Posts Tagged ‘prison reform’
How about cage-free people?
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I wonder at the oddness of it.
We in the USA prefer the eggs of cage-free chickens. Yet we cage more people than any other nation.
I guess we think cages bad for chickens but useful for humans.
At caging the latter, we are certainly the world’s most prolific:
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Now, surely most people in prison are not there because they’re dangerous. Violent crimes are only a small fraction of jail-meriting offenses here. So most prisoners are not locked up to protect the rest of us.
We must have locked them up, then, because we thought it good for them.
But we’re sure it makes chickens worse.
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Written by Monte
April 28, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Posted in Politics
Tagged with Crime, Crime and Justice, criminal law, hard time, incarceration, jail, jails, justice, Law, Organizations, Penitentiary, People, prison, prison reform, rate of incarceration, sentencing, sentencing reform, Social Research, United States, Violent crime, World population, Yale University
American Drug War Economics – Vol.1
- Image by warrantedarrest via Flickr
When I was a college kid in the 1970s, buying pot was easier than buying cigarettes (though, to be honest, I don’t remember ever buying either!)
Probably, it hasn’t changed. But here’s what has: I didn’t know of one single person who’d gone to prison over it. It’s a whole lot easier to end up in prison today.
Kids, just like kids of my generation, act like kids. But “get tough” laws are on the books now. They rip kids’ futures away, and give them instead a bed in the most violent, gang-dominated, drug-permeated neighborhoods in America: our prisons.
When they get out, they’re marked. Getting a job is tough. Getting scholarships is nearly impossible (“get-tough” legislators having pre-wired the FAFSA to identify criminal records), so education is almost out of the question. Careers that require certifications are mostly closed. The options they had planned for are gone.
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For all that, what have we, as a society, gained? Nada.
These horrific laws, easily passed and rarely opposed (what politician wants to be labeled “soft on drugs“?), which incarcerate many of our best and brightest and then leave them with few non-poverty options, have utterly failed to reduce drug use. And they have cost us a fortune.
Meanwhile, your legislators are looking for more billions to build more prisons because this juggernaut crushes kids by the thousands every single day. No other nation imprisons as many of its own as we do in “the land of the free.”
It will continue until we stop it. And, since lots of people make lots of money keeping things just the way they are, it won’t stop easily.
But here’s one place—of many—to begin.
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Let’s get started.
Tags: drug+use, war+on+drugs, economics+of+drugs, drug+war+economics, mandatory+sentencing, drug+laws, tobacco+industry, alcohol+industry, prison+overcrowding, funding+prisons, taxes+prisons, money+prisons, building+prisons, US+prisons, incarceration, recidivism, get-tough+laws, crime, criminal+justice, new+prison, incarceration+rate, addiction, imprisonment+drugs, Monte Asbury
Written by Monte
December 8, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Posted in human worth, Jesus, Politics, Poverty, Social change
Tagged with American Drug War: The Last White Hope, college admissions, discrimination, Drug War, Drugs, FAFSA, Health, higher education, Kevin Booth, prison, prison reform, sentencing reform, United States, universities