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The lawsuit claims this practice has continued for over 30 years, despite DCFS officials being well aware of the problem.
"Sometimes I even feel like they wanted me in there, because I was in there so long," said one 18-year-old who was wrongfully incarcerated for 166 days.
Probation is supposed to help people get their lives back on track while staying accountable and keeping the public safe, but in many states offenders are set up to fail in systems that can't or won't give them the opportunity to succeed.
What was originally intended as an alternative to incarceration has become a system for mass state control.
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against a new California law that makes physicians subject to professional discipline for sharing COVID-19 "misinformation" with their patients.
U.S. District Judge William B. Shubb says California's ban on medical advice that includes COVID-19 "misinformation" is unconstitutionally vague.
A Department of Justice investigation has revealed that Louisiana prisons and jails routinely incarcerate inmates well past their release dates. This practice is in violation of inmates' 14th Amendment rights, and it's costing state taxpayers an estimated $2.5 million each year.
A DOJ investigation shows Louisiana incarcerates 26.8 percent of inmates past their release dates, violating inmates' 14th Amendment rights.
Biden thinks banning "assault weapons," or at least restricting their sale to people 21 or older, is a rational response to the two recent California shootings. As he sees it, "stronger action" is obviously necessary, even if that action is not logically related to the incidents that prompted his statement.
https://reason.pub/3kLgAa4
🎨: Lex Villena
The controversy over TikTok in the U.S. is part of a larger debate over strategic competition between the U.S. and China and has profound implications for freedom of expression and regulatory policy.
Bipartisan efforts to ban the app in America would be a great blow to our economy and our liberty.
The abuse of power by public employee unions is the main story of public failure in America—worse even than polarization or red tape. It is not possible to bring purpose and hope back to political discourse until, as a threshold condition, elected leaders regain the authority to run public operations.
Read more: https://reason.pub/3WLznix
When it comes to Donald Trump, there's really no way for social media platforms to win.
Meta announced yesterday that it will restore former President Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts.
In 1950, there were more than 16 workers for every beneficiary. In 2035, that ratio will be only 2.3 workers per retiree.
Live With Robert Pondiscio, Nick Gillespie, and Zach Weissmueller.
An "unbearable bleakness" has overtaken childhood education as a "pedagogy of the depressed" pushes a simplistic vision of "America the Problematic" on impressionable young students, wrote Robert Pondiscio in Commentary last year.
A former teacher, Pondiscio is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the 2019 book How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice (Avery), a behind-the-scenes account of Success Academy, one of America's most accomplished (and controversial) charter school networks. (Watch Reason's interview with Pondiscio about that book.)
Public schools have failed to teach kids to read and write because they use approaches that aren't based on proven techniques based on phonics. Many schools have been influenced by the work of Columbia University's Lucy Calkins, who is the subject of a new podcast series from American Public Media, Sold a Story, "an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences—children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended."
"The South Bronx elementary school where I taught 5th grade for several years was a proponent of Calkins' approach," Pondiscio wrote in a 2022 New York Post op-ed. "We adopted her teaching methods and employed her literacy coaches for years, to very little effect. Her greatest sin against literacy comes after kids learn to 'decode' the written word, whether or not they are taught with phonics, which is just the starting line for reading."
How did this happen? Is the solution school choice—a system in which parents can opt out of traditional public schools and their flawed approaches to teaching reading? As Pondiscio argues, is withdrawing "concern for traditional public schools" equivalent to withdrawing "concern for our republic"?
Join Reason's Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller for a live discussion with Robert Pondiscio on all these questions and more this Thursday at 1 p.m. ET. Watch and leave questions for Pondiscio on the YouTube video above or on Reason's page.
Right in the middle of National School Choice Week, conservative politicians and regulators in Florida are fighting against the introduction of a black history class that would help high school students earn college credit.
Florida conservatives are telling families who support school choice that they can't even choose their kids' classes.
Read the story: https://reason.pub/3XFBEx2
Responding to mass shootings by a 72-year-old and a 66-year-old, Joe Biden pushes a bill that would ban "assault weapon" sales to buyers younger than 21.
The president seems to have forgotten his concession that such laws leave murderers with plenty of options that are "just as deadly."
"Our core beliefs, our behaviors, our patterns of relating, our patterns of coping get encoded in neural networks, which is why they are so difficult to change. Psychedelic substances have this really interesting and unique capacity to loosen those structures and, in some cases, dissolve them so that people have the opportunity to rework their relationship to themselves and the world."
The Biden administration's antitrust efforts are being shut down by judges, except for a single successful case where best-selling authors were involved.
This change could help people like Terri Mollica, a federal inmate who has an untreated uterine fibroid that weighs roughly 15 pounds and causes bleeding, anemia, infection, and fevers.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission might make medical neglect a qualifying condition for compassionate release.
Texas government bodies undertaking a massive expansion of the Alamo grounds have been telling Vince Cantu the same thing for years: sell us your bar, or we're going to come and take it.
"In think, in principle, it's ridiculous to have to deal with this eminent domain bu****it on the grounds of the Alamo," says owner Vince Cantu.
A report from the Government Accountability Office made public this week found "substantial levels of fraud" in the program. More notably, it indicated that the government lacks a real strategy for dealing with the problem.
https://reason.pub/3XTmqF7
🎨: Lex Villena
Why did schools stop teaching kids how to read?
Thursday at 1 p.m. ET, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Robert Pondiscio joins the Reason livestream series with Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller to discuss what he calls the "pedagogy of the depressed" in American schools: https://youtu.be/IIcC64U6KiU
"Brown v. Board of Ed ultimately was never about black kids getting into a white school," says Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.
"It was always about ultimately a parent being able to decide where their children should attend school."
Virginia's lieutenant governor wants state education dollars to fund students, not school buildings.
Gov. Hobbs' review will look to improve ex*****on procedures in Arizona—though the governor has not stated an intent to outlaw the death penalty in the state.
Following numerous botched ex*****ons in the past decade, Arizona will temporarily halt ex*****ons to review death penalty procedures.
This woman's jaw-dropping $2,173,703 IRS penalty is completely unrelated to the gravity of her offense.
A $2.1 million penalty for failing to file a form on time reveals the agency’s true nature.
Why are educational institutions in real life more like the one in "Carrie" than the one in Harry Potter?
A new paper suggests that patients might be better served if there's a larger profit motive in health care.
A new paper shows how the profit motive might have helped some nursing homes navigate COVID-19 better than others.
Paul Ehrlich has been wrong again and again about an impending famine. So why would 60 Minutes interview him?
"60 Minutes" recently had on Paul Ehrlich, who claims the world is careening toward mass destruction. The opposite is true.
"The CDC has been a terrible broker of information, particularly because they don’t really acknowledge the limits of their own knowledge at any given point in time," Nick Gillespie says on this week's podcast.
In The Reason Roundtable, the editors discuss the Facebook Files, which revealed the considerable influence the CDC wielded in regard to what users were allowed to say on Meta platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For evidence of the president's opposition to school choice, you don't have to look far.
President Joe Biden's administration says it supports school choice, but only when those choices align with government control.
To avoid demographic and economic decline, the U.S. should embrace its advantage as a nation that attracts more people than it loses.
China's population has declined for the first time in over 60 years. The U.S. can avoid a similar fate by embracing its immigration advantage.
The Libertarian Party has always been fractious, but its infighting has intensified since the Mises Caucus, a faction opposed to "wokeism," took control of the organization.
This is what it looks like when a political party's branches start to go their own way.
Priscilla Villarreal, whose presence in Laredo, Texas, is associated with her profanity-laced commentary on law enforcement, was jailed for the crime of asking the government questions, getting answers, and publishing those responses.
That would appear to be a fairly cut-and-dry infringement on her First Amendment rights. Yet, it's a question that has stumped the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in a case that could have far-reaching implications for anyone engaged in journalism, regardless of their political bent.
Read the story: https://reason.pub/3ZUgWv7
Some laws of economics are ironclad. Competition is a natural regulator of economic activity. When demand outweighs supply, prices will rise. And when prices rise, a prominent progressive will blame it on corporate greed.
https://reason.pub/3Hv99wu
🎨: Lex Villena
Whoops, we leaked the no-fly list.
"We" means CommuteAir, a regional airline whose insecure server, accessed by a Swiss hacker named maia arson crimew, included a file helpfully named NoFly.csv, which turned out to be a 2019 version of the U.S. government's no-fly list.
Reviewing and improving the federal government’s data security and digital defenses should be a priority.
Does federal law shield a religious postal carrier who refuses to work on Sundays? The U.S. Supreme Court will decide.
For more: https://reason.pub/3XSMakj
Who says you have to be rich to go to private school? A libertarian businessman built his own network of low-cost private schools that the government can't meddle with. 🏫🎒🖍️
https://reason.pub/3GWmMmT
🎨: Lex Villena
Content-generating artificial intelligence will probably enhance human labor rather than make it obsolete.
Florida has had more exonerations of death row inmates than any other state in the country: roughly 1 for every 3 ex*****ons carried out. That ought to inspire more humility, not aggressiveness, in deciding when the state should be allowed to kill.
"We can't be in a situation where one person can just derail this," Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told a gathering of law enforcement officials.
46 arrests? Led by Homeland Security? This must have been some sort of major s*x trafficking ring, right? Nope! Just men trying to pay for private, consensual s*x.
The Department of Homeland Security is playing vice cop, again, while pretending that the agency is striking a blow against "s*x trafficking."
The government wants to seize more than $2 million from Monica Toth, an 82-year-old woman who the IRS says ran afoul of documentation guidelines.
The Supreme Court just declined to hear her case: https://reason.pub/3XyFmbP
If you've sent or received money to or from somebody in Mexico, law-enforcement agencies have probably tracked your transactions.
Here's how the Arizona Attorney General's Office launched a national program to track Americans' financial transactions to other countries.
Gov. Katie Hobbs wants to repeal Arizaona's school choice expansion, which last year was lauded as one of the best in the nation: https://reason.pub/3kwmkUV
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New York's "investment of the century" comes at a high cost for the people whose homes must be bulldozed to make way for a Micron semiconductor plant.
People claim breakfast is the "most important meal of the day.” But it's not.
Gun control is 'the most racist practice in America,' says Maj Toure, the Philadelphia native and community leader. https://reason.pub/3TvWuMt
From Reason’s archives: We spoke with Mike Rowe in 2013 about the high cost of college. Tuition rates and student debt loads have only grown since this interview took place. While some hailed Biden’s debt forgiveness plan this year as a welcome remedy, it would have done nothing to contain college costs. And now a federal judge has ruled that President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt is unconstitutional. https://reason.pub/3ToDiAo
This man knows his rights. In Florida, people are only required by law to show police officers their ID when they are stopped on suspicion of a crime. Nevertheless, the two officers handcuff Hodges and pull his ID from his pocket to run a check on him. Read more: https://reason.pub/3UsXiD7
Howdy neighbor. Do you have a warrant?
A few highly motivated special interests can inflict great economic damage on the country despite broad—but less-intense—opposition to their cronyist policies.
Environmental Progress founder Michael Shellenberger believes the Green New Deal’s focus on wind and solar is a waste of time and money.
Promised an improved way of life, GoRemy does everything he can to believe in a new ideology–except the math.
"As goes California, so goes the nation," Gavin Newsom once said, following the state supreme court's legalization of same-sex marriage. Is that still true, or is it Texas now? Or is the importance of geography simply diminished in the networked age? Is Florida the future?
Expecting governments and international bodies to orient every large company toward some widely agreed upon "common good" assumes that many of the very institutions that bungled the COVID-19 response can competently handle the planet's most intractable problems. Instead of the Great Reset, in which sclerotic 20th-century institutions accumulate even more power, perhaps we're entering… the Great Escape.
Whether or not the lab leak theory is correct, it's now clear that a number of public officials and influential scientists concealed their conflicts of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and minimized their own roles in providing government funding for unsupervised gain-of-function research that may have led to the pandemic.
Angela McArdle became the head of the Libertarian Party (LP) in May 2022 at the national convention in Reno, Nevada. She represents the Mises Caucus, a group that aims to take the LP in a new direction. Under McArdle's leadership—officially, she's the chair of the Libertarian National Committee—the LP's social media messaging has angered some members, and a handful of state chapters have disaffiliated or dissolved. What's been going on behind the scenes at the LP? Is the party growing or shrinking? How did LP candidates fare in the midterms? What's the plan looking ahead to 2024? Join Reason's Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller for a live conversation with McArdle about all this and more on Thursday, November 10 at 1 pm Eastern. You can watch it above, on Twitter, or at Reason's page. We welcome comments and questions at YouTube and Facebook, and we'll put the best to McArdle.
Gun control is 'the most racist practice in America,' says Philadelphia native and community leader Maj Toure.
Here’s a scenario for election theft allegations that might pass for optimistic in a political environment as dysfunctional as our own: A few more years of this onslaught of bipartisan and demonstrably groundless accusations and the charge might cease to be a serious thing. https://reason.pub/3UIbg3E
Antiwar.com's Scott Horton and former Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis warn about the grave danger of escalating the war in Ukraine.
Whether you want to spin your way out of a recession, walk back your support of rioters, or simply rile up your donor base, Grammarly's helpful suggestions make your political messaging as clear—or murky—as you need.
"We see a lot of health editors and health reporters prioritizing a tidy narrative about Anthony Fauci over providing the truth to their readers,” says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. https://reason.pub/3UgSfp0
Meet "Generation Disaster." A look at the cumulative impact of being raised in a relentlessly apocalyptic social and political environment, the role that Boomer and Gen X parents and authorities play in stoking anxiety, and how new forms of technology and media have influenced the worldviews of millennials and Generation Z.
Do you have questions about law enforcement? Here are some fun facts: • Police officers have no legal obligation to protect you from imminent harm! • You can be too smart to be a police officer! • Cops aren't required to know the law even as they arrest people for breaking it!
The "Monty Python" legend says political correctness is ruining creativity in all aspects of human activity.
Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves and yet the country has run out of gasoline! This in turn has crippled the economy, made travel prohibitively expensive, and increased prices of basic goods.
Joe Biden and his crew are delusionally pronouncing that we can tame inflation by pumping massive amounts of government money into the economy—a course of action that will almost certainly make everything more expensive.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the voting booth...
Whether or not the lab leak theory is correct, it's now clear that a number of public officials and influential scientists concealed their conflicts of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and minimized their own roles in providing government funding for unsupervised gain-of-function research that may have led to the pandemic.
The Department of Homeland Security has greatly expanded its efforts in recent years to control the flow of information across major social media platforms, documents obtained and published on Monday by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein of The Intercept reveal. Texts and emails show tech executives in regular communication with government agents about their efforts to battle "misinformation" related to topics ranging from the pandemic to U.S. elections to the war in Afghanistan. One document shows that Facebook even created a special portal for government agents to report problematic posts. "Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse," write Fang and Klippenstein. Reason's Nick Gillespie, Robby Soave, and Zach Weissmueller on Thursday at 1 p.m. ET will discuss these revelations, what it means for free speech on the internet, and what steps might be taken to counter these attempts by the national security state to police American political discourse by exerting pressure out of the sight of the American people.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the voting booth...
Science writer Mick West examines alleged UFO sightings. He finds they almost always have far more obvious explanations. 🛸👽 https://reason.pub/3gRH0Vw
To many drug policy reform activists, Biden's recent proclamation does precious little for those imprisoned—some with life sentences—for nonviolent marijuana-related charges. Rather than make good on his campaign trail promises, Biden has done the bare minimum, attempting to garner political goodwill without actually freeing anyone imprisoned by policies Biden himself once heralded. https://reason.pub/3TJhroa
Out of 27,900 research publications on gun laws, only 123 tested their effects rigorously.
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