There are many types of crimes, and there are many types of criminals.  Some criminals are murders, some are rapists, some rob from little old ladies in a make money online scheme, and some make the headlines of the NYTimes.  However, without a doubt, the lowest form of criminals are the pimps.  These bottom of the human barrel criminals manipulate, abuse, rape, and profit from the suffering of young girls day in and day out.  Young girls, just like Sara Kruzan, who grow up in broken homes, are forced by these people to give up their most precious human right, the right to self respect and dignity.  Pimps manipulate these young girls, tell them they are “special,” treat them like celebrities, such as an Audrina Patridge or a Jennifer Love Hewitt, and then turn around and rape them, beat them, and force them to sell their underage bodies to decrepit pedophiles.  If there was ever a prime candidate for the term “lowest of the low,” pimps are it.

When it comes to prosecuting these human refuse, however,  one might as well try to get rid of stink bugs.  The simple fact is that Pandering, the legal term for what pimps do, is a very difficult thing to prove to a jury.  To say nothing of the fact that the girls a pimp “owns” are often times so abused and confused that they will try and protect the very man that makes his living off of their daily degradation.  Given that reality, what choice does a young girl like Sara Kruzan have?  She knows that if she goes to the police, and they cannot make a case against her pimp, she will get hit, kicked, raped, and hit some more as soon as her pimp finds her.  For girls like this there is no escape, there is no protection from the law, and there are no maps to a better life.

Sara Kruzan chose to kill her pimp, a man who had manipulated and raped her from the age of 11.  This girl now sits behind bars, hoping that the California justice system will show her some mercy.  What Stop Direct File wants to know is how could it not?  Born to a home life deprived of parental love, raised by a drug addicted mother, manipulated by a pimp, who promised to be the father she so desperately wanted, and then raped and abused into a life of prostitution — how could any justice system blame her for killing her abuser when she was 16?

There is no question that murder is wrong.  However, there are many many times when extenuating circumstances make a person less guilty, or not guilty at all, of a crime.  Kill a man in self-defense, for example.  A woman who manages to kill a man who is raping her would never be convicted of murder by a jury.  Why is it different for Sara Kruzan?  The only difference I see is that she lacked the social network necessary to gain access to a decent lawyer.

At an age when more fortunate children are playing Nintendo 3DS, taking guitar lessons at the Guitar Center, or scheming ways of finding the hidden files on their Dads iPad, this poor girl was being raped, manipulated, and sold as a sex toy by a piece of human filth.  The fact that she was even prosecuted for killing such a piece of slime is bad enough, but the fact that she was given life without parole is even worse.  If there was ever a person who deserved mercy, or a situation where the demands of mercy and justice were the same, it is this one.  Free Sara Kruzan.

In 2006 there were a total of 892 incarcerated juveniles being held in Colorado. The total number of families with children living in Colorado was approximately 580,286. To put that in perspective: If you identified 650 families with children in the White Pages and called them all, at least one of them would have a child who is currently incarcerated. If you just called 1,500 phone numbers in the White Pages and asked if they knew anyone who was incarcerated, you’d find at least one who would respond “yes.”

On the face of it, that might not seem so bad, but when you look at it from a cost-effectiveness standpoint, the numbers are horrific. Every year the state of Colorado spends $28,000 on each inmate. It spends even more on juvenile inmates, but if we use the $28,000 number Colorado spends at least $25 million a year just to hold juvenile offenders. That doesn’t count the cost of trying, sentencing, convicting, paroling and eventually re-incarcerating them.

At the 2008 rate of national re-incarceration,  142 of those juvenile prisoners will be released and eventually return to Colorado’s prisons or jails. That means that over a period of approximately 6 to 7 years, all juvenile offenders in Colorado will most likely return to prison as adults. Here’s the point: An incarcerated prisoner makes no money and, therefore, pays no taxes to help cover the expense of their incarceration. Prisoners aren’t even allowed to access the Internet so they can make money online. That means that, as taxpayers, you and I foot most of the bill.

According to a paper discussed in the September 2008 Edition of The Monthly Labor Review entitled Effect of Employer Access to Criminal History Data on the Labor Market Outcomes of Ex-Offenders and Non-Offenders (Keith Finlay, Tulane University) Males under the age of 24 who have been previously incarcerated “are less likely to be employed, have lower wages, and have lower earnings.”  Former juvenile prisoners get out of jail, can’t get work because of mandatory reporting requirements or lack of education and end up going back to prison. In fact, a lack of employment opportunities is the number one reason ex-offenders return to prison. Nationally, that fact costs us $68 Billion per year.

In a nutshell–we don’t just foot the bill for a juvenile prisoner’s incarceration. We foot the bill for as long as he can’t find a job and keeps going back to prison. That might be his entire life. Employers’ perceptions about former felons are the real reason juvenile offenders can’t get back to work. In theory, incarcerated juveniles have paid their debt to society, but you can’t blame employers for being skeptical.   The only way to nip this problem in the bud and get the kid a job so he’ll stop draining the public coffers is to restore employers’ confidence in each individual offender. To do that, the state needs to institute comprehensive community corrections programs that retrain, reform and certify juvenile offenders re-entering society.

Felony reporting, in many states, is mandatory and it should be. Employers who don’t know if someone has a felony conviction are more likely to discriminate based on racial and demographic biases when making a hiring decision. The only way to restore employer confidence and stop the cycle of recidivism is to balance felony reporting with ex-offender certification.

The story, from this USA Today Article, basically goes like this: a Miami man was wrongfully accused, tried, and convicted of crimes he did not commit.  He was convicted based upon faulty evidence which had been manipulated by the local prosecutor who was looking to score a win.  By the time the truth came to light the life of an innocent man, and that of his wife and children, was ruined beyond repair.  How could this happen?

Sadly, the case outlined in the article is far from the only example of this.  As our technology advances, DNA testing has freed many people from prison, and from the convictions they were wrongly given.  In all of these cases, no matter what the differences are, you will fine one common thread: somewhere, at some point, the prosecuting attorney chose to pursue a conviction at all costs, rather than justice at all costs.  Pandemonium around events such as the recent UT shooting (University of Texas) help us understand why prosecutors, as elected officials, get carried away with the pursuit of conviction rather than the pursuit of justice.

The reality of America today is that law enforcement, like all other public functions, has limited resources.  Investigating crimes, chasing criminals, and legal prosecutions cost money — lots of it.  Resources are scarce, and the waste that would incur from admitting a wrongful arrest, releasing the former suspect, and beginning the investigation all over again, would be enough to make any prosecutor look bad to his bosses.  Essentially, there is a great deal of pressure on law enforcement personnel to get the job done, quickly, efficiently, and correctly; the first time around.  When the uncertainties inherent in human life intervene, and for whatever reason an innocent person is accused of a crime, that pressure all too often prevents justice from being done.  Rather, the prosecutors push ahead with the case, despite faulty evidence and flawed witnesses, because they need to look good to the public that elects them.  Unless they want to be out of a job.

It is exactly this pressure that makes prosecutors biased attorneys, and should prevent them from having the power to choose to charge child offenders as adults.  Despite the best intentions, despite the desire to see justice done, prosecutors simply do not have the requisite distance to enable them to examine cases objectively.  Judges do, and for that reason, Colorado needs to change its current justice system.  Let the sad stories of destroyed lives show us all that it does not take a willful decision to wrongfully imprison someone, it only takes one overworked and underpaid prosecutor choosing to take the easy road.  This should never happen, but when it happens to young people, it is even more sickening in the eyes of justice.

Labor Day, the one day out of the year that we celebrate all the hard work we do, was intended as a well deserved tribute to the men and women who worked in steel mills, factories, construction, and other such positions that the ruling elite look down on as “manual, menial” careers.  Labor Day has been a federal holiday since 1884, a year and an era when unions were necessary, were actually concerned about the workers who paid dues, and not simply seeking political influence.  The sad fact of modern American reality is that most of the jobs that Labor Day was intended to celebrate are now gone.  Government regulations, environmental regulations, and competition from overseas, have shut down the steel mills, the factories, and made life for “blue collar” workers hell. After all, how can a company, burdened with very costly government mandated OSHA and EPA regulations, compete with the prices of a company free from such regulations?  That is why Chinese steel is everywhere, and America is saddled with a “Rust” belt.

When conservatives talk of a free market based economy, they are not talking about NAFTA type treaties.  In 1993, before Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law, many conservatives were opposed to the treaty.  The resistance was so strong that  the Heritage Foundation had to address it.  Clearly from that article, job creation was expected, as well as the idea that American companies could “take advantage” of Mexico’s “cheap” labor costs.  What does it mean to have a low labor cost, relative to a high labor cost?  In a nut shell, it means that companies can pay their workers less, because they expect less.  Many Americans on the Left and the Right supported that idea.  Payroll is always a companies largest expense, and finding ways to lower that is always high on a CEO’s priority list.  Oddly enough, the entire company benefits from this, a truth the left is reticent to admit.

NAFTA has never been a cause of illegal immigration.  The idea that Mexican farmers cannot compete with American ones is simply mistaken.  In reality, a great many of the fruits and vegetables we enjoy in America come from Mexico, whereas our own American Farmers are given government subsidies to grown nothing.  The root cause of illegal immigration from Mexico is the corruption and crime that is rampant in that nation.  Living in Las Vegas I have had many opportunities to speak with illegal Mexican immigrants, and they have almost all told me that they miss their nation, but “things are too bad there.”  America and our economy have not caused illegal immigration, rather, those men and women have taken a risk and tried to obtain a better life for themselves in a country relatively free from political corruption (at least so far.)  I do not object to that.  I object to them breaking our laws and draining our social safety nets, when our legal citizens are suffering.

Labor Day was meant to celebrate the American worker.  Today, in our globalized economy, the “American worker” is a term that has lost all its meaning.  Despite what Harry Reid said, most of the manual construction and landscape jobs in Las Vegas (and most cities) are done by illegals.  (Reids claim to the contrary surly ranks high among the most stupid things a human being has ever said.) The current blow-up in Arizona has nothing to do with NAFTA, nothing to do with Free Market economics, but everything to do with a states desire to protect its citizens.

Arizona SB 1070 was not written and passed because of racism, or prejudice against “Brown” people.  It was enacted because of the out of control drug violence in Mexico that is spilling over into Arizona and other border states.  When Governor Jan  Brewer requests 3,000 National Guard troops, and is only given 30 (thats 1%) is it any wonder that there is some angst against the Feds?  As for what Sheriff Joe is doing, I say keep it up.  My friends on the left view prison labor as “slave” labor.  This is their choice, just as it is their choice to remain ignorant of the economic realities surrounding the issue.

Billions of dollars are spent each year on our incarcerated population, and each year the tax payers receive higher crime rates and less safe communities as their ROI. What Sheriff Joe is doing is different, it is unique in America today, and it could be the solution to our woes.  If jails are not places people want to go, then perhaps they will think twice about a life of crime.  If prisoners in jail are given a job to do, perhaps they will acquire some life skills and be able to survive in the real world.  It is not about taking advantage of “slave” labor.  Cynicism and sophistry would like to claim it is, but it is about using scarce tax dollars better than we do now.  The current justice system has double digit recidivism rates.   Clearly something needs to change.  As someone diametrically opposed to Direct File and JLWOP I applaud what Sheriff Joe is trying to do.  Children who have made mistakes deserve a chance at a new life after rehabilitation.  Teaching them to work, stick to a schedule, and a marketable skill are far superior tactics than locking them away for decades.

As we celebrate Labor Day on Monday, most people I know will actually be at work.  The banks will be closed, the government will take a three day weekend, but ordinary hard working Americans like me will be at work.  Trying to survive a bone crunching recession caused by misguided democrat housing policies and made worse by a blind reliance on Keynesian economics.

As the son and grandson of union members, Labor Day has a special meaning for me. When I think of Labor Day, I imagine my grandfather hanging off a bridge upside down by his ankles for refusing to call off a strike at the old CF&I steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado. While I tend to be more moderate than my father and grandfather when it comes to labor issues in this country (i.e., I think unions ultimately shot themselves in the foot by demanding too much), I am also cognizant of the real and sometimes deadly sacrifices that working class Americans have made to win fair wages, decent treatment and reasonable hours.

This year, the United States finds itself in the throes of the longest, most taxing recession since the Great Depression. Millions are unemployed and millions more are having trouble making ends meet with the work they have. We don’t just live in a market economy, we now live at its mercy. Approximately 90% of the capital in this country is controlled by an equally approximate 1% of the population.

Almost 16 years ago, the government under the leadership of George H.W. Bush dramatically expanded “free market” power through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  This led to the displacement of millions of  Mexican farmers and other types of laborers who could not compete with the highly productive agriculture industry in the United States. These farmers, with very few other prospects, sought better lives North of the Mexican border. As the United States simultaneously shifted from an industrial-based economy to a service-based economy, many service sector industries welcomed the new illegal labor pool as a method of controlling labor costs. Restaurateurs and housing contractors, to name a few, knowingly hired illegal immigrants at lower wages than American counterparts and actively lobbied conservative representatives to keep regulation and oversight to a minimum.

With the economy in the doldrums, the issue of illegal immigration has come to a boiling point. Considering the “free market” conservative roots of the immigration problem in the United States, it is ironic that the Republican Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, and her “tough on crime, tough on brown people” lackey, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, are the most vocal proponents of a deportation policy. To me, it is outrageous that on the one hand conservatives like Jan Brewer would encourage illegal immigration to keep labor costs low but simultaneously deride the very problem her party helped to create. It is so outrageous, I have to wonder if there is an angle that involves profit motive.

It is no secret that Sheriff Arpaio has made his reputation on the cheap labor his prisoners provide to Maricopa County through his notorious tent city jail. According to his website, Arpaio’s chain gangs contribute thousands of dollars of free labor to the community: “The male chain gang, and the world’s first-ever female and juvenile chain gangs, clean streets, paint over graffiti, and bury the indigent in the county cemetery.” Never mind that those are jobs that good, taxpaying citizens could have.

What’s not clear is what percentage of Arpaio’s prisoners are currently illegal immigrants. Over the past few years, it has become clear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local Sheriffs aren’t exactly operating in concert. According to Wikipedia, about 31,000 people who are not American citizens are held in immigration detention on any given day, including children, in over 200 detention centers, jails, and prisons nationwide. According to WikiAnswers, ICE can detain an illegal immigrant for up to 90 days before deporting them. To someone like Sheriff Arpaio, that has to look like a huge free labor pool that he can exploit while at the same time advocating for deportation.

Having a deportation policy as opposed to a border control policy is a win/win/win all the way down the line for someone like Arpaio. The fact is that many deported illegal aliens simply return to the United States the same way they came here. According to USImmigrationSupport.org, “the U.S. Border Patrol is often catching immigrants who were previously deported. For many it is not their first time, but rather their third, fourth, or even fifth deportation.” I’ve read dozens of articles about Arpaio in the last few days. No where, that I can find, does he or Jan Brewer ever advocate for better border control. I suspect that’s because shutting down the free and reduced labor pool isn’t in their long-term interests.

In the end, the debate over illegal immigration is a classic case of talking out both sides of your mouth. On the one hand, Republicans want “free markets,” “free trade” and a whole host of other “freedoms” that come at the expense of rights that took decades to achieve (fair wages, decent working conditions, etc). On the other hand, they don’t win too many friends by giving jobs away so they have to appear to be “tough on immigration.” Never mind that the businesses and industries that Republicans represent are the biggest violators of immigration policy. So they find the happy medium: Deportation.

The fact is that we, as a nation, invited the illegal immigration issues we have.  It is incumbent on us to take responsibility for those issues. If we want people of other nations to respect our laws, we have to respect them ourselves. Businesses that hire illegal immigrants are just as culpable as immigrants themselves and yet there has been no outcry from people like Jan Brewer and no offer from Joe Arpaio to tie those business executives onto his chain gang. Why?

In the end, Labor Day is about celebrating our hard work. It’s about the contributions that each of us have made to building this nation. The policies that people like Brewer and Arpaio advocate only contribute to tearing this nation down.

The star of Robert Rodriguez’s new film, Machete, wasn’t always just acting. In a recent interview with TIME, Danny Trejo talks about his career as a juvenile drug addict and armed robber; a career that took him to “every penitentiary in the state of California” before he turned his life around and became a drug counselor in L.A.

Trejo was a real live tough guy whose best friend applied his first prison tattoo with a needle and thread. He changed. As an adult, he’s led a stellar career that has placed him in more than 200 films playing (usually) the villain that he used to see himself as. The irony doesn’t escape him and he laughs off the violence portrayed in Machete by explaining that “[it's] almost funny. It’s not gory. You’re shocked, and then you laugh.”

The fact is that Trejo got lucky. Once they’re in, most kids like him don’t ever get out of the system. Some are relegated to institutions for the rest of their lives for a single mistake. In Colorado alone, there are 49 offenders sentenced to life without parole as children. Yet, some of those kids’ crimes were as innocuous as helping an armed robber like Trejo get away from what turned out to be a botched job. They are the unlucky few.

Many of us have stories like Trejo’s. Many of us had violent or abusive childhoods. Many of us were lucky enough not to get caught up in the system. Don’t we owe the unlucky ones a little understanding? Life sentences for kids–even the ones who were party to a criminal act that resulted in death–are wrong. They deny children the right to make the choice that Trejo made. They deny them the right to become adults.

If Trejo is an example of ‘the worst of the worst’ and he was rehabilitated then our denial of childrens’ humanity and potential for change is a truly sad reality.

It’s no secret that Clifford Joseph Harris, Jr. better known to the world as the rapper T.I. made some mistakes.  Those mistakes led to his arrest and conviction on a Federal weapons charge in 2007.  This was hardly his first run in with the law.  By the time young T.I. was 14 he had already been arrested numerous times, a sort of occupational hazard for teenage drug dealers.  The story of T.I. is not unique.  A young man grows up in a desperate situation, falls in with a bad crowd, makes immature decisions, and before you know it the young man is looking at serious criminal charges.  The story of T.I., however, is not totally tragic.

As his music career, which began at age 7,  was really taking off, and his future prospects went from dim to bright, T.I. realized that his street tough, “gangsta” life style was going to bring him nothing but loss and pain.  He put that realization into art form in his song “Dead and Gone.”  What is the lesson for Colorado in this?

Had T.I. been arrested in Colorado when he was a young teenager, would the juvenile justice system have allowed him to learn from his mistakes and essentially rehabilitate himself?  Given the atmosphere of revenge and blind retribution caused by the Direct File practices of DA’s, the answer to that question is most likely no.

This is not meant to imply that Colorado DA’s are not essentially good people who do not care about the safety and needs of the people they are elected to represent.  Rather, those DA’s are laboring under a misguided idea that children who commit serious crimes are somehow forever lost causes who need to be isolated and imprisoned until they are old men.  The life and story of T.I. shows that children who make mistakes can, and do, in fact learn from them.  Young thugs, no matter how hard or tough they think they are, do eventually realize that their lifestyle needs to change.

T.I. should be thanking his lucky star that he was not born in Colorado, otherwise he would never have had the chance to reach that conclusion.  T.I. would have become simply a statistic, another young man locked up for life, with no chance of parole.  JWOP might as well be a death sentence.  How many kids like T.I. are behind bars in Colorado?  How many souls are being sacrificed upon the alter of misguided retribution, when a little true rehabilitation and mercy could have made all the difference in the world?

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Full House, which among others starred Bob Saget, John Stamos and Jodie Sweetin.  I loved the idyllic representation of a non-traditional family whose comedic antics had adults and kids, alike rolling with laughter. Today, Jodie Sweetin gave birth to another child and headlines went up. That birth drives home for me a very simple truth: the cycle of life repeats itself.

For many that cycle–a child grows into an adult and has children of her own–is not a positive one. A little over a year ago, my cousin gave birth to a new baby. Addicted to meth, I worried about my cousin’s ability to stay clean and raise that child. She probably won’t get the chance because she was recently sentenced to 10 years under the supervision of the Department of Corrections in Colorado (my cousin’s child is under the care of her grandmother).  My cousin’s case is a mild one in comparison with some of  the more devastating effects of child abuse and neglect.

Right now, on the Western Slope, 15-year-old John Caudle is being held for evaluation pending trial for the murder of his mother and step father. He faces 80 years in prison for trying to free himself from the cycle of drug addiction and abuse wrought by his parents–by adults he was supposed to trust. Dozens more victims of abuse who, as children, took the law into their own hands sit idle in prison. Sentenced to terms as long as life without parole, they will likely never have the chance to break the cycle and lead lives as idyllic as the one portrayed in Full House.

Jodie Sweetin had her own struggle with methamphetamine. So far she’s been able to stay clean. She’s lucky; she got a second chance and we applaud her. Don’t child abuse victims sitting in prison for trying to get the same second chance deserve the same understanding?

Children are different from adults. Dozens of studies show that teens, in particular, lack the same decision-making capacity as adults and yet when they become inconvenient; when their parents fail them, we seek to discard them and put them in cold storage–many times for the rest of their lives. Why are those children any less deserving of society’s understanding than Jodie Sweetin?