Prison book ban ruled unlawful by High Court
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Lock people away in a cell for a decade, deny them a lot of basic human rights (like books) then when they're good and messed up in the head from it, let them lose on the public. If they re-offend, well, that's clearly a sign that they are just a bad person. Best lock them up again.
I understand the desire to rehabilitate people, but when those in prison have more services and resources handed to them than the general population gets then there is a serious problem. If we started earlier in the education process and young students knew that they would be supported all the way through college / trade school / whatever, they would be far less likely to give up early thinking that they could never 'afford' to go to school so why bother.
Now there's an idea. Do both, give education away to everyone, including inmates.
During my parents younger days, here in Australia, a university education came at no cost to the individual. Sounds like a reasonable sort of scenario I reckon.
Turned out to be a pretty good investment for HMG going by the amount of tax I have paid... :-)
http://www.reentryeducationnetwork.org/advocacy-platform.htm...
> New York State college in prison programs have also proven effective, with only 7.7% of incarcerated people who attended college classes re-incarcerated compared to the 29.9% recidivism rate of those who did not attend any college classes.
A 75% reduction in recidivism will pay for community college many, many times over. It's a tremendous net-win for the taxpayer, but our "hard on crime" attitudes prevent us from saving ourselves billions of dollars in damages, policing, legal costs, housing/feeding, etc.
(I had wondered how self selection factored into the numbers...edit to add: I did not mean to suggest that the 40% I quote is directly comparable to the numbers in your post, I meant to share the factoid that the effect was strong when a quality control for self selection was present)
Ignoring that, how about the effect that if you get caught for your crime you get a free college education? Wouldn't that remove some of the downside of a life of crime.
That's a problem if prison it to be primarily punitive. I'd prefer it were rehabilitative, and thus focused on "what's the best way to turn this person into a productive, positive member of society once released?" I'd also prefer a basic, community college-level education be available to all, not just the incarcerated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/us/in-riverside-california...
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/01/14/new-mexico-ma...
http://www.elpasotimes.com/latestnews/ci_26100843/aclu-woman...
The bible actually doesn't support the idea of prisons at all. If someone murders, then they need to be put to death. Otherwise, theft, drugs, and all other crimes are best handled outside of a prison system that does very little to help a person recover from their problems.
Christ advocated restoring a person. Secular governments advocate locking them up so they don't have to deal with it.
Are you a Christian fundamentalist? Well known examples include the Westbury Baptist Church and the Southern Baptist Convention. If you're not like those people then what you believe is irrelevant to what I'm talking about and I don't understand why you're acting offended.
If you're interested, you can read a bit of exposition on the role of the Christian Right in pushing for increasingly harsh punishment in the US: http://www.politicalresearch.org/2004/11/06/calvinism-capita... . Along related lines, I find myself disgusted by the zeal with which Christian fundamentalists engage in the corporal punishment of children, again with solid support from the Bible: http://zakherys.tripod.com/greven.htm
You're correct that the Bible doesn't advocate imprisonment: It goes further by supporting slavery, which combines the loss of personal liberty with the obligation of enforced labor. And while the penal systems of modern, enlightened countries do tend to aim at resocialization rather than vengeance, prisons in the American Bible Belt have re-introduced conditions strongly reminiscent of Biblical slavery. Coincidence? I think not.
However, I do consider myself a Christian - and looking at the 5 truths that make someone a "Fundamental Christian" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalism#Christian) I certainly hold to all five.
However, it appears that the new meaning of "Fundamental Christian" you and some others have assigned actually has nothing to do with this standard definition - and is a often a warped, hateful, version of someone's own imagination.
The "Christian Right" is about as varied as the muslim world is. You have to understand that the only people you hear about are those that are doing it wrong. For example, no one cares about everyone walking normally - it's those that start fights that get the attention.
Anyway, "It goes further by supporting slavery" isn't true either. That is just a sensationalist claim based on the ancient history recorded in the old testament. Jesus and the apostles and prophets actually went the other way and said that Christians should serve others instead of themselves.
Slavery was abolished in Britain and America through work of Christians like William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King, Jr.
But I suppose you could say the same about prison, for some people.
Someone committing a nonviolent crime to get free room and board and college, of explained, sounds rather clever. Most people end up in significant debt for a similar outcome. (And low security prison in the US isn't so bad, about the same level as sharing a 2 star hotel room with a coworker, from what I've seen.)
> The majority of employers indicate that they would “probably” or “definitely” not be willing to hire an applicant with a criminal record.
Robbing a bank for $1 is still a crime, though not as severe one as intended: http://volokh.com/2011/06/21/man-commits-1-robbery-to-get-he...
A similar case: http://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/index.ssf/2013/08/...
Career criminals do so as well, of course: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/on-purpose...
According to this local news story, 80% of inmates at one Colorado county jail are either mentally ill or have serious medical issues that are diagnosed on arrival: http://kdvr.com/2014/07/07/expensive-trend-people-committing...
I could go on and on about this :-(
The creation of the mental health system in the UK in the first place was a direct result of the observation that a large percentage of people incarcerated were mentally ill.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/timeline-mental-...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/12/w...
The obvious solution is to make sure the same benefits are available to the general public without the requirement of criminality.
That already exists in our current prison system. Here in Toronto, 'criminals' are found every year standing beside broken windows of downtown businesses late at night because they couldn't stand the frigid cold and the homeless shelters were full. All they usually want is a warm place to sleep and some food that didn't come out of a dumpster.
While the prospect of running a lucrative commercial B&E enterprise with the "worst case scenario" including a college education might be tempting...
You will still be a known criminal to your family and friends, which will take years to change their opinion of you if at all possible. Nobody will feel comfortable leaving you alone in their home. Nobody will allow their children to approach you. Your options for employment will drop drastically once you are released from prison.
You will still lack freedom. Feel like taking a jog in the park? Not for another 10 years, you can't.
Etc.
If the above seem like a better scenario than your current situation, perhaps you need some guidance in a community college type setting.
You imply that rehabilitation is the only reason for prison and that there are proven methods of rehabilitation.
Rehabilitating people is hard and we don't know of any great ways to do that. Removing criminals from society is easy and straightforward.
Other countries have lower recidivism rates. Why not copy their leads? (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/why...)
If the point of our prison system is to lower crime rates, it isn't doing a very good job.
We could make prisons much cheaper than they currently are just by choosing either rehabilitation or warehousing. Warehousing would be even cheaper - or maybe split the prisoners up by worth (essentially asking is this person a good person who did something bad, or a bad person) and then have two different criminal systems.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about prison. Prisons and incarceration do not remove people from society, those people are still a part of society even if their interaction and freedoms are restricted. Not too mention who and what defines criminality is a horribly messed up system.
But in any case, I think there's absolutely no to torpedo rehabilitation in the way that we often do in prisons.
Basically if you want to challenge a law, a judicial review is the only way you can go about it (going through the political process, writing to an MP and the like leaves you open to the whim of the press and "public opinion")
http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/governance/news/content/18682/...
If this law goes through only those with significant amount of cash can ever challenge illegal laws. Combine that with the changes to legal aid, mean that only the rich will be able to attain justice.
This means that if the government changes policy, and that policy change is incompatible with the law, it must be changed. This is the mecanism that would stop the government from passing a statutory instrument(a law that requires no vote in parliament) to allow the Treasury to take assets without due process (something that was protected by the magna carta, but was recently repealed)
How ever for a law to be challenged, a judicial review must be triggered.
"Judicial review is a type of court proceeding in which a judge reviews the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body. In other words, judicial reviews are a challenge to the way in which a decision has been made, rather than the rights and wrongs of the conclusion reached. It is not really concerned with the conclusions of that process and whether those were 'right', as long as the right procedures have been followed. The court will not substitute what it thinks is the 'correct' decision."
[http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/19/judicia...]
But isn't that an essential feature of the constitutional structure of the UK: given that the UK doesn't have a separation of powers system in which various entities within government have limited powers, any decision by government that is within the sovereign power of the government is substantively legally, the only question of its legality is whether or not it is a valid decision of the government, made by the means legally prescribed by the government for the kind of decision it is -- but this can look at like review of the legality of the substance of the decision, because the legally prescribed mechanism for a decision may vary based on the substance of the decision.
(In a sense, this is true of any sovereign government, even, e.g., the US separation of powers system, wherein the "way the decision has been made", in order to be legal, for certain decisions involves a Constitutional Amendment.)
Could it be because what the particular government is doing is ethically wrong. It's easy to look at the past and say 'why didn't people change these things, it's obvious they were wrong.', but then we look at judicial review and say, 'well, they are just giving the government trouble'. Don't you think that's exactly what the people that defended slavery would have said? Or the people that didn't want women to have voting rights? Or any number of anything we take as rights under the law?
It's like calling a radio a high tech electronic device.
But i get where your coming from journalists like to blow everything out of proportion.
Hence it's not "cheap e-book reader, top of the range tablet", but "expensive e-book device, bottom of the range reader", if you follow me.
This company aims to provide modified iPads to prisons and jails. SF county has signed onto the scheme: http://apdscorporate.com/
This company already has a heavily locked-down tablet and provides a way for relatives to buy music for or send email or donate money to prisoners: http://blog.jpay.com/mini-tablet-for-prisons-now-available-i...
Victims' rights groups are not very happy about this: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/17/tablets...
EDIT: I mentioned a scheme in Ohio, but associated it with the wrong link. That state uses Jpay, not the APDS system.
You can screen for some, but I would expect all parcels to have some limited form of search. I would tend to think a better option would be to fix the availability of library services to prisoners, perhaps even only allowing access to the delivered books in a library setting; books are kept by the system in the library for the prisoners.
I understand that idea that reading is fundamental, but controlling what is in their environment is a big part of maintaining a safe and secure environment.
"a better option would be to fix the availability of library services to prisoners" - alas, this is not even a bad joke. In e.g. high security prisons, you might get to visit the library once every 4 weeks. If (or these days, more often than not when) there are staff shortages, supervision of prisoners' library visits is among the first things cut - in which case, you might get to visit again in 4 weeks time, maybe.
Source: 2nd hand info from talking to someone who works in a prison.
This does not apply to remand prisoners.
Convicted prisoners get 1 parcel of clothing after conviction (at the governer's discretion).
Also exceptional circumstances "could include for example ... replace clothing due to restricted access to laundry facilities."
Source: Prison Service Instructions 30-2013 Section 10.4, 10.5 and also annex F.
I wonder how many prisoners are being sent the poet laureates work anyway?
A far better solution is to fix prison libraries, perhaps if all the heat being generated by literary types was directed at that, rather than "OMG they banned books" types protests, we might be able to get more books.
For instance there are literary trusts that donate sacks of books to all children at various points in their life in parts of the UK. Why not set up a prison literary trust that donates books to all prisoners? Get it signed off by the state as an "approved source" and a real change occurs. But then protesters wouldn't get to protest.