Opinion | Hurricane Ida Is a Glimpse of the Future of Climate Change – The New York Times

By Andy Horowitz

Dr. Horowitz, who lives in New Orleans, is the author of “Katrina: A History, 1915-2015.”

“As a boy, Louis Armstrong worked for the Karnofsky family. The Karnofskys’ tailor shop on South Rampart Street in New Orleans became a second home to him, and the family helped him buy his first cornet. On Sunday night, the Karnofsky building, long neglected by the city and a succession of private owners who promised to restore it, finally collapsed under the force of Hurricane Ida’s winds.

I live in New Orleans, but I saw the news on my phone, as I scrolled from the safety of a rented apartment in Birmingham, Ala. My family and I arrived on Friday. We are among the Louisianans who could afford to evacuate. We got here by driving I-59 to I-20, which is to say, we relied on the comparatively well-funded public infrastructure of interstate highways to get out of harm’s way.”

Opinion | Why Life Without Parole Isn’t Making Us Any Safer – The New York Times

Video by Mark Boyer, Asaf Kastner and Brian Dawson

“Robert Richardson robbed a bank of about $5,000 in 1997 and was sentenced to 60 years in prison without the possibility of probation or parole. He was 30 years old when he was locked away in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, making his penalty a virtual life sentence.

Mr. Richardson doesn’t deny that he did wrong. He concurs with the adage “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

But in the video guest essay above, he contends that life sentences without parole are counterproductive — for the prisoner and society alike — and should be prohibited. He is joined in the video by his wife, Sibil Fox Richardson, whose decades-long effort to secure his release was documented in the film “Time,” and by one of their sons, Freedom.

Mr. Richardson focuses his lobby on Louisiana, one of the states with the most prisoners serving life sentences without parole. Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana has sought to shed the state’s reputation as the nation’s incarceration capital, signing into law a package of criminal justice reform bills intended, in part, to reduce the size of the prison population.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT comment:

Excellent video work NYT. I agree with this ex con and his cause. Some of the Europeans are way ahead of us in this embarringly bad area of US justice. “21 years The longest sentence allowed in a Norwegian prison is 21 years, although the new penal code allows for a 30-year maximum sentence for crimes related to genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. Incarceration in Norway – Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org › wiki › Incarceration_in_Norway”