Tidbits

Check out these criminal justice-related items while I hustle to meet several work deadlines:

• Prison conference today: At UT Austin's LBJ School - here's the agenda (pdf).

• The camera never blinks: I was quoted yesterday in this New York Times article on whether surveillance cameras are effective.

• Jail fashion: Clothing for inmates in the Lubbock County Jail was rejected for being the wrong color, so the manufacturer is selling them in New England retail stores.

• I'm in the wrong business: $172,000 pay for a Houston police officer on the DWI task force in one year.

• Hacked: Private info of nearly 200,000 current and former students was stolen from the University of Texas for the second time in three years.

• Keeping cops honest: Detroit PD will start videotaping interrogations for capital crimes. Why? "Number one, it keeps cops honest," Chief Bully-Cummings said. "It's a protection for the citizen that's being interrogated. But from a chief's point of view, I think the greatest benefit is to police because what it does is provide documentation that they didn't coerce."
  

• Should drug use be legal if you're employed? With tongue firmly in cheek, the Onion explores a policy alternative to "narrow the focus of the drug war to the true enemy." The Onion also recently, brilliantly called for greater diversity in police lineups. Now that's funny.