As of January 1 of 2009, the state of California has the right to take a DNA sample from everyone arrested in the state, analyze it, and stick the profile in a criminal database. This applies whether or not the person is ever convicted or even charged with a crime. According to Michael Risher in GeneWatch, the new law allows “a single law enforcement officer the power to place people under lifetime genetic surveillance. “

The new law could also magnify racial disparities in the criminal justice system. “Given the ubiquity of racial profiling” in this country, Risher writes, “people of color will largely populate the databanks.” This places people of color under increased scrutiny from the law for the rest of their lives. He writes, “a racially skewed databank will produce racially skewed results.”

Source:  GeneWatch  

Seven U.S. cities have signed on to a program that allows fugitives to surrender themselves into churches, rather than law enforcement agencies, Lisa Parro reports for Christianity Today. Run by the U.S. Marshals Service, Fugitive Safe Surrender is designed to “take that desperateness out of the equation” according to project developer Pete Elliott. Elliot says that 85 percent of fugitives who turn themselves into the churches claim they would not have surrendered were it not the program.

In spite of its success, critics believe that Fugitive Safe Surrender violates the separation of church and state and therefore is unconstitutional. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, for example, opposes the program, citing the lack of a secular alternative site. The organization also sees a danger in churches functioning as tools of the state.

Supporters of the program, however, believe the conflict between church and state is negligible, especially compared to its concrete benefits. Charles Haynes, a scholar from the First Amendment Center told Parro that there’s no conflict, provided that churches don’t use the program to proselytize.

—Steve Thorngate 

There are over two million men and women trapped within the booming U.S. prison system, and their personal stories rarely make front-page news. To bring prisoners’ lives to the free world, the Texas Observer has published two long narratives from prisoners in the Texas prison system. The biweekly magazine introduces the essays, cautioning “under the circumstances, we can’t vouch for the purity, veracity, or motivation of their voices. But we do believe there is value in letting different voices to be heard.”

Andrew Papke is serving two back-to-back twenty year sentences for killing a young couple while driving drunk. “Death by lethal injection is but a circle come full,” he writes. “Lady Justice is not blind. She has 20/20 vision. Her actions shriek, ‘How you live is how you die,’ assuring us that all ends are born of their means.”

Papke reminds us how shakily thin the line is between being a prisoner and a free person. “There is only a small degree of separation between any of us,” he writes. He asks readers to imagine making the small decisions that would land us in death row:

These seemingly insignificant decisions, the small mistakes that compromise us, can veer out of control quicker than we can react. Suddenly we are blindsided by something happening, and though before we would have said, “Oh, I could never end up like that,” it doesn’t turn out that way. Once the hooks are set in our souls, things we could never have imagined doing can explode into acts that require a price to be paid.

Sid Hawk Byrd kidnapped, robbed, and sexually assaulted a woman in 1980—and then was placed in segregation eight years ago after an escape attempt. He writes about the banality of life and the struggle to stay sane living in a cell so small he can take only three steps from one end to the other. He has no television, no recreation, no release at all. He has few joys, one of them being the prison’s population of feral cats.

I have raised a kitten named Sox for two years. He lives in my cell, but comes and goes as well. They have made me put him out, but he comes back. He is potty-trained. He thinks he is human, I believe, and he is a smart cat. But he lives in a cruel world where danger, even for cats, is real. A guard not long ago stomped on and killed a friendly cat named Limo. He was a tiger-striped, gray-and-white fellow that loved to play and would jump up into any prisoner’s cell if the tray flap was open. He was too trusting, and this guard kicked him to death. 

—Brendan Mackie