Good news about the Prison Industrial Complex?

"WASHINGTON (AP) -- Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said Wednesday that society should re-examine how it spends money and makes choices about who goes to prison, how long they stay and what happens when they get out.

He accepted the first copy of a report from the American Bar Association, which found that many get-tough approaches to crime don't work and some, such as mandatory minimum sentences for small-time drug offenders, are unfair and should be abolished.

Laws requiring mandatory minimum prison terms leave little room to consider differences among crimes and criminals, an ABA commission studying problems in the criminal justice system found. More people are behind bars for longer terms, but it is unclear whether the country is safer as a result, the ABA said." -- AP thru Infoshop.

Finally someone with some authority has realized that prisons aren't really an answer to most crime, and that the costs- which have gone up 400% between 1982 and 1999- aren't really worth it as we may not be safer. Kennedy said, "Society ought to ask itself how it's allocating its resources," and that "The phrase 'tough on crime' should not be a substitute for moral reflection," as the study found that the exponential incrase in spending on mass incarceration has had no notable positive impact on society, although there are notable negative socio-economic implications. The ABA's study found that the probability of someone being prisoned in their lifetime tripled from 1974 to 2001 and also made note of the inherent unfairness toward blacks and latinos. Hopefully this will go through and alleviate some of the pains of the (lack of) justic system in America. No more prisons.
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"WASHINGTON )— Secretary of State Colin Powell says Arab militias attacking and destroying villages in the Sudan is a "catastrophe." The State Department calls it "ethnic cleansing."

The Sudanese government has been turning a blind eye — or in some cases, even supporting the militias — while making it very difficult to get humanitarian aid to its suffering people.

Crops, cattle and irrigation systems have been destroyed and more than 1 million Africans there have become refugees. The Agency for International Development (search) says 350,000 people could die of disease and starvation over the next several months.

Powell, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a congressional delegation led by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., are headed to the Sudanese capital next week to try to bring attention to the humanitarian crisis.

Powell is the highest-ranking U.S. official to go there since the late 1970s. He said he wants to take a particular look at the Darfur (search) region in western Sudan, where hundreds of villages have been attacked by the militias. He also plans to tell Sudanese leaders to "let the aid flow freely." - Fox News.

Hopefully they do something right this time. At Amnesty you can help take action by "urging the Chad government to protect Sudanese refugees."
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"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy grew much more slowly than previously thought in the first quarter and inflation was higher, a government report showed on Friday."
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Apparently a nice dog prevented a killing spree in Toronto.
It looks like people just need a little love in their lives sometimes.

Edit: Damn, I need to stop writing these so late at night. I accidentally called the prison industrial complex the military industrial complex. How'd that slip through?