Links (again)

• There have been a lot of critical comments about Reagan recently. However, I thought this one – Martha Burk’s critique of Reagan’s record from a feminist point of view – would be of particular interest to “Alas” readers.
• Also, Respectful of Otters reminds me why I loathed the Reaganites.
• Back in the present, Pinko Feminist Hellcat posts about the rape of women at Abu Ghraib. Outcry? What outcry?
• Mouse Words reports that they’re trying to ban SUVs in Paris. I approve.
• Things may be worse than I thought.
  Jon Gould and Stephen Mastrofski document astonishingly high rates of unconstitutional police searches in their forthcoming article Suspect Searches: Assessing Police Behavior Under the U.S. Constitution to be published in Criminology & Public Policy (2004). By their conservative estimate, 30 percent of the 115 police searches they studied violated the Fourth Amendment. The vast majority of the unconstitutional searches were invisible to the courts, having resulted in no arrest, charge, or citation. Focusing exclusively on stop-and-frisk searches, an even higher proportion – 46 percent – were unconstitutional. Moreover, 84 percent of the searches involved African-American suspects.

  Via Stuart Buck, who uses it as a springboard for a very unconvincing argument against the exclusionary rule. (As he admits, just because the exclusionary rule isn’t preventing all illegal searches doesn’t mean it doesn’t prevent any.) Clearly, however, the exclusionary rule by itself isn’t doing enough.

• A long and detailed paper on gerrymandering, which I haven’t read yet. But from the bits I’ve skimmed, it looks like a good backgrounder.
• The Fifty Minute Hour quotes from a (not available online) Nation article, focusing on the easiest way to slow the spread of AIDS.
  The good news is that injection-driven epidemics are relatively easy to contain. Participants in needle-exchange programs show none of the ambivalence associated with behavioral initiatives to increase condom use: Almost no drug user chooses to share needles if offered another option. Ongoing treatment with methadone, widely tested in developing and industrialized countries alike, has been shown to reduce both injection and drug-related crime. More broadly, researchers evaluating the full spectrum of efforts to prevent HIV and other harms among drug users–which includes peer education, syringe exchange and safer injection rooms, methadone maintenance and overdose prevention–have demonstrated positive outcomes in trials from Australia to Belarus.

  The bad news is that evidence of effectiveness has so far proven no match for ideology. Public health efforts to offer drug users options other than abstinence, whether in the United States, Asia or the former Soviet Union, have frequently taken a back seat to criminal enforcement campaigns or languished for years in perpetual pilot-program status.

  This will keep going on as long as moralistic fanatics remain in charge of drug policy. Read the whole thing.

• Which reminds me of this article, from The Economist: Putting the World to Rights. It’s a report on what a bunch of eggheads have agreed, after some study, are (relatively) cheap and effective measures to improve the world. (The conference was organized by an anti-environmentalist, so it’s no surprise that doing anything about global warming came bottom of the list. But the proposals they favored are well worth looking at.)
• Searching for The Great Brain. A family tries to locate the real-life settings of the series of children’s books by John Fitzgerald. I loved those books when I was a kid – I keep on meaning to reread them. Via Boing Boing.

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