The Pew Report linked here good source for the sobering data on incarceration rates in the United States.
In the past two decades, state general fund spending on corrections increased by more than 300 percent, outpacing other essential government services from education, to transportation and public assistance. Only Medicaid spending has grown faster. Today, corrections imposes a national taxpayer burden of $68 billion a year. Despite this increased spending, recidivism rates have remained largely unchanged.
The full report and individual reports for each state are available as PDF downloads at the bottom of the page.
A Cimex study looked at a bunch of police-operated crime maps in the UK and found them confusing and difficult to use, even when compared to the tabular crime data presented on UpMyStreet, a non-governmental website offering information for people planning a move within or to the UK.
The police websites mentioned in the article include:
Magic Paper
[via rodcorp]
“. . . because this is honestly the most exciting thing in the world.”
Thelonious Monk’s advice to saxophonist Steve Lacy (1960)
[via TomC]
My favorite line: “What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play” (italics substituted for underlines). For some reason, everybody keeps lopping off play at the end of the sentence; but it’s right there in Monk’s handwriting, just below the last syllable of important.
If you’d like to swim upstream on this link: Swiss Miss got it from Eric Alba who got it from Neven Mrgan who doesn’t tell us where he found it.
It’s been floating around the web for a while, though. Do The Math did a little legwork on this and discovered that the original document is mentioned or used in Steve Lacy’s introduction to Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music.
Comics grammar and tradition
[via TomC]
A style guide for comics letterers. I’m intrigued by all the traditions—”[a balloon] tail should terminate at roughly 50-60% of the distance between the balloon and the character’s head”—and recent trends:
Thought balloons have fallen out of fashion in recent years in preference for narrative captions. Text in a thought balloon can be italicized. The tail on a thought balloon is made up of smaller bubbles and should point towards a character’s head (not mouth, as in a standard balloon tails). Generally you should have at least three little bubbles of decreasing size that reach toward the character. Two seems insufficient and more than four or five seems excessive.
Kansas rethinks its prison policies
[via bfunk]
Among other initiatives, there’s been a major push to soften the traditional, cop-like approach used by parole officers when dealing with parolees.
The new strategy seems to be working: five years ago around 203 parolees returned to Kansas prisons each month but by 2007, the number reduced by 100 per month and the number of new crimes—felony convictions that people pick up while they are on parole supervision—also nearly halved.
