What, then, is the problem? A closer look at these criticisms seems to suggest that a core objection is to the justification of any violence against criminals, or the presentation as crime as something without empathetic roots. It’s one thing to point out that some villains in these films are cartoonishly evil; it’s another to object that this portrait lends undue justification to violence. Vincent Canby, after sneering at the simplistic portrait of criminals in Death Wish, notes that it “sometimes succeeds in arousing the most primitive kind of anger.” Christopher Orr, in his The Brave One review, tires of the usual litany of “Big Apple baddies” and says that the film “unambiguously endorses vigilante killings.” The principal objection, in each case, seems not aesthetic, but moral; the offense is to create one-dimensional criminals that one need not regret seeing handled with summary force, with nary a glance at their broken homes, or hungry children, or kindness to animals. It’s tut-tutting not unlike wondering just how many maidens are actually tied to railroad tracks by top-hatted brutes each year, and whether this really justifies sending them over waterfalls without due efforts at rehabilitation and legal counsel.

I do think that the liberal and conservative approaches to criminal justice are different. But artistically, there’s something else going on here. Vigilante movies and television shows tend to lay out a solution to a problem: criminals are punks who need executing or something short of it, and if only our police officers could act in accordance with our emotional revulsion, we’d clean up our streets in a hurry; or, if only men were men, punks who want to rape and torture women would get a nasty surprise; or whatever variant of the week you prefer. Such a worldview seems to assume that crime is inevitable and can only be dealt with after the fact and through deterrence.

Anti-hero stories tend to be ways of explicating problems, rather than offering solutions. Futzing around with criminals’ backstories is an act of sympathy, but it’s also an attempt to figure out why crime happens in the first place and to consider whether we could have prevented it. Breaking Bad isn’t an argument that we should tolerate Walter White being a dreadful human being who sells drugs, watches people die of overdoses, misleads his family, and induces old men to act as suicide bombers. It’s a question about whether if Walter White had adequate health care coverage, a decent pension, and life insurance, he’d have done terrible things anyway, or if he’s a small, angry man who turns to evil because he wants to be recognized by the universe. The Wire isn’t a story about how we should substitute Inspectors General for putting Omar Little in the witness stand and being generally amusing. It’s an explication of how ridiculously difficult it is to build a safety net and put the right incentives in place to help people keep from using drugs and to encourage them to work legitimate but less-remunerative and less-reliable jobs and to build legitimate businesses. It’s a simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic perspective on crime: a belief that we can stop it before it starts, but that it’s very, very hard to do so and requires considerable investment.

I also think Paletta underestimates the extent to which vigilante fantasies are really fantasies when it comes to cops who use more force than their departments want them to. We’ve got a vigorous public debate going about the right to videotape incidents of the police using force on suspects precisely because the police use considerable force on suspects in public often enough to be uncomfortable about having it documented. In the 1990s, police brutality cases were expensive enough to spark a debate about whether they were worth the bite they took out of city budgets when the money could have gone towards hiring more beat cops. People who want to be entertained by the prospect of an unfettered police force battering criminals into submission can find plenty of real-life examples.

I also appreciate that apparently, Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson will work together, but won’t kiss, staying faithful to a narrative in which the big emotional reveal is that Judge Dredd considers Judge Anderson his friend. That’s a welcome diversion from the standard stressful situation=smooches narrative, and it’d be nice to have a story where men and women actually get to focus on building their professional relationship and friendship rather than figuring out when they’re going to get down. Of course wartime romances are a thing But if you’re going to really go in on building the world the Judges live in, it makes sense that the standard emotional narratives that operate in that realm would be different. And cutting the Judges off from a range of human experiences emphasizes both the unnaturalness of what they’re being asked to do and their distance from the people they pass judgment on.

Gary Mitchell

The state Constitution says, “No person hereafter convicted of [an] infamous crime, shall be eligible or capable of holding any office of trust or profit in this Commonwealth.”

“I can run, I can win, and citizens can elect me, but the state will not allow me to take oath. Who runs the law? I thought the Constitution was for the people and by the people, and the people have spoken,” Mitchell said.

The state Supreme Court has ruled that any felony is an “infamous crime.”

Mitchell appealed to Lawrence County Judge John W. Hodge last Friday, noting that he had applied for clemency with the state Board of Pardons. He asked the judge to dismiss or stay the state’s attempt at his removal until the board rules on his request. Hodge rejected his request within less than an hour of hearing his argument.

Voters who elected Mitchell are incensed by the decision. “They took his money and then when he wins, which I don’t think they expected him to, they won’t let him serve. That’s not right,” said the Rev. Linda Martinez. Indeed, such an denial of office flies in the face of rehabilitation and pushes an overly targeted group of people further away from participation in the democratic process. After all, 13 percent of adult African-American men like Mitchell are currently prevented from voting — let alone from holding office — because of a previous conviction.

Mitchell promised to pursue his right to serve: “It doesn’t make me bitter, but it does rile me up for a fight.”

[I]n moments of desperation, a lie can seem like the only option. Anita McLemore, a Mississippi mother of two, faced one of those unfortunate moments when filling out her application for food stamps — and now she’ll pay the price, by spending three years of her life behind bars in federal prison.

Thanks to a federal ban on food stamps for people with felony drug convictions, people like McLemore are out of luck when it comes to getting assistance with putting food on their tables. Though states can opt out of the ban, those that don’t (like Mississippi) deny food stamps even to individuals who have already served their sentences or overcome previous addictions. It’s true that McLemore’s past isn’t perfect — she has four felony drug convictions and one misdemeanor, which place her firmly in the category of people the federal government has declared unfit to receive public benefits. Hence, faced with the prospect of being unable to feed her family, McLemore lied on her application.

In a compassionate nation, the penalty for drug use is not starvation. In a just nation, the penalty for drug use is not that your two children must be hungry as well. There is no excuse for a federal drug policy that punishes anyone by taking away their ability to put food on the table — and that punishes them so severely for the crime of needing to eat.

And, unlike thousands of Wall Street bankers who helped plunge America’s economy into a catastrophic recession, McLemore actually paid back the $4,367 she received.

They are wrong:

Adamant in its disagreement with the policy choice made by the States of California to decriminalize marijuana for medical use — which is California’s sovereign right under our federalist system of government — the federal government has instituted a policy to dismantle the medical marijuana laws of the State of California and to coerce its municipalities to pass bans no medical marijuana dispensaries. . . . While the federal government is entitled to enforce its criminal laws against marijuana in the states that have decriminalized it for medical use in an even-handed manner, the Tenth Amendment forbids it from selectively employing such coercive tactics to commandeer the law-making functions of the State. This case is brought to restore the constitutional balance embodied by the federalist principles of our Constitution and the Tenth Amendment.

This is strong rhetoric, but it’s tough to find an actual legal argument in here. In essence, the lawsuit appears to claim that the federal government is violating something known as the “anti-commandeering doctrine,” which forbids the federal government from requiring a state government to take a particular action. As the Supreme Court held in Printz v. United States, “the Framers explicitly chose a Constitution that confers upon Congress the power to regulate individuals, not States.”

The problem with this lawsuit is that there is no indication whatsoever that DOJ is ordering California to do anything. The Justice Department is targeting marijuana clinics and individuals who do business with them. None of these people are the state of California.

Yet the fact that DOJ’s attacks on these clinics is constitutional does not make them right, and they expose a very real political danger for anyone worried about the tenther movement’s effort to replace our Constitution with a radical libertarian vision that would declare much of the Twentieth Century unconstitutional. The polling trend on marijuana policy is clear and unambiguous, and it leaves no doubt which side is on the right side of history:

Our current policy, which criminalizes an activity that nearly half of all Americans will engage in is unsustainable. And many people who want to take a machete to the Constitution are eager to exploit this fact. Randy Barnett, the extremist law professor who wants to make everything from Social Security to Medicare to child labors law unconstitutional, began his crusade by unsuccessfully arguing to weaken federal marijuana laws in the Supreme Court. The Tenth Amendment Center, an even more extremist organization that lists unconstitutional nullification of federal laws as one of its primary objectives, touts an unconstitutional hemp bill as one of its top priorities.

Progressives cannot afford to cede an increasingly popular issue to a movement that wants nothing more than to dismantle our social safety net, strip workers of their most basic legal protections and create a society where wealth becomes destiny. Our current federal marijuana policy is unambiguously constitutional, but that does not make it right.

Why are TV writers making their mysteries less mysterious? I think it’s because lots of new procedurals try to fit more than just a case of the week into the 44-minute running time. Most shows also have a serial element, a mystery—usually a quest for elusive information—that lasts throughout the whole series. In the case of Unforgettable, it’s Carrie’s attempt to remember the day her sister was murdered; on Person of Interest, it’s a driven cop’s attempt to capture Reese, who is wanted for a number of serious crimes around the world. Person of Interest’s writers are also trying to draw our attention to that Big Brother machine and the principals’ back stories: Why does Finch have a terrible back injury, and why is Reese such a loner? These larger arcs are supposed to encourage fans to keep tuning in each week, but they can’t be so intrusive that they alienate casual viewers and send them stretching for the remote. That’s why most shows relegate the serial to a tacked-on coda.

Inadvertently, I also think this suggests something about the persistence of procedurals in an age of declining crime.

To back it up a second, when I moved to Washington, I was living by myself for the first time, in a bigger city than I’d ever lived in before. And shortly after I moved here, I was in the public library when a woman had a violent psychotic breakdown an aisle over. I may have been a little anxious. Over time, I got vastly more comfortable, but I will admit that part of what helped was watching enormous amounts of Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I recognize the ridiculousness of that, but they reassured me that as long as I took cabs home after midnight, locked my fire-escape-adjacent windows, and obeyed my instincts in relationships, I would probably not end up dead in an alley or locked in a sex dungeon. This 2002 Michael Kinsley column about women and Law & Order? That was basically me.

But my nerves were basically about the overall challenges of adjusting to a new situation, with all the commuting and budgeting and everything else adult life implies, not about realistic concerns about violent crime. Between 1991 and 2010, violent crimes overall went down from 758.2 per 100,000 to 403.6 per 100,000. Murders and non-negligent homicides fell from 9.8 per 100,000 to 4.8, and the rates of forcible rape (which, really? Is there voluntary rape?) went down from 42.3 per 100,000 to 27.5 per 100,000. Perceptions of crime risk haven’t gone down quite as consistently. In Gallup polling on whether respondents thought their was more crime in their “area than there was a year ago, or less?” the last year where a majority thought their region had gotten more dangerous from year to year was 1992, hitting a low of 26 percent in October 2001, and heading back up to 47 percent in 2005. In that same survey, 67 percent of respondents said they thought crime was rising across the country, a number that hadn’t been that high since 1996, when 71 percent of respondents said they thought crime was increasing.

But the point remains: as the actual risk of being a violent crime victim has declined, and as people perceive themselves to live in safer or at least neutral eras, it makes sense that our procedurals would move to a place where we’re less concerned with the resolution of the case and the incarceration of individual criminals and more concerned with the people who provide this bulwark of safety. I’d really like to see more successful mainstream shows that meditate on the tactics that those people use (I need to check out Person of Interest, which I’m told is surveillance-y, and also based on a dear friend’s work). If you’re going to have a long-running mystery or issue a cop or doctor has to resolve, why not have it be the reaction they got after working in Internal Affairs, a la Commissioner Gordon? Or for killing abusing or killing suspect, which could very well be part of Deena Pilgrim’s arc in Powers? One tends to think that the worst parts of our criminal justice system affect the people who commit its wrongs, as well as are the subjects of them. Not all shows about cops have to depict them as bad people. But it might make sense to draw drama from actual problems, instead of inventing absolutely ridiculous ones.

It’s interesting that changes in view seem to track precisely despite the large gap in baseline views. The same factors seem to drive support up or down across the board.

This month, U.S. attorneys representing four districts in California announced that the government would single out landlords and property owners who rent buildings or land where dispensaries sell or cultivators grow marijuana. Now, newspapers and other media outlets could be next.

U.S. Attorney Laura E. Duffy, whose district includes Imperial and San Diego counties, said marijuana advertising is the next area she’s “going to be moving onto as part of the enforcement efforts in Southern California.” Duffy said she could not speak for the three other U.S. attorneys covering the state, but noted their efforts have been coordinated so far. [...]

Federal law prohibits people from placing ads for illegal drugs, including marijuana, in “any newspaper, magazine, handbill or other publication.” The law could conceivably extend to online ads; the U.S. Department of Justice recently extracted a $500 million settlement from Google for selling illegal ads linking to online Canadian pharmacies.

Because the law prohibits the “placing” of ads, it’s likely that it only applies to the dispensaries themselves and not to the newspaper and radio stations — but there’s no guarantee that media outlets cannot be prosecuted as well because a few courts have actually interpreted the law.

It is unfortunate that the Obama Administration would expend scarce prosecutorial resources on these kinds of cases. California’s marijuana dispensaries serve patients seeking medically prescribed treatments for their health conditions. Admittedly, it is also notoriously easy to obtain recreational marijuana from these dispensaries as well, but so what? Forty-two percent of Americans will smoke marijuana at some point in their lifetimes. Three people who’ve already used it are Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It’s difficult to justify treating an activity that nearly half of all Americans engage in as if it were a serious offense worthy of a potentially life-destroying jail sentence.

Harsh marijuana laws are hemorrhaging support, as a recent Pew survey shows a sharp and unambiguous trend in favor of legalization:

The numbers leave no doubt that the days of needless jail sentences for marijuana crimes are numbered. It’s time for the Obama Administration to get on the right side of history and back major reforms.

Michael Conahan, a former jurist in Luzerne County, was sentenced on Friday to 210 months in custody by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Edwin M. Kosik II. Conahan was also ordered to pay $874,000 in restitution. [...] As Main Justice reported in August, Ciavarella, former president judge of the Court of Common Pleas and former judge of the Juvenile Court for Luzerne County, was sentenced to 28 years in prison and ordered to make restitution of $965,930. [...]

Conahan’s role in the “cash for kids” scheme was to order the closing of a county-run detention center, clearing the way for Ciavarella, once known as a strict “law and order” judge, to send young offenders to private facilities. This arrangement worked out well for Ciavarella and Conahan, as well as the builder of the facilities and a developer, who pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

The arrangement didn’t work out so well for the young offenders, some of them sent away for offenses that were little more than pranks and would have merited probation, or perhaps just scoldings, if the judges had tried to live up to their oaths.

Sadly, this kind of behavior by the private prisons industry is not at all surprising. The industry spent millions in lobbying dollars to push harsh criminal penalties and longer sentences in order to maximize their own profitability. Leading lawmakers like Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) each supported major prison privatization plans after receiving tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the industry. Indeed, the number of prisoners incarcerated in corporate-run facilities grew by 37 percent during a seven-year period when their lobbying efforts also grew by 165 percent.

Nevertheless, the willingness of two judges to simply trade away their judicial oaths to benefit a corporation’s bottom line is truly shocking.

Operation Restore Our Community or “ROC”…begins next week. The city judge will either let misdemenor [sic] offenders work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine or go to church every Sunday for a year.

If offenders elect church, they’re allowed to pick the place of worship, but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department. If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender’s case will be dismissed.

This program isn’t just unconstitutional, it is unconstitutional even under conservative Justice Antonin Scalia’s vision of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. In his dissenting opinion in Lee v. Weisman, Scalia wrote that the state may not us the “threat of penalty” to “coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise.” Telling someone — even someone convicted of a crime — that they must participate in a religious service or go to jail clearly fails Justice Scalia’s test.

Indeed, as conservative law Professor Eugene Volokh points out, religiously compelled church attendance is so clearly and obviously unconstitutional, that the Mississippi Supreme Court held that a “judge’s decision to order people to attend church as a condition of bail is not just unconstitutional, but merits a 30-day suspension from the bench.” Again, this was in Mississippi.

Just across the border in Alabama, however, one town apparently thinks that the Constitution no longer applies.

It’s an interesting question, how it’s appropriate for the leagues to regulate the behavior of their players, given that the sports industry relies on both the physical safety and health of the players, and the willingness of fans to emotionally invest in both franchises and individual players. I think there’s a fairly clear case for high penalties for behavior that endangers players’ well-being. If you’re caught driving drunk, the law can and should punish you for putting yourself in a situation to hurt other people, and it seems entirely reasonable that your employer would punish you for putting yourself in a position where you’d be unable to fulfill the terms of your contract by hurting yourself.

I think the line for behavior professional sports teams should punish for endangering fans’ enthusiasm is a lot less clear, both because fans have totally different standards for what’s acceptable or what’s outside their comfort zone. Legally, of course, people who are charged with crimes are innocent until prove guilty, but do we think there’s an obligation for employers to abide by the same standard? Especially when sports teams may feel compelled to make decisions in advance of the legal process? And what are the requirements for making restitution if an employer suspends or penalizes an athlete for behavior the legal system later exonerates them of, or for charges that are later dropped? You can’t give Ben Roethlisberger back the games he was suspended for after being accused of sexual assault, and even if the allegations were withdrawn, I’m not sure he should get them back. There’s a difference between losing your freedom and losing your reputation, but I’m not sure how penalties ought to work in the space in between.

The initiative is based on studies that have proven California’s existing death penalty law ineffective and overly costly, as the largest and most expensive death row in the country has cost the state $4 billion while only executing 13 inmates since 1978. More death row inmates have died from natural causes than have been executed in California, where the last execution took place six years ago. Converting existing death sentences to LWOP would save the state $184 million each year, according to a study released in June.

Taxpayers for Justice spokesperson James Clark told ThinkProgress that money saved from ending the death penalty could be redirected to local law enforcement efforts to solve murder and rape cases, more than half of which he said remain unsolved:

Everyone agrees the system as it stands is non-functional since no one is being executed, and any attempt to make it functional will put California’s budget further in the hole, so the only solution is to replace the death penalty completely. [...] California is wasting billions on just a select few murderers while nearly half of all murders are unsolved — and more than half of all rapes are unsolved. Ending the death penalty and diverting those resources to local law enforcement is a smart and necessary public safety measure.

As ThinkProgress reported in March, California’s most prolific death penalty judge agrees with the coalition. Former Superior Court Judge Donald McCartin, who earned the nickname “the hanging judge” for the numerous death sentences he issued, wrote an editorial in the Los Angeles Times calling on the state to abolish the death penalty to help close its $25 billion budget gap.

Earlier this year, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) vetoed the construction of a new $356 million death row facility at San Quentin State Prison.

Once the initiative is filed, the coalition will need to collect roughly 750,000 signatures to get it approved and placed on the November 2012 ballot, an effort Clark said he expects will succeed with ease. As for the measure’s success, the group is banking on a combination of recent polling showing Californians growing increasingly opposed to the death penalty and high voter turnout among women and racial minorities, two groups more likely to oppose to the death penalty, due to the presidential election.

The initial stories give us a sense of how at least two Fables interact with the modern world, Prince Charming by conning the women he lives off of, Rose Red by living the life of an indolent, spoiled party girl. The assumption seems to be that the rest of the world would be considerably hostile to the Fables, and that mainstreaming might be difficult, but we don’t actually see a lot of evidence of this. I don’t know if it would be more conservative to argue that society wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) be accepting of differences, especially when they’re miraculous, or if it would be rebuttal to liberalism to argue that the Fables could successfully be assimilated, but Willingham and his collaborators don’t really seem to be making that case in either direction. Either that, or the Fables are in some way going Galt from the Mundane world, but if that’s Willingham’s argument, it’s nigh-invisible.

And that’s a problem for some later stories. In “Animal Farm,” if the Mundanes had been established as an active threat to Fabletown as a whole, Snow White and her allies in Fabletown administration would have a much stronger case for cracking down not just on the residents of the Farm, and keeping tight control over the denizens of Fabletown in New York City. And as a result, the satire of wannabe revolutionaries, like Goldilocks, who is sleeping with Little Bear essentially to prove that she’s a rebel, would be a lot funnier if their cause was proved ridiculous and self-destructive in advance. Instead, the book sort of seems like it’s condescending to and about characters with legitimate grievances, and setting the supposed heroes up to be a bit brittle, which is a bit odd given how flexible they must have to had to be to survive for so long. “We haven’t yet been corrupted by the Mundys’ modern social philosophy concerning such things,” as Snow White declares after the executions that end the rebellion at the Farm. “The responsibility lies entirely with the perpetrators and not their victims.” But if you’re going to survive for millenia, and after a devastating war, the things you carry forward and the things you leave behind matter.

But the party’s real trouble so far has been the struggles of some of its members to abide by the law. Three Ohio Republicans have had run-ins with the law this year. State Rep. Robert Mecklenborg (R) was arrested for drunk driving with a stripper in his car. State Rep. Jarrod Martin (R) has had three drunken incidents with law enforcement, including one in which he was driving with his kids in the car. State Sen. Kris Jordan, meanwhile, is being investigated for a domestic dispute with his wife while he was allegedly drunk and in possession of a firearm.

And in the wake of those run-ins, Ohio-based blog Plunderbund reports that Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine has seemingly cast aside the “zero tolerance” policy he instituted for “any candidate or party official who crosses the line.” DeWine, in 2009:

Our party historically upheld the highest standard for ethics and morality in government, but most voters know us better for our hypocrisy. Not an election goes by without a major scandal involving a prominent Republican figure.

We cannot continue to campaign on a higher standard of government if we fail to uphold it, so we must adopt a zero tolerance policy for any candidate or elected official who crosses the line.

But as Plunderbund notes, DeWine, Kasich, and other Republican leaders have not attempted to enforce that zero tolerance policy when it comes to the three members who have had legal problems this year. Mecklenborg resigned July 17 and is leaving office today, but both Martin and Jordan are still serving in their current positions.