Fugitives
As is often the case on a Monday, there's no single story dominating the
news. But there is sort of a crime theme. The New York Times
leads with the arrest of seven Mexican immigrants on charges of smuggling into
this country and then virtually enslaving dozens of deaf Mexicans selling
trinkets in the New York City subways. The Washington Post leads with word that Charles Taylor, the
warlord who started and dominated Liberia's seven-year civil war (estimated
deaths: 150,000) is winning his country's presidential election. Taylor, the
paper notes, is a fugitive from Massachusetts, where he broke out of jail while
being held on embezzlement charges. At the Los Angeles
Times , the big story is that state and federal authorities suspect that
almost half of California's private methadone clinics are overbilling state
health insurance programs. USA Today leads with the FBI's hunt for Andrew
Cunanan.
The deaf immigrants story probably has legs because NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani
has made it a personal cause (he's already visited with them) and because, the
NYT reports, smugglers have scammed Mexican deaf people into similar
situations in other American cities as well.
The WP continues the series on mismanagement in Mayor Marion Barry's
D.C. city government that it started yesterday. Today's front page story covers
the featherbedding that seems to be a feature of almost all city departments.
For instance, states the Post , most municipalities use one employee per
about 500 to monitor the time cards of other city workers. The District has one
for every eight.
The main news in the Cunanan hunt, according to USAT , is that the FBI
is now warning people who knew the fugitive that his murder spree may be a
matter of seeking revenge against those he thinks crossed him. Also, that the
FBI is reviewing photos taken by a Brazilian woman that she claims show Cunanan
together with Gianni Versace at Versace's Miami Beach estate the Sunday before
he was killed. Additionally, authorities are also considering the possibility
that Cunanan is now dressing as a woman. (Unfortunately, the FBI doesn't have
as much expertise in this area as it used to.)
The NYT has a good front-page piece about the juvenile court system,
making the point that it is so overwhelmed by the increase in juvenile crime
and the breakdown of the family that almost no one believes it still serves a
useful purpose. But there is also something quite interesting that the article
doesn't say. At one point, the piece quotes a "Bernadine Dohrn, the director of
the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University" as saying
that high rates of prosecution of juveniles overwhelm the courts, "and when you
do this wholesale, you drive kids into the system who don't belong there, and
you don't find the kids who aren't in school and are getting into serious
trouble. They are able to pass through for a long time without being stopped."
The Times doesn't mention that once upon a time, Ms. Dohrn was in favor
of young people in serious trouble being able to slip through the system like
that--when she was, like Mr. Cunanan, on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted List,
because of her activities as a leader of the Weather Underground.
Think that the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill is mainly just an
inconvenience to those who use the parks, the subways and the public library?
Well, according to an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal , "Each year, about 1,000 people in the
U.S. are murdered by severely mentally ill people who are not receiving
treatment."
