"“How can you tell what type of cellphone an inmate uses,” he asked, “based on what’s in his cell?” He let me think for about two seconds before cheerily giving me the answer: you examine the bar of soap on the prisoner’s sink. The safest place for an inmate to store anything is in his rectum, and to keep the orifice supple and sized for the (contraband) phone, inmates have been known to whittle their bars of soap and tuck them away as a placeholder while their phones are in use. So a short and stubby bar means a durable old dumbphone; broad and flat means a BlackBerry or an iPhone. Pity the poor guy whose bar of soap is the size and shape of a Samsung Galaxy Note."
This stinks of the standard urban legend trope structure, and with that in mind, I don't think it's true. There's absolutely not reason to keep an ass pocket supple and sized for contraband. And it's absolutely not true that you need a place holder for the contraband, when the contraband in not being hidden there.
Lastly, regularly putting a bar of soap in one's anus would be incredibly uncomfortable, and inmates would quickly stop that process, replacing it - if it was really needed in the first place - with something plastic and chemically inert.
This article might be summarized as "guards told me outrageous things about inmates and I uncritically repeated them 'cause it seemed like a good story"
Well, strictly speaking the dude who shared that particular insight is portrayed to have a bit more cred than the guards' stories, but i guess that's beside the point
You're not thinking like a prisoner though. How do you know what kind of reasoning is going on inside of a prisoner's head? They don't have the same information that you have.
There is no reason to avoid leaving a hat on a bed, but superstitious people might have a reason, even if it doesn't make any sense to you.
“Before prison gangs showed up,” he says, “you survived in prison by following something called ‘the convict code.’ ”
There is a great book by a Polish-American sociologist Marek Kamiński[1] describing the convict code in Polish prisons, Games Prisoners Play[2]. It's based on his personal experience (he ended up in prison as an anticommunist dissident in the 80s) and tries to explain the prison culture from game theory perspective. Which is a fine premise but what makes it a great read is the long, intricate process of initiation he went through as a fresh prisoner.
It's also not nearly as brutal. There are no gangs, there's only this one inner culture. Actually, some of the initiation games were kind of clever.
In one they threw him under the bunk and two of his cell mates where kicking him (or poking with a broom, something like that) while the third was yelling "gear up" or "gear down". He broke a comb he had in his pocket and screamed like it was a bone at which point they stopped but what they were looking for was for him to say "put it in neutral".
I took Kaminski's Game Theory And Politics class and he lends the material an absolutely fascinating perspective. One of my favorite undergraduate courses and I got an A..
Correct me if I am wrong, I am no expert on this matter, but it seems like prisoners get stuck in a loop - Make one mistake, you are in prison. Once you are tagged a prisoner, you rarely get any jobs outside. When you are in prison you get caught up in the whole gang thing and your best friends are now other criminals/gang members.
What is being done to help prisoners rehabilitate and break out of this loop?
In the U.S.? Not much. Some, such as Loïc Wacquant, don't really see a distinction between being in prison and not for some people:
> The 'hyperghetto' constitutes the fourth stage in the development of 'peculiar institutions', following (sequentially) slavery, Jim Crow, and the early ghettos. According to him, the ghetto and the prison are for all practical purposes indistinguishable, reinforcing each other to ensure the exclusion of African-Americans from general society, with governmental encouragement.
There are some attempts at what is called 'restorative justice' in certain situations in certain places, but the idea of prison as being rehabilitative is not on the mind of the public.
This is what happened to someone I know. He made a single mistake, hanging around with the wrong crowd, and then even though he was trying to change his life, he kept getting screwed over by "the system". There were lots of issues related to going to halfway houses or going to jail. He got sick and missed an appointment with a parole officer, which caused him to lose his job, which caused him to be thrown back in jail. He was trying his best to follow the rules, but after losing his temper and threatening to attack someone who had been bothering his father, he eventually ended up getting thrown out of the country (he lost his permanent resident). Obviously he made a few bad choices, but if someone is making a concerted effort to change his life, it feels like they should be afforded more of a chance to succeed.
With the privatized prison system in the US, it's more commercially viable to have people stay in that loop than not.
I'm not sure that there is any incentive to help people out of that loop with so much profit for everyone in the chain (police departments, lawyers, judges and most of all, the private company that runs the prison). The only net loss in this loop are the taxpayers who pay for all of it.
It is misleading to refer to the US prison system as privatized, when the percentage of the total inmates that are in private prisons is only around 3% [1].
Privatized prisons do create a huge moral hazard, but currently the pro-prison groups with the biggest scope and influence are probably police/guard unions [2] and the "tough on crime" crowd.
Those two groups still profit from prisons, regardless of whether the prisons themselves are privatized. Perhaps it's best to speak of prison profits and interests which exist in every prison and lead to the same problems as privatized prisons. Not to mention other profiting industries like the phone company who handles all the collect calls, equipment manufacturers, etc.
Bottom line is, it pays to send and keep people in prison regardless if the prisons themselves are privatized.
So the phone companies are in on it too? Maybe the problem is people commit crimes? Most crimes go unsolved. How many crimes happen before they are actually caught.
So, comparing US incarceration stats with other countries, would you then say the average US citizen is more likely to commit crime than other nationalities?
The percentage of private prisoners is single digits. The policies that lead to high incarceration rates today, namely long drug sentences and three strikes laws, were promulgated in the 1980's and early 1990's, when the industry was essentially nonexistent.
Are drugs as big a component of incarceration rates as the C.W. suggests? The overwhelming majority of IL inmates were sentenced for property crimes (which in the uniform crime classification do not include drug crimes of any sort). Certainly the C.W. on the impact of marijuana legalization isn't accurate; cannabis accounts for a tiny fraction of all incarcerations (significantly less than 1%). I checked a few months back, and a plurality of Cook County incarcerations were due to domestic violence.
Three strike laws and Kafka-esque probation policies could definitely be a big part of the problem.
(N.B.: I'm a strong supporter of cannabis legalization, and of decriminalization of all but a few of the rest of the recreational drugs).
I think the CW overestimates drug crimes, and also overestimates what those sentenced for drug crimes would be doing with their lives otherwise. Having read through quite a few criminal files, I can think of only a single example of someone that made me think: "gee, he's in jail solely because drugs are illegal."
I support legalization and oppose three strikes laws because they fuck over a small minority of people who don't deserve it. But it's a small minority.
So if we just legalized drugs, people who are so fully addicted to them that they'll burglarize houses to pay for them will, presumably because drugs will be so much cheaper, get a job at McDonalds instead?
It is the price. Not many people addicted to cheap legal drugs become criminals. To buy cigarettes or grog, it is enough to work a low-paying job or just beg for money. Personally, i don't believe you should be able to buy hard drugs in the supermarket, but there should be a cheap legal way to buy them from a doctor and get help at the same time.
It's part of a strong argument for making them illegal. You'd also need to show that making them illegal actually decreases the rate at which that happens.
Probably. Decriminalization and being able to get hard drugs from a doctor would go a long way in reducing drug-related crime. I don't think society is ready for hard drugs in the supermarket aisle. At least i'm not ready for it.
Drug convictions are 20% of the national prison population. That said, you can link many of the other crimes to the drug trade or drug abuse.
Cannabis to drug dealers is like ground beef to your butcher -- it's often the base of the business. Harder drugs attract more profit and police attention.
Note than many cannabis associated crimes are misdemeanors that don't call for jail time. In a "tough" state like New York, possession of very small quantities of cocaine or heroin often result in felony conviction. But at the same time, drug distributors move a lot of weed (hence the ground beef analogy).
Everything you have said is false. Private prisons are not colluding to keep prisoners in prison or lobbying the state or doing any kind of action to increase the number of people that become imprisoned nor increase their length of stay. There is no evidence for anything you have claimed, you simply use "privatized" as if it were a dirty word and we should knowingly nod our heads in assent.
> I'm not sure
The way to resolve an information need is to engage in an objective search of facts, not speculate endlessly and make unsubstantiated claims of criminal behavior of others without some kind of evidence to base it on.
If you want people to spend less time in prison, you'll want the laws changed because that's where all this come from. Some of the laws in California are the result of ballots.
"Private prisons are not colluding to keep prisoners in prison or lobbying the state or doing any kind of action to increase the number of people that become imprisoned nor increase their length of stay."
If I read the parent comment you seem to be saying that legal lobbying is the problem. However, the Ciavarella story concerns illegal corruption.
I'm not a fan of the American prison system, mainly because it promotes forced labour, or slavery. The 13tm amendment explicitly contains an exemption for prison labour, something which has historically been abused in America.
A PA judge was sentenced to 28 years for getting paid to put children behind bars and you're bitching about me picking the first link to an article on the subject I found from a quick google search?
He said "private prisons are not colluding" I produce a link to a case that very clearly demonstrates collusion. You claim this proves there is no collusion. Yeah, we're done here.
"Arizona is one of four states (along with Virginia, Oklahoma and Louisiana) in which state governments are bound to contracts guaranteeing a 95%-100% occupancy in facilities leased by private prisons."
Are you actually insane enough to believe that the (tiny number, 3% quoted below) of privately run prisons are managed by companies who are somehow colluding to ensure that the prisoners all re-offend once they finish their sentences? Because there isn't enough crime to keep them in profit currently?
I doubt the companies running the prisons are actively doing anything to 'make' prisoners recommit crimes after they leave. They can just not spend more than legally required to house, educate, care, and support them though...
>'What is being done to help prisoners rehabilitate and break out of this loop?'
Not much that I'm aware of. Being "tough on crime" is still pretty popular depending on political affiliation, Joe "Concentration Camp" Arpaio is still a sheriff and GEO is up 15% YTD [1].
However, there's been a fair amount of recent coverage around stepping back from some of the policies that got us here [2] so there's reason to be hopeful.
Spot on, and not very much. For instance, only 32% of inmates have a high school education or higher. Getting a job with both a prison record and almost no education is nearly impossible. What option do a lot of former inmates have that won't lead to recidivism?
Not sure about other states but there are small efforts to rehabilitate some of the inmates in Colorado. The programs are unfortunately small but quite successful. I think there are many in prison who could stay out if they just had something to look forward to on the outside.
The connection with another living creature that they're responsible for seems to do these guys a world of good beyond anything else we can offer them.
After reading the links, seems like they are paid very little (60 cents/day). Also, I feel training them to get higher level jobs could be more beneficial. e.g. Freelance PM/Designer/Dev could earn a lot more while working remotely with little background checks.
Almost nothing is being done. In the US the model of how our criminal justice system handles the guilty is one of revenge, retribution, and punishment, not of rehabilitation. This works about as well as you'd imagine given that most inmates only spend a few years in prison.
Language like this seems to me to dehumanize the inmates. Given that the author fails in getting into a conversation with the inmates, I find it irksome he feels called to pontificate on the situation, especially when other author have succeeded in having discussions with both gang members and alleged-but-not-actual gang members.
I suspect the inmates were wise in not talking to him. Since gang membership is a means that the California Prison System can use to discipline an inmate with little evidence, it's in the system's interest to describe everyone as a gang member (with Pelican Bay being the punishment zone for anyone so accused). Naturally, extreme insecurity makes banding logical as well - however the questionable part of the discussion is whether the prison is trying to control gang membership (in the same fashion that its questionable whether the war drugs is an honest effort to control drug use).
The article was interesting for its history of prison gangs.
However, if you're going to write about anything, then you owe it to both the readers and the subjects to interview the people involved.
You're not going to get an interview by walking once down a cell block asking to talk about gangs. No shit. The people who create shows like "Jail" or "Lockup" manage to get hundreds of hours of interviews with gang members. However, they establish mutual respect and rapport.
I suppose I can't judge too harshly as it's certainly a difficult assignment, but it seems like the author put a very minimal amount of effort into interviewing, and instead pontificated from on high about gang members.
For me, prisons are the ultimate test in civilization. Convicted felons cannot usually expect to be treated better than any other group in society, so if how they are treated sort of draws a lower bound on the "goodness" of society. If you treat your convicted felons as good as you can, it probably means that the rest of the country is treated even better. That's a very good starting point.
In that respect, I'm sad and ashamed that in my country (the Netherlands), just like in the US, things are pretty crappy. For example, we have a single "maximum security prison" where all the bad and criminally insane people go. When it's time for the prisoners to go out and get some air, the guards lock themselves up on the other side of the fence, and it's each inmate for himself. What could possibly go wrong?
We're a bunch of barbarians and I wish this was at all on the political agenda.
While I don't know everything about either the US or NL prison systems, I have lived in both places and do know both a guard at a non-maximum security correctional facility in California, and several psychologists who work at TBS 'clinics' in NL. For non-Dutch, these TBS clinics are where many dangerous criminals can be held for longer terms than are normally associated with the punishment for a given crime, based on the fact that these people are mentally unstable and likely to commit a crime again.
The differences in the criminal systems are huge. I agree that a great way to judge a society is by how it treats it's inmates, and that this could certainly be improved in Holland... but comparing the prison systems in the US to NL is just ridiculous.
Sentences are incredibly short in NL compared to US. There is a focus on re-entry into society, not so in the US. Life-long imprisonment is extremely rare in NL, with most cases being people in TBS clinics under supervision and care of psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. There is no death penalty. The incarceration rate is 8x higher in the US.
The sad thing is that many (most?) people don't have problems with this as in their opinion prisoners are there for punishment anyway, and public money is always better spent elsewhere.
And that's the main difference between legal systems; NL is about re-education, US is about paying a debt to society (or keeping people off the street).
Saying that prison sentences are about "paying a debt to society" is laughable. Three-strikes laws can make three fairly minor individual offenses add up to life imprisonment. Keeping anti-racist literature in your cell can land you in solitary confinement for decades.
If there's anything the US prison terms are "about", it's kicking a whole class of people while they're down and unable to do anything about it. Any politician can promise to increase sentences and appear by doing so to support "law and order" or the appropriate amount of crypto-racism or whatever it is people support these days. Felons are stripped of their ability to vote in some states, so there's literally no chance for retaliation and thus literally nothing to lose, and potential to gain. As a result, prison sentences are huge and there's no way to reduce them politically.
American prison sentences betray the basic lack of empathy of American politicians.
The first paragraph kind of ignores the homeless and the poor and even Mr Average Joe, who's got a list of medical conditions, which he can't afford to fix, so getting himself locked up for a while, just to get access to healthcare, doesn't sound insane.
Can you imagine that? Remain free and barely be able to put food on the table for your family or go to prison, just to solve a medical problem?
Europeans are amazingly gullible. No one in the US can be denied medical care thanks to Kennedy and unlike Germany doctors don't have to report the patient to authorities if they are here illegally.
Sure they can, except for immediate emergencies and for pregnancy labor[0]. Immediate emergencies are not preventative or palliative care, nor are they a substitute for a comprehensive health care system available to everyone.
Yeah, it's Europeans that are gullible. You're the one who thinks everyone in America gets medical care no matter what their circumstances. There is no non-evil reason for an American to post what you posted.
So here we have the end of the line for people who want to control others: folks who have broken the rules and need to be isolated. The state can control literally every aspect of their lives: where they live, what they eat, who they associate with, and so on.
Guess what? There's still crime, gangs, an informal government, and an economy. And you either kill them all (as one person in the article said, a bullet to the back of the head does wonders for behavior) or you allow it to happen.
I know there's the usual "America is a police state!" response to this article, and sure enough, we have created a security state, but more fascinating to me was the complex self-governing structures these inmates have set up -- which is exactly why the economist was studying them.
There's a huge academic and political debate that this ties into. For instance, do governments create markets and money? From the data presented in the article, no. They might dictate the terms of markets, to a small degree, but they're just a bit player. Can more laws eliminate crime? No. At some point, even when you have total control over each and every person, crime still happens. I don't know where the curve is, but there is a power curve at work, and you can reach the point of diminishing returns. It made more sense for the corrections officers to allow the gang activity that to continue to try to fight it.
Fascinating stuff, and of course this article is nowhere near authoritative. Still, I'd love to hear more about research in this area.
"An inmate doing push-ups in the SHU’s exercise yard, a small concrete room with an overhead skylight where inmates are allowed to spend an hour and a half a day and receive their only exposure to sunlight"
What's the rationale behind curtailing exposure to sunlight?
A prisoner is already under stress, presumably, especially first timers. Won't denying them natural light only worsen their psychological makeup and pull them into negative spiral?
Pelican Bay is a supermax prison, and the SHU is for the "worst of the worst". It's unlikely they put first timers there.
As for the rationale: since the law prohibits you from actively torturing/executing prisoners, you have to resort to more creative means of inducing suffering (and thus hopefully compliance). Removing and limiting all privileges, personal belongings, and mental stimulation (including a view other than drab gray concrete walls, or sunlight) is a guaranteed way to get people's mental state to deteriorate.
The worsening of the psychological makeup is thus by intent. This is meant for people who are deemed unredeemable, as well as a punishment to threaten prisoners in less severe prisons with: "We have an even worse place for you, should you cause too much trouble."
Limiting hiding places and tools for violence come immediately to mind.
It's easy from the outside to say this rule or that seems cruel or unreasonable, but they are created from experience trying to manage an incredibly creative and incredibly hostile population.
Actually, the Alaska prison system allowed personal computers to inmates up until about 18 years ago. As of 2003, I knew you could have a playstation or nintendo handheld game system, if you were active with required programs and held a prison job. After that I do not know, as that was the last time I was there.
It seems like there's a lot that could be done to curtail the use of cell phones in prisons that wouldn't require invasive body-cavity searches. Couldn't you just jam common cell phone transmission frequencies? That'd curtail guard use of cell phones, too, but that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.
Keep in mind that prison administrators trust the guards less than they trust the inmates. Phones and drugs don't arrive in the mail -- the COs are often complicit.
Prison personnel are already prohibited from having two-way communication devices except their radios. The problem with jammers is the FCC. They are paranoid about allowing the operation of any devices intended to screw up communications, and rightfully so.
It might be expensive, but you could make the entire prison a Faraday cage (although not sure how that would work if people are allowed to go outdoors).
Indeed. This doesn't leave an awful lot of room for profit. A prison is supposed to be a profitable business, what do people think this is? A service to society?
Don't rapiscans offer the same kind of non-invasive body-cavity searches? Why not just move the ones that are used in airports to prisons... Seems odd to need to do any invasive body-cavity search when u can just use the same thing that is used in an airport...
Surely the reason such tech isn't already in place is because such communications are being recorded/monitored?
Couldn't you easily locate devices using triangulation and hand-held receivers? Indeed you could probably just have a device at the door of each cell, and in other places, that told you when a communication on the right frequency was being made.
NSA are apparently monitoring my communications and I don't have a criminal record or even live in USA ... so why wouldn't they be monitoring USA prisoners, particularly gang members?
First of all, the NSA is not omniscient. Second, the NSA is tasked with national security- ie, they don't share data with prisons even if they have a juicy scoop.
It's probably fair to assume that phones and other contraband are a part of the balance of power between the authorities and the gangs they need for stability.
That's already being tried and doesn't work (enough). So the problem becomes 'what else can we do'. What you're saying is 'well we have so many teen pregnancies, why don't teens just stop having sex?'
You can roll about 5-6 tiny cigarettes from a single regular cigarette. These miniature cigarettes give about 30-50 seconds of light time. People would pay a "book" of stamps (20) for one of the mini's. Figure 200 cigarettes to a carton, makes 1000 mini's. So, about 20000 stamps can be received for a carton.
The seller only accepts whole "books", not poker-chip (separated) stamps. The federal system lets you mail out whole books of stamps. The post office will buy them back for face value.
Its quite profitable supporting smokers' habits in prison.
Thanks. So it includes a markup from `wholesale' to `retail', too. By the way, I guess smoking is prohibited completely in prison? Or are the rations just too small?
The feds took out cigarette smoking system-wide back in 2004-5. They stopped selling them in the commissary and then allowed a year of smoking before possessing them got you in trouble. State prisons I do not know about, except Alaska, and you could not smoke there back in 2002 - the last time I enjoyed their hospitality.
The author fails to mention one significant factor to the self-segregation of prison populations in the federal prison system. The federal hate crime law makes an assault upon a person of a different color punishable by a mandatory 25 year sentence.
So, if a white had a problem with a hispanic, he had to take it to the white shot-callers (gang bosses) who then went to the hispanic shot-callers. The hispanic bosses would then discipline their member (which could entail forcing him to repay a debt, or assaulting or even murdering him). As long as the violence didn't cross racial bounds, the hate crime doesn't apply.
hate crime laws don't apply to every attack upon someone of a different color. they only apply if the attack is BECAUSE of the victim's color. if you're attacking the other guy because he goosed your sister, it's not a hate crime no matter what color he is.
Take a second to think about what you're saying. You're basically talking about prison revenge scenarios. Do you seriously think the real reasons are ever going to be admitted?
"Your honour, I didn't shank him because I hate hispanics, it's because he stole my dope!"
oh, I understand that. ...but saying it's due to the hate crime law is not the same thing as using that law as an excuse. My point is that it's being misused, not denying that it happens.
Well, actually, SIS (Special Investigative Service), the "cops" in the federal system, treats any altercation between different colors as racially motivated.
Think about it. The reason they (SIS) automatically assume altercations as racially motivated is because the gangs in federal prison "take care of business" (i.e. punish someone for something wrong) within their own ethnic group.
So, if there _is_ any violence across ethnic groups, it's due to racial motivation.
What I mean is, SIS automatically assumes inter-race altercations are racially motivated. They do this because the gangs prevent inter-race altercations that have to do with drugs, money, pride, etc. The gangs have a "justice system" and handle that stuff without getting the cops involved as much as possible.
So, if somethings brews up, it's usually without gang sanction and racially motivated.
On one of my con-air flights, I sat by a guy who was being transferred to court for a new charge from the U.S. Supermax at Florence, Colorado. He was, of course, doing life. He joked with me that the only way he got to travel and see the sights and eat some good food was to kill a guard every now and then.
It's also illustrative to ask what reforms are possible in a society like the U.S. has: http://www.explainingprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03.... The U.S. homicide rate has been 5-7x higher than in England for more than a century. You can't blame it on the drug war or on Prohibition: it was 7x higher in 1900-1920, before Prohibition, before the expansion of federal criminal law, before for-profit prisons and before prison guard lobbies.
For some reason, the U.S. is just an incredibly violent society. Our justice system has evolved in light of that.
Homicide is a very small percentage of all crimes. I think it's obvious that our justice and penal systems have evolved to incarcerate the "unwanted," mainly people of color. They are both racist institutions that, especially in the last 60-70 years have been trying to "make up" for the advancements in the civil rights of minorities.
As far as what reforms are possible, how about releasing everyone who has committed victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, etc.)? The "justice" system in this country has lost all credibility because such crimes are mainly used to target minorities and the poor. Treating inmates humanely would also help. Removing the profit incentives of prisons would go a long way towards this as well. Not sending people to jail because they can't pay $100 fine would also be a huge step. There are many things society can do to keep a lot of the "low-level" offenders from ever getting into prison and becoming hardened criminals. For most people, once they're in prison, it's too late.
No, it's not. Murder is ~12% of all state incarcerations (state prisons being where the majority of all US inmates are housed). For context, all drug offenses put together make up just 17% of 2011 state incarcerations. If you include manslaughter, which you should, because (a) it's a form of homicide and (b) many murder prosecutions plead down to it, you get to just about 14%.
Homicide is a significant component of all US crime. There's no way to look at the numbers and characterize them as "very small".
If you released everyone currently imprisoned for drug crimes, you'd set free about 250,000 people, which is great, but you'd be leaving 1.1 million people incarcerated. Drugs aren't the big problem. Something else is.
(Prostitution, a "public order" offense, is a rounding error --- women represent 5% of all public order offenses, meaning that the category captures not just prostitution but is a whole myriad of offenses mostly committed by men. Very few women are actually imprisoned for prostitution; Texas is newsworthy for having around 300 of them, against a 5-figure female prison population).
Huh? The above comment stated that murder is a very small percentage of crimes, not that murderers are a very small percentage of incarcerated inmates. The comparatively high percentage of people in jail for murder is because murder is 1) more thoroughly investigated and 2) more harshly punished.
In 2010, roughly 1% of violent crimes were murders. [1] Combine this with nonviolent crimes, I'd say that's plausibly a "very small percent".
Not that I'm trying to say murder is not a problem. Killing people is bad, 'mkay.
I don't even know how the point about murder as a percentage of all crime even makes sense in this thread. What, do you imagine, is the point he was trying to make?
That a vastly larger number of people have been incarcerated for victimless crimes than for murder. Your objections would make sense if the sentences for murder and your median victimless crime were roughly equal.
An incarceration for a victimless adult crime, or for a 'status offense' as a juvenile, is an excellent start to eventually turn a harmless person into a murderer. By reducing the number of crippling interventions into the lives of people who haven't committed significant harm, you likely reduce the population of murderers in prison 20 years from now.
The overwhelming majority of current inmates are not imprisoned for victimless crimes. If the average sentence for murder were 10 years, and the average sentence for drug possession were 3 months, you would have to incarcerate 40 times as many people for drug possession than for murder to have equal numbers of both that are currently incarcerated.
The 3 month drug arrest is enough to keep you from getting a job, from getting college loans, and long enough to get you fairly deeply connected in a gang culture.
edit: can't quickly find stats, but the national arrest chart on http://prostitutionprocon.org/arrests.htm shows arrest numbers from 1994 to 2004. For 2004, the combined number for rape, robbery, and murder is around 120K, and aggravated assault adds another 380K. Drug violations accounted for 1.5M.
Most inmates are incarcerated for property crimes, the sentences for which are not 10 years, but rather more like the sentences for drug crimes.
It's a good point, the turnover in prison population for lesser crimes compared to that of murder convicts, but it still doesn't support the argument upthread.
Murder is insignificant in the prison reform discussion. As pointed above, it's a tiny percentage of all crime. Unless you want to suggest releasing murders (as another article on here did, though I disagree), there is nothing that can be done there. What can be done is to focus on the people that shouldn't be in jail. Change laws that criminalize victimless offenses. Release current prisoners. Those are real action items, and even if it is only a quarter million, that is still about an eight of the total prison population. End parole / probation for such offenses as that is likely to lead to people going back to jail. This is not an insignificant number. Releasing these people will make a difference, more than anything else I've seen suggested.
I'd be interested to see how many murders are are linked to dealing drugs. When you have a lot of money and weapons around people end up getting killed.
I do agree with your point thought that the US just seems to be more violent. Are serial killers and the like mainly a US phenomenon?
I'd suggest that murder rates are correlated mostly with a nation's experience of colonization. That's why they're uniformly higher in Africa and the Americas than in other parts of the world. Actually in that subset the USA does better than all but a few nations.
> Our justice system has evolved in light of that.
I don't know that I'd say 'evolved'. You said it yourself: the homicide rate has been 5-7x higher than in England for more than a century.
We're not really doing anything different than what we used to do - a punitive justice system, sometimes morally dubious punishment, and total 'othering' of convicted criminals. I don't know that we can really be shocked when nothing changes.
That's not true at all. There was a real effort in the 1950's and 1960's to turn the justice system into one more oriented toward rehabilitation. In the face of crime skyrocketing in the 1960's and 1970's, voters went the other way, instituting our present system. Take for example things like three strikes laws, which are mostly responsible for the "he went to jail for life for stealing $200" horror stories. Those were pioneered in 1993-94, by referendum in progressive states like Washington and California, by overwhelming margins (80-90% voting in favor).
> There was a real effort in the 1950's and 1960's to turn the justice system into one more oriented toward rehabilitation
Err, so there was an erroneous decade where we tried to do better?
The mid 50s-60s were a discrepancy in american history in a multitude of ways, so I'm not sure that I'd consider prison reform any different in that regard.
I also wouldn't consider a decade as representative of the american justice system when we have plenty of evidence that it's not representative of either the past (where we used to just hang people after three strikes) or the present (where, as you noted, we have three strikes laws).
In fact, it seems as though once a century we'll have a decade where they half-heartedly try to implement rehabilitative reforms, keep at it for maybe the better half of a decade, and then act shocked that it hasn't decimated incarceration rates yet. Shockingly, it takes longer than a few years to reform a society.
The comparison was against the U.K. I'm not an expert in turn of the century British criminal law, but I don't imagine you'll find that it was particularly oriented toward rehabilitation. Yet, their homicide rate has always been dramatically lower.
I agree that prison reform seems unlikely but I would put this in terms of the entrenched interest of guards, law enforcement and all the beneficiaries of the War On Drugs. Prison gangs are subordinate players in this game but certainly they are the monsters that the Drug War overall has successfully conjured up.
The solitary confinement practiced in Pelican Bay is a gross affront to humanity. In a hundred years and change, it will be considered the great moral blemish on the early 21st century, and our children's children's children will be disgusted by our complicity in it.
Solitary confinement is literally torture, and can drive people permanently insane. People can be placed into solitary confinement after being "validated" as gang members just for having political writing in their cells: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/solitary-confine...
This article discusses this only casually, which ultimately makes its author complicit in these crimes against humanity.
Journalists have a public responsibility, for sure. It'd surely lack moral sense to casually report on the mistreatment of Armenians, or not bother to really mention it at all, during the Armenian genocide when covering the plight of the Armenians.
This has been recognized in history by many, to leave you with two quotes from Einstein and King respectively:
"If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity."
"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."
I certainly don't want to get sentimental and I'm not one to favor hyperbole, being complicit in these crimes is too strong for my taste. But I agree with the sentiment of his post, which urges journalists to recognize their power and seize the opportunity to report on gross inhumane mistreatment of people, especially when these people are the subject of his writing. Again, I understand his wording was strong, but I wish we'd focus more on the intent of his post than on the semantics.
>I wish we'd focus more on the intent of his post than on the semantics.
But it's easier to score upvotes (and downvote away uncomfortable truths) by attacking semantics.
As to the strength of my wording, there were 1.5 million deaths in the Armenian Genocide, according to Wikipedia; there are more prisoners than that in prison in the United States today, and the situation has continued pretty much the same as now for the last 20 or so years.
Is the torture of tens or hundreds of millions, depending on how long the situation continues, equivalent to the genocide of 1.5 million? Maybe, maybe not. I find this sort of moral calculus distasteful, and I think that anyone who has the opportunity to reduce the amount of torture in the world, yet does not take that opportunity, is undoubtedly complicit. This journalist goes as far as dismissing a hunger strike 30,000 prisoners participated in as something "organized by gangs" as if it was just an organizational tactic. Those are 30,000 people who are being tortured to death (whether literally or by breaking their minds until they are no longer human). Belittling their struggle makes him undoubtedly complicit.
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.
That's fine, and I even agree with you, but hyperbole absent a rhetorical purpose like a contrast or illustration is a plague on modern media (loss of nuance).
It needs to be challenged when seen, not passively accepted.
I think we should implement an all-solitary-confinement prison system.
We can make the initial prison terms shorter by an order of magnitude (a few days to a few weeks, depending on the nature of the crime). This should be hard enough time to scare most first-time offenders straight.
If you get repeat offenders, start increasing the length of solitary confinement exponentially.
The benefit is that you need less guards, the guards are better protected, less prison gangs because there would be no intermingling of prisoners, and it would protect the prisoners as well. It would help first-time offenders because they will probably get scared straight faster, and they wouldn't be in jail as long. And if you get a really violent criminal, it would be akin to locking them away and throwing away the key.
Thanks, that is actually a very nice article with a refreshing take on the problem. I wonder if there's actually any good arguments against what he is proposing (giving convicts a choice to be lashed to reduce jail time).
What he proposes makes a lot of sense if you accept that the purpose of prison is punishment. However, the more successful prison systems of the world focus on rehabilitation, not punishment.
Also, for incorrigible criminals, lengthy prison sentences do serve the purpose of keeping them off the street, while lashing does not.
Well, it's not just punishment lashing is good for. It's also very good as a discouragement of course. He does propose that for serious (violence-involving) crimes there should always be prison for the reasons you mention.
The most succesful prison systems of the world do not have to deal with millions of prisoners in organized gangs fortunately for them.
That's true, but there is strong evidence that while people prone to commit crimes are in jail that are not, simultaneously, outside of prison committing more crimes.
You and me didn't read the same article, or the same HN thread.
The guys in the SHU are in one of the highest security prisons and, still, they managed to stir a huge prison strike and (If you believe the article) lead a criminal empire that extends its influence far from the prisons.
So, point me to that "strong" evidence, and make it peer reviewed, if possible.
This stinks of the standard urban legend trope structure, and with that in mind, I don't think it's true. There's absolutely not reason to keep an ass pocket supple and sized for contraband. And it's absolutely not true that you need a place holder for the contraband, when the contraband in not being hidden there.
Lastly, regularly putting a bar of soap in one's anus would be incredibly uncomfortable, and inmates would quickly stop that process, replacing it - if it was really needed in the first place - with something plastic and chemically inert.
http://drbenkim.com/dont-use-soap-private-parts.htm
How do I know? I live in the Bay Area. Healthy sexuality is discussed over wine by people of all sexual persuasions.