91–100 of 139 posts
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Did you read the article?
I did indeed... I was questioning why you thought this was exclusive to state controlled prison and suggesting the issue was with those drawing a govt paycheque rather than the whole machine.
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The problem we are seeing this election cycle is the undemocratic consequence of first past the post. The American republic has degenerated so direly that, as is par for the course, the American people will once again be given only two choices for president (and likewise, at most two choices in every other ballot position they are eligible in this November, besides the most local of elections) of which very few non-h…
> the American people will once again be > given only two choices for president They might on "final election night", but the same people who will have (most likely) to choose between the lesser of two evils, had the opportunity to nominate different candidates up to right now...
One quote stuck with me: “But it’s a tough place to do time. People that say cons have it easy, they ain’t never been in Menard.” Not an American, but between saying that cons have it easy and the fact of mass incarceration in the first place, it seems that there's a certain mercilessness in American culture.
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If more people thought like you, perhaps more people would think twice before raping, murdering and robbing. I have trouble sympathizing with violent criminals.
OK, but what is making the US a more violent place than other comparable countries? http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/02/is_the_u_s...
Do cells not have cameras? I would think it'd be feasible to detect fights with basic motion detection.
I don't understand multiple occupancy cells in prison. Dangerous convicts are in prison usually for something unpleasant or violent that have done to another human being. Putting them side by side in a hen coop sounds like absolute stupidity. Unless of course the whole plan is to have them slowly kill each other off to remove the problem prone from society.
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then you get a interesting, new, prisoner dilemma puzzle. if you are the leader of a big gang, and still have power on the people outside, you can make enough gang-newcomers go to jail until you are free.
Thousands of them? And they'd all have to get longer sentences than you? Not going to work.
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This is also what happens when well-intentioned people are vastly more successful at fighting prison construction than fighting mass incarceration. Our prisons are routinely at 1.5x, 2x, 3x capacity. Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one, people living on cots in a gymnasium w…
There's a simple solution to that, set people free. We don't need to build more prisons, we already imprison more of our population than any other country in the world, we have too many prisons and too many people in them. We need to imprison less people. Release all inmates who committed victim-less crimes, if more room is needed, release all inmates who committed non violent crimes-there are better ways to deal wit…
The most interesting part, to me, is the "public-order" criminals. When my girlfriend worked corrections, she noted that at the state level, the vast majority of prisoners were in for violent crimes - rape, robbery, murder, arson, etc. At the county level, however, a large number of prisoners were in for what she termed as "criminalized insanity." They're too mentally ill to function, so they live on the streets until they get arrested for doing some small crime - loitering, public urination, trespassing, etc. They get locked up for a few days, get a court date, and get released. Then they go right back to the streets, miss their court date, get arrested again for a bench warrant next time they have a run-in with the law, get sentenced to a slightly longer stay, get released on probation, violate probation, get arrested again the next time they have a run-in with the law...
Wash, rinse, repeat. All of this is really short-term... and yet they're forming 13.8% of the incarcerated population. We're spending an enormous amount of resources on what amounts to impromptu, ad-hoc, half-assed mental healthcare, and none of it works. But eliminating it entirely and saying, "Go forth and sin no more" is going to do absolutely nothing unless there are corresponding programs that can actually help such people.
That kind of coordination - saying, "Okay, we're going to have to spend $x million extra dollars extra for a few years until the mental health benefits start to decrease the cost of jails and prisons" - is extremely difficult, if not impossible to accomplish.
Regarding drug pushers and prison - I constantly swing back and forth on this issue, mostly because they are morally degenerate for exploiting human weakness for profit. If you google Whiteclay, Nebraska and go to images[2], you'll find a whole bunch of pictures of wasted Indians lying in alleyways right outside the (white-owned) liquor stores. It's created an enormous amount of frustration in the community, and the response from the government is "Well, it's not illegal to sell alcohol to alcoholics."
I give pause to the folks who demand unrestricted drug use for everyone, (which is what decriminalization is - if something's restrictions have no teeth, namely incarceration, it's unrestricted. Same exact reason why financial laws are flouted so often - no teeth) because this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale.
The real question, and one that I can't even begin to unravel because there's so much goddamn bullshit on the Internet from agenda-pushers on both sides, is "Is this state of affairs, where a large portion of the population is incarcerated for vice, preferable to a state of affairs where vice is openly permitted?"
Personally, as someone who lives in a relatively affluent suburb, I'd say that legalizing everything would be a massive boon to me. My taxes will go down, and more importantly I'm insulated from the consequences by a lack of public transit and vigilant cops who are, er, unfriendly to the lowlives who occasionally wander away from the city. The folks in the city and poorer towns, who actually get to deal with the massive consequences of widespread addiction, might beg to differ.
[1] http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteclay+nebraska&client=ub...
People talk about institutional evil. This is an example of it. You can almost trace their thinking "Oh, so solitary is bad now. We'll fix it. Put two people in a 10x4 cell. See, not solitary anymore, and we doubled the capacity too. Bonuses for everyone". Ideally you'd think those who made those decision would be disciplined, pensions would be cut, etc. But nothing like that is gonna happen. Even if the family wins…
It's fair for taxpayers to pay for it because they're also the voters who voted for the system. Most people actually want more horrible prisons, they want solitary confinement, they want prisoners to kill each other, they want long sentences. That's why it happens. So isn't it quite reasonable to push the cost back onto those people when they get sued?
I couldn't bring myself to read the article past the death. Were the prison authorities charged with murder? Did any charges stick?
This happened: http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2013/03/inmate-who-gave-b... (tldr, inmate delivers her baby in a cell, with no medical oversight, at all)
No criminal charges. They did shut down the jail, but likely for other reasons.