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America's Prison Industrial Complex: Man finally released after 43 years in solitary
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Imagine you've been out of prison for a few months, you're on an ankle bracelet for your first year and you've been a good boy. You're sleeping soundly at two in the morning when all of a sudden you hear someone bust down the door.
Now this individual has had problems with his parole officer in the past. His P.O. was basically a giant asshole who felt that it was his duty to catch these guys doing something bad no matter how minor or trivial. Now imagine that your ankle bracelet just decided to shit the bed when this overzealous asshole is watching over your every move.
P.O. busted down the door, scared the shit out of the kids and the dudes wife and wound up in a fist fight with said person of interest because the guy thought someone had broken into his house to rob him.
Needless to say he got shipped off to prison with time added on because of that fight and the asshole P.O. tacked on some bullshit attempted escape shit and the P.O. got time off for his injuries.
Parole is the worst thing in the world.
You know, if prison were a gambling man.
My main problem with this line of thought is it taps into the poisonous well of "they were convicted so fuck them". We've seen before innocent people do get convicted. Any system that forces an innocent person to confess to a crime they didn't commit is immoral and broken, there is simply no two ways about it.
Secondly as people have already pointed out, a no doubt intended side effect of this is it means you can never appeal because they'll just drag out your coerced confession from the parole board hearing.
Saying "we should just convict less innocent people then" is simply allowing perfect to be the enemy of good, mistakes in the justice system are always going to happen.
Probation has bullshit like that too. I mean, your story about a cop breaking into somebody's house in the middle of the night is more extreme than anything I have. But stuff like "we need you to come in for a urinalysis in two hours and we don't care that you are at work and that you have to travel by bus, just be here" happens all the time
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You have a constitutional right to a swift arraignment and timely trial, though for loose definitions of swift and timely.
Three years is extreme, but it happens. More commonly, people sit in jail for several weeks or a few months between arraignment and trial. A month isn't unheard of. If the court decides you need a psych eval, that might add another month, because there might only be one single psych professional serving the jail and he probably doesn't even work for them full time.
Think about what would happen to your life if you disappeared for two months. You'd likely lose your job. There is nobody paying rent on your apartment. Maybe nobody is paying your bills, or maybe you only have enough money in the bank to cover one round of bills. Maybe your kids are living with a relative, or maybe the court put them in foster care.
Even before you're convicted or plea, your life is basically destroyed.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave
It is a historical artifact from the partially-religious origins of the penal system. It is not a coincidence that the term penitentiary shares a root with penitence. Anglican clergy and Quakers argued in favor of incarceration over other contemporary punishments (which were often corporal) out of a belief that those who committed petty crimes could find penance through solitary reflection and prayer.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Hey, I thought we agreed to 'no prison rape jokes' in this thread.
... too meta?
But seriously, this is an issue that we need to address. There are many standards by which a society can be judged (treatment of the elderly, the poor, etc) and those who are incarcerated is certainly among them. The manner in which the US has turned its prison population into a profitable commodity, and the abuses that have cropped up (above and beyond the usual horror stories) is something that I hope is addressed in my lifetime, and suspect will be viewed with contempt in generations to come.
Yes, there are people who are dangerous enough to be separated from society in general while being rehabilitated, but prison as punishment (and all the inappropriate comedy found therein) seems far too often to do more harm than good.
Not to mention the need to take a hard look at how we treat former convicts, and yes, the manner in which the police and courts treat suspects. It's a massive issue, but those factors and more need to be addressed eventually.
The two could have a causal relationship. Maybe we are doing something very right.
Edit here are the actual statistics. http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
I'd love to see the incarceration rates plotted against violent crime rates as some food for thought. Maybe there is a bit more to the story than middle america is racist or greedy fat cats and their prison money machines.
hmm so presumably concomitant increase in canada prison population
noep
meanwhile in da states
dis is curious
let us look at which countries in da europes have da lowest crimez
now a kwick chart of homicide rates in european countries
i wonder if homicide rates hav been goin down everywhere
hmmmmzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
As someone who was in the thick of this in one of the poorest countries on the planet, I have to say:
Lifting the floor alone doesn't fix the problem after the gangs have already started. I'd compare it to getting sick: washing your hands & taking care of yourself is great, but prevention no longer works once you've got a parasite.
Gangsters won't let you improve the situation around them - they'll burn and pillage (figuratively in the first world, literally in the third world) until it's back to where it was before you began your work.
Sorting gangs out is a matter that requires policing, and probably armed policing. After you've sorted them out, preventing new ones from taking root is (mostly) a matter of economics & education.
You're not. First world countries shouldn't be like this.
Crime has almost always been on a downward slope, worldwide, as long as we've been keeping records. There is the occasional uptick elbow here or there, but the overall trend has always been a decline.
If you want a contemporary comparison between two different systems, look at the crime rate & recidivism rate in America, with it's 'tough on crime' theocratic approach that seeks to appease any onlooker that wants to see criminals paying penance, and then look at the same rates in Norway, with it's more empirical approach and 'outrageous' policies according to stupid onlookers used to western systems (criminals are treated as persons; they have restrictions on where they can go / what they can do based on their offenses and their danger to others, but otherwise they have decent lodgings, recreation, access to actual therapists rather than confessors, a sense of privacy & personal agency, etc) - including short terms.
Locking people up for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60~ years is retarded, unless you intend to keep them in jail indefinitely - and yet North American prisons routinely give sentences within those ranges.
Gerstein hearings are supposed to establish within 48 hours whether probable cause exists to continue holding the suspect, but in practice the judges usually rubber stamp continued detention.
I host a podcast about movies.
Probably wrong since, as Slurryeality points out, crime rates have also fallen in countries which haven't incarcerated such huge proportions of their population.
Fair point, but it's entirely possible that crime falls in Norway as a result of progressive social policy while crime hides in the US as a result of regressive social policy, simulating an international reduction.
I host a podcast about movies.
wait wat
Crime moves, to a point, in lock-step with standards of living: that's why there has always been a decade-by-decade decline (standards of living are always sloooowly going up).
Stable economy? Less crime. Governing body that is more than a few guys with machine guns driving around in a truck? Less crime. Widely available education? Less crime. Public water & electricity infrastructure? Less crime. A police force that at least tries to be an objective arm for a code of laws? Less crime. Public health services? Less crime.
Of course, when you realize the above, you should also (hopefully) realize why it's then stupid to create a little universe exclusive to criminals where none (or very few) of the above are any longer available and expect that said universe should churn out anything other than more fucking criminals.
I think that'd explain the differences between the two rates, and why they individual factors might not seem to have as large an effect as smaller scale studies would suggest, but I think the main reason is due to improved communication and mobility, so people's idea of "one of us" is generally larger - you routinely interact with more and varied people so it's increasingly likely that they will be seen as real people rather than objects to be taken advantage of. At the same time, the amount of petty crime you can get away with is decreasing due to improved police techniques and technologies.
Chance of capture is going to be a much higher factor when it comes to deciding whether to commit a crime than the actual punishment. Once you get to over a year or two then there's probably not a great deal of difference between them as far as deterrent's go.
"we" as an economy make a lot of fucking money of the prison sector. Like I hate, HATE getting all tinfoil hat, and I double-hate parroting NORML platforms in public because I have just had too many goddamn identical conversations in bars but this all about drugs, the economy, priorities, the rat race, your keys to your own mind and body, and the general contempt of the government for the fourth amendment. Our government chooses things to outlaw wrong, investigates crimes wrong, then it punishes them wrong. It's a giant wad of wrong, a Gordian knot of fuckmuppetry. The police culture in the united states of america treats the fourth amendment and first amendment as bugs, as hurdles, and does everything it can to side-step them and that's fucking wrong.
If the fourth amendment is a significant barrier to investigation and prosecution of a crime, that should be cause for ONGOING and CONSTANT evaluation of if the social damage of the crime is worth the abrogation of individual rights.
I host a podcast about movies.
The difference is that I'm not actually in charge of the criminal justice system (if I were, you'd probably be having a discussion as to whether or not the tanks full of crocodiles are really a necessary judicial mechanism).
I sort-of expect the people running the system to be better than me.
If you believe that retribution or revenge is reasonable, your elected representatives will believe similarly, as elected officials are just mirrors of the community. Because politicians who do not mirror their community get kicked out of office.
this is adorable. 8->
Prison isn't just about turning the lives around of those who have committed crimes. Its not just about segmenting the population to quarantine law breakers. Its punitive as well. The nature of the crime determines the sentence, not how long it would take for someone to become useful
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Anyway, I would also argue that if somebody is going to commit a crime once there would be little preventing them from being a repeat offender without rehabilitation.
What purpose, setting aside deturance, does punishment serve?
So if I decided to go on a killing spree I should get a free stay in a prison themed day spa and receive free vocational training?
What could go wrong?
The problem with a liberal world view is the assumption that human behavior is static. If we were to adopt more prisoner friendly policies we would have more crime.
Reading comprehension, and determining my actual position by actually reading what I have written in this thread, would help you.
Going on a killing spree makes you a likely-to-reoffend, in-need-of-rehabilitation, needs-to-be-kept-separate-from-society criminal.
Look at my post again. It's the revenge part of the prison system I don't support. We shouldn't be locking people up for purely punitive reasons.
This is usually said by people who know nothing about the prison experience.
Vocational training is extremely useful for prisoners and the prison system.
Try arguing against things people have actually said, please.
I've heard a few interesting theories on the increase and decrease in our homicide rate. Possible explanation is age demographics. If people in their 20s are more likely to kill our homicide rate is largely influenced by the age of the boomers. That would also influence crime rates everywhere as developed nations become geriatric as a whole.
But something big happened in the late 60s and mid 90s. One theory I've heard is that in the 60s we emptied out mental hospitals. Today we've picked up the slack with prisons, but the total rate of those institutionalized is roughly the same.
The quality of life argument seems silly to me because we had less crime in the 1950s than today.
That's not very representative. Before I get into any of the data, it should be noted that the UK and US report violent crime very differently. In the US its basically killing someone, raping someone or assaulting someone (but not battery). The UK includes battery, harassment and crimes against the person, so that comparison is difficult.
One, the drop in homicide rate in the US not recent. It goes back to the early 90s. A long term segmentation of those more likely to commit crimes could indeed create a reduction in crime rate. Stats from the last 4 years don't in any way disprove that. That chart doesn't describe a consistently dropping crime rate in Europe, and the full report describes an increase in crime from 2004. Its taken from Trends in crime and criminal justice, 2010 a EU publication. This describes only crime rates between 2007 and 2010 and that chart only describes homicides specifically. Also from the report is that prison population is up 2.5% per 100K over this time period(as well as an increase in crime rate from 2004).
Two, there's a perception that the US has a higher crime rate than Western Europe/the EU-27 or whatever. At one point that was true.
(again, put aside the UK result due to change in reporting patterns). But even if we use victimization reports that use a common standard instead of relying on reported to police stats:
Crime is roughly flat-ish in Europe compared to the US over the time period in question, while US crime rates are sharply down. It certainly seems it could be argued that our crazy high incarceration rate has decreased crime substantially. Alternately it could be coincidental, but given we have if anything a weaker social safety net (at least pre-ACA) than we did 30 years ago and less broad prosperity another explanation would be needed. A drop in firearm ownership prevalence doesn't really explain it since crime overall is down and firearms only really correlate with homicide, suicide and an escalation to armed robbery.
I mean I'd much rather fix the underlying issues - obsession with guns, a weak safety net and racial discrimination overt, obscured (as in sentencing) or historical (economic) - but you can't completely dismiss that a high incarceration rate might be both a symptom and a limiting factor of those underlying issues in regard to the crime rate.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
So then why do other industrialized nations with more "prisoner-friendly policies" not have much higher crime rates than the United States?
Also, are you seriously claiming that any change in prison policy that's more "prisoner friendly" will increase crime? Like, if we magically got rid of prison rape tomorrow there'd somehow be a spike in crime rates?
Not to mention that the "liberal" concept of prisons as potentially rehabilitative is in fact based on the exact opposite assumption, that human behavior is not static.