Comments

1
Fucking spoiled American prisoners. Send them to most of the prisons on the planet where you don't get 3 squares a day, gyms, cable TV, ability to receive education. etc. American prisoners live better than most of the worlds poor, even while sitting in their feces.

Fuck 'em.
2
these a-holes should be thankful to be getting 3 square meals, job training and housing while we effectively raise their kids for them. Not to mention their incarceration provides good jobs for underprivileged state workers who cant afford to buy a degree in whiteguyology.
3
Education has been almost entirely eliminated from California prisons, further U.S. prisons are the some of the worst in the industrialized world, countries that treat inmates better have far lower rates of recidivism, so we can conclude #1 above is not a Xian, and he thinks the U.S. should be more like Iran and that more Americans should be crime victims.
4
1&2 I'm glad I don't live in your heads. Hate. Ignorance. Certainty. Blech.
5
@1 & 2,

Yeah, it's always their own fault. It's always their own bad choices and bad decisions. They deserve what they got.

Until it happens to you.

Then, it's not your fault, it's the system singling you out. YOU didn't make bad choices, YOU didn't make bad decisions... it was someone else who's got it out for you.

Classic mistake.
6
@ 3 your the ignorant one hippie, stop being so idealistic live in the real world.
7
The right-wing position as expressed here is that the underclass belong in prison even before they've committed a crime, and that every crime no matter how trivial demands the death penalty or life imprisonment. That's inhuman, and even if you don't care about other people but only yourself it's counterproductive, since you WILL be paying for these people and living amongst them whether you like it or not.

Societies that treat prisoners like human beings and try to find ways to integrate them after their sentences are served are more successful than ones that do not.

But then, right-wingers have always been intent on making the world a worse place to live, even for themselves. It's part of their psychosis. It's projecting the fetid stink of their own souls onto the world around them. It's ugly to the core.
8
@6: Hippie?

really? Your view of world events is based on Cartman in Southpark? Really?

Well at least you're good for a laugh.

The real world is California will have to release 10,000 prisoners to conform to a court order

The real world is that most people who enter prison eventually leave, the only question is should people leave prison better or worse than when they went in?

The real world is that we have examples of programs that work, and none are the types of things right wingers want

For those who can think:

http://www.safecalifornia.org/stories/en…

or you can Google HOPE+Alm+Honolulu

But 1,2 and 6 can just keep Thinking Death Wish was a documentary
9
@ 1 & 2

You are so clearly talking out of your ass. Your arguments don't take into account the rampant health problems, physical and sexual violence, extremely poor nutrition and legitimately debilitating long-term psychological scars of todays prisoners. America arrests, charges and incarcerates more people (as in both percentag and total numbers) than any other country in the world. And it can't seem to rehabilitate any of them. It's not because prisons are sooooooo easy. It's because they're so fucked up that prisoners no longer know how to function in society.

But I guess it's easy to have a big mouth on the internet when you've never experienced the shit you're commenting on. Fucking tools.
10
@ 1 & 2

You are so clearly talking out of your ass. Your arguments don't take into account the rampant health problems, physical and sexual violence, extremely poor nutrition and legitimately debilitating long-term psychological scars of todays prisoners. America arrests, charges and incarcerates more people (as in both percentag and total numbers) than any other country in the world. Because of this it's so crowded in prison that it's nearly impossible to both keep diseases from spreading quickly and to keep violence from happening. And it can't seem to rehabilitate any of them. It's not because prisons are sooooooo easy. It's because they're so fucked up that prisoners no longer know how to function in society.

Last I checked, disease, malnutrition, mental illness and physical and sexual assault were not legal punishments. It's not bad enough that someone is taken away from their family/friends/life, put in a jump suit and forced to spend X amount of years in a tiny cinder block room?

But I guess it's easy to have a big mouth on the internet when you've never experienced the shit you're commenting on. What a couple of fucking morons.

P.S. I've also been the victim of an extremely violent crime in the past. And I wouldn't wish todays prison conditions on my attacker. So don't give me any of that "sheltered liberal" shit.
11
@1 and 2:

The prison-strike broadsheet being distributed by the movements' supporters actually includes an article (last page) comparing US prisons to the authors' experience in an Iranian prison, with less rosy conclusions than you seem to have come to:

http://kasamaproject.org/files/prison_ed…
12
@11 Actually I'm writing this from the community room in cell block R5 in the east wing of the Walla Walla state penitentiary. So FUCK YOU!! [you anti-govt teabaggers.] I'm about to retire from Corrections at the ripe old age of 52 after a lifetime of sheepdogging your disadvantaged minorities toward health and productivity!! Now I'm goin to Mexico for the next 40 yrs to spend this over-inflated pension on hand-crafted tequila and "full-body" massages! You lose Hippies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
@12 Oh, you're a CO? That sheds a bit more light on your stance. In your earlier comment you said "Not to mention their incarceration provides good jobs for underprivileged state workers who cant afford to buy a degree in whiteguyology."

Pretty awesome that you made money off of other peoples pain and slave labor. Your attitude pretty well demonstrates why some CO's get strangled when they're alone.
14
So #12 (assuming he's not lying) plans to retire at taxpayers expense, and spend the rest of his life getting drunk and having sex with 14 year old prostitutes. Says a lot doesn't it?
15
@12, have fun. Those forty years will be over in about six months, I predict. Less, if you spend a lot of time on bar stools bloviating at the top of your lungs about your time as a prison guard.
16
With the exception of particularly heinous crimes, prisons should focus on rehabilitation. To mangle a common saying:
Imprison a man, you stop him from offending while he's in jail. Teach a man how to be a productive and law-abiding citizen, and he keeps his nose clean for the rest of his life.
17
@15: I doubt he's telling the truth.
18
@3 You're. Not your. This is Amurika, speak English
19
Geh, my @3 was meant for @6
20
The brutality endorsed by conservatives fails even the basic proportionality test of the Code of Hammurabi. If I punch you in the face, I deserve to be punched back, once - not deliberately subjected to the endless violence of prison life. If I shoot some heroin, I don't deserve to be deprived of adequate medical care, if I steal your iPad Idon't deserve to be driven insane by solitary confinement, if I hold you captive for a few minutes while I mug you I don't deserve to be held captive for decades.

The mixed rationales of our criminal justice system have unleashed a hell where prisoners can be held much longer than would be proportionate - as prevention - but brutalized under the rationale of punishment. We might be better off going back to the old system of corporal punishment, where there's a limit to the severity of punishments before they become obviously wrong - a hundred lashes for stealing a loaf of bread makes us recoil, but a year of continuous brutality in prison may be shrugged off.

And regarding the complaints that prisoners are receiving too much in the way of material sustenance, since the prisons are extracting labor from them at below-market wages, it's the responsibility of the prisons to produce enough value from that labor to cover the cost of prisoner maintenance. Society gets its cut from prisoners, and if we don't make adequate use of that cut, it's our fault.
21
Hey! America! Where we have MORE people per capita in jail that the height of the Stalinist gulag era! What what?! America, #1!

Why does the country that crows most about Freedom actually have more people per capita in jail than anywhere else in the world... including Iran, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc.

Riddle me that.

Oh, hey, you say "solitary confinement" is very common in American prisons? No kidding...
22
'"Most of these people will return to our communities,” said Rice. “When we punish them in such a manner that they’re coming out more damaged than they went in, and are ill-equipped to re-enter communities and be productive citizens, we’re doing a disservice to society as a whole."'
23
@21, yes, and solitary confinement is unambiguously torture. Good link. The growing outcry reminds me of the way colonial Australia's Benthamite Port Arthur prison, which not only isolated prisoners but cut them off from all human contact and sound, driving them mad, was abandoned over a century ago. Psychological torture is not a good way to prepare people for life on the outside.

Unfortunately, in the post-Reagan climate in the US, public demand has always been for more and more punishment, more more more, with not even much interest in determining whether you're punishing the right person, let alone what it's doing to him.
24
It's called Choose Your Battles, you stupid fucking hippies.

Yeah, let's hit the streets over this one. Save the convicted felons! Even though they've raped and murdered your friends and family members, stolen their shit, and assaulted them, it's not fair for them. Waaaah! They could end up with psychological scars from prison instead of a warm fuzzy. No fair! You're all such meanies!

People from the PNW are a bunch of stoner bubbleheads. Keep smokin' up, hippies, your opinions are very reflective of your diminishing brain cell count.
25
@24, are you sure you wouldn't prefer the username "Effluent"? It's more suited to the sewage you post here.
26
Look on the bright side: The state will save on food.
27
@16, I think the focus should be, in order: protection (of the public), restitution through labor, deterrence, and (finally) rehabilitation. Punishment is a given; who wants to be locked up? With respect to rehab, the rule of thirds applies. One-third can be rescued; one-third are on the bubble and can go either way; one-third are beyond redemption.

Therefore, the first order of business is triage. Don't waste rehabilitation on the unredeemable, and do what you can to keep the unreedemable away from the rest.
28
Maybe locking up all these pieces of shit is why crime rates in the USA have dropped so dramatically on the past 30 yrs.
29
@28: Nope, it's the result of Roe v Wade - see Freakonomics.
30
@27: prevention as a primary goal is problematic in a criminal system that draws its legitimacy from the notion of justice. A system that was seriously organized around crime prevention, rather than using that as a justification for its real aims, would probably be unacceptable to the public. It would, as you suggest, involve vastly different penalties for people convicted of similar crimes - decades in prison for likely recidivists, even those convicted of petty crimes, until they "aged out"; light treatment and extensive rehab for other criminals. Taken to its farthest extreme you'd have certain classes of murderers getting no prison time (unlikely to reoffend and better able to perform restitution outside prison) with habitual shoplifters getting decades in prison.

In fact, a system serious about crime prevention would implement pre-emptive detention (sentencing an innocent person to 30 years in prison is the moral equivalent of sentencing a criminal who deserves1 year to 31 years, which would already be acceptable under this system) or, as alluded to in @29, birthrate reduction in at-risk communities. Morally problematic, to say the least, but that's what a serious crime-prevention system would look like.
31
@30, all I hear is blah blah blah
32
@28 so better we abort the poor. Great idea!

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