The Caging of America - Why do we lock up so many people?

[Liberal_in_LA]

The Caging of America
Why do we lock up so many people?


For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1kbWPuQh9

[russspeakeasy]

1. Follow the money.

[BumRushDaShow]

2. Prison industrial complex. n/t

[PA Democrat]

3. Mandatory sentencing guidelines, three strikes law,

and Americans seem to have more of a punitive mindset. We tend to view prison sentences as punishment and not an opportunity to rehabilitate. We have a very poor mental health system and many people end up in prison who might not have otherwise if they had access to proper mental health treatment.

[tabatha]

4. Because someone somewhere has been able to make a profit.

Republicans - say tough, you do the crime, you do the time.

Liberals - like me - think that there should be some sort of rehabilitation before prison, because prison can make a person worse, and sometimes people just need help and not discipline.

[tabatha]

9. Smoking pot is a not a serious crime.

[tabatha]

11. It should not be illegal.

If the punishment were fair, than that is a different question.

The rich get a tap on the wrist, the poor go to jail for a long time.

(Just for the record, I do not smoke pot or anything else.)

[T S Justly]

5. Drugs

[kestrel91316]

6. Why? So they can't vote. Because they are mostly of the blue persuasion.

[woo me with science]

12. 2.7 YEARS = Average length of solitary confinement in a prison in Virginia

Our prisons routinely lock people away from human contact for YEARS at a time.




A recent editorial from Virginia:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/solitary-confinement-in-virginia/2012/01/11/gIQAKAvh1P_story.html

By Editorial Board, Washington Post

DEEP IN THE HEART of Virginia coal country sits a mountaintop prison, its remote location an outward expression of the plight of the inhabitants inside. Some 500 of its 745 inmates are held in solitary confinement — 23 hours a day, seven days a week, some for years — with virtually no human contact or meaningful stimulation. Prison officials estimate that 173 of those in solitary suffer from mental illness. Whether the illness was induced by isolation is not known; what is beyond dispute is that isolation exacerbates the problem.

This is Red Onion State Prison, as described by The Post’s Anita Kumar. Virginia is one of 44 states that enlist solitary confinement as a way to manage some of its prisoners. Virginia officials estimate that as of this fall roughly 1,800 inmates were kept in isolation, comprising a large chunk of the 25,000 or so prisoners nationwide who find themselves in these conditions every day. Prisoners at Red Onion have been kept in solitary confinement from two weeks to seven years, according to Ms. Kumar’s report, with an average length of stay in segregation of 2.7 years.

Virginia officials say that they rely on solitary confinement to manage inmates who are unable to control their rage or who have assaulted corrections officers or other prisoners. Sometimes, they say, a prisoner is placed in a special segregation unit — about the size of a doctor’s exam room — for his own good to avoid being injured by others. Security and safety in a prison must be a top priority, and strategic and limited use of solitary confinement may at time be a necessary tool. But routine reliance on prolonged solitary confinement should never be the default.

Short-term isolation is unlikely to cause serious harm. But prolonged solitary confinement can lead to devastating consequences, including psychosis, reduced brain function, debilitating depression and increased rates of suicide.

(more at link)

[duhneece]

14. Lack of compassion and greed

Punishing, Puritan justice vs Restorative Quaker justice were in conflict from the start of our history. Throw in recent opportunities to profit while being cruel & lacking in compassion.

[duhneece]

15. And racism

Read Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration"...

[Initech]

16. Profit profit profit profit profit profit profit profit profit

It's all about money and power. The prison industrialist complex started with the drug war and is one of the reasons it will never end. Remember that scandal in Pennsylvania where for-profit prisons would pay off judges to sentence minor youth infractions? I'm sure it happens all over the country but it's all in the name of their lust for profit.