Officials deem sex offenders’ home unfit for neighborhood
ALTADENA - Following an outpouring of community outrage, six high-risk sex offenders installed this month at a home in an isolated Altadena neighborhood will be relocated by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, officials announced Thursday.
By Monday, all of the men will be moved from the single-family home on Risinghill Road, said representatives for Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich and state Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-Pasadena, who worked together to bring about the change.
“Placing one next door to a family with young children would be irresponsible,” Antonovich said. “You don’t give an arsonist matches and then place them on parole. . .
New High In U.S. Prison Numbers
More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.
With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.
The growth in prison population is largely because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group. . .
Immigration: No Correlation With Crime
Despite our melting-pot roots, Americans have often been quick to blame the influx of immigrants for rising crime rates. But new research released Monday shows that immigrants in California are, in fact, far less likely than U.S.-born Californians are to commit crime. While people born abroad make up about 35% of California’s adult population, they account for only about 17% of the adult prison population, the report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) showed. Indeed, among men ages 18 to 40 — the demographic most likely to be imprisoned — those born in the U.S. were 10 times more likely than foreign-born men to be incarcerated.
“From a public safety standpoint, there would be little reason to limit immigration,” says Kristin Butcher, an economics professor at Wellesley College and one of the report’s authors.
The new report even bolsters claims by some academics that increased immigration makes the United States safer. A second study, released earlier this month by Washington-based nonprofit Immigration Policy Center, found that on the national level, U.S.-born men ages 18-39 are five times more likely to be incarcerated than are their foreign-born peers. And, while the number of illegal immigrants in the country doubled between 1994 and 2005, violent crime declined by nearly 35% and property crimes by 26% over the same period. The PPIC even determined that on average, between 2000 and 2005, cities such as Los Angeles that took in a higher share of recent immigrants saw their crime rates fall further than cities with a lower influx of illegals. . .
Spanking Raises Chances of Risky, Deviant Sexual Behavior
THURSDAY, Feb. 28 (HealthDay News)—Researchers have uncovered another damaging consequence of spanking: risky sexual behaviors, or even sexual deviancy, when the child grows up.
“This adds one more harmful side effect to spanking,” said Murray Straus, a spanking expert who was expected to present the findings of four studies at the American Psychological Association’s Summit on Violence and Abuse in Relationships in Bethesda, Md., on Thursday.
“I think that it’s pretty powerful,” said Elizabeth Gershoff, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work. “It’s across several studies and across different forms of either risky or deviant sexual behavior. . .
