So the answer is life sentences for all felonies? Now who is naive and simplistic?
Did anyone say that? If so, I missed it.
Yes, Clothahump said it, when he argued that if you let out criminals, they will just go back to committing crimes again.
thanks! it helped. 
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/095/marijuanaprisoners.shtml
That was like the first google search result. I thought it was pretty common knowledge. If you desire more I’ll happily provide the next ten google results. I’m sure they’ll all back this up.
I did say “if they’re not a threat.” And I do think you’d reduce the crimes associated with drug use if you made them legal. For one thing it would eliminate the legal risk involved, which would bring down prices.
The problem with life sentences is supporting a criminal for life. Again it comes down to math. If it costs 70 to 100 dollars per day to house and feed a lifer then expect a life span of around 75 years on average.
25,000 dollars a year per prisoner on a life sentence. So for example if you murder someone in at 20 and get life without parole and live to be 75 in prison it would cost 1,375,000 to take care of this prisoner till he dies.
Remember this is just one prisoner costing us all a cool million to house and feed.
So how have experiments with alternative sentencing (house arrest etc.) worked out?
The problem with house arrest is the same. Not everyone on house arrest has a place to call home or a family to take them in and house and feed them. They can’t live with the mother of their children or she would lose her housing and food. What if Billy Bob’s elderly parents can’t afford to take their adult son home on a bracelet?
Yeah, so, when it comes to nonlifers who committed crimes to support their drug habits, just give him a daily fix. With economies of scale, it’s gotta cost a lot less that $70 a day, and said addict won’t be committing burglaries, muggings or car thefts and might even be able to hold down a job (albeit one that doesn’t involve putting the public at risk).
If public expense is the concern, I’m not sure why this isn’t a viable option.
See, that’s like what casdave was talking about - people assuming that all criminals are the same, and that the same sentencing has to apply to all of them.
The Victorians had an idea that there were certain classes of people, from the deserving poor, underserving poor, manual labourers, all the way up the pile to the Royalty, but at the bottom they had it in their heads that criminals formed a class of their own, and by incarcerating them, crime would end.
Their idea was not just the adults, but that criminals were effectively a breed and you had to also lock up their children too.
You might also like to consider the appalling racism of the age, now look at the US and carry out an ethnicity breakdown, if you can’t work this out then there is no hope for you.
Crime is a largely a function of poverty, not of race, nor of class, and the dangerous ground we are treading is that we have an economy that excludes certain groups, and then we decide to set a very low bar for extremely long prison terms - the effect is almost inevitably going to hit certain groups more than others.
Lock up significant proportions of certain groups and then employ them to produce consumer goods for companies who can outcompete US labour on wage and medical costs, does not sound like a very good direction to move toward.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/199622
http://listsoplenty.com/blog/archives/2822
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-11-27-prison-catalog_x.htm
The US has constructed a Penal-industrial combine, companies operating in this area have even decided to move work from Indonesia into US prisons, and they have not done this to rehabilitate criminals.
The idea of teaching someone a trade inside a prison, when this actually shuts down similar employment outside prisons shows this form of rehabilitation to be one big fat juicy lie.They will leave prison with a skill that is only required in prison.
The OP may have this simplistic idea, but the truth is, that there are no easy answers, nor should there be, we should always be asking what it the purpose of incarceration, just what is personal liberty worth, what is collective liberty worth, and how can we find ways to address offending behaviur in a constructive manner and not an exploitative one.
Of course its difficult, and rightly so - welcome to the world of uncertainty of awkward situations and impossible solutions, because the alternative is one of opression.
An excellent point. If we simply hand the addict as much meth as his little heart desires, he wouldn’t have to steal to get his fix, and his life span would no doubt be vastly shortened as well, saving the state an enormous amount of money over imprisoning him.
Well, actually, his lifespan could be significantly lengthened if his government-supplied fix was free of any incidentally toxic cutting agents dealers put in to increase profit. I suppose if taking meth is all he wants to do, then he’ll die soon enough, but I gotta assume at least some addicts would lead otherwise reasonably normal lives if they didn’t spend their non-high hours just thinking up ways to acquire the money to get high again.
And assuming jail isn’t the best place to kick the habit, a government-supplied addict has a better shot of getting clean if he or she is not endlessly cycling in and out of incarceration for theft and/or prostitution. They won’t alienate family members (who are their best bet for a support system in any effort to get clean) by stealing from them.
I’m guessing you were trying to be flippant (though I’m prepared to admit if I am mistaken), but my original question is anything but. If a significant amount of petty crime (and the resultant and expensive imprisonments) is the result of addicts stealing or hooking to satisfy their habits, and this is significantly expensive to the state and serves to enrich criminals, why not just give the addicts free (or at least cheap) drugs from government-licensed and regulated labs? How is the current system better?
This is a link to the prison I refered to earlier.
I don’t have time today to do this topic justice but I do know at least at some time in the UK just giving addicts the drugs was tried with heroin and I seem to recall it worked well. Heroin is not inherently expensive and addicts could be given the stuff for peanuts. On clean heroin, addicts would just live pretty normal lives. Most of the problems come from unhealthy impurities in unregulated black market heroin supplies, and from the criminality necessary to find the money to feed the habit. Of course, such people are a drain on society and probably contribute nothing but if that’s going to be true anyway, then what do you lose?
The UK stopped prescribing heroin to addicts back in the 1980’s, the reason? The US ‘War on drugs’.
A number of incentives and disincentives were applied by the US to the UK, and other nations.
In Australia there were threats of trade ‘difficulties’, but on the other hand the US agreed to fund the Australian sate’s production of Heroin for medical use.
We in the UK were warned by US drug experts, down at the rehab practitioner level that this was a bad idea, and that this would create a self sustaining and expanding drug market for dealers. This is exactly what has happened.
Heroin was not a profitable drug in the 1970’s for dealers, the addict could get his ‘script’ and would not be purchasing illegally, all that changed with the stupi US ‘War on drugs’. Basically the US has exported a drug market.
The dynamics are these, supply Heroin on prescription, it is not actually all that expensive, and you cut out the dealer, and you cut out the need to get more people hooked to support their own habit.
In the UK we now suppply methodone in prisons, I will have to look into the policy outside prison, but I do believe that we also supply a ‘maintenace’ prescription of methodone.
Please tell us you’re just pretending to be a vitamin-deficient red-neck for some laughs!
If not, your message is so … uh, (what’s a good euphemism that won’t get me barred by the moderators?) indicative of a faulty grasp of reality, I’m afraid I’ll just add Mean Mr. Mustard to my ignore-him filter.
Good-bye.
Why don’t we just shoot the accused?
Much cheaper and it surely will drive down crime. Eventually.
Something similar is done over here in the NL for street junkies. As far as I know it’s mildly effective for people who want to get rid of all the side effects of heroin (you know; being homeless, having to steal to get your fix at insanely inflated prices and generally fucking up your life), but methadone is even harder to quit than heroin, only partially effective at getting people to stop using heroin and not any healthier either. The only reason we don’t supply heroin instead is because it’s scary and illegal. Stupid, IMO.
ETA: In my opinion, drug addiction is a medical problem. In all cases. Attacking it using the methods we use to “crack down on crime” will only inflate the problem.