Watching the watchers

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Lew

Via Eric Crampton, of all people (his “interesting” sidebar is, well, interesting, and incidentally his co-fisk of the BERL booze report is brutal), the news that (in US prisons, at least) guards commit more rapes than inmates is pretty sobering.

Although sexual abuse of prisoners is widespread, rates vary across facilities. For example, 10 facilities had comparatively high rates, between 9.3 and 15.7 percent, whereas in six of the facilities no one reported abuse during that time period. More prisoners reported abuse by staff than abuse by other prisoners: 2.9 percent of respondents compared with about 2 percent. (Some prisoners reported abuse by other inmates and staff.)

Victims and witnesses often are bullied into silence and harmed if they speak out. In a letter to the advocacy organization Just Detention International, one prisoner conveyed a chilling threat she received from the male officer who was abusing her: â€œRemember if you tell anyone anything, youâ€™ll have to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life.â€

This isn’t a report from some two-bit bunch of pinko soft-on-crime liberal nancies – The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission was formed in 2003 by the (then-majority Republican) US Congress, by a unanimous vote in conjunction with the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act. It is a large-scale demographic and consultative research project intended to first determine the scale of the problem of prison rape, then to develop policy and procedure by which to eliminate it and standards to which prison operators must adhere in ensuring its elimination. As Senator Edward Kennedy, one of the initiative’s sponsors, said “it is not a liberal issue or a conservative issue. It is an issue of basic decency and human rights.” The research has been almost six years in the making.

So, for the benefit of David Garrett and Judith Collins:

Crowded facilities are harder to supervise, and crowding systemwide makes it difficult to carve out safe spaces for vulnerable prisoners that are less restrictive than segregation.

In other words: dorm-style and double-bunked prisoner accommodation means more rapes. Further:

In Farmer v. Brennan [1994], the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that deliberate indifference to the substantial risk of sexual abuse violates an incarcerated individualâ€™s rights under the Eighth Amendment. As the Court so aptly stated, sexual abuse is â€œnot part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses against society.â€

If it’s good enough for the USA, with the world’s highest incarceration rate per capita, then it’s good enough for New Zealand, which under the previous government as much as the current one, looks determined to challenge that record.

Welcome Standardistas

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Lew

Lynn has linked through to us while The Standard is down – thanks. I won’t have time today to put much up, so in order that you’re not disappointed by the relative lack of content, here are a few other unusual suspects worth your attention:

BAGnewsNotes, because politics sometimes needs to be seen to be believed.
The Dr Seuss propaganda cartoon archive.
My old mate Gabe runs a radio show on FleetFM called Playing Singles, Drinking Doubles, dedicated to outlaw country, honky tonk, gospel, rock & roll, western swing and the blues.
The Objective Standard, whose watchword is Exploit The Earth Or Die. Magnificent in its delusion. Even the ad links on this site are interesting – here’s one to a book called The Values of Harry Potter: Lessons for Muggles. Who knew Harry Potter (by implication: JK Rowling) was a Rand cultist? Or wait, is it that Rand cultists are actually wizards? Clearly, since I can’t figure this out, I’m a muggle.
Here’s a wonderful montage of Fox News screengrabs. It’s a big file, but truly the gift which keeps on giving.
Save The Media – career journalist Gina Chen blogs on how old media can learn from new media.
The Peoples Cube – life behind the irony curtain. So overdone it initially made me wonder whether it was propaganda or ironic counter-propaganda, but nevertheless, an almost-endless trove of remarkably original material. Particularly righteous is the Pascal’s Global Warming Wager.
Submit on the Auckland local government reforms. Last stop today; train’s going to keep on rolling until it reaches the end of the line or the engineer dies.
Why Obama really won the Democratic primary.

Add your own unusual suspects in comments, if you like.

Cheers,
L

[If anyone has a post they’d like us to put up please email us (kiwipolitico @ kiwipolitico.com) and we’ll get it posted! Anita]

Crosby|Textor are at it again

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Anita

They appear to only have one tactic, and they’re using it again. Last night’s Media 7 had a segment on Lynton Crosby’s recently aborted defamation action against Nicky Hager. Media 7, being responsible journalists, asked Lynton Crosby if he would like to come on the show, his response was a nasty gram through his lawyers threatening yet more legal action and heavying TVNZ into not discussing the case.

Media 7 is here (second segment), complete with nastygram and a good discussion of how the wealthy use our archaic and overcomplicted defamation laws to stifle dissent
Nicky Hager’s brief explanation of the case is here
The full detail is here

It’s nice to know the kind of people John Key chooses to take advice from

Identity is more than class

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Lew

Marty mars, commenting at The Standard, nails down the problem with Eddie’s and IrishBill’s latest bit of anti-mÄori party propaganda in one brief sentence:

You cannot fix any class issue until the race issue is sorted and that wonâ€™t be sorted while you are still working everything from the class angle.

Until the Marxist left realises that MÄori have their own political identity and generally don’t (won’t and shouldn’t) identify en bloc with non-MÄori political movements which require their MÄori identity to be subsumed by a transnational class identity, it can’t reliably count on MÄori support, and can’t really consider itself an inclusive movement.

Substitute ‘MÄori’ for other political minorities if you like – the internationalist movement will only be successful when it learns to accommodate diversity and turn it to political advantage, rather than trying to squash it.

The Clark Labour government’s fundamental inability to realise this (by passing the Foreshore and Seabed Act, most notably) is why the mÄori party is trying other options. They and their people have had seventeen decades worth of out-of-touch honkeys telling them how to achieve the sort of political and economic progress they want, and at the same time largely denying them the resources with which to achieve such progress. Time for a new strategy, and creating a bidding war between the two main ideological blocs doesn’t look like a bad one, to me.

Hone is right, though – the party is going to have to get a lot more than they have if they want to retain their people’s loyalty and not be seen, come 2011, as the Brown Tories.

The problem with stupid questions

Posted on June 23, 2009 by Lew

… is that they tend to beget stupid answers. Or at least unexpected answers.

Via James at Editing Teh Herald, it seems the UK’s Daily Mail (whose egregious abuses of truth and decency are legend) has gotten bit by this simple truth, with an online poll receiving a response 96% in the affirmative to the question “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?” The Daily Mail, bless ’em, wouldn’t stand for this and it now shows 100% in the negative.

Now, I’m not saying that the s59 poll is that insultingly loaded, and obviously we can’t use twitter to vote in referenda, but groups like The Yes Vote are counting on people being similarly insulted by the dishonest and misleading question that they’ll consider how the framers clearly want people to vote and vote the reverse in order to demonstrate that they don’t appreciate being treated like democratic cattle to be herded in the direction the lobby wants.

So here’s another meaningless poll: have the AAS lobby over-egged their question?

Coddington makes sense on smacking

Posted on June 21, 2009 by Lew

Words I never thought I’d write, but good grief, The Yes Vote has linked me to proof-positive that despite her previous crimes against logic and argumentation, not to mention evidence, Deborah Coddington can write wisdom from time to time. Her HoS column today makes a strong liberal* case against the S59 referendum by killing** the sacred cow that cries of “nanny state!” are pure and unassailable positions of principle, and arguing that when it comes to discipline there’s a gap between principle and implementation into which society must not permit children to fall.

Act’s John Boscawen has a bill to amend Section 59 – again – so it will be “no longer a crime to use reasonable force” if parents discipline a child.
Here we go, loop de loop. Boscawen says he’s sick of nine years of Labour’s nanny state telling parents what to do, but isn’t this more of the same? You can use a light smack, but not a hard smack? Why not a good, old-fashioned razor-stropping like my father used to give me, followed by Mum with the wooden spoon, and while you’re at it John, bring back six of the best in schools for bad girls like me – never did us any harm, did it?
Truth is, no matter how hard politicians try to flannel, they’re always telling us what to do. Paula Bennett said she didn’t think a smack as part of good parental correction should be a criminal offence and she didn’t want to go into homes and tell people how to parent.
Oh really? Not even when they’re disciplining with the jug cord or vacuum cleaner pipe?

But for the last sentence, this could pass for the usual sort of faux-outraged don’t-tread-on-me doggerel. But what’s remarkable about the last sentence is that it rejects the typical anti-statist line that all intrusions into private affairs are equal and equally meritless – it recognises that the state has a role to play in protecting children from the (however well-meaning) depredations of their parents and that there is a strong public good in the appropriate exercise of that role.

This is based on a deeper argument about the rights of the individual – and the assertion that children are individuals with rights of their own, not their parents’ belongings to be treated according to parents’ sovereign wishes.

It’s no wonder children are not valued as individuals in this country, but instead as some sort of chattel belonging to adults until they reach some magic age – 16 or 18 or 20. We do not own our children, a fact that has yet to be driven home to those selfish individuals who fight their way through the Family Court over who has the offspring, ensuring any remaining family happiness is destroyed forever.
Sadly, I don’t ever see a future in this country where all children are treasured, despite all the good work done by many organisations and individuals.
It’s not just about eliminating the beatings, it includes respecting young people’s presence. I hate it when parents don’t introduce their children to me, as if they don’t exist.

Because, in truth, nobody believes that parents have an unassailable right to treat their children as they please*** – it’s just that people of various political stripes like to be seen to support parental sovereignty without also being on the hook for the hard decisions such a position requires.

Policy is about value judgements, and if the AAS lobby were honest they’d be arguing the value of corporal punishment in parenting: arguing that it will strengthen families, grow good children and create a better society; and how it will do so. To an extent Larry Baldock has tried (33 minute audio), but only to an extent, because even those at the heart of the AAS lobby recognise the weakness of their position in strict analytical terms. So they fall back on symbolic arguments they don’t really believe in, but which are malleable enough to be twisted around to support their misguided cause.

People who claim pure and unassailable statements of principle in terms of policy implementation is usually selling you a bill of goods, but it’s nice for someone so strongly (shall we say) ideological to be pointing it out. More power to your typing fingers, Deborah.

* The classical kind, not the latte-sipping kind.
** Or at least beating it with a jug-cord.
*** Ok, some people seem to.

David Garrett â€“Â standing on the sidelines throwing stones at his own team

Posted on June 21, 2009 by Anita

I know there’s a complex in-government/not-in-government thing, and a David Garrett is only a junior backbencher and appears to be one of the more out of control ones, but â€¦

I’m not sure it’s a good look when Garrett publicly supports the private prosecution of two Chief Executives of government departments. His party is currently providing confidence and supply to the government which employs the CEs, and he’s on the select committee which oversees their departments.

Stealth march

Posted on June 19, 2009 by Lew

A few thousand primary school kids, dressed mostly in high-visibility gear and carrying (or wearing) makeshift traffic cones, lollipop signs and banners, have just marched through Wellington CBD escorted by police motorcyclists, ambulances and led by a highland band (bagpipes and all).

I work in a media office. Most of us spend hours every day scouring the news as it comes in – on paper, over the airwaves and on the interwebs – as a matter of our daily work. Not one of us had the faintest inkling what the march beneath our window was about, who had organised it or what end it aimed to achieve. We guess from the (excellent) adornments worn by the wee nippers and their guardians that it’s to do with proposed speed limit reductions around schools. But that’s just a guess.

Whoever organised this has achieved a remarkable feat: coordinating thousands – ok, maybe it was hundreds – of kids (which is like herding cats), gaining approval from their parents, the police, the City Council and signing up a marching band, without anyone in our esteemed media establishment hearing a word about it. That person should probably be put in charge of corporate communications for a big company or government department with a lot of bad news – one of the power companies, perhaps, or a trading bank.

Incidentally, if school speed limits is the cause being protested, then I fully support it. There’s a school near where I live which is at the bottom of a 70k/h hill, and the thought of sending their precious dear things down that road each day must give local parents conniptions. I have it on good authority that the local AOS sergeant, who has a kid at the school, spends his off hours parked up there issuing tickets in addition to his ordinary policing workload. Not ideal.