ArcaMax

Show of hands: How many readers believe that the U.S. prison system truly works to rehabilitate convicts before releasing them back into society?

I'm betting not many hands went up.

A quick history of America's correctional-industrial complex shows that up until the late '60s, the goal really was to rehabilitate prisoners so they could have ...Read more

How many times have you seen these scenarios play out on TV crime dramas? The savvy detective tells a scared kid in the interrogation room that if he will just confess, then the cops can promise leniency. Or the investigator tells the juvenile that his buddy in the other room has spilled his guts. To save himself, the suspect is told, he needs ...Read more

Sad to say, we keep killing each other. New FBI statistics show that, even though we practiced widespread isolation during the pandemic, the nation's murder rate grew last year at the fastest rate ever -- up 29.4%. There are fewer homicides now than during the peak years of the early '90s, but not since the federal government began ...Read more

This column is not about relitigating the 2020 election. President Joe Biden is the duly certified U.S. president. Period. Now, let's talk about the mess in which we find our election system. Let's talk about voter fraud.

It does exist; claims to the contrary are incorrect. And discussions about voting integrity matter because we have about one...Read more

About 11 times every hour, about 250 times a day, an American citizen dies of a drug overdose. The most frequent culprit is fentanyl. The most popular mode of delivery is fentanyl-laced heroin, fentanyl mixed with cocaine or illegally produced OxyContin pain pills containing fentanyl. And it's not just hardcore addicts who are dying.

The ...Read more

Calls for the blanket defunding of police are ill-conceived and self-destructive. The proof is in the spike of violent crime in cities that cut their police budgets during the last year.

That said, it doesn't mean that programs can't be implemented to shift police priorities and share duties with other specialists, like mental health ...Read more

Did you realize that there are more Americans on parole or probation than are held within the prison system? Yep, it's hard to fathom but 1 in 58 American adults -- about 4.4 million citizens -- are currently under some sort of community supervision.

Do they all need to be? Doubtful. And the status quo is costing taxpayers billions every single...Read more

Bill Bratton has been the police commissioner of three major cities: Boston, Los Angeles and New York. When asked last year about the value of cops, Bratton, 73, said: "They are the glue that literally holds society together. They are an essential element of a successful democracy." I agree.

But we have come to a place now where we need to ...Read more

Domestic abuse is a terrible cycle. Victim advocates say it takes an average of seven events before the injured person tries to leave an abusive situation for good.

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence estimates nearly 20 people are physically abused by an intimate partner in the U.S. every minute. Over the course of one year...Read more

In March 2020, this column focused on the need for citizens who are unhappy with the state of our political and justice systems to speak up about their concerns.

Your opinion can't be counted if you stay silent, I wrote. Or as one of my readers put it, "We now have the government that we have earned but not the government our children deserve...Read more