Word: prison
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...judge Eddie Hardaway. Although several witnesses say the gunman was black, Hardaway believes white people put him up to it. He sees no connection between the shootings and the rash of church arsons--but other blacks do. In January, Hardaway sentenced two young white men to five years in prison for vandalizing black churches in Sumter County. The day the sentences were reported in the local newspaper, fire destroyed two churches in neighboring Greene County. "Those fires," says Barrown Lankster, the local district attorney, "could have been set by someone who was angry about the sentences. We won't know...
...common misperception is that putting someone to death saves the greater economic cost of housing them in prison. However, due to the extensive legal fees of the appeals system, the death penalty costs more than three times as much as life imprisonment. One could maintain that the appeals system should not be as extensive. Yet this claim introduces the most powerful and most common, argument against the death penalty...
...Captain Trash, Thomas Derrah amazes. Trash looks like a gum-chewing heroin addict, but in his escape from prison (the unbelievable number "Rat Seraban") and trip to Russia ("Russia's a big motha," he says), he proves he is more than just a whining yesman. "I think we should rip off their necks and piss down their throats," he suggests matter-of-factly. Derrah has never been more funny...
...Whereas jail was once seen as a place for penitence and growth, where people who went wrong could change themselves and improve, we now associate jail with an overly expensive and dangerous cage. In jail little of value occurs; instead, increased rage is generated. Those who emerge from the prison doors are now greeted with the black rose of society in the form of an inescapable reminder of their past crimes...
...keepers of the conservative flame now consider it "anti-American" to target scapegoats and misuse patriotism for cheap political advantage. They're right. But do they by any chance remember the sneery majoritarianism of George Bush's campaign of 1988--the one all about saluting the flag and prison furloughs? Maybe they even remember back to 1968 and 1972, when Pat Buchanan helped Richard Nixon start this fine Republican tradition...