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Yes, reform is badly needed. I'm an ex-con involved with prison reform advocacy & activism; and I've written about this at length over the past 10 years, some of which has been reposted here.
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Apr 29, 2016 07:09
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mitztronic posted:Approximately 50,000 are in prison for drug possession. That's more than the population of my hometown... Speaking of small towns: don't forget that for election/redistricting purposes, prison inmates count toward the census population of a legislative district where the prison is located, regardless of where their home address is. So politicians from rural districts with prisons get more clout due to artificially inflated population numbers, and they get it for nothing, because inmates can't vote. This is known as "prison gerrymandering" and it's more widespread than you think. Prisoners of the Census posted:60% of Illinois' prisoners are from Cook County (Chicago), yet 99% of them are counted outside the county.
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Apr 30, 2016 06:56
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Cockmaster posted:One might make a valid case for making prison undesirable enough that would be criminals aren't just writing it off as an occupational hazard, but there's absolutely no excuse for making it so brutal as to leave people more messed up than when they came in. One would be misguided in making that case, though, since a gilded cage is still a cage. I could give you a luxury suite at Four Seasons or Caesar's Palace but you wouldn't like it very much if I locked you in there for a decade or two; plus sent some dudes in there to control everything you do 24/7 the whole time- to include what you eat, when you eat, what time you go to bed, what you do when you're awake, what clothes you wear, when you're allowed to open the curtains to see the sky, and all that. You wouldn't like that suite very much if I were to control all contact with the outside world, monitor & record the entirety of those limited interactions, read all of your mail, supervising you when you use the shower or toilet, control & monitor what little amount of reading/TV watching you're allowed to do, control what little exercise you're allowed to do, control all aspects of your health care to include what drugs you take and how often (with or without the involvement of a doctor- at my sole discretion) (with or without your consent or cooperation), go through all of your meager belongings every so often & throw it all on the floor, strip search you at my discretion, cavity search you while we're at it, and all the rest. And, of course, using whatever force is necessary to ensure all of this. The myth of "humane prisons coddle criminals and will make them commit more crimes," like all revenge-based prison misconceptions, needs to die ASAP. If "deterrence" worked then there wouldn't be any more murders in death-penalty states. It's easy to write off penalties as "cost of doing business" because that's what our elites do: the investment banking firm pays the SEC fine because it's less than the profits it made from the illegal act, the retailer pays the class-action settlement because it's cheaper than paying the employees it wronged, etc- and that's what you see on the news. That kind of stuff doesn't hold up when you try to apply it to an individual low-income offender (much like the "family sitting at the kitchen table doing the budget" example never holds up when comparing it to the Federal budget). Take it from a former low-level offender: the one and only thing that drives behavior is probability of being caught. Period. Full stop. More on this later.
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May 3, 2016 08:43
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