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California Youth Crime Plunges to All-Time Low, a paper from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, analyzes recent data from the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center, and concludes that decriminalizing marijuana was correlated with an unheard-of 20% drop in the youth crime rate. The California youth crime rate is now the lowest it's been in recorded state history.

A large proportion of the drop in youth crime is directly attributable to a drop in arrests for possession of small amount of marijuana, but the rest seems to be a dividend from keeping kids out of the criminal justice system. That is, if you stop jailing kids for holding a little weed, they won't go to juvie and become career criminals.

California is still jailing some kids for holding, though, thanks to the provision in law that makes possessing marijuana in or near a school into a special offense.

Males said he suspects that many of the 5,831 marijuana arrests of juveniles in California last year may have occurred on school grounds. He doesn’t have data yet to check his theory, however.

In his police briefing, Males also notes that juvenile arrests in California were the lowest ever recorded since statewide statistics were first compiled in 1954. The decline, Males said, wasn’t due just to fewer marijuana arrests.

Drug-related juvenile arrests overall fell by 47 percent between 2010 and 2011. Violent crime arrests fell by 16 percent; homicide arrests by 26 percent; rape arrests by 10 percent; and property-crime arrests by 16 percent. Nationwide, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, arrests of juveniles for all offenses decreased 11.1 percent in 2011 when compared with the 2010 number; arrests of adults declined 3.6 percent.

Marijuana Decriminalization Drops Youth Crime Rates by Stunning 20% in One Year [Alternet] (via Reddit)

Do you, an adult with a job, really need a guide to “how to poo at work”?

Yes, you do?

Okay, I’ll save you $10: Go into the bathroom and take a dump with your butt.

On a side note, I really need to find a better way to share from Reader....

A Softer World:

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Last week, my nine-year-old daughter Jane and I were interviewed on NPR about some of our favorite apps for the family. One of our picks was Story Dice. This attractively-designed iOS app lets you roll virtual dice that have a number of different symbols on their faces. You can select the number of dice per throw (from 1 to 10). Every time you shake the phone or tap the screen you get a new throw of the dice. I'm not sure how many different symbols there are, but I see new ones all the time, and we have played with this app quite a bit.

I imagine there are lots of uses for Story Dice, but our favorite use is to hold family story-telling contests. When we are in the car or at a restaurant, we will roll the dice and each member of the family takes a turn telling a story. The rules are that the story must mention every symbol in the throw, and the story can't be longer than a couple of minutes. Then we vote on who told the best story, and the winner gets something like a dollar, or a bite of everyone else's dessert, or some other similar reward.

Story Dice would be a useful tool for writing exercises, too. It's $2 in the iTunes store.

Story Dice

Just for fun, make up a story using the symbols above and post it to the comments!

MarketWatch wanted to know how many 1,000+lb items in Amazon's database qualified for free Prime shipping. A lot, it turns out, including a 1,672 lb gun-safe (via Consumerist)