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One wonders what sort of prison and judicial reform could ever happen in a system like the US has? The entire thing is so deeply entrenched at so many levels I

One wonders what sort of prison and judicial reform could ever happen in a system like the US has? The entire thing is so deeply entrenched at so many levels I doubt it could be done cleanly if at all.

joe_the_user 12y ago
I agree that prison reform seems unlikely but I would put this in terms of the entrenched interest of guards, law enforcement and all the beneficiaries of the War On Drugs. Prison gangs are subordinate players in this game but certainly they are the monsters that the Drug War overall has successfully conjured up.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
rayiner 12y ago
It's also illustrative to ask what reforms are possible in a society like the U.S. has: http://www.explainingprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homicide-rates-in-the-united-states-and-england-1900-2000-pinker-2011-jpg.jpg http://www.explainingprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03.... The U.S. homicide rate has been 5-7x higher than in England for more than a century. You can't blame it on the drug war or on Prohibition: it was 7x higher in 1900-1920, before Prohibition, before the expansion of federal criminal law, before for-profit prisons and before prison guard lobbies. For some reason, the U.S. is just an incredibly violent society. Our justice system has evolved in light of that.
- bronbron 12y ago
  > Our justice system has evolved in light of that. I don't know that I'd say 'evolved'. You said it yourself: the homicide rate has been 5-7x higher than in England for more than a century. We're not really doing anything different than what we used to do - a punitive justice system, sometimes morally dubious punishment, and total 'othering' of convicted criminals. I don't know that we can really be shocked when nothing changes.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    That's not true at all. There was a real effort in the 1950's and 1960's to turn the justice system into one more oriented toward rehabilitation. In the face of crime skyrocketing in the 1960's and 1970's, voters went the other way, instituting our present system. Take for example things like three strikes laws, which are mostly responsible for the "he went to jail for life for stealing $200" horror stories. Those were pioneered in 1993-94, by referendum in progressive states like Washington and California, by overwhelming margins (80-90% voting in favor).
    - bronbron 12y ago
      > There was a real effort in the 1950's and 1960's to turn the justice system into one more oriented toward rehabilitation Err, so there was an erroneous decade where we tried to do better? The mid 50s-60s were a discrepancy in american history in a multitude of ways, so I'm not sure that I'd consider prison reform any different in that regard. I also wouldn't consider a decade as representative of the american justice system when we have plenty of evidence that it's not representative of either the past (where we used to just hang people after three strikes) or the present (where, as you noted, we have three strikes laws). In fact, it seems as though once a century we'll have a decade where they half-heartedly try to implement rehabilitative reforms, keep at it for maybe the better half of a decade, and then act shocked that it hasn't decimated incarceration rates yet. Shockingly, it takes longer than a few years to reform a society.
      - rayiner 12y ago
        The comparison was against the U.K. I'm not an expert in turn of the century British criminal law, but I don't imagine you'll find that it was particularly oriented toward rehabilitation. Yet, their homicide rate has always been dramatically lower.
        bronbron 12y ago
        > I don't imagine you'll find that it was particularly oriented toward rehabilitation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_League_for_Penal_Reform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_League_for_Penal_Reform
- joesmo 12y ago
  Homicide is a very small percentage of all crimes. I think it's obvious that our justice and penal systems have evolved to incarcerate the "unwanted," mainly people of color. They are both racist institutions that, especially in the last 60-70 years have been trying to "make up" for the advancements in the civil rights of minorities. As far as what reforms are possible, how about releasing everyone who has committed victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, etc.)? The "justice" system in this country has lost all credibility because such crimes are mainly used to target minorities and the poor. Treating inmates humanely would also help. Removing the profit incentives of prisons would go a long way towards this as well. Not sending people to jail because they can't pay $100 fine would also be a huge step. There are many things society can do to keep a lot of the "low-level" offenders from ever getting into prison and becoming hardened criminals. For most people, once they're in prison, it's too late.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    I use homicide because good records have been kept of such crimes over a long period of time. More recently, homicides have tracked the overall violent crime rate pretty well: http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vcrime500.jpg http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vcrime500.j...
  - tptacek 12y ago
    No, it's not. Murder is ~12% of all state incarcerations (state prisons being where the majority of all US inmates are housed). For context, all drug offenses put together make up just 17% of 2011 state incarcerations. If you include manslaughter, which you should, because (a) it's a form of homicide and (b) many murder prosecutions plead down to it, you get to just about 14%. Homicide is a significant component of all US crime. There's no way to look at the numbers and characterize them as "very small". If you released everyone currently imprisoned for drug crimes, you'd set free about 250,000 people, which is great, but you'd be leaving 1.1 million people incarcerated. Drugs aren't the big problem. Something else is. (Prostitution, a "public order" offense, is a rounding error --- women represent 5% of all public order offenses, meaning that the category captures not just prostitution but is a whole myriad of offenses mostly committed by men. Very few women are actually imprisoned for prostitution; Texas is newsworthy for having around 300 of them, against a 5-figure female prison population).
- jessaustin 12y ago
  I'd suggest that murder rates are correlated mostly with a nation's experience of colonization. That's why they're uniformly higher in Africa and the Americas than in other parts of the world. Actually in that subset the USA does better than all but a few nations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

joe_the_user 12y ago

I agree that prison reform seems unlikely but I would put this in terms of the entrenched interest of guards, law enforcement and all the beneficiaries of the War On Drugs. Prison gangs are subordinate players in this game but certainly they are the monsters that the Drug War overall has successfully conjured up.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

rayiner 12y ago

It's also illustrative to ask what reforms are possible in a society like the U.S. has: http://www.explainingprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/homicide-rates-in-the-united-states-and-england-1900-2000-pinker-2011-jpg.jpg http://www.explainingprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03.... The U.S. homicide rate has been 5-7x higher than in England for more than a century. You can't blame it on the drug war or on Prohibition: it was 7x higher in 1900-1920, before Prohibition, before the expansion of federal criminal law, before for-profit prisons and before prison guard lobbies. For some reason, the U.S. is just an incredibly violent society. Our justice system has evolved in light of that.

bronbron 12y ago
> Our justice system has evolved in light of that. I don't know that I'd say 'evolved'. You said it yourself: the homicide rate has been 5-7x higher than in England for more than a century. We're not really doing anything different than what we used to do - a punitive justice system, sometimes morally dubious punishment, and total 'othering' of convicted criminals. I don't know that we can really be shocked when nothing changes.
- rayiner 12y ago
  That's not true at all. There was a real effort in the 1950's and 1960's to turn the justice system into one more oriented toward rehabilitation. In the face of crime skyrocketing in the 1960's and 1970's, voters went the other way, instituting our present system. Take for example things like three strikes laws, which are mostly responsible for the "he went to jail for life for stealing $200" horror stories. Those were pioneered in 1993-94, by referendum in progressive states like Washington and California, by overwhelming margins (80-90% voting in favor).
  - bronbron 12y ago
    > There was a real effort in the 1950's and 1960's to turn the justice system into one more oriented toward rehabilitation Err, so there was an erroneous decade where we tried to do better? The mid 50s-60s were a discrepancy in american history in a multitude of ways, so I'm not sure that I'd consider prison reform any different in that regard. I also wouldn't consider a decade as representative of the american justice system when we have plenty of evidence that it's not representative of either the past (where we used to just hang people after three strikes) or the present (where, as you noted, we have three strikes laws). In fact, it seems as though once a century we'll have a decade where they half-heartedly try to implement rehabilitative reforms, keep at it for maybe the better half of a decade, and then act shocked that it hasn't decimated incarceration rates yet. Shockingly, it takes longer than a few years to reform a society.
    - rayiner 12y ago
      The comparison was against the U.K. I'm not an expert in turn of the century British criminal law, but I don't imagine you'll find that it was particularly oriented toward rehabilitation. Yet, their homicide rate has always been dramatically lower.
      - bronbron 12y ago
        > I don't imagine you'll find that it was particularly oriented toward rehabilitation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_League_for_Penal_Reform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_League_for_Penal_Reform
joesmo 12y ago
Homicide is a very small percentage of all crimes. I think it's obvious that our justice and penal systems have evolved to incarcerate the "unwanted," mainly people of color. They are both racist institutions that, especially in the last 60-70 years have been trying to "make up" for the advancements in the civil rights of minorities. As far as what reforms are possible, how about releasing everyone who has committed victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, etc.)? The "justice" system in this country has lost all credibility because such crimes are mainly used to target minorities and the poor. Treating inmates humanely would also help. Removing the profit incentives of prisons would go a long way towards this as well. Not sending people to jail because they can't pay $100 fine would also be a huge step. There are many things society can do to keep a lot of the "low-level" offenders from ever getting into prison and becoming hardened criminals. For most people, once they're in prison, it's too late.
- rayiner 12y ago
  I use homicide because good records have been kept of such crimes over a long period of time. More recently, homicides have tracked the overall violent crime rate pretty well: http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vcrime500.jpg http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vcrime500.j...
- tptacek 12y ago
  No, it's not. Murder is ~12% of all state incarcerations (state prisons being where the majority of all US inmates are housed). For context, all drug offenses put together make up just 17% of 2011 state incarcerations. If you include manslaughter, which you should, because (a) it's a form of homicide and (b) many murder prosecutions plead down to it, you get to just about 14%. Homicide is a significant component of all US crime. There's no way to look at the numbers and characterize them as "very small". If you released everyone currently imprisoned for drug crimes, you'd set free about 250,000 people, which is great, but you'd be leaving 1.1 million people incarcerated. Drugs aren't the big problem. Something else is. (Prostitution, a "public order" offense, is a rounding error --- women represent 5% of all public order offenses, meaning that the category captures not just prostitution but is a whole myriad of offenses mostly committed by men. Very few women are actually imprisoned for prostitution; Texas is newsworthy for having around 300 of them, against a 5-figure female prison population).
jessaustin 12y ago
I'd suggest that murder rates are correlated mostly with a nation's experience of colonization. That's why they're uniformly higher in Africa and the Americas than in other parts of the world. Actually in that subset the USA does better than all but a few nations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...