THIS IS OUR MONEY: LIE NO. 3: The prison budget increase is due to criminals, not poor policy. “In 1993, Pennsylvania had 24,000 men and women in its prisons. Today that number is over 50,000. This number speaks to a failure. Sometimes it’s a failure in our schools, or in our society, but ultimately in the personal character of the criminal.” – Tom Corbett Corbett’s budget includes a $186 million increase for the state Department of Corrections. That’s an 11 percent jump, part of a long trend of skyrocketing state prison costs. Corbett attributes this trend to the personal failings […]
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Phawker Presents The Fourth Installment Of BLOTTO
BY LANCE DOILY I had spent the last 20 or so hours in the Waterfront Pub’s basement sleeping off a bender and didn’t even know it was supposed to snow, let alone be declared a state of emergency. According to the cook who periodically came down to check me for vital signs, I was looking at around three and a half to four feet of snow, in addition to a county wide power outage. Pile that on top of the nearing sub-zero temperatures that all but guaranteed vehicular abandonment for anyone stuck on the road, and I call that a […]
Phawker Presents The Third Installment Of BLOTTO
BY LANCE DOILY It was only about quarter to nine in the morning but what the hell, it’s happy hour somewhere in the world, right? I am sitting on a stool in Murph’s, a barely standing dive bar on Union Blvd. where I spend most of my time when I’m not working, regardless of whether or not I’m supposed to be. The salesman back at the distributor I make deliveries for must have figured out my weakness for the place, as sometimes he’ll space it out so that I have to deliver here up to 4 times a week. If […]
Phawker Presents The Second Installment Of BLOTTO
BY LANCE DOILY I’m still not sure what I did to get the Singac American Legion put on my route for the third straight week, but there’s no point complaining about it. You see, this woman Amy is in charge of handing out the truck runs in the morning, normally the most demeaning job in the company due to our fierce stubbornness and fiery tempers. But over the years she’s built up an impressive portfolio of dick pictures we’ve all been coaxed into sending her for one reason or another (for the record, none of us has gotten any further […]
COMING ATTRACTION: Next Week, Get Blotto
EDITOR’S NOTE: Next week Phawker will begin publishing installments of Lance Doily’s gonzo memoir BLOTTO: The Outrageous Misfortunes Of A Jersey Beer Truck Driver. We will run a new one every day next week to give readers a sense of what it’s all about and then a new one every Monday after that. Now, here’s Deeney with some of the backstory on Mr. Doily and how his screamingly hilarious memoir came to the attention of Phawker… BY JEFF DEENEY The first question people generally ask me about Phawker’s newest contributor/ Jersey beer truck driver Lance Doily is how the fuck […]
THE HORROR, THE HORROR: How Holes In The Social Safety Net Let Monsters Like Gosnell In
BY JEFF DEENEY Let me begin by assuring anyone reading this from outside the region that the disbelieving moan of “What the fuuuuuck, Philadelphia?!” that reverberated around the world yesterday is being heard loud and clear here in the evermore ironically nicknamed City of Brotherly Love. Surely, the grand jury report detailing Kermit Gosnell’s filthy West Philly baby abattoir is utterly soul-shattering in and of itself, regardless of your proximity to the events. But many Philadelphians felt an additional, all-too familiar communal nausea watching the story go viral through the Twitterverse, first moving from the local media to national outlets, […]
How Jared Lee Loughner Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
BY JEFF DEENEY In the days since Gabrielle Gifford was shot, the media conversation surrounding the event has shifted focus away from whether or not the ambient atmosphere of bigotry and political extremism in Arizona, along with the toxic political rhetoric espoused by Tea Party figures like Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle, drove Jared Lee Loughner’s actions. Details have emerged painting a portrait of an unhinged young man with obvious mental health problems, and the conversation is now focusing on whether the mental health system did enough to help Loughner and protect the community. Whenever a high profile violent crime […]
KENSINGTON STRANGLER: Hell’s Angels
BY JEFF DEENEY The media discussion of the Kensington Strangler has at this point strayed pretty far from the essential questions, so I would like to try to bring it back to center. When I say the discussion has strayed from the essential questions and has stopped really informing media consumers I would point to Dave Davies’s unfortunate interaction with Mayor Nutter on WHYY last week. The intent here isn’t to beat up on Dave, because I think nearly all agree that he’s about the best we have going in terms of Philly reporters. But the fact that even Dave […]
REWIND 2010: Our Favorite Albums Of 2010
ALBUM OF THE YEAR ARCADE FIRE The Suburbs In a more accurate world, if you looked up anthemic in the dictionary, you would invariably find a picture of the Arcade Fire. Rousing, heartfelt, and everyone-can-sing-along have been, heretofore, the hallmarks of the Montreal band’s recorded output and on The Suburbs, they continue passionately pounding out sweeping, densely layered, stadium-shaking soundtracks for people who have long since made peace with the fact that sooner or later the world will break your heart. If nothing else, Arcade Fire proved that the profound sense of loss – of innocence, of control, of loved […]
KENSINGTON STRANGLER: 4th Woman Found Dead
DAILY NEWS: A young woman was found dead, partially clothed and with a plastic bag covering her head, in a desolate lot in Kensington yesterday. One thought hung in the frigid air over the crime scene, over the group of police officers and worried residents who stood nearby and shivered in the cold for hours: Had the Kensington Strangler struck again? Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey acknowledged that investigators were wondering the same thing. MORE INQUIRER: Philadelphia police found the body of another woman in Kensington Wednesday evening and the task force investigating the strangling of women in that area […]
EARLY WORD: NPR For The Jeff
In the wake of his hard-hitting Daily Beast piece on the Kensington Strangler and the gloves-off editorial he wrote for Phawker railing against the Philadelphia police departments’ unspoken policy of ignoring allegations of sexual violence against prostitutes, Jeff Deeney has been invited to discuss all the above on Radio Times tomorrow at 10 AM.
VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: A Town Without Pity
[Photos by JEFF DEENEY] EDITOR’S NOTE: This first ran on Phawker on August 26th, 2008. Sadly, it’s become no less current in the two years since we first published it. BY JEFF DEENEY For the next few weeks, the focus of Valley of the Shadow will shift to Chester, Delaware County. In 2008, Philadelphia experienced a significant reduction in homicides. That has not been the case in Chester. In fact, this month Chester saw six homicides in a single week, which for a city of only 35,000 is a staggering number. Before starting in on a series about Chester I […]
Prescription Heroin Even Better Than The Real Thing?
BY JEFF DEENEY FOR THE DAILY BEAST Why can’t America seem to kick its heroin habit? According to a new study, it might be because we’re not giving addicts exactly what they want: heroin, in pure, prescription form. Reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, the study provided either methadone or prescription heroin to a group of addicts who used heroin daily. Six months later, more than two-thirds of the participants who had been given prescription heroin were staying off the street version of the drug. Less than a third of the methadone group had the same success. The […]