I believe that the way our current system is set up, very few come out out of prison a better person. Via TalkLeft, we find Gray Davis’s latest attempt to make this worse:
The state’s financially strapped corrections department is prohibiting inmates from leaving their cells at three prisons in an attempt to reduce overtime pay for guards and is considering further cost-saving restrictions at most of the system’s 32 institutions, according to the chairwoman of the state Senate committee that oversees prisons.
Fabulous. Folks, unless someone is on Death Row or in jail for life with no chance of parole, these people WILL be released from jail. And in most cases, they will still be unskilled, uneducated, and perhaps carrying Hepatitis B, HIV, or both. The only skills training they will have received are PhD’s in hard crime, an education provided free of charge from their fellow inmates. Add to this to the well known destabilizing effects of sensory deprivation caused by longterm solitary cofinement, and we are ACTIVELY experimenting in the creation of a breed of supercriminals- supercriminals who will be one day back on the street, living down the street from you, and more than likely, responsible for the majority of the violent crimes happening in your town or neighborhood.
It is not being soft on crime to recognize that this is a recipe for disaster. You are not a flaming liberal for not wanting to have these monsters released from prison in a worse condition than when they entered (and we did put them away for a reason, didn’t we?) You are not a bleeding heart commie for wanting prisoners to receive education, skills training, and rehabilitation. What you are is someone with an IQ higher than a pool of tepid water.
Oh hell. Go read this. This is sort of related.
JKC
Good post, John. It saddens me that few if any people in this country on either side of the political spectrum have tried to figure out why we have more people incarcerated than anywhere else in the world.
the talking dog
Get off it, John. Prison reform is entirely, 100% a pinko liberal issue. Recall that it was the late Tip O’Neill who gave us draconian national drug crime sentences so that the Dems could be perceived as NOT soft on crime.
You make sense here, but your buddies on the right will scoff, and my buddies on the left will cower lest they be called “coddling prisoners”, so, as dead right as you are here, let’s just forget it.
Go watch Gray Davis TRY to do anything with prisons EXCEPT be an absolute barbarian prick– and the Murdoch-led press will be all over his ass.
Worse- let him try to do anything with prisons that COSTS MONEY (this as the inane three strikes laws and other absurd California justice keeps the prisons nice and full!)
Recall even the SCLM darlings at 60 Minutes went crazy over a report that prisoners were on line for transplants (damn their constitutional rights to medical care– damn them all!) Not the issue of, say, how much money treating prisoners might cost (which might be interesting in its own right)– but just VISCERALLY– it was just WRONG for prisoners to get transplants (and we’re not necessarily talking about lifers).
Unfortunately, we are a smug, self-satisfied society, who likes things easy. “Punish prisoners” is easy and sounds good. Even if its a social disaster.
Dave
Mixed opinions, as usual.
One the one hand, I don’t think we need to get ‘soft’ on crime… but on the other, I think the way to be ‘tough’ on crime is to make the sentences mean what they say.
I also have vague thoughts along the lines of needing a higher percentage of ‘hung by the neck until dead’ type of executions for Death Row prisoners.
Give the guy on the street vaguely considering crime as a way of life, a visible, gross, painful-looking deterrent.
Not a media circus about a midnight ‘lethal injection’.
And honestly, while I don’t want to make prisoners exempt from decent medical treatment, at the same time, they (and illegal aliens) should not get preference above law-abiding citizens of the United States of America.
Too, if someone is sentenced to die, has used up their appeals, etc… I don’t see the point of rushing them to the hospital to get a non-communicative disease treated, or an organ transplant, just so we can have a Proper Lethal Injection a week later.
Hm. I may copy this over into a post on my blog (http://belisaurius.blogspot.com) and expand on it a bit… Guess I had more to say than I thought.
tom scott
From the SF Examiner
“The prison guards’ union, for example, is a staunch supporter of the governor, to the tune of $661,000 if one includes, besides direct contributions of $305,000, the $356,000 in Governor’s Cup golf fund-raisers at Pebble Beach.
In January, Gov. Davis granted the guards a raise of 33.76 percent by 2006, a hike of $1 billion overall. He is also giving them something else.”
Go figure
Jake
Does Gray Davis do anything right? I can not believe 1 person (including himself) would ever vote for Davis. He should be ran out of town.
Methuselah's Daughter
The criminal justice system in America is a disaster, to be certain. It is one of life