Decrimilize soft drugs

I think we need to dramatically downsize our prisons and to do that I think we need more speedy way to execute criminals. I also think that there should not be a life sentence anything that goes over 40 years of prison time should automatically be death sentence.

Also legalization of certain drugs so the prisons will not be filled with petty criminals.

I also think there should be a 3 strikes your out rule. If you are caught burglarizing a home or business 3 times you get a 40 year sentence in prison. If you get out and you do it again. DEATH SENTENCE.

Now that is called being tough on crime.

but they're people! Prisoners deserve to be treated like kings and better than the middle-wage american!

Yes, the prison systems do need a revamp, and soft drugs (mainly weed) shouldn't be illegal.

this is not medieval england

I beat the crap out of a tenant of mine that shoved my seventy-five year old mother. I ended up doing almost two years as a result. So as someone who has been in the system let me tell you a few things I observed.

One thing I observed is that close to 30% of the people behind bars were there for stealing (from burglary to armed robbery) to obtain money to feed their drug habit or had resorted to dealing to pay for their drugs.

These people were not able to obtain any medical assistance for substance abuse prior to being incarcerated and the drug programs that were offered in the jails were a joke, not because the people involved did not care but because they were underfunded and understaffed. Rehabilitation is not a priority in the system so a large number of these people will get our and end up getting on drugs and reoffending again because they do not have any kind of support group to assist them.

By that I mean that when they get out they are left mostly with no means of support, they have no family structure that they can call upon to assist and being that they have a criminal record they are locked out of any jobs that would enable them to earn a living wage.

One person that came in to the jail while I was there was a guy who I worked for at a political activist group several years before. He had a master’s degree in environmental science & had a very good job within the organization. I did not recognize him at first; he had to identify himself to me. I asked him what had happened and he said; “Do you remember when I first came to Philadelphia?” “Yes” I answered. “Well, someone introduced me to this guy named heroin and he has been kicking my ass ever since”

So, about 30% of the people were there for drugs.

Additionally about 25% of the people who were there were mentally ill. They were fine as long as they took their medication but when they did not they were really of the wall. Now remember, out of jail there are no programs (or just not enough) to assist them in ensuring they both take their medications or to even enabling them to obtain their medications. Contrary to popular belief Medicare and Medicaid do not pay for 100% of the cost for medication. In Pennsylvania the co-pay is $4.00 now that does not sound like much but please take into consideration that many of these people need five or more drugs to keep them stable and the drugs do not work forever, they begin to lose there effectiveness over time as you build up a tolerance for them. That is also another leading cause of them becoming unstable and ending up in jail as it gets them before they are even aware of it.

That accounts for over 50% of the total number of people in jail; Drug addicts and the mentally ill.

They need to be in hospitals, not jails! They need help not punishment.

Now, let’s move on to the remaining people. A large number of people in jail are illiterate. I spent many an hour reading letters to people that they received from family and loved ones; I also spent many an hour writing letters for them. Those people are doomed to a life of crime as they cannot get any kind of job and being uneducated is not a qualification for assistance under the current welfare system. The jails offer almost no education programs for people in jail, contrary to the information heard about jail house diplomas. Remember a large percentage of the people who are illiterate have high school diplomas.

If we spent more time and energy on ensuring a good education for people then we could spend less on jails. The people I have mentioned here account for about 10% of the people in jail.

That leaves about 35% of the total jail population left from my first hand observations. Of that remaining 35% about half of them need to be kept in cages! The remaining 17% can be split into two additional groups.

5% are innocent people falsely accused and wrongly convicted and the remaining 12% are the group I feel into, we did it, we are not likely to do it again and we are here to take our punishment for poor judgment.

So let’s see
30% drug addicts
25% mentally ill
10% unemployable
5% innocent

Now remember this is just what my personal first hand observations were from inside of the jail over a period of just under two years, not a scientific study conducted by mathematicians and psychologist in a lab.

So only three of ten people who are in jail should be!

That is to me a disgrace to my country. That we, the wealthiest country on earth would allow such a thing to be; that we would rather lock someone up for $30,000 a year rather than spend $7,000 to educate them.

That we would incarcerate the mentally ill and then toss them back into the street and not provide them with the needed support to allow them to live normal productive lives.

That we would not make sure that people who had made a bad decision (drugs) had a real opportunity to attempt to escape the monster of drug addiction.

Does the prison system need a new direction? Oh yea, very much so! Not to be soft on crime but to be very very hard on it... to reduce it and to make it unacceptable in our society! The current system breeds more crime and that needs to be stopped and it could be stopped for less money than it is costing us to create more crime under the current system!



Now before you know-it-alls go on your rants about these people & their standings as human begins, let me remind you that we have all at one time or another made a bad decision that could have destroyed our lives if we had been caught.

 Thanks for the info spaceponey, your info gives a better picture of what we should do. Why does it seem that people how are not in power have ideas to fix problems but the ones how are in power wont do anything. They probally so high of the smell of their own piss that they cant stand that somebody else came up with their own idea. You get some good leaders but there are not that many  . SpacePoney do you mind if I put what you said on Joe user, I think it really gives a good insight in what is happing inside prisons and what we should do. I will say that you wrote this but I just wanted to make sure you are ok with it.

Geez, SpacePony, I leave you alone for a week and you start making all kinds of sense. What happened?

Did you happen to witness any examples of corporations employing prisonors to work at drastically reduced wages? I know a lot of call centres are now being run out of American prisons (or small northern Ontario towns, which are kind of like prisons) as well as the ubiquitous "license plate" type of manufacturing. I sometimes wonder if the reason there are so many undeserving people in prison is to provide a cheap labour force for these companies -- the fact that many prisons are now being run by private corporations is not a good sign...

Totally agree. In discussing this kind of issue, there tend to be two prevalent principles that drive peoples thoughts:

A belief that prison is there as a punishment, or a belief its there to rehabilitate and ensure the miscreant does not do it again.

I tend towards the latter. The former is easy to follow, has a high perception amongst many, and becomes "emotionally satisfying". That does not mean be "soft" on criminals. It does mean tackle the root cause for that individual doing it in the first place. The latter phrase opens the door for all sorts of favorite short term High Publicity bandwagons that are irrelevant to the core issue - they just sound great - but thats not where its going, or should be going.

Criminal acts are in the main a result of what society considers "unacceptable". Change the perception of what is and is not acceptable, you change attitudes and follow on actions. For a criminal act to occur the perpetrator has come to the conclusion (or self justification) that, on balance, for whatever reason, what they are about to do is "acceptable", or more usually "justifiable" - else they would not do it. Change that value equation, that belief structure, you significantly enhance the possibility of stopping people re-offending, even breaking The Law in the first place.

As SpacePony pointed out above - we all do things, or were on the edge of doing things, that if caught we would end up in serious trouble. The next bit is where people go off at tangents on different views - but the premise is a simple one.

In the overwhelming number of cases, individuals are stopped from doing these activities, not because of fear of what will happen to them, but because of their belief structure as to what is or is not acceptable. They would either disagree its "illegal" or justify their actions in such a way as to trivialise that its "illegal". Strengthen the belief structure in what society says is "illegal", and you reduce the chances of crime occurring. The crazy loons who let loose with AK47's on campuses, know full well where they are headed, but that didnt stop them - they did it because what they believed to be the key issue was more important than the law, and "justified" what they did or were about to do. Crazy? Thats for sure, but is what they BELIEVED, change their value equation, beliefs, you significantly reduce the likelihood of illegal acts in the first place.

Emotional responses to violent criminal acts are natural, and understandable. Repeating the error themselves by beating the %^%$£ out of the criminal either physically or throwing them jail, and throwing the key away, does ziltch to solve the core issue - its merely retribution, and does nothing to prevent crime or rehabilitate criminals. It only breeds a generation of even more hardened individuals who previously thought life was giving them a bad deal - the only difference is now they KNOW they are getting a bad deal - such will be their thought process, as their belief system has not been changed. Its been reinforced they were right in the first place because, in their mind, retribution for what they did was wrong, I was right etc!

Would there still be "animals" around who you could to talk to until your blue in the face and they would not change, thats for sure, human beings are complex beasts. However 99% of people do respond to change if handled correctly.

A return to the Middle Ages of `100 lashes, or "throw em in the pond, float and they are guilty, drown and they are innocent" is silly and pointless. (The latter pond example was a common response to allegations particularly WitchCraft allegations - as nuts as it seems these days).

Easy? No its damned difficult, but its utterly pointless just throwing people in jail and burying the key - the latter does nothing, absolutely squat, to help stop crime in the overwhelming number of cases.

Regards
Zy

feel free to repost with or without giving reference to my name.

No, I did not see much of this, the one example I did see was food preparation. All the food was placed into the containers by inmates. Unlike you see in the movies the food trays are very small and the typical diet is only 1,400 calories a day.. That is the minimum required by international law for feeding to prisoners. It is a slow starvation diet. The prisoners make up for this by buying commissary goods, like candy bars. Now the cost works like this you get paid (I should mention that this varies from jail to jail) fifty cents for your eight hours work and a candy bar cost seventy-five (I am going back five years).

I should also clarify that this was a county jail not a state prison and the prisoners who were there from the state prisons (for trials and various other hearings) all said how it was so much better upstate.

I had it easy in the jail as one of the Lieutenants who ran a wing of the jail was a client of mine in the outside world. In less than one week I was in a cell (as opposed to the rooms that house eight people in a space that is 15 x 15 there were two of us in a space that was 7 x 12) the usual wait is thirty days.

I immediately was given one of the cushiest jobs in the jail (the receiving room, where all incoming prisoners are processed). I got preferential treatment across the board. Almost every day a guard would bring me a salad from the officer’s mess hall and one of the deputy wardens gave me unlimited access to her coffee maker for fresh coffee and to a small room where I was able to watch TV for an hour alone. She also let me read her newspaper during that time. In addition to that one of the sergeants was running for the position of union local president and having had considerable experience in the field he recruited me to put together a campaign program for him.
This status kept many of the prisoners who would have attempted to exploit me (as they did others) from even saying boo to me out of fear that they would get their heads bashed in. It also kept the few and I do emphasize few, guards who were on power trips from messing with me as well.

Being white and with most of the guards as well as the prisoners being black and Hispanic I was in a very small minority. In one pod (eight pods make a block) there are 80 prisoners.

The breakdown was like this 5 white people 1 Asian 20 Hispanic. 54 black this was in Philadelphia.

For the most part racism was not a real big issue, unlike the state level. Don’t get me wrong it was an issue but it was one where the boundaries were easy to break down.
The real difficulty was between the Muslims and the rest of us. I am not going to go into depth about that here at the moment except to say that when the Muslims met for prayer on Fridays we would take a guess at how many people would get stabbed and how long it would be before we were placed in lock down for the rest of the night. (The record was about twenty minutes, so that would mean it was about five minutes into their service).

Also I think I should mention the prison staff. Most of the staff were highly professional and performed their jobs exceptionally well. The “bad guard” was most certainly the exception there. The real problems were in the upper levels where politics came into play.

Lesser crimes (misdemeanors) --> jail
Greater crimes (Felonies) --> prison

These are totally different systems in both their organizational strucure and their function in society. Not to mention they vary from State to State.

I would like to share some of my experiences from teh other end of the system. For the most part, I agree with your analysis, Spacepony. I have a few differences and some imput I would like to share.


-Drug Addicts-
Like you said, a good number of CD's, GTA's, thefts, Robberies and Burglaries are comitted by drug addicts. You can actually guesstimate where a drug house might be by looking at a map of crime stats. Almost all are repeat offenders.

The problem is with rehabilitaion. Ususally for the first few offenses they are sent to drug treatment instead of jail (The gov't foots the bill since it's mandated). However, this is practically non-enforcable. There's little to no penalty for not seeking treatment (they get a capias and are told to go back to treatment - maybe a possible short jail sentence). So they don't go. Why go to treatment, when you can just go get high with out all teh hassle?

-Mentally Ill-
Unfortunately the same standards for drug addicts are applied to teh mentally ill. In leiu of Jail time, go to the hospital. Problem is that they don't go and the criteria for forcing someone into the hospital is fairly strict (atleast on our end). The essentially have to be suicidal. Again the gov't will foot the bill, but we just can't physicaly force them to teh hospital in all but the rarest of situations.

-Uneducated-
I'm not sure about Philly, but here in the Rust belt, we do have a criminal Job training program. Again its used in leiu of Jail time. Problem with it is... You have to support yourself while essentially going to "school" and once you get a job (entry level), well, you can make a lot more money running drugs or stealing cigarrettes (5 minute heist for $200 worth of cigarettes), and you don't have to go to school to make that money! In addition, that's what a lot of the people were doing in teh first place so they are alread networked with other criminals and "job" ready.


A lot of the people I arrest and put into Jail are multiple offenders. I arrested one man for 110th time the other day (in his career, not mine). Almost everyone in our county jail (sentenced, not arrested) is a repeat offender. Even those in Jail for the first time, as they have their past sentences suspended in favor of community control initiatives..

I totally agree with you that there is a perception problem with the concept of Jail and Prison. Many criminals look at it as a right of passage, not a punishment.

I think rehabilition can work for some offenders, especially where there isn't a history of crime. But I think the problem with rehabilitaion is that is an uphill battle. Many of the people I arrest have crime in the family (father was a theif, son is a theif or Mom was on crack and got daughter hooked on crack at the old age of 14), They've been raised thinking that stealing cars/smoking up was acceptable and jail is just a right of passage (its normal). For a good number of people, being a criminal is so engrained that the prospect of punishment doesn't bother them.

I truly think a multi-pronged proactive approach is needed. We need to prevent people from becomming criminals along with rehabilitation for those who do fall through the cracks with an emphasis on prevention.
We (the police) also need more discretionary power when dealing w/mentally ill. We don't have lot of options other than arrest (only if there's a criminal offense) or taking them to a homeless shelter (if they havne't been banned). Unless we can get them to say they are thinking of hurting themselves we can't force them into a hospital. And even if we do force them into a hospital, you can't keep them there for an extended stay against their will (then its an arrest and you need due process and probable cause. Suicide is not illegal in my state). They essentially get a quick eval and are released.

Absolutely interesting discussion. I was going to post something last week when I first saw this but decided against it. I really don't have anything to add because what it comes down to is that I'm not educated about this. I just don't know.

I'd like to sit here and rant about mandatory minimum sentences and how they're ridiculous in relation to nonviolent crimes, but I feel it's a baseless argument . . . coming from me. Then again, I'm not exactly in line with the mentality that the drug scheduling is a good idea. Well, it might be a good idea, but only if the government was willing to amend it based on current scientific data. I can riff on about that, but that isn't really the topic here.

Anyway, this is a fantastic discussion and it's very interesting to get personal accounts from "both sides".

Two years for disciplining someone for pushing an elderly woman...

Sorry Spacepony, but your incarceration is what's wrong with the prison system. Unless your "victim" was a 5 year old kid or another 75 year old woman, it's utter bullshit. I don't care if you put the shit in the hospital for a week, they should have thanked you. You don't push around elderly women, and if one of their relatives beats the living shit out of you for it, you got what was coming.

Consequences are supposed to be for people that do something wrong.

Whether this or that drug is illegal is fairly irrelevant since they don't slap hard on the first offense. I don't buy that so many of your comrades in prison were innocent victims or one time offenders either. Everyone lies, and most crimes go unsolved.

If they hit hard on the first offense, and prosecuted actual crime instead of taking honest citizens to task for defending themselves and others, the number of people in prison would plummet, just look at NYC. Even excluding the drug treatment changes, the prison inhabitants went way down.

Just one thing. What I said about people neeidng to be parade around town with bill bords saying what they did, or having them in stocks and being hit by fruit. I meant that was for teenagers, since it seems to me that sending teenagers to juvy or jail will just harden them up and is a waste of resources. Having them doing communty service is like a slap on a wrist. Most teenegers hate being made a laghuing stock of. If I was cauhgt stealing and they had me walking around town saying what I did I would be so ashamed when strangers, friends, famly, and that hot girl you want to go out with see you. Why do think criminals hate having their crimes exspoed?

ant thus stated is the other side of the same problem.

The "programs" that are offered and the way they are offered tends to be a set up for falure. In regards to the police having more discretion that is a two edeged sword. I agree with you about Police needed greated discression concerning handling some offenders however with that often come accusations of peferential treatent oc certian people, a no win situation for the police and a real loss for those in need of that discresion.