The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Cargo — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:22:18 -0000

I worked in correction for two decades. We can and have in the past made corrections less harmful than it is currently. We lack the leadership will. Perhaps the crushing expense of prisons can cause us to loosen our variety of ideological grips and look to what social science and a few agencies find can lower recidivism and incarcerations in the first place. That we lump those enslaved to addiction and the mentally disabled in with the few cold blooded is at best an incredible embarrassment.

Senator Webb has introduced legislation designed to take an honest look at what should be done. S.714 is making its way through the process with extensive support. Perhaps we realizing that the actual assaults on our standards of living are not from street criminal rather by those we trusted with our economic well being.

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

vaildog — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:54:43 -0000

Every once ina while I catch one of the prison documentaries on MSNBC or some other channel. What always amazes me is that for being such a supposedly controlled environment how much goes on that should not be tolerated. Guards are very candid about who belongs to what gangs and what contraband prisoners have access to. Why is this tolerated? The prison system should exist to enforce discipline, breakdown criminal networks and reintegrate people into society. There should be intensive efforts to identify those prisoners who are willing and able to be reformed and maximize resources to ensuring that happens.

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Nick Hudson — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:37:31 -0000

I think Alyssa Rosenberg's post on prisons is spot on, and her experience seems similar to that of guards and inmates in at least some state prisons. One of my brothers is a prison guard in Huntsville, another spent four years in prison, and I work for an organization called Grassroots Leadership that works to prevent privatization of public jails and prisons. (We have a blog if anyone is interested: texasprisonbidness.org)

The state falls short of meeting the required 1-48 guard-to-inmate ratio by nearly 3,000 guards, and the director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice requested $200 million to fill that gap before the legislative session began. Because of the state's strapped budget, TDCJ received no additional funding. So we have eighteen and nineteen year olds-- like my brother and his fiance-- guarding the understaffed prison facilities.

I must add this, though-- When we add to the slew of normal problems in prisons the complicating element of privatization, things get worse-- less oversight by the state, unresponsiveness to open record requests, annual staff turnover rates of 90% (compared to 43% for public facilities), lower guard-to-inmate ratios, and perhaps worst of all-- a financial interest in housing more and more prisoners. By allowing privatization of prison facilities, we actually make guards and prisoners less safe, and we see real threats to public safety manifest themselves. The organization I work with has teamed with a criminologist and a public policy analyst to faithfully document the outcomes of Texas' privatization experiment on a blog, http:www.texasprisonbidness.or....

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Anal_yst — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:24:58 -0000

Are you talking about violent or non-violent criminals? 1st-timers or repeat offenders? Without clarification and some support I'm more than a tad skeptical of your statement.

You certainly can't be suggesting that we should be locking up every 18 year old kid unlucky enough to be caught with a few grams of weed with murderers and rapists, can you?

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Josh Jasper — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:41:41 -0000

MJ - Spoken as a true believer who has no idea what conservatives want. They want to be safe.

Nah. They want revenge. It's why they support torture. Not because it works, but because it hurts people they're angry at.

The safety thing is a sham to get people to think that's what they're getting. If real safety was an issue, they'd actually look at places that had low crime rates and try to emulate them, instead of piling on punishment and expecting it to work, despite evidence to the contrary.

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Seekonk — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:09:03 -0000

Our society generally disdains "social engineering", but according to criminologist Elliott Currie, mass imprisonment is the most thoroughly implemented social experiment in US history.

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Dwayne Betts — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:32:09 -0000

The better question may be can we create more pockets of productivity in prison. I agree with Bill that there has to be a meaningful parole system, but I don't see how that is possible when people get sentenced to thirty and forty years and a hundred years. At some point we have to take a step back and admit that prison is a land where the rule of law is violence. It's what is put in place by guards, by other inmates and by the judicial system. But that's just not effective. Still, since we have no alternatives, we are trapped with prisons as the most unproductive places.

Even medium and low security prisons are unproductive - because getting there is never really about a means to better programming, it's about a way to escape violence and get closer to one's family.

Also, this just isn't a popular topic. Prisons are filled with men who have been found guilty of crimes, and people think that they should pay for their crime - not be able to sit in a cell and get better than the people who never committed crimes.

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Bill L. — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:14:27 -0000

Rehabilitation is largely irrelevant unless the justice system offers a meaningful parole system. But that won't happen unless sentencing systems move away from determinate-sentencing models where the convict serves a specified amount of time and is then automatically released. Otherwise rehabilitative activities are a nice thing for prisoners to do, but there's little incentive to do them.

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

dmf — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:13:54 -0000

It certainly doesn't help to have prison systems which benefit financially from keeping people locked up and local govts which see prisons as replacements for factories. And from what I have heard from older guards the drug trade has just corrupted everything. But in my clincal experience mandated treatment is almost an oxymoron as it's very hard to stay clean and sober when you have self-motivation and hope so we have to be careful about trends like the drug courts which send people to rehab as if that will do the trick. I think that if socgrad where here we would be reminded that without the opportunity for meaningful employment there is little hope for folks who find themselves at the edges of our society and many of these people lack the social skills needed to even begin job training so this will require massive and interconnected efforts for which we currently lack any real govt office/program so we will see what Obama and all do.

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

mj — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:12:09 -0000

Josh,

Spoken as a true believer who has no idea what conservatives want. They want to be safe. Since rehabilitiation fails for the vast majority of criminals they prefer prisons. Maybe in your next reponse to a well reasoned post noting there are no easy answers you can avoid suggesting an easy answer so incredibly naive it doesn't even pass the laugh test among leftists.

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Josh Jasper — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:24:31 -0000

The problem in a nutshell is conservatives. They want punitive "justice", by which they really mean revenge.

Re: Can We Make Prisons Productive Places?

Persia — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:22:27 -0000

I emailed a link to the earlier post about juvenile justice to my lawyer friend, and her reaction was very much this-- we keep working on a 19th-century paradigm, which didn't work particularly well back then.