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This is also what happens when well-intentioned people are vastly more successful at fighting prison construction than fighting mass incarceration. Our prisons

This is also what happens when well-intentioned people are vastly more successful at fighting prison construction than fighting mass incarceration. Our prisons are routinely at 1.5x, 2x, 3x capacity. Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one, people living on cots in a gymnasium with no privacy whatsoever, in such close quarters that even the most patient people would be at each other's throats. Until the prison population actually declines, we ought to at least be building prisons fast enough to stay at design capacity. Google your state - you'll be amazed. Prisons aren't designed to be comfortable, but they sure as hell get a lot less comfortable with too many people in them.

gnaritas 11y ago
There's a simple solution to that, set people free. We don't need to build more prisons, we already imprison more of our population than any other country in the world, we have too many prisons and too many people in them. We need to imprison less people. Release all inmates who committed victim-less crimes, if more room is needed, release all inmates who committed non violent crimes-there are better ways to deal with them than prison. Prison should be for violent criminals only. Release all drug users, release all drug pushers, none of those people belong in jail.
- XorNot 11y ago
  You miss the point. It's easier to stop prisons being built then to set people free. But it would probably be easier to deal with the whole problem if in fact we were a lot stricter about ensuring proper prison capacity, construction and staffing were followed. But then again, doing any of that is a lot harder then egging on the narrative that prison is actually meant to be a mad max wasteland, and pretending we're totally not responsible for turning a blind eye to the rape, murder and gangs we let happen there.
  - gnaritas 11y ago
    No, I don't miss the point, I just don't agree that building more prisons is acceptable.
- zanny 11y ago
  > victim-less crimes I think I found the double-think. But absolutely, incarceration is used as a tool of suppressing "undesirables" according to the writers of law. The co-conspirator of Watergate is making waves online again this past week for having talked about how the Nixon administration planned the war on drugs as a means to destroy hippie and black communities through mass incarceration and prosecution.
- rtpg 11y ago
  I agree that we should have less people in prison. In order to be lucid about the situation though, it's important to realise that a very large part of the prison population is in there for violent offences. Even knowing this, I still believe we should be reducing sentences (I have a hard time justifying putting anyone in a cage for 15 years as a punishment...) but there probably needs to be some alternative things going on too.
  - lkbm 11y ago
    To put some numbers on the part of the prison population there for violent offenses: * Bureau of Justice Statistics says 53% of state prsionsers and 7% (what?!) of federal prisoners (2014): http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14_Summary.pdf http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14_Summary.pdf * Federal Bureau of Prisons says 46.5% drug offences (no specification on violent v. non-violent) and 9.2% immigration as the third largest group. Second largest is more violent sounding, though: Weapons, Explosives, Arson 16.9% (2016): https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... I don't think non-violent crime should always mean no prison, but I suspect there are better ways of dealing with the majority of them. Also, since you mentioned shorter terms, here are the BOP's numbers of sentence length: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_sentences.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_sente...
    - MajorLOL 11y ago
      Heres something to consider; Drawing such a sharp distinction between violent and non violent crimes omits many real-world factors. What kind of criminal is this person is different from what was this criminal convicted of. I can be a part time drug dealer, shooting rival gang members, robbing houses and pimping whores. But land myself in prison for 10 years due to my 6th possession charge. If you draw a hard distinction statistically, I fall into the 'I can't believe we imprison people for having a little pot' Additionally, what is a non-violent crime? Looks like good chunk of prison inmates are property crimes, larceny, burglars, thief. What percentage do you suspect of these non-violent offenders were armed during the commission of their crimes? What percentage would have turned violent if confronted during their crime? I suspect that these people who steal your car, break into your home and business and steal your things are effectively violent offenders.
- omegaham 11y ago
  According to this site[1], felons incarcerated for drugs comprise 16% of the total prison population. 64.8% are incarcerated for violent offenses and property crimes, both of which have victims. The most interesting part, to me, is the "public-order" criminals. When my girlfriend worked corrections, she noted that at the state level, the vast majority of prisoners were in for violent crimes - rape, robbery, murder, arson, etc. At the county level, however, a large number of prisoners were in for what she termed as "criminalized insanity." They're too mentally ill to function, so they live on the streets until they get arrested for doing some small crime - loitering, public urination, trespassing, etc. They get locked up for a few days, get a court date, and get released. Then they go right back to the streets, miss their court date, get arrested again for a bench warrant next time they have a run-in with the law, get sentenced to a slightly longer stay, get released on probation, violate probation, get arrested again the next time they have a run-in with the law... Wash, rinse, repeat. All of this is really short-term... and yet they're forming 13.8% of the incarcerated population. We're spending an enormous amount of resources on what amounts to impromptu, ad-hoc, half-assed mental healthcare, and none of it works. But eliminating it entirely and saying, "Go forth and sin no more" is going to do absolutely nothing unless there are corresponding programs that can actually help such people. That kind of coordination - saying, "Okay, we're going to have to spend $x million extra dollars extra for a few years until the mental health benefits start to decrease the cost of jails and prisons" - is extremely difficult, if not impossible to accomplish. Regarding drug pushers and prison - I constantly swing back and forth on this issue, mostly because they are morally degenerate for exploiting human weakness for profit. If you google Whiteclay, Nebraska and go to images[2], you'll find a whole bunch of pictures of wasted Indians lying in alleyways right outside the (white-owned) liquor stores. It's created an enormous amount of frustration in the community, and the response from the government is "Well, it's not illegal to sell alcohol to alcoholics." I give pause to the folks who demand unrestricted drug use for everyone, (which is what decriminalization is - if something's restrictions have no teeth, namely incarceration, it's unrestricted. Same exact reason why financial laws are flouted so often - no teeth) because this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale. The real question, and one that I can't even begin to unravel because there's so much goddamn bullshit on the Internet from agenda-pushers on both sides, is "Is this state of affairs, where a large portion of the population is incarcerated for vice, preferable to a state of affairs where vice is openly permitted?" Personally, as someone who lives in a relatively affluent suburb, I'd say that legalizing everything would be a massive boon to me. My taxes will go down, and more importantly I'm insulated from the consequences by a lack of public transit and vigilant cops who are, er, unfriendly to the lowlives who occasionally wander away from the city. The folks in the city and poorer towns, who actually get to deal with the massive consequences of widespread addiction, might beg to differ. [1] http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339 http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteclay+nebraska&client=ubuntu&channel=fs&biw=1920&bih=901&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjf666Lzt7LAhUC1WMKHSmNDEAQ_AUICCgD https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteclay+nebraska&client=ub...
Karunamon 11y ago
Thought experiment: What would happen if the laws were amended so that, should someone be sentenced to prison time, and all prisons within a reasonable radius are at capacity, that either the person with the lowest amount of time to serve in that prison (barring violent offenses) is automatically set free, or the sentence is commuted to probation or such? There's an argument to be made here that cramming two people into a parking-space-sized cell is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, so the state really should have to decide if placing Joe Potsmoker in for a year is worth releasing Bill Burgalar five years early. Just saying "fuck it, throw 'em all in" shouldn't be an option. (This is assuming that prison has any reformative value at all, of course...)
- superuser2 11y ago
  This happens. Not on a 1:1 basis, but early release to alleviate overcrowding somewhat is not unheard of. The careers of the politicians responsible are eviscerated, spectacularly, when the people they released go on to commit violent crimes.
- gcb0 11y ago
  then you get a interesting, new, prisoner dilemma puzzle. if you are the leader of a big gang, and still have power on the people outside, you can make enough gang-newcomers go to jail until you are free.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    Thousands of them? And they'd all have to get longer sentences than you? Not going to work.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      How about shifts? Prison holds 1000? Make a gang of 4000. You can each serve a week a month to criminalize with impunity.
      - Dylan16807 11y ago
trhway 11y ago
>Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one if you trace whom prison guard unions support you'd notice that it is the prison-industrial complex who is a major player responsible for incarcerating more people. Having crowded prisons helps a lot to overcome any opposition to new prisons exactly because of the logic like yours.
chishaku 11y ago
> Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one... Is there any evidence that people "against the prison industrial complex" are directly responsible for the rate at which new prisons are being constructed? I'm not sure but I'm inclined to think that this would have more to do with strained budgets than any successful activism. Edit: I looked into this a bit with California as an example. In 2011, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that required California to dramatically reduce its prison population. "Justice Kennedy, citing the lower court decision, said there was 'no realistic possibility that California would be able to build itself out of this crisis,' in light of the state’s financial problems." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html The opinion of the lower court: "Relying on expert testimony, the court ruled that the California prison system, the nation’s largest with more than 150,000 inmates, could reduce its population by shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole, which they said would have no adverse impact on public safety." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/us/10prison.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/us/10prison.html
vacri 11y ago
> but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one I've not met anyone who is against prison construction that is not also against long sentences and against sentences for trivial crap. It's the state's half-arsed job that's responsible, not the people who are trying to make the place better. We definitely shouldn't be building prisons just for capacity, because then when they are slated to close, it become another political football: "jobs", "soft on crime", so on and so forth. The solution is to stop jailing people to such a ridiculous degree - in the US it's basically j-curved since the '90s.

gnaritas 11y ago

There's a simple solution to that, set people free. We don't need to build more prisons, we already imprison more of our population than any other country in the world, we have too many prisons and too many people in them. We need to imprison less people. Release all inmates who committed victim-less crimes, if more room is needed, release all inmates who committed non violent crimes-there are better ways to deal with them than prison. Prison should be for violent criminals only. Release all drug users, release all drug pushers, none of those people belong in jail.

XorNot 11y ago
You miss the point. It's easier to stop prisons being built then to set people free. But it would probably be easier to deal with the whole problem if in fact we were a lot stricter about ensuring proper prison capacity, construction and staffing were followed. But then again, doing any of that is a lot harder then egging on the narrative that prison is actually meant to be a mad max wasteland, and pretending we're totally not responsible for turning a blind eye to the rape, murder and gangs we let happen there.
- gnaritas 11y ago
  No, I don't miss the point, I just don't agree that building more prisons is acceptable.
zanny 11y ago
> victim-less crimes I think I found the double-think. But absolutely, incarceration is used as a tool of suppressing "undesirables" according to the writers of law. The co-conspirator of Watergate is making waves online again this past week for having talked about how the Nixon administration planned the war on drugs as a means to destroy hippie and black communities through mass incarceration and prosecution.
rtpg 11y ago
I agree that we should have less people in prison. In order to be lucid about the situation though, it's important to realise that a very large part of the prison population is in there for violent offences. Even knowing this, I still believe we should be reducing sentences (I have a hard time justifying putting anyone in a cage for 15 years as a punishment...) but there probably needs to be some alternative things going on too.
- lkbm 11y ago
  To put some numbers on the part of the prison population there for violent offenses: * Bureau of Justice Statistics says 53% of state prsionsers and 7% (what?!) of federal prisoners (2014): http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14_Summary.pdf http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14_Summary.pdf * Federal Bureau of Prisons says 46.5% drug offences (no specification on violent v. non-violent) and 9.2% immigration as the third largest group. Second largest is more violent sounding, though: Weapons, Explosives, Arson 16.9% (2016): https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... I don't think non-violent crime should always mean no prison, but I suspect there are better ways of dealing with the majority of them. Also, since you mentioned shorter terms, here are the BOP's numbers of sentence length: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_sentences.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_sente...
  - MajorLOL 11y ago
    Heres something to consider; Drawing such a sharp distinction between violent and non violent crimes omits many real-world factors. What kind of criminal is this person is different from what was this criminal convicted of. I can be a part time drug dealer, shooting rival gang members, robbing houses and pimping whores. But land myself in prison for 10 years due to my 6th possession charge. If you draw a hard distinction statistically, I fall into the 'I can't believe we imprison people for having a little pot' Additionally, what is a non-violent crime? Looks like good chunk of prison inmates are property crimes, larceny, burglars, thief. What percentage do you suspect of these non-violent offenders were armed during the commission of their crimes? What percentage would have turned violent if confronted during their crime? I suspect that these people who steal your car, break into your home and business and steal your things are effectively violent offenders.
omegaham 11y ago
According to this site[1], felons incarcerated for drugs comprise 16% of the total prison population. 64.8% are incarcerated for violent offenses and property crimes, both of which have victims. The most interesting part, to me, is the "public-order" criminals. When my girlfriend worked corrections, she noted that at the state level, the vast majority of prisoners were in for violent crimes - rape, robbery, murder, arson, etc. At the county level, however, a large number of prisoners were in for what she termed as "criminalized insanity." They're too mentally ill to function, so they live on the streets until they get arrested for doing some small crime - loitering, public urination, trespassing, etc. They get locked up for a few days, get a court date, and get released. Then they go right back to the streets, miss their court date, get arrested again for a bench warrant next time they have a run-in with the law, get sentenced to a slightly longer stay, get released on probation, violate probation, get arrested again the next time they have a run-in with the law... Wash, rinse, repeat. All of this is really short-term... and yet they're forming 13.8% of the incarcerated population. We're spending an enormous amount of resources on what amounts to impromptu, ad-hoc, half-assed mental healthcare, and none of it works. But eliminating it entirely and saying, "Go forth and sin no more" is going to do absolutely nothing unless there are corresponding programs that can actually help such people. That kind of coordination - saying, "Okay, we're going to have to spend $x million extra dollars extra for a few years until the mental health benefits start to decrease the cost of jails and prisons" - is extremely difficult, if not impossible to accomplish. Regarding drug pushers and prison - I constantly swing back and forth on this issue, mostly because they are morally degenerate for exploiting human weakness for profit. If you google Whiteclay, Nebraska and go to images[2], you'll find a whole bunch of pictures of wasted Indians lying in alleyways right outside the (white-owned) liquor stores. It's created an enormous amount of frustration in the community, and the response from the government is "Well, it's not illegal to sell alcohol to alcoholics." I give pause to the folks who demand unrestricted drug use for everyone, (which is what decriminalization is - if something's restrictions have no teeth, namely incarceration, it's unrestricted. Same exact reason why financial laws are flouted so often - no teeth) because this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale. The real question, and one that I can't even begin to unravel because there's so much goddamn bullshit on the Internet from agenda-pushers on both sides, is "Is this state of affairs, where a large portion of the population is incarcerated for vice, preferable to a state of affairs where vice is openly permitted?" Personally, as someone who lives in a relatively affluent suburb, I'd say that legalizing everything would be a massive boon to me. My taxes will go down, and more importantly I'm insulated from the consequences by a lack of public transit and vigilant cops who are, er, unfriendly to the lowlives who occasionally wander away from the city. The folks in the city and poorer towns, who actually get to deal with the massive consequences of widespread addiction, might beg to differ. [1] http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339 http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteclay+nebraska&client=ubuntu&channel=fs&biw=1920&bih=901&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjf666Lzt7LAhUC1WMKHSmNDEAQ_AUICCgD https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteclay+nebraska&client=ub...

Karunamon 11y ago

Thought experiment: What would happen if the laws were amended so that, should someone be sentenced to prison time, and all prisons within a reasonable radius are at capacity, that either the person with the lowest amount of time to serve in that prison (barring violent offenses) is automatically set free, or the sentence is commuted to probation or such? There's an argument to be made here that cramming two people into a parking-space-sized cell is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, so the state really should have to decide if placing Joe Potsmoker in for a year is worth releasing Bill Burgalar five years early. Just saying "fuck it, throw 'em all in" shouldn't be an option. (This is assuming that prison has any reformative value at all, of course...)

superuser2 11y ago
This happens. Not on a 1:1 basis, but early release to alleviate overcrowding somewhat is not unheard of. The careers of the politicians responsible are eviscerated, spectacularly, when the people they released go on to commit violent crimes.
gcb0 11y ago
then you get a interesting, new, prisoner dilemma puzzle. if you are the leader of a big gang, and still have power on the people outside, you can make enough gang-newcomers go to jail until you are free.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  Thousands of them? And they'd all have to get longer sentences than you? Not going to work.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    How about shifts? Prison holds 1000? Make a gang of 4000. You can each serve a week a month to criminalize with impunity.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago

trhway 11y ago

>Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one if you trace whom prison guard unions support you'd notice that it is the prison-industrial complex who is a major player responsible for incarcerating more people. Having crowded prisons helps a lot to overcome any opposition to new prisons exactly because of the logic like yours.

chishaku 11y ago

> Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one... Is there any evidence that people "against the prison industrial complex" are directly responsible for the rate at which new prisons are being constructed? I'm not sure but I'm inclined to think that this would have more to do with strained budgets than any successful activism. Edit: I looked into this a bit with California as an example. In 2011, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that required California to dramatically reduce its prison population. "Justice Kennedy, citing the lower court decision, said there was 'no realistic possibility that California would be able to build itself out of this crisis,' in light of the state’s financial problems." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html The opinion of the lower court: "Relying on expert testimony, the court ruled that the California prison system, the nation’s largest with more than 150,000 inmates, could reduce its population by shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole, which they said would have no adverse impact on public safety." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/us/10prison.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/us/10prison.html

vacri 11y ago

> but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one I've not met anyone who is against prison construction that is not also against long sentences and against sentences for trivial crap. It's the state's half-arsed job that's responsible, not the people who are trying to make the place better. We definitely shouldn't be building prisons just for capacity, because then when they are slated to close, it become another political football: "jobs", "soft on crime", so on and so forth. The solution is to stop jailing people to such a ridiculous degree - in the US it's basically j-curved since the '90s.