How Gangs Took Over Prisons
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This stinks of the standard urban legend trope structure, and with that in mind, I don't think it's true. There's absolutely not reason to keep an ass pocket supple and sized for contraband. And it's absolutely not true that you need a place holder for the contraband, when the contraband in not being hidden there.
Lastly, regularly putting a bar of soap in one's anus would be incredibly uncomfortable, and inmates would quickly stop that process, replacing it - if it was really needed in the first place - with something plastic and chemically inert.
http://drbenkim.com/dont-use-soap-private-parts.htm
How do I know? I live in the Bay Area. Healthy sexuality is discussed over wine by people of all sexual persuasions.
There is no reason to avoid leaving a hat on a bed, but superstitious people might have a reason, even if it doesn't make any sense to you.
There is a great book by a Polish-American sociologist Marek Kamiński[1] describing the convict code in Polish prisons, Games Prisoners Play[2]. It's based on his personal experience (he ended up in prison as an anticommunist dissident in the 80s) and tries to explain the prison culture from game theory perspective. Which is a fine premise but what makes it a great read is the long, intricate process of initiation he went through as a fresh prisoner.
It's also not nearly as brutal. There are no gangs, there's only this one inner culture. Actually, some of the initiation games were kind of clever.
In one they threw him under the bunk and two of his cell mates where kicking him (or poking with a broom, something like that) while the third was yelling "gear up" or "gear down". He broke a comb he had in his pocket and screamed like it was a bone at which point they stopped but what they were looking for was for him to say "put it in neutral".
[1] http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=4931
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Games-Prisoners-Play-Tragicomic-Worlds...
Congrats!
Key & Peele - Fronthand Backhand
What is being done to help prisoners rehabilitate and break out of this loop?
I'm not sure that there is any incentive to help people out of that loop with so much profit for everyone in the chain (police departments, lawyers, judges and most of all, the private company that runs the prison). The only net loss in this loop are the taxpayers who pay for all of it.
> I'm not sure
The way to resolve an information need is to engage in an objective search of facts, not speculate endlessly and make unsubstantiated claims of criminal behavior of others without some kind of evidence to base it on.
If you want people to spend less time in prison, you'll want the laws changed because that's where all this come from. Some of the laws in California are the result of ballots.
You sure about that? http://www.dailypaul.com/312217/pennsylvania-judge-sentenced...
If that's the best you can do then you have proved his point, not yours.
If I read the parent comment you seem to be saying that legal lobbying is the problem. However, the Ciavarella story concerns illegal corruption.
I'm not a fan of the American prison system, mainly because it promotes forced labour, or slavery. The 13tm amendment explicitly contains an exemption for prison labour, something which has historically been abused in America.
Quick general overview of prison labor: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/04/04/prison-labor...
More detailed account of prison labor in Nevada regarding casinos and construction. http://vltp.net/casinos-prison-labor-strange-bedfellows/
The slave market: http://www.unicor.gov/
You can even get slave labor to operate your call center: http://www.unicor.gov/services/contact_helpdesk/
"Arizona is one of four states (along with Virginia, Oklahoma and Louisiana) in which state governments are bound to contracts guaranteeing a 95%-100% occupancy in facilities leased by private prisons."
Privatized prisons do create a huge moral hazard, but currently the pro-prison groups with the biggest scope and influence are probably police/guard unions [2] and the "tough on crime" crowd.
[1] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-unit...
Bottom line is, it pays to send and keep people in prison regardless if the prisons themselves are privatized.
Three strike laws and Kafka-esque probation policies could definitely be a big part of the problem.
(N.B.: I'm a strong supporter of cannabis legalization, and of decriminalization of all but a few of the rest of the recreational drugs).
Cannabis to drug dealers is like ground beef to your butcher -- it's often the base of the business. Harder drugs attract more profit and police attention.
Note than many cannabis associated crimes are misdemeanors that don't call for jail time. In a "tough" state like New York, possession of very small quantities of cocaine or heroin often result in felony conviction. But at the same time, drug distributors move a lot of weed (hence the ground beef analogy).
I support legalization and oppose three strikes laws because they fuck over a small minority of people who don't deserve it. But it's a small minority.
> The 'hyperghetto' constitutes the fourth stage in the development of 'peculiar institutions', following (sequentially) slavery, Jim Crow, and the early ghettos. According to him, the ghetto and the prison are for all practical purposes indistinguishable, reinforcing each other to ensure the exclusion of African-Americans from general society, with governmental encouragement.
There are some attempts at what is called 'restorative justice' in certain situations in certain places, but the idea of prison as being rehabilitative is not on the mind of the public.
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Body_Soul.html?id=WFWY...
He joins a boxing gym on the south side of Chicago and as well as learning to box, "studies" his fellow gym-goers.
Not much that I'm aware of. Being "tough on crime" is still pretty popular depending on political affiliation, Joe "Concentration Camp" Arpaio is still a sheriff and GEO is up 15% YTD [1].
However, there's been a fair amount of recent coverage around stepping back from some of the policies that got us here [2] so there's reason to be hopeful.
1: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AGEO&ei=5BgaVMjANtOQ8...
2: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/12/6139819/bill-clinton-violent-cr...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/how-dair...
https://www.coloradoci.com/serviceproviders/puppy/index.html...
The connection with another living creature that they're responsible for seems to do these guys a world of good beyond anything else we can offer them.
https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=last+week+tonight+prison&tbm...
Language like this seems to me to dehumanize the inmates. Given that the author fails in getting into a conversation with the inmates, I find it irksome he feels called to pontificate on the situation, especially when other author have succeeded in having discussions with both gang members and alleged-but-not-actual gang members.
I suspect the inmates were wise in not talking to him. Since gang membership is a means that the California Prison System can use to discipline an inmate with little evidence, it's in the system's interest to describe everyone as a gang member (with Pelican Bay being the punishment zone for anyone so accused). Naturally, extreme insecurity makes banding logical as well - however the questionable part of the discussion is whether the prison is trying to control gang membership (in the same fashion that its questionable whether the war drugs is an honest effort to control drug use).
However, if you're going to write about anything, then you owe it to both the readers and the subjects to interview the people involved.
You're not going to get an interview by walking once down a cell block asking to talk about gangs. No shit. The people who create shows like "Jail" or "Lockup" manage to get hundreds of hours of interviews with gang members. However, they establish mutual respect and rapport.
I suppose I can't judge too harshly as it's certainly a difficult assignment, but it seems like the author put a very minimal amount of effort into interviewing, and instead pontificated from on high about gang members.
In that respect, I'm sad and ashamed that in my country (the Netherlands), just like in the US, things are pretty crappy. For example, we have a single "maximum security prison" where all the bad and criminally insane people go. When it's time for the prisoners to go out and get some air, the guards lock themselves up on the other side of the fence, and it's each inmate for himself. What could possibly go wrong?
We're a bunch of barbarians and I wish this was at all on the political agenda.
Can you imagine that? Remain free and barely be able to put food on the table for your family or go to prison, just to solve a medical problem?
Sure they can, except for immediate emergencies and for pregnancy labor[0]. Immediate emergencies are not preventative or palliative care, nor are they a substitute for a comprehensive health care system available to everyone.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10367&page=163
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411588_uninsured_dying.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1829431/
Tell me more about how Americans can't be denied healthcare, please.
http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/09/27/because-fox-aske...
The differences in the criminal systems are huge. I agree that a great way to judge a society is by how it treats it's inmates, and that this could certainly be improved in Holland... but comparing the prison systems in the US to NL is just ridiculous.
Sentences are incredibly short in NL compared to US. There is a focus on re-entry into society, not so in the US. Life-long imprisonment is extremely rare in NL, with most cases being people in TBS clinics under supervision and care of psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. There is no death penalty. The incarceration rate is 8x higher in the US.
Violent criminals in the US are sent here: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/11/group-therapy-cage-m...
Violent criminals in NL are sent here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/omroepbrabant/sets/72157624396...
http://www.europe1.fr/france/la-prison-des-baumettes-ce-cauc...
The sad thing is that many (most?) people don't have problems with this as in their opinion prisoners are there for punishment anyway, and public money is always better spent elsewhere.
If there's anything the US prison terms are "about", it's kicking a whole class of people while they're down and unable to do anything about it. Any politician can promise to increase sentences and appear by doing so to support "law and order" or the appropriate amount of crypto-racism or whatever it is people support these days. Felons are stripped of their ability to vote in some states, so there's literally no chance for retaliation and thus literally nothing to lose, and potential to gain. As a result, prison sentences are huge and there's no way to reduce them politically.
American prison sentences betray the basic lack of empathy of American politicians.
Guess what? There's still crime, gangs, an informal government, and an economy. And you either kill them all (as one person in the article said, a bullet to the back of the head does wonders for behavior) or you allow it to happen.
I know there's the usual "America is a police state!" response to this article, and sure enough, we have created a security state, but more fascinating to me was the complex self-governing structures these inmates have set up -- which is exactly why the economist was studying them.
There's a huge academic and political debate that this ties into. For instance, do governments create markets and money? From the data presented in the article, no. They might dictate the terms of markets, to a small degree, but they're just a bit player. Can more laws eliminate crime? No. At some point, even when you have total control over each and every person, crime still happens. I don't know where the curve is, but there is a power curve at work, and you can reach the point of diminishing returns. It made more sense for the corrections officers to allow the gang activity that to continue to try to fight it.
Fascinating stuff, and of course this article is nowhere near authoritative. Still, I'd love to hear more about research in this area.
"An inmate doing push-ups in the SHU’s exercise yard, a small concrete room with an overhead skylight where inmates are allowed to spend an hour and a half a day and receive their only exposure to sunlight"
What's the rationale behind curtailing exposure to sunlight?
A prisoner is already under stress, presumably, especially first timers. Won't denying them natural light only worsen their psychological makeup and pull them into negative spiral?
It's easy from the outside to say this rule or that seems cruel or unreasonable, but they are created from experience trying to manage an incredibly creative and incredibly hostile population.
Unconnected computers can be hacked to an outside line. Again, searching the contents of them would be time consuming.
Exercise equipment makes great weapons.
As for the rationale: since the law prohibits you from actively torturing/executing prisoners, you have to resort to more creative means of inducing suffering (and thus hopefully compliance). Removing and limiting all privileges, personal belongings, and mental stimulation (including a view other than drab gray concrete walls, or sunlight) is a guaranteed way to get people's mental state to deteriorate.
The worsening of the psychological makeup is thus by intent. This is meant for people who are deemed unredeemable, as well as a punishment to threaten prisoners in less severe prisons with: "We have an even worse place for you, should you cause too much trouble."
It's torture, of course, except it's legal.
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/17/local/la-me-0417-pri...
Expense can't be the reason. Maybe the reason they don't do that is because the guards want their phones to work.
Couldn't you easily locate devices using triangulation and hand-held receivers? Indeed you could probably just have a device at the door of each cell, and in other places, that told you when a communication on the right frequency was being made.
Been there, seen it.
The seller only accepts whole "books", not poker-chip (separated) stamps. The federal system lets you mail out whole books of stamps. The post office will buy them back for face value.
Its quite profitable supporting smokers' habits in prison.
Keep in mind that prison administrators trust the guards less than they trust the inmates. Phones and drugs don't arrive in the mail -- the COs are often complicit.
When you're minimizing travel anxiety and humiliation,
Remember Rapey-scan(tm). Ask for it by name!
So, if a white had a problem with a hispanic, he had to take it to the white shot-callers (gang bosses) who then went to the hispanic shot-callers. The hispanic bosses would then discipline their member (which could entail forcing him to repay a debt, or assaulting or even murdering him). As long as the violence didn't cross racial bounds, the hate crime doesn't apply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard_and_James_Byrd,...
http://www.alternet.org/story/27726/hate_crimes_in_prison
On one of my con-air flights, I sat by a guy who was being transferred to court for a new charge from the U.S. Supermax at Florence, Colorado. He was, of course, doing life. He joked with me that the only way he got to travel and see the sights and eat some good food was to kill a guard every now and then.
"Your honour, I didn't shank him because I hate hispanics, it's because he stole my dope!"
So, if there _is_ any violence across ethnic groups, it's due to racial motivation.
So, if somethings brews up, it's usually without gang sanction and racially motivated.
[1] http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2014/08/1014_W...
The entire thing is so deeply entrenched at so many levels I doubt it could be done cleanly if at all.
For some reason, the U.S. is just an incredibly violent society. Our justice system has evolved in light of that.
I don't know that I'd say 'evolved'. You said it yourself: the homicide rate has been 5-7x higher than in England for more than a century.
We're not really doing anything different than what we used to do - a punitive justice system, sometimes morally dubious punishment, and total 'othering' of convicted criminals. I don't know that we can really be shocked when nothing changes.
Err, so there was an erroneous decade where we tried to do better?
The mid 50s-60s were a discrepancy in american history in a multitude of ways, so I'm not sure that I'd consider prison reform any different in that regard.
I also wouldn't consider a decade as representative of the american justice system when we have plenty of evidence that it's not representative of either the past (where we used to just hang people after three strikes) or the present (where, as you noted, we have three strikes laws).
In fact, it seems as though once a century we'll have a decade where they half-heartedly try to implement rehabilitative reforms, keep at it for maybe the better half of a decade, and then act shocked that it hasn't decimated incarceration rates yet. Shockingly, it takes longer than a few years to reform a society.
As far as what reforms are possible, how about releasing everyone who has committed victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, etc.)? The "justice" system in this country has lost all credibility because such crimes are mainly used to target minorities and the poor. Treating inmates humanely would also help. Removing the profit incentives of prisons would go a long way towards this as well. Not sending people to jail because they can't pay $100 fine would also be a huge step. There are many things society can do to keep a lot of the "low-level" offenders from ever getting into prison and becoming hardened criminals. For most people, once they're in prison, it's too late.
Homicide is a significant component of all US crime. There's no way to look at the numbers and characterize them as "very small".
If you released everyone currently imprisoned for drug crimes, you'd set free about 250,000 people, which is great, but you'd be leaving 1.1 million people incarcerated. Drugs aren't the big problem. Something else is.
(Prostitution, a "public order" offense, is a rounding error --- women represent 5% of all public order offenses, meaning that the category captures not just prostitution but is a whole myriad of offenses mostly committed by men. Very few women are actually imprisoned for prostitution; Texas is newsworthy for having around 300 of them, against a 5-figure female prison population).
In 2010, roughly 1% of violent crimes were murders. [1] Combine this with nonviolent crimes, I'd say that's plausibly a "very small percent".
Not that I'm trying to say murder is not a problem. Killing people is bad, 'mkay.
1. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/c...
An incarceration for a victimless adult crime, or for a 'status offense' as a juvenile, is an excellent start to eventually turn a harmless person into a murderer. By reducing the number of crippling interventions into the lives of people who haven't committed significant harm, you likely reduce the population of murderers in prison 20 years from now.
The 3 month drug arrest is enough to keep you from getting a job, from getting college loans, and long enough to get you fairly deeply connected in a gang culture.
edit: can't quickly find stats, but the national arrest chart on http://prostitutionprocon.org/arrests.htm shows arrest numbers from 1994 to 2004. For 2004, the combined number for rape, robbery, and murder is around 120K, and aggravated assault adds another 380K. Drug violations accounted for 1.5M.
edit2: http://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezaucr/asp/ucr_display.asp
It's a good point, the turnover in prison population for lesser crimes compared to that of murder convicts, but it still doesn't support the argument upthread.
I do agree with your point thought that the US just seems to be more violent. Are serial killers and the like mainly a US phenomenon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
Solitary confinement is literally torture, and can drive people permanently insane. People can be placed into solitary confinement after being "validated" as gang members just for having political writing in their cells: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/solitary-confine...
This article discusses this only casually, which ultimately makes its author complicit in these crimes against humanity.
Wow. The standards and actions required for being designated an utter bastard have slipped a long way in my short time in this world..
This has been recognized in history by many, to leave you with two quotes from Einstein and King respectively:
"If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity."
"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."
I certainly don't want to get sentimental and I'm not one to favor hyperbole, being complicit in these crimes is too strong for my taste. But I agree with the sentiment of his post, which urges journalists to recognize their power and seize the opportunity to report on gross inhumane mistreatment of people, especially when these people are the subject of his writing. Again, I understand his wording was strong, but I wish we'd focus more on the intent of his post than on the semantics.
It needs to be challenged when seen, not passively accepted.
Need I say more?
But it's easier to score upvotes (and downvote away uncomfortable truths) by attacking semantics.
As to the strength of my wording, there were 1.5 million deaths in the Armenian Genocide, according to Wikipedia; there are more prisoners than that in prison in the United States today, and the situation has continued pretty much the same as now for the last 20 or so years.
Is the torture of tens or hundreds of millions, depending on how long the situation continues, equivalent to the genocide of 1.5 million? Maybe, maybe not. I find this sort of moral calculus distasteful, and I think that anyone who has the opportunity to reduce the amount of torture in the world, yet does not take that opportunity, is undoubtedly complicit. This journalist goes as far as dismissing a hunger strike 30,000 prisoners participated in as something "organized by gangs" as if it was just an organizational tactic. Those are 30,000 people who are being tortured to death (whether literally or by breaking their minds until they are no longer human). Belittling their struggle makes him undoubtedly complicit.
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing.
We can make the initial prison terms shorter by an order of magnitude (a few days to a few weeks, depending on the nature of the crime). This should be hard enough time to scare most first-time offenders straight.
If you get repeat offenders, start increasing the length of solitary confinement exponentially.
The benefit is that you need less guards, the guards are better protected, less prison gangs because there would be no intermingling of prisoners, and it would protect the prisoners as well. It would help first-time offenders because they will probably get scared straight faster, and they wouldn't be in jail as long. And if you get a really violent criminal, it would be akin to locking them away and throwing away the key.
The guys in the SHU are in one of the highest security prisons and, still, they managed to stir a huge prison strike and (If you believe the article) lead a criminal empire that extends its influence far from the prisons.
So, point me to that "strong" evidence, and make it peer reviewed, if possible.
Also, for incorrigible criminals, lengthy prison sentences do serve the purpose of keeping them off the street, while lashing does not.
The most succesful prison systems of the world do not have to deal with millions of prisoners in organized gangs fortunately for them.