So to eliminate crime all together, why not just incarcerate everyone now?
Don’t get me wrong rjung, I am with you on this. I think over-incarceration is a knee-jerk response that is promoted as a feel good sop to the conservative constituentcy. But given that it is so popular and irresistable, I at least demand that legislators do the responsible thing and raise taxes to pay for the security they crave.
The trouble is, of course, that prisons are supposed to do each of those not necessarily compatible things. Getting people to agree on a single purpose is never going to happen. I think the goal of the criminal justice system is to reduce crime, and prisons should be to keep the criminals off the streets until they are rehabilitated, whenever the hell that is.
Otherwise, I second (or third) FearItself’s comments about tying the prison budget to the criminal statute budget. I hate it when people say, “Throw the bums in jail” but when it comes to building prisons many of the same ones say “Not in my backyard.”
“Business” implies turning a profit. Could you please elaborate some on the business model for a modern penal facility?
Prisons are not a big business because they do not generate revenue. Once the prison is built, it becomes a sunk cost. That is to say the money is spent regardless of the number of prisoners it holds. Filling the prison with inmates does not diminish these costs and can only add more as the prisoners must be fed, clothed and guarded. There really is no economic incentive as far as I can see to fill prisons for the sake of filling them.
Why? People want criminals off the street. That doesn’t mean they want them locked up next door.
Paging Casdave
They have to put them somewhere! Inevitably, it will be in someones neighborhood. But I don’t understand why people are so afraid of prisons in their communities. All the bad guys are locked up! Even if prisoners escape, the last thing they are going to do is stick around… they’re going to get the hell out of there ASAP.
Some people don’t want prisons in their communities. Others do. I suspect it had a lot to do with what kind of community it is. I live in Queens ,NY. I wouldn’t want a prison or a jail in my community. Not because I’m afraid of the criminals- they’re in the neighborhood already. On parole , probation ,served their time or haven’t been caught yet. I dont want a prison or a jail for the same reason I wouldn’t want a hospital or a factory - it’s a residential neighborhod, where most houses don’t have driveways and the parking and traffic is bad enough already. My understanding is that upstate NY communities often want prisons, because with the prison comes jobs and customers for local businesses.
Exactly. We’ve inherited this "prison system:, and we sadly don’t know why we have it or what we’re supposed to do with it.
Yes, it’s probably better than the massive executions they had previously, but it’s still a several-hundred-years-old idea that was based on specious logic then, and is being supported now b/c we don’t know what the f— else to do about crime.
Seriously. Stop and think about it. How does isolating a human being from regular society make them stop committing crime once they get out? Or does it not do that, and the fear of such isolation is supposed to be enough to convince OTHERS to not commit crime (except crime keeps happening, so apparently that presumption is off-base).
We need to admit we don’t know how to keep people from committing crimes and being violent.
It’s not necessarily fear of escaped inmates, but of property values declining because of a prison’s proximity. I’ve never shopped for a home near a prison, but as I understand, it can really drive values down in the surrounding areas. I guess people just don’t want to look out their kitchen window and see a grim institution surrounded by barbed wire.
As to your remark about them wanting to get as far away as possible after escape, it doesn’t always work out that way. Escapes are often poorly planned, sometimes spur-of-the-moment. The inmate may find that he has nowhere to go, and no way of getting there. Most escapees never make it very far, and are often captured within a few miles of the prison.
About a year ago, an inmate escaped from the prison in which my husband works. His ride didn’t show up, so he was on foot. He found a payphone and tried to call friends, but no one would come and get him. He wandered around in a Wal-Mart two miles from the institution for hours, and finally called the prison to tell them to come pick him up.
Quite correct.
My husband is in upper management in our state’s correctional system, so he rubs elbows with directors at the highest levels in our state. I can tell you for a fact that there is no desire whatsoever to increase the population. Actually, the opposite is true, because due to budget cuts, prisons are closing, meaning inmates have to be crammed into the remaining already-overcrowded institutions.
Over-crowded institutions are more dangerous places to work. Security must be slackened in order to accomodate the extra prisoners. (My husban’s institution is at 250% capacity. Inmates have to sleep on cots in the hallways.)
Our justice system is reactionary. It’s not designed to prevent crime, but to deal with it after the fact. Yes, the concept of a deterrent effect is part of it, but we all know that people don’t commit crimes expecting to be caught. Almost everyone thinks they’ll get away with it.
Isolating criminals from “regular” society isn’t necessarily the problem. Firstly, they probably didn’t come from “regular” society to begin with, and secondly, despite Hollywood’s version of it, prison life can approximate “regular” life to a certain extent.
The problem is trying to become a productive citizen after release. An ex-inmate may have every intent of “playing it straight” once he’s released-- getting a job, buying a house, paying taxes and whatnot-- only to discover that he’s very limited in what he can do to support himself. People don’t want to hire ex-cons. Even if he has taken advantage of all of the educational and vocational programs while incarcerated, the inmate may find that getting a good-paying job on the outside is next to impossible. Crime can appear an attractive means of supporting oneself after efforts to find honest work are repeatedly repulsed.
Well it’s difficult to provide hard facts about why people aren’t doing something. But I think it’s been pretty well shown that there are some people who commit a statistically disproportionate amount of crime. Remove these individuals from society and the general crime rate will decline. It’s not like previous non-criminals are going to step in to pick up the slack. And empirical evidence has shown that this theory works in the real world.
You’re arguing two different points. Saying that we don’t know how to rehabiltate criminals is not the same as saying incarceration serves no purpose.
As I have pointed out, incarceration does lower the crime rate - not by rehabilitating criminals but by seperating them from the rest of society. It’s not the ideal solution but it has the overriding virtue that it’s one of only ideas that’s been demonstrated to be generally effective.
If you have suggestions about better ways to lower the crime rate, we’d like to hear them. But be prepared to give evidence they work before you expect society to replace the existing system with a new one.
True but that does not change the fact that people who are dangerous to society need to be isolated so that they do not harm others.
“Nelson’s a troubled, lonely, sad little boy. He needs to be isolated from everyone.”
-Marge Simpson
Unfortunately, although it separates the crooks from the rest of society, it doesn’t separate them from each other. Put a bunch of criminals together in the same building and you’ve basically got a Crooks Convention.
Is there a way to keep prisoners isolated from each other that doesn’t significantly increase the cost of locking them up in the first place?
The other problem is it’s unfair to people in the military. My father was an Air Force noncom, my wife’s father was a jet fighter pilot (the real thing, not like Bush) in the Navy. Both were decent, honorable men during their service, like I imagine most are. They certainly weren’t street toughs. Sure, the military makes for tough, disciplined men, but I think a criminal rehabilitation military unit would have to be a special branch. The movie “The Dirty Dozen” is kinda misleading as a model for the effect the military has on criminals. Most likely, Lee Marvin would have been fragged as soon as the mission was underway.
White collar crime is gonna be a lot tougher than that. Look at the Martha Stewart case for example. Looks like a triumph for justice, doesn’t it? But it’s not. The Martha Stewart case was a response to widespread insider trading on Wall Street. Hundreds of stockbrokers were doing things like leaking news of good-looking IPOs to favorite clients, or prospective clents keeping the news secret from other clients. How many people went to jail for it? Martha Stewart and maybe half a dozen others. Stewart’s the public scapegoat that’s letting a lot of very slimy guys slide out of the spotlight and continue to play their little games.
Maybe we could relieve the pressure on our prisons by taking a similar approach to other crimes. Instead of having hundreds or thousands of shoplifters in jail, just have Winona Rider and a dozen or so others there. Don’t go after ALL the pedophiles, just have a big show trial for Michael Jackson and lock him up. It might not solve our crime problem, but it would get plenty of media attention and make folks feel good that “we’re doing something about crime” which is really what prison–buiilding and mandatory sentencing are all about anyway.
We have to admit that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The criminal justice system as it is now is not entirely reactionary because its very existence does have a deterence effect. Speaking only of anecdotal evidence, my friend and neighbor has been dissuaded from drinking and driving by the existence of harsh drunk driving penalties. Now he drinks and takes cab rides instead of driving. Others, of course, are not similarly dissuaded and persist in bad behavior.
Actually, totally isolating crooks is a bad idea. It was tried in the very first penetentiary built in this country, by the Quakers. Prisoners were kept alone in their cells 24/7, the idea being that they would have a chance to meditate and get closer to God in their isolation. What actually happened is that most of them went mad. It’s also a problem for prisoners isolated in SuperMax facilities in our present system … too much time in such a prison, and these already-unstable but sane prisoners sometimes come out clinically insane.
I don’t have a problem with locking up violent offenders, but the main problem with our prison system is that it’s a dog-stupid system as it is now. We need to stop putting people in jail for drug offenses.
Hell, to tell you the truth, I don’t think we should put people in jail for white collar crimes. I think they should be put under house arrest in a crappy one-room apartment with only basic cable and then allowed to work, but all the money goes toward restitution of their victims, until they’ve paid off their crimes in full or their sentence is served, whichever comes first. I’m really not worried that Martha Stewart is gonna stick a shiv in my face and demand the contents of my wallet. She or David Rabinowitz, the generic insider trader, are not threats to the public safety. So why put them in cages?
As I have pointed out, incarceration does lower the crime rate - not by rehabilitating criminals but by seperating them from the rest of society.
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Sort of. Your statement is only true if you’re talking about the criminals who NEVER return to society. That’s fine. I have no problem with removing people who seem to be so dangerous to society that they can never be “fixed.” But what about the vast numbers of prisoners who will be returned to society–except that we’ve now seriously screwed up their ability to interact with normal people, and given them access to nothing but criminals for the stay of their incarceration. All we’ve done is delay the problem slightly, and possibly made it worse by making them less fit for society and more familiar with violence and criminals.
Imagine a man who makes a livng by robbing a liquor store every two weeks. Lock him up for a year; that’s 26 robberies he didn’t commit. Lock him up three years; that’s 78. Ten years; 260. Thirty years? By the time he gets out he’ll probably be feeling too old to rob liquor stores anymore.
I’ll certainly grant you, it’d be much much better if we have taken the same man, given him a thirty day course of advanced rehabilitation, and released him back into society secure in the knowlege that he would never rob another liquor store. But unfortuantely, nobody has invented such a process. Trust me, the effort is being made to rehabilitate every prisoner.
I say we bring back banishment. The US has a whole shitload of protectorates and steamy uninhabited islands in the south pacific, don’t we? For those hardened cases whose crimes show that they are not fit to live in society, I say we give 'em some basic hand tools, a couple of packs of Burpee seeds, and drop them off on some flyspeck island thousands of miles from nowhere. It’s be a lot more humane than executing them.