Prison Pop

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WE'RE NUMBER 1! WE'RE NUMBER 1!

Immigrants are to blame for this you know.

Yeah . . . shouldn't have let those Europeans in. They ruin everything!

Yeah, the frakin' lighties!

Friggen Columbus, should have never stepped foot on Plymouth Rock with all those criminals!

The man behind Fast Food Nation wrote an interesting article on the prison industrial complex.

Incidentally, if anyone knows of any good books on the subject, I could use a recommendation.

Worst name for a soda, ever.

Sure makes those marijuana advocates look stupid, huh? OH SHI-

Thank God Lou Dobbs is on the lookout for you guys. Those sneaky Europeans are taking American jobs while politicians do nothing, FYI.

Christian Parenti's Lockdown America is a great read an intro to the subject. Well-written, accessible and he covers a broad range of issues.

Ruthie Gilmore's Goden Gulag deals specifically with California, is a bit heavy on the political economy, but is still brilliant.

Thanks!

we'll catch up with you soon, so enjoy it whilst it lasts

Yeah, like when we prosecuted Kissinger for war crimes! Oh wait...

What is sickest about all of this is that prisons are being widely "privatized" now. Many prisons double as agricultural and manufacturing centers, and these private companies come in and essentially purchase what amounts to little more than a "for sale slave labor force" under the front of "running a prison."

I doubt anything real will come, but I'm ready to be pleasantly surprised.

Privatizing prisons is privatizing human dignity. The bargain we make in holding prisoners is taking away their freedom, but the amount of punishment that goes on instead of reform (as well as group punishment instead of targeted punishment) is astonishing.

Everyone hears about the guy in Yemen who got put in prison for some marijuana on the bottom of his shoe or the guy in girl in Turkey put there after someone slips some hash into her bag to get it through customs. What a shame. Someone should get them out.

Is it because they are innocent or because we don't trust Yemen or Turkey? But what about the prisons here? Who has the right to guard me? To hold my freedoms in his hands? What moral high ground should he be held to?

A high school education, a willingness to follow the groupthink, and a cursory background check seem to be all that is needed.

The number of prisoners held in private prisons is relatively small and doesn't really appear in real terms let alone relative terms. The last number I saw was about 62,000 inmates incarcerated in private facilities--a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.3 million totally population those incarcerated in prisons.

The use of prisons as sources of manufacturing labor for private companies is also not that widespread. Many prisons are located in rural and remote areas that add significant shipping costs and prisoners have a habit of sabatoging machinery. Also, prisons often put their population on lockdown for days at a time to discipline the population, which doesn't always coincide with production needs of business. That's not to say that use of prisoners for profit by companies isn't particularly nefarious, but that the overwhelming drive behind the massive incarceration in the United States is not driven by the private prison industry or the companies profiting off of prison labor.

*just gets the sarcasm behind your original post*
*feels slow*

One good thing that happened, and it happened during this administration was the change in the crack cocaine sentences to match powder cocaine sentences. And it is retroactive. The first prisoners getting out (of decades long sentences) should be on March 3rd. Remember, this is getting a 5x or 10x sentence just for the form of the drug, not its potency. Like getting 10 years for having Coca-cola on you and 50 for having Pepsi. The reason for the higher price of powder cocaine is simple: demographics.

Drugs are the purest form of supply and demand. Watch The Wire and see how they change the street names of drugs (keeping the same formula) and do all sorts of stuff normal marketers do to get people to buy. Or just watch The Wire because it is a great show.

It's a little of both, couple that with the fact that we throw pot smokers into jail and it pads the numbers quite a bit.

We used to do that as well. Doesn't compare. (IIRC, our prison population is just about to exceed the number of cells again; about 80000. Not close to the half-million we'd need to be proportionate to the US.)

True, but you also don't have the massive differences in wealth that we do. If I am wrong I'll recant that part.

Seriously tho with the larger pop even if we had a smaller percentage of poor people that would still equate to a larger physical number and thus more criminals. As it stands we have whole cities with poor people New Orleans is a good example. That breeds massive amounts of criminals.

http://archive.webdialogues.net/cs/legischool-gangs/view/di/74?x-t=home.view

300,000 gang members in California alone....

That really doesn't explain the massive expansion of our prison system, which has occurred within the lifetime of most of us on this site. In 1978 there were less than a half-million people in jails in prisons. In the past thirty years the prison population as well as the incarceration rate has increased nearly five times to 2.3 million people. While inequality has increased during that period, and the number of poor people has also increased, those increases do not correlate with the massive and historic wave of incarceration.

Rather the growth in incarceration is due to policy decisions to dramatically increase sentences, incarcerate people for behaviors that previously would not have resulted in incarceration and to criminalize a more behaviors.

The 300,000 "gang member" number in California should be taken with a grain of salt, and is equally useless in understanding the growth of prisons. In Los Angles, you can be classified as a gang member, simply because a police officer says you are one. There's a list of criteria which includes things like having a tattoo, having a nickname (street name) and knowing someone the police also say is a gang member. Additionally, there is a tremendous amount of literature that argues prison fuel growth in gang membership--as opposed to the conventional wisdom that prisons are solution for the gang problem.