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conrad defiebre offers a nice story on crafty inmate quilters in monday’s strib.

i’ve known female prisoners to take great pride in such work, particularly when their products are donated for a good cause. nevertheless, this is the first i’ve heard about male participants. one young st. cloud inmate explains the attraction:

it’s quiet, it’s mellow, and the stuff is donated to some people who need it.

hallelujah. and nobody’s stolen any scissors or needles yet, either. the registration-required site offers a fine slideshow with audio.

while all of the attention of late has been focused on paris hilton, her on-again, off-again, on-again jail sentence, and questions of celebrity Justice, there will be an important decision in genarlow wilson’s case on june 11th. the judge will decide whether to release him from prison.

his case has received extensive and thoughtful media coverage, but if you haven’t heard about it, here’s a summary from the website for his appeal:

Genarlow Wilson sits in prison despite being a good son, a good athlete and high school student with a 3.2 GPA. He never had any criminal trouble. On the day he was to sit for the SAT, at seventeen years old, his life changed forever. He was arrested. In Douglas County he was accused of inappropriate sexual acts at a News Year’s Eve party. A jury acquitted him of the allegation of Rape but convicted him of Aggravated Child Molestation for a voluntary act of oral sex with another teenager. He was 17, and she was 15.

Along with the label “child molester” which will require him throughout his life to be on a sexual offender registry, Genarlow received a sentence of eleven years — a mandatory 10 years in prison and 1 year on probation.

On July 1st, the new Romeo and Juliet law went into effect in Georgia for any other teen that engages in consensual sexual acts. That change in the law means that no teen prosecuted for consensual oral sex could receive more than a 12 months sentence or be required to register as a sex offender.

Had this law been in effect when Genarlow Wilson was arrested, or had been done after the Marcus Dixon case, Genarlow would not now be in jail.

Genarlow and his mother are overjoyed that no one else in Georgia will have to know their pain. In the meantime, however, the legal fight goes on for Genarlow Wilson.

Genarlow has been incarcerated since February 25, 2005.

let’s say that you don’t happen to share my affection for the fine art of concert flyers. how would you stop “rogue promoters” from papering the halls, walls, and buses of your fair city with gig posters? in glasgow, the city council cleverly started slapping CANCELLED stickers over the offending posters. the result?

… some rogue promoters … have been inundated with complaints from music fans.
People who have bought tickets to some of this summer’s big gigs have complained, thinking that an event, rather than the advert, had been cancelled.
The source said: “If people start phoning concert promoters complaining that they thought the gig had been cancelled, then the promoters have no-one but themselves to blame for having the posters put up in the first place.”

i give them 10 out 10 for style, 10 out of 10 for creativity, and maybe 3 out of 9 zillion for enforcement priorities. but dang that’s clever.

as i’m sure you’ve heard, paris has left the building.

the seattle times reports that barack obama is warning of “quiet riots” among blacks after the disaster of hurricane katrina and the current administration’s poor treatment of new orleans’ residents in its afttermath.

we’ve all read how the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay has risen in recent years. in minnesota, compensation for executives from northwest airlines and united healthcare spark frequent editorials of the “oh, come on! you cannot be serious” variety.

big-time CEOs such as warren buffet have also decried such compensation packages, railing “that a mediocre-or-worse CEO – aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo – all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.”

but it really takes charles denny, the respected former chair and CEO of ADC telecommunications, to show us how bad things have gotten for former executives. this week, mr. denny slipped an astonishing parenthetical admisson into his fine strib piece on CEO compensation:

Public opinion is turning against business leaders. Poll after poll reflects growing public distrust in executives. The Harris Poll showed a drop in public confidence in major business leaders from 28 percent approval in 2000 to 13 percent today. Only organized labor, Congress and lawyers received lower rankings.

(As a former CEO, I feel the sting of public disdain. When my grandchildren ask me what I did at work, I tell them I was the company librarian.)

nice. what do you think they’re paying the ADC librarians these days?

an inmate on death row in texas is seeking jokes so that he can select the funniest one and offer it as his last statement before his execution on june 26. to read the full story from the AP, click here.

the short version is this: patrick knight is on death row for shooting his neighbors to death 16 years ago. he claims that his idea to offer humorous last words is not intended to disrespect his victims; instead, he says: “I’m not trying to say I don’t care what’s going on. I’m about to die. I’m not going to sit here and whine and cry and moan and everything like that when I’m facing the punishment I’ve been given.”

knight got the idea for a joke as his last statement after a friend was executed earlier this year and laughed from the death chamber gurney: “Where’s a stunt double when you need one?”

for many inmates, the use of humor is an important survival strategy in prison. is it taking it too far for a condemned inmate to tell a joke before being executed, or should the individual be allowed to express whatever last sentiment s/he chooses?

the Salem Statesman Journal reports:

from today’s seattle times:

For four months, Federal Way police sent two undercover detectives — a 29-year-old woman and a 33-year-old man — to infiltrate an area of increasing drug use:

High schools.

Officials provided few details Thursday on how the detectives, well out of their teens, were able to pass themselves off as students, but their undercover operation succeeded to an alarming extent.

With little difficulty, they purchased a cornucopia of illicit drugs — including marijuana, Ecstasy, cocaine and the prescription drug oxycodone — as well as rifles and semiautomatic handguns.

The investigation culminated Thursday with criminal charges filed against 12 students, ranging in age from 13 to 18, and against two adults not associated with Federal Way schools.

well, it’s been a quiet week in lakeland, florida. the weekly crime map shows only a handful of robberies, some residential burglaries, a couple of stolen cars, and a graffiti report. even so, i was surpised to learn that shoplifting a $6.49 box of prophylactics from the lakeland sears could still land one’s picture on the local crime stoppers leaflet shown above. a few hypotheses:

1. awesome technology. the picture quality was just too good to ignore. check it out: the poor lad is caught red-handed.

2. moral revulsion. some folks are still sickened by the idea of condoms being sold right out there in the open like that. perhaps if the young fellow had grabbed, say, a $6.49 bottle of brut the lakeland police might not have made this case such a priority.*

3. cold cash. maybe somebody is after the reward money: according to the crime stoppers f.a.q., “Tipsters remain anonymous and become eligible for rewards of up to $1,000.”

4. crim theory. perhaps lakeland is big on broken-windows law enforcement or shaming sanctions.

5. wistful nostalgia. the mayberry-gone-wild aspects of this story would seem to evoke durkheim’s society of saints. wouldn’t it be nice if this was the picture of serious crime in america? the young rascal would naturally fess up in such a world, where he’d be given a good talking to by a kindly officer.

*oops, scratch that. only four days later, a crime stoppers alert detailed the theft of “a pack of socks and three bottles of cologne.” i bet it wasn’t brut, though.