lea

Post-modern prison experiment:
Indeed, the entire city of Fallujah will virtually become a 300,000-person open-air detention center. It will be accessible only through checkpoints and will be a guaranteed car bomb-free zone since the biometrically catalogued inhabitants will not be allowed to possess private vehicles.
Politically, Fallujah II as a postmodern concentration camp can only become a public relations disaster for the United States. Militarily, the failure of Fallujah II is illustrated by the fact that after a month of fighting, the city is still a contested war zone – so dangerous that the citizens of Fallujah have not yet been allowed to return. Five weeks on, the military and political goals of Fallujah II have not been met.
December 13, 2004 Plenty of Strategy, Just No Exit
by Mark Rothschild

I’m not sure I understand the difference. How does decriminalization not equal legalization?

Yes, prisoners should be safe and secure in their persons from violence and abuse. When the system is reformed to be more functional, to convict the guilty, to remove them from society for a longer period of time, and to execute those who commit premeditated murder, or who abduct and forcibly rape women or children, then perhaps the rage the author notes will abate.

It seems to me that there is a problem with the notion of “victimless crime”. DS makes a really important point in categorizing “non-violent offenders” rather than trying to categorically state that some crimes are victimless. In Ken’s thread, Chris pointed out that many of the victimless crimes involve abbrogation of responsibility, and that children, other dependents, friends etc. are victimized. So the de-criminalization of selling small amounts of drugs is a non-starter for me. OK, alcohol abuse can lead to more violent behavior, and nicotine addiction is not illegal. But i don’t buy that all the negative effects of drug sales stem from their being illegal.

But selling small amounts of substance is non-violent in the sense that DS was using the term. One of the best suggestions in the Human Kindness Foundation article linked by Yehudit was sequestering the violent inmates. Kerick also paid them special attention, with more searches and additions to their sentences.

This notion seems really key to me. Have a non-violent section of prisons, and allow even initially violent criminals to escape to there if they control themselves. Because in many ways, that’s really what we want out of rehabilitation, isn’t it? That the violent learn that it is worth controlling their violence. The lesson could come from faith, from spirituality, from following the example of someone else’s kindness. But just this finding out that you can control yourself to avoid going to a worse place… in some cases, would it not be enough?

Matya no Baka!

But I purposely left that open when I wrote the post.

I hope you are never in handcuffs, and I’m sure there will be a big mistake going on if you ever are. But people end up in the iron clutch of the system for all kinds of reasons. Prosecutors with ambitions for higher office come to mind. Or just lipping off to a cop … .

And, in any case, the system cannot be perfect and the optimum number of errors cannot be zero, and some people who don’t belong there will end up in prison even when the system is working well.

Prisons should be hard, unpleasant places which are still safe and orderly. That is difficult to do but it is achievable. That way, even the few people who don’t belong there will at least not have their lives destroyed. And the ones who come out after serving their time will be better suited to restart their lives, hopefully in some more useful fashion.

Furthermore, I stated that we should both congragulate you and be grateful for your actions, even if they do set a guilty man free back into society. My only point is that asking for thanks from the society that such actions endanger, is asking too much.

If I am ever in handcuffs, in Chicago or elsewhere, I shall endeavor to be innocent, by not having committed a crime, so that evidence proving my guilt, however procured by the State, will not show up in court.

Let’s make the further assumption that they actually do it as right as they do hospitals and schools. What would that prison look like? What would recidivism rates be like? What would the rape rate be like? What would the escape rate be like? I suspect that the “screw-’em” and “hurt them harder” impulse would run smack into their Church wiring.

Now let’s step back from the thought experiment and ask your average middle-class suburban Catholic what would be wrong in putting those kind of reforms in the current secular system? The obvious counter is to denigrate their own faith and say that preachers and priests have no business running a prison. But why is that? That’s as realistic as saying that they have no business running a bakery or a home for runaways where they lock the doors at night.

The uncovered part of this article is that rehabilitation has been tried and discredited by way too many wooly headed thinkers who made the problem worse instead of better. Too many prisoners while away their time filing lawsuits to get more cable channels and those of us who don’t have cable TV because it costs too much resent paying for prison cable.

Any new reform effort has to come from a sector of society that wasn’t discredited in the previous round of softening (and there have been several rounds of this back and forth in US history). Why not churches?

A defense lawyer is there to make the state prove its case with legally obtained evidence.

If you ever get arrested, and prosecuted, you will get to enjoy being under a very heavy boot indeed. Don’t think it can’t happen. Cops and prosecutors are not always error free in their work, or free of vindictiveness, or the desire to close a file and lock up someone plausible-looking, or any other human failing.

Freedom mean nothing if it does not have institutional reality. Constitutional rights which defend us from being arbitrarily locked up by the state have a way of disappearing if no one is there to make the state play by the rules.

Have all the contempt you want.

My contempt is directed to an attitude you display, which is to assume that a guy who is being prosecuted is guilty. I didn’t say it. You assumed it.

Being arrested, being held in prison, being prosecuted only happens to “them”, is that it? Maybe not.

If you are ever in handcuffs in Cook County, I have some lawyers names for you. It will probably be too late once you have been ingested by the system and are wearing the yellow jumpsuit, by then you are one more hog in the slaughterhouse. But the guys I know are good, and they will do what they can for ya.

I suppose we should congratulate the lawyer. We’re much too afraid of being his client’s next victim, however, to feel grateful.

Except it is never permanent. With very few exceptions prison sentences come to an end some day. And then the prisoner walks out the front door of the prison into the free open world where you and your family live. And if that prisoner has been living in conditions of extreme brutality for years, he is unsuited to function there.

Changing the way we do things now, from my perspecitve, is not about making prisons nice places to be. Prisons are and should be primarily places of punishment.

The Sanity Inspector raises a good point. Anybody who wants to try to clean up this mess gets lumped in with the old “it’s society’s fault” crowd. I have no use for those people either. This shows that we need to get a new vocabluary and a new consensus to deal with this problem. The old views of the “reformers” were a failure, but letting the prisonw we are paying for be anarchic and bureaucratic at the same time means we are paying our hard-earned tax money to make our society more brutal and dangerous than it needs to be. Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowshipis a good program, but it is a volunteer program. Such things should be encouraged. But, in the meantime, institutional changes like the ones Kerik instituted do not rely on good will, and citizens should demand them. Creative thinkers who have studied prisons, like John DiIulio have laid out suggested programs which could mitigate the downside without being “soft on criminals”.

We need a conservative perspective on this which is hard-nosed and practical. Anything which smacks of conferring a benefit on the criminal would be a political loser. The focus has to be on reducing costs and improving safety for law-abiding people.

Indeed it isn’t clear to me why even violent criminals shouldn’t be treated more fairly. The current system in most places, in which the worst inmates effectively control the prisons, is a boon for the gangsters and psychopaths. Reforms like Kerik’s make treatment of inmates less arbitrary, punish victimizers and remove much of the payoff for violence. Prison remains an unpleasant place, but at least prisoners shouldn’t be punished for being weak or rewarded for being predatory.

Don’t lump me or the vast majority of us in this category, its a cop out. I never contemplated committing violent crimes as a youth, never. Neither did any of my friends. The implication that “it could have happened to any of us” is nonsense. No small part of the reason for never wanting to do anything that would end in prison was the knowledge of what goes on there. This is a tremendous deterent for non-criminals to stay that way.

I am perfectly willing to give second chances, especially for young non-violent offenders, and especially for people who did nothing other than possess or sell small amounts of illegal drugs. But what distinguishes criminals from those who made a “mistake of youth” is a state of mind and the company they keep. As long as criminals keep hanging out with criminals, they will continue to think and act like criminals. For all intents and purposes they will be “human garbage”, until they decide to stop predating their fellow man and using violence and theft as a means to support themselves and in many cases to entertain themselves. Reagrdless of the desperation of the situation they are in, these are still choices that are made through free will.

I think the war on drugs is a huge part of this mess. It has clogged our prisons with non-violent offenders making it much more difficult to police the legitimate “human garbage” causing so many problems. The unfortunate reality of sending these non-violent offenders to jail is that it converts them into criminals 1) because once you have a prison record its (rightfully) difficult to get a job and become integrated into society and 2) it puts these people in an environment where they must make friends with other criminals for normal human comtact as well as protection from other predator inmates. If they aren’t criminals when they get to prison, they will be when they leave.

I have little interest in making prisons more humane or comfortable. I AM in favor of only sending those that are already hardened, violent criminals there and leaving them there at least until they are old enough not to be violent any more, or until they rot. For these people, they can victimize each other all day long, I don’t really care.

For the young, non-violent offenders we should 1) stop sending these people to prison for drug offenses or minor stuff like shop-lifting or check fraud, 2) If we do send them to prison, keep them away from the hardened criminals so they won’t become hardened criminals themselves.

Martha Stewart didn’t go to real prison, I’m sure we can come up with a similar place for non-violent first offenders where we can actually reform them. Part of that program should include showing them exactly what awaits them in the real prison, if they choose to go there.

Just to wrap this up, lets be clear about who we are talking about when we refer to violent, hardened criminals (human garbage). These are the very small percentage of the population who, regardless of how they got that way, spend their lives wreaking havok on their fellow man. Some of them enjoy the misery of others, some have so little control over their emotional urges that they can erupt into violence at any time, others have decided that violent theft is their best mode of making a living. Then there are those whose sexual urges drive them to commit un-speakable acts, on un-willing victims. My personal opinion is that none of these groups can be reformed, they are defects of a combination of nature and nurture and have no use to society, other than to destroy it.

The job of the justice system is to permanently separate these people from society. But we should also keep those that are in danger of becoming members of this group from being exposed to them in prison.

And we could all do well to remember that some of us were probably impulsive jerks at 18 and likely to be awfully close to the line a few times. When I was that age, middle class kids got counseling and lower class kids got sent to the reformatory.

The prisoners I taught said you could always tell the guys that had been sent over from Huntsville – they spent the whole time looking behind their backs to see who had a shiv. It took them a while to calm down. (And one of my students disappeared, dropped from class, because he had engaged in a fight – he was sent to Huntsville. They kept the minimum security minimum security that way.)

They couldn’t learn anything until they were looking in front of them and not behind. But then, they did learn and one thing was how to get along with one another (the seating was, by their choice, not by race or at least not completely so). It wasn’t idyllic but it was, as Lex observes, practical as well as humane. (High recidivism rates don’t help anyone.)