Cecily McMillan: On Being a Woman Inside and Outside of the Criminal Justice System →

Last week, I got the chance to catch up with Cecily about her activism, her experiences with the criminal justice system and the myriad ways that gender shaped both her own experiences and those of incarcerated women.

If you haven't heard of McMillan's case, here's why you should be concerned:

On March 17, 2012, Cecily McMillan, a graduate student and Occupy activist was arrested at Zuccotti Park and charged with assaulting a police officer, a felony that carries a seven-year prison sentence. McMillan did elbow the officer in the eye; however, it was a reflexive response to him violently groping her breast while arresting her. Although she has the scars to prove it, she was still sentenced to three months at Rikers Island.

There was video evidence, as well. Travesty of justice.

Raising Hands to Join Peacekeeping Forces →

Potentially very good news for global governance:

Japan said it would change its laws in order to be able to send soldiers on United Nations peacekeeping missions. Mexico said it would revive its involvement in United Nations peacekeeping. Indonesia, Mongolia and Bangladesh promised to prepare troops for rapid deployment.

...

There are more peacekeepers than ever before — 130,000 troops, police officers and civilian staff members, according to the United Nations. Attacks on them are rising.

‘What the Isis jihadis lose in strength from the air strikes they may gain in legitimacy’ →

Most importantly, by overlooking the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which caused the death of nearly 200,000 Syrians, the air strikes create the perception that the international coalition is providing a lifeline to the regime. Despite repeated reassurance by Washington, such a perception is likely to become entrenched if the Assad regime begins to fill the vacuum left by the offensive against Isis, especially that there has been no evidence yet that the opposition forces are part of the military strategy against Isis.

House Passes Regional Elections Bill, Scraps Direct Voting →

The House of Representatives voted in the early hours of Friday 226-135 in favor of passing a bill that takes away people’s right to vote for mayors, district heads and governors, and gives it instead to regional legislatures.

Eric Holder To Step Down As Attorney General →

President Obama said on Thursday that Holder, 63, intends to leave the Justice Department as soon as his successor is confirmed, a process that could run through 2014 and even into next year

DEFENSE CONTRACTORS ARE MAKING A KILLING →

War is big business.

The Pentagon recently estimated that military operations in Iraq were costing an average of $7.5 million a day between June and last week — an annual rate of about $2.7 billion. But even if costs ballooned to, say, $15 billion a year, the figure would still be dwarfed by the approximately $1.3 billion a week we’re still spending in Afghanistan.

And for now, there’s no cash flow problem: Obama can just dip into the “Overseas Contingency Operations” budget, the $85 billion ”all-purpose war funding credit card” Congress just gave him – $26 billion more than he had even asked for.

Books for the Horde: The New Jim Crow, Chapters 2 and 3 →

This sounds like an incredible book:

On the financial incentives implicit in the War on Drugs:

In fact, the Times reported that police departments had an extraordinary incentive to use their new equipment for drug enforcement: the extra federal funding the local police departments received was tied to antidrug policing. The size of the disbursements was linked to the number of city or county drug arrests. Each arrest, in theory, would net a given city or county about $153 in state and federal funding .... As a result, when Jackson County, Wisconsin, quadrupled its drug arrests between 1999 and 2000, the county’s federal subsidy quadrupled too .... Suddenly, police departments were capable of increasing the size of their budgets, quite substantially, simply by taking the cash, cars, and homes of people suspected of drug use or sales.

On the (predictable) result of these incentives—plunder:

One highly publicized case involved a reclusive millionaire, Donald Scott, who was shot and killed when a multiagency task force raided his two-hundred-acre Malibu ranch purportedly in search of marijuana plants. They never found a single marijuana plant in the course of the search. A subsequent investigation revealed that the primary motivation for the raid was the possibility of forfeiting Scott’s property. If the forfeiture had been successful, it would have netted the law enforcement agencies about $5 million in assets. In another case, William Munnerlynn had his Learjet seized by the DEA after he inadvertently used it to transport a drug dealer. Though charges were dropped against him within seventy-two hours, the DEA refused to return his Learjet. Only after five years of litigation and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees was he able to secure return of his jet. When the jet was returned, it had sustained $100,000 worth of damage.

A sense of injustice in China? →

In fact, there is an alternative reading of Whyte's data that comes to a somewhat darker conclusion. It is true that there is a large majority in Chinese society who are optimistic about the direction of change China is undergoing, and who are optimistic about their futures and those of their children. But there also seems to be a meaningful percentage of China's population who do not share these attitudes and beliefs. And perhaps this group is large enough to portend the kind of social conflict that Whyte is so skeptical about. When it comes to the likelihood of social unrest, perhaps it is not the modal individual but the disadvantaged minority who is most salient.