finding my place, stage 1

so here's what $938 worth of law textbooks looks like:


doesn't look like all that much, does it? they're pretty big books, but still. oh, well, whatever -- welcome to my book locker. required for one class is an "i-clicker" which looks like an early remote control and is a way to communicate electronically with the professor during class (just having an "i'm old" moment).

truth is i'm excited about it all. at orientation next week, one task will be to locate our "flexes" which make up the cornell mail system. i cheated and found mine today. there it was, right there, with my name on it, as if they are expecting me!

went and sat in the carrels today, just to see if i could find a favorite. did the goldilocks thing -- this one's too close to the stairs where people are talking, that one's too close to the whatever machine is running in that corner. but found one. then went up to the beautiful reading room and read there for a while. feels good. feels good enough that i was having a hard time reading, just excited to be claiming such a place.

i know all this is very uncool, but i am really loving it, and eager to get started. life is good and i'm grateful.

what to do with sex offenders

there is much conversation in the legal "blawgs" (e.g., here) these days on sex offender post-release residency restrictions. i am mostly watching and listening, but i am struck by this:

this may be the best solution the political/legal world can come up with, but as a society, we can and need to do better.

can we (the public) take advantage of the current outrage against sex offenders to demand that our departments of correction actually begin to provide some sort of correction? here again, we act as if the only tool we have is a hammer. if someone breaks the law, we incarcerate them and that is supposed to deter future crime on the part of the offender and others. this seems to work for some crimes, but certainly not for others. we need to see this.

it is in our national interest, and is our responsibility to our children, to recognize that this incarceration-only approach has no effect on future sex offenses. we need to face up to what is. we are holding them, and we are squandering this chance to have an impact, instead releasing them back into society when the strong evidence is that they remain dangerous. insisting that these people live a certain distance from schools will not solve this. locking them up forever will not solve it. more rules and increased punishment will not solve it. we need to look in a different tool-kit.

for a long time, we have been content to let our corrections systems be only punitive, and to consider anything constructive (education, treatment) as "coddling." but there is another way to see this. we need to demand that -- for our sakes -- our departments of correction develop and provide effective treatment for sex offenders. we need to figure out what works and do it.

and once we do this, it is possible that we can focus on solving other problems which incarceration alone is not solving: substance abuse and violence, for example.

prison population mark

from the drug law blog late last week:

A major report from the Pew Center is out today noting the sad statistic that 1 in 100 adults is now locked up in jail or prison in this country.

if you have a second, the graphic here, which shows the racial breakdown, is worth a look. The 1 in 100 figure above includes women. For black men 20-34 the figure is 1 in 9.

1 in 9.

1 in 9.

international human rights

unc law's 12th annual student-organized conference on race, class, gender and ethnicity was held yesterday --lots of food for thought.

using an international human rights framework to look at domestic legal issues is a fairly new idea, and one that is fascinating. there are serious hurdles, including the fact that international treaties have these pesky little non-self-executing clauses (rendering them unenforceable), even when they have been ratified.

still, there is reason for hope. it may be possible to use them in the legal arena as evidence of international standards. i am also interested in the idea that they can be used with the public -- maybe it will be useful to understand human rights violations as things which happen not only in countries like iran, china, but here. we think we always wear the white hats.

also intriguing was this concept, offered, i think, by mark gibney of unca during q/a: human rights-based education of young children. wow -- that could make a difference. my brain has gone bounding off into summer democracy camp or something, where kids could actually go off together, learn about basic human rights, and create rules and a societal structure for enforcing them, etc. and play it out -- really give them power within human rights framework -- see how it works and how complicated it is, get them thinking, participating -- is anyone doing this?