Raise the Crime Rate, an article on the abysmal state of American prisons

This is yet another reason why the "justice" system is an illusion.

Lawyers are taught that "morality" and law are different; that, the penal system is designed to deter and mete out legitimate retribution. The word "reform" is rarely used. But distancing morality and law only generates the insulating foam of total hypocrisy and the variety of psychological disassociation necessary for the perpetration of psychopathic brutality.

Justice is no purpose of the justice system. You should never forget that the prime directive of the Law is to preserve the stability of the matrix like system itself. Injustice is always permitted to the degree that it does not threaten the legitimacy of the institutions and the culture that hold the rest of us under their thrall.

What's necessary is to bring law entirely within the scope of morality and ethics as ordinary (meaning the vast majority of people) conceive of morality and ethics.

The prisons are a breeding ground to induce the traumatic and inhuman experiences that, over a course of generations, will produce precisely that: A sub-class of traumatized and inhuman quasi-people to whom we can regularly assign duties (moving trash from point A to B) without affording proportionate rights. And who are these people? What do they look like?

HG Wells often wrote about a future where two species of Man would co-exist in perfect harmony, a class that worked and another that simply played, a class that controlled and another that obeyed, a class that explored the universe and another that was to be stranded to the dirt and filth of the rankest sectors of our planet.

The future happens in stages. It will take a considerable period of time. But...it is also happening every day. Just open your eyes.

Damn totally missed it, and I was here that day, probably for a few hours....

(not worthy of the front page I guess it was deemed)

This is horrific . There IS NO EXCUSE for it .

I am African American, and I live in NZ. The other day I was driving my car in Auckland and a cop pulled out behind me. I turned to my friend in the passenger seat and said, "This is one reason why I love New Zealand.....I don't fear for my life when I see a police car". I am still shook up when I see a police car at first, but not like in the USA. This is unspeakable, there are no words for it....and the debate hasn't even begun on this subject. I don't think I can ever feel like I can move back to the US until a lot of things change....a lot. 200k victims and there is nothing but silence? Who are these psychos that we vote for? Absolute psychos..... If there is a revolution.....I say switch everything....remove forcibly all the police, DA, judges, elected officials, and any one working in govt. appointed position, and start new. All official, judges, police and DA who are reviewed and found to intentionally but someone in jail should get the same time times 2. We do that....everyone who follows know's what will happen and we can start new from there. Things have gotten so bad I fear politics is not the way out..... arrest detain and let them be judged by the people....the 99%. Not some corrupt judge cut from the cloth of Scalia or Thomas, and they should be in PRISON too!

I have the extreme Right Wing approach to the war on drugs; legalize all of them and make it a capital crime to sell them. If a coke or junk addict wants their shit, they can get it just about as easy as if it were legal, but the government gets no tax from their sale, so let the government sell them, use won't go up. Most people don't smoke cigarettes but they are legal. Marijuana, although very harmfull to the user, is merely funding the drug cartels in Mexico and causing millions of dollars to cross the border. If people want to grow their own for their own consumption or to give it away, so be it. Take the consumers out of the "war" on drugs and that whole problem tends to mitigate itself.

As far as crimes with guns though, if one commits a felony and has a gun on their body, capital punishment. If one rapes a woman and used any threat at all of personal harm, capital crime. Obviously, there must be clear and direct evidence for the capital punishment to be administered.

Removing the prohibition against drugs, executing felons who had guns when they did the crime, and executing rapists and child molesters would really go a long way to reduce the prison population.

Before any of the typical knee jerk reactions take place, the question must be answered; will you let the house or apartment right next to you be filled with released violent felons, rapists and child molesters? If so, then go ahead and counter this posting,and/or vote it down, but don't be a sackless troll and merely vote it down. There is no point in mindless head-in-the-clouds attitudes on the major problems that all of us law abiding citizens have to face every single time we go out in public, or close up the house to go to bed.

think about the percentage of citizens that are branded criminals from victimless crime and won't be allowed to vote in any election...think 3.5 million votes wouldn't have an impact?

Wait until March 3 , when we have in place the NDAA.

The corporations are making millions of dollars with these private prisons. Right now the Pentagon is planning to give Black Water the assignment of the war on drugs. Imagine a private corporation running the war on drugs. This is very scary.Add a comment (You can paste links too)

I think that the raised crime rate is a symptom of a larger societal problem. Unfortunately it is often "easier" and more profitable to treat the symptom and not the cause.

There is a great deal of money made from our ill-legal system.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/06/08/prison-math

"In 2009, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 1,524,513 prisoners in state and federal prisons. When local jails are included, the total climbs to 2,284,913. These numbers are not just staggering; they are far above those of any other liberal democracy in both absolute and per capita terms. The International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College London calculates that the United States has an incarceration rate of 743 per 100,000 people, compared to 325 in Israel, 217 in Poland, 154 in England and Wales, 96 in France, 71 in Denmark, and 32 in India.

America’s enormously high incarceration rate is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to a 2010 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), U.S. incarceration rates between 1880 and 1970 ranged from about 100 to 200 prisoners per 100,000 people. After 1980, however, the inmate population began to grow much more rapidly than the overall population, climbing from about 220 per 100,000 in 1980 to 458 in 1990, 683 in 2000, and 753 in 2008.

Why are American incarceration rates so high by international standards, and why have they increased so much during the last three decades? The simplest explanation would be that the rise in the incarceration rate reflects a commensurate rise in crime. But according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the total number of violent crimes was only about 3 percent higher in 2008 than it was in 1980, while the violent crime rate was much lower: 19 per 1,000 people in 2008 vs. 49.4 in 1980. Meanwhile, the BJS data shows that the total number of property crimes dropped to 134.7 per 1,000 people in 2008 from 496.1 in 1980. The growth in the prison population mainly reflects changes in the correctional policies that determine who goes to prison and for how long.

Mandatory minimum sentencing laws enacted in the 1980s played an important role. According to the CEPR study, nonviolent offenders make up more than 60 percent of the prison and jail population. Nonviolent drug offenders now account for about one-fourth of all inmates, up from less than 10 percent in 1980. Much of this increase can be traced back to the “three strikes” bills adopted by many states in the 1990s. The laws require state courts to hand down mandatory and extended periods of incarceration to people who have been convicted of felonies on three or more separate occasions. The felonies can include relatively minor crimes such as shoplifting.

What have longer prison sentences accomplished? Research by the Pew Center on the States suggests that expanded incarceration accounts for about 25 percent of the drop in violent crime that began in the mid-1990s—leaving the other 75 percent to be explained by things that have nothing to do with keeping people locked up.

As for the costs, state correctional spending has quadrupled in nominal terms in the last two decades and now totals $52 billion a year, consuming one out of 14 general fund dollars. Spending on corrections is the second fastest growth area of state budgets, following Medicaid. According to a 2009 report from the Pew Center on the States, keeping an inmate locked up costs an average of $78.95 per day, more than 20 times the cost of a day on probation.

More important is the long-term impact that the tough-on-crime policies of the last two decades have had on prisoners and society. Housing nonviolent, victimless offenders with violent criminals for years on end can’t possibly help them reintegrate into society, which helps explain why four out of 10 released prisoners end up back in jail within three years of their release.

As the Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and the University of Washington sociologist Becky Pettit showed in a 2010 study published by the Pew Center on the States, incarceration has a lasting impact on men’s earnings. Taking age, education, school enrollment, and geography into account, they found that past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks, and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent. Only 2 percent of previously incarcerated men who started in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution made it to the top fifth 20 years later, compared to 15 percent of never-incarcerated men who started at the bottom.

It isn’t just offenders whose lives are damaged. Western and Pettit note that 54 percent of inmates are parents with minor children, including more than 120,000 mothers and 1.1 million fathers. One in every 28 children has a parent incarcerated, up from 1 in 125 just 25 years ago. Two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for nonviolent offenses."
more at the link.

This goes to the core of who we are as a people. We certainly cannot tout that we have the moral high ground regarding how we treat prisoners in this country. Some would say however that once in prison you lose all of your rights. However, as a nation predicated on a constitution but also on the laws of nature we should strive to at the very least uphold the moral standards we would expect for ourselves. It is frightening that in this country now you can be sentenced to 25 years in a federal penetentiary for just a small amount of marijuana (so this government can claim some false win against a "drug war" they perpetuate for profit) when hardened criminals with connections can buy their way out. The abuse of prisoners as well especially of youth in youth centers is appalling. But prisons are big business these days raking in millions for the companies and CEOs they have been privatized to. So it is no longer about innocent until proven guilty or even about upholding basic morals or even expending funds or effort to rehabilitate. We are all little more than cattle to be moved in and out with a price on our heads and it is a national disgrace. But you won't see this discussed by any candidates on any side in any "campaign" either. That's because it reveals the true ugly underbelly of this system that for all intents and purposes has never really ended slavery. It just found more subtle ways to keep it going. Good article. Thank you for posting it.

Oh stop it, prison is a lot of fun.

We need to stop the war on drugs. . . it's been lost, and most who are imprisoned have committed no violent crimes to persons or property and imprisonment only serves to perpetuate misery and the further empowerment of an ever growing collective praetorian guard

thank you for this powerful post...a much needed call to reform one of the most shameful things going on in this nation.