Friday, 02.29.08
The Price of Prison
Photo by Flickr user 427 under a Creative Commons license
Wrongfully accused
August 2007
Stuart Taylor on wrongly convicted inmates, and the difficulty of setting them free.
Nasty and brutish
April 1920
Frank Tanenbaum on turn of the 20th-century prison cruelty.
Rehabilitation, not retribution
November 2005
A model prison that educates and rehabilitates with dramatic successes.
The prison-industrial complex
December 1998
That number is best understood as a mere snapshot. Approximately 630,000 ex-offenders leave prison every year, so the number of adults who've been a part of our corrupt, broken prison system is in fact far larger than the 1.6 million currently locked up. Then there are the children with parents behind bars, no small number of whom will eventually wind up in prison themselves. After all, when virtually all the adult men in your life do a bid at some point or another, there's no stigma attached to it. It's simply part of growing up. Just as a shrinking slice of our population fights our wars, a handful of American neighborhoods fill our prisons to the brim, providing opportunities for armies of correctional officers, social workers, caterers, and humorless concrete-loving architects.
As Paul Cassell told Adam Liptak of The New York Times, "One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense." And that sounds reasonable enough. Yet we shouldn't forget the number of alleged offenders who lack adequate legal representation, or have been sentenced under onerous mandatory minimum or three-strikes laws that carry unreasonably stiff sentences for offenses any reasonable person would consider nonserious.
Which leads us to the broader question of sentence length. Economists Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote found that sentence length in vehicular homicides varied dramatically according to victim characteristics. What does this mean, exactly? Because vehicular homicides tend to be fairly random, you'd think victim characteristics would matter very little. It turns out, however, that offenders are given far longer sentences for killing women rather than men and whites rather than blacks. We're not talking about victims with criminal records or victims in the drug trade, etc. Rather, we're talking about random innocents mowed down in the street. To put it crudely, it seems pretty clear that the criminal justice system values some lives less than others. Not shocking news, of course. But it should be.
Powder keg prisonsIn 2007 David DeVoss reported on Gov. Schwarzenegger's struggle with California's retrograde correctional unions. |
Vicious circleThis Jason DeParle essay brilliantly describes how mass imprisonment exacerbates poverty and inequality. |
Rogue prisonsHuman Rights Watch offers comprehensive coverage of the failures and abuses of the American prison system. |
Inside San QuentinLouis Theroux, the world's most brilliant television journalist, offers a witty and balanced account of life in an American prison. |
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Beyond the racial/ethnic disparities, what strikes me as being particularly alarming is that the rates of recidivism have not changed, as fully half of all inmates are put back behind bars within three years. It seems that our "corrections" system does not in fact correct anything.
Also, I wonder if the increasing rates of incarceration have a negative effect on deterrence. I mean, at some point, among highly-imprisoned demographics, prison probably loses it's taboo.
yeah that it's shouldn't have an '. forgive me.
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A huge chunk of this is non violent drug possession, right?
It seems to me that every politician alive must understand that legalizing or even decriminalizing (for example) marijuana would be a hugely hugely sensible thing to do, with a whole host of beneficial consequences such as a reduction in prison populations. But nobody is willing to stick their neck out.
Posted by Jordan Weber-Flink | February 29, 2008 3:43 PM