Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, May 24, 2010

More good news

By Dave Anderson:



Mark Kleiman is passing along some very good news:



Good news: crime is
down again, by a substantial amount (7.5% for homicide). Aside from a
blip up in 2006, the decline has now been going on for a decade and a
half, and the overall decline is now greater than 50%.


Better news: the incarceration rate has finally stopped growing;
this year it will probably decline. Less public hysteria about crime
might support more intelligent � more effective and less pointlessly
cruel � crime control policies. (Someone ought to write a book about
that.




The fact that crime is dropping concurrently with incarceration rates opens up space for local and state governments to look at one of the biggest pots of discretionary spending in their budgets, prisons, for savings.  Intensive parole/probation, decreasing sentence lengths for non-violent crimes, pre-trial diversion programs for non-violent mentally ill defendants are some of the ways that public safety policy can be done as or more effectively and more efficiently.  As long as crime rates continue to decrease, the political costs of embracing effective and non-maliciously punitive public safety policy are nil. 

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2 comments:

  1. CurmudgeonMay 24, 2010 at 7:10 PM

    The political consequences of punishment reform will depend far more public fears of crime rather than the actual crime rate. If the public is scared of crime, cutting police and prison funding would be political suicide regardless of the crime rate.
    Be cautious about buying into blanket efforts to reduce prison time for non-violent crimes. Both Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay committed non-violent crimes. Stealing the retirement savings of millions causes a lot more damage to society than a single armed robbery and should be punished accordingly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dave SchulerMay 25, 2010 at 5:47 AM

    Counter-intuitively number of police officers isn't particularly strongly correlated with crime rates, either.

    ReplyDelete

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