Category: crime and punishment

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crime and punishment education and schooling

A Cheating Culture

Cheating has always been a problem in higher education, but ChatGPT has caused it to metastasize.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the percentage of students at one college who admit cheating has jumped “from 35 percent in 2019 to 65 percent in 2024.” This school is not an outlier.

Teachers can see how bad it’s gotten. One professor emailed a student caught using ChatGPT to write a paper to warn that she would fail the course if she did it again. The student replied with a heartfelt apology but soon did it again. It turned out that the apology itself had been spewed by ChatGPT.

How to combat the trend? 

There are many ways if one is serious about it. Detecting prose that is ChatGPT-​spawned is usually not hard. But if students suffer no real costs for cheating, as is often the case, cheating will only remain routine.

“Researchers have long documented that many students cheat at some point in their educational career,” the author of the Chronicle article explains, “and that their motivations are situational rather than character based.”

Talk of motivations is off-​point. Students’ actions are “situational”-based in terms of incentives. Students come in a wide range of character, I hazard, each individual’s integrity built up by a long string of past decisions, which were, undoubtedly, influenced by incentives. When strict honesty is not taught and rewarded, and gross dishonesty not condemned and punished (with bad grades or expulsion), then even students with strong character will be tempted to cheat, and weaker students will cheat.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment property rights social media too much government

The Squirrel vs. The State

squirrel, government, regulations

“Squirrel!”

In an age of short attention spans and viral memecraft, the latest cultural moment regarding a squirrel could influence more minds about politics than all the quips, speeches and gaffes of Trump and Harris combined.

The news is not hard to understand. “Wild squirrel that was taken in by Mark Longo seven years ago was confiscated after conservation officials received reports of ‘potentially unsafe housing of wildlife,’” is how The Guardian put it on Halloween. 

“An orphaned squirrel that became a social media star called Peanut was euthanized after New York authorities seized the beloved pet after a raid on his caretaker’s home, authorities said,” was Saturday’s Guardian update.

After the six- (or ten-) officer raid and after the execution, the deluge: ire and satire flooded the meme-o-sphere.

Not a few governments enforce laws against taming wild animals. One concern is rabies, though the rabies danger of a squirrel rescued as a baby and raised indoors must be preciously close to ZERO. When individuals own tigers and other predators, the danger is obvious — but certainly P’nut was not such a concern.

This is just the way the modern State operates: bureaucratically, with lumbering indifference to property rights (the squirrel was indeed owned, and housed privately), liberty (sans harm, the case to leave well enough alone is pretty clear), and common sense (Andy Griffith would not have put down the squirrel; he would have told Barney Fife to put down the revolver). 

How ridiculous and cruel government can be!

Maybe the last half dozen of undecided Americans will pull the lever, Tuesday, for less nonsensical government intrusion because of it.

It certainly doesn’t make the meddler class look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: We also mourn the passing of Fred the Raccoon, a fellow rescuee at P’Nut’s Freedom Farm, also confiscated and executed by the State of New York for the same trivial infraction of his owner: not licensed by the State.

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crime and punishment education and schooling national politics & policies

Forever Be Changed

Kamala Harris, power

I’ve discussed Kamala Harris’s support, as district attorney and attorney general in California, for an abusive law enabling the arrest of parents if their children miss “too much” time at school, how the law has been deployed against parents like Cheree Peoples, whose daughter has sickle cell anemia.

I’ve quoted Harris’s words.

Now I will quote more of them. But let’s also listen to those words and observe her demeanor and tone, how Kamala Harris gloats about her use of power.

“As a prosecutor … I have a huge stick. So I decided I was gonna start prosecuting parents for truancy.… ‘If you don’t go to school, Kamala’s gonna put you and me in jail.’ [laughs] … I said [to prosecutors] ‘when you go over there, look really mean.’

“I learned that with the swipe of my pen, I could charge someone with the lowest-​level offense. That person could be arrested, they could lose time from work and their family, maybe lose their job. They’d have to come out of their own pocket to help hire a lawyer.… Weeks later, I could dismiss the charges. But their life would forever be changed.”

Video of Harris saying such things is part of a political attack ad about why men needn’t be prejudiced against female candidates in order to oppose giving Kamala Harris power over everyone in the country.

In the waning days of the campaign, we could do worse than to share this evidence, her own candid, joyous testimony about herself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Censors Slapped at Start

Kamala Harris, satire, free speech, censorship

Californians may now be allowed to see and laugh at “falsehoods” after all.

The Golden State legislature and Governor Newsom will probably fail in their attempt, made in open violation of the First Amendment, to ban certain parody and satire that communicates what they call “falsehoods.” (California hasn’t yet outlawed political novels.)

The battle isn’t over yet. But a court has issued a preliminary injunction against recently passed legislation, declaring that it “does not pass constitutional scrutiny.”

Cited in the ruling is this excellent insight: “‘Especially as to political speech, counter speech is the tried and true buffer and elixir,’ not speech restriction.”

Further, by “singling out and censoring political speech, California hasn’t saved democracy — it has undermined it. The First Amendment does not brook appeals to ‘enhancing the ability of … citizenry to make wise decisions by restricting the flow of information to them.’” Though the judge determined that California has “a valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,” the current legislation “lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content based law requires under strict scrutiny.”

What could such “narrow tailoring” have consisted of? The repudiated legislation has everything to do with speech that should be unhindered and nothing to do with protecting the electoral process. 

AB2839 and a related law, AB2655, were the rapid response of California’s kingpins to an effective parody video of a “Kamala Harris” “ad.” In it, “Harris” explains that she is a vacuous “deep-​state puppet.”

The First Amendment protects the right to utter truth, falsehoods, and the kinds of satirical fictions and parodic exaggerations that everybody but opponents of free speech understand to be fictions and exaggerations.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Kamala Harris’s Attack on Parents

Kamala Harris, truancy, truant, schools, education, regulations, consequences

Among the skeletons rattling around in presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s closet is her support — while San Francisco’s district attorney and while running for state attorney general — for a law to punish parents for their children’s absences from school.

The story, reported by Huffpost, NPR, and others several years ago, has more recently been publicized by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Harris supported the harass-​parents truancy program when it was conceived in the state legislature, saying that “a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.” Under the program, which still exists, a school can refer persistent truancy to a district attorney’s office, which can then threaten to prosecute parents.

One victim was Cheree Peoples, who was arrested and handcuffed in 2013 while still in her pajamas. “You would swear I had killed somebody.” Her daughter Shayla had missed twenty days of school in the current school year. Cheree faced a possible penalty of $2,500 or a year in jail. 

Shayla has sickle cell anemia and required frequent hospitalization. 

Shayla’s mother fought the charges for a long time. Eventually, they were dropped.

Harris bragged about the truancy program while being inaugurated as attorney general. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Today, Harris says the harass-​parents law she championed has been abused by others. But isn’t the law itself the abuse?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

Don’t Mention the Menace

school board, education, schools, gangs, censorship

“It was a chaotic ending to the public comment period during Tuesday night’s Loudoun County [Virginia] School Board meeting,” reports WJLA, the ABC affiliate in our nation’s capital, “when Chair Melinda Mansfield ended that portion of the hearing after giving multiple warnings to parents raising concerns about a current student with alleged gang ties [who] was arrested last year for carrying a gun and making threats to kill a classmate.”

Well, a public official did indeed put parents on notice not to talk further about the problem they came to discuss. However, a student who carries a firearm to school and threatens to murder his or her peers does perhaps warrant some smidgen of dialogue. 

“According to sources with knowledge of the situation,” WJLA informs, “the student is allegedly connected to the MS-​13 gang and is in the U.S. illegally.”

Parent Abbie Platt divulged that her “daughter is terrified to go to school with him.”

Four parents addressed the school board regarding this student; each was cut off by the board’s chair who accused them of “breaking the school board policy” by “providing information that could identify the student.”

“Everything that was brought up in this public comment is already public knowledge,” explains Tiffany Polifko, a parent and former school board member, telling the board that to “stop your constituents from speaking” is a classic violation of the First Amendment.

A spokesperson for Loudon County Public Schools defended the board’s speech squelching: “Even some minor details could lead … to the identity of a student, that’s just not a situation we’re comfortable with, that we’re going to accept.”

So, your kid needs to accept the risk of brutal torture and death, and you need to be quiet about it — because even discussing the danger might reveal the identity of the murder-​and-​mayhem-​threatening student.

Those are public school priorities. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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