Word: prisoners
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That's because much of the relative calm of recent years may have been due to the dominance of one local overlord. Paramilitary leader Diego Fernando Murillo, a.k.a. Don Berna, had a monopoly over the drug trade, ruling his empire and followers even from prison. But when Don Berna was extradited to the U.S. in 2008, mid-level narco-traffickers started fighting to fill the power vacuum the capo had left. "Little cats became tigers," says a former drug trafficker. Many demobilized paramilitary fighters picked up arms again instead of pursuing the work training and education opportunities offered...
...progress is taking place in the context of repression: the West Bank still has many aspects of a low-security prison. Israel controls the borders, the airspace, the water supply and the electricity. As you drive from Ramallah north to Nablus, illegal Israeli settlements and outposts command the tops of many hills - an infestation that most Palestinians, rightly, consider a continuing invasion of their land. Even the most optimistic Palestinians assume that the real Israeli plan is to wait them out, keep building settlements and force as many Palestinians into the diaspora as they can. Benjamin Netanyahu's recent decision...
...death-penalty case. In the U.S., where we've executed 1,200 people since the death penalty [was reinstated in 1976], that's $1.2 billion. I just think, gosh, with $1.2 billion, you could hire a lot of policemen. You could have a lot of educational programs inside of prisons, so that when people come out of prison they know how to do something besides rob convenience stores and sell drugs. There are already counties in Texas, of all places, that have said, This is just not worth it. Let's fix the schools and fill the potholes...
...years as police pit their strength against a dwindling army of criminals. In his recent book, When Brute Force Fails, UCLA's Kleiman argues that new strategies for targeting repeat offenders - including reforms to make probation an effective sanction rather than a feckless joke - could cut crime and reduce prison populations simultaneously. Safer communities, in turn, might produce more hopeful and well-disciplined kids. It's a sweet image to contemplate in this sour era, but a lack of jobs is a cloud over the picture...
This lack of consequences for failures among senior officers is particularly profound in cases of extreme malfeasance and war crimes. Whether it is the behavior of prison guards at Abu Ghraib in Iraq or less publicized - but sadly numerous - cases of murder and brutality committed by soldiers and Marines, the military has punished, often severely, those who committed crimes. But it has spent little energy examining the leadership and command failures that created a climate in which such crimes could occur in the first place. (See pictures of the Fort Hood shootings...