There are so Many People in Jail, They Literally Don’t fit
The criminal justice system in California is rapidly approaching a breaking point:
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A special panel of federal judges tentatively ruled Monday that California must release tens of thousands of inmates to relieve overcrowding.The judges said no other solution will improve conditions so poor that inmates die regularly of suicides or lack of proper care.
…
"There are simply too many prisoners for the existing capacity," they wrote. "Evidence offered at trial was overwhelmingly to the effect that overcrowding is the primary cause of the unconstitutional conditions that have been found to exist in the California prisons." [AP]
Passing harsh laws, capturing offenders and convicting people of crimes is the easy part. What a lot of people don’t get is that the process doesn’t end there. You have to actually do something with the people you’ve decided to remove from society. Keeping massive populations behind bars for years at a time is phenomenally expensive, even if you do an appallingly poor job of it.
It’s utterly disgusting that our drug laws condemn these people to a living hell, all because drugs are supposedly bad for your physical and emotional health. The treatment of our prisoners is disgraceful and the legions of prison-state profiteers who lobby for more jails and tougher laws seldom receive the recognition they deserve in the hierarchy of scum-sucking subspecies destroying our society.
The prison industry will not stop. These people have already created an unbelievable mess and they will fight for more laws and funding no matter how much worse it gets. When human beings start getting sick and dying in our jails, someone outside the criminal justice industry has to intervene, otherwise nothing will be done about it. It shouldn’t even be necessary for judges to compel better prison conditions, but of course it is.
Fortunately, the one inevitable boundary that exists here is the fact that there is simply nothing left to spend on keeping more people in prison. The incarceration industry can’t print its own money. It’s a shame that we couldn’t stall the escalation of our massive prison population with appeals to logic and compassion, but if it takes bankruptcy to abate this then so be it.
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redditNot Exactly
Comment posted by NewOldSalt on Thu, 02/12/2009 - 4:17amProhibition can and does print it's own money.
Figuratively speaking.
However, it's different from the literal printing of money the govt. does.
Do not believe for a minute that letting some folks out of a few overcrowded facilities means anything.
While I agree with your general perspective and level of frustration, this does mean something. It provides yet another data set, hard numbers, to this problem.
Even though some may claim it's not significant in and of itself, it continues to expose a pattern of problems that is coming to a head.
Not only that but you better believe it means something to the folks being let out, and their families!
But I still wonder who they're planning on letting out, and what they are accused of.
I agree with you that it sure would be better if the policy makers/media/etc... owned up to the fact this "war" is a disaster and all they are doing is festering hatred towards the govt./society/authority by pummeling the "drug offenders" with draconian treatment.
Certainly the saying "crime doesn't pay" is in force here too! It's completely unsustainable to lock people up and invoice the rest of us for it! There is no real value in it at all! Nothing is gained, only perceived loss is averted.
Heaven forbid the self-righteous go even more crazy and start the notion of prison factories to "put them to work to pay for their incarceration."
more into the future
Comment posted by kjs420 on Fri, 02/13/2009 - 12:56pmWhen China has finally had enough "western BS", and they want their money, and all we got is more paper with green ink on it, or "labor" you know, "slaves", we have prisons full of them, it's either that or land, which do you think our compassionate government will go for? Especially, now they they have those new laws on "rendition" and other "snatch n trade" options at their disposal. How's your Chinese?
It's probably going on right now, anyone can be snatched up on "suspicion", which is a pretty broad term, and whisked away, to be held in a foreign country, and without even having to be charged with anything. Let freedom ring.
They should be publicly
Comment posted by kjs420 on Fri, 02/13/2009 - 12:59pmThey should be publicly flogged.
I can't tell you how many
Comment posted by NewOldSalt on Thu, 02/12/2009 - 3:29pmI can't tell you how many puns/homophones I've come up with for "Dick Cheney." Nearly all of them are unsuitable for this public forum.
And to see him dig in his heels when interviewed by Jim Lehrer, and act like those belligerent CEOs who have gone before Congress these past 5 years, that they're worth every penny, and should have received ten times the bonuses they gave themselves... takes away any remorse I may feel when they face Judgement Day.
Here's a bit of history that I think will repeat itself... the story of Haman in the book of Esther (Bible). "Now it's your turn to live in those prisons you made!"
As long as police and prison guard unions
Comment posted by aahpat on Thu, 02/12/2009 - 10:00amgive more money to the Democrats and Republicans than do the poor people who are victimized by the police state laws the Democrats and Republicans will continue to write laws that give police and prison guards their authoritarian welfare.
Our entire prison system is fucked up
Comment posted by Moonrider on Thu, 02/12/2009 - 2:19pmOur society puts non-violent people in the same facilities as the violent ones, allowing the violent ones to prey upon the non-violent. Rapes, assaults and worse happen every day in every prison in the nation. No one convicted of a non-violent crime deserves the death penalty from AIDS due to being raped by a violent criminal in prison. The guards are often guilty of unprovoked violence against prisoners and of turning a blind eye to prisoner on prisoner violence. There is little to no effort made to rehabilitate violent people or those who think they have every right to help themselves to the property of others without permission.
Non-violent prisoners come out of these facilites filled with hate for the society that allowed those atrocities to happen to them while they were "paying their debt to society". Petty criminals come out with skills to make them into serious criminals and no skills that would allow them to become productive members of society. Until we stop putting drug users, manufacturers, and distributors in prison, until we begin to separate the violent criminals from all the non-violent ones in our prisons, until we begin to try to rehabilitate violent criminals, and those who do not respect the right to property, we will be making all the problems with crime in our society worse.
I'm pro-choice on EVERYTHING!
Money
Comment posted by smorgan on Thu, 02/12/2009 - 1:29amOf course, many people profit from prohibition. That's the point of my post. But it's the taxpayer's money and there's not enough of it to sustain all of this reckless profiteering indefinitely. We're on a trajectory towards a point when these industries will have bled us for all we're worth. And when that happens, there will be no choice but to turn back.
Prohibition makes lots of money for lots of people. But it always wastes more resources than it generates.