Too many laws in the U.S defy basic human rights principles of justice by resorting to overly punitive sentences for nonviolent and low-level crimes, according to a report published Tuesday by Human Rights Watch.
(TriceEdneyWire.com) — The civil rights community’s get-out-the-vote machine is slowly reawakening. But given what’s at stake in this year’s mid-term elections, activists say, GOTV (Get Out The Vote) campaigners need to shake off their malaise—ASAP.
Just a few months ago, Florida Republican leaders were backing a legal challenge to oppose a medical marijuana ballot initiative in the state, saying it would lead to the “Coloradoification” of the state.
Veteran actor Danny Glover, who spoke Sunday at The University of Chicago during the school’s Annual Public Lecture Series, said the Academy Award-winning movie “12 Years a Slave,” deeply affected him.
he US Justice Department is pursuing criminal investigations of financial institutions that could result in action in the coming weeks and months, US attorney general Eric Holder said in a video, adding that no company was “too big to jail.”
NEWARK, N.J. – On one level, the race to succeed U.S. Sen. Cory Booker as mayor of New Jersey’s largest city is a local political contest with the candidates debating issues familiar to urban America: intractable violent crime, a struggling school district challenged by charter schools, a perpetual battle to attract development and create jobs.
As prosecutors across Maryland wait for the new law that will remove criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana, they’re taking a patchwork approach in the way they handle such cases.
Impacted communities have long slammed U.S. policies of mass incarceration that are locking up more people than any other country in the world. Now that criticism is also resounding from the highly-regarded National Research Council (an arm of the National Academy of Sciences), which issued a devastating report this week charging that “unprecedented” levels incarceration are spreading great social harm.
The individual analyses of the economists and drug policyexperts, signed by five Nobel Prize winners in economics, expose the collateral damage of the drug war and offer suggestions on how the policies can—and should—change.
The war on drugs has been a $1tn failure. For more than four decades, governments around the world have pumped huge sums of money into ineffective and repressive anti-drug efforts.