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lotsofcows

Do you still have "3 minor crimes" == "prison time"?

Are prisoners still forced to provide cheap "American" goods that would otherwise come from China?

Do "Christian" groups still push for the highest technically possible sentence against the public interest?

An odd thing to say about a slate article, but I think they're overthinking it.

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> Do "Christian" groups still push for the highest technically possible sentence against the public interest?

I've never heard that. On the contrary, many churches have jail and prison outreach ministries (here's one I just found on google: http://www.theriversidechurchny.org/socialjustice/?prison). One of them, Prison Fellowship (and its founder Chuck Colson) is quite large and widely respected and supported in the Christian community (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Fellowship).

Justice Fellowship spun off of Prison Fellowship, which specifically fights to reform the American justice system (http://www.justicefellowship.org/issues).

It's easy to find self-described Christians who are extremely right-wing and favor harsh sentences for "lawbreakers" because they see themselves as the good people who will never break a law, and therefore never experience or otherwise have to think about proportionality.

Quite frankly, I think it's possible to find that in almost any group that is middle class or higher. Reducing it to a religious problem is pretty simplistic, especially since it's already pretty well understood to be a race problem and an economic/class problem.

Yeah but that's more tied with the "right wing" than the "Christian". Sure there's overlap between those groups, but you won't find more left-wing Christian groups pressing for harsher sentencing, and you will find right-wing non-christian (non-religious) groups pushing for harsher sentencing, so I think referring to them as " Christian is really a misidentification.

Sure. And from a Christian perspective, they ignore Christ's teachings when they do so:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2025:35...

Christ always had a special place for the people in the worst circumstances, even if they deserve their problems.

>Are prisoners still forced to provide cheap "American" goods that would otherwise come from China?

It's worse than that. One prison rents their inmates to a company which has them cold calls people and pretend to be a charity in order to sell them overpriced crap "American Helping Hands" http://www.americanhelpinghands.org/Products.aspx

>An odd thing to say about a slate article, but I think they're overthinking it.

I've seen this same trope going around recently that drug law reform won't help us control the prison population, usually as an excuse not to reform drug laws. If you get caught with drugs, you may well be breaking other laws that allow police or D.A.'s to charge you as a violent or higher level offender. Caught with drugs and a gun? Your gun possession may have been legal in absence of the drugs but now you may be on the hook for a/another felony. Did you "resist arrest"? They love this stuff because they think it makes them look more effective.

The problem with the word "Christians" is that it is a very vague term. For baptists, the term would include the likes MLK and Jimmy Carter but also the Westboro church (which is irrelevantly small, but gets a lot of publicity).

It also includes Catholicism and mainline protestants who are appalled at the US' prison system and have been very vocal working to change it.

I don't believe the prison work programs are forced at all, I think they have a choice to do it. Instead it's a chance for them to get work experience/vocation education that they might not have received.

I spent four hours in a county court room one morning. You can do it, too. I regularly heard the judge dole out terms like "5 years in state prison, with a month of credit for every 3 months of work." Convicts were literally being told to work in exchange for their freedom, like modern day indentured servitude.

Supporters of this may believe that giving inmates jobs is a better rehabilitation device than playing basketball, working out, watching TV, or sitting in a cell all day. Instead, being taught to do things that most members of society have to do to survive.

Work credits could be seen as getting a shorter sentence by showing that you can behave like members of society (i.e. displaying evidence of your rehabilitation). They normally give credits like this for general good behavior, too (again, evidence for behaving in society, at large).

I would be in full support, too, if inmates received more than $0.21-1.23 per hour: http://drc.ohio.gov/web/drc_policies/documents/25-OPI-11.pdf

The habitual offender sentencing laws generally only apply when at least 1 of the crimes is a violent felony.

Which isn't to say I think they are a good idea, but they don't really target minor crimes.

Not true in Nevada and a handful of other states. Any third felony can mean a sentence of up to 20 years, and any fourth felony can mean life without the possibility of parole [1]. What's worse is that many cases contain multiple counts. Under Nevada law, these are considered separate felony convictions if they occurred on different days. For example, someone that pleads guilty to three counts of car theft that occurred over the course of a few months, serves their time, and is released, is now eligible for a life-without-parole sentence if they are convicted of any felony in the future - despite having only been arrested and convicted once before.

As you might expect with such a draconian law, approximately 1 in 5 prisoners in Nevada are serving a life sentence.

[1] http://law.justia.com/codes/nevada/2010/title15/chapter207/n...

The original question asked about minor crimes, which felonies are not.

You'd be surprised what constitutes a felony. In some states a theft or destruction of an item valued at over $100 is a felony. In fact the crux of this article is that the prison population has risen so dramatically due to the decision by prosecutors to file dramatically more felony charges than they they had previously filed:

"What appears to happen during this time—the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that’s available—is that the probability that a district attorney files a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies. I can’t tell you why they’re doing that. No one’s really got an answer to that yet. But it does seem that the number of felony cases filed shoots up very strongly, even as the number of arrests goes down."

Failing to comply with a police order is a felony in many jurisdictions.

Which is a huge problem: there are felonies which should not be felonies. Felonies are supposed to be major crimes, crimes for which death is warranted (but which, for various reasons, modern society punishes with over a year in prison).

'Failing to comply with a police order' on its own should probably carry a small fine.

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