Word: prisoners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...middle of a small Nebraska community (much of the film was shot near Lincoln) and a cross section of citizens trying to cope with their repressive new society. Devin Milford (Kris Kristofferson), a former antiwar activist and candidate for President, has just been released after six years in a prison camp. Returning home, he finds his proud but disillusioned farm family hanging on to the last vestiges of their dwindling land. A boyhood friend (Robert Urich) has become a county administrator and, almost against his will, a rising star in the new government hierarchy...
...blame. Parents still have fights with their children, only now the argument over whether Dad has pulled strings to get his daughter into a dance company has nasty overtones of political collaboration. Even the smallest details are shrewdly familiar: the bored, hollow-eyed bureaucrat who processes Devin out of prison ("You got a red-tag file . . . It's probably screwed up, most of 'em are"); a forlorn production of The Fantasticks in an underheated school auditorium; a family bickering over dinner about the squatters camping out on their farmland...
...essential for getting courts to consider alternative sentencing, says University of Chicago Law Professor Norval Morris, is to develop a publicly understood "exchange rate" between prison time and other forms of punishment, a table of penalties that judges can use for guidance on how to sentence offenders. "We should be able to say that for this crime by this ; criminal, either x months in prison, or a $50,000 fine plus home detention for a year plus x number of hours of community service," Morris contends...
...similar table is already in use in Minnesota, where alternative sentencing has become well established since the 1978 passage of a law that limits new sentences to ensure that prison capacity is not exceeded by the total number of inmates. The crime rate has not increased, supporters boast. Other states remain far more hesitant. Still, the present pressures may yet bring a day when the correctional possibilities will be so varied and so widely used that prison will seem the "alternative" form of punishment...
...President George Bush confirmed that another American hostage, CIA Beirut Station Chief William Buckley, was killed last year by his captors. Anderson and Sutherland were abducted in the spring of 1985 by Shi'ite radicals. Their captors' principal demand: the release of 17 presumed Shi'ites who are serving prison sentences for, among other things, terrorist attacks on the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait. Three other Americans, Joseph Cicippio, Frank Reed and Edward Tracy, are said to be held by groups called the Revolutionary Justice Organization and Arab Revolutionary Cells-Omar Moukhtar Forces...