Domain: prisonpolicy.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to prisonpolicy.org.
Comments · 23
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Re:They should have been doing this all along.
Oh? Then cite 5 comprehensive studies saying so.
Here you go:
1. Lowering recidivism through family communication
2. The family and recidivism
3. Family ties during imprisonment
4. The effect of family visits on inmates
5. Rethinking recidivism: A communication approach -
Such anger, much despair
Some public policies in this country are setting precedents that are immoral, unethical and, sadly, not illegal. This is one. This has appalling implications for the future of this nation, if you think about it. Incarceration is supposed to be its own punishment, sufficient to the crime. Educate yourself on the cost of making phone calls from prison: https://www.prisonphonejustice... Now look at prison commissary practices and some of the companies that are profiting by selling 30 cent ramen noodle packages for a dollar: https://www.keefegroup.com/ and https://www.prisonpolicy.org/r.... Don't be fooled by the specific product prices in the example. Commissary prices are grossly inflated compared to those available in a competitive retail environment. Plus, inmates are paid slave wages: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/b... Twelve cents an hour is common in federal prisons. Now we hear about the unethical practice of creating voiceprints with neither knowledge nor consent of those being voiceprinted. It's shameful. Immoral, unethical, shameful. By the way, if you're one of those single-note, hard-core, "fuck them they committed a crime" type of people, just move on, OK? You have no idea what you're talking about and I won't waste my time engaging with you. Go take your unvaccinated children on a playdate, or something.
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Such anger, much despair
Some public policies in this country are setting precedents that are immoral, unethical and, sadly, not illegal. This is one. This has appalling implications for the future of this nation, if you think about it. Incarceration is supposed to be its own punishment, sufficient to the crime. Educate yourself on the cost of making phone calls from prison: https://www.prisonphonejustice... Now look at prison commissary practices and some of the companies that are profiting by selling 30 cent ramen noodle packages for a dollar: https://www.keefegroup.com/ and https://www.prisonpolicy.org/r.... Don't be fooled by the specific product prices in the example. Commissary prices are grossly inflated compared to those available in a competitive retail environment. Plus, inmates are paid slave wages: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/b... Twelve cents an hour is common in federal prisons. Now we hear about the unethical practice of creating voiceprints with neither knowledge nor consent of those being voiceprinted. It's shameful. Immoral, unethical, shameful. By the way, if you're one of those single-note, hard-core, "fuck them they committed a crime" type of people, just move on, OK? You have no idea what you're talking about and I won't waste my time engaging with you. Go take your unvaccinated children on a playdate, or something.
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Re:mass biometric surveillance
Don't want mass biometric surveillance in prison? Don't do something that would put you in prison, dumb ass. If I had my way, you wouldn't get out again.
That would be all well and good if the laws and justice system in the US were a little more sane. The population of the US is currently 326 million (2017). The population of the world is 7.5 billion(2017). The 2016 US prison population was 2.3 million including federal, state, local, immigration, military, juvenile. and civil detention facilities. The 2016 prison population for the entire world was 10.35 million. The US has 4.3% of the worlds population but houses 22% of the prisoners in the world. There are also 3.8 million people on probation and 820K on parole. That works out to 6.92 million people who are actively registered in the criminal justice system. That's a little over 2% of the US population.
With the number of laws on the books in the US, damn near the entire population could be arrested on any given day for an infraction. It just matters if you get caught, of if a police officer feels like finding something to charge you for. There are many states that have laws about which positions are legal to have sex with your spouse, in the privacy of your own home. In one of the Carolinas it's illegal to sing off key. There's a town in Arizona that it's illegal to wear suspenders, and another that it's illegal for a woman to wear pants.
There are 646K people incarcerated in local jails. Of those, 70% haven't been convicted yet as the justice system is backed up. There are almost 5500 people who are in civil detention centers in over a dozen states. These are people who were convicted of sexual crimes and have already served their entire sentence. But they are still confined, well, because.
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Re: What's "broken"?
That's a beautiful rant and it is, indeed, an outrage how federal agents of various Agencies pressure people into "confessing" by threatening them with financial ruin of the trial.
But it is irrelevant to the topic, because the entire federal prison population is a tiny slice of the total. Less than 10%, in fact.
We have become Stalin's Soviet Union.
No, we haven't. Stalin killed tens of millions...
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Re:War on Drugs
We put more people in jail because of the war on drugs.
Only around 1 of 5 of the US prison population has drug charges as the only or main reason. Both property crime and violent crime have far more incarcerations.
https://static.prisonpolicy.or...The ratio of incarcerations to the general population is sky high in the US compared to other countries even if every single one of the drug convicts were released.
There are many factors why the US has such a high number of inmates, including a for-profit prison system, elected judges (nobody will get elected on a promise to be more lenient than hard), but probably most of all inequality.
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Considering we still do slavery
Considering we still do slavery, seems premature to me:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The US has 1.5 million people in prison as of 2018...
...many of whom are there for "crimes" of a personal or consensual nature, and many of whom are used as barely- or un-paid labor, while at the same time being sucked dry financially for simple things like phone calls. ...yeah, I think "master" and "slave" can definitely remain around in their original context for quite some time. -
Re: Holy shit you're dumb Khyber
It may be insensitive, and it's definitely offensive (as i believe it's supposed to be) but the fact is that in US prison populations, blacks outnumber latinos 2-1, and latinos outnumber whites by a further 2-1. The reasons for this are, to me, far more offensive than APK's comments, but are also way beyond the scope of what I wanted to point out. Sometimes the actual facts and figures agree with the numbers suggested by prejudice and stereotypes.
That doesn't really excuse APK's comments, but calling him racist based on this is a bit of a stretch, even if he was basing his imagery from nonfactual stereotypes. More likely it's something (unfortunately) ingrained in all of us by years of crime shows, and perhaps a Sublime song. And check out the website. It's a fascinating and awful look at incarceration in america. Its actually terrifying.
I don't need APK to resign from whatever he does, but maybe you both could take a spin through the site below and possibly channel some of that energy into something useful.
Or maybe just better insults.
http://static.prisonpolicy.org...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/r... -
Re: Holy shit you're dumb Khyber
It may be insensitive, and it's definitely offensive (as i believe it's supposed to be) but the fact is that in US prison populations, blacks outnumber latinos 2-1, and latinos outnumber whites by a further 2-1. The reasons for this are, to me, far more offensive than APK's comments, but are also way beyond the scope of what I wanted to point out. Sometimes the actual facts and figures agree with the numbers suggested by prejudice and stereotypes.
That doesn't really excuse APK's comments, but calling him racist based on this is a bit of a stretch, even if he was basing his imagery from nonfactual stereotypes. More likely it's something (unfortunately) ingrained in all of us by years of crime shows, and perhaps a Sublime song. And check out the website. It's a fascinating and awful look at incarceration in america. Its actually terrifying.
I don't need APK to resign from whatever he does, but maybe you both could take a spin through the site below and possibly channel some of that energy into something useful.
Or maybe just better insults.
http://static.prisonpolicy.org...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/r... -
Re:Prison for this not likely for anyone
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/re...
There isn't even an entry for people who were sent to prison for being careless about top secret security clearance.
The most likely occurrence for being sloppy would be a reprimand and extra training classes.
People are prosecuted for intentionally releasing top secret material to enemies or to the public.
People are not prosecuted for being careless or incorrectly configured servers.
It is not true that "anyone but hillary" would do prison time for what happened here. They would get butt hurt and it might even hurt their career (and might get them fired and their clearance withdrawn) but federal prosecution for all practical purposes does not occur in this kind of situation.
In December 1996, CIA Director John Deutch resigned after it was discovered that he had stored highly classified documents on his home computer, which was connected to the Internet.
After a criminal investigation, Deutch agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and pay a $5,000 fine. But before the prosecutors could file the papers in federal court, President Bill Clinton pardoned him on his last day in office. -
Prison for this not likely for anyone
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/re...
There isn't even an entry for people who were sent to prison for being careless about top secret security clearance.
The most likely occurrence for being sloppy would be a reprimand and extra training classes.
People are prosecuted for intentionally releasing top secret material to enemies or to the public.
People are not prosecuted for being careless or incorrectly configured servers.
It is not true that "anyone but hillary" would do prison time for what happened here. They would get butt hurt and it might even hurt their career (and might get them fired and their clearance withdrawn) but federal prosecution for all practical purposes does not occur in this kind of situation.
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Re:Pretty reasonable
Prison is not a deterrent: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/conte...
Prison increases recidivism: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/sc...So what does prison actually do? It doesn't prevent crime, and it doesn't make it less likely someone will commit a crime in the future. You can say you're using it to keep violent criminals away from the public, but the truth in the US is way more creepy.
The reason prison is big in the US is because your government/corporations use it for cheap labour. Prison industry is big business with low overheads. That article also comes with some interesting statistics:
Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offences. Sixteen percent of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.
But of course I'm sure you can tell me why prison works and it does any of the things that you think it does, when only 3% of incarcerated people are the kind of people you actually need to keep locked up and the rest are more likely to commit crimes after they've been in jail.
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Re:Imaginary reality to "prove" imaginary racism
For the life of me I can't figure why you'd use that to support your claim that Asians don't suffer from racism...
They certainly do suffer from racism. The real racism of a system, that pretends to be anti-racism.
They do not, however, show any of the symptoms, for which the imaginary racism is usually blamed when failures of Blacks are discussed: they are not incarcerated disproportionally more often than others (heck, you can't even find them on the chart!) and their incomes aren't lower than those of Whites — quite the opposite, in fact...
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Re:Flip Argument
...some non-specific charge that you believe they missed.
The charge of excessive force is absolutely specific. It is not only missed here, but in every grand jury trial in the last few decades. I already covered some of the "why" it is missed, and rough statistics to back "that" it is missed. Go back and re-read what I wrote, and if you don't like the statistic the show I heard that on was 910AM SF, Gil Gross, and he was pulling data from the US DOJ for the topic (between 5:30-6:05PM 11/25/14).
I'm not a lawyer so to me the difference between "charge" and "indict" is not very significant to our discussion. If you want a pedantic discussion then you are probably engaged with the wrong guy.
Why do you continually claim that you need to be in a specific profession to be able to read, comprehend, and make decisions? Here you imply that you need to be a Lawyer to figure two dictionary words. Previously you stated that can't read and understand testimony unless you are a lawyer, and that you can't understand forensics without being a forensic scientist. I honestly don't understand that frame of mind. I see it as a repeated appeal to authority and not a rational defense for your position.
You can read what grand juries do here. I should not have to also provide the definitions for indict and charge. It is prudent to the discussion since you keep claiming that "we are throwing him under the bus", further claiming we can't hold an individual accountable for individual actions.
Where did you see those numbers?
Pick a topic and search for it. http://www.prisonpolicy.org/gr... was the first link when searching for "incarceration by race", but militarization and psychological profiling for police officers were linked way up in the thread. I don't normally trust one places statistics, but these can usually be corroborated with various other agencies such as US Census, US DOJ, DEA, etc..
Yes, I think we agree on the ends but not the means.
I wish history backed your theory of change without action, but I can't find any history to back it. Corruption will not just get up and walk away happy, never has and never will.
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Re:Discrimination
why must we force equal distribution of gender/race/etc in everything?
Oh we don't have to force an equal distribution into everything. For example the prison population is drastically gender imbalanced and no one seems terribly bothered.
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Re: Ridiculous.
"I can also airily wave my hand and claim evidence."
I don't need to "wave my hand", jerk. I can spend two fucking minutes on google and look up some actual research.
Maybe you should do the same. That's just one example out of maybe 100 good ones that came up after I spent 10 seconds to type in a search phrase. -
Re:Hard to feel sympathy
What's the goal of punishment? To make criminals feel bad? Who does that benefit, exactly? The victims somehow? Punishment can be an important part of correction, but punishment as deterrent doesn't work very well. Longer sentences after a certain point are correlated with an increase in recidivism. take a look.
What do you imagine you're trying to accomplish by punishing criminals?
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Re:Not Racism
It's not racism if the ads were being generated purely on statistical models.
.. unless you can show how people have manipulated the process for some reason, it's merely statistics.It's not even "direct" statistics of any sort
According to this, the incarceration rate for black people is over 5X that of white people (380 white, 966 Latino, 2,207 black per 100,000 people).So the model is more complicated than "A black person is X% more likely to be in prison, so let's show them X% more prison-related ads"
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Re:Hypocrisy in action
..., because arrests are public record, an outside party can look at the records and see that the [insert minority here] population, which is 10% of the whole population makes up 90% of the arrests. What does that sound like to you?
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Re:Way too much is being made of this...
I apologize, I may have misread a percentage chance for American men to mean all Americans. Perhaps that shows up some gender bias in myself. I recall having read that it was 8% as of 2005, but I cannot now find the article in a cursory search. Here are the stats I have found, though:
- In 1991, the odds were 5.1%. http://www.jointcenter.org/DB/factsheet/correction alsys.htm
- Based on data from 1991-2001, the odds for all Americans is 6%, 11% for American males. http://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/lifetimechance. html
It may still be accurate that it is close to 10% based on current incarceration rates. I know that the DoJ web site shows incarceration percentages have been rising for the last five years, so it may not be outside my original mark of 10% today. However, being that I can't find any reliable stats, I'll withdraw my 10% and enter in a plea of 6%. I'll do some more digging and see if I can find the article I remember reading, or see if I can find estimates based on more recent incarceration rates. -
Re:Not one of us
>Might not the idea that the two immigrant hoodlums running from the police who accidentally killed "electrocuted" themselves, might have some what less credibility being that just a few months ago, the police stalked, chased down and gunned down a brazillian immigrant at a subway stop and initially covered it up and blamed the immigrant that allegedly was wearing a coat in summer and acting suspiciously and running away all of which turned out not to be true at all and in fact was a complete fabrication?
Good story, if slightly slanted reporting. WRONG COUNTRY! . I know we're all part of the EU now, and it's only a short hop across (or underneath) the channel, but France and the UK are still separate countries.
> Tell me why enforced secular humanism seems to be targeted primarily at the muslim community?
Stupid politicians.
> Tell me about job prospects> and what the french have to do fix this problem.
Change their macroeconomic policies for startes; hell is likely to freeze over before that happens.
> Tell me why the majority of people in french jails are muslim.
Sorry, I don't believe that story. Quote 1: "Despite making up only 10 percent of the population, Muslims account for most of the country's inmates and a growing percentage of the prison populations in many other European countries." - make up scary facts.
Quote 2: "While there are no official data on issues of race and ethnicity in much of Europe -- it is in fact illegal to keep such data in many places -- experts on prison populations agree on the new disproportion of Muslims." - admit that you don't actually know the facts. I'll be generous and just assume the reporter isn't numerate enough to understand the difference between a majority and disproportionate representation.
Why is the majority of US prison inmates black and hispanic? Probably because poor people tend to end up in prison way more often than rich people.
As to citizenship issues in Europe, yes, it's pretty fucked up. Germany & Turkey is a particularly stupid situation, and counterproductive; but AFAIK Turkey takes some of the blame in a) not allowing dual nationality and b) restricting inheritance to nationals. That's what I seem to recall, but I haven't looked at it in ages, so I may well be wrong. But I know plenty of people who have gained UK citizenship; and I don't actually think it's harder than US citizenship.
>I find it mortifying that we collectively do not have enough reflexitivity to go beyond the "they are not us, they are them and they hate us, they are foreign" mentality. And it is shameful.
Amen. -
Re:Parent example of anti-US relativism
No, we are not all that much more free than these other countries. Our laws just persecute different groups.
Are you aware that the U.S. has the highest per-capita prison population of any nation in the world?
A lot of Americans are surprised to hear it, because we've been brought up from birth being told over and over again how great and free our nation is. It's true, the ideals we believe our country to hold are good ones -- but in practice, the people we elect often (usually?) ignore those ideals.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.htm l
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/globalinca rceration.shtml
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Re:Yes,http://prisonpolicy.org/graphs/murderrates.shtml
Looks like they are underrepresented on death row, actually.