rape is less like a date rape drug case and more like a sexual harassment of a subordinate employee case. The gravamen of the wrong is abuse of power within a relationship by someone whom we presume under the law should know better than to do so.

There is also a widespread view that sexual relationships carried on by someone who isn't ready for them or capable of "truly understanding" what sex involves (do any of us ever really reach that blissful state) will inflict intense psychological trauma that will destroy a person's entire well being, also making it far more serious than other kinds of things to which one might consent.

If a 41 year old man who is physically ready for sex, and perfectly well could be homosexual or bisexual, is voluntarily (to the extent that his eight year old intellectual capacity permits) having sex with another man and enjoying the experience, who is to say that it really is wrong?

This man doesn't appear to be suffering from psychological trauma. He doesn't have to worry about having children or being rendered unmarriagable or forced into a marriage that can't be legally terminated. His body, and no doubt his hormones, are ready for sex and have been for decades. Finding someone who is ready and willing to satisfy his sexual drive probably isn't very easy for a 41 year old with an IQ of 48 who lives on welfare in public housing. It is certainly plausible that Alan is gay or bisexual (indeed, by some definitions his acts and words are sufficient to say that this is true as a matter of definition), that the relationship between Alan and Kieron is as sincere, voluntary, loving and non-exploitative as the sexual relationship between any two single adults, and that the town's intervention is simply a case of an inability to genuinely come to terms with the idea that two men can have legitimate, loving sexual relationships. There are certainly strong hints in this case that this is what is happening in this situation.

On the other hand, it certainly wouldn't be implausible that Kieron is an evil hearted, exploitative manipulator who has managed to get Alan to say things that hide Alan's inner feelings of pain and being used and compelled into something that makes him uncomfortable that Alan isn't capable of articulating to legal system officials in that kind of atmosphere and that Alan has no sexual attraction to Kieron, but has trouble distinguishing between sexual attraction and the kind of platonic physical contact that is normal between eight year old boys.

While Kieron's motives aren't the center of the court's inquiry, which is really about what is best of Alan, it is certainly possible to see Alan as being in a position a bit like someone who is acting happy because he has been tricked into thinking that he has formed a relationship that was really just a scheme to make him the butt of a cruel joke and doesn't know it yet, but is sure to be furiously angry and miserably sad when he realizes it.

By analogy, contrary to common belief, a large share of bona fide childhood sexual abuse victims have trouble remembering the incidents because they weren't as aware of the special meaning that our culture attaches to sexual contacts at the time, and feel the bulk of the psychological trauma that they experience not when the sexual abuse actually takes place, but when they get old enough to gain an understanding of that special meaning and finally realize that an adult whom they trusted exploited them all those years ago. A reasonable person could fear that Alan is at grave risk of experiencing a similar kind of traumatic realization and suffering dearly at a psychological level when and if that happens.

If one thinks that absence of capacity to consent is really all that matters in a case like this one, Kieron's motives are irrelevant and people with the intellectual capacity of eight year olds are morally equivalent to actual eight year olds and shouldn't be subjected to sexual activity. But, if the important question is really abuse of a position of trust that Kieron holds as the intellectually normal close friend of mentally retarded Alan, then Kieron's motives and what is going on in the interactions between Kieron and Alan matter a great deal to the merits of whether a court should or should not prevent Alan from having sex with Kieron.

On balance, I'm skeptical of the British judge and town government's decisions in this case. It bears the stink of a lot of unreasonable prejudices. But, I also recognize that this decision is a highly fact specific inquiry for which ordinary social intuition provides few exact precedents, and that decision makers further removed from the facts are at a decided disadvantage. It is hard to say with any great degree of certainty from the little that we know that the judge's decision was clearly wrong in this unfamiliar territory.

READ MORE - Sexual Freedom v. Freedom From Exploitation