In Boston and New York, Bill Bratton brought modern management to police work. We asked Bratton what he learned from combating urban crime, and the fear associated with it, that can help in the quest for security in an age of terrorism. His answer? Law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to work together. And the […]
Robert Keough
Posted inUncategorized
The long morning after
One of the challenges in publishing a quarterly magazine is trying to anticipate what’s going to be on readers’ minds three to six months down the line. But the grim drama of September 11 gave new meaning to the term “overtaken by events.” With the issue you hold in your hands three weeks away from […]
Posted inPolitics
Lani Guinier on merit opportunity and redistricting
As much as she might wish otherwise, Lani Guinier will probably always be best known as roadkill on the Washington, DC, Beltway. Nominated in 1993 to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, Guinier was savaged by conservatives as “Clinton’s Quota Queen,” a “dangerous radical” who would overturn democracy in favor of a system of […]
Posted inEducation
Harry Spence turns his fixit skills toward schools
Harry Spence has been reinventing government since before the term was, well, invented. Massachusetts’s pre-eminent public sector turnaround specialist, Spence has spent his adult life fixing dysfunctional public institutions. He took one obligatory private-sector turn, but developing suburban hotels just wasn’t the kind of challenge that could get his blood going. Give him a sclerotic […]
Posted inUncategorized
Paul Grogan and Alvaro Lima give Bostons inner city the business
Over its five years of publication, CommonWealth has displayed a consistent interest in city living–specifically, how cities from Boston to Pittsfield can stay or become safe, vibrant, satisfying places for people to live, work, and raise children. And it’s safe to say that many, if not most, Massachusetts cities have seen their fortunes improve over […]
Posted inUncategorized
Hanging Tough
It’s not easy to take the pulse of somebody who won’t sit still. And that’s the problem with trying to take stock of the Cellucci-Swift administration at mid-term. Of course, if you ask Gov. Paul Cellucci and Lt. Gov. Jane Swift, they’ll tell you they’re not going anywhere, apart from the trade missions that regularly–some […]
Posted inCriminal Justice
Revolvingdoor prisons
Urban anti-crime activists say they have two groups of people to worry about in the coming years: the large cohort of youngsters now aging into their teenage years and the generation of toughs sent to prison in the crackdown of the ’90s who are now getting out. “You’ve got young guys on the corner trying […]
Posted inHealth Care, State House News Service
Michael Dukakis and Jerome Grossman MD discuss competition regulation and relationship in health care
It has been said that if the health care system in this state, and in this country, is in crisis, it has been in crisis for 25 years. And during that crisis, it is fair to say, more people have gotten better care and more successful treatment for a variety of ills–many of them incurable […]
Posted inUncategorized
How to avoid sentencing scandals
The furor over Superior Court Judge Maria Lopez’s sentence of Charles Horton to home confinement and probation for abducting a child and sexually assaulting him at the point of a screwdriver has, as usual in allegations of judicial “softness” on criminals, veered off in the wrong direction. Calls for the judge’s removal from the bench […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Color of Justice
When it comes to drug cases, Judge Sydney Hanlon knows what she’s looking at. As presiding justice of Dorchester District Court, she runs Boston’s busiest community court, with 8,636 criminal complaints filed there last year. In narcotics charges, only one court in the city and three others in the state see more action than hers. […]