RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
April 27 to May 3, 2025 In RealClearInvestigations, Ana Kasparian reports on Proposition 57, the latest in a series of misbegotten California penal reforms that have helped release countless violent criminals back onto the streets: - Proposition 57 was sold to the public in 2016 – and approved by 65% of voters – as a way to relieve the state’s chronically overcrowded prisons by rewarding “nonviolent” offenders with early release for good behavior.
- Many of such convicts have been rearrested. The state’s latest recidivism report shows that more than two thirds of the 34,215 inmates granted early release between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020 had been rearrested as of April 2, 2025.
- And many were hardly nonviolent offenders. The legislature's previous crime reclassification efforts meant that only a few tightly defined crimes would disqualify prisoners from the measure’s benefits.
- Domestic violence was not on the list, meaning a get-out-of-jail card for Smiley Martin, a career criminal in stir for severely beating his girlfriend.
- Just months back on the street, Martin joined several accomplices, including his brother, in the worst mass shooting in Sacramento’s history – leaving six dead and 12 others injured on April 3, 2022. He died of a drug OD in lockup before being tried.
- The troubled history of Prop 57 highlights the challenges of rehabilitating inmates while also reducing prison overcrowding without building more prisons.
Antisemitism has received broad attention since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the Gaza war it sparked. But as David Swindle reports for RealClearInvestigations, antisemitism has been rising sharply around the world for more than a decade, especially among young Americans. Swindle reports that this ancient hatred is being fueled by growing rates of anxiety and depression, intensified in part by social media:
- A longstanding Anti-Defamation League survey found that in 2024, 46% of respondents worldwide agreed with at least six of 11 antisemitic statements such as “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars,” and “Jews’ loyalty is only to Israel.” In 2014 that figure was 26%.
- The rise was even sharper in the U.S., where much of the increase occurred before the Oct. 7 attacks.
- Antisemitism is rising not primarily because previously non-bigoted older adults have embraced hatred. The ADL’s Global 100 report found that, globally, 50% of those under 35 embrace antisemitism, compared to just 37% for those over 50.
- The statistics suggest that in the U.S. contemporary problems are powering ancient antisemitism – problems including the rise of social media, the toll of isolation during COVID lockdowns, and fears of climate change.
- Scholars have long shown that people turn to Jew-hatred because they actually hate themselves for creating the unsatisfying lives they have.
- Declines in education and historical memory are also fueling antisemitism. A 2020 survey of younger Americans found that 63% of respondents did not know that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books Albuquerque Won’t Release Its Audits, RCI
Taxpayer-Funded Exhibit Lionized Fauci, RCI
Un-Super 'D' Grade Nets School Super Bonus, RCI
Nothing Funny About Cuomo’s Spending, RCI
Why Is Trump Outspending Biden?, RCI Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Emails Suggest Hunter Biden Connected Burisma With USAID, X
Mass Exodus at Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Office, ABC News
Top Firms Fund Ex-Obama Official Favoring 'War With Whiteness', Washington Free Beacon
ICE: ‘First of Its Kind’ Operation Nets 800 Migrants in Florida, CNN
Jennifer Hegseth's Unorthodox Role at the Pentagon, Washington Post
Inside the Pro-Trump Silicon Valley Group Chats, Semafor Other Noteworthy Articles and Series By the summer of 2023, Viktoriia Roshchyna was the only Ukrainian journalist willing to cross the frontline. At some point, the Russians seized her. This article reports that Roshchyna “was held without charge and without access to a lawyer. During her detention, her only known contact with the outside world was a four-minute phone call to her parents, a full year after she was taken.” Last week, Russia returned her remains along with those of 756 other causalities. Preliminary forensics suggest “numerous signs of torture”, according to the prosecutor. Burn marks on her feet from electric shocks, abrasions on the hips and head, and a broken rib. Her hair, which she liked to wear long and tinted blonde at the tips, had been shaved. Sources close to the official investigation have also disclosed that the hyoid bone in her neck was broken. It is the kind of damage that can occur during strangulation. However, the exact cause of death may never be known because when her body was returned during the exchange on 14 February, certain parts were missing, namely the brain, eyes and larynx. This article reports that a war crimes investigation has been opened with a view to prosecuting those responsible. That may produce results one day because the Guardian and others have “tracked down first-hand testimonies to reconstruct the events that led to Roshchyna’s capture, and the details of her treatment in detention.” This article also reports that she was one of an estimated 16,000 civilians – including aid workers, journalists, business owners, local politicians, church leaders – detained and held without charge by Russia. Last Dec. 9, prison guards at the Marcy Correctional Facility near Syracuse, N.Y., carried Robert Brooks "into the infirmary face down, holding him by his cuffed hands and ankles.” Once inside a private exam room, this article reports, “officers beat and choked him while nurses lingered in the hall. Brooks died the next day at a nearby hospital.” A few months later, on March 1, officers “beat Messiah Nantwi to death, prosecutors allege, in an attack that started in his cell and continued in the infirmary at Mid-State prison, across the street from the facility where Brooks was killed." Quote: While beating deaths and murder charges like the Brooks and Nantwi killings are incredibly rare, alleged physical abuse in New York prison infirmaries is not. The Marshall Project has identified 46 allegations that corrections officers assaulted prisoners in medical wings of New York prisons since 2010, according to a review of court settlements, disciplinary records and pending lawsuits. Three prisoners died, including Brooks and Nantwi, while many others were left with severe injuries such as collapsed lungs and broken bones. And in the past six years, three women have alleged in lawsuits that male officers raped them in an infirmary. … Prisoners and advocates say guards abuse people in the infirmary because it’s tucked away and has areas with no cameras. Beatings in the infirmary of one New York prison were so common, prisoners called the medical wing “the torture chambers.” At another facility, the infirmary was called “the slaughterhouse.” This article reports that after Brooks’ killing, New York’s corrections commissioner ordered that all security staff with body-worn cameras must record whenever they are around prisoners, including in medical settings. A Labor Department program designed to train 16- to 24-year-olds to join the workforce spends more per person annually than Ivy League colleges, this article reports, but participants wind up making minimum wage on average: The Job Corps pays teenage runaways, high school dropouts, and twentysomething ex-cons to live in dormitories and receive their GEDs and vocational training. The national cost per graduate was $188,000, with the average graduate staying 13.5 months. Of more than 110 campuses, the 10 least efficient averaged a cost of $385,000 per graduate. Job Corps participants earn $16,695 per year on average after leaving the program, according to new government data. … The Old Dominion Job Corps campus in Monroe, Virginia, had 95 enrollees in 2023, at a cost of $137,000 each. Only 17 successfully completed the program, amounting to a cost of $764,000 per graduate. Old Dominion is operated by ODLE Management Group LLC, which runs several campuses. This article reports that the cost per graduate is especially high because only about one-third of enrollees complete the program. “Of about 30,000 enrollees in the 2023-24 school year, roughly 10,000 were expelled for misconduct, 5,000 were booted for absconding, and 5,000 dropped out for other reasons.” Abortion advocates and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration insist the pill responsible for more than half of the nation’s abortions is “safe and effective.” But, this article reports, a new, wide-ranging analysis of insurance claims regarding the abortion drug regimen found that the rate of life-threatening complications is at least 22 times higher than what the FDA and Danco Laboratories, manufacturer of mifepristone pill Mifeprex, suggest: Approximately 10.9 percent of those [insurance] claims, or 94,605 chemical abortions, involved potentially life-threatening “serious adverse events” such as emergency room visits, hemorrhage, sepsis, infection, and/or follow-up surgeries for the women who had downed the abortion drug within the last 45 days. That rate, which researchers adjusted to reflect “that some women suffer from adverse events in multiple categories,” is 22 times the FDA’s <0.5 percent estimation printed on the Mifeprex label. The researchers also suggest that the 45-day timeframe they used is “conservative, as some adverse events may present later (and studies relied on by the FDA used a timeframe as long as 72 days).” The article reports that the FDA “derived its mifepristone data from 10 clinical trials. In 2000, the agency used those trials to justify fast-tracking abortion pill approval despite ongoing concerns about dangerous and fatal complications.” From the Annals of Safety in Numbers, this article reports that leaders of some of the America top schools have formed a “private collective” to fight the Trump administration’s threats to withhold federal funding in order to force them to dismantle diversity programs, battle antisemitism and advance other reforms the president supports: The informal group currently includes about 10 schools, including Ivies and leading private research universities, mostly in blue states. … The group comprises figures at the highest levels, including individual trustees and presidents. Maintaining close contact, they have discussed red lines they won’t cross in negotiations and have gamed out how to respond to different demands presented by the Trump administration, which has frozen or canceled billions in research funding at schools it says haven’t effectively combated antisemitism on their campuses. The group’s aim is to avoid the fate of some top law firms, where one deal led to others following suit. The universities want to make sure other schools don’t go so far as to strike deals that create a worrisome precedent that others would be under pressure to follow, say the people familiar with the effort. This article reports that “the Trump administration has been worried schools would team up in resistance, because it is harder to negotiate with a united front.” |
