Prisons

[madmusic]

“Most of us in Congress and most Americans do not spend a lot of time thinking about the conditions of the prisons across our nation, but we should. We should, because, in the words of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, ‘What happens inside jails and prisons does not stay inside jails and prisons.’ And, as the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky once reflected, ‘The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.’”
—Senator Richard J. Durbin (D-IL),

more: http://www.prisoncommission.org/report.asp

[NMDemDist2]

1. don't we jail more of our citizens per capita than almost anywhere

else?

we're in the top 5 for sure

:puke:

[Downtown Hound]

2. WE'RE NUMBER 1!

WHOO HOO!

GO U.S.A!

[acmejack]

3. Crime Statistics > Prisoners > Per capita by country

I think you will find this fascinating...

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-prisoners-per-capita

[OneBlueSky]

12. and now they're building camps . . . lots and lots of camps . . .

to go with the lots and lots of camps already in existance . . . they ain't building 'em just for the hell of it . . .

[Freedom_from_Chains]

4. There is a real lock em up and throw away the key

mentality in our society but what we tend to ignore is that 95% of the people who are in prison today will one day be back out on the street. And someone who has spent the last 10-20 years or so living in a brutal environment is not someone you really want to fuck with.

[Vorta]

5. The Republicans keep telling us that they are successful business people.

Don't they? AT least many seem to claim to have built a successful business or taken some public corporation higher. And yet, all too often it seems that the Republican position doesn't make sense from a business point of view. They support the death penalty even though it is more expensive (taxpayer dollars) than life in prison. They claim to support "law and order" but seem to want to support the former and achieve the latter by the most expensive and least efficient approach. They are adamantly opposed to national health insurance, even though it would be a boon to small business start ups.

I think that they might be lying.

[madmusic]

6. Lying? The Republicans? No way!

They're making money big time: private prisons. See, now you can go back to considering them successful business people.

edit damn typo

[Vorta]

7. re

edit damn typo

Sounds rather Shakespearian.

now you can go back to considering them successful business people

I guess, if successful businessmen need government contracts to be a success. I've always thought it was better to invent something or produce something useful.

[madmusic]

9. True, true, true...

As so they try to produce more life sentences. Even the California prison guard union does this. But since there will probably soon be a sentencing commission in the state, they will lose that leverage. In the mean time...

http://dwb.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/8363129p-9292876c.html">Prisons: Power nobody dares mess with
Guards rake in $100,000 a year and political IOUs as they battle reform.

The California state prison system provides a poignant example of how a government
agency became dominated by a special interest.

Over the past 20 years, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA)
has held the state’s correctional system in an ever-tightening grip. The union’s control of
state criminal justice policy has produced mismanagement and abuse that waste tax
dollars and compromise the public interest.

Elected officials who oppose or even question the CCPOA’s dictates risk political
ostracism, retaliation and electoral defeat. In a manner not seen since the Southern
Pacific Railroad’s domination of state politics during the late 19th century, the union has
established itself as a nearly unchecked political force.

For the past 10 years, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan public
policy organization, has monitored and documented the political activities of the CCPOA.
By tracking these activities we can demonstrate how the union promotes its self-interest
by seeking to maintain an ever-growing prison population. More inmates mean more
prison guards, which expands union membership and ensures increased political clout.
The more people California incarcerates, the stronger the prison guard union.

more at the link

[Vorta]

10. That's disgusting

I confess to being asleep on this one. I knew that we had a lot of people in jail, some say a higher percentage than any other country. As silly as it sounds, I started singing Prison Trilogy in the shower one morning last week and started wondering what the actual goal was (surely not burning prisons to the ground) and whatever happened to that. It seems that prison reform has taken a back seat to fighting the death penalty, and no surprise given that to even mention prison/justice reform in politics will get you labelled "soft on crime" to a willing and frightened public.

It doesn't seem like there is a lot of sympathy out there, and there would be if people realized who is in jail. I think the average voter thinks our jails are full of murderers, rapists, and burglars. A fair number of the voters would be very surprised to know that a fair percentage of the prisoners are in for things their own children have done while flying below the suburban radar.

[aikoaiko]

8. I've toured some south GA prisons -- they were generally OK

Of course when getting the grand tour one understand one is seeing the best possible face of a prison.

The accomodations were clean and well maintained. Some of them were in dormitories (30 bunks in a large room), some were in cells housing 2-4 in clusters, and some were in solitary cells. The prison uniforms were clean. The food was not very good. For example, the "pork chops" were all processed pork formed into the shape of chops. When I asked why they said that the normal variations in chops would cause fights in the cafeteria.

All the prisoners stood at attention as we walked by and inspected the units. When we asked questions they all gave positive reviews of the conditions. Of course there was this one guy who started to make wise cracks about the conditions and he got the evil eye from the trustee/oldtimer.

The farm prison and the max prison I toured were not country clubs and did not give the impression that people would "enjoy" staying there (at least not from my middle class perspective), but the conditions were not "cool hand luke" either.

[madmusic]

11. Did they seem crowded? California is about to burst...

Lawsuits seek to limit prisons' capacity

11:39 PM PST on Monday, November 13, 2006

By PAIGE AUSTIN
The Press-Enterprise

Attorneys for prisoners' rights filed motions Monday seeking to cap the inmate population in California prisons.

Blaming cruel and unusual conditions on crowding in the state's 33 prisons, attorneys in two class-action suits are asking a three-judge panel to decide if the prison population should be capped. In the motion, the attorneys cite Gov. Schwarzenegger's and the corrections department's recommendations to limit the population to between 111,000 and 138,000 inmates. Currently the state houses about 173,000 inmates, which is more than double the system's capacity.

"Court intervention is necessary to achieve constitutional conditions because the state of California has been unable to respond in any meaningful way to the prison overcrowding crisis," stated Donald Specter, Director of the Prison Law Office and one of the lawyers who filed the motions.

The motions were part of Plata v. Schwarzenegger and Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, two medical and mental health class-action cases that have led to major prison reform, including the receivership of the prison health care system.

Around the state, inmates are crowded into gyms and dayrooms in triple bunks. Last summer at the California Institution for Men in Chino, inmates slept outside rather than in crowded holding tanks. The five state prisons in the Inland Empire are operating at between 150 percent to 235 percent capacity.

more: http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_D_prison14.39ae242.html

[aikoaiko]

13. From what we were shown there was no overcrowding issues

I think our overcrowding issues are in the county jails.