Prison Without Punishment
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
The original charges were possession charges from about 5 years ago, and I only had 6 months to go when I was violated for working out-of-county (I had to go where the contract was). It was a simple "technical" violation so I figured I would be ok.
I was not. I was sentenced to 15 months in prison for some reason that no one could explain. I didn't even "score" prison time, yet my crap public defender just sacrificed me to the state prosecutors.
Thank goodness I had 13 months credit time served, so I only had to do like 51 days "up the road". Florida D.O.C decided to make it hard on me for whatever reason, and sent me back to Gulf C.I. Annex in the panhandle, some 9 hours from my home.
I was first assigned to a "T-dorm" where approx 80% of my fellow inmates were serving life sentences. Yes, you heard correctly...they made me, with my little 51 days, live in that particularly dangerous environment.
Needless to say, I avoided talking about my release date.
There are absolutely no programs at Gulf C.I. I am 100% convinced that the entire system is designed to create recidivism, not prevent it. The C.O's smuggled in K2 and it seemed everyone was smoking that shit constantly.
It was easier to get drugs then it was to get a book to read.
I was released on the 7th with no phone, money, and prison issued clothes. I had to stay in shelters for 2 nights until I finally made it back to central Florida.
I am in the process of writing a blog post about the entire incredible experience, but the tl;dr version of it is that the system is a sledge hammer and every problem is a block of concrete to be smashed to dust and swept away.
You can read my previous posts about it. I'm just glad it's all finally over and I'm free to move and work as I need.
I can confirm that generally there is a different viewpoint. In Germany prison is somewhat of the last resort mostly to be avoided, and even then the aspect of rehabilitation (and deterrence) is most important.
In the US I find there's often a notion of revenge, as in "This person must suffer for what for (s)he did!"; and more severe sentences usually to be considered as "more justice".
Edit: Some spelling for clarity
US is puritans. Revenge is one of the cornerstones of the puritan moral.
The USA spans a huge continent which was settled by a huge number of very different groups all with different moral and philosophical foundations.
Yeah, but somehow it's only one group of people who seems to call the shots: Those with a disdain for the poor, the weak, the ill, the black and women.
It is also noticeable in social economical policies - the approach "you're poor because you're a lazy bum" can be seen as a form of punishment which is a natural view in the US (especially to the religious part of the society) while obviously less so for Germany. Note that such "punishment" is not explicitly inflicted by people, instead it viewed along the lines like "God loves hard working good people (and hates the opposite ones)".
The US also "encourages and fosters" the idea of personal responsibility. Everyone can become a billionaire. If you don't, that's your personal failure. If you commit a crime, that's your own fault and you should be punished for it. If you become unemployed and don't find another job, you're lazy and just don't put in enough effort. If you're poor, again, your fault and how dare you ask for hand-outs?
The US doesn't emphasize individualism, it's anti-social.
"The Paranoid Style In American Politics" is probably the the best explanation of the fundamental forces that shape most of our politics. Playing to paranoia about "the enemy" has always been a successful tactic, and the war on drugs is simply the latest in a long line of "enemies".
"The commies are hiding everywhere" changed into "Gangs are in your town/school/neighborhood trying to get you kids hook on drugs". In modern times, a reasonable number of people see this pattern happening again with the paranoia about anting that looks Arab or Muslim: "We have to keep fighting the terrorists - don't you know that ISIS is hiding everywhere?". Unfortunately, a lot more people are fooled by the rhetoric when a politician starts spreading fear and loathing suggesting that "Those welfare queens are getting rich! It a complete free ride! 99.6% even have refrigerators!".[1]
It's an obvious trope once you learn to see it.
[1] http://www.cc.com/video-clips/jfmt11/the-daily-show-with-jon...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/u-s-grapples-rise-roll...
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/03/us/mohammed-drawing-contest-sh...
You're twisting "Paranoid Style" to deny the existence of real things. "Paranoid Style" doesn't apply to real things. It applies to "Communists infiltrated our schools to brainwash our kids" and not "communists infiltrated government." It applies to "the crack epidemic was created by the CIA" and not "we have a serious problem with drugs and organized crime in America." It applies to "All Muslims are all practicing taqiya and are working together to invade and undermine the USA" and not "Muslim communities contain extremists that are lying in wait to attack Americans."
Recidivism is the biggest problem especially when something like 75% of inmates will be arrested again within 5 years.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occu...
> We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.
> Occupancy requirements, as it turns out, are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/lockup-quotas-low...
> In 2012, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest for-profit prison company in the country, sent a letter to 48 state governors offering to buy their public prisons. CCA offered to buy and operate state prisons in exchange for a 20-year contract, which would include a 90 percent occupancy rate guarantee for the entire term. Essentially, the state would have to guarantee that its prison would be 90 percent filled for the next 20 years (a lockup quota), or pay the company for unused prison beds if the number of inmates dipped below 90 percent capacity at any point during the contract term (a "low-crime tax" that essentially penalizes taxpayers when prison incarceration rates fall).
I can't prove that this is related to the private prison industry. But I'm not buying for one second the sudden sharp rise was caused by suddenly increased vengefulness, either. So what gives?
Prison in many EU countries is avoided for a lot of reasons, including statistics, which state that crime rate doesn't correlate with punishment as much as social/economy factors.
Similar to these Norway has a life-sentence limit of 20 years ( I think ).
The idea behind prison in continental legal systems is to serve 2 purposes :
1a. To educate the person that committed the crime that it's actually bad 1b. To frighten the same person before the crime is committed 1c. To prevent the same person to commit a crime before he's re-educated. 2. To educate other potential crime committers what will happen if they do the same.
1a,1b,1c are individual prevention and 2 is general prevention.
So ... If one of those can't be met by the punishment then punishment for that crime is not considered.
21, iirc, but also with a recently added clause that allows them to hold someone for longer (5 year increments) if deemed still a risk (i guess the stress test of that clause is behind bars right now).
It's more insidious than that. We just want people we're afraid of out of our daily reality, and we want it cheap. Once we throw someone in prison, our goal is accomplished. Very few people care what happens next, as long as they don't escape.
Incarceration is vengeful because the cheapest and most natural way to do it is to lock a bunch of violent people with nothing to lose in the same room and tell a small army to keep them under control. I'd argue we didn't design it to be brutal, we just don't care that it is.
As a German that seems incredibly fucked up.
The barrier is cultural. The public in the U.S., by and large, expects prisoners to be punished harshly. Retribution and deterrence rank way higher than rehabilitation in terms of the desired outcome of incarceration. As far as the average American is concerned, anything that happens inside of the prison walls, including but not limited to rape, murder, torture, is the price you pay for breaking the law.
If we want to have better prisons, then we'll need people to develop some degree of empathy for prisoners, and that's a tough battle in the U.S.
There are no prisoners without there first being criminals.
To be fair on Mandela the modern US stance is that he should have been assassinated, rather than imprisoned.
https://wikileaks.org/cia-hvt-counterinsurgency/press-releas...
Second, you seem to imply that "criminal" is a category, like "Australian" or "blind".
The key phrase from OP is "if you want to reduce crime." Maybe you don't want to reduce crime. Maybe revenge and punishment is more important to you. That is a valid viewpoint, but not one I share and i would rather not live in such a society.
Not necessarily true, but assuming it is true, the most likely future criminals are past criminals. There's no single group more likely to commit crime then those that are released from prison. It follows that one of our best returns on investment is reducing criminality in that group.
It's asking a lot of people to make them separate their personal feelings from policy changes, and as the article shows, in America there isn't really a buffer between informed decision-makers and the general public. Imagine we let citizens replace the FDA, instead of controlled studies we'd get people reporting how something makes them feel or how a relative of a relative said so-and-so is good for them.
Lastly the whole image of a criminal and the prison system is wrong: they're often portrayed in media as tattooed scumbags and there are constant jokes about "dropping the soap" and getting raped in the ass. It points towards a huge dehumanization; imagine we talked about others like that, saying things like they're getting what they deserved. Prison itself has replaced rehabilitation and it entails immoral treatment from guards and fellow inmates.
There was a time when this was more or less my sentiment. Then I went to a prison and met some inmates.
Turns out, most prisoners are decent enough men that fucked up, usually because of desperation or drug induced mania. Almost all of the inmates I spoke with at length feel a deep sense of shame and obligation to right their wrongs. Many inmates, when given the opportunity, would like to leave prison in a better state than they arrived, i.e. with marketable job skills and the ability to resist their old ways (drugs, alcohol, crime, etc).
With that being said, I personally believe that prison needs to have some sort of punishment aspect to it or people won't buy into it. If the general perception is that "justice" is not being served when crimes are committed, my guess is that extra-judicial reprisals will start to occur.
That said, I've long thought if you stop treating people like animals, they'll stop acting like it. I've never studied prisons, or psychology, or anything remotely related. But I genuinely believe this philosophy is investigating.
Foucault argued that the point of prison is to create more crime though.
Add profits generated by the prison industrial complex and it actually starts making real economic sense to keep them coming back.
Unless there is minimum sentencing involved, which became popular in US during War On Drugs. That took a lot of discretion that judges had and turned decisions into absolute black and white type things.
That is not going anyway.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/why...
Is it just a codeword for the sentiment that the U.S. has black people, and they're inherently evil, so cannot be rehabilitated or treated nicely like Finland? That seems to be the only explanation that fits. If that's what you think, why not say it?
If that isn't what you meant, maybe you can explain further. For instance, you could try to finish these sentences:
"The USA is a larger, richer, country, and therefore it cannot build a prison facility that holds 300 people and is rehabilitative rather than punitive because......"
or for homogeneity:
"The USA has a somewhat more diverse population than Finland, and therefore it cannot build a prison facility that holds 300 people and is rehabilitative rather than punitive because......"
I'm curious to see what the explanation is. It certainly isn't anything obvious to me.
[1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stvollzg/englisch... (and yes, the translation of the section title is ... imperfect).
Punishment is a goal of many victims and of people who believe punishment discourages crime. When the perpetrator is brought to justice, the victims-turned-accusers will demand punishment. It is the goal of the government to represent their interests. It partially does this by setting up the prison system as it is and imposing prison sentences.
If dealing out punishment, as wished by the victims, was not an indirect goal contributing to the way things are, prisons would be more comfortable. The circumstances in prisons, their austerity and severity, cannot be explained except by wanting to punish the people in there. They are not optimally suited for only rehabilitation and protection of the public.
This is of course entirely understandable.
Sometimes respect and dignity for the prisoners by the prison authorities can go a long way towards reforming the prisoner.
Read the description by the CEO of y-combinator's Pigeonly. They look for any possible infraction to send you back to prison. He had to illegally keep a cell phone in order to found his business.