The American prison system makes no sense

Great Debates
1

I’ve been watching Lockdown which is a national geographic documentary series about different prisons around the country. It’s pretty fascinating to me how crafty the inmates are, how different their priorities and outlook on life are than mine as a free man…and also because I simply cannot process how anyone would be a corrections officer locked in with these highly dangerous, musclebound people there for life who wouldn’t blink before killing you.

Anyway, what prompted me to make this thread is how little the prison system makes sense, except as a torture device. We have an extremely high recidivism rate in this country, and you can easily see why with how these prisoners are treated. They are given awful food, are afraid for their lives and fear rape, extortion etc. Once they are out, they are expected to go from a life of gangbanging to holding down a 9-5 instantly or else their parole officer can send them back to the joint.

What I don’t understand is why EVERYONE isn’t pro-prison reform. Our system does not work, if it’s foremost goal is to protect society…those that aren’t locked up for life without the possibility of parole, will be back in our communities. I don’t see why everyone isn’t also for putting more money into the system so that they can hire more Corrections Officers for the safety of the prisoners and also the staff. (Well actually, I can “see” why people who think all prisoners should be tortured couldn’t care less about prisoner safety, since they get off on punishment…but the staff are trying to make a living and they keep US safe by keeping THEM in there, so don’t we want them protected?)

It’s popular with morons for politicians to claim to be “tough on crime”, but these outdated methods of thinking basically send timebombs back into our communities. We need more money for prison outreach and whatever we can do to make it so prisoners can make a decent living when they get out, we need to do.

Also question, why do people who are convicted of crimes have to say so when applying for a job? I can understand say, a convicted sex offender being barred from being a school bus driver, but I don’t understand HOW it helps society if it is impossible for ex-cons to get legitimate jobs with decent wages. I think that ex-cons should have councelors who tell them what jobs they can or cannot apply for, and if the ex-con disagrees there should be an appeals board or something. If the ex-con is approved to work at that job, it should be none of the employer’s business whether he has been convicted of a crime and what for.

2

We need more money for education, housing, medical care, food, transportation, child care, Legal Services, etc. all for citizens that have not been convicted of felonies. Prisons and prisoners are a much lower budget priority and rightfully so.

3

Becaue you have to be specifically for something, not jsut generic “reform,” and we don’t have a strong track record of successful alternatives.

If culture was very different (in ways many prison reformers wouldn’t like) maybe other things could succeed. However, as a practical matter msot Americans have enough to worry about and jsut don’t give a damn anymore. Rising crime and unstoppable violence dutring the 70’s and 80’s killed any sympathy or interest.

4

Having a huge incarceration rate is not saving the U.S. any money.

5

I agree that there are problems with our prisons, but they’re more symptoms of systemic flaws rather than just our prisons. For instance, cost and crowding make management of prisoners extremely difficult, which means fewer guards per inmate, worse conditions, etc. Now, one can either address crowding by building more and more prisons, thus increasing costs accordingly, so it’s self-defeating, or we can address the cause of those problems, which largely involves our laws and justice system, particularly with relation to the drug war.

Another major cause of criminal behavior is lack of education, poverty, and the economy. So, we can either priorite reforming the prison system to accomodate these people, which is like putting a band-aid on the problem, or work on the social issues that caused them to do it in the first place which both helps fix the prison problem AND helps fix those other problems as well.

So, sure, I’d like to see some reform in our prisons, but given a choice between applying our time, money, and effort toward that, or toward address the unlying systemic problems, we should choose the latter.

6

So we used to have unstoppable violence until we stopped it?

7

If prisons are run as for-profit private corporations, there is strong incentive to:

  • Get more clients (prisoners)
  • Have return clients (increased recidivism rates)
  • Cut costs by maintaining a minimum number of staff
  • spend as small amount as possible on those things that do not increase profit (meals, training facilities, education)

If the prisons are there to turn a profit, this is what you’ll get.

8

America is a land of haves and have nots. Prisoners are the lowest of the have nots. The Haves now want more from the Have Nots not in prison, and make money off the deal.

You can see this every day by reading/watching the news.

9

We have to incarcerate as many people convicted of crimes as possible. Otherwise the phrase “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” wouldn’t make sense. And simplistic phrases make the best public policy.:rolleyes:

10

Don’t blame prisons for the number of people who are incarcerated. Prisons don’t grab people off the streets to fill empty cells. If you think America has too high an incaceration rate, then look at the legislatures and court systems.

Or if you want to look at the problem more broadly, look at the schools and community centers and libraries and day care centers. Prison is just the final symptom in a chain of social failure. If you want to reform society you’re better off putting your resources earlier in the chain. A million dollars spent on a school will do a lot more than a million dollars spent on a prison.

11

Is its foremost goal to protect society, is one question to ask yourself. I recall reading studies that suggest that very often a person will claim the goal of punishment is something utilitarian, but when it’s put to the test, the only factor that will accurately predict the punishment they dole out is their personal sense of moral outrage. They’ll claim they’re motivated by deterrence or public safety, but the severity of the punishment they’d assess themselves doesn’t correspond to how deterrable, or how much of a continuing public danger, the offense is.

In other words, for at least a lot of people, the point of punishment is to scratch a just deserts kind of itch. That being the case, the suggestion that we ought to take steps to improve prisoner well-being would equate to an across-the-board relaxing of criminal penalties – not popular. I also think there’s something to the idea that it’s easier to prevent something from happening in the first place than it is to fix it once it’s happened. If we were building a prison system from scratch, people might be on board with the idea that this level of violence and corruption is unconscionable, but since it’s already like this, it seems like we’d be going out of our way to make prisoners’ lives easier, which gets back to the moral outrage.

12

True that. But I’ll go out on a limb and guess that much about stressful prison living is less about saving taxpayer dollars than deliberate “retribution.”

Anyone who believes that right-wing rhetoric about spending cuts is about saving taxpayer dollars probably believes in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. Head Start, for example, pays for itself several times over just in juvenile crime reduction, let alone adult crime reduction, yet was a favorite “cost” target of right-wingers.

There’s a reason why Republicans are happy to cut programs like Head Start and Public Broadcasting which tend to empower the lower classes, but that reason is not to lower tax rates on the rich by another 0.0001%.

13

The issue is complicated by the fact that no politician is going to want to appear soft on crime and therefore, legislatures punt on the issue of justice and prison reform whenever it comes up.

A large segment of society acknowledges that incarcerating drug users is probably counter productive, but heaven help a politician who works to change the drug laws if anyone currently in prison on drug charges gets out because of his/her work and ends up killing someone. That politician will be skewered in the next election.

14

Can I get a cite on the Head Start thing? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I’ve heard differently, and that most gains even out by second or third grade.

15

Hear, hear!

And I would add that we need reforms that will end the destruction of the family.

16

You’re assuming that schools suck. From what I’ve heard, most schools in poor neighborhoods fail more because the students aren’t taught by their parents to care about schooling, to believe that they can succeed, etc. than because the teachers aren’t there every day trying to teach the kids. How are you supposed to legislate making parents believe in their kids?

There’s the argument to be made that if the end of the chain sucks enough, kids might pay more attention in school, out of fear. But if prison life is all about gangbanging and living in poor conditions, then how is that any different from the life the prisoners would be living on the outside, in their poor neighborhood? You can’t expect it to put a lot of fear into people.

If you dump money into prisons and make it really suck for those who are incarcerated – one person per cell with no contact with anyone but visitors, or breaking rocks in a field every day – then it’s possible that you’d see a lot more push to stay out of prison, even if it meant going straight.

17

When they have tried everything else, perhaps those in power might attempt rehabilitation, however to achieve this would be incredibly expensive.

Money, especially public money, is political and crime is also political which makes spending public money on criminals yet more so.

There is no one solution to crime, simplistic thinkers such as the overwhelming majority of voters listen to simplistic speeches given by politicians and persuade themselves that such an answer must exist.

Rehabilitation takes a huge amount of time, and ultimately there would be plenty of falling back, not something that the public wants to hear.

The best way to deal with crime has been alluded to in an earlier post, spend the money in other places and prevent folks from becoming criminals, it would mean a transfer of power from public opinion to far more respect to the teaching and social worker professions.

The problem here seems to be that the public and politicians love to excoriate under-resourced public servants.How many CEOs would remain in post if the built their position upon attacking the competance and work ethic of their own employees? Yet this is what city and federal politicians do all the time, and the public just loves to get all hot about it

Individuality is a massive item in the US psyche, and the right to be arsewipe parents with no regard to the consequencies to society and individual children seems to be part of that ‘right to individuality’.

The reason your prisons are full is a failure of your society, if you find the 2 million in prisons, with a majority of them being from black groupings acceptable, then you will continue to vote for the type of folk who advocate cuts to social programes and saving your tax dollars, but ultimately the natural consequence of this abrogation of social responsibility is to have more people in prison.

I do have to wonder, during ‘Black history month’ if the manufacture of valuable goods on a grand scale from an incarcerated workforce from an underprivelidged background and from certain ethnic minorities has certain echoes?

18

The experience of being in prison already sucks. In theory, that would be fine except for one thing: Most incarcerated people will eventually get out and rejoin society.

That article is from 2004, and says that 10% of all prisoners are serving life sentences. One could probably assume that it’s higher now, but even if it is, that means relatively few people go away permanently. They’re going to be out among us again, so I ask what is to be gained by having them treated badly in prison? Traumatize a person and put them back in society and I think that’s asking for trouble.

19

Keep in mind I actually am an expert on prison conditions. Prisons are not being run to make prisoners miserable. The main goal of prisons is to keep things quiet and under control. Of course, the methods used to keep things quiet and under control often make prisoners miserable.

But the reality is that if you lock a few hundred criminals up together, control is pretty much a necessity. The prisoners might not like it but if the prison administration decided to ease up on the control they exercize, the general misery would not decrease. It would in fact sharply increase as the prisoners, under less control by the staff, had more opportunities to “interact” with each other. Let’s face facts, it’s not the guards who are raping prisoners, stabbing prisoners, and stealing from prisoners - it’s the other prisoners who are making prison conditions miserable.

20

I don’t have a cite but I don’t think there is any correllation with how much the prison sucks and recidivism rates. Either the inmates go back to society with the opportunity and skills to rejoin society and work or they don’t. When you can’t get shelter or feed yourself, or get your fix because you went to prison as an addict and still got high inside, and you’re on the street and still need your drugs, it doesn’t matter how much prison sucks…you need money and drugs NOW.

Which is why job programs, counseling, and social services is so important. I think the problem is the vast majority of people see prison’s purpose as a vengeance device, and they don’t think how these people will one day be your neighbors, so it’s a pretty good idea to pay a few bucks so they learn how to weld while in the joint and have a parole officer who has less than 500 cases so he can actually supervise them post-incarceration. It seriously HAS to be cheaper than housing them when they re-offend.

Sorry, I did not mean to imply I thought they were being run to make the prisoners miserable, I think it is a side effect of voters’ short sided apathy to treatment of prisoners.

If you are talking about me, I never once said anything about giving the inmates more control, in fact on Lockdown at one prison in Wyoming the staff do an average of 26 hours overtime a month because they are staffed at 50%. I think that is unsafe for both staff and inmates, and with full staff they would have MORE control over inmates.