My weekly dose of Justice

Howdy all. This week was a particularly fun and productive week outside of work. At work, I have basically been playing phone tag with witnesses trying to track a complainant down with no success. So let’s just squawk a little bit about the goings-on outside of work.

This weekend my roommate’s dad flew in from Canada. He was in the area on business—or was supposed to be. His trip was cancelled and he had the tickets, so he came for a long weekend. It was great to be able to meet him. He is a case study in what my roommate will look like few years down the line. They look exactly the same. What’s more, he VERY generously entertained us with dinner (I am not sure I have paid that much for food this entire summer—hyperbole? Don’t be so sure…). In all earnestness, thank you Mr. Johnson for a wonderful evening!

Anyway, enough of the previous malarkey. Once again I went to the same church in Fairfax County. I am ecstatic because the pastor allowed me to borrow the audio CDs from a conference put on by Morningstar Ministries on Faith Healing. I am pretty sure my roomies thought I had lost it when they found me loading those up to my computer the other night. I am surprised it took them that long to question my sanity…Anyway, after church I went out to eat with a friend, Donald, who is from the Congo. We were celebrating the new job that he got. He has been in the area for over a year looking for a decent job. He is totally legal and has all of his papers in order. He is very qualified, articulate, and competent. In fact, he even received his Master’s in the US. He has just had a hard road. It is just a tragic fact that our country is xenophobic. It is even worse in Donald’s case, as he also encounters racism. This is something I am not used to witnessing, being from Iowa, which can be said to be almost homogenous demographically. So it is very eye-opening, and I must say hard, for my naïve eyes to witness racial prejudice when it is displayed. Of course, I am not exempting myself, because I inadvertently stereotype as much as the next person who has not walked in another’s shoes. I am just saying, now that I live in an area where I am the minority I can’t be oblivious to it when it occurs.

On Monday, the Law and Criminal Justice programming for The Washington Center was very entertaining and informative. The Arlington K-9 unit came for a demonstration. There were two deputies that lead the presentation. Deputy Varius and…I can’t remember the name of the second one. Deputy Varius got a little rowdy, but overall, he was a very well behaved dog. You read me right. I wrote dog. I guess I didn’t realize that they have to deputize a dog in order for it to perform police functions. It makes sense when you think about it. That way it can assist in lawful searches and seizures of person and property. Deputy Varius was a black lab, very smart and entertaining. He was a neutral response narcotics dog... He is trained not to bark, bite or scratch. He sits when he finds something. Apparently dogs can be used to sniff out about anything. The human deputy talked about narc dogs, chemical weapon dogs, biohazard dogs, and explosives dogs. The two most crazy ones he mentioned where cancer and disease sniffing dogs and cadaver dogs. I hope I don’t have need of either of those two in the near future.

The speaker in the presidential lecture series was Shelia Johnson. Quite frankly, this lady was impressive. She is a mogul of mega magnitude. She owns the following teams: The Washington Mystics (WMBA), Wizards (NBA), and Capitols (NHL). She is also the co-founder of the Black Entertainment Channel (BET). Just for the record, she disowns the current image of that network.

By far, the best part of my week is the National Institute of Justice Conference that my office allowed me to attend. It was three days of nonstop criminal justice sweet learning. It really was an incredible opportunity to educate myself on what is cooking in the criminal justice field. There were several themes in the conference which focused on how science and technology are starting to change the face of criminal justice. Crime mapping was all the rage. There were nine classes offered on it. I only attended one, since I have no plans to be a crime analyst in the near future. However, it was incredibly interesting. With developing technologies, crime data is getting easier to collect and analyze on a local, state, and national level. The fact is that policy decision making is going to become even more data-driven in the future as more, clear data becomes the expectation. If you are going to go into criminal justice, just keep that in mind. And if you are going work for the government in criminal justice, definitely get ready.

What is really cool is that several offices within the Office of Justice Programs (the one that contains my office) gave a presentation on Prison Rape Elimination (PREA) findings, which is all the rage in my office right now. It has kept me busy all summer with research and analysis. Right now we are preparing a report of policy recommendations for Congress. They were presenting findings of a few parallel reports. I took down their policy recommendations for PREA and I plan to share them with my supervising attorney just for kicks.

I also learned about various after school programs for at-risk youth and whether or not they impact crime reduction. I have very good impressions about the effects of these kinds of programs (if run properly). There is one in my hometown that I used to help with. I saw the day-to-day results with the children. Although I have no numbers to back me up, I have experiences to say that this stuff can really have positive impact. That is one of the reasons why the trend toward the numbers is a good deal. If you have the data to back up your word, you can get policymakers’ attention and cooperation.

There was also a very neat class on how local law enforcement is using the internet as a tool for law enforcement. There is so much in this category that I am just going to skip it altogether and talk about the sweet armor testing DVDs that I wanted to take. They had all of these booths with crazy robotics, body armor, microwave guns, with free DVD demonstrations. I felt like it was a real life HALO game.

The best segment, at least for my tastes was one on prisoner re-entry programs. After learning about various programs available for prisoners about to re-enter normal life, the audience was dazzled for the remainder of the segment. Check this out: the Prisoner Entrepreneur Program (PEP). An incredible prisoner re-entry program in Texas. This 6-figure financial guru toured a prison in Texas and saw that all of the inmates were adept businessmen, but their efforts were misdirected. So she just moved to Texas, raised the funds, and started a faith-based entrepreneurial training program for inmates approaching release. This program is comprehensive, highly selective, and highly successful. It reaches well beyond the prisoner’s release. It is just downright impressive. I can’t rave about it enough. Let me just put it this way, I have become well acquainted with the many ills inherent in the Texas correctional system this summer so this is very heartening to me. In fact, I have pretty much made up my mind that I have to figure out how to land an internship there next summer.

Speaking of prisons, one of my roomies and I rolled on out to Foundry Methodist Church after work today to participate in their Books for Prisoner’s project. I came across the first week I was in town. I was lost trying to find The Washington Center’s building and decided to stop into a nearby church to check out their service schedule. It just so happened that Foundry Methodist is crazy on social justice (my kind of church) and had a million programs to get involved with. So anyway, we checked out this program and here is how it works. It is a relatively simple concept, but it is well done. People donate books; we shelve them in the stacks so that they are easy to sort through. Prisoners from across the country write in with requests for different kinds of books. We go through the stacks, find a book to fit their request and mail it off to them. My suspicions were correct on the evening. I guessed that dictionaries, thesauruses, and law material would be popular because they are engaged in various letter writing campaigns.

Anyway, you all have good one, ya hear?