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Security Oversights and Complacency Set the Stage For Killers' Escape
HughPickens.com writes: The NY Times reports that although no single lapse or mistake in security enabled two killers to break out of the Clinton Correctional Facility two weeks ago, it is now clear that an array of oversights, years in the making, set the stage for the prison break and for the ensuing manhunt. According to the Times, a sense of complacency had taken hold that in some ways might have been understandable: "There had not been an escape from the 170-year-old prison in decades, and officials say no one had ever broken out of the maximum-security section. ... 'As the months go by, years go by, things get less strict,' says [retired corrections officer] Keith Provost. ... [U]nlike many prisons and jails across the country, there are no video cameras on the cellblocks at the Clinton facility that might have detected suspicious activity." And although prison rules forbid putting sheets across cell bars to obstruct viewing, in practice, officers say, inmates frequently were allowed to hang sheets for lengthy periods. Officials say there is a good chance that the two men had been at work on their plan for weeks, maybe months. Night after night, the authorities have come to believe, the two men stuffed their beds with crude dummies, slipped out of holes they had cut in the back of their cells and climbed down five stories using the piping along the walls. They then set to work inside the tunnels under the prison, spending hours preparing their path of escape before returning to their cells unobserved.
No contemporary prison break has reminded me so much of the 1962 breakout from Alcatraz (theories on survival aside).
If Hillary can't even keep people in her own private prison, how can we expect her to run the country?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
a pity that it was only the escape part and didn't expose massive high level corruption and abuse as well.
The corruption and abuse in the prison system, and the collusion between the prison industry, the unions, and the police, to keep it going, does not need to be "exposed" because it is done openly, and generally with the support of the public. Any attempt to fix the prisons needs to start with a massive reduction in the number of people incarcerated. Per capita, America imprisons far more than other countries, and far more than even authoritarian countries such as China and Russia.
Before election day, you will see ads, and receive mailers, from politicians promising to "get tough on crime", along with endorsements by the police chief, and the police union. Please vote for someone else.
List of countries by incarceration rate
I certainly wouldn't fancy their odds over the medium to long term(it isn't exactly getting easier, for anyone, to conduct most aspects of modern life without leaving a handy trail through a variety of databases; and explaining gaps in your employment history is enough fun if you actually were ill/unemployed/etc rather than 'in prison for murder' so your future options are kind of limited); but these two have done much better than average, especially when you consider that they apparently had to work without a getaway driver.
Upstate NY is fairly big, and has some heavily wooded and otherwise potentially helpful terrain; but they started with quite limited resources and a modest head start; while the authorities have numbers, hardware, and the likely cooperation of most of the residents of the area; this isn't exactly Robin Hood hiding out from the king's men.
Does anyone else find it odd that the press is reporting where the police will be searching next for the escapees? Who are they trying to help here?
load "linux",8,1
The corruption and abuse in the prison system, and the collusion between the prison industry, the unions, and the police, to keep it going, does not need to be "exposed" because it is done openly, and generally with the support of the public. Any attempt to fix the prisons needs to start with a massive reduction in the number of people incarcerated. Per capita, America imprisons far more than other countries, and far more than even authoritarian countries such as China and Russia.
If you add the number of forced "stays" at mental health hospitals in other countries, the numbers are substantially equalized. This is, of course, damning on its own, as the US has defaulted to using prisons and jails to incarcerate the mentally ill. This is not ideal from a humane or a fiscal point of view.
Another counter argument is that crime rates have dramatically and universally fallen across the US during the same time period that rates of incarceration have risen.
Before election day, you will see ads, and receive mailers, from politicians promising to "get tough on crime", along with endorsements by the police chief, and the police union. Please vote for someone else.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Pretty much every organization, and certainly every union out there from the Piano Tuners 421 to the police, are going to endorse somebody. Having lived in Chicago--well-known as a union town--for several years in the 00's, and around the country, I don't recall anything like the level of organization you are claiming. I've certainly never received a mailer from a police union, nor do I think I've ever seen an ad run by the union.
I believe its also been proven through a thorough meta-study that the lead in fuel was causing an increase in violent crime.
Yes, it has. And that's why they took it out.
Of course, you can still find people who are pissed that they did.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
crime rates have dramatically and universally fallen across the US during the same time period that rates of incarceration have risen.
1. Crime rates have fallen dramatically in other countries as well.
2. Crime rates fell just as much in states that didn't massively increase prison populations, as in states that did.
Maybe not officially executed, but several of Putin's opponents and naysayers wound up dead anyway.
No, that isn't "literally the standard operating procedure in most of the US today." That is nonsense.
Your statement about "black children are incarcerated like this and put in debt bondage to the state" is rubbish, absolute rubbish.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell