61–70 of 427 posts
Gonna throw some weird idea about prison, what about: - Smaller but individual cells. (have to think about how to keep them very clean) - No outside yard for crowd. - No plural bathroom. Everything you do is for the benefit of society 90% and the rest for you. - Clean something outside, plant trees I don't know, so you get walk, sun and forest time. - You can read books, or some journals. - You can talk to old wise p…
NY has recently taken a significant step forward in ensuring adequate access to higher education through the legislature's and Cuomo's initiative to bring tuition free higher education to all NYS residents.
I've become part of several minority communities and met many people with circumstances not so fortunate as mine. It is unbelievable to hear how such a large percentage of these young men have spent time in prison. During highschool I found it odd that in a school with a greater than 60% African American community the AP and IBO classes I was enrolled in were consistently 90% white. I skipped a lot of class back then and was always amazed by the peers who, despite by all standards being considered "the bad kids", could tear a car apart and build it all back together again.
In the projects in Brownsville I learned that my girlfriends mother had secured some sort of video shooting arrangement, she said the entire neighborhood would turn out in their Sunday's finest when the cameras were around. Everyone wanted to see what was going on.
In the projects in Brownsville I noticed an abject lack of activity spaces and an abject lack of green. Brownsville is one of the poorest communities in NYC and it consists primarily of a large number of bleak housing project buildings arrayed across several blocks. I have never heard so many sirens as I did in Brownsville. In the short month I was there my girlfriends mother literally walked into a shoot out to calm some of the younger community members down.
I've always thought to myself that I could do anything anyone else could do (well not always, took a lot of introspection in highschool). I mean, look at the person doing it. They have two arms, I have two arms. They have two legs, I have two legs. They've got a head and brain and I have exactly the same.
It would clearly be obnoxious not to believe in any other person the same way. I believe we're very fortunate to ride the subways in NYC because when you see a child hankering for a balloon you realize that child is just like any other.
I applaud this effort. I've met so many people who are smart as whips and deserve the access to the opportunities and future I had and have.
And that's why I believe the solution starts from the ground up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (...) and be rehabilitated. -Never having experienced the US penal system first hand, I cannot be too bombastic - but from the outside, it sure looks as if rehabilitation has taken a back seat to punishment. If one were of a sufficiently cynical disposition, it would be tempting to assume that all involved parties (except the inmates) has more to gain from keeping people locked up than rehabilitating them.
Rehabilitation must exist but it must also take the back seat to punishment. In Europe there is this strange concept that developed that crime is a sort of disease and that prisons are kind of hospital. So there is some expectation that a criminal will be "cured" when leaving jail. And many judges got to the thinking that crime is caused by poverty and since jail will not cure poverty we should not send criminals to…
just outsource this to a low cost area. i'm sure a poor state would love to make some money housing california prisoners.
I get it - it's tempting to solve the Harvard Business School issue by sending the MBA students to prison before they wreck havoc on the economy. But I'm not sure their dads would pay the exceeding tuition. Also, there is the whole question of whether it would be fair to the other prisoners. Pretty soon the prison economy would be infested with cigarette derivatives and yard swaps.
Instead of wasting time and resources to select the "best" possible level of future criminal, we just throw the whole lot in jail.
Gonna throw some weird idea about prison, what about: - Smaller but individual cells. (have to think about how to keep them very clean) - No outside yard for crowd. - No plural bathroom. Everything you do is for the benefit of society 90% and the rest for you. - Clean something outside, plant trees I don't know, so you get walk, sun and forest time. - You can read books, or some journals. - You can talk to old wise p…
Gonna throw some weird idea about prison, what about: - Smaller but individual cells. (have to think about how to keep them very clean) - No outside yard for crowd. - No plural bathroom. Everything you do is for the benefit of society 90% and the rest for you. - Clean something outside, plant trees I don't know, so you get walk, sun and forest time. - You can read books, or some journals. - You can talk to old wise p…
Someone certainly stands to gain from it and it certainly isn't society at large, as you can easily grasp from the results on the "war on drugs"... [3]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Arrests_and_incar...
The USA has ~5% of the world's population but 22% of the world's prisoners. Financial profiting from prisoners: Prison Labor - paid $0.93-0.16/hr California Prisons didn't want to release prisoners because they would loose cheap labor..Courts said they had to: https://thinkprogress.org/california-tells-court-it-cant-rel... 30% of California forest firefighters are prisoners .. The state argued against parole credit f…
Legally speaking seems like in the US that prisoners are slaves.
SOURCE: https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/13thamendment.htm...
The USA has ~5% of the world's population but 22% of the world's prisoners. Financial profiting from prisoners: Prison Labor - paid $0.93-0.16/hr California Prisons didn't want to release prisoners because they would loose cheap labor..Courts said they had to: https://thinkprogress.org/california-tells-court-it-cant-rel... 30% of California forest firefighters are prisoners .. The state argued against parole credit f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does the US court system not refund travel cost? I'm sorry, I'm actually laughing out loud for that one. No, they do not refund any cost you incur for going to court. Luckily, I wasn't accused of any drug crimes or they may have seized my car and kept it under then-existing asset forfeiture (legal theft) laws
if you were wrongly convicted of a crime, would the costs of your defense be somehow be re-imbursed or compensated?
Looks like there are some attempts to provide compensation, but they vary
https://www.innocenceproject.org/compensating-wrongly-convic...