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The death penalty debate can become incredibly technical at times. Both sides tend to argue from legalistic, criminal justice, or moral terms, but in the process the actual executed are too often forgotten. In this space, each month, I want to recount those people who the citizens of the United States deemed too dangerous to be allowed to live.

At the beginning of August nine men were scheduled to be executed. By the end of the month, two of those men were dead.  The other seven executions were stayed.

Roderick Davie, 38, was executed in Lucasville, Ohio on August 10. On June 27, 1991 Davie went to the Veterinary Companies of America offices in Warren, Ohio, where he shot and killed two people, John Coleman, 38, and Tracey Jeffrey, 21. During the incident, Davie also shot and injured William John Everett. Davie had been fired from the VCA a month before the shooting.   When asked why he had done it, Davies told detectives, "I just flipped out this morning. I went down to the VCA and shot 'em up."

With his last breath, Davie expressed his remorse to the families of the people that he killed saying that he was sorry and hoping that this would allow them to move on. He was pronounced dead at 10:31 am. He is survived by his parents, his daughter, Paris and his niece, Brittany. Davie was the seventh person killed by the state of Ohio since the beginning of the year and the 1222nd since the death penalty was reintroduced to the United States in 1976.

When thinking about violent crime in the U.S., it's easy to conjure up images of big metropolises and inner-city environs. Rarely do Native American reservations come to mind.

Actually, though, violent crime rates on Native American reservations are more than twice the national average. At current rates, one in three women on reservations will be raped and 40% will be victims of domestic abuse in their lifetimes.

The federal government has the jurisdiction to prosecute such violent crimes, but the decades of neglect on reservations have devastated law enforcement efforts, with more than 50% of violent crime going unprosecuted in recent years.

In recent years, a number of innovative anti-violence and intervention programs have proliferated around the U.S. Lately, they've come to be seen as a new silver bullet for dealing with our epidemic of urban violence. But are the success stories anything beyond the anecdotal?

Emerging studies of the causes of violence — and the impact of various anti-violence programs — do offer some hope that we can effectively target and prevent violence. But it's not an easy road, and early results show that not every community-based program works.

A new study of an anti-violence program in Pittsburgh, for example, found that several years of alternative strategies aimed at preventing violent crime had little to no effect on three dangerous neighborhoods. In fact, the murder rate remained flat in all three areas, while violent assaults actually increased — bucking a national trend.

For what looked like a promising program, it's a grim finding. The study evaluated Pittsburgh's One Vision One Life program, which was created after the city experienced a record 125 murders in 2003. And while it's nearly impossible to control for all variables when evaluating violent crime, the study — conducted by the RAND Corporation and University of Michigan researchers — seems to have made every effort to carefully calibrate its data for different factors.

The Pittsburgh results don't suggest that anti-violence programs are a waste, but they do show that there are significant challenges in building programs like One Vision — much less evaluating their outcomes.

Another study, for example — one focused on Chicago's groundbreaking Ceasefire initiative — turned up far more positive results. Last year, the National Institute of Justice published a study of Ceasefire and found the program was connected to significant drops in violent crime. In fact, Pittsburgh's One Vision was modeled on Ceasefire. But every city is different, and implementation is never easy.

Chicago's Penn Elementary School has seen a marked reduction in violence among students this year, and administrators say it's all thanks to two unlikely new role models, formerly known as "Shotgun" and "Black." As the Chicago Tribune writes, the two men are ex-Vice Lord kingpins who've helped transform the troubled Chicago School.

For years, Derek Brown and Chevez Fitzpatrick ran drug operations for the Holy City of Vice Lords, a gang that recruited at this very school. There are bullet holes in the school's exterior wall that came from gunfights in which Brown was involved. But four years ago, the two men decided to turn their lives around. They started working with CeaseFire — a groundbreaking initiative that we've written about in this space before. Now, the two men run a boxing training program at the school, act as mentors and participate in interventions when a student is suspected of gang involvement.

Gangs act as a magnet in neighborhoods in which kids face a desperate lack of employment and educational opportunities, and it takes a strong antidote to stop such violence from spiraling. Former gang members like Brown and Fitzpatrick can be far more effective than law enforcement officers, school administrators — and even sometimes parents — in showing kids another path, and diffusing violent situations before they escalate.

No matter how many times you’ve heard the statistics, the violence in Ciudad Juarez is at absolutely stunning levels. The city is at the epicenter of Mexico's spiraling drug violence, and has experienced already 600 murders so far this year.

What accounts for the chaos? Failed drug war policies on both sides of the border. And while many assume that the victims are mostly gang members killed by other gang members, such a view overlooks the sprawling destruction the violence has triggered, and the countless civilians whose lives are jeopardized in the cross-fire.

The city of 1.5 million has seen nearly seven murders a day in 2010 — easily the highest murder rate in the world. In a series this week on Al Jazeera, reporter Mariana Sanchez reports on the city's paramedics, who are often threatened with violence when they respond to shootings. Gang members somehow get their radio frequencies and often warn first-responders to stay away — or be killed. The number of injuries from violent crime is three times the murder rate: accordingly, the city’s police force and its 10 ambulances are called into harm’s way to respond to such crime about 25 times a day.

As we’ve written here, Mexico’s spate of drug violence is a direct result of American and Mexican prohibition. About 60% of drug activity in Mexico is geared toward supplying marijuana to the United States. If we legalized pot here, the infighting for a slice of the Mexican market would plummet. Yet when Hillary Clinton led a recent, high-level delegation to Mexico to discuss this very topic, the old paradigm of throwing money, police and strict sentencing at the problem seemed as strong as ever — sensible alternatives weren’t on the table.

Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children's Defense Fund, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

When young black men are the victims of violent injuries in urban neighborhoods, what happens next? This question haunted Dr. John Rich, a Harvard, Dartmouth and Duke-educated primary care doctor at Boston Medical Center. In addition to his work at Boston Medical Center, Dr. Rich was the founder of the city's Young Men's Health Clinic. Both locations brought him in constant contact with young men who were victims of violence. But as a black doctor dealing with the aftermath of violence in young black men day after day, Dr. Rich wasn't satisfied to simply treat their physical scars. He wanted to know about more than just the medical effects of the gunshot and knife wounds he was seeing. He wanted to understand their emotional and psychological impact.

Dr. Rich and his colleagues kept asking themselves why they were seeing so many victims of violence and what they could do to try to break the cycle. To find out, Dr. Rich began interviewing young men in the hospital as they were recovering from their injuries -- often following up after they returned home and sometimes staying in touch for months or years. These stories and their lessons are shared in his powerful new book, Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men.

Today, I spent time in prison rehearsing a speech that I'm scheduled to deliver next week to students in a local high school. The students of the school are not labeled as ‘at-risk.' Still, though, school administrators hope that they'll benefit from listening to members of our prison's outreach program anyway -- the goal of which is to help youth understand how bad decisions in our youth fueled later problems with the law.

When I speak, I intend to address the importance of reading. But by reading, I'm not referring to the act of scanning words, sentences and paragraphs. Instead, I want to plant a seed about the importance of reading circumstances, opportunities and options.

As a teenager, such ability eluded me. I wasn't able to "read" my environment, and it was that illiteracy that drove my decisions to break the law. Although my bad decisions began in my late teens and continued through my early 20s, I continue paying the price for them at 46, here in prison.

It may be more traditional for schools to bring in "positive" role models to address the student body. After all, young adults benefit by listening to community leaders who speak about their careers and the positive contributions they make to society. It takes a really courageous administrator to invite a group of federal prisoners into the school, as most people in society rightfully frown upon our status as convicted felons. Nevertheless, the messages delivered by those of us in prison -- so-called "negative" role models -- may prove equally helpful to impressionable minds.

Kevin Singer, currently serving a life sentence in Wisconsin, has been a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast "since childhood," says the New York Times. Prison authorities confiscated Singer's hand-written D&D paraphernalia and forbade Singer from playing his favorite role-playing game on the grounds that it might lead to gang activity. In a ruling Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected Singer's claim that the D&D ban violated his First and 14th Amendment rights.

Both legal and gaming blogs pounced on the story, and readers responded in droves. At last count, the post at Above the Law, which included prurient confessions and a distasteful sexual assault joke, garnered 73 comments; the Gizmodo post had 208.

Now, the argument that Singer's nerdy hobby is a threat to prison security is too patently absurd for me to refute here. Do a lap around the blogosphere and you'll read lots of predictable but fun jokes pointing out how unlikely it is that D&D would cause breakouts of violence.

But beyond the quirky particulars of this case, what is the news here? That prisons arbitrarily curtail the rights of inmates? Well, duh. What headlines should we look for in tomorrow's NYT? "Drunk Person Makes Regrettable Decision"? "Economy Bad"?

Are suburban gangs on the rise in the U.S.?

It depends how you look at it, and how you define a gang. The FBI's annual National Gang Threat Assessment recently found more than 20,000 active gangs in the U.S. with over one million total members. But Time magazine wondered in a recent piece whether we might be defining 'gang-related' too broadly.

David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Time that crimes being attributed to gangs are really part of a "formless street scene."

"People think they are organized and [part of] making money on the streets, but for the most part, all of that is wrong. What you usually find are groups that fit none of the above descriptions." He adds, "What you find out doesn't fit people's preconceptions, and it's still very real."

A recent article in Miller-McClune however, took the opposite view, arguing that thousands of gang-related crimes are not being labeled as such because police chiefs and town councils don't want to be known as gang towns.

"If you're always looking for the features of a stereotypical street gang in the suburbs, you're not going to see it," gang expert Dan Korem said. "There are a lot of misconceptions. You say 'gangs in the suburbs' and people have this picture of Crips and Bloods hanging out on the corner. It's more complicated than that."

So which is right? It's a semantic difference and it doesn't really matter. Either way we need to address violent crime before it happens and provide alternatives to help young people avoid violence.

Social media has the power to amplify conversations and connect far-flung networks – even when those networks are gangs.

Police in the U.S. and U.K. are noticing an uptick in the use of social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo to organize criminal activities and threaten rival gangs. A British judge recently sought to limit the online activity of ten alleged members of the Fallowfield Mad Dogs in Manchester (their MySpace page is pictured above) as part of a sentence for involvement in a fight. The judge ruled that the men couldn’t appear online together in photos. Police are using MySpace to conduct investigations, identifying gang affiliations through profiles.

Law enforcement agencies should use the web to monitor possible violence and threats, but we should tread cautiously here. Using social networks to intimidate is nothing new, and these sites will always mirror society. Efforts to eradicate an activity online that happens in the real word will be futile, the web is now part of the world and we need to treat it as such. The web may add speed and cross boundaries, but violence was around before Bebo, so let’s not blame the medium for offline violence. We also need to be careful with limiting online activities and using spurious claims on MySpace profiles to bolster criminal cases.