#the marshall project

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The murder of Laken Riley took center stage during Thursday night's State of The Union. Riley was a 22-year-old student who was killed last month at the University of Georgia. The suspect in her murder is a Venezuelan migrant whom officials say was illegally in the U.S.

During the Republican rebuttal, Riley's murder was brought up by Alabama Sen. Katie Britt. "She was brutally murdered by one of the millions of illegal border crossers President Biden chose to release into our homeland. Y'all ... as a mom, I can't quit thinking about this. I mean, this could have been my daughter. This could have been yours."

The claim that immigration brings on a crime wave can be traced back to the first immigrants who arrived in the U.S. Ever since the 1980s and '90s, this false narrative saw a resurgence.

During the current presidential campaign, the vitriol has been intense. Just in the last few months, former president Donald Trump has spoken of immigrants as criminals and mentally ill people who are "poisoning the blood of our country". Florida Gov. (and former presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis suggested migrants crossing the border be shot.

However, research indicates that immigrants commit less crimes than U.S.-born people.

Much of the available data focuses on incarceration rates because that's where immigration status is recorded.

Some of the most extensive research comes from Stanford University. Economist Ran Abramitzky found that since the 1960s, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born people.

There is also state level research, that shows similar results: researchers at the CATO Institute, a Libertarian think tank, looked into Texas in 2019. They found that undocumented immigrants were 37.1% less likely to be convicted of a crime.

Beyond incarceration rates, research also shows that there is no correlation between undocumented people and a rise in crime. Recent investigations by The New York Times and The Marshall Project found that between 2007 and 2016, there was no link between undocumented immigrants and a rise in violent or property crime in those communities.

The reason for this gap in criminal behavior might have to do with stability and achievement. The Stanford study concludes that first-generation male immigrants traditionally do better than U.S-.born men who didn't finish high school, which is the group most likely to be incarcerated in the U.S.

The study also suggests that there's a real fear of getting in trouble and being deported within immigrant communities. Far from engaging in criminal activities, immigrants mostly don't want to rock the boat.

But the idea that immigrants bring crime remains widespread.

A few months ago, NPR reported on a migrant shelter functioning in Staten Island, N.Y. Anthony Pagano, the owner of a flower shop located close to the shelter, told NPR he was against it being located in his community.

"How do you put migrants across from an elementary school? An all-girl high school, and another public elementary school," he asked. "You don't know who they are. Criminals. You see all the crimes that are being committed by migrants."

New York City Police data shows there was no rise in murder, rapes or robberies in the area.

[joe-england]

Dungeons and Dragons is a lifeline for some Texas prisoners on death row

Wow.

[action]

Read more on Biden's plan for Marijuana Clemency and what it means for the criminal justice landscape in the US.

[xipiti]

The first time Tony Ford played Dungeons & Dragons, he was a wiry Black kid who had never seen the inside of a prison. His mother, a police officer in Detroit, had quit the force and moved the family to West Texas. To Ford, it seemed like a different world. Strangers talked funny, and El Paso was half desert. But he could skateboard in all that open space, and he eventually befriended a nerdy White kid with a passion for Dungeons & Dragons. Ford fell in love with the role-playing game right away; it was complex and cerebral, a saga you could lose yourself in. And in the 1980s, everyone seemed to be playing it.

D&D had come out a decade earlier with little fanfare. It was a tabletop role-playing game known for its miniature figurines and 20-sided dice. Players were entranced by the way it combined a choose-your-own-adventure structure with group performance. In D&D, participants create their own characters — often magical creatures like elves and wizards — to go on quests in fantasy worlds. A narrator and referee, known as the Dungeon Master, guides players through each twist and turn of the plot. There’s an element of chance: The roll of the die can determine if a blow is strong enough to take down a monster or whether a stranger will help you. The game has since become one of the most popular in the world, celebrated in nostalgic television shows and dramatized in movies. It is played in homes, at large conventions and even in prisons.

By the time Ford got to high school, he had drifted toward other interests — girls, cars and friends who sold drugs and ran with gangs. Ford started doing those things, too. He didn’t get into serious trouble until Dec. 18, 1991. Sometime before 9 p.m., two Black men knocked on the door of a small home on Dale Douglas Drive in southeast El Paso, asking for “the man of the house.” The woman who answered, Myra Murillo, refused to let them in. A few minutes later, they returned, breaking down the door and demanding money and jewelry. One opened fire, killing Murillo’s 18-year-old son, Armando.

Within hours, police picked up a suspect, who said Ford was his partner. They arrested Ford, who was 18 at the time, the following day. He has maintained that the two men who entered the house were brothers, and that he was outside in the car the whole time. There was no physical evidence clearly connecting him to the crime. He was so confident that a jury would believe him that he rejected a plea deal and took his case to trial in July 1993. He lost. By October, at age 20, he was on death row.

Back then, death row for men was located in a prison near Huntsville, Texas, where hundreds lived in tiny cells. The men were allowed to hang out together, watch television, play basketball and go to work at prison jobs. And because they were locked behind bars rather than solid doors, they could call out to one another and talk. That was how, one day, Ford caught familiar words drifting down from the cells above him, phrases like, “I’ll cast a spell!” “Aren’t there too many of them?” and “I think you have to roll.”

It was the sound of Dungeons & Dragons.

[delta7of96]

"The Prison Soul Band That Opened for Stevie Wonder"

:https://l.smartnews.com/p-4KyVS/h4uxte

[biglisbonnews]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week Our Top 5 stories of the week from Maurice Chammah, Benoît Morenne, Amanda Gefter, Jane Miller, and Cheryl Katz and our first-ever audience award. https://longreads.com/2023/03/10/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-456-2/

[mearchy]

Fox's reports are the most sardonic, passive aggressive reports anyone in the Senate Security Office has ever read. But they have to accept them because they are all technically by-the-book correct and unnervingly thorough, and nobody can find fault with them as hard as they try. The less caf he has had, the worse it is. He goes from "As per Coruscant Guard records..." and "As all Senate employees are aware..."

to "As one might be able to assume by means of basic observation and an approximately swamp-rat level of intelligence-" and "To elaborate on that, as one is required by Report Administration Regulation Clause 365:1a to do, despite a statistically proven decline in reading comprehension among government employees-*"

My man is hitting the keys one by one so hard his keypad breaks. He's got reflexive tears of manic rage in his eyes. He's imbuing his incident reports with so much hysteria the next Jedi who comes into contact with them gets a headache. Free him

*he has a source for this, by the way. Fox includes citations in his reports like a maniac. Like Cody. This is because if he has to countenance one more follow-up email than is necessary he will brain himself against the desk. He will commit lobotomy by pencil. Just you try and fucking stop him, Thorn.

[dwcmarshalarts]

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown

Per Aspera timeline and fanart by DWC Marshal Arts

Adastra and Cassius by Echo Project

[temeyes]

What's the TF 141 Halloween costumes?

omg this was kinda late but here's what they wore!!

hc'ed that Soap is like, a closet cosplayer, Gaz wouldn't go all out, Price would go for beard representation, and obv Ghost is the mf that puts all his salary to his halloween costumes LMAO

[unsafescapewolf]

Summer Kofi doodles part 11!

[itlovesinthewoods]

Noah/MC are like.... you will never understand what I've been through. You're the only person who can truly understand me. You've hurt me in the past. I've hurt you and I don't think that's something I can ever make up for. A part of me despises you. All of me loves you. You're the embodiment of everything I've lost, everything I could've had. Being near you is unbearable and seeing you brings back all all the hurt that I've tried to bury for years. Being with you slowly heals my fractured heart. We're stuck in our pasts. We'll never go back to the way we once were, to the people we once were. We're best friends and strangers. We're not lovers, we're more and less. You're my salvation. I don't want salvation, I just want you. I doomed you. I'll crawl through hell to save you. Guilt consumes you, for those you've been unable to save and I recognize myself in you, yet it was I, who couldn't save you in the end/who was but another person you weren't able to save. My fate is at your hands. You're my/I'm your judge, jury and executioner. You let me live and it was the most beautiful and precious thing to me. You took away my chance at death, and what it entailed, and it hurt more than anything I have ever experienced. Your selflessness borders on selfishness. You put me over yourself and I'll never be able to forgive myself for that. We've crossed the boundaries of life and death for each other. I find solace in you. You're made up broken pieces that could never be put together properly but so am I. The unmendable pieces that we're made of can never be fixed but maybe we can create something new with them together. I love you unconditionally. My love for you is heavily built upon my yearning for what I've lost. My love for you is ever-changing and ever-shifting and it has become something purely for you. I love you.

[80smovies]

[diabollicallyangelic]

Caption #4 -> "You both bring out the worst humanity has to offer.

Adam, you're so unspeakably stubborn and cold you turn even the people who loved you most against you.

And you, Jonah. You defend his flaws. You defend his every move.

I pity you, the worst of the worst. Specifically designed to fuel each other's destructive behaviour.

Are you happy? Are you happy in the hell you've created?"

--

Anyways, art! I love my Mandela boyos

[missr3n3]

since i already mentioned next chapter of cut down the altar is a time skip epilogue, i thought i'd go ahead and show off some time skip designs!

no filter version below the cut for better color referencing

[theprojectatedensgate]

Same ~