Who knew Satan worked at the local mall? While bars, cheap hotels and similar places of questionable repute may remain America's favorite spots to sin, two economists say that giving people an extra day to shop at the mall also contributes significantly to wicked behavior -- particularly among people who are the most religious. Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Daniel M. Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame discovered the malevolent Mall Effect by studying what happened when states and counties repeal "blue laws." Those statutes prohibit the sale on Sunday of certain nonessential items, such as appliances, furniture and jewelry, typically sold in shopping malls, as well as liquor and cigarettes. [continues 371 words]
Maybe it's time to get soft on crime. That's because many criminals are more likely to go astray once they get out of prison if they faced longer sentences and more punitive conditions in the slammer, claim economists M. Keith Chen of Yale University and Jesse M. Shapiro of the University of Chicago. "Harsher prison conditions are associated with significantly more post-release crime," they report in their updated working paper posted on the university Web sites, a finding that suggests doing hard time often may only produce more hard-core crooks. [continues 240 words]
Pollster John Zogby had a problem: Too many political conservatives and not enough lefties were signing up to participate in his online surveys of public opinion. Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project also had a problem: He didn't know what Americans really thought about legalizing the five-leafed devil weed. But both problems went up in smoke recently when Zogby's polling firm approached Kampia's Marijuana Policy Project with a novel proposition: Help us recruit smokers and their pals to participate in our cyber-surveys, and we'll let you add a few dope questions to our national polls. [continues 995 words]
Minorities Tell Of Profiling, Other Bias More than half of all black men report that they have been the victims of racial profiling by police, according to a survey by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Overall, nearly 4 in 10 blacks -- 37 percent -- said they had been unfairly stopped by police because they were black, including 52 percent of all black men and 25 percent of all black women. Blacks are not the only Americans who say they have been the targets of racial or ethnic profiling by law enforcement. One in five Latino and Asian men reported they had been the victims of racially motivated police stops. But racial profiling is only one of many examples of intolerance that minorities say they continue to confront. [continues 1833 words]
More than half of all black men report that they've been victims of racial profiling by police, according to a survey by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Overall, 37 percent of blacks said they've been unfairly stopped by police because they were black, including 52 percent of black men and 25 percent of black women. Blacks aren't the only Americans who say they've been the targets of racial or ethnic profiling by law enforcement. One in five Latino and Asian men reported being victims of racially motivated police stops. [continues 432 words]
Voters should just say no to ballot initiatives that legalize smoking marijuana for medical reasons: They're bad medicine as well as bad legislation, argues James McDonough in the upcoming issue of Policy Review, published by the Heritage Foundation. McDonough, director of the Florida Office of Drug Control Policy, notes that a number of the active ingredients in marijuana have demonstrated real potential for relieving such symptoms as pain, nausea and lack of appetite. And he recommends "ambitious research ... to understand fully how these substances affect the human body." [continues 161 words]
Great publicity for the libertarian Cato Institute's upcoming conference on drug policy: Its keynote speaker just got jumped on by the country's chief drug warrior. New Mexico Gov. Gary E. Johnson (R), who has publicly called the war on drugs a failure and mused aloud about the possibility of decriminalizing drug use, last week received a five-page letter from national drug control policy director Barry R. McCaffrey, asking him to "re-examine" his views. McCaffrey's spokesman went a bit further, calling Johnson "the poster child for drug legalization." Cato thinkers, many of whom support some form of legalization, must be squealing with glee. Johnson is scheduled to keynote Cato's conference, called "Beyond Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century," on Oct. 5. [end]
New Facts And Hot Stats From The Social Sciences He was a kid with a big, big problem, recalls Harvard psychologist Maressa Hecht Orzack. "I have been a computer addict since I was 11," wrote the boy, then 14 years old, in an e-mail message to Orzack. He told her he was a onetime A-student who now had trouble even making D's. He was missing meals, losing track of time and falling asleep in school--all because of the time he spent on his computer. "I'm afraid that I will run away if my parents take my computer away. It is almost like the computer owns me." [continues 771 words]
Happy days are here again. Or at least happier days, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News national survey that found Americans are far more satisfied now than at any time in recent years with the overall direction of the country, their elected leaders in Washington and with the performance of the federal government. Economic growth at home and relative peace abroad continue to benefit President Clinton, whose job-approval rating stands at 60 percent -- the 22nd consecutive time since mid-1995 that his approval rating has topped 50 percent in the poll. [continues 299 words]