While progressives are justifiably celebrating the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, the Court made another decision that spells the beginning of the end of the Prison Industrial Complex. The Court decided that the Federal three-strikes law is unconstitutionally vague.
With the Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. United States, support for imprisoning blacks comes full circle. By an 8 to 1 margin, the most conservative Supreme Court in US history decided that the Federal Law that authorized strict penalties for 3rd strike felonies is unconstitutional. This reverses decades of cases where the Court ruled that locking up people for minor crimes and throwing away the key is just fine.
The question now is, “Where do we go from here?” This decision only affects federal cases, but it does mean that thousands of federal prisoners will have their sentences reviewed. In California, which has already changed its 3rd-strike laws, the total number of prisoners dropped nearly 9.4% (15,493 people) between 2010 and 2011. But federal prisons hold twice as many prisoners serving drug-related terms, so it is possible as many as 15%, or 30,000 will be released in the first year.
Will legislatures be able to resist pressure to keep these laws on the books? Given the changed political landscape with regard to racial profiling (which is now outlawed in many jurisdictions) and Marijuana use (which is now legal in 3 states and the District of Columbia), we can hope that many legislatures will correct their racist laws. At least, we can all work to force them to do it by electing Democrats to state legislatures.
A California law passed in 2003 prohibits sex education curriculum that contains “medically inaccurate or biased information.” So when parents found out their kids’ text book taught abstinence until marriage and excluded info about preventing pregnancy and STIs they went to court. A judge agreed — and made history in America.
According to NASA’s new report, California only has enough water to get it through the next year. People are under strict water-saving measures; farmers are struggling to keep their crops alive. Yet, Nestlé is bottling water from at least ten natural springs throughout California, including from some of the most drought-stricken areas of the state, and selling it for profit. In places like Sacramento, it’s paying less than $0.14 per gallon. This is bananas.
“Maps indicate that the areas of California hardest hit by the mega-drought are those that grow a large percentage of America’s food. California supplies 50% of the nation’s food and more organic food than any other state.
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You don’t think of water as privilege until you don’t have it anymore.
Yolanda Serrato, a mother of three in East Porterville, California, tells The New York Times.
As California’s historic drought persists, Serrato lives in one of hundreds of households in the Central Valley that no longer have access to running water. Get the full story from NYT.
Yolanda Serrato, a mother of three in East Porterville, California, tells The New York Times.
As California’s historic drought persists, Serrato lives in one of hundreds of households in the Central Valley that no longer have access to running water. Get the full story from NYT.
Plagued by prolonged drought, California now has only enough water to get it through the next year, according to NASA.
In an op-ed published Thursday by the Los Angeles Times, Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, painted a dire picture of the state’s water crisis. California, he writes, has lost around 12 million acre-feet of stored water every year since 2011. In the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, the combined water sources of snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil water and groundwater amounted to a volume that was 34 million acre-feet below normal levels in 2014. And there is no relief in sight.
"As our ‘wet’ season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows" Famiglietti writes. "We’re not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we’re losing the creek too."
On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that one-third of the monitoring stations in California’s Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountains have recorded the lowest snowpack ever measured.
"Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing,” Famiglietti writes.
He criticized Californian officials for their lack of long-term planning for how to cope with this drought, and future droughts, beyond “staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”
Last month, new research by scientists at NASA, Cornell University and Columbia University pointed to a “remarkably drier future” for California and other Western states amid a rapidly-changing climate. “Megadroughts,” the study’s authors wrote, are likely to begin between 2050 and 2099, and could each last between 10 years and several decades.
With that future in mind, Famiglietti says, “immediate mandatory water rationing” should be implemented in the state, accompanied by the swift formation of regulatory agencies to rigorously monitor groundwater and ensure that it is being used in a sustainable way—as opposed to the “excessive and unsustainable” groundwater extraction for agriculture that, he says, is partly responsible for massive groundwater losses that are causing land in the highly irrigated Central Valley to sink by one foot or more every year.
Various local ordinances have curtailed excessive water use for activities like filling fountains and irrigating lawns. But planning for California’s “harrowing future” of more and longer droughts “will require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon,” Famiglietti writes. “Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin.”
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