Stop Casting Stones

The Failure of Punitive Crime Policy

By Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.

It’s obscene.

The obscenity is not only in the increasing rate of homicide in New Orleans—up 14 percent from 2010 to 2011—or the loss of innocent lives, or the senselessness of the murders committed. The height of obscenity arrives when we, as a city, acquiesce to the loss of life as if those who died do not matter, or as if “they got what they deserved.”

The collective failure to mourn the loss of every life and failure to recognize how every victim is one of our own marks our own inhumanity.

There is a different way. I will highlight best criminal justice practices from other cities in a subsequent article. This article focuses on a prerequisite: recognizing the failure of a punitive criminal justice system.

Read more >