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From the Los Angeles Times

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Gabrielle Giffords leaves Tucson

A plane carrying Gabrielle Giffords takes off from an Air Force base en route to Houston, where she will begin a stay at a rehabilitation center.

by Bob Drogin and Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times

January 22, 2011

Reporting from Tucson

As residents lined the streets to bid a bittersweet farewell to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was moved to a renowned rehabilitation hospital in Houston on Friday, she responded to their cheers with a smile and even tears, her doctor said.

"She could hear it," said Dr. Randall Friese, a trauma surgeon who accompanied Giffords to Texas. "She smiled, and then she actually teared up a little bit. It was very emotional, very heart-wrenching."

So was the raw sentiment on the streets of Tucson, an outpouring of reverence and respect that appeared to bind the battered city together 13 days after a gunman killed six people and wounded 13, including Giffords.

The Arizona Democrat, who was shot through the head, left her hometown with the kind of police motorcade and live TV coverage often reserved for a head of state.

"We just wanted to come today and say goodbye," said Dot Jones, 63, her eyes welling with tears as the procession passed.

"In some ways, I don't think Tucson will ever get over it," said her husband, John, 63.

Friends, political supporters and a high school special education class clustered outside the hospital complex, waving American flags and flashing thumbs-up signs. "We love you Gabby!" one woman cried.

Led by a dozen police motorcycles, an ambulance carrying Giffords left University Medical Center at 9:22 a.m. and drove to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where she was transferred onto an air ambulance for the flight to Houston.

In addition to Friese, Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly, her mother, Gloria Giffords, an intensive care nurse and two congressional aides accompanied her.

After the flight landed, a medevac helicopter ferried Giffords to the trauma center at TIRR Memorial Hermann hospital. Doctors there said that the transfer went flawlessly and that Giffords would get her first rehabilitation session Friday afternoon.

"She looks spectacular," Dr. Dong Kim, chief neurosurgeon, said at a news conference. "She looks awake, calm and comfortable."

Dr. John Holcomb, who heads the medical team, said Giffords would remain in the intensive care unit at least until next week to ensure no infections develop. Doctors then will move her to the hospital's Institute for Rehabilitation and Research, which specializes in the treatment of brain injuries.

Giffords has "great rehabilitation potential," said Dr. Gerard Francisco. "She'll keep us busy, and we'll keep her busy as well."

Kim said Giffords may require four to six months of speech and physical therapy, although some of it may be as an outpatient.

U.S. Capitol Police have set up extra security at the 119-bed hospital.

Giffords, 40, was shot in the forehead when a gunman opened fire on a crowd that had gathered to meet her outside a Tucson supermarket on Jan. 8. A federal grand jury has charged Jared Lee Loughner, 22, with crimes including attempted assassination. He will be arraigned in Phoenix on Monday.

On Friday morning, Tucson police blocked traffic at each intersection so Giffords' motorcade could pass, and throngs of well-wishers waited on nearly every corner. Some cheered, some wept and some prayed.

"It's the end of a chapter for us," said Rick Morey-Wolfe, 37, a hospital contractor. "It's sad to see her go — this is her town. But we're happy to see her go somewhere where she can get better."

Cindy Harrelson, a grandmother of three, leaned on her walker as the motorcade assembled. She said she'd had a tumor in the same region of the brain where Giffords was shot.

"I know what she has to go through, mentally and physically," Harrelson said. "I'm glad she's going someplace that's better for her and her husband."

On Campbell Avenue, Emily Joseph, 22, clutched a sign reading, "Tucson's heart goes with you. Come home soon, come home strong."

"I want her to know we're still pulling for her," Joseph explained.

A small group stayed outside the Air Force base even after security guards had waved the motorcade through the gate.

Carlos Gonzales, 61, dressed in a U.S. flag shirt, cried when the procession passed. He had skipped work as a marketing director for the day, and he held a sign reading "God Speed Gabby" high in the air until Giffords' plane had disappeared from sight.

"Tucson has come together like I've never seen before," he said. "This tragedy has surpassed everything. It has surpassed politics, religion, race."

Tucson residents like to boast that, despite pushing 1 million in population, their sometimes-eccentric community has only one freeway and retains a small-town feel.

On the streets Friday morning, it seemed that everyone knew Giffords — either directly or as a symbol of the tragedy.

"This woman is different than any other person I've seen in politics," said Al Garcia, 47, who wore a Marine Corps jacket. "The first time we met her, it was like we'd known her forever."

Michael Young, 61, clutched an old Giffords campaign poster. "She's a genuinely nice person," he said. "I'm glad she's doing so well. I'm a little sorry she's leaving us," he said, his voice starting to quiver. "But I understand."

Rana McGoldrick, 40, has known Giffords since high school. She brought her toddlers, Brennan and Declan, to see her friend off.

"It's bittersweet," McGoldrick said. "She's leaving Tucson, her home. But we know she'll be back."

Dave Sanderson, 50, voted for Giffords' Republican opponent in November's election. But since the shooting, he has walked his two pit bulls every day to see the growing mound of flowers, candles and cards that well-wishers have left for Giffords and the other victims outside the hospital.

"This tore me up," he said.

As Giffords' motorcade approached, Sanderson put a pair of sunglasses on one of his dogs, Buzz, and stuck a U.S. flag in the dog's collar. "We thought we'd give her a Tucson sendoff," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gabrielle-giffords-medical-20110122,0,4802350,print.story

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Maker of anesthetic used in executions is discontinuing drug

Death penalty states could face long-term complications after the move by the only U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental. California may have to revise laws governing its three-injection protocol.

by Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer

January 22, 2011

The sole U.S. maker of the anesthetic used in executions announced Friday it would stop manufacturing sodium thiopental to prevent its product from being used to put prisoners to death.

Discontinuance of the drug that has been in short supply nationwide for the past year portends long-term complications for death penalty states. Some, like California, might have to revise laws governing executions and those seeking supplies from foreign makers may be turned away by countries that condemn capital punishment.

In California, the legal guidance for carrying out executions was amended in August after three years of debate and deliberation. The state's new protocols specify use of sodium thiopental as the first drug in the three-injection sequence, and any substitution would require the state to again revise the protocols, said Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and director of the law school's Death Penalty Clinic.

Legal challenges to lethal-injection procedures have kept executions on hold for five years in California, where 718 prisoners are on death row. Corrections officials' attempt to carry out the execution of murderer Albert Greenwood Brown in September was thwarted by the litigation, as well as by the expiration of the state's last few grams of sodium thiopental.

Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., stopped making its brand of sodium thiopental, Pentothal, at a North Carolina plant early last year because of an unspecified raw material supply problem. When Hospira attempted to move production to a factory in Liscate, Italy, near Milan, Italian authorities demanded assurances that the drug wouldn't end up in the hands of executioners. Hospira spokesman Dan Rosenberg said company officers couldn't make that guarantee and decided instead to "exit the sodium thiopental market."

"We cannot take the risk that we will be held liable by the Italian authorities if the product is diverted for use in capital punishment," Rosenberg said.

Sodium thiopental is a powerful barbiturate that has "well-established medical benefits" for patients, the spokesman said, adding that Hospira has never condoned its use in executions.

As Pentothal supplies have run out, some of the 35 states that allow capital punishment have had to postpone executions or obtain supplies of the drug from abroad.

Both supporters and opponents of capital punishment predicted the drug discontinuance would place new legal hurdles to executions.

"Long-term, I expect that the states will follow the lead of Oklahoma and switch to another drug without a supply problem," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which is in favor of the death penalty.

"Short-term, this requires going through the cumbersome regulation process with comment-spamming by the anti-death-penalty crowd," he said, urging the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which carries out executions at San Quentin State Prison, to start the legal revision immediately "so as to have it completed before an actual supply problem delays and denies justice again."

Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization opposed to capital punishment that tracks death sentences, said states with the death penalty will now have to turn to a different anesthetic or seek sodium thiopental from a foreign supplier, "both of which have pitfalls."

Oklahoma has already executed two men using the anesthetic pentobarbital, commonly used to euthanize animals. But many states' statutes and protocols specify what drugs are to be used, and switching requires a lengthy legal review and submission for public comment, Dieter noted.

Importing sodium thiopental has raised questions about how to verify its purity and effectiveness, and the FDA has declined to take responsibility for vetting the imports, said Dieter.

California corrections officials imported a large quantity of sodium thiopental — enough for about 90 executions — from a British distributor in November, before a public outcry in Britain led to a ban on export of the drug to the United States. All European states have renounced the death penalty and many have legal restrictions against knowingly facilitating executions elsewhere.

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel has been reviewing California's new lethal injection procedures and is expected to rule soon on whether they comply with the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-execution-drug-20110122,0,6418151,print.story

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Parents vs. 'Skins'

Think the MTV show's depictions of teenage sex and drug use are terrible? Then monitor your kids.

January 22, 2011

On the third episode of MTV's new series "Skins," a high school student takes erectile dysfunction pills and, with the camera filming him from behind, runs naked down the street. His tumescence serves as a running joke throughout the episode. The new show is a hit among middle schoolers, and the actor in the aforementioned scene is 17 years old.

According to the New York Times, MTV is taking steps to edit out some of the more objectionable content in this episode — not because it's inappropriate for teen viewers but because network executives are worried they may be charged with violating child pornography laws.

MTV and other basic-cable networks have been pushing the envelope on sexual and violent content for decades, but seldom have they aired anything as brazen as "Skins," a scripted series starring a troupe of unknown actors between the ages of 15 and 19. A remake of a series that originally aired in Britain, it is loaded with teen sex, masturbation and casual drug use. The conservative Parents Television Council calls it the "most dangerous program that has ever been foisted on your children."

The show does cross a boundary when it comes to TV depictions of sex involving minors, but any kid who's been to a Judd Apatow movie has seen worse. Today's teens have easy access to Internet porn, pay-cable sex shows and other entertainment offerings that scandalize those from earlier generations; MTV isn't alone in degrading cultural standards. Of course, that doesn't entirely excuse the network, which is breathtakingly disingenuous about its practices. It claims in a release that "Skins" is meant to be viewed by adults, and to prove it the channel airs the show at or after 10 p.m. Eastern time and has slapped a TV-MA rating on it, meaning it's theoretically unsuitable for those under 17. If airing programs late at night ever put off teens, the strategy has been rendered obsolete by digital video recorders. And the notion that a show starring teen actors, playing characters dealing with teen issues, on a network watched mostly by teens, is actually intended for adults is laughable.

The Parents Television Council is lobbying for a Justice Department investigation of MTV, but looking for government remedies is ineffective and unwise; we suspect the network's editors are smart enough to skirt prosecution. The Federal Communications Commission doesn't regulate the content of cable networks, and even if it did, a crackdown on shows like "Skins" would be a bad idea, because adults should be able to watch whatever they like on cable and federal attempts to protect kids from adult programming have never been successful. The best and most appropriate ways for parents to protect their kids from objectionable material on TV are to monitor their viewing and to learn to use the V-chip.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-mtv-20110122,0,3041268,print.story

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From the New York Times

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U.N. Urges Inquiry of Migrants' Disappearance in Mexico

MEXICO CITY — The United Nations top human rights official pressed Mexico on Friday to investigate the disappearance of 40 Central American migrants last month and determine whether the military and the police were complicit.

The statement, by Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, reflects heightened pressure on Mexico, which human rights groups accuse of falling short on promises to protect migrants from thieves, rapists, murderers and corrupt officers as they head to the United States.

The migrants, believed to be mostly Salvadoran and Guatemalan, were part of a group of 250 people on a freight train in southern Oaxaca State. Ms. Pillay said they were initially detained on Dec. 16 by the police, immigration officers and military personnel.

Some were taken into custody. But about 150 managed to continue traveling on the train, run by the federal government-owned Ferrocarril del Istmo de Tehuantepec.

The train operator demanded money from the migrants and, after scoffing at the sum they mustered, the train was boarded a short while later by armed gunmen who robbed and beat some of the migrants and abducted 40 of them, Ms. Pillay said.

The Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, a Catholic priest who operates a migrant shelter in the area, received a death threat after he publicly denounced the crime and disclosed that witnesses had told him the kidnappers had ties to the Zetas, one of the largest and most violent criminal gangs in the country.

“The migrants were abducted in highly questionable circumstances,” Ms. Pillay said, adding that Mexico needed “to ascertain whether or not any state officials, including those working for the state-owned train operator, were complicit with the criminal organization that carried out the abductions and extortion.”

Mexico's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva told The Associated Press that the government had condemned the killings and was conducting a rigorous investigation. Mexico had initially denied reports that gunmen had boarded the train, but the government of El Salvador and human rights workers said they were in contact with witnesses willing to testify.

The plight of migrants has caused a round of diplomatic meetings between Mexico and Central American neighbors in recent months to head off tension.

Last fall, 72 migrants, mostly from Central America, were abducted and killed in northeastern Mexico by a group the police said was connected to the Zetas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/world/americas/22mexico.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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In Tucson, Solace From Relatives of Past Killers

TUCSON — Few visitors make their way past the cactus garden and into the dark ranch-style home where Randy and Amy Loughner have spent much time grieving alone. The rampage in which their troubled 22-year-old son is accused opened a fault line between them and the rest of this recovering city.

But beyond Tucson, two people who have never met the Loughners are now seeking them out, and others are likely to follow.

When Jared L. Loughner was identified as the gunman who shot 19 people here two Saturdays ago, his parents joined a circle whose membership is a curse: the kin of those who have gone on killing sprees. Now, others in this circle of relatives are beginning to issue invitations to the Loughners.

David Kaczynski, brother of Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, left a message with Mr. Loughner's public defender offering his ear if the parents wanted to talk to “someone with a similar experience,” he recalled.

Robert P. Hyde of Albuquerque had the same instinct. The brother of a mentally ill man who killed five people, two of them police officers, Mr. Hyde looked up the Loughners' address and mailed them a letter inviting them to contact him. The gist of his letter, Mr. Hyde said by phone, was that “what happened is not your fault.”

After killing sprees in American towns and cities, the relatives of the gunmen face the intense scrutiny of neighbors who wonder how far the apple fell from the tree, or if the home environment was abusive, shaping a killer. Grief from these relatives can provoke a complex reaction as the outside world ponders whether they are victims in their own right, or the gunman's enablers, or both.

While the actual victims of crimes and their relatives “have people pulling for them,” Mr. Hyde said, “we on the other side don't want to even broach that subject. I will never say, ‘I lost my brother, too — I'll never go fishing with him again.'

“It would look cold and callous,” he added. “People don't understand. And you don't want to offend anybody.”

So, he concluded, “you just suck it up.”

If that gets to be too much, the relatives of killers have been known to find comfort in one another, creating a fragile and fraught emotional network among the nation's most isolated families.

After his brother's daylong rampage in 2005, Mr. Hyde called David Kacynzski, by then a prominent campaigner against the death penalty. At the time, Mr. Hyde was in such a daze, so consumed with questions — How did this happen? What could I have done differently? — that he could hardly even get dressed in the morning.

“We talked,” Mr. Hyde, 50, recalled. “It was very helpful, a spiritual kind of thing. The fact is we were both brothers who had a brother who did this.”

A need for legal advice — such as how to help a brother or son avoid the death penalty — can prompt these phone calls. In 1999, William Babbitt, the brother of a mentally ill man on death row in California, contacted Mr. Kaczynski because he felt his brother should be spared the death penalty, just as Theodore Kaczynski had been.

The loose network among relatives offers the grim solace of knowing that others too have suffered the same curse.

Mr. Kaczynski recalls feeling reassured more than a decade ago — while his brother was still under prosecution — upon receiving a note from the parents of John C. Salvi III, who had murdered two abortion-clinic receptionists. “We're thinking about you, we're praying for you, and we understand,” was the message, Mr. Kaczynski said.

“At first, you feel like you're the only person this has ever happened to,” said Lois Robison, whose mentally ill son was executed in Texas in 2000 for the murder of five people. “You're no longer Ken and Lois Robison, the two schoolteachers. You're Ken and Lois Robison, the parents of a mass murderer.”

Ms. Robison, 77, now regularly speaks with the families of other men the state has executed.

Reflecting on the Tucson shootings , Ms. Robison was reminded of her reaction to learning about her son's rampage: she could not stop sobbing until she was given sedatives. She said she expected the Loughners now felt like “pariahs”; she, too, struggled with the feeling. After her son's crimes, some parents sought to have their children transferred out of her class.

Even though the pack of reporters outside the Loughner home has gone, the parents still live in virtual hiding. Until Monday, when the Loughners emerged and stepped into a waiting car, there had been so few signs of life inside that neighbors had assumed the couple had left town.

Since then, Mr. Loughner, a tall man with a bushy mustache, has occasionally been seen speeding away from his house in a black El Camino. On Thursday afternoon, he had a baseball hat pulled low over his eyes as he hustled out of the car, hastened to his house and quickly disappeared behind a wooden gate without saying a word.

Capt. Mark E. Kelly, the husband of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically wounded in the attack, has told ABC News that he was open to the idea of meeting with Mr. Loughner's parents, adding, “They've got to be hurting in this situation as much as anybody.”

Captain Kelly's comments have prompted plenty of reflection among those who have already gone through this familiar healing ritual, in which the family of the murdered meet the family of the murderer.

Bill McVeigh, the father of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh, in a phone conversation Thursday with Bud Welch, the father of a victim of that attack, ventured that “this was quite soon for one of the victim's family members to be talking about that,” according to Mr. Welch's account. In their case, Mr. McVeigh and Mr. Welch, who talk every few months, did not meet for more than three years after the younger McVeigh's act of terror.

While Mr. Hyde and a few others sought out the relatives of other killers on their own, many do not. In fact, the relatives of perpetrators are such pariahs that it was a crime victims' group that first organized a formal meeting of them. In 2005, a group of relatives of murder victims, all opposed to the death penalty, held a conference for the relatives of some 20 people who had been executed for capital crimes.

It was “the first time in the modern era there was ever assembled in a room a couple of dozen people who had all shared the experience of having a family member executed, and found a little empathy and solidarity for a group that has had none,” said Renny Cushing, the executive director of Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights, which organized the meeting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/us/22relatives.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Mayors See No End to Hard Choices for Cities

WASHINGTON — Despite having one of the highest crime rates in the nation, Camden, N.J., laid off nearly half its police force this week after failing to win concessions from its unions. On the other side of the country, Vallejo, Calif., was filing a bankruptcy plan that proposed paying some creditors as little as a nickel or 20 cents on each dollar they are owed.

These are hard times for cities, and the mood was grim as more than 200 mayors gathered here this week for the winter meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors.

Many mayors have already raised taxes, cut services and laid off workers, even police and firefighters. Now they are girding themselves for more tough times, as falling home values are belatedly showing up in property tax assessments, and struggling states are threatening to cut aid to cities.

“I came in full of idealism — I was going to change my city,” said Mayor Bill Finch of Bridgeport, Conn., who has laid off 160 workers. “You get involved in government because you want to do more for the people, you want to show them that government can work and local government, by and large, really does work for the people — directly, you can't hide. But then you say you've got to pay the same amount of taxes, and you're going to get less.”

Some mayors said that they expected more cities, mostly smaller cities, to seek bankruptcy or possibly even default on their loans as the downturn grinds on, though municipal analysts see defaults as unlikely.

In interviews, mayors spoke about their efforts to keep their cities afloat by raising taxes, consolidating services, selling off city assets and shrinking their work forces.

Many of them, including Democrats who have been historically close to unions, said they were taking aim at public pensions, which they said were no longer affordable.

“That's not a Democrat or Republican issue,” said Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, a Democrat who is supporting measures that would lower the cost of pensions for new police officers and firefighters and require employees to contribute toward the cost of their retirement health benefits. “The fact is, our pensions aren't sustainable.”

Mr. Villaraigosa disputed a prediction made last year by one of his predecessors, Richard J. Riordan, that Los Angeles's pension woes would be likely to drive the city into bankruptcy. Saying “there's no question you will see some cities that default,” he insisted that Los Angeles would not be one of them.

“There is no scenario where we would ever be in the ‘B' situation,” he said. “I don't even use that word, because we're going to make the tough decisions.”

The mayors descended on Washington amid great uncertainty over what the focus on deficit reduction by the new Republican majority in the House would mean for cities.

The jobs outlook is still bleak for many cities. An economic forecast prepared for the mayors' group projected that while hiring would pick up this year, 109 metropolitan areas would end the year with a 10 percent unemployment rate, or higher.

The forecast, prepared by IHS Global Insight, projected that 105 metropolitan areas would not return to their prerecession peaks for jobs until 2015; for 32 areas, including Toledo, Ohio, and Detroit, it would not happen until 2025.

So between the breakfasts and luncheons, the awards presentations and the tap water tasting contest, the mayors pressed their federal agenda here, meeting with President Obama and members of Congress and the administration.

They called for more transportation spending for cities and for preserving the Community Development Block Grant program, one of the few federal programs that sends money directly to cities without passing through statehouses.

In the interviews, they spoke of their uneasiness, and the hard steps they have already taken.

Philadelphia has raised its sales tax and property tax, trimmed 1,200 jobs, and joined a number of other cities in instituting “rolling brownouts” of fire stations, closing a few stations each day to save money. Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia said that those “brutal” steps had helped stabilize the city's finances, but that there are still risks ahead.

“It's what I refer to as a triple threat,” he said. “I'm concerned about budget deficits at the state, I'm concerned about budget deficits at the federal government, and our local school district.” The school district is separate from the city, but its woes could hurt the city.

When the housing bubble burst in Pembroke Pines, a city of 150,000 in Broward County, Fla., taxable property values plummeted, and the city responded by raising the tax rate and making a declaration of “financial urgency,” which allowed it to reopen its contracts.

Its mayor, Frank C. Ortis, said the city cut workers' salaries by 4 percent, privatized its buildings department, and ended the defined benefit pension plan for new nonuniformed hires.

Union officials decried the assault on public pensions, noting that the average pension is $19,000 a year, and that pension payments are usually only a small percentage of state and local budgets.

“There's no doubt that state and local governments are now under fiscal duress, but public service worker pensions are not to blame,” said Lee Saunders, the secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

He said that many pension funds were troubled because officials had failed to make adequate contributions over the years. “Employees should not pay the price when our elected leaders fail to lead,” he said.

Many mayors are worried that their states will cut aid to cities. Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, Calif., warned that Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to eliminate municipal redevelopment agencies would deal a terrible blow to her city. And Mayor Christopher B. Coleman of St. Paul said that while the city would have received $103 million in state aid last year if past trends had continued, it wound up getting only $47 million.

Mr. Coleman said that he had been forced to close a third of the city's recreation facilities in the five years he has been mayor, and that while his most recent budget had not raised taxes, it had been a struggle.

“Taxpayers don't want to keep seeing their tax bills go up,” he said. “But as unhappy as they are about that, try to close a library sometime.”

Walking into a lunch on Thursday, Mayor Donald L. Plusquellic, the long-serving mayor of Akron, Ohio, greeted a fellow mayor with a hug. “It's no fun anymore!” he told her. “Things are tough!”

Mr. Plusquellic, who has revived Akron's downtown since taking office in 1987, has had to resort to layoffs of police officers and firefighters in the last two years.

“I want to say, let me go back to the world I lived in two or three years ago, where people would come in and say, hey, we need this new park, or this new recreation facility, and I could say, O.K., we'll just do that,” he said. “It's a different world now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/us/22cities.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Removing the Roadblocks to Rehabilitation

What works and what doesn't work to solve a social problem is often no mystery.  The mystery is why we so often persist in doing what doesn't work.  The topic of Tuesday's column -- prisoner re-entry into the community — offers myriad examples.   One is the practice of dropping people getting out of jail or prison right back into the neighborhoods where they got in trouble in the first place.  Intuition tells us that this is a bad idea: the old street corners and the old friends seem like a recipe for the old troubles.  Research on this idea is rare and hard to do — it's tough to get around the problem that the person who chooses not to go home may have other qualities that make him successful.

A study published in 2009 in the American Sociological Review by David Kirk, a sociologist at the University of Texas, confirms our intuition.   Kirk took advantage of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, which prevented some New Orleans residents getting out of prison from going back to their old neighborhoods.  For the prisoners, this consequence of Katrina turned out to carry a hidden blessing. Those who couldn't go home did significantly better at avoiding future incarceration than those who lived in neighborhoods where they could and did go home.

Prisoners are often aware of the temptations they will face upon resuming their old lives.  Nearly half of the prisoners in Illinois surveyed by the Urban Institute said they didn't want to go back home upon release.  But states not only encourage people to go home again, some of them demand it — in most states, prisoners released on parole are legally required to go back to their county of last residence.

This rule is one of many protocols for dealing with former prisoners that seem to make little sense.  Many prisoners are sent home to arrive in the middle of the night with only a few dollars in their pockets.  Virtually no one in prison in the United States today can get methadone maintenance therapy, the gold standard drug treatment.  Prisoners are no longer eligible for the grants that used to make getting a college education in prison possible. This system is designed to fail.  And it does.

It is not failing quietly.  On the positive side, there are programs all over the country that recognize that helping prisoners remake their lives is both humane and cost-effective.  On Tuesday I wrote about two comprehensive ones: the Fortune Society's Castle and Delancey Street.  Both provide housing, a new peer group, job training, classes, drug treatment — one-stop shopping for recently released prisoners.

Many readers responded, either in comments or e-mails, with information on other programs that offer services in prison or to recently released prisoners or ex-gang members.

Nancy K from St. Louis wrote in about Prison Performing Arts in Missouri, which works with incarcerated adults and children to put on a play over the course of a year.  Carole Farnham from Richmond, Va., wrote about Boaz and Ruth.  This Richmond organization provides job training and other services to local former prisoners who work on projects to revitalize a blighted neighborhood.

Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles employs former gang members in a restaurant or companies that bake bread or do silk screening.  The money raised pays for services such as mental health counseling, 12-step meetings and gang tattoo removal.  Dismas Houses in several states and overseas provide homes where former prisoners live alongside college students. There are also the Safer Foundation in Illinois and Iowa, Pioneer Human Services in Washington state, the Center for Employment Opportunities in New York and perhaps a handful of other programs.

Several of the writers acknowledged that these programs are always broke (at Boaz and Ruth, the staff works part of the time for free), which is probably typical.  It is a shame — all of these ideas likely deserve fat budgets and widespread adaptation.  But as with the Castle and Delancey Street, they don't get them.  No doubt these programs save the American public a lot of money (incarceration is expensive) and the few thousand people these programs work with are mightily helped. But hundreds of thousands more former prisoners arrive home on the bus at nighttime alone.

How can this be, when we profess to be concerned about crime?  As taxpayers, we don't want to pay the costs of incarceration.  As citizens, we want to be able to live free of crime.  Why, then, the persistence of obvious folly?

The underlying reason is that crime has normally been a highly emotional issue for voters.  Politicians may understand that certain strategies do not leave us safer, yet they do not try to change them for fear of being tarred as soft on criminals.  When crime rates are high and crime is a potent electoral issue, the pressure encourages public officials to appear tough on crime at all costs.  When crime rates are low and voters might be more receptive to more effective approaches, the issue has usually vanished from public attention.

A related reason is that advocates of new strategies rarely have the research that would allow them to make their case.  Especially with an issue like crime, it is important to be able to offer proof to counter the emotion.  But many aspects of why people commit crimes and how to stop them have been little studied. “Research is very expensive to do,” said Peggy McGarry, the director of the Center on Sentencing and Corrections for the New York-based Vera Institute. “You have to create a comparison group out of the files of a public agency, create a database, do interviews.  It is getting harder and harder to persuade private funders to spend money on research because the human need is just so great.  And they are not convinced that legislatures and government offices are going to do anything with the results of it anyway.  Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to evaluate the Castle if you are not convinced that New York State will try to replicate it?”

The good news is that we may have reached a turning point, a chance at last to see effective anti-crime policies edge out ineffective ones.  One reason is the record number of people being released from prison.  This has made prisoner re-entry a hot topic in the field of corrections (if still invisible to the rest of the world).  The politics, too, have changed.  The crime rate throughout the United States has dropped, which means that voters are less panicked about crime and less singleminded about harsh measures.

The public isn't thinking about crime — but state officials are.  States are in budget crisis.  Many states are looking for ways to let nonviolent prisoners out — and they can't afford to see them come back again. California's three strikes law — your third felony conviction, even if for something minor, brings a 25-year-to-life prison term — is costing the state $500 million a year, according to the state's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.

Those costs will rise as the prison population ages as a consequence of the law — housing elderly prisoners can cost upwards of $50,000 per year per inmate. And elderly prisoners are the last people you want in prison, as they are the least likely to re-offend.  States are finally getting interested in finding out what actually maximizes the chance that ex-offenders will become good citizens.  They're not going to be able to do that without financing research.

With the passing of the Bush administration, and its frequent willingness to distort science to suit political needs, Washington has a renewed interest in evidence-based everything. Our policies on sex education need to be evidence based — let's do what works to avoid teen pregnancy and sexually-transmitted disease, instead of what makes us feel righteous.  We need an evidence-based response to climate change instead of wishful thinking sponsored by ExxonMobil and the National Association of Manufacturers.   This shouldn't really be a controversial idea — do what is effective, instead of what is merely politically safe.  With subjects as radioactive as how to treat former prisoners, evidence-based policies are toughest to implement and most needed.  But first, you've got to have evidence.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/removing-the-roadblocks-to-rehabilitation/?ref=opinion

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