The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/reform/)
On Sunday, pro-police Back the Blue protestors and police abolitionist counterprotesters clashed during a protest condemning Mayor Myrick’s ’09 police reform plan.
On Friday, the President of the Panhellenic Council proposed an unprecedented shift in Greek Life on campus: a freeze of all social mixers between member sororities and fraternities on campus until the Interfraternity Council and Executive Board upped safety measures for party-goers.
“The essence of the criminal justice reform model in the popular press has focused on the lowest of the low hanging fruit — the nonviolent drug offender in prison for possession of controlled substances,” Prof. Joseph Margulies, government, law, said in a lecture Thursday afternoon. But, according to Margulies, this narrative often embraced by the media is wrong. Margulies is a self-described “student of the American criminal justice system,” according to his bio on the Cornell Law School website. He has defended numerous people “caught up in the excesses of the so-called war on terror,” such as Abu Zubaydah — a Saudian Arabian national held at CIA black sites and interrogated in 2002 and 2003, the public discovery of which led to the infamous Bush Administration “torture memos.”
He disputed the popularly-held notion that the United States incarcerates large numbers of low-level non-violent offenders for minor possession charges and sentences them to disproportionate sentences — calling that perception the “holy grail” of incarceration. “We don’t send those people to prison … the search for the low-level non-violent drug offender is like the hunt for a snark …They may exist but they are vanishingly rare,” he said.
Students weren’t the only ones left with questions after the administration sent out an email to students last week outlining plans for mental health reforms on campus. The Sophie Fund, an advocacy group focused on supporting mental health initiatives in Ithaca, called the plans “disappointing” in a posted response.
In an email to students on Wednesday night, vice president for student and campus life Ryan Lombardi outlined plans for sweeping reforms to student mental health services. Some students, however, questioned whether Lombardi’s promises would result in meaningful improvements to Cornell’s frayed mental health support system.
Cornell’s Prison Education Program, which seeks to provide college courses to inmates at maximum and medium security prisons in upstate New York, hopes to “counter a culture of punishment that predominates in the correctional system today,” according to Dr. Robert Scott, executive director of the Cornell Prison Education Program.
Mayor Svante Myrick ’09 intends to create a new commission to holistically assess long-standing housing issues in the city, including the lack of enforcement mechanisms, affordable housing and preventing landlords from requiring leases to be signed over a year in advance.
In regard to mental health, Pollack spoke about several substantive changes, including an increase of over two and a half years from 32 to 43 counselors and Cornell’s decision to contract with ProtoCall, a 24-hour by-phone mental health counseling service that Pollack said was “very carefully vetted” in the hope that it would be helpful.
Forty-eight hours after polls closed in this year’s Student Assembly elections, the student body is no closer to knowing just who will represent them for the next twelve months. And now, The Sun has learned that results may not be public until as late as after Spring Break. The reason for this extended protraction is a challenge to the campaign of presidential candidate Varun Devatha ’19. Devatha was disqualified from the election late Wednesday for using a Cornell University logo in campaign materials, a violation of Article I, Section B, Rule 5 of the Student Assembly Election Rules, but has since appealed his disqualification. The letter of the rules is clear: the use of the logo is prohibited.