And I’m a little more inclined to listen to the government statistics. Granted, this is not clear if it’s measuring drug offenses in isolation or just blanket including everyone with a drug charge (ie, yeah you killed 18 people, but you were high while doing it = drug offense).
Edit: I believe the 14% figure was in reference to those Obama floated releasing, who were basically squeaky clean besides having some negligible amount of pot or something on them. In other words, those who it shouldn’t really be a political thing to release, but of course everything from the POTUS is politicized.
Despite their usual euphemistic names, Departments of Correction (prisons) don’t really do much correction, i.e. rehabilitation. In many, there are a handful of drug/substance abuse counseling programs or classes, but very few kinds of programs that could actually help someone make better decisions with their life and actually start making a new life by finding a non-halfway house/shelter place to live, getting a job, etc.
It also doesn’t help the recidivism rate that felons, violent and non-violent alike, usually can find very few employers that are willing to hire them. And very few apartment complexes willing to lease them apartments. Many people who go to prison don’t exactly come from stable, healthy family situations, and that might mean they don’t have family members who can offer them a place to stay or financial help when they get out. All this, combined with the lack of programs and resources for actually rehabilitating someone in prison, can make committing new crimes seem like a path of lesser resistance.
I don’t see what’s “contrary” about those figures. Maybe I need to clarify a few things:
538 published that article in July 2015, and at that time there were 207,847 people incarcerated in federal prisons, 48.6% of which were there for drug offenses. Your cite (with statistics updated as of the end of October 2016) shows pretty much the same thing 179,499 people incarcerated in federal prisons, 46.4% of which are there for drug offenses. There’s some minor fluctuation there over a period of ~15 months, but no major changes.
The number of federal prisoners is absolutely dwarfed by the number of people in state-run prisons (1,358,875 as of July 2015) and city and county jails (744,600, again as of July 2015). It’s basically 10x more prisoners at the state and local level than the federal level.
BTW, those last two numbers are government statistics too, just maintained by the DoJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics because they deal with a different segment of the prison population: those under state or local government control, rather than the federal prisoners managed by the Bureau of Prisons.
Yeah, it really seems like sentencing someone to prison is saying “We’ve decided you are no longer allowed to have a legitimate job or home. But we’ll at least send you to crime college so you can learn how to commit more lucrative crimes after you get out.”
My understanding is that most of the people in prison already graduated from crime college and committed more “lucrative” / severe / heinous crimes. I’m comfortable with them staying there and serving the rest of their sentences.
If we want to have a conversation about releasing drug runners and drug dealers that haven’t shot / stabbed / raped anyone (eg “non-violent”), maybe it’s a conversation worth having, but even if we decide to release all of the non-violent ones, we’re still going to be the country that incarcerates the most people in the world.
The vast majority of prisoners will be released at some point. Right now, our approach seems to be to throw them to the wolves after tacking on even more hurdles for them to overcome to support themselves while also expecting them to be law-abiding citizens.
Until we realize that in-custody rehabilitation, both substance abuse and non-substance abuse related, is a key crime prevention tool and not “coddling” or “touchy-feely crap,” then we will continue to make the same mistakes that repeat offenders do - making poor and short-sighted decisions and expecting different outcomes each time. This doesn’t mean giving them each a tv, Playstation, and their own room like Norway mass murderer Anders Breivik, but thankfully there are plenty of other options out there.
Unless they’re on death row or get Dahmered in g-pop, they’ll eventually be released, and then they’ll be full fledged, tenured, crime professors. And despite what you might have heard, most people aren’t born criminals. They’re forced into crime for reasons of poverty or desperation, and then they go to jail, where they learn a) that they won’t be getting anymore jobs after that and b) all the illegal ways to obtain money, property, and eliminate their enemies in order to make up for a).
I’m not saying no one deserves punishment, just that prison seems to be entirely counterproductive if the goal is “less crime”. And if we just want to torture bad guys for revenge, there are cheaper ways to do that than prison.
To answer the original OP’s question with an opinion- No, I don’t think so.
As far as higher crime rate in US goes, though-- I wonder how much of it is related to how fluid our society is? With people moving around ever which way for work, there are fewer stable, multi-generational households/less accountability being places on younger people by people they’ve known their entire lives.
Crime is a conscious activity. Are you suggesting it is not?
Men may be more likely to commit bank robberies than women, but bank robbers in general are quite rare.
Robbing a bank is usually a conscious choice. Very rarely is anybody forced to commit a bank robbery. (It has happened, see here: The rise and fall of the Bombshell Bandit - BBC News - female example too, if that’s somehow relevant.)
Maybe someone is seriously starving, and welfare is not enough, and they can’t find or keep a job… but even that’s no excuse. I heard about a homeless person who made an “industry” of going to an expensive restaurant, ordering a meal, and when asked to pay simply wouldn’t (because he couldn’t). He would wait for the police to be called and would go back to jail where they’d feed him for free (he wouldn’t run away, as this was his goal). Even though he committed a crime, nobody was threatened, and his aim was obvious. He was motivated by survival, not greed.
Some bank robbers are idiots, and some plan their operations quite well, so I don’t think it’s due solely to an inability to think ahead, Darwin Award-style testosterone poisoning, etc. I guess I’m saying I see very few excuses that would “justify” bank robbery. The justice system might let you off if someone threatened your family if you didn’t rob a bank…
As for the second… no excuses. If someone was truly suffering from some incredibly bizarre and powerful mental disorder that “forced” them to sexually assault people (or some subset thereof, perhaps only attractive women) then instead of putting them in jail they should be put in a high security mental hospital until they are no longer a threat (could be there for life, or until they’re too frail to pull it off, or until they’ve been given some sort of long-term chemical castration that actually works). I am of course ignoring some bizarre circumstance where someone is forced to do so at gunpoint (in which case there are two victims, with the rapist being the third person holding the gun). I simply do not accept that any man could commit rape due to “circumstances” or “biological factors”, and if it turns out I’m wrong and that can actually happen, well, see what I said about the mental hospital.
Maybe some men are more likely to fantasize about rape, or would be happy to do so and only don’t because they fear the consequences… but they know it’s wrong anyway. If we have to use fear of prison to keep them in line, so be it.
This is what I think, but I question this “solution” to non-violent drug offenses. Prisons aren’t doing enough to treat their addiction, so it’s not surprising that prisoners will go back to abusing drugs once they’re out of prison. Putting someone in prison longer isn’t going to break their addiction*, and putting lots of people in jail for life because they can’t shake an addiction is a punishment that does not suit the crime.
*China actually did something like this, see here: Opium - Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) - the article is overly optimistic, as there’s still a drug problem, but it’s possible all of those people who got rounded up were “cured”. A more extensive article I had read and can’t find now talked about how many people literally died of withdrawal in prison (the human rights violations required to pull this off means it shouldn’t be practiced), and featured at least one person who said they were happy that they had been put through this since nothing else had worked for them.
This is patently false. Psychological state, intent and extenuating circumstances very much come into play when charging and sentencing someone for a crime. Premeditated murder carries a stiffer sentence than manslaughter. The mentally incompetent are usually sent to psychiatric facilities, not prisons and first time offenders may receive a lighter sentence, depending on circumstances.
Cleaning up garbage along the side of the highway is productive.
By your logic, if I murder someone, the best thing to do is to get me back to work so I can continue being productive. That doesn’t do much to deter me from killing again, nor does it provide any justice for my victims.
Also to prevent them from doing it again for a time.
I’m not sure why this is relevant. Generally I think people don’t commit crimes because most people aren’t assholes. Or at the very least, they buy into the social contract that if they don’t want to be the victim of a crime, they can’t commit crimes either. The “why” you aren’t out there raping and murdering is probably a bit less important than the fact that you aren’t doing it.
I guess I wasn’t clear enough. The part I wanted a cite for was “most people” [are] “forced into crime for reasons of poverty or desperation”. What’s your evidence for this claim?
That’s true, but I believe that past some point, heavier sentences don’t have any more deterrence effects. Let’s assume you’re an ordinary citizen with a relatively regular life, tempted to commit some heinous crime for which the usual sentence is, say, 10 years. You know that if you commit this crime, you’ll spend what is really a long time in a really bad place. You know you’ll lose your job, your house, your children. That you will be publically shamed and vindicated. That your friends and family will turn their back on you. That you’ll have a hard time ever finding again a good job, or even any job. Basically you’re going to completely wretch your life over this crime.
There might be some very rare people who will rationally decide to nevertheless commit the crime ( I’ve a 60% risk of getting caught, but this robbery will net me $ 10 millions if I don’t, so it’s worth the risk), but the overwhelming majority won’t. They will commit it because they are unable to control their impulses, or are convinced they won’t get caught, or just don’t think at all about the consequences, or are mentally unbalanced, or have such a terrible life that they think they have nothing to lose, or are so bent on commiting the crime that they don’t give a shit about the possible consequences, etc…
I don’t believe that a criminal who isn’t deterred by a 10 years sentence and a wretched life is going to be deterred by a 30 years sentence or a death sentence. Again with some fringe exceptions, a rational actor carefully considering the pluses and the minuses isn’t going to risk throwing his life away for some generally minimal gain. So, I believe in deterrence only up to a point. Generally rational and generally sane people will shy away from crime even with sentences much lower than those usually dealt for serious crimes.
On the other hand, contrarily to the OP, I don’t have any issue with the concept of punishment, and even, though many will find it apalling, of vengeance. IOW, even though I believe that raising the sentence from 10 years to 30 years will have almost no effect on the crime rate, I’ve still no problem with handing a 30 years sentence if the crime is heinous enough.
On the third hand, I still think that rehabilitation should still be a major goal, that most of our western societies only do token and vastly insufficient efforts to rehabilitate criminals, and that we seem happy with getting out of the justice system people who are generally worst than when they entered it rather than better.
From this thread and others I get the idea that a lot of Americans would be in favor of all violent crimes carrying a life sentence for the first offense.
All the talk of warehousing the criminal so he can’t commit more crimes sounds good, but falls apart when you eventually release them along with having made it impossible for them to work or live honestly.
So the obvious solution is to not release them. Ever. The fix for overcrowding is simple. If your prison can hold 10,000 people put that many in. When the 10,001st shows up, simply shoot the most senior prisoner. Now you have room for the new guy. The fix is cheap too.
Of course this line of thinking is magical BS worthy of Breitbart. Not to mention deeply, deeply evil. But I have no doubt it’d get a lot of traction in a national referendum. As did a bunch of other Breitbart-esque magical BS in a recent national referendum.
Crime rates, especially for violent crimes, have dropped significantly across the developed world, despite most of the developed world coming nowhere near the US’ incarceration rate.
Now if we want to talk about why crime rates are dropping, that’s a very interesting discussion to be had. But the cause doesn’t seem to be locking up bad guys more often and for longer.
In the US though it doesn’t matter: stiffer sentences are always the solution, no matter what the data show.
The chair, chamber, or needle should be working all day everyday at all prisons in the US. Basic non-violent crime should be 5-10 years. Anything else should be death penalty.
(Not that I support it as such), but sometimes I almost feel like bringing back flogging. Alkl the local toughs I see at the Court Complex, I suspect they’ll shit their pants if the judge announces 20 lashes for one of their friends/prison buddies. Might keep them from actual crimes.
(Not that I support it as such), but sometimes I almost feel like bringing back flogging. Alkl the local toughs I see at the Court Complex, I suspect they’ll shit their pants if the judge announces 20 lashes for one of their friends/prison buddies. Might keep them from actual crimes.