Prison reform

[Jeff Higgins]

We are cursed with an "under class" in our society that most of us will never understand. This "under class" has an entirely different world view than the rest of us, than those of us whom we consider to be "normal" functioning members of society. As Patrick has found out, meeting, speaking with, and really getting to know someone who has spent their life in this "under class" is a pretty eye opening experience. One that most of us will never get to experience. One that, however, we should all experience.

We just don't have the guts to deal with these people. Our compassion and understanding are wholly misplaced with this "under class". We assume - or hope - that they will react to it as we would react to it. They are incapable. They cynically take advantage of us every time we display any compassion towards them, seeing us merely as easier prey when we do so. They are predatory, opportunistic animals who will bite the hands that feed them. Over and over again.

Like I've said, they all deserve a chance. Some, like Patrick's "J", may put some honest effort into assimilating into society. When we see that they are trying, and not just scamming by appearing to try, we help them in any way we can. The ones that refuse, once they have used up their allotted chances, just get exterminated like the vermin they are. Not warehoused and fed for life. Exterminated.

[Superman]

Still hallucinating from the cannabis, I am left wondering....how we would choose the people to kill. Though some feel capital punishment is not okay, society does put people to death. For particularly heinous crimes (and the occasional innocent person), but very few. Now...if we are going to start an extermination program, then I wonder about the criteria.

I say we spare the people who have overdue library books. So I wonder where we should draw that line? Jeff....any idea of the volume we should target? 100? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000?

The ones who refuse treatment? The ones who offend, even after treatment? Do we even try to treat them? You are an engineer. What spec do we follow?

[Jeff Higgins]

I would start with those who camp in the left lane.

[Superman]

Agreed. And as a warning, I think motorists should be issued one yellow paintball round per month, for voting. Drivers with the most yellow splotches....

Long story. Sue me.

You may all recall that in 1980, Fidel Castro took a bunch of folks seeking asylum, together with some culled from his prisons and mental institutions, loaded them onto a collection of boats and rafts, and sent them off toward the USA. They started arriving on the shores of Florida, and Castro promised that if we sent them back, he would machine gun them on the beach. We let them stay in makeshift camps. Once he saw that we would accept them, Casto sent more over, until we had a whopping 125,000 of them. That, gentlemen, was an invasion. They were slowly assimilated into society, and most settled into the Miami area and other communities.

Since Castro had unloaded a lot of "bad hombres" from his jails, many ended up getting in more trouble here. Once arrested, they could not be deported, so they were sent instead to the U.S. Penitentiary, Atlanta, which was hastily recommissioned for the task. Thus began a steady flow of recently arrested and convicted detainees into this creepy old (built in 1902) fortress that was designed to hold 3000 prisoners. It got so overcrowded that the ACLU sued the U.S., claiming the conditions were inhumane, and ordering that the least bad folks be released back into society to keep the number below 3500 or something. Each detainee's case had to be reviewed every six months, and a decision had to be made who to release and who to keep. This was to be done by panels of DOJ lawyers and INS agents on a more or less continuous basis.

I was a FNG puppy lawyer to DOJ when I got a call one Friday afternoon from a director in the Criminal Division, asking if I would volunteer to replace a guy on the panel who had gotten sick. Details were sketchy, and my new boss was out of town, but I said "sure" before giving it much thought. It was an emergency and sounded interesting and I wanted to make a good impression. I got a hint of things to come when I was told to check into my motel under an assumed name. Monday morning I was walking across the parking lot toward the prison, listening to the prisoners chant "martar el panel!" A warm welcome indeed. We went in, got photo'd and fingerprinted, and signed a directive on who to contact if we were killed or taken hostage by the prisoners, who seemed not to appreciate the due process we were there to deliver.

The cell block was 5 stories high, and we walked through the heart of it with just a couple of guards, who were unarmed. There were no weapons inside--at least the good guys didn't have any. It was dark inside because the prisoners had recently rioted, burned mattresses and broken the outer windows, so the BoP had installed sheet metal over the window openings. Prisoner flow was controlled by man-traps and gates, but you could see the place was ready to go up again.

That was the start of a week spent reviewing the files of prisoners (including a psych evaluation) while they sat in front of my INS partner Murray and I, wearing shackles and straining to show us various knife wounds, bullet holes and such, and explain the reason for their current predicament. They had interpreters but most spoke English. Their crimes were generally pretty serious--murder, rape, assault--and they came from violent pasts. Their stories were by tuens entertaining, horrifying, and grotesque. They worked us like politicians during interviews, smiling and shaking hands, but they screamed at us every night from up in their cages. I learned the hard way not to walk too close to the wall of the cages when somebody from up above let loose a perfectly timed pee stream. It was not a happy place, but it was a really fascinating experience. The panels would have to decide whether or not to let folks out, and were up against a hard limit of how many could be kept there, which guaranteed that we'd be releasing some bad folks onto the street. It had our full attention, and I still wonder about some of the guys we took a chance on. It gave me a real appreciation for the civil servants on whom we bestow society's most intractable problems.

After I got back, and over my wife's objections, I asked to be assigned full time to the rotation, but my boss was unenthusiastic and said no. Then in 1987 the prisoners rioted and took 100 hostages, but no panel members, which is good, because it would not have ended well for them. Everybody got released after a lot of negotiations, but it was tense. The panels went on for some time after.

If you've read this far, you may be asking "Does this train of thought have a caboose?" Well, yes, here are a few thoughts:

1. As I discovered memorably during my stint in ATL, there are some folks who really just belong in cages.
2.. Prisons suck. Even though ATL was an outlier in terms of crowding and violence, it's hard to imagine anything good coming out of putting violent people in cages, other than to protect society.
3. Since prisons suck, we should make damn sure that we only send really bad people there, because they will only grow worse once inside. Rehabilitation is rare, though it does happen.
4. Our prisons are overcrowded in part because we over-criminalize trivial offenses and make the wrong things illegal. Decriminalize pot and release all non-violent drug offenders.
5. Harsh sentences don't send messages to the types of folks who make up the vast majority of prisoners. By and large, criminals are not given to introspection and careful consideration of consequences. Even the smart ones tend to think they are invincible (see, e.g., Paul Manafort) and won't get caught.
6. So, if rehabilitation is a pipe dream and deterrence doesn't work, what then? I think we need to look at root causes and try to figure out what turns normal people into criminals. We know a lot of them--poverty, lack of education, racism. Work on those problems and I think we'll see the crime rate go down. It won't be fast, but it's already been headed that way for some time as we as a society have attacked those root causes.
7. In the meantime, I agree that left lane bandits should be put to death.

[Crowbob]

It seems we pretty much know how to fix the problem. But I haven’t heard much about why we don’t.

As cynical as it sounds, the industries providing criminal justice services do not want the problems fixed. Nor do the providers of social services. Think about it. Think about all the educators, social workers, mental health provides, legal people, law enforcement, prison bureaucrats and support people like food service, etc. And those are the people who have legal, supposedly productive careers and jobs.

If you add in the politicians, the drug manufacturers, border security, healthcare and big education it’s pretty easy to see why the problems are not being fixed and probably never will be.

[Chocaholic]

Originally Posted by Superman

Still hallucinating from the cannabis, I am left wondering....how we would choose the people to kill. Though some feel capital punishment is not okay, society does put people to death. For particularly heinous crimes (and the occasional innocent person), but very few. Now...if we are going to start an extermination program, then I wonder about the criteria.

I say we spare the people who have overdue library books. So I wonder where we should draw that line? Jeff....any idea of the volume we should target? 100? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000?

The ones who refuse treatment? The ones who offend, even after treatment? Do we even try to treat them? You are an engineer. What spec do we follow?

How about we spare the most innocent of all who don’t yet have the ability to speak for themselves. You’re looking for criteria to spare those who potentially commit crimes and can seek help. Does it seem reasonable to execute those for the crime of not yet being born? I won’t apologize for bringing this up. Who to kill is the topic being discussed. To ignore a huge segment of humanity in the discussion seems disingenuous. Perhaps uncomfortable, but disingenuous.

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by madcorgi

Long story. Sue me...

Wow. Great story and insight. I could not agree more that solutions to our crime problems are social, rather than punitive. That, and we incarcerate far too many for relatively innocuous offenses, many of which do not even have "victims".

Alas, in the end, there will always be those who will be prone to predation upon the rest of us. Those are the ones I am thinking of when I use words like "extermination". The question of the day is just what does it take for one to qualify for this treatment?

I don't think "first offenders" (which most often really means the first time they were caught and successfully prosecuted) qualify, no matter how bad the offense. Short of murder, that is. Maybe even not yet then. We make mistakes in this regard. We have recently seen some folks exonerated years, even decades after conviction through modern DNA evidence. So, maybe not even murderers. Just to be sure...

I'm thinking repeat, multiple violent felony offenders. The kinds who now qualify for "three strikes" sentencing in states that have such. These are the ones who have clearly demonstrated that they do not even want to try. Rather than give these life, just take their lives. We should not have to house and feed them for years, or decades, until they die of natural causes. They will die in prison anyway - let's just expedite the process a bit.

Oh, and Scarface was a great movie...

Originally Posted by Crowbob

It seems we pretty much know how to fix the problem. But I haven’t heard much about why we don’t.

As cynical as it sounds, the industries providing criminal justice services do not want the problems fixed. Nor do the providers of social services. Think about it. Think about all the educators, social workers, mental health provides, legal people, law enforcement, prison bureaucrats and support people like food service, etc. And those are the people who have legal, supposedly productive careers and jobs.

If you add in the politicians, the drug manufacturers, border security, healthcare and big education it’s pretty easy to see why the problems are not being fixed and probably never will be.

You know, I've thought this as well, and sometimes still do. Then sometimes I think this would take a level of conscious, deliberate planning and organization beyond what I think mankind is capable. Too many separate, uncooperative moving parts to reach a level of agreement to make this happen. Yes, there is a lot of money being made, but it's being made by such vastly separated interests that I just don't think they could pull this off.

I get back to the root cause Terry alludes to above - far too many things are "criminal". That, and we jump right into punishment - admittedly feeding the machine to which you allude - rather than counseling, social programs, redirection, and all of that.

Originally Posted by Chocaholic

How about we spare the most innocent of all who don’t yet have the ability to speak for themselves. You’re looking for criteria to spare those who potentially commit crimes and can seek help. Does it seem reasonable to execute those for the crime of not yet being born? I won’t apologize for bringing this up. Who to kill is the topic being discussed. To ignore a huge segment of humanity in the discussion seems disingenuous. Perhaps uncomfortable, but disingenuous.

This has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion, Mike. While a worthwhile topic in its own right, please don't sidetrack and dilute this thread with your misguided interjection of this wholly unrelated topic. Start a new thread or something. Actually, there have been plenty of threads on this already. Please go find one of those.

[seafeye]

https://stillnessinthestorm.com/2018/08/judge-sentenced-to-28-years-in-prison-for-selling-kids-for-cash-to-prisons/


Enough said.
We would all be better off paying welfare than making prison owners rich.

[Tobra]

We are doing both

Originally Posted by Superman

Agreed. And as a warning, I think motorists should be issued one yellow paintball round per month, for voting. Drivers with the most yellow splotches....

I would go use all of them I could get on my ex-wife's car on the first day this went into effect.

[p911dad]

I was recently watching a veteran PD lieutenant here in Charlotte being interviewed about the latest string of brutal murders in the city. When pressed about how this could be made better, he simply said we are dealing with feral people that grew up with no good role models and have no idea of how to deal with problems except with violence always an option. He said that many have no hope of rehabilitation, most are multiple offenders and will continue on that path. He sounded resigned to this as that is just how it is.

[Superman]

Originally Posted by Tobra

We are doing both

Yes Klinky, we are.

I should not have doubted whether I would see a well thought out response from Sheriff Higgins. I bristled at the "exterminate" notion, but now I see we are not in disagreement. I think it would be more expensive. Money, sure. But also facilities and staffing. Macro stuff requires a longer time horizon. It would take years to get that many people up and trained. You said the same thing, I think. And it would take leadership. Those people seem also currently not available. I too am pessimistic but I too think it is the solution. Which brings me to....

....social engineering. Manipulating markets and education/information. Where to spend money and build infrastructure and where to leverage capital interests and what regulations/controls are needed in order to achieve an outcome. But....this planning and resource allocation and regulation change is a decision of the people and/or their representatives.

Everyone wants this leadership. Some think it is possible and others think it is not. They are, respectively (and respectfully), democrats and republicans.

[Jeff Higgins]

Interesting decisions on the table there, Supe. I would argue that "some think it is desirable and others think it is not" - desirable to live under the crushing weight of the level of regulations/controls necessary to achieve that outcome... or to live a life free of that level of regulation/control and accept that we must deal with these "feral people" (great reference, p911dad).

I think ol' Ben Franklin put it very well - "those who would sacrifice any measure of liberty to achieve any measure of security deserve neither".

The answer is not to regulate/control everyone in an effort to contain the "feral people". The answer is to deal decisively with the "feral people" and leave the rest of us the hell alone. Some think it is possible and others think it is not. They are, respectively, (and respectfully), Republicans and Democrats.

I actually don't believe that for a minute (the political part) - it's not Republicans vs. Democrats on this issue. It's realists vs. empathists (I made up that word). Those who see the reality of human nature and those who dream of what it could, what it should be. The former clearly recognize these "feral people" for who they are and what they represent as a burden and a danger to the rest of us. The latter see them as "poor, misunderstood" people who are entirely capable of rehabilitation and re-assimilation back into (as if they were ever really in) society, if only we click our heels and wish hard enough. I obviously subscribe to the former.

[Superman]

The word you made up is a good one. The description of their vision is not. And also I think you may be conflating the "feral people" with those who simply don't know any better and would appreciate some help. There are good people who spoke a completely different language than you did, when you were learning to be the man you are.

Yes, I am a dreamer and I hope to never be convinced to give up hope. on the humans. Plus, the alternative is deciding who is exterminated and who gets to stay.

And for the record, I am not completely Pollyanna. Yes, there are "feral people" who will not play nice with others regardless of the resources we expend. And then we are left with the question.....

Does it not make sense to find an alternative to prisons, for those who can be taught our 'way?' Once they get going, they seem to do fine. Lots of them actually do respond to education/training. This is considerably less expensive (to taxpayers and to society) than prisons. And so.....how much are we willing to spend to keep our streets safe? Build more prisons? Make the laws tougher (this seems to be not working)? Educate/train?

So.....what is your solution then, as one who falls into the "former" category? Build more prisons and stage more executions? 10K? 1M? (Yosemite Sam emoji goes here)

[otto_kretschmer]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

If a prison's success was measured by how many inmates were prepared and obtained jobs after release vs how many ended up back in prison, and they were paid on the basis of their success, we would have better outcomes from our prison system. The idea of warehousing people for some number of months and then just turning them out into society hoping they will behave is insane - but that's our system.

the purpose of a prison is punishment and deterrence

reformation is not the purpose of a prison

[Jeff Higgins]

I'm not "conflating" anything, Supe. We have already established a very clear distinction between "those who simply don't know any better and would appreciate some help" and the "feral people" who have decided to prey upon us in clear rejection of our offers of "some help". We've discussed the differences at length. Please don't start us around that block for another lap.

We have similarly agreed that we have too many prisons and too many prisoners in them for too many offenses that should lead to something other than imprisonment. At least here in the U.S. - with damn near the highest incarceration rate on earth. So, no, we have established that is not the answer. Let's not rehash that one once again either.

What we are discussing are those who have been in our prisons for violent offenses. Repeatedly. Those who have demonstrated, through their recalcitrance and consistent rejection of "some help" to be incorrigible. Those who will, absolutely, offend again if released. Those are the ones who "need killin'".

[otto_kretschmer]

Originally Posted by legion

150 years ago, you could move west, change your name, reinvent yourself, and leave your past behind.

you can still join the French Foreign Legion

[otto_kretschmer]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

The United States has close to, if not the highest incarceration rate in the world. Not just in the "first world", or in the "free world", but in the world.

Interesting that we can so clearly see the corruption and human rights abuses rampant in other countries, yet we are so blind to this one in our own. Everyone bellyaches about Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump - pick your flavor and whine about their "corruption" - yet nary a peep about the ongoing crime against humanity that is our prison system.

in much of the world the "criminal" never gets a trail, they're just executed in the street

their end is sometimes recorded and you can view these vids if you know where to go

[otto_kretschmer]

I don't think the mods would appreciate it if I posted a link to a real lynching so I'll throw up a Monty Python vid to help my point



now the real thing happens all the time and is never reported in our media

our news is white washed like our history lessons

the communities in these videos don't have the resources for police, a judicial system and prisons so they take care of the problem as soon as they hear about it

Jeff, I think your argument suffers from binaryism (a word I made up). People will not fall neatly into "feral" and redeemable categories. There are as many gradations as there are people. Where's the line? It's a pretty important line--maybe even so important that it shouldn't be a line at all. Maybe something else should come into play . . . hark . . . those are the ghostly echoes of the founding fathers I hear, asking us: WTF, Dudes? How come you forgot all about Due Process.

Not to mention that we in the US have not exactly covered ourselves in glory as to whom we incarcerate. Every year, prisoners are exonerated on DNA evidence or other proof of innocence, innocent folks who served decades because they were either wrongly accused, had confessions beaten out of them, were wrongly convicted, are routinely under-represented because we starve of PD offices. You can bet more than a few wrongly accused have been executed over the years. So--what makes us so sure that as we all merrily wave to the buses headed off to the gas chambers that we have made the right choice? Makes me kinda uncomfortable.