The New York Times: Dog Bites Man

As much as we revere The New York Times (which, yes, I realize is unfashionable these days), the paper has long had a bizarre blind spot in matters of the judicial system and corrections.

Case in point is this inadvertently ludicrous headline, which ranks mighty high on the "duh" register: "To More Inmates, Life Term Means Dying Behind Bars."

Umm, excuse our naivete, but shouldn't that be self-evident? Now, the paper can argue the propriety of sentencing guidelines all it wants, but is it really newsworthy that the majority of inmates sentenced to life in prison actually spend their lives in prison?

Such curious lack of comprehension has plagued the Times for years. The newspaper's former prison issues correspondent, Fox Butterfield (what an amazing name, incidentally) used to churn out the occasional story expressing shock -- shock! -- that the nation's prison population went up even while the nation's crime rate declined.

A headline from a Nov. 8, 2004, Fox Butterfield story: "Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates."

Evidently, the reporter and his editors never considered that maybe, just maybe, there was a causal relationship between locking up offenders and reducing crime.