4 ms·

One of the main points the author makes is "There are 2.3 million Americans in our prisons and jails. That is too many. " Might I suggest the US stops putting

One of the main points the author makes is "There are 2.3 million Americans in our prisons and jails. That is too many. " Might I suggest the US stops putting people in prison for possession of drugs for personal use and a lot of other relative minor offenses?

epochwolf 13y ago
That's the proposal. Sentence them to the lash instead of to prison. ;) Decriminalizing drugs is a good first step. Back to the topic at hand. A public lashing is probably a better solution for non-violent crime than prison. Something to think about.
- rbehrends 13y ago
  Or community service or a fine as they do it in other countries? There are primarily two things that contribute to the high incarceration rate in the US: (1) Incarceration for petty offenses. Heck, pre-trial detention contributes a lot. (2) Disproportionately long prison sentences. Corporal punishment isn't a great alternative for either. If anything, it reinforces the brutality of the existing incarceration regime.
  - digitalengineer 13y ago
    Just read up on some data about flogging up until 1954, Great Britain. Memories of criminals about flogging. Interesting read, OP seems to have a point, some men don't fear prison, it's their natural habitat. They do fear "The Cat" and changed their behavior accordingly. (scroll to "Only the 'CAT' holds back the brutes" http://www.corpun.com/ukpr5407.htm http://www.corpun.com/ukpr5407.htm
    - rbehrends 13y ago
      Having an insufficient deterrent is not the problem when other countries have 10%-20% the incarceration rate of the US without flogging while having generally lower crime rates overall and violent crime rates in particular.
      - judk 13y ago
        We can't time travel and not-import a huge swath of poor abused hated people. Do you propose we deport them to become more like other countries?
        rbehrends 13y ago
        The US does not have a particularly high proportion of first-generation immigrants compared to some European countries. There are also other countries that have more poverty (in the absolute sense at least), yet less crime and less incarceration. Poverty is also something that society can do something about; if you say that the problem is that America has created a large underclass, then that's the problem you want to solve. Flogging won't reduce the size of that underclass; it can only subdue it.
        judk 13y ago
        Why did you stick "first generation immigrant" in there. Those aren't the people who were imported and abused.
        rbehrends 13y ago
        Because your language was sufficiently imprecise so that it wasn't clear what you're talking about, and because, while being a first-generation immigrant may correlate with a higher crime rate, the same does not generally hold for future generations (when integration has happened). Note that life in the slums of Victorian London was not any better than for post-Civil War African Americans, for example. If you control for first-immigration immigrants along with socio-economic disadvantages, most of the difference in crime rates between minorities and the rest of population goes away. That minorities were/are imported and abused plays a role only insofar as existing racism and social stratification perpetuates the disadvantages they suffer. However, flogging will not eliminate racism or social stratification; if anything, it will do the opposite.
    - colanderman 13y ago
      Few men get the "cat" twice. I know only one man who did. [...] Obviously, the only way to get a message of disapproval into such an obtuse skull is via the nine whipcord communications lines of the Home Office cat-o'-nine-tails through the flesh of his shoulders and nerves up to his selfish, destructive, jungle brain. Mm, the old anecdote + proof by obviousness. A classic form of scientific study.
      - digitalengineer 13y ago
        Not entirely, this Mr Fabian was one of the world's most famous policemen in the middle of the 20th century. Robert "Fabian of the Yard" Fabian was the former chief detective of the (London) Metropolitan Police murder squad, based at Scotland Yard.
  - JonnieCache 13y ago
    >If anything, it reinforces the brutality of the existing incarceration regime. I think that was the articles point. If america was constantly subjecting black people to brutal physical punishment in every public square for no good reason, rather than quietly locking them away, they might have to confront a few truths.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    > Corporal punishment isn't a great alternative for either. If anything, it reinforces the brutality of the existing incarceration regime. Read the last two paragraphs. It makes exactly that point: The current system is dishonest in that it hides the brutality of the system.
    - rbehrends 13y ago
      That's debating society stuff, though, not an actual reform proposal, and highly conjectural. Plenty of people make prison rape jokes already; I don't see them having a problem with flogging, either. Especially since it would likely happen behind closed doors. To not hide it, people would have to see it, and the current prison system is brutal enough so that showing it would be enough of a shock; the problem is that it's not being seen enough, and I don't see how that would be any different with flogging.
- sigzero 13y ago
  "Decriminalizing drugs is a good first step." No, it really isn't. Changing the punishment would be.
  - TelmoMenezes 13y ago
    Do you have any data to support this assertion? Because I have data to support decriminalization: http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-portugal-lessons-creating-fair-successful-drug-policies http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminal... I can also give you the view from the ground level: I grew up in Portugal and in the 80s people shooting heroin in the streets was common. Now it's almost unheard of. Addicts are helped, not punished, and it just works.
    - digitalengineer 13y ago
      In The Netherlands some cities provide addicts with methadone and they give away free needles if they returns their old (and used) needles. There is a quit and private place to 'shoot' as well.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Really, many of the problems of drugs come from illegality. Decriminalizing drugs means that the very real health problems that drugs cause the users can be addressed as health concerns without the weird job-risking hoops that people jump through.
    - Xylakant 13y ago
      Even more important: Most of those very real health problems that drugs cause the user are actually not caused by the drug itself but rather by impurities added by the dealer, dirty needles, less-than-ideal sanitary conditions etc. Those can all be tackled if drugs are not illegal.
ansible 13y ago
Indeed. If we chose to treat drug addiction as a disease instead of a crime, we could vastly reduce the current prison population levels. We would see an overall reduction in violence too. Gangs and organized crime would still exist, but without one of their major funding sources, they would have a dramatically lower impact on our society as a whole. Of course, the law enforcement complex and the prison industrial complex may not like to see their main reason for existence (and funding) reduced, so they are likely to fight changes to the War on Drugs. And if people are smoking more weed, maybe they're drinking less alcohol, so there are other interested parties who, by the way, have lots of money for marketing and lobbying. The sad fact is that the USA isn't really seeing the worst of it. I read stories about the cartels in Mexico and just cringe. We are destabilizing our neighbouring nation, our important trading partner and ally over this issue.
- Touche 13y ago
  > Indeed. If we chose to treat drug addiction as a disease instead of a crime Treat it like a disease, you mean.
  - ansible 13y ago
    Actually, I'm fine with both senses of what I originally wrote. We need to treat the individuals the same as if they had a problem with alcohol. We should also plot out drug use on a map, much like the CDC looks at an outbreak of cholera. Look at the factors that may be contributing to increased cases (poverty mainly, but there may be other things), and then start working on those.
rdtsc 13y ago
The prison industrial complex (aka institutionalized slavery if you wish) is puttying lots money in lots of pockets. Lobbyists for PIC don't even hide it, they directly oppose scaling down the War on Drugs, because it will put an immediate dent in their profits. All political (who's voting for "soft on crimes" candidates these day? Nobody) and economical constraints (PIC) conspire to create this situation.
- astrodust 13y ago
  Coming soon: The lashing industrial complex.
rayiner 13y ago
I agree that the U.S. should stop doing that, but the U.S. doesn't do that very much to begin with. See: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-myths-and-facts-20120822/myth-prisons-are-full-of-people-in-for-marijuana-possession-19691231 http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-m.... While I agree that the Drug War should be ended, I think people overstate how much of an impact that would have on our prison population. There are a lot of people in prison on drug charges because drug distribution is a core business of America's gangs. The drug war is at least in part a proxy war on gangs. Legalization would hurt the gangs, but it's not as if all those people would suddenly go straight. There's 1.4 million gang members in the U.S. The gangs would continue to operate, and if drugs were off the table, the gangs would go into some other business and end up in prison for some other reason.
- enoch_r 13y ago
  Many gangs are the black-market equivalent of corporations. They are economic and social entities that have evolved to profit in illegal markets. Unlike ordinary corporations, they cannot resolve disputes with courts--so they use violence. Unlike ordinary corporations, they cannot prevent theft by calling the cops--so they use violence. And, of course, because they're already facing very high prison sentences if caught, the marginal cost of committing additional crimes is lowered. Removing a giant market for gangs wouldn't just send gangs to work in other markets. Many of them would go out of business. This is precisely what we saw during the time of Prohibition--entrepreneurial gangs took advantage of their new market opportunity when alcohol was made illegal. They went out of business, or their power was greatly reduced, when Prohibition ended.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    I appreciate that point, but that's not really the nature of the gangs you see these days in Chicago, LA, etc. Aggressive RICO prosecution over the last few decades have already weeded out many of the "professional" gangs. What's left are a lot of gangs with amorphous leadership and quite young memberships, arising from conditions in segregated inner cities.
omonra 13y ago
There are approximately 422K people in prison for drug offences (http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs#sthash.KZSvtVHe.dpbs http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs#sthash.KZS...). Which still leaves 1.9mio for non-drug offences - more than the second country with largest prision population (China, 1.5mio - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2page1.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...).

epochwolf 13y ago

That's the proposal. Sentence them to the lash instead of to prison. ;) Decriminalizing drugs is a good first step. Back to the topic at hand. A public lashing is probably a better solution for non-violent crime than prison. Something to think about.

rbehrends 13y ago
Or community service or a fine as they do it in other countries? There are primarily two things that contribute to the high incarceration rate in the US: (1) Incarceration for petty offenses. Heck, pre-trial detention contributes a lot. (2) Disproportionately long prison sentences. Corporal punishment isn't a great alternative for either. If anything, it reinforces the brutality of the existing incarceration regime.
- digitalengineer 13y ago
  Just read up on some data about flogging up until 1954, Great Britain. Memories of criminals about flogging. Interesting read, OP seems to have a point, some men don't fear prison, it's their natural habitat. They do fear "The Cat" and changed their behavior accordingly. (scroll to "Only the 'CAT' holds back the brutes" http://www.corpun.com/ukpr5407.htm http://www.corpun.com/ukpr5407.htm
  - rbehrends 13y ago
    Having an insufficient deterrent is not the problem when other countries have 10%-20% the incarceration rate of the US without flogging while having generally lower crime rates overall and violent crime rates in particular.
    - judk 13y ago
      We can't time travel and not-import a huge swath of poor abused hated people. Do you propose we deport them to become more like other countries?
      - rbehrends 13y ago
        The US does not have a particularly high proportion of first-generation immigrants compared to some European countries. There are also other countries that have more poverty (in the absolute sense at least), yet less crime and less incarceration. Poverty is also something that society can do something about; if you say that the problem is that America has created a large underclass, then that's the problem you want to solve. Flogging won't reduce the size of that underclass; it can only subdue it.
        judk 13y ago
        Why did you stick "first generation immigrant" in there. Those aren't the people who were imported and abused.
        rbehrends 13y ago
        Because your language was sufficiently imprecise so that it wasn't clear what you're talking about, and because, while being a first-generation immigrant may correlate with a higher crime rate, the same does not generally hold for future generations (when integration has happened). Note that life in the slums of Victorian London was not any better than for post-Civil War African Americans, for example. If you control for first-immigration immigrants along with socio-economic disadvantages, most of the difference in crime rates between minorities and the rest of population goes away. That minorities were/are imported and abused plays a role only insofar as existing racism and social stratification perpetuates the disadvantages they suffer. However, flogging will not eliminate racism or social stratification; if anything, it will do the opposite.
  - colanderman 13y ago
    Few men get the "cat" twice. I know only one man who did. [...] Obviously, the only way to get a message of disapproval into such an obtuse skull is via the nine whipcord communications lines of the Home Office cat-o'-nine-tails through the flesh of his shoulders and nerves up to his selfish, destructive, jungle brain. Mm, the old anecdote + proof by obviousness. A classic form of scientific study.
    - digitalengineer 13y ago
      Not entirely, this Mr Fabian was one of the world's most famous policemen in the middle of the 20th century. Robert "Fabian of the Yard" Fabian was the former chief detective of the (London) Metropolitan Police murder squad, based at Scotland Yard.
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  >If anything, it reinforces the brutality of the existing incarceration regime. I think that was the articles point. If america was constantly subjecting black people to brutal physical punishment in every public square for no good reason, rather than quietly locking them away, they might have to confront a few truths.
- vidarh 13y ago
  > Corporal punishment isn't a great alternative for either. If anything, it reinforces the brutality of the existing incarceration regime. Read the last two paragraphs. It makes exactly that point: The current system is dishonest in that it hides the brutality of the system.
  - rbehrends 13y ago
    That's debating society stuff, though, not an actual reform proposal, and highly conjectural. Plenty of people make prison rape jokes already; I don't see them having a problem with flogging, either. Especially since it would likely happen behind closed doors. To not hide it, people would have to see it, and the current prison system is brutal enough so that showing it would be enough of a shock; the problem is that it's not being seen enough, and I don't see how that would be any different with flogging.
sigzero 13y ago
"Decriminalizing drugs is a good first step." No, it really isn't. Changing the punishment would be.
- TelmoMenezes 13y ago
  Do you have any data to support this assertion? Because I have data to support decriminalization: http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-portugal-lessons-creating-fair-successful-drug-policies http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminal... I can also give you the view from the ground level: I grew up in Portugal and in the 80s people shooting heroin in the streets was common. Now it's almost unheard of. Addicts are helped, not punished, and it just works.
  - digitalengineer 13y ago
    In The Netherlands some cities provide addicts with methadone and they give away free needles if they returns their old (and used) needles. There is a quit and private place to 'shoot' as well.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Really, many of the problems of drugs come from illegality. Decriminalizing drugs means that the very real health problems that drugs cause the users can be addressed as health concerns without the weird job-risking hoops that people jump through.
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    Even more important: Most of those very real health problems that drugs cause the user are actually not caused by the drug itself but rather by impurities added by the dealer, dirty needles, less-than-ideal sanitary conditions etc. Those can all be tackled if drugs are not illegal.

ansible 13y ago

Indeed. If we chose to treat drug addiction as a disease instead of a crime, we could vastly reduce the current prison population levels. We would see an overall reduction in violence too. Gangs and organized crime would still exist, but without one of their major funding sources, they would have a dramatically lower impact on our society as a whole. Of course, the law enforcement complex and the prison industrial complex may not like to see their main reason for existence (and funding) reduced, so they are likely to fight changes to the War on Drugs. And if people are smoking more weed, maybe they're drinking less alcohol, so there are other interested parties who, by the way, have lots of money for marketing and lobbying. The sad fact is that the USA isn't really seeing the worst of it. I read stories about the cartels in Mexico and just cringe. We are destabilizing our neighbouring nation, our important trading partner and ally over this issue.

Touche 13y ago
> Indeed. If we chose to treat drug addiction as a disease instead of a crime Treat it like a disease, you mean.
- ansible 13y ago
  Actually, I'm fine with both senses of what I originally wrote. We need to treat the individuals the same as if they had a problem with alcohol. We should also plot out drug use on a map, much like the CDC looks at an outbreak of cholera. Look at the factors that may be contributing to increased cases (poverty mainly, but there may be other things), and then start working on those.

rdtsc 13y ago

The prison industrial complex (aka institutionalized slavery if you wish) is puttying lots money in lots of pockets. Lobbyists for PIC don't even hide it, they directly oppose scaling down the War on Drugs, because it will put an immediate dent in their profits. All political (who's voting for "soft on crimes" candidates these day? Nobody) and economical constraints (PIC) conspire to create this situation.

astrodust 13y ago
Coming soon: The lashing industrial complex.

rayiner 13y ago

I agree that the U.S. should stop doing that, but the U.S. doesn't do that very much to begin with. See: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-myths-and-facts-20120822/myth-prisons-are-full-of-people-in-for-marijuana-possession-19691231 http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-m.... While I agree that the Drug War should be ended, I think people overstate how much of an impact that would have on our prison population. There are a lot of people in prison on drug charges because drug distribution is a core business of America's gangs. The drug war is at least in part a proxy war on gangs. Legalization would hurt the gangs, but it's not as if all those people would suddenly go straight. There's 1.4 million gang members in the U.S. The gangs would continue to operate, and if drugs were off the table, the gangs would go into some other business and end up in prison for some other reason.

enoch_r 13y ago
Many gangs are the black-market equivalent of corporations. They are economic and social entities that have evolved to profit in illegal markets. Unlike ordinary corporations, they cannot resolve disputes with courts--so they use violence. Unlike ordinary corporations, they cannot prevent theft by calling the cops--so they use violence. And, of course, because they're already facing very high prison sentences if caught, the marginal cost of committing additional crimes is lowered. Removing a giant market for gangs wouldn't just send gangs to work in other markets. Many of them would go out of business. This is precisely what we saw during the time of Prohibition--entrepreneurial gangs took advantage of their new market opportunity when alcohol was made illegal. They went out of business, or their power was greatly reduced, when Prohibition ended.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I appreciate that point, but that's not really the nature of the gangs you see these days in Chicago, LA, etc. Aggressive RICO prosecution over the last few decades have already weeded out many of the "professional" gangs. What's left are a lot of gangs with amorphous leadership and quite young memberships, arising from conditions in segregated inner cities.

omonra 13y ago

There are approximately 422K people in prison for drug offences (http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs#sthash.KZSvtVHe.dpbs http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs#sthash.KZS...). Which still leaves 1.9mio for non-drug offences - more than the second country with largest prision population (China, 1.5mio - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2page1.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...).