The Trouble with Prisons

I actually have no problem with the reasons mixing.

ISOLATION - Would you let a paedophile back out? It seems 90% of them reoffend. So they need to be isolated.

REABILITATION - Some people in jail are otherwise good people who make one mistake that deserves jail...rehabilitation is a distinct probability for them. Further, if you don't provide the chance for reabilitation, all many prisoners have left when they leave, is to offend again.

DETERENCE - Jail is a deterence for some. Others see it as a rite of passage, and others don't think about it when they commit the crime that sends them there.

That said, I think corporal punishment (that is corporal, not capital, which some people get mixed up when they hear 'corporal') is a better way to go for many offences (not all). Now, I don't mean chopping someones hand off for thieving, because people lose hands by accident, and they would be forever tarnished, but there are other ways - like tatooing 'thief' on the back of someones hand, or floggings that don't leave scars, or some other method. And for pedophiles, some method that causes impotence.

We at least need seperate facilities for these different goals. A place designed for deterence is not the best environment for rehabilitation.

The basic problem is that prison as a punishment for many of the crimes which land people there is absolutely counterproductive and most of that sort of crime would evaporate were we to end the "war on drugs(TM)". Ending the war on drugs would at least reduce prison populations to manageable levels.

another cause gunga and i agree on.

I have about four or five major or quasi-major issues with Republicans, and this is one of them. Pretty much everything demokkkrats ever try to do is some sort of an issue...

What are the other ones, Gunga?

The three biggest would be this question of prisons and the "war on drugs(TM)", "right2life(TM)", which I wish I'd never heard of, and this question of wanting to create some sort of a super country comprising Mexico, the US, and Canada, without any real thought as to who owns what, whose constitution or legal system will be adopted, or anything like that.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States?-with five percent of the world's population?-houses 25 percent of the world's inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America's urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term "super-predator" in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that "Two Million Prisoners Are Enough." But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.
http://bostonreview.net/BR32.4/article_loury.php

The whole problem is the phony "war on drugs(TM)".

The amount of chemicals one of these idiots uses in a day would cost a dollar if produced and sold on the free market. Under the present system, the druggie is paying 200 - 400, say, for the dollars worth of chemicals and, since he's dealing at a ten percent fence, he's having to steal $4000 worth of something or other to get the 400 to buy the dollars worth of drugs. In other words, a dollars worth of chemicals is being transformed into $4000 worth of crime times the number of those idiots out there times 365, all via the magic of stupid laws. No nation on Earth could afford that forever.

Ideally you'd like to keep a few things like crack, pcp, and lsd illegal, but you'd be better off to legalize it all than to go on doing what we're doing.

Ending the war on drugs
Dec 31st 1998
From The Economist print edition

The war against drugs is either not working or succeeding at too high a cost, several recent books agree. What should replace it is harder to be certain of
DRUG CRAZY. By Mike Gray. Random House; 240 pages; $23.95.OPIUM: A HISTORY. By Martin Booth. St Martin's Press; 381 pages; $24.95. Pocket; £6.99 (paperback).THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PSYCHOACTIVE SUBSTANCES. By Richard Rudgley. Little, Brown; 302 pages; £18.99.BUZZED. By Cynthia Kuhn, Scott Swartzwelder, Wilkie Wilson with Leigh Heather Wilson and Jeremy Foster. Norton; 317 pages; $25 and £18.95.ENDING THE WAR ON DRUGS. By Dirk Chase Eldredge. Bridge Works; 207 pages; $22.95.THE FIX. By Michael Massing. Simon and Schuster; 335 pages; $25

WAR is a dirty business, and the war on drugs involves plenty of filth: deceit, corruption and damage to civil liberties, not to mention outright violence?-and that's just from the good guys. Every struggle has to have heroes, and America's anti-drugs campaign makes its casting billboard-clear. The white hats are enforcement agents stamping out narcotics at home and abroad, police sweeping dealers and users off the streets, judges jailing drug offenders, not to mention plucky little civilians who "just say no". The black hats are shadowy figures: greedy drug barons, mostly foreign, who exploit their own countrymen and corrupt America's children. Congress and Hollywood, spurred on by alarmed parents, have created such a drugs mythology that the good and evil of narcotics is now as distinct, to many, as Mother Teresa and Saddam Hussein.

Yet today's highly militarised drugs campaign originated in more than medicine and morality. From the start the war has involved political interest and financial gain, as well as frequent misunderstanding?-not to mention downright misrepresentation?-of the best evidence about drugs' medical and social effects.

If these were novel or incidental mistakes, the war might be more understandable. But, along with social concern and good sense, modern drug policy has from the start involved fear and unreason, often directed against foreigners or outsiders. It is almost 125 years since authorities in San Francisco launched an early salvo in the western war on drugs by clamping down on opium use among the growing population of Chinese labourers. In the years leading up to the Harrison Act of 1914, which amounted to the first federal ban on non-medical narcotics, its drafters played on fears of drug-crazed, sex-mad negroes to win support in the South.

Then 20 years later, the spectre of the sky-high, violent Mexican immigrant was played up to sell the public on the criminalising of marijuana. At several times since the 1930s, governments have used the drug card, whether to lean on dispensible foreign dictators or to brush back homegrown countercultures.

One thing that has changed, though, are the high stakes that America is willing to play. In 1980, the federal government spent around $1 billion on drug control; federal, state and local spending last year exceeded $30 billion, which includes much expanded programmes of crop eradication, border patrolling and sting operations. Only a third of the federal government's drug-control spending goes on drugs education or drugs treatment.

How much success this money buys depends on your definition. According to United Nations estimates, Americans are spending almost $60 billion on illegal drugs a year, mainly on the "soft" drug, marijuana, and its "hard" counterparts, cocaine and heroin. These are, unavoidably, guesstimates. But nobody seriously contests that drugs continue to pour into America and that prices have fallen. Cocaine costs half or less what it did in the early 1980s and heroin sells for just under $1,000 a gram, three-fifths of its price a decade ago. Purity has also increased. In the 1980s, street heroin was so adulterated that injecting straight into the blood was the surest way to achieve a high. Now fixes are commonly more than 50% pure, which means that users who might be deterred by needles can smoke or snort the drug instead.

A third of all Americans admit to having tried drugs and at least 13m are occasional users. Drug arrests were 1.1m in 1995, double the 1980 figure. There are 400,000 Americans behind bars for drug offences, eight times the number 19 years ago.

Those who fight the war on drugs, with its strict penalties at home and sharp punishment abroad, point to seizures of both drugs and their users as victories. In their terms, they are. And if slowing the spread of hard drugs is a sensible goal, which it seems to be, there is indeed good news. Nationwide studies of drug use, such as the University of Michigan survey of high-school students, suggest that although teenage marijuana use has risen in recent years, experimentation with cocaine or heroin among young, first-time users has stayed fairly steady. Those who question or oppose the drugs war, however, reckon that this is the wrong body count. Although casual hard-drug consumption may be dropping, the number of hard-core hard drug users?-those most directly associated with the private and collective misery of drugs?-has scarcely budged since the war began.

Instead the war's critics propose an entirely new approach that drops or downplays military means and abandons unconditional surrender as the goal. The anti-war doves, as will be seen, form a growing and disputatious camp. Yet whether they favour disapproval or toleration, continued prohibition or legalisation, most doves accept that core drug abuse is not going to be eradicated at an acceptable price, that crusading moralism is counterproductive and that drugs policy should be refocused on education for the young and "harm reduction" for habitual users?-for example, methadone programmes, needle-exchange centres or prescription heroin.

It sounds like common sense. But good sense alone will not end the war on drugs. Both the law makers and law breakers have too much invested in the conflict for either to lay down arms easily. Even amid falling prices, drug producers continue to profit from the risk premium that prohibition puts on their multi-billion dollar industry. The anti-drug warriors' jobs and budgets depend on expensive enforcement and lucrative asset seizures. Having demonised their foes, they can only with great difficulty now make peace with the devil.

Back to the future

Neither side is above massaging the drugs statistics. But anyone who suspects that the critics of the drugs war are toying with the facts should read "Drug Crazy". This book describes the origins and consequences of America's present narcotics policy. It moves from gangland drug busts to Colombian coca plantations to Mexican border patrols. This is reportage from the front line, told with all the verve of an action film, a style which no doubt owes much to the fact that its author, Mike Gray, is a Hollywood screenwriter and producer.

Mr Gray does not shrink from describing the violence of the drugs war, from shoot-outs in the ghettoes of Chicago to explosions on the streets of Bogota. But the legal burden of America's current drug policy comes through most clearly in his description of how drug dealers are brought to justice. Chicago's county court, which has seen its caseload quadruple in the last 20 years largely because of continued tightening of policy on drugs, now runs round the clock.




Although most people who take crack cocaine are white, 96% of the crack defendants in federal courts are black or Hispanic. This is largely because white people, being richer, do their deals behind closed doors, while blacks and Hispanics tend to trade on the streets, where they are more easily watched and arrested.

The night shift at Cook County court catches only the foot soldiers of such drug armies as Chicago's Gangster Disciples. The officers stay out of sight and, generally, out of jail. Justice is summary, and baffling: ten-minute trials lead to five-year sentences for possession of a fifth of an ounce of crack, while the same amount of powdered cocaine lands its owner a few weeks in prison. Crack is cocaine mixed with baking soda to make it smokable and stronger. But concentrating the drug also concentrates the penalty, introduced during the crack scare of the 1980s. As blacks use more crack than powdered cocaine, the punishment falls disproportionately on them. Arrest and imprisonment are scarcely deterrents. A young lawyer at the county court is quoted as saying, "We're not producing justice here. We're manufacturing revolutionaries."




On a continent once famous for revolutionaries?-Latin America?-the tough position of the United States has had mixed effects. The Bush administration spent $2 billion on crop eradication and substitution, spraying the jungle and bribing peasants to plant passion fruit rather than coca plants?-with little success. By 1992, cocaine production had grown by 15% and the business had spread across an area the size of the continental United States. It had also become frighteningly efficient, first dominated by Pablo Escobar (a "ruthless killer", as Mr Gray describes him, with "a pleasant side") in Medellin and then the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers in Cali. The high-tech barriers America erected along its borders have succeeded in diverting entry of South American cocaine from Florida to California and Texas via Mexico, thereby drawing another country into the violence and corruption which has plagued Colombia. And the high premium that the criminalisation of drugs places on them means that South America has turned its eye to heroin, a far more profitable drug than cocaine.

None of this, as Mr Gray stresses, should come as a surprise. America's last concerted effort at substance control, prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s, had similar effects. It inflated prices, drove bootleg suppliers to organise, encouraged the spread of guns and crime, corrupted a quarter of the federal enforcement agents?-and doubled the consumption of hard liquor, all within a decade. Nor does "Drug Crazy" neglect the influence of stubborn or strong-minded individuals. It is full of outsize characters from the past: Hamilton Wright, for example, an American doctor turned diplomat, who tried to bully the world into drug prohibition, crafted the Harrison Narcotics Act and was later sacked for drinking on the job. Or Harry Anslinger, head of drug enforcement from 1930 to 1962, who perfected the sledge hammer school of narcotics control and invoked every menace from axemen to communism.

Drugs in history

Because the drugs war is so noisy and so visible, it is often easy to forget that drugs are not just an American issue. Martin Booth's "Opium: A History" charts the rise of heroin from its ancient origins in the poppies of Eastern Europe to modern-day trade on the streets of America. The book's wealth of detail is remarkable: all aspects botanical, political, economic, cultural and pharmacological are discussed (including the unexpected etymology of such slang as "hip", "hype" and "junkie"). Unlike "Drug Crazy" which is mainly focused on the Americas, much of "Opium" is set in Europe and Asia, giving the book a more international perspective and more comprehensive feel.

Although Mr Booth's accounts of famous addicts, from Clive of India to John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola, make for interesting reading, the real fascination of "Opium" is in its account of the common man's habit through history. Until the Harrison Act, morphine and opium?-mainly in the tincture laudanum or as patent medicine?-were freely available in America, as they were in Europe. Opium was a sovereign cure in Victorian England for afflictions ranging from diarrhoea to depression. Babies were fed the drug in soothing syrups such as Godfrey's Cordial, leading to claims of physical and mental retardation, exactly the same concerns voiced about today's "crack babies".

In 1868, British public health authorities took most opiates out of the hands of grocers and put them into those of dispensing doctors and pharmacists (as, in America, did the Harrison Act). Starting with the International Opium Commission of 1909, American efforts to curtail world manufacture, sale and distribution of opium and its derivatives met with lively resistance from Europe, India and other countries with a stake in the international trade. Yet from the 1920s to the 1980s, a series of international treaties forced countries to clamp down on the production, trade and consumption of opiates, whether for ritual, for fun or as self-administered medicine. In that time, the penalties for peddling and possession tended to climb, especially in America.

One clear historical lesson that emerges from "Opium" is that people will take drugs whether or not they are proscribed, and they will do so for all sorts of reasons?-to escape life's burdens, for adventure, for straightforward fun. In 19th-century Britain, Mr Booth tells us, the Fens of East Anglia were awash in opium. Agricultural labourers took their pennyworth of "elevation" along with a nightly beer as a lift out of working drudgery. This is not so far from the plight of crack addicts in America's inner cities, boxed in by poverty, dead-end jobs and broken families.

What does vary widely with history, however, are official attitudes towards the drug trade. As Britain followed America's line in the 1980s and got "tough on drugs", complaints were regularly fired against heroin-producing nations, such as Pakistan. Supply-side control was seen as the solution to the drug problem; if only these people would pull up their poppies, then Western drug use would plummet. Ironically, exactly the same argument was used against the British in the early 19th century, when they foisted opium from India on the Chinese in exchange for tea. When China's then drug czar, Lin Tsê-hsu, complained to the British that they were breaking imperial edicts banning opium import and possession, the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, replied that the opium trade was a Chinese problem and that it should be dealt with by controlling consumption. His logic sounds familiar today.



http://web.archive.org/web/20010802112234/www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=181005

At the turn of the century, both heroin and aspirin were legally available and sold for approximately the same amount. Today aspirin can be purchased at the corner drug store for 20 cents per gram; heroin costs $50 per gram. [p. 33, 3] The price of heroin rose drastically after it was made illegal due to the dangers involved in its sale. Dealers are willing to kill each other for profits obtained from such a lucrative market; junkies are willing to rob and kill for money to support their habit--money, if drugs were legal and cheap, that they could easily obtain by working at McDonald's. You and I, through high crime rates caused by the War on Drugs and high tax rates used to support the War on Drugs, pay the price. During prohibition "liquor store" owners murdered each other to protect their turf just as drug dealers do today. Today, liquor store owners are generally peaceful. Eliminating the enormous profits involved in black-market businesses eliminates the motive for violent crime, and therefore the violent crime.

More law enforcement is commonly touted as the answer to America's violent crime problem. Since 1970 the percentage of the American population in prison has tripled with no noticeable effect on the homicide rate.[2] More than 1.3 million citizens are now in jail.[p. 24, 3] The United States has a larger percentage of its population in prison than any other nation[2], and still maintains the highest homicide rate in the industralized world. [1] We have even thrown away parts of our constitution in the name of fighting crime. Asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement officers to seize the property of American citizens without even charging them with a crime, even though the 5th amendment to the constitution clearly states "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." Of course if you want your property back you do have the right to post a bond and try to prove yourself innocent, of a crime you have not even been charged with, in a court of law. No attorney will be provided for you if you cannot afford one. Over $2.4 billion worth of assets have been seized since 1985, $664 million in 1991 alone--and in 80% of the cases no charges were ever filed.[7]

Disparities between the poor and the rich are often considered causes of our high crime rate, but the United States has not only one of the world's highest crime rates, but also one of the world's largest middle classes. The religious right claims America's huge crime rate is caused by a break-down of family values. This would require family values breaking down suddenly in 1907, returning in 1933, and suddenly breaking down again in 1964. Many liberals believe that America's large crime rate is due to our lack of gun-control laws, but America's gun-control policy has changed little throughout this century. There is no way gun control can explain the enormous fluctuations in America's homicide rate. The United States government's substance control policies are the only answer. The only way to lower America's violent crime rate, short of turning the United States into a totalitarian state, is through ending the War on Drugs.
http://w3.ag.uiuc.edu:8001/Liberty/Tales/CrimeAndDrugWar.Html

Currently those institutions which comprise the penal system are the only viable solution to either eliminate or rehabilitate the wrong-doers, and the system attempts to be equitable in regard to the three dominant methods for correction (derived from the Quakers etc). Without question the overlaps may be a detriment at times.

Within the penal system a number of organizations (or sub-groups) attempt to rehabilitate convicts while concurrently alleviating the symptoms of isolation and deterrence. This is once instance of the overlap we are speaking of. It is a rather difficult enterprise since entrance into the (penal) system immediately engenders isolation into another facet of society, and this "new" society within which a convict is thrown into does not (from the outset) deter him/her from repeating the same acts. A prison is, as they say, a world of its own; its function among inmates in turn engenders rapid assimilation into the new society for the sake of survival.

To separate these three dominant ideas from their overlaps (in the current penal system) would entail a revamping of the penal system into three corresponding divisions. How do you recommend this be done? I have some ideas; none definitive in any regard.

The number of Americans in prison has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul
The report released on Monday cites statistics and examples ranging from former vice-presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby to a Florida woman's two-year sentence for throwing a cup of coffee to make its case for reducing the U.S. prison population.

It recommends shorter sentences and parole terms, alternative punishments, more help for released inmates and decriminalizing recreational drugs as steps that would cut the prison population in half, save $20 billion a year and ease social inequality without endangering the public.

"President (George W.) Bush was right," in commuting Libby's perjury sentence this year, the report says. "But while he was at it, President Bush should have commuted the sentences of hundreds of thousands of Americans who each year have also received prison sentences for crimes that pose little if any danger or harm to our society."

The report was produced by the JFA Institute, a Washington criminal-justice research group, and its authors included eight criminologists from major U.S. public universities. It was funded by the Rosenbaum Foundation and financier George Soros's Open Society Institute.

Its recommendations run counter to broad U.S. public support for getting tough on criminals through longer, harsher sentences and to the Bush administration's anti-drug stance.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/19/5330/