The Ohio state Senate today passed into law a pro-gun bill that will make it legal to bring a gun onto the statehouse grounds. But right before its passage, the most dangerous provision of the legislation — that would have reformed concealed carry laws — was stripped, likely thanks to efforts by the Ohio police.

Originally, the bill contained another iteration of so-called “reciprocity” laws, lobbied for heavily by the National Rifle Association, that aim to make concealed carry permits issued in one state valid in another. This means someone who obtained a permit to carry in Virginia, for example, could just continue to carry a firearm around when they moved to Ohio.

But the effort was halted last minute, likely because of the opposition from Ohio’s law enforcement. State police came out strongly against the bill, noting the problem with flat-out acceptance of other states’ gun laws, instead of requiring all people in Ohio to undergo Ohio’s training program:

The Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police and the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio oppose the bill. Mike Weinman, director of government affairs for the FOP of Ohio, said automatic reciprocity circumvents Ohio’s training standards, which include at least 10 hours of class time and two hours of range time. He said he also doesn’t know how thorough the background checks are in other states. “We don’t want untrained people in our bars and strip clubs engaging in firefights in crowded rooms without any type of training,” he said.

Weinman’s point is valid: Ohio’s laws are already so lax that any permit holder can enter an establishment that sells alcohol with a concealed weapon, as long as they don’t drink — a restriction that is not easy to track.

The NRA has been pushing for similar legislation around the country, including in the U.S. Congress where a similar reciprocity measure was proposed by the GOP. These laws have been continuously rejected, however, by legislatures with concerns like those of Ohio’s police force.

For the third time in in recent memory, a Florida guard has been recorded viciously assaulting a defenseless teenage inmate on camera — but this guard is still supervising children. Shannon Lynn Abbott, an employee at the private Milton Girls Juvenile Residential Facility, threw an unidentified 15-year-old prisoner against a wall and a hard floor on a tape obtained by the Miami Herald. Though the prisoner showed no signs of resistance during the attack, Abbot and another guard proceeded to sit on the prisoner for several minutes while other people entered the room. Yet though Abbott is currently under arrest for assault, she’s somehow still in charge of young inmates:

Although the encounter got Shannon Linn Abbott arrested, it didn’t get her fired. The 33-year-old bailed out and was back on the job right afterward and supervising children, to the extreme dismay of the Department of Juvenile Justice.

Similar inhumanity is sadly common in the American juvenile prison system. Kids as young as 13 are thrown into solitary confinement and often denied access to basic health care. Many are in juvenile detention for minor school disciplinary violations that simply  ”making adults mad.”

Though private prisons like Milton Girls are rife with cruel treatment of prisoners, some members of Florida’s state legislature have pursued an illegal end-around to try to privatize the state’s prison health care system.

Rapists should be legitimately prosecuted, but Eric Cantor has ways of shutting that whole thing down

As Irin Carmon explains in a must read piece at Salon, Native American reservations are virtually law-free zones for women victimized by non-Indian rapists. Eighty percent of Native American rape survivors were attacked by non-Indians, and these crimes are currently beyond the reach of tribal authorities. Meanwhile, federal officials have the theoretical power to prosecute sexual assaults on reservations, but they lack the resources to do so. The result is that many abusers quickly learn they are free to attack women without consequence:

“We have serial rapists on the reservation — that are non-Indian — because they know they can get away with it,” said Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center in Lake Andes, S.D. “Many of these cases just get dropped. Nothing happens. And they know they’re free to hurt again.” . . .

Overall, American Indians are two and a half times likelier to be victims of violent crime than the general population, according to the Department of Justice. But a 2010 report by the General Accounting Office found that there is an unusually high rate of refusals to prosecute by U.S. attorneys, who “declined to prosecute 46 percent of assault matters and 67 percent of sexual abuse and related matters.” The report noted that violent crimes actually had a higher rate of declination, possibly because the evidence was harder to come by.

A major step towards solving this problem is the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, which passed the Senate with strong bipartisan support last April. Among other things, this bill would restore tribal authorities’ ability to prosecute non-Indians who commit domestic violence against the members of their tribe. According to the Census Bureau, 39 percent of Native women are subject to domestic violence at least once. Many of these incidents involve rape.

In the House several top Republicans, including members of the House Leadership, proposed a compromise bill that would extend these protections to Native domestic violence victims while allowing defendants to remove their case to federal court. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), however, reportedly refuses to accept any protections for Native women that would expand tribal jurisdiction. As a result, there is a very real danger that Cantor will kill the bill by simply waiting out the clock until the new Congress is sworn in.

In the immediate aftermath of the Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock debacles, one would think Cantor would be willing stop standing on the side of rapists for purely political reasons, even if he cannot actually bring himself to care about holding rapists accountable. Apparently, however, the #2 man in the House still stands with the likes of Akin and Mourdock.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) signaled his willingness this week to consider amending federal drug law to permit possession of small amounts of marijuana, or at least exempt new state marijuana laws from the federal drug scheme.

In a letter to the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy released Thursday, Leahy sought guidance on how the Department of Justice might “prioritize Federal resources” in reacting to the passage of laws in Washington and Colorado that legalize and regulate recreational marijuana. He wrote:

Legislative options exist to resolve the differences between Federal and state law in this area and end the uncertainty that residents of Colorado and Washington now face. One option would be to amend the Federal Controlled Substances Act to allow possession of up to one ounce of marijuana, at least in jurisdictions where it is legal under state law. In order to give these options full consideration, the Committee needs to understand how the administration intends to respond to the decision of the voters in Colorado and Washington. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this matter.

Leahy is not the first member of Congress to seek amendments to the federal Controlled Substances Act, which currently bans all possession and distribution of marijuana, though he may be the highest ranking. Two Colorado House members introduced a bill last month to exempt states with their own marijuana laws from the CSA. Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), who strongly opposed Colorado’s marijuana legalization law, joined Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) in sponsoring the proposal. A number of other members of Congress have implored the Obama administration to refrain from prosecuting those in compliance with state law.

Leahy also announced Thursday that the Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing to probe how the Obama administration plans to react. Since the passage of the Colorado and Washington laws last month, the administration has provided little clear guidance, frustrating both states’ governors as they begin to implement the new measures. Last month, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that he needs a response “as soon as possible.” The first indication that a response may be imminent came from Holder yesterday, when he said he said the Department will likely respond “relatively soon.” “There is a tension between federal law and these state laws,” he said.

Immediately after the passage of the two ballot initiatives, the DOJ and the Drug Enforcement Administration released identical statements saying only that enforcement of federal drug law “remains unchanged.” And on the day the Washington law went into effect, the U.S. attorney in Seattle reminded state residents that possession, use and sale of marijuana is still a federal crime.

The United States is not just the number one jailer in the world. It also incarcerates juveniles at a rate that eclipses every other country. Evidence has long been building that schools use the correctional system as a misplaced mechanism for discipline, with children being sent to detention facilities for offenses as minor as wearing the wrong color socks to school. A juvenile county chief judge testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that these are not isolated incidents, but rather systemic trends that bombard prosecutors and courts with a glut of cases in which kids pose no danger but merely “make adults mad”:

When I took the bench in 1999, I was shocked to find that approximately one-third of the cases in my courtroom were school-related, of which most were low risk misdemeanor offenses. Upon reviewing our data, the increase in school arrests did not begin until after police were placed on our middle and high school campuses in 1996—well before the horrific shootings at Columbine High School. The year before campus police, my court received only 49 school referrals. By 2004, the referrals increased over 1,000 percent to 1,400 referrals, of which 92% were misdemeanors mostly involving school fights, disorderly conduct, and disrupting public school.

Despite the many arrests, school safety did not improve. The number of serious weapons brought to campus increased during this period of police arrests including guns, knives, box cutter knives, and straight edge razors. Of equal concern was the decrease in the graduation rates during this same period—it reached an all-time low in 2003 of 58%. It should come to no one’s surprise that the more students we arrested, suspended, and expelled from our school system, the juvenile crime rate in the community significantly increased. These kids lost one of the greatest protective buffers against delinquency—school connectedness.

I also witnessed an increase in kids of color referred to my court. By 2004, over 80% of all school referrals involved African-American students. The racial disparity in school arrests was appalling and I felt I was contributing to this system of racial bias by not doing something.

It was also frustrating for me as a judge to see the effectiveness of the prosecutor and probation officer weakened by my court system being inundated with low risk cases that consumed the court docket and pushed kids toward probation—kids who made adults mad versus those that scare us.

Judge Steven Teske of Clayton County Juvenile Court in Georgia took a proactive approach to address this problem, initiating discussions with the school superintendent and chief of police to change the practices that led kids to his courtroom. Because he had cooperative partners, the number of students referred to juvenile court for school offenses was reduced by 83 percent. But not all counties are this accommodating. In Meridian, Miss., where the county incarcerates kids for dress code violations, county officials were so unwilling to work with the Department of Justice that the agency was forced to file suit that alleges students are punished “so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience.”

The phenomenon of criminalizing school discipline, known as the “school-to-prison” pipeline, is yet another product of the War on Drugs, “as ‘get-tough’ law enforcement strategies” moved from the streets to schools, according to the Advancement Project’s Judith Browne Dianis. “Adults are treating young people like criminals, and are responding to typical student behavior that has no bearing on safety with discipline that defies common sense,” she said in her testimony. “… Pushing and shoving in the schoolyard is now a battery, and talking back is now disorderly conduct.”

As the U.S. system of mass incarceration takes an ever-greater toll on budgets and communities, more social scientists of all ideological leanings are calling for lesser prison sentences and alternatives to prisons. An extensive New York Times report on this phenomenon tells the story of Stephanie George, who is serving a sentence of life without parole for her alleged nominal role in a drug deal. It was a sentence Reagan-appointed Judge Roger Vinson didn’t even want to dispense, but his hands were tied by mandatory sentencing schemes. Aside from making the U.S. the number one jailer in the world, here are some of the other shocking facts about the nature and impact of U.S. mass incarceration featured in the report:

• Of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S., 500,000 are locked up for drug offenses – ten times more than there were in 1980. Researchers have found that these lock-ups have no concurrent effect on the illicit drug supply, as demand remains the same and replacement dealers are easy to come by.
• Some 41,000 people in the United States are serving the once-uncommon sentence of life in prison without parole – a harsh punishment that is reserved in many other countries for only the most heinous crimes. In England, only 41 people are serving this sentence.
• More than half of the incarcerated are locked up for nonviolent offenses.
• Adjusted for inflation, state spending on corrections has more than tripled over the last 30 years, making it the fastest-growing budgetary item after Medicaid.
• In the U.S. today, about 1 in 40 children, and 1 in 15 black children, have at least one parent in prison.
• California spends more than 10 percent of its budget on prisons, and less than 8 percent on higher education. Thirty years ago, it spend 10 percent on higher education and just 3 percent on prisons.
• Conservative social scientists who were once some of the primary proponents of tough criminal policies are now recommending diverting drug offenders from prisons to treatment programs and reducing the prison population by at least one-third.

These facts are animated by the stories of individuals like Stephanie George, who was a young single mother when she first started selling crack to pay the bills. After she went to jail once, she vowed never to risk being away from her children again. But when cocaine was found in her home (she said it did not belong to her), the volume of cocaine and her prior offense dictated the life without parole sentence. Her three young children, ages 5, 6, and 9, spent the rest of their childhoods with George’s sister, and George’s only way out is presidential clemency  –  a measure very rarely invoked by President Obama.