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When are too many people in prison?

Bergslagstroll said:
Also why make a diffrence between whites and blacks are they not both equally much Americans?
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They are, but even though there is a black President now any all that, some people still can't get over the "im a victim" mentality of being black.
 
Mira said:
After having spent a year there and following their release, only 4 out of 10 committed crimes again and went back to jail (regular jail) , the other six reintegrated into society as very responsible and hard-working citizens, that's 60% successful rehabilitation which is a lot.
idea.
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It is 60% for the US as well: [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism]Recidivism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
 
Bergslagstroll said:
Also why make a diffrence between whites and blacks are they not both equally much Americans?
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The aftermath of segregation is still a big problem that the US has to face that few other countries do. Blacks still face worse conditions than whites, while whites overall have the same or better conditions than any European country.
 
Dav said:
The aftermath of segregation is still a big problem that the US has to face that few other countries do. Blacks still face worse conditions than whites, while whites overall have the same or better conditions than any European country.
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I really hate it when I read these horrible generalizations.
 
Catz Part Deux said:
True. I also think that our society is considerably more fragmented than that of the Japanese.
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It's because we are a diverse nation. Not that that is a bad thing, necessarily, but it is a side effect, considering the US never has the best record when it comes to "diversity". Japan simply doesn't have that, it's mainly a homogenous society with the biggest minority group being chinese and korean.
 
DarkWizard12 said:
It's because we are a diverse nation. Not that that is a bad thing, necessarily, but it is a side effect, considering the US never has the best record when it comes to "diversity". Japan simply doesn't have that, it's mainly a homogenous society with the biggest minority group being chinese and korean.
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Chineese and Korean, who also have SIMILAR cultural upbringing.
 
We could free em up if we stopped putting folks in lockdown for total crap charges. Like drugs and prostitution. That should be legal and would solve the overcrowding in our penal system.
 
Caine said:
Did I not just state it?


When you have a place where due to the culture and the way families are raised, with a focus on family and education, you end up with a place where people commit less crime.

If you have people comitting less crime, you have a lower crime rate, and a lower rate of incarceration.......... Im confused by your lack of understanding this.
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So you think your upbringing and environment as a child defines you? I think not. If this were the case how do you explain how some kids from teens live on the streets and pretty much raise themselves never get into any trouble?
 
Kali said:
So you think your upbringing and environment as a child defines you? I think not. If this were the case how do you explain how some kids from teens live on the streets and pretty much raise themselves never get into any trouble?
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In that case, its how they raise themselves.

But its very important to study where someone comes from, what they dealt with as a child, what amount of positive parental involvement, or where else they derived their moral compass from when they were in their teen years, thus when they formulate their outlook on life.
 
NYT editorial seems to have some sound insights to part of the problem:
Here in the United States, four decades of drug war have had three consequences:

First, we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons. The United States now incarcerates people at a rate nearly five times the world average. In part, that’s because the number of people in prison for drug offenses rose roughly from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today. Until the war on drugs, our incarceration rate was roughly the same as that of other countries.

Second, we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad. One reason many prominent economists have favored easing drug laws is that interdiction raises prices, which increases profit margins for everyone, from the Latin drug cartels to the Taliban. Former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia this year jointly implored the United States to adopt a new approach to narcotics, based on the public health campaign against tobacco.

Third, we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend $44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14 percent get treatment.)
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The Raw Story NYT editorial on drug war: Time to legalize (or at least decriminalize)
[most salient portion relative to this thread bolded by bubba]

it's past time to quit putting folks in prisons for committing victimless crimes
 
Dav said:
It is 60% for the US as well: Recidivism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In the link that you have provided it says,

According to a national study, within 3 years almost 7 out of 10 released males will find themselves back in prison. The study says this happens due to personal and situation characteristics, including the individual’s social environment of peers, family, community, and state-level policies. [4]

That is 70% going back to jail compared to the 40% of the rehab centre in France.

Plus in the U.S. we are talking about 30% of the general prison population which include all levels of crime. I'm talking about 60% rehabilitation for extremely violent criminals.
 
Mira said:
In the link that you have provided it says,

According to a national study, within 3 years almost 7 out of 10 released males will find themselves back in prison. The study says this happens due to personal and situation characteristics, including the individual’s social environment of peers, family, community, and state-level policies. [4]

That is 70% going back to jail compared to the 40% of the rehab centre in France.

Plus in the U.S. we are talking about 30% of the general prison population which include all levels of crime. I'm talking about 60% rehabilitation for extremely violent criminals.
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Scroll down further and it says 60% recidivism rate... which I confused with 60% rehabilitation rate but it's the opposite. Whoops.
 
Make drug offenses punishible by death and then kill them within 30 days of conviction.
 
Catz Part Deux said:
This is a section of a piece from the Cato Institute. I've cut only one section from the entirety (which talks about the impact of black incarceration rates versus the impact of black on black crime) because it dispells an importion notion: That the U.S. is more violent than other western countries.

We aren't.

In fact our rates of victimization are significantly less, per 100,000 people.



Cato Unbound Blog Archive Reforms that Ignore the Black Victims of Crime

There is a common misperception that it's a bad thing that we incarcerate so many people in the U.S., but the fact of the matter is that there is a cost impact from crime that counterbalances the costs of incarceration. Just something to think about.

The comparison of the crime rates, per capita, of these other nations, also speaks to gun control issues, as well. We do own a lot of guns in the U.S., but we aren't more violent than other nations...in fact, we are significantly less violent than many with strict gun control laws.

Yes...I am a nerd, but at least I know it.
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The problem isn't the "violence of the People", but rather the violence of the State. Obviously there are too many laws on the books by which the State can huck us into jail. We need to go through and start eliminating reasons for which the State can jail us.
 
Ikari said:
The problem isn't the "violence of the People", but rather the violence of the State. Obviously there are too many laws on the books by which the State can huck us into jail. We need to go through and start eliminating reasons for which the State can jail us.
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Agreed. We just have too many laws and too many mandatory sentences. Which by the way are only there because the prosecutors can make plea bargains in order to nail down a conviction, guilty or not. It cost tax payers around $56 per inmate per day and we keep passing new laws. 1 in 32 adults in the country is incarcerated or on probation. Of course if we actually took the time to address the two main contributing factors to incarceration, which are mental illness and addiction we could save tons of money in the long run. Money that could be better spent on other constructive things. Sadly, crime means more taxes because we need more jobs. More laws spawn more crime, which leads to more investigators, policemen, correction officers, prisons and so on.
 
Japan is a highly conformist society with a higher rate of common trust since people's actions tend to fall within a predictable framework. It makes it easier to regulate people and make effective policy. People who are dangerous and show outward instability are noticed more easily because of this.

Also, committing crimes doesn't just affect you, but your family. Depending on the crime, you may not only ruin your life, but the lives of your family members, forever. They won't be able to get jobs, have a normal social life, and their standard of living will decline. A common tactic to escape such a scenario is to commit suicide to spare your family the shame.

People who have never left the Western world will have never experienced a place with such pressure to conform. Tokyo is basically the most orderly human place on Earth.
 
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rhinefire said:
Make drug offenses punishible by death and then kill them within 30 days of conviction.
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:sarcasticclap Great idea....

Starting with doctors who give anyone a prescription to vicodin, valium, and xanax. Poor Rush:rofl
 
I read were there is more then 2 million people in US prisons.That's a lot. Perhaps the Government likes to criminalize people.
 
Catz Part Deux said:
The comparison of the crime rates, per capita, of these other nations, also speaks to gun control issues, as well. We do own a lot of guns in the U.S., but we aren't more violent than other nations...in fact, we are significantly less violent than many with strict gun control laws.
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Not necessarily. Incorporation of raw data will not produce the most empirically sound results, certainly not to the same extent that isolation of the gun effect will. For example, we have Duggan's More guns, more crime.

This paper examines the relationship between gun ownership and crime. Previous research has suffered from a lack of reliable data on gun ownership. I exploit a unique data set to reliably estimate annual rates of gun ownership at both the state and the county levels during the past two decades. My findings demonstrate that changes in gun ownership are significantly positively related to changes in the homicide rate, with this relationship driven almost entirely by an impact of gun ownership on murders in which a gun is used. The effect of gun ownership on all other crime categories is much less marked. Recent reductions in the fraction of households owning a gun can explain one‐third of the differential decline in gun homicides relative to nongun homicides since 1993.
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That said, I'm happy to at least see attempted consultation of empircal research, even if it's the somewhat discredited data of John Lott, for instance.
 
Lopettaa said:
I read were there is more then 2 million people in US prisons.That's a lot. Perhaps the Government likes to criminalize people.
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Perhaps people like to break laws?

Why does it always have to be the government's fault?





Oh, thats right... its "blame everyone else" America we live in.
 
Caine said:
Perhaps people like to break laws?

Why does it always have to be the government's fault?





Oh, thats right... its "blame everyone else" America we live in.
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I don't think it's a matter of blaming the government for individual acts of deviance. Crime is big buisness in our country and it makes far more finacial sense to our government to just lock people up instead of getting to the root of any contributing factors relating to crime. We pass many many new laws every year while keeping the same old failed ones on the books. Laws that have proven to just not work (or in other words contribute more to criminal deviance-recidivism than to rehibiltaion or prevention).

So, with more laws there will have to be more jobs, because we will then need more inverstigators, policemen, juries, judges, lawyers-prosecutors, prisons, prison corrections officers, prison nurses, prison cooks, probation officers, law enfocment technology and so on. Crime pays alot of salaries in our country. Why would we want to to go and mess that up? Less crime means less jobs are needed in our criminal justice system.

Have you ever seen what happens when the state trys to close a prison institution to save the tax payers a few dollars? People are outraged, and why? Because the major employer in their community is about to go out of buisness and many people are about to lose their jobs.
 
TheDude said:
I don't think it's a matter of blaming the government for individual acts of deviance. Crime is big buisness in our country and it makes far more finacial sense to our government to just lock people up instead of getting to the root of any contributing factors relating to crime. We pass many many new laws every year while keeping the same old failed ones on the books. Laws that have proven to just not work (or in other words contribute more to criminal deviance-recidivism than to rehibiltaion or prevention).

So, with more laws there will have to be more jobs, because we will then need more inverstigators, policemen, juries, judges, lawyers-prosecutors, prisons, prison corrections officers, prison nurses, prison cooks, probation officers, law enfocment technology and so on. Crime pays alot of salaries in our country. Why would we want to to go and mess that up? Less crime means less jobs are needed in our criminal justice system.

Have you ever seen what happens when the state trys to close a prison institution to save the tax payers a few dollars? People are outraged, and why? Because the major employer in their community is about to go out of buisness and many people are about to lose their jobs.
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Im sorry, I didn't realize that it was the LAWS BEING MADE that are at fault for people breaking them.

The laws you speak of, you know, the ones that require prison time. They are generally really, I don't know, BAD THINGS. That people shoudn't be doing. To say, "Hey maaan, they don't work" is ridiculous. There are alot of people who will do whatever the hell they want whenever they want, regardless of what the law states. In fact I think that is stated in the rap music listeners guide volume 1.
 
Caine said:
Im sorry, I didn't realize that it was the LAWS BEING MADE that are at fault for people breaking them.

The laws you speak of, you know, the ones that require prison time. They are generally really, I don't know, BAD THINGS. That people shoudn't be doing. To say, "Hey maaan, they don't work" is ridiculous. There are alot of people who will do whatever the hell they want whenever they want, regardless of what the law states. In fact I think that is stated in the rap music listeners guide volume 1.
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i hear you

those folks out there committing victimless crimes, like smoking weed, consensual sex for money

can't let that get out of hand

lock em up [/s]
 
justabubba said:
i hear you

those folks out there committing victimless crimes, like smoking weed, consensual sex for money

can't let that get out of hand

lock em up [/s]
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Do you realize the only lock up time "smoking weed" and "consensual sex for money" receive is usually the 1 day or a few more they spend in pre-trial right?

I think you are getting minor possession of user level amounts of marijuana mixed up with possession with intent to sell/distribute and trafficking, which actually get prison time.

Ive also not heard of any prostitute getting prison time.

But then again, maybe my state just does **** right.
 
Caine said:
Im sorry, I didn't realize that it was the LAWS BEING MADE that are at fault for people breaking them.

The laws you speak of, you know, the ones that require prison time. They are generally really, I don't know, BAD THINGS. That people shoudn't be doing. To say, "Hey maaan, they don't work" is ridiculous. There are alot of people who will do whatever the hell they want whenever they want, regardless of what the law states. In fact I think that is stated in the rap music listeners guide volume 1.
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Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Let's just keep doing the same thing we've been doing for the past 4 decades and hope for better results?:confused:


What are you a DA?
 
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