Word: felons
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...hold only 5% of the nation's criminal population while costing far more to run than all the crimes committed by their inmates. Pessimism is well founded, but the encouraging sign is that few if any Americans defend the system as it is. From the President to the lowliest felon, the nation wants a humane system that truly curbs crime. This is the year of the prisons, the year when Congress may double federal spending (to $300 million) to spur local reform, the year when something may finally get clone and Americans may well heed Dostoevsky's goading words...
Jail conditions frequently breed hardened criminals who then go on to the prisons themselves, the second anomaly in a pattern that stands as a monument to irrationality. The typical U.S. felon is sentenced by a judge who may have never seen a prison and has no idea whether x years will suffice. Leaving the courtroom, where his rights were scrupulously respected, the felon has a good chance of being banished to one of 187 escape-proof fortresses, 61 of them built before 1900. Now stripped of most rights, he often arrives in chains and becomes a number. His head sheared...
...Kansas has heeded Psychiatrist Karl Menninger, a searing prison critic (The Crime of Punishment), and set up a felon's "diagnostic center" near the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. The state now sends all prison-bound felons to the center for exhaustive tests by four full-time psychiatrists and numerous other experts. Result: half these men get probation. Among all such Kansas probationers, the failure rate has dropped to 25%, much less than in other states. Congress has approved a similar $15 million center in New York City to screen federal defendants after arrest...
...raises doubts. In a couple of recent cases, no charges have been lodged. But last week the U.S. Attorney's office in Providence said it was seriously considering action against Stringfellow and Towne. They base their defense on moral rather than legal grounds. They knowingly harbored a convicted felon; indeed, they freely admitted it after Berrigan was taken. But they did so for what seemed to them just and noble motives. Stringfellow seemed undisturbed at the prospect of criminal proceedings. "I suppose," he remarked, "that everybody is in jeopardy nowadays...
Caldron Cookery: An Authentic Guide for Coven Connoisseurs bv Marcello Truzzi, illustrated bv Victoria Chess. I 15 pages. Meredith. $3.95. Having exhausted everything from aardvark fried in yak butter to zabaglione a zingari, the compilers of cookbooks have turned to something really occult. Bats, eye of newt, serpents, felon's hands and less mentionable exotica seem to have formed the staple diet of the industrious witch. It should be said that this book serves no culinary purpose except perhaps to divert conversation among guests from the infamous concoctions some contemporary witch may happen to be serving in the name...