The Oldest Problem in American Prisons
aging.nautil.us
aging.nautil.us
Apparently, if you compare apples to apples, in 1953 the USSR period had more like 7.4 million "adults on probation, in jail or prison, and on parole". 2.61% of total population vs 0.76% in present US.
If you count the people that died in gulags... it is lot worse there.
Of course - "US - we are not yet as bad as North Korea, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany" is hardly a great optimistic slogan. The US prison system needs reform ASAP.
Getting old is a prospect a lot of their victims were spared if that's the right word. And life becoming more miserable as we age is an experience not confined to prisoners.
To my mind an old folks home can be an experience that must be not too dissimilar to prison. We like to have a benign view of old people but horrible young people don't become nice old people. I don't like the thought of inflicting yet further misery on old people by having these people joining them.
There should be old folks prisons for old prisoners.
I do realize it is a serious crime; the most serious crime when you deprive another human being of the ability to live. There is no way to ever pay that debt, but at the same time, 25 years is a very long time. 15 years is your birth to a drivers permit. It's enough time to go from a high school diploma to a PhD. It is a significant portion of one's life.
> People jailed for life have usually done some pretty nasty stuff.
In America there are many people serving insanely long terms for even lesser crimes. In places with three strikes laws or point systems, people can be serving over 20 years for low volume drug distribution.
Incarceration does not make a better or safer society. It just creates a new slave class. America has the highest percentage of prisoners of any other country on the planet. It's also the only high-income/western country with the death penalty. It indicates something is terrible wrong with our justice system.
Unless they're child molesters, many of the elderly in prison are in a condition where it is almost impossible for them to physically harm anyone again. What does society gain by not letting them spend the last few years of their lives dying humanely?
By all means though, let's have prisons that are essentially old folks homes with secure fences around the grounds and treat the inmates as decently as possible.
Woah. How many thanks to the for-profit prison industry?
The current system of work is pretty insane. It basically turns us into slaves that produce for peanuts what nets the people in charge a massive cut. They essentially get large payouts for being willing to take massive risks. Why is the FedEx guy who gambled the company to success considered an amazing story? That's as fucked up as Abraham being asked to murder Issac. He didn't give a damn about his employees. He was just willing to take insane risks to keep his shipping company going or let it all burn.
The best formula I've figured out so far is actually something I'm bending my life toward(!) and that is creating alternative environments to prisons.
As someone wisely pointed out, the first question is "Are prisons for punishment, or for healing?" If they are for punishment, our society will suffer that price when people mingle minds with prisoners who are under punishment, and then try and re-integrate. This is why recidivism (rate of falling back into the prison machine) is really high in the US comparatively.
Consider if the prison system were meant to heal and help people re-integrate! You know, I was reading about French philosophy and very early on, like in the 1600s the French realized that if you have a death penalty, the incentive for an inmate to reform is gone. Meaning: death penalty equates to "do not change because there is no point" but a prison sentence that is not terminal / whole-life actually does give incentive to reform.
Yes, the economic system is unjust, but even worse we have people who are starving and dying in the cold because they have no money, and if they have no money we assume that they are not worth-y in the US. Very tragic.
Anyway, I don't want to harp on too much about things I would change, I am actively in the process of creating a foundation for such things, and I'd rather do than say, and be than dream.
I like your idea about getting shares -- it would be great if that is how we operated. Then you'd actually experience some of the wealth of the company over time. You help build this grape vine? Here, have some grapes in 6 months when it starts fruiting. Sure, more people join and maybe you only get 10 grapes next year since you left, or just one grape ten seasons from now, but it all adds up.
Money is good for many things, but the fact that it is a requirement to have basic survival taken care of is just deplorable.
"Who will pay for basic survival then?"
Well, nobody! This place is so abundant with resource, we throw away enough food to feed the homeless. We already have empty houses where people could live, it's just our human concepts and discriminations that block us on the daily.
If people did not have to fight for basic survival, could you imagine the number of Tupacs coming out of the ghetto? Could you imagine the number of Neil deGrasse Tysons coming to fruition? Most of the amazing minds we have are squandered to total frivolity, but will we ever show that on television? Will we ever have our propaganda machine look at its own shortcomings so we can make the nation we know possible?
Death penalty people are probably going to supermaxes which are not cheap.
People tend to get the more expensive death penalty cases and compare then to cheaper prisons.
You guys make it sound like criminals are victims, like we should feel sorry for them or something. Sometimes what I read on HN scares me and makes me sick.
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/09/08/man-allegedly-ro...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/28/man-commits-crime-t...
http://www.wsfa.com/story/17695143/2012/04/24/homeless-man-i...
That said, crime isn't a silver-bullet-solution kind of problem. It's a systemic problem with a lot of causes, so any sort of broad stroke claim about what will and will not reduce crime is unlikely to be accurate.
It's cheaper to pay for housing, food and medicine than housing, food, medicine and guards. And the former has the possibility of those people finding employment meaning we don't have to pay for them at all and actually benefit from their labor.
Also, obviously, not all crime is the same. Plenty of crime could never be prevented by any kind of policy. But there also is a lot of minor crime that probably could.
Current prisons reinforce risk taking behaviors and can worsen behavioral disorders that can lead to crime in the outside, and violence in the inside.
>see if crime doesn't plummet
It doesn't take a PhD in economics to realize that attaching a profit motive to incarceration just might increase "crime" since a for-profit prison naturally wants to increase profits.
You also are shoehorning what I actually said into "hurr sure for-profit prisons are great" when I actually offered a critique and possible remedy to the problem at hand.
The prisons could easily be structured in such a way that penalties could be used when excons don't reintegrate well, and bonuses when they do. Bam, easy. Prisons aren't a business, even if money is involved. They are supposed to rehabilitate people, and I think there's plenty of work to be done in coming years to restructure how prisons operate, the rules that they need to play by, and strategies for correcting risk taking behavior in excons.
Yikes. You should really examine this topic in more detail:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-pris...
>We could try to break up a fight if we wanted, he says, but since we won't have pepper spray or a nightstick, he wouldn't recommend it. "We are not going to pay you that much," he says emphatically. "The next raise you get is not going to be much more than the one you got last time. The only thing that's important to us is that we go home at the end of the day. Period. So if them fools want to cut each other, well, happy cutting."
>I ask one of the regular white-shirted COs what an average day in seg looks like. "To be honest with you, normally we just sit here at this table all day long," he tells me. They are supposed to walk up and down the eight tiers every 30 minutes to check on the inmates, but he says they never do that.
https://www.aclu.org/banking-bondage-private-prisons-and-mas...
>Private facilities have also been linked to atrocious conditions. In a juvenile facility in Texas, for example, auditors reported, "[c]ells were filthy, smelled of feces and urine."
I'll be sure to examine things with more detail, lmao
I think there's plenty of room for improvement for the prison system, and I've enjoyed discussing it with you. You have broadened my perspective on the issue
The real issue isn't paying for it, it's administering it. We make it so difficult to to navigate the social safety net that it becomes a skill and the people who need help are frequently without that skill.
Thanks for your sacrifice. What if I am not willing to pay? Will I be sent in prison? That'd be pretty ironic.
There is no paradox in that.
If it were less, would you pay? Or is more of principal thing?
That's the irony.
That's the further irony.
You're already paying lots of money to keep too many people in prison. The poster back up the thread was simply suggesting a cheaper alternative that would save you money.
Just give it to everyone and increase taxes slightly (very slightly). We already have the whole "report income for taxes" part done, so just use that to increase taxes on those who would otherwise not be eligible, then give the benefit to everyone.
The net expense will be the same, except with much less administrative effort.
While this is probably a false equivalency and anecdotal, I'd like to point out that there are 2.3 million people in prison and it costs the US about $80bn/year. We have roughly 46 million people on food stamps and it costs us roughly $80 billion a year.
With the money wasted on prisons, mostly going into the pockets of private industry, I'd wager a large bet there's likely the amount needed to feed, cloth, and house them all within our currently wasted expenditures.
So the answer should be: all of us; because, we'd VERY likely be saving money and have a more functional society.
Unemployment and welfare can actually return up to 1.7x the amount disbursed in tax revenues. Obviously this factor reduces as the amount disbursed goes up as a proportion of overall GDP, but pales in comparison to e.g. tax cuts for corporations/wealthy which net much closer to zero - corporations simply move that money overseas or tax shelter it using things like "double irish with a dutch sandwich" schemes.
I hate it when people make this "who feels like paying for it," bullshit. Your money isn't what you think it is. Our current monetary systems (from coinage to fiat) all depend on creating debt and guilt (same word in German and Old English)and impose a moral obligation that keeps us serving a ruling class.
You're already paying for that person to be in prison, for the CIA to distribute weapons to people to start wars and for a massive war industry that then fights those people we give weapons to. Don't pretend you can vote with your money or that you can vote with your votes. The world is much more complicated than that.
It seems to me we have the tech to provide good solutions, it just needs to be applied.