Word: penal
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...Erika and a pimp named Helga. For two hard-working years, they saved money to go into business as antique dealers. Then Helga ran off with the money. Heartbroken-and furious-Erika went to the police and charged Helga with pimping, but the case was dismissed because the German penal code recognizes only men as procurers. That legal bias will be corrected some time next fall, when a new law will make pimping by either sex a criminal offense. Small comfort for Erika, however. Her once beloved Helga has already used Erika's earnings to open an antique shop...
Their deaths last December were violent evidence of a serious new form of prison unrest. They did not die in an ordinary penitentiary riot, but in a full-scale street-gang rumble, transported virtually intact from the Chicago slums into the prison. Gang activity now plagues penal systems not only in Illinois but in California, New Jersey and New York, among others. Indeed, nearly every prison that draws inmates from large urban areas these days must deal with gangs operating behind bars...
...sentencing be done not by judges but by officials more closely familiar with prisoners, for instance parole authorities. Indeed California and a few other states have adopted a so-called "indeterminate sentencing" policy under which an offender stays in jail for as long or as short a time as penal officials think necessary for rehabilitation. Frankel thinks that this much-touted liberal reform amounts merely to passing the power of abuse along. Besides, he notes, the hard truth is that there is no successful prison rehabilitation to speak...
...willing to pay the money it would take to really get tough." That is, authorities are not willing to build and staff the necessary new courthouses and penitentiaries. Only one-tenth of next year's $2.6 billion federal anti-crime budget, for instance, is earmarked for court or penal purposes...
Though he spent 18 months in a Danbury, Conn., prison for stealing draft files, Berrigan said he has no plans to work for penal reform: "I don't believe I can do anything significant with an institution that is so blatantly repressive." he said, "There is a need to deal with larger problems...