Jan 28th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Too Much Prison
Ben Trachtenberg has a smart item in the ABA Journal about the horrible waste of resources represented by our current mass incarceration policies. Throwing people in jail is a vital element of crime control policy, but it’s very expensive in terms of direct expenditures and has tons of indirect costs as well. We need to be relying on it in a much more targeted way, and putting more resources into alternative forms of punishment and more and better policing.
69 Responses to “Too Much Prison”
Register
RSSLogin
Advertisement
Visit Our Affiliated Sites
Books By Matthew Yglesias
Topic CloudView topics sorted by popularity
Abortion
Afghanistan
Basketball
Blanche Lincoln
Budget
China
climate
Congress
Crime
DC
Demographics
Economics
Economy
Energy
Environment
EU
Finance
Football
Gender
Health Care
History
Inequality
Infrastructure
Intellectual Property
International Law
International Relations
Israel
Media
Monetary Policy
National Security
NBA
Palestine
Political Reform
Public Health
Public Opinion
Race
Regulation
Sarah Palin
Sports
Stimulus
Sweden
taxes
Technology
Trade
transportation
Featured
Subscribe to the Progress Report
Contact Matthew Yglesias
Use this form to contact blog author Matthew Yglesias.
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
January 28th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
How about less and better policing? How much public benefit are we gaining from the drug war at this point?
January 28th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
No, Blake, you are a fool. Zero tolerance works thusly: you prevent a guy from drinking in the streets, and thus without him drinking in the streets, you will prevent him from getting in drunken fights and violence in the streets. You prevent people from doing graffiti on the streets, and you get potential gang recruits off the streets.
You crush crime in its infancy, and eliminates the conditions that make crime possible. This is truly preventive.
It’s nice to theorise about just locking up the guys who really deserve it, but the fact of life is, one crime leads to another, and if we can stop smaller crimes that lead to bigger crimes, we are doing good.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
With more cops on the street, we got better coverage and less areas where crime can happen in the shadows. The goal is to force crimes off the streets, where they have a nasty tendency of compounding one another. After all, if you deny criminal the benefit of open public space, you deny them a great avenue to congregate crime. Of course this doesn’t apply to organised crime, but it sure helps reduce their profile and ability to recruit.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
No, Blake, you are a fool.
Thank you Benito.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Could Matt (or anyone) give some examples of “alternative forms of punishment”, that effectively keep criminals off the street and don’t violate the 8th Amendment?
January 28th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
you prevent a guy from drinking in the streets,
I really hate laws against public drinking. Heck, I know a restaurant that isn’t allowed to serve beer in the outdoor seating area, even though they have a proper liquor license.
if we can stop smaller crimes that lead to bigger crimes, we are doing good.
Which gets to something related to the above: what makes the “smaller crime” a crime in the first place? Yes, you can explain why it’s a good thing to punish people violating public drinking statutes, but why is that a crime? I’m all for nailing people for small property crimes so that they don’t go unpunished and for the fact that such people probably have some other outstanding warrant that we’ll find out about when they’re caught, but non-violent soft drug offenses are really becoming a waste of our time and energy.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Criminals commit crimes. If you lock them up, they can’t commit crimes nor spawn future criminals. What am I missing here?
January 28th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Criminals commit crimes. If you lock them up, they can’t commit crimes nor spawn future criminals. What am I missing here?
That explains why so many people speed on the highways: those criminals haven’t been locked up and stopped from breeding.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Which is why I support draconian penalties for jaywalking and speeding.
How boneheaded do you have to be to read ‘war on drugs’ and think ‘public intoxication’ laws.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Yeah, but where would we get all that cheap prison labor? The US has more prison laborers than any country in the world, even China. And it’s really cheap. The last jail I was in pegged the hourly wage at the price of a postage stamp. So they pay 42 cent per hour, and that’s above average. And this labor provides a lot of valuable services. Ever wonder how your recyclables get separated? Ever wonder who’s taking your credit card number when you buy something over the phone? Ever wonder who stuffs all the envelopes when the government does a mass mailing? Prisoners, of course. Where would we be without them?
January 28th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
We imprison people, even though we know it’s not rational, because we have foreclosed other non-custodial options. We can’t inflict physical or emotional pain on people as punishment/deterrent, we can’t have them do forced labor above some token level (constitutionally we can, but as a practical matter we can’t), and we can’t have them fired because we’d only end up paying for their upkeep just as surely as if we imprisoned them. What meaningful options to we have, once a crime is committed, other than incarceration? Defining current crimes into non-crimes strikes me as a lame strategy, unless it’s a redefinition we would want to do even in the absence of an incarceration crisis.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Jail is what America has instead of a welfare state. Indeed, jail is the only form of welfare that White America is enthusiastic about paying for.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
More cops = good.
More prisons = bad.
While this may seem contradictory, it’s not.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Criminals commit crimes. If you lock them up, they can’t commit crimes nor spawn future criminals. What am I missing here?
Now all you need to do is find the lead criminal and drive a stake through his heart!
January 28th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Decriminalize drugs, problem solved.
Next question?
January 28th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Yes, you can explain why it’s a good thing to punish people violating public drinking statutes, but why is that a crime?
Obviously the prohibition of drinking in outdoor areas of restaurants is bone-headed and a bureaucratic mistake, but the point you are not grasping is that when people are, without fear of prosecution, doing drink, drugs, and other sorts of questionable public behaviours, it a) because of the effects of drink and drugs induces them to act recklessly and b) emboldens them, by the nature of permission to act in disregard of good public behaviour, to act recklessly and criminally.
I am a big fan of fine drinks actually, but public drinking is just stupid. It poisons the public atmosphere of trust if you have drunken and high people wandering around on streets. You a) make law-abiding citizens less willing to go out and b) embolden the non-law-abiding to act thusly, and you end up with a balance much more tilted toward illicit behaviour on the streets.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
That’s a good explanation, Myles, for punishing public drunkenness.
Once again, your problem is that you pick on things that are crimes first and demand they be punished because it fulfills a social/psychological need in your mind, rather than wondering why people should be thrown in jail for things that aren’t harming anyone in the first place, and the resources required to punish certain crimes cost far more than their impact when punished on a large scale. Hardly anyone for the moment is being sent away for 5 years for the crime of drinking in public, but selling someone some pot will get you into a heckuva lot of trouble.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Trachtenberg’s piece is data-free, and thus not very helpful. Most notably, the his paradigmatic exemplars of incarceration gone wrong — “nonviolent convicts sentenced for drug possession” and “septuagenarians sent away for decades under a “three strikes” law — are largely mythical.
In California, which I’m mostly familiar with, there are vanishingly few prisoners in the system who are there for drug possession alone, and those who are there are entirely repeat offenders for whom treatment has failed time and time again. Far from leading to an explosion in the prison population, incarcerated persons as a percentage of the total population has declined slightly even after passage of the three strikes law (to be sure, this is also attribuable to declining crime rates, but here we have to take into account the deterrent effect of prison sentences on rate reduction, as well).
As to who is actually in California prisons, the majority (slightly more than half) of the population are incarcerated for committing violent crimes against the person; the remainder of “non-violent” crimes mostly consists of crimes that most of us probably consider prison-appropriate — burglary, arson, previously convicted felons who are in possession of a weapon despite a parol condition. Roughly 11% are there for any drug crime at all — including dealers at all levels. A tiny percentage are there for relatively minor felonies that are the proverbial “third strike.”
None of this is to say that there aren’t major areas of prison reform that are absolutely necessary, or that rehabilitation and other methods aren’t important means for dealing with many non-violent criminals, including those convicted of drug possession. Nor is it to say that injustice isn’t happening or can’t happen in an individual case.
But its simply a myth to believe that we can trim our prisons of non-violent offenders who “shouldn’t really be locked up” and see a significant decline in the prison population. Proponents of prison reform need to get serious about looking at the data that’s actually there.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
That’s a good explanation, Myles, for punishing public drunkenness.
No public drinking, no public drunkenness.
By the way, Canada has essentially decriminalised marijuana. It hasn’t really done the country any good, made crime any less, except to induce higher levels of marijuana consumption.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
No public drinking, no public drunkenness.
I hope you’re not commenting in a public space, as that would probably make you a hypocrite on public masturbation. Sheesh, Miley and Hector are a pair of clowns.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Still, the point is that marijuana consumption is not negative in producing a sober, clean, harm-free public spaces. It is still an illicit mode of behaviour. Thus it ought be banned in public spaces in the same way as booze.
Prosecuting pot sellers, while not defensible for War On Drugs reasons, is advisable if you have seen the empirical reality: in the United States, pot consumption among high school teenagers, and among the young population in general, is much rarer than in countries where there is much more of a liberal attitude towards pot. That is a good thing.
Part of it is that pot transactions have been make more much legally sanctioned offences and thus subject to serious punishments.
Even among various parts of the States, areas with less stringent laws against pot have seen teenage pot use increase relative to other jurisdictions. A lot of times it’s just a matter of supply, and if you choke, or at least seriously reduce the supply, you reduce the harm.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Well, I think that’s the right approach. But I’d also like our police officers to start heading back towards safety officers and keepers of the peace, and less about Big Brother, Big Bully.
I’m sure I’m fond of a time that never existed, but wouldn’t be nice if police were once again part of the community and people liked seeing them, and asking them for help.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
No public drinking, no public drunkenness.
Right, because no one ever leaves a bar after too many and behaves badly on the street. Drunk people only behave badly precisely where they do their drinking.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
But I’d also like our police officers to start heading back towards safety officers and keepers of the peace, and less about Big Brother, Big Bully.
I second this. As I have said, mounted police, community patrols, more dispersed, community-based police stations, separation of patrol and response functions, etc, bring ‘em on.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
“except to induce higher levels of marijuana consumption”
Is that really true? Maybe the change in laws merely changed how people respond to the survey. I smoke pot every day, but if the government sends me a survey asking if I smoke pot, the answer is ‘no’. If pot were legal, that answer would change to ‘yes’. Now if the City of Boulder were to ask the question, I’d answer ‘yes’ right now. They already have my drug test results, so I’m not telling them anything they don’t already know. But I’m not dealing, so the Feds have no jurisdiction for now. But the jurisdiction issue may change, so I won’t tell the Feds anything. Now the Feds can obviously read this post, but they can’t prove that I’m not just lying. They need those urine samples from Boulder, and Boulder won’t cooperate. In fact, they’ve already thrown them away.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Robert Halford makes a good point about data. A short essay without footnotes provides limited opportunities for citations.
With respect to my claim about elderly prisoners, see “Aging Behind Bars,” a report from the Sentencing Project concerning California’s graying inmate population.
As for the non-violent drug offenders, I agree that we can quibble about how many exist; some people sentenced to prison for such offenses likely committed more serious crimes and received a plea deal. (The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that around 250,000 state prison inmates are locked up for “drug crimes” but does not separate dealers from mere possessers, much less major dealers from minor ones.) That said, we have millions of people in prison. If I can identify a subgroup that shouldn’t be there, why not take action?
Finally, even when we agree someone should serve real time, we can still debate how much. Maybe some people are sentenced to twenty years who would learn their lesson in two years. That’s an expensive and inhumane miscalculation, and I think the burden of proof should rest with whoever is defending our “lock up one-in-each-hundred Americans” status quo.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
America is a violent nation. We have to recognize that at least part of the reason why we have such a large prison population is that we have a lot of crime.
Now, there are different ways of dealing with crime, but incarceration is the only one that gives you the incapacitation effect. So we also have to recognize that incarceration works. And it works quickly. And it also happens to be popular.
There are good reasons to think that the U.S. has too much incarceration and is not using its resources in the most efficent manner.
But the problem is that there are not many other mechanisms that have been shown to be effective in driving down crime rates (other than increased police forces). And having a high crime rate is toxic to pursuing other liberal goals. Liberals have to a large extent conceded on the law and order issues because it is the only way to pursue other goals. So long as people fear crime (whether reasonably or unreasonably) it is difficult to institute the sort of social welfare policies that liberals like.
Fortunately or unfortunately, reducing the size of the prison population is not an issue that will help liberals. They may be able to win some on the margins – for example by devoting more resources to increasing the police force – but it would not be a good idea to tackle this one head on.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I think the burden of proof should rest with whoever is defending our “lock up one-in-each-hundred Americans” status quo.
Maybe in philosophy class, but in the real world locking people up is a popular policy. If you want to change this policy, you will have to convince people otherwise.
January 28th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Blah, I’m doing what I can to convince people. One argument in these trying economic times might be that, however much you might enjoy locking people up absent evidence of its effectiveness, we just can’t afford it.
In a far longer piece I wrote in 2005 on state sentencing policy, I detail the skyrocketing costs of state prison systems. The section entitled “Monetary costs of prison construction and operation,” beginning at page 48 of the PDF (or at page 526 of the volume, should you happen to subscribe to the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform), cites some useful sources. See also the sources cited in footnote 2 (page 2 of the PDF).
If I can’t convince you to reduce our incarceration rate on the basis of justice, how about an effort to avoid sending our states into bankruptcy? I bet California wishes it had a few more dollars available these days.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Myles,
I don’t see how questioning the wisdom of the drug war and more policing as a crime prevention strategy makes me “a fool.” Your thought experiment about drinking in the streets leading to gang wars is somewhat tangential to the point I was making. But I’ll bite: it seems like a poor use of public resources to arrest every drunk guy on the street, or every kid with a spray can. What percent of incidents of public drinking do you think lead to violence (I’m guessing that’s gonna be a low figure)? And how much does it cost to haul in every drunkard the police see? What else could police do with their time? And how will police use their discretionary power to arrest people for whatever kinds of “public nuisances” they see fit? Might we encounter some racial disparities in such cases? You could use a little Wire Season III on this point.
Matt is right that we’re past the point of diminishing marginal returns on incarceration. Moreover, imprisoning 1 percent of the population–more than any country in the world–raises serious questions about democratic legitimacy.
What I was trying to say with my original comment was that, beyond reducing mass incarceration, we should think about whether “more policing” is the best way to go. As far as I know, the verdict on broken windows policing as a strategy is mixed (e.g. crime was on the way down before Giuliani implemented that plan). And the idea of filling the streets of cities with more and more police is pretty unsettling to me. Men and women with guns and sticks and badges that give them authority are often prone to abuse their power, especially when they get bored. So let’s not get too carried away with over-policing. Maybe we could spend those extra dollars on after school programs, so that kids have less time to make trouble. I would like to live in a country were policing and incarceration are not the most powerful and visible forms of political authority.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Maybe we could spend those extra dollars on after school programs, so that kids have less time to make trouble.
Uhm, this would serve exactly the people who would not be on the streets causing trouble in the first place. Those who are likely to be troublemakers won’t be at those after-school programs.
One of the more misguided liberal formulations.
“Mixed” is more than enough to continue with broken windows policing. I can’t really understand why you dislike that stuff: crime is more likely to happen where there are broken windows and trash and graffiti everywhere. This is pretty intuitive. And it costs far less than fix this its infancy, when you don’t have cops risking getting shot by people with guns, than to wait until the criminal elements are actually active.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Another thing: Broken windows, graffiti, trash => lower home values.
Lower home values => more crime.
Not so complicated.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Perhaps Myles should emigrate to Singapore, and leave all the dirty liberals here with our graffiti and public drunkenness.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Robert Halford? Figures that the guy who wrote “Breaking the Law” would be against incarceration.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Myles,
Why does your domino theory of human activity apply to crime and not social programs? You keep a teenage kid occupied after school, and so he doesn’t leave school and join a gang and etc etc. The advantage of after school, as opposed to policing is it doesn’t involve coervice authority and jails. It actually does something constructive for people. In your world there are just these “bad guys” who are born bad and the best we can do is throw em in jail. Are there some people in society like that? Maybe. But not 1 in 100. Most criminals become criminals because of other social factors (like bad schools and no money). So we should spend money on fixing those social circumstances. Attack the cause, not the symptom.
Just because places with broken windows and graffiti have more crime doesn’t mean that the broken windows and graffiti cause the crime. That much should be obvious. I think its more likely, in fact, that poor communities (where there is more crime) have more buildings that aren’t looked after, and therefore have more broken windows and graffiti. So before we enter into Myles’ utopian police state, we might want to rethink the cause and effect here.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Well Blake, your model was in intellectual prevalence for much of the time pre-Giuliani. People thought by focusing on the big crimes and trying to use social policy for the rest we would solve the problems.
Turns out, it’s wrong. It didn’t work. When gov’t reduced punishment, crime increase, not decreased. When policing got laxer, crimes increased, not decreased. Ever since the liberal ideals about crime were in the ascendency, NYC got less safe, not more. What worked was being tough on every single crime. You can immediately reduce crime without changing much in terms of socio-economic circumstances.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Ben T., thanks for responding and participating — and for raising the issue of prison policy, which, despite its importance, has largely fallen off the political agenda as the crime rate and the population’s fear of violent crime has gone down.
Few people would disagree that, at least in the abstract, that if there was a way to reduce the cost and rate of incarceration without any serious trade-offs in terms of crime levels or other negative social effects, we should do so. The problem is that many prison reformers simply cite to the costs or the growth of the system, or to the total percentage of the population incarcerated, without taking a more detailed look at who the incarcerated population is and why they are there, and what the costs of reducing the incarceration level would be.
Once one does so, the places in which we can see a major cost-free benefit from reducing the “culture of incarceration” are much less obvious — as I say, the nonviolent cocaine user inmate is largely a myth, and the overhwelming (95%+) majority of inmates are incarcerated for crimes that the majority of the population would consider easily appropriate for incarceration, particularly once we consider that prosecutorial and sentencing discretion is considerable for the folks who actually end up in the system.
I agree with you that some sentencing is too long, and probably unnecessary, particularly for the extremely aged population. Crime is very much the province of young men, and there’s not much preventitive detention need for even most very bad people once they get older than 65. But the devil is very much in the details. Take an armed robber who physically assaults a victim, and is known as a career gang member. If he’s arrested at 19, it more likely than not does society a considerable amount of good to provide for a 20 year sentence as a purely preventative measure, until you get the benefits of maturity age at 39. The same person arrested at age 29 probably does not need the same length of a sentence (to age 49) to provide the same public protection benefit. But assigning different sentence lengths to the two criminals raises real issues of justice and fairness, as well as deterrence for future crimes. And of course things get even more complicated as you get closer to the real world. This doesn’t mean that these issues aren’t worth looking into, it just means that a blanket call for sentence reductions per se probably isn’t very helpful, and that, more broadly, you can’t just look at the cost of the system per se and conclude that too much prison is a bad thing (by the way, I’m not saying that you were doing this, or that you have a responsibility to come up with a comprehensive plan for prison reform in a magazine essay, just that these issues are really hard).
January 28th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
You can argue as forcefully as you like, but the empirical evidence is not on your side. Simply put, liberal ideas about crime have failed and conservative ideas about crime have (largely, not totally, but largely) succeeded. Witness the remarkable turnaround of NYC after they threw the liberal orthodoxy out.
P.S.: To the guy who mentioned Singapore: I am sure the residents of West Los Angeles and Compton and Southie in Boston, would appreciate Singaporean levels of safety, even if that meant giving up some freedoms. Of course I am not suggesting such a thing, but I do suggest you give up spouting limousine liberalism when you don’t face the everyday dangers.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
We send people to jail and insure they remain criminals for life. It’s a great system really. I always wonder why people are convinced Americans are genetically predispositioned to violence in a way Europeans are not. Social policy determines the society. This is our reward for adopting a punitive approach to dealing with our poor.
January 28th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Myles: actually, we’ve never tried the social side of liberal’s approach to crime. As long as you have very poor people living with very rich people, crime is going to be a problem. At this point I doubt it could pay dividends in anything less than a 10 to 20 year time frame. On the other hand, legalizing drugs would put an awful lot of gang members out of work. I think the short term crime reduction there would be enormous.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
“Broken windows, graffiti, trash => lower home values.
Lower home values => more crime.”
Try this one: Less government spending=> poor roads and water service => lower home values => more crime. The fact is that we want our ghettos to be ghettos. That’s why we don’t spend any money to improve them. The prison industry needs us to create high crime societies to fill their cells. And they donate a lot to political campaigns.
But there is one real reason for reduced crime: abortion. It’s the only factor that stands up to regression analysis. Don’t believe me? Then explain why Guiliani’s policies caused crime to go down in St Louis. Abortion was legalized nationwide, Guiliani only changed one city’s policies. Yet crime went down across the entire nation. Only a national policy change could do that. That national policy was Roe v Wade.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Myles,
Again, the evidence isn’t with you on NYC. Crime levels were on there way down before Giuliani started arresting people for J-Walking.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
“I always wonder why people are convinced Americans are genetically predispositioned to violence in a way Europeans are not.”
Well, we probably are genetically predisposed towards violence. Remember, we were the people who got kicked out of Europe. Europe sent its bad apples to America, and that’s who we are. It’s the same when you look at Australia and New Zealand. They shouldn’t be different, but they are. Australians are much more violent. But Australia was a penal colony. New Zealand wasn’t. Europe benefits from the fact that they just sent their criminals elsewhere.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Re: Ever wonder who’s taking your credit card number when you buy something over the phone?
Nowadays it’s usually someone in India.
Re: Public drinking. What does this have to do with a discussion about prisons? We don’t throw people in Sing-Sing for tipping a bottle of Madd Dog on the street corner. Often enough they’re just made to dump it out and are given a warning. At worst they get a ticket and have to pay a fine.
Re: No public drinking, no public drunkenness.
Someone has never been anywhere near a college campus on a major frat party night. The booze is indoors all right, but the drunks are stumbling around everywhere.
Re: consumption among high school teenagers, and among the young population in general, is much rarer than in countries where there is much more of a liberal attitude towards pot.
OK, I’m 41 and things may have changed since my misspent youth. But I do recall that scoring a bag of weed was really, really easy to do in high school compared with the maneuvers we went through to get a twelve pack.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Someone has never been anywhere near a college campus on a major frat party night. The booze is indoors all right, but the drunks are stumbling around everywhere.
I am in a fraternity. Look, college has no application to general society in this case. I am talking about habitual drunks or the youthfully aggressive. Fact is, normal people don’t go about stumbling out doors drunk unless they are already there. College, of course, is different as frat parties end in people generally going home or going to another party, and that means, well, people transiting streets. Of course, there are the guys who hang around on the lawn and stuff, but frats shoo them off generally, so as to not attract campus cops.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
But the good news is that it keeps unemployment #’s down. If we were to add in all the people in prison who could be in the workforce to the umemployed, well we’d be looking at 11% unemployment … If you add on that we would have a couple 100,000’s of umemployed prison guards, well we would have 12% unemployment. The stats for black males would be staggering, probably close to 30% are unemployed or in prison right now.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Funny how when the fraternity boys are roaming the streets in a drunken stupor it’s not a crime.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
People are thrown in jail for drunk driving. Then they fail parole because they have substances in their system and it’s back to jail. I don’t condone drunk driving, but other solutions need to be found for substance abuse.
Fraternities are irrelevant. The problem is young people who are kicked out of high school because they are not performing well academically and “no child left behind” policies give schools an incentive to get rid of them because make the schools look bad. These people have no jobs and no prospects. In former days they would have worked on the farm or in factories.
Access to decent jobs and recreation opportunities — not only in sports but in the arts — would help the situation. As would aid to family farms in the form of health care, among other things.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
“People are thrown in jail for drunk driving. Then they fail parole because they have substances in their system and it’s back to jail. I don’t condone drunk driving, but other solutions need to be found for substance abuse.”
Well that certainly hits home. You are basically describing me. In lieu of most of my last jail sentence, I was put in a rehab program. How’d that work? Well, I’m sitting at my computer and drinking whiskey. But I’m not driving. In fact, I just got off the bus. I was buying more whiskey. I may still kill myself with alcohol, but it’s just a race with cancer. I’m guessing cancer will win. Whatever. At least the rehab program convinced me to be concerned for the welfare of other people. Jail never did that.
In the end, I think the forced abstinence programs do a lot of good. They’ll only make you quit if you want to quit. But if you don’t want to quit, they’ll still make you think about what you’re doing. I have many friends from that program, and they are all better people for going through it. Some still use, some don’t. But nobody is worse for going through the program.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
“Re: Ever wonder who’s taking your credit card number when you buy something over the phone?
Nowadays it’s usually someone in India.”
Not true. Our prison telemarketing industry puts Bangalore to shame. Yes, when you need help with your computer, it will come from India. Indians know a lot more about that stuff than American prisoners. But when someone is trying to sell you new siding for your house, they are calling from jail. Those prisoners need to learn how to fake an Indian accent. They’d be more credible if they did.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Class is most certainly not irrelevant. Poor people get thrown into the criminal system for doing the very things for which well-off people get a slap on the wrist or less. The higher penalties for crack vs. cocaine is a good example for those who are busted.
Often, the police won’t even answer calls against fraternities because they know daddy will make a fuss. You can bet that if a black man had shot out someone’s kitchen windows it would be described as “a drive-by” and there would have been an investigation. If the frats do it, nobody even bothers to investigate.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Often, the police won’t even answer calls against fraternities because they know daddy will make a fuss.
Uhmm…dude…that’s cuz they are pretty harmless.
They are a bunch of college kids having fun….not in-the-womb bank robbers.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Most of the poor people who do time for doing the same thing the frats don’t get busted for aren’t “in-the-womb bank robbers” either.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:09 am
A lot of those college kids are engaging in gang rape, also.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:20 am
A lot of those college kids are engaging in gang rape, also.
Need we go through the Duke Lacrosse nonsense again? Seriously.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Please be advised that or are not reliable sources of what college kids are actually doing.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:51 am
Robert Halford? Figures that the guy who wrote “Breaking the Law” would be against incarceration.
Well done! I’ve been trying to come up with a solid JP gag since I saw RH’s first comment this afternoon, but you really aced it by the tying it in perfectly with the thread topic.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Oh, Myles, do you ever get tired of being such a child wandering into adult conversations? I suppose you don’t, but the actual adults here do – especially since you are so consistently wrong and proud of your ignorance. You have no real life experience to guide you – cloistered against the world in your middle-upper class upbringing, and using only your Young Republican hymnbook to sing from. (I bet you’re a big Ayn Rand fan, too – right? That’s common for boys your age, until they grow up).
Anyway, let’s correct some of the things you are dead wrong about.
First of all, Canada has certainly not decriminalized pot. There is certainly disparate enforcement across the country (in parts – but not all – of BC, cops may not even bother telling you to butt out; in rural Alberta, right next door, it isn’t out of the question for first time offenders to see short jail terms). This kind of arbitrary justice across the country is absurd, and the high rates of marijuana consumption engender a disrespect for the law that is entirely unhealthy for a society trying generally to promote the rule of law. I hate to make an appeal to authority here (and don’t care to forego my pseudonym), but I would probably count on 1 hand the number of people in this country that are as conversant in the law of marijuana as I am. Quite simply, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Second, despite draconian enforcement in the US, Americans are likely second only to Canadians in the industrialized world (Papua New Guinea is likely highest) in their consumption of pot – and at levels *twice* that of a notoriously “liberal” country like, say, Holland (12% v. 6%).
Third – I realize that you have been a child for the entirety of the War on (certain classes of people who consume certain kinds of*) Drugs (which I also realize doesn’t inhibit you from parading your ignorance), but seriously – there is very little else more clear after 25 years of the WoD than that attacking drug use through supply has Epically Failed.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:28 am
Sorry – meant to footnote
*”War on (certain classes of people who consume certain kinds of) Drugs” courtesy of Scott Lemieux…
January 29th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Time should not be the driving force in determining the effectiveness of incarceration on one who has committed a crime or crimes. The issue is , what is being done with the time? America loves what is mistakenly referred to as Retributive Justice. Retribution is designed to crush, period, and is not justice. George Carlin would put that phrase in with other non sequitur’s like jumbo shrimp. Restorative Justice is not an either/or alternative, it is a comprehensive package of punishment and remolding.
Education, job skill training, and mental health therapy is essential for inmates, as they will all come out. We need for them to be Better People when they do. Restorative Justice would take incarceration time to address mental health issues first. A program like Moral Reconation Therapy is just the ticket. It is a cognitive behavioral therapy program designed for those in lock up to be reeducated “… socially,morally, and behaviorally, to instill appropriate goals, motivations, and values.”(ccimrt@aol.com) The next step is education and job training.
Employment, when in the process of reentry, is that which enables an ex-offender to obtain housing, and transportation, and to pay fines. In the process they [hopefully] become law abiding citizens, paying taxes, thus reducing recidivism and creating a real drop in crime rates. Without additional education and job training, beyond what they had before being locked up, the possibility of employment for an ex-offender is just about nil. They go back to crime as a means of ’self employment’.
Within the Restorative Justice process, there are mediation components. Inmates who choose to be a participant in such a process, can engage in one of two ways. A person who has been victimized in a particular way, like say armed robbery, can speak to a group of inmates who have committed similar crimes and tell the inmates how that crime affected them, the victim. This is done in a mental health group therapy type setting, and is strictly controlled. It is probably the first time an inmate has come face to face with the harm they have done to others.
The other setting is when a victim or victims’ family member confronts the actual perp. Such a setting takes rigorous preparation for both parties; the perp must be silent unless allowed to speak by the victim, and everything is directed by a professionally trained mediator.
Lastly, the community is involved when an ex-offender is released, not just probation and parole. And so, R.R., there is your alternative.
March 11th, 2009 at 4:43 am
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:16 am
tramadol
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
March 24th, 2009 at 6:13 am
Thanks for this
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:13 am
Incredible site!
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 6:01 am
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right viagra