Just curious to see what you all think. I personally think we should privatize the prison system and reform our drug laws (especially marijuana). Will it ever be likely that one day our prison system will become such a troublesome burden on our economy that we will be forced to have them privatized? Thanks.
Legalize victimless crimes, like marijuana possession and prostitution.
Have more jails like this one, cheaper to run and easier to expand.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9907/27/tough.sheriff/
More house arrest and electronic monitoring for non-violent offenders.
Prisoner Deathmatches.
Just kidding. Replacing drug laws with drug regulations, as exist for other consumer products, would help immensely.
Pass a law that mandates appropriations for prisons everytime lawn’ order legislators pass new criminalization laws (like Three Strikes laws). Demand a penal system impact study that projects the increase in prisoners as a result of the the new law, and require X dollars per prisoner be appropriated before the law can take effect. The effect will be to force legislators to raise taxes and bear the consequences of their actions when they feel the need to “get tough on crime” right before an election.
Decriminalize drugs. Over a third of the people in prison are doing time for drug crimes.
Prison privatization doesn’t work. It actually ends up costing more than government run prisons. The businesses that are claiming to be cheaper are distorting the data.
Joe Arpaio is a joke. The man doesn’t know anything about running a real prison.
Fear Itself pointed out another one. Get rid of all mandatory sentencing laws for non-violent criminals. It’s a disgrace when a rapist is let out to make room for someone who just got thirty years for his third shoplifting conviction.
I like some of the recommendation so far. Mandatory minimums, persisten offender laws and draconian drug laws are a big part of the problem.
How about something that might actually change the way people act (and not just how we respond to their actions)? Education, investment in urban communities, trying to provide hope to an entire class of people who see very little of it.
The solution is definitely NOT to build more prisons. Build them, and someone will do their dangdest to fill 'em up. Two million incarcerated is plenty for this land of the free.
I disagree. The legislature and the courts determine how many people go to prison, not the wardens and the guards. Saying that building prisons encourages imprisonment is like arguing that we shouldn’t build hospitals because it only encourages people to get sick.
Think of crime as water. Prison is the final step in the law enforcement process; the drain if you will. If the water is rising you don’t slow down the flow of water by plugging up the drain, you do it by turning off the faucet. As Fear wrote, the amount of prison space should be equal to the amount of people being sent to prison by the courts.
Change the culture to not reflexively think “Throw 'em in jail!” is the solution for all of society’s ills.
And while we’re at it, let’s equate major corporate crimes with other major crimes, so CEOs will think twice before defrocking thousands of taxpayers with shady bookkeeping tricks. Betcha Enron would never have gotten in the mess it’s in if there was a real chance Ken Lay et al would go to a federal pound-me-in-the-arse prison if they were convicted…
No- :three strikes" laws are GOOD. They keep repeat violent offenders locked up.
What we need to do is get rid of all the marijuana laws, and release all the offenders. That’s a good first step. Let’s see how it works.
All we are doing is putting some pot heads in jail- where they are trained & brainwashed into being hardcore criminals. In order to survive- they have to join a gang, Once in the gang, they’ll be a criminal for life when they get out. This is so stupid it makes my brains hurt.
If we can’t do that, have some Governor commute all their sentances to work-parole or public service.
I also think we could solve a lot of our recruiting problems if young first offenders were allowed to enlist instead. Many of the youths come from a culture where you need to belong to a gang- let’s get them out of that culture.
This might not do much good. There’s going to have to be a sanction for those who violate whatever conditions are placed on their release. The most common sanction is incarceration for some period of time, and the people most likely to violate the conditions of their release are those convicted of drug offenses.
This would have to be refined a bit more before I wouldl agree with it. Because while I certainly wouldn’t agree with sentencing someone to thirty years for a third shoplifting conviction (assuming that such a thing ever happens), I would not really have a problem with sentencing someone to thirty years for a third non-violent burglary conviction, or a third conviction for grand larceny. Non-violent and victimless are not the same thing.
On the issue of decriminalizing drugs- I have no problem with that, in theory. However, you (generic you) can’t have it both ways. If drugs are decriminalized because it’s a victimless crime, it’s no one else’s business what you put in your body or whatever the reason might be, then I expect not to see people convicted of other crimes, those with victims, (such as assault, burglaries, larcenies, possession of stolen property etc ) sentenced to drug treatment programs as an alternative to incarceration on based on the theory that the person wouldn’t have committed that larceny,burglary or assault but for the drug use. If drugs are going to be decriminalized, then the person who commits a crime to get money to buy drugs should be treated exactly the same as one who commits crimes to get money to buy cigarettes or shoes or to gamble . Those people don’t get to go to programs to stop smoking or gambling or shopping instead of prison.
How about stepping back to think about why we even have prisons in the first place, and what they’re supposed to accomplish.
Are they supposed to punish criminals? Are they supposed to rehabilitate criminals? Are they supposed to remove dangerous people from society? Are they supposed to reduce crime?
I think everyone needs to agree on what the heck the whole system is supposed to do in the first place. Then we can think about how to make it work better.
At the state level, the over crowding is today largely a matter of lack of operational funding, not “space.”
A number of years ago states saw the rising rate of prisoner growth and geered up building new prisons in anticipation of this, but it can take years to get new prisons online. In the mean time, the RATE of growth had fallen dramatically and shortly thereafter the state budget crunch hit. The system funding couldn’t operate all prisons.
The crime rate has fallen a lot over the last decade and while the number of prisoners may have grown, the rate of prisoner growth has fallen.
My point was not that wardens are responsible for filling the prisons. At least not directly. But prisons are big business. Once a locality or state or the federal government has spent big bucks to build a new facility, there become strong institutional pressures to make sure that it is being put to use. There are also strong private lobbying interests (such as the that of prison guards) which create additional political pressure regarding policy decisions relating to prisons. And more generally and perhaps more importantly, the more we simply say “build more prisons” the less likely we are to critically examine the how and the why of our enormous prisoner population. To change your hospital anology, I’d say building more prisons in response to overcrowding issues is perhaps more akin to building more hospitals in response to a typhoid (for example) epidemic–yeah, it creates more beds and better conditions for those who are there, but does nothing to actually get to the root of the problem (i.e. cleaning up food and water supplies).
I think this is a really bad idea… and it worked out the opposite in the 70s when this kind of thing was common. Instead of lots of good recuits for the military, the military was overrun with druggies and other would-be-felons, to the point where officers were terrified to enter enlisted barracks without sidearms and armed guards and most army bases had huge problems with drug dealing and whatnot. It took an almost Soviet-style purge in the late 70s to cure this…
The US Military is a volunteer army, which is part of the reason it’s so damn good at it’s job. Everyone in it wants to be there, with a few exceptions… and the capability of such an army was recently proved by less than 200,000 troops being able to destroy the Iraqi army on their own ground after months of the enemy being able to fortify it’s position. Partially technology advantage, but mostly it was the quality of the soldiers…
That said, I think the community service idea is a fantastic one, and think decriminalizing most drug crimes (excepting drugs sold to minors) is a fantastic idea (especially marijuana). Just don’t send 'em into the military thinking the military can fix em. It won’t happen and might just break the forces.
Soylent Green.
What?
We’ve got to feed the remaining prisoners something ! 
Well, I would simply have all murders, rapist, and child molestors taken out and shot, to free up room for the normal assortment of thieves & thugs. That Soylent green idea sounds pretty useful here too.
More seriously, we have to ask ourselves as society, how much are we willing to pay to keep criminals off the streets, and are there really too many people in prision right now? ( I do think pot smoking should be legal, and other drug use punished by non-prison punishments.) If people did the crime, they should do the time, even if a lot of people are breaking the law. Many people have suggested the removal of various three-strikes laws, mandatory minimal sentancing, and other “tough on crime laws” that have been passed in that last 10-15 years. I disagree; crime rates have dropped significantly during the timeframe, and those laws are partly responsible. Of course, the drop in crime is the result of myriad of different factors, the import & impact of each worthy of a Great Debate in and of themselves.
Futhermore, it has been suggested that it would better for the government to address the “root social issues” that to throw people in prison. I disagree; from what I have seen is that governments (or at least the ones in these United States one) suck at fixing social problems, and can throw huge amounts of money to little effect trying to correct social programs. On the other hand, governments are very good at inflicting organized violence on groups of people, and having the government just go and round up criminals and throw them in jail is something the government can do fairly well, and with a noticeable, easy to measure impact.
Some people seem to feel that prisons are a failure because they’re being built as the crime rate is dropping.
That was the whole idea.
It may not be the ideal solution. But people came up with the simple theory that locking up criminals would reduce the crime rate. And it turns out they were right. The reason (or at least one reason) the crime rate has gone down has been the massive increase in incarceration rates. It’s a massive government program that actually acheived its stated goals.
The ironic result is that people are complaining about it. Now that the crime rate is down people don’t see the justification for bearing the continued cost of a massive prison system.
But if we stop incarcerating criminals, without replacing imprisonment with an equally effective system, the crime rate will go back on the rise. Then, when the crime rate is high, there will once again be public demands for locking criminlas up and throwing away the key.
Is this your opinion, or do you have some hard data to back this assumption up? Correlation does not equal causation.
The problem being debated is not the cost of prisons, but the overcrowding problem. If we believe we can create safer streets by sentencing more criminals, we have to raise taxes and build more prisons. Unfortunately, the very legislators who are the most ardent proponents of tougher sentencing also want massive tax cuts. Does anyone else see this as terribly irresponsible?