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The New Black posted:To my mind, all this is basically the inevitable result of running prisons for profit, and I can't see any way of improving it beyond nationalising all the prisons. The other trouble is that the default position of a huge number of Americans is 'If you can't do the time, don't do the crime' - can you imagine the response from the right if Obama tried to improve prison conditions? They literally think that the second you break the law you immediately waive any and all basic human rights. They almost seem to consider getting repeatedly anally raped to be part of the punishment (at least, this is my impression from US popular culture). Yes and no. It is the result of running prisons for profit but we have to be clear about what that means. Like, it's obviously not just banal corporate evil at the heart of this. The world's CEOs didn't just get together and say "we're going to get 3 strikes laws passed so we can exploit the prison system! Muahaha!" You can't really explain overcrowding, for example, as a cost-cutting measure to maximize the number of prisoners held with the smallest amount of prison capital. It's not the same thing as cramming as many employees into small cubicles as possible to reduce overhead, because you still have to explain why we have so drat many prisoners to begin with. The problem is also not a matter of prison labor being cheap and therefore useful to corporate America, putting pressure on the state to imprison more people and treat them more brutally or something, which I think is maybe it a bit overemphasized as far as critiques of the prison system go (the usual technique is to point out the relationship between slavery and the modern prison system and that's just a little tenuous I think). It just doesn't make sense that we'd need prison labor when third-world labor is just as cheap and effective and even more disciplined, and except in a few industries immune to criticism from social activists in American political discourse. Sure, there a few isolated areas that you can't move the labor overseas because it has to be done here and so prison labor is a bit more appealing (sorting through hazardous waste, for example, and more heinously BP's use of prisoners to clean up the oil spill). But honestly, the last number I heard was like under a 200,000 prisoners actually employed in this fashion (i.e., in the private sector only) which is really a drop in the bucket compared to third-world labor and even that has resulted in expensive PR backlash at times, as was the case with Walmart back in '06. And third-world labor is much less of a lawsuit magnet, limited as prisoners rights may be. It's furthermore not clear that outlawing the privatization of prisons, which some states have apparently done, will help improve conditions overall--many public prisons are just as terrible. Also, I'm not an expert on the prison industry but I imagine you still have to contract out certain services like food and healthcare and its pretty much always a poo poo show from there, quality-wise. So privatization isn't really the whole story, I don't think. Again, you can kind of explain certain things here and there as basic moral hazards that pop up whenever there's a private industry where there shouldn't be (healthcare, military). But the big thing that we can't explain within that kind of framework is the ridiculous number of prisoners, many of whom are just of no obvious benefit to the private sector in terms of actual dollars. And I think it sounds a bit too conspiratorial to suggest that this is some kind of concerted effort on behalf of the corporate sector to get more prisoners. Like it's just too complex and too big to happen as some kind of scheme, and it happened alongside a ton of other major changes in the justice system as a whole (policing in particular). Three strikes laws, mandatory minimums, drug wars and so fourth are all incidentally good for businesses but I think putting that kind of apparatus in place had to have happened organically and outside of any particular lobby. But I do think you're essentially right that the profit motive is at the heart of this. It's just a little more abstract than lobbying and collusion and the prison industrial complex. It's more about how you deal with people that can't be included in the capitalist system. You have to find a way to sort of waste their productive capacity because the system can't sustain them, and war and prisons are just a couple of the way we have found to do that. You can blow a ton of public dollars on social welfare programs and lift up the lower classes, but it is, in fact, much more profitable to send to them to prison and its much more stable socially. What's happening with prisons is that it's an entire industry centered around wasting production, wasting human potential, because too much production exacerbates problems organic to a capitalist system and will eventually tank the economy. So really its just the natural consequence of growing wealth disparity and increasing need to discipline the working class. And I again I want to stress that I don't think this is some kind of grand conspiracy--it's not the aristocracy getting together and twirling mustaches and saying "how can we gently caress over the poor?". But it is a natural consequence of having an extreme wealth gap, of which crime is an obvious symptom, and needing a way to keep people on the wrong side of that gap from threatening those on the right side.
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Aug 1, 2010 03:03
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Uh, a million other things happened in the late 70s and early 80s, you know, and they could all be (and probably are) relevant. Union crackdowns, economic recession, Paul Volcker and disciplining labor, war on drugs. It makes a lot more sense to see the state of prisons as a consequence of a larger state of affairs than just someone getting the bright idea to privatize prisons and an industry erupting overnight that somehow had enough power to inflict massive, sweeping changes on the justice system just to make a buck.
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Aug 1, 2010 03:24
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mew force shoelace posted:There is lots of times and places you get a lot of bad dudes together in one place, it doesn't seem like them all raping each other is exactly a natural consequence of that. I mean three of your reasons come down to 'no one is stopping them' and it's not really the case that in other countries there is a bunch of people straining to all rape each other but are being stopped. If you took a bunch of prisoners in other countries and had the guards close their eyes and turn around it wouldn't turn instantly to rapefest and I think most of the inmates would be a little weirded out by the idea it might. My initial hunch is that this is not about "a lot of bad dudes" but rather "some bad dudes, some not so bad". The U.S. locks up a shitload of non-violent offenders, but this started taking place in a much bigger way after prison administration deliberately established an environment of predation and violence between inmates. So it sounds to me like they created a monster one year and then after it matured for a decade they started feeding it frail, more or less defenseless victims as a consequence of the war on drugs. Prison is a horrible, lovely place in most of the world, but if you want to explain the unique U.S. horror show of rape and violence I think a good place to start is California in the late 60s up through Attica and asking what happens when you take that situation and pair it with a massive influx of non-violent offenders in the 80s.
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Aug 1, 2010 12:30
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21stCentury posted:Actually, I'll have to agree that "unforgiveable" is way overblown. But I don't think it's merely "unfortunate" when you realize that this lead to putting the American Prison System on the UN's Human's Rights' watchlist. Maybe the point I made earlier is just dead in the water here but I really don't think American prisons are just "what happen" when you put a lot of violent people together in a room. Only about half of the people in prison are violent offenders to begin with, and they're all coming into an environment where violence and predation were not only tolerated historically but even deliberately encouraged by prison administration. It might not actually look the way it does if we really were just taking like "naturally" violent people and putting them behind bars or something like that. I think the criminal justice system in recent history has been transformed into not merely a way of dealing with people who break the law but more significantly a tool of state oppression and terror. Inside the prisons, violence had the very explicit and well understood purpose of fracturing people with otherwise common interests, basically like a divide and conquer kind of thing, and that has since bled through the bars and into the streets and created a kind of feedback loop that I think more plausibly accounts for the uniquely appalling conditions in American's prison system.
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Aug 4, 2010 08:08
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Hedenius posted:This is what I don't get. Why on earth don't the rich folks think about what their lives will turn in to once the Ayn Rand scenario hits? Prisons are welfare. It's just in the form of an industry, similar to defense/high-tech or pharmaceuticals. I've seen it referred to as "carceral Keynesianism" and that sounds about right--the expansion of prisons have helped to bridge some of the employment gap left by globalization and general capital crisis, both by sucking up members of the underclass into an economic purgatory and by employing a great deal of low-skill labor at actually fairly lucrative wages. So if you aren't an engineer but you still want to live off the taxpayer dime and don't mind being a part of the carnage you can do pretty well in prison administration. If you're asking why, however, there isn't like welfare in the form of an education-industrial-complex, it should be obvious why the rich don't want that at all. Social safety nets of any kind--welfare, public healthcare, and so on--are manifestly beneficial to labor because it makes it a lot easier to organize and strike if necessary. Employers just don't have as much power when employees aren't utterly terrified of losing their financial life line.
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Aug 4, 2010 20:19
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Cross-posted from Cops on the Beat so as not to derail:ToxicFrog posted:"At least half the people in prison don't deserve to be there" is not the same as "at least half the people in prison are innocent of any crime", and I'm pretty sure that's what Joat Mon and Dusty Jeffers are getting at. It's not that most of the people in prison haven't broken any laws; it's that the laws they have broken either shouldn't exist in the first place or carry massively disproportionate punishments. I think there is good reason to suspect that a large minority of prisoners have not actually committed a crime. Our ridiculous bail and plea bargain system mean simply being accused of a crime is often enough to destroy ones life without any respect to something like due process or whathaveyou. But the thing is if you try to understand criminality and the prison population in terms of "what these people have done" it never matches up right. You have to look at criminality rather as a class populated according to "who they are" in order to get the numbers to match up. Like, it does seem to be the case that almost everyone has broken a federal law at some point in their lives. There is just an amazing amount of things that are against the law to the point that enforcement is mostly a joke because no one even has the ability to know what is and is not a crime. The key is largely how we are to construe the class "criminals" as opposed to the class "law-abiders", which thanks in part to the rhetorical strategies of the gun control lobby and "tough on crime" politicians, has taken on significant semantic baggage that is much more complex to unpack than simply whether or not one has committed a crime (or even a violent crime). I think it should be very obvious by now that regardless of how you choose to analyze the concept of a "criminal", in practice the term is purely political, and universally understood to mean "the lower class"--in other words, the poor, minority groups, disenfranchised youth, whatever people who aren't middle class suburban WASPs and higher do is what criminals do. And this largely explains crimes of "public order" and "vice", which almost always have two versions--there's like a real serious charge which we might have a legitimate case for prosecuting as a matter of public interest, and then there are things that are a bit sketchier. It's very easy to be guilty of a crime of vice or public order just as a matter of course in certain parts of the country, and it's not at all clear that if this species of law were to stop being enforced tomorrow then civilization as we know it would collapse. So the obvious example is that there is probably a good case to enforce laws against drug trafficking, but drug abuse is highly debatable. Its clearly in the public interest to prevent human trafficking, but prostitution again is just a bit more fuzzy. Drunk driving yes, but public drunkenness? Eh. Crime is just a tricky thing like that. It's a much more elastic, fuzzy kind of concept than simply "whatever the law says". In fact it is perilously easy to fall into the class of "criminal" according to the casual, commonly understood use of the word even when you have not, strictly speaking, committed a crime. And the reverse is also true--plenty of people who are guilty of seriously heinous and costly crimes are not deemed to be criminals in the typical person's estimation. So in a really insidious sense, the majority of people in prison are criminals--like 99% even. Whether, in some legal sense or factual sense, they have committed a crime is a different story, and that's the disparity that needs to be accounted for. But it doesn't do any good to go through all the cases and talk about "have these prisoners, as a matter of law or fact, commited a crime?", because that just isn't what the criminal justice system is interested in. Crime is not an act but an identity. Woozy fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Aug 9, 2010 |
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Aug 9, 2010 16:41
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baquerd posted:America was built on slavery, it seems reasonable to return to it when faced with economic challenges. It wasn't just built on slavery, it was founded on it. I don't know why Australia is the only country that gets poo poo for this, but many American colonists were likewise prisoners sold to servitude to keep the cost of the prison system down.
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Aug 23, 2010 08:38
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nm posted:This is the problem, right here. This is the problem? Really?
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Nov 17, 2010 07:56
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nnnnghhhhgnnngh posted:Not sure it's hyperbole at all. Already seems like prison labor is a significant chunk of the economy. There's prisoner rental; for example BP saved some change, and got tax breaks, for having convicts clean up beaches after their Gulf spill. There are direct savings; IIRC prisoners produce a huge chunk of US military gear, backpacks and webbing and the like just for starters. HidingFromGoro posted:Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis You should read that book. It touches on the subject a bit. One of the points the author makes that I find myself paraphrasing a lot in these threads is that the whole point of globalization was a steady supply of cheap and highly-disciplined labor overseas. Prisons are used for some things that are difficult to outsource but really they aren't all that appealing for a lot of obvious reasons: prisons are lovely work environments, fights break out, workflow is disrupted constantly by guards and general prison bullshit. It doesn't make a lot of sense to use prison labor except for a handful of things that for various reasons can't be done in the third world. Prison labor is part of the story, but the economic benefits, from the perspective of power, are indirect: the law-enforcement apparatus in it's current state is designed for total control, and prisons play the role of shattering community ties and pitting the impoverished against eachother. Like a divide and conquer kind of thing. It's much better to think of crime-fighting as something police and prisons do sort of as a bonus in between suppressing dissent and ensuring that the lower classes can never get their poo poo together and start murdering bankers en masse. The reason we have police is to dress up people in riot gear the next time there's a protest, and the reason people put up with them is because ostensibly they "fight crime" when they're not destroying lives. So the economic benefit of prisons turns out to be that they work as a way of protecting the political relationships that make the U.S. such a lucrative place for corrupt shitheads in the first place. It's not necessarily about having PIC and contractors and getting cheap labor at home--those are just perks, so to speak.
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Jun 7, 2011 16:20
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It's an even more complex issue than that because even the "legitimate" avenues of participation in democracy preferred by reformers and liberals bring you face to face with the carceral system and it's defenders. It was bad enough being an anti-war protester the way the police behaved I can't imagine what it would be like to be an anti-prison/anti-police state protester.
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Jun 23, 2011 20:25
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Zeitgueist posted:I run into a brick wall when I talk to some progressives about prison reform. People have been socialized to treat criminals like dog-poo poo. That's a big problem. I brought this up to a group of College Democrats at a bar one night--specifically because someone made a prison rape joke back when we all though Obama was actually going to do something about the financial collapse--and the reaction was a mix of soul-crushing apathy and "if you love murderers and rapists so much why don't you marry them". The really, really hosed up thing though, is the amount of people I met in jail who didn't seem to see anything wrong with how things work.
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Jun 23, 2011 20:43
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You might enjoy this article. It deals a bit with how the language of law and order and the field of criminal justice is used to justify the prison system. (just don't bring this up in any of the gun threads because the distinction between "criminals" and "law-abiders" is pretty much sacrosanct there) Edit: quote:The semantic somersaults of the prison and State bureaucracy serve a calculated and specific ideological function. Once we penetrate this linguistic shield we have the key to understanding the social and political functions of the prison system. The dominant theoretical assumption among social and behavioral scientists in the United States today is that the Social order is functionally stable and fundamentally just. Pretty much spot on. Woozy fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jun 23, 2011 |
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Jun 23, 2011 21:20
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Aturaten posted:So, I've got a question: does the FBI hide male on male rape statistics because of prison rape? Your average American doesn't believe it even "counts" as prison unless you get raped, so I don't really see why they'd bother.
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Sep 24, 2011 01:46
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Willie Tomg posted:I will never understand the reasoning or motivation of someone who comes into the middle of a huge issue specific thread like this one, skips right to the last page and blurts out "Hey have you considered that If You Do The Crime You Do The Time? Ah, but have you considered deterrence?
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Jul 5, 2012 20:23
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dethkon posted:This article is hosed up: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nm-judge-man-raped-everyday-article-1.2417141 Judges are loving worse than prosecutors, even. If this woman believed sincerely that anyone she sentenced to prison would be raped or assaulted she has every moral obligation to stop being a rather large cog in the carceral machine and find a new line of work. You don't get to both be a sanctimonious idiot and draw a paycheck sending human beings to a loving rape dungeon.
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Nov 9, 2015 01:10
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Powercrazy posted:If she is reluctant to send people to prison because of the real possibility of them being raped, she is actually in perfect spot to reduce that outcome. Judges have wide latitude in many sentencing decisions. Additionally they can dismiss prosecutor cases as without merit if the prosecutors or the police are being "overzealous." lol yea okay
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Nov 9, 2015 01:32
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