Monday, December 15, 2014

Article Summary with Template

https://news.vice.com/article/the-mass-incarceration-problem-in-america

The general argument made by Wyler in her work, "The Mass Incarceration Problems in America" is that the US puts far too many people in jail. More specifically, Wyler argues that the war on drugs is to blame for the rise in prison rates. She writes, "Since 1980, the number of incarcerated citizens in the US has more than quadrupled, an unprecedented rise that can attributed to four decades of tough-on-crime oneupmanship, and a draconian war on drugs." In this passage Wyler is implying that in order to fix our prison problems, we must stop our war on drugs. In conclusion, Wyler's belief is that the US spends too much money and energy on trying to stop people from using drugs, and as a result we are putting more people in prison who shouldn't necessarily be in there.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

3 anecodotes, factoids, questions

Anecdotes:

  • Experiences of when I went into Suffolk county jail
  • Story about person who has had life altered by being in jail
  • Anecdote about person rehabiliatated from prison
Factoids:
  • three out of every four released inmates go back to jail in 5 years
  • Second Highest incarceration rate in the world
  • over 50% of prisoners are in for drug charges
Questions:
  • What can we do to reduce the amount of people going to jail?
  • Should we follow the Scandinavian example and reduce sentence lengths and focus on rehab?
  • What is the main purpose of our prison system?

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Research Questions

How could the United States improve on its current penal system?

What is the purpose of criminal law?

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

Focault's theory is that the penal system developed into a less humanitarian system. He talks about public torture in France, and how it was originally done in order to serve a few purposes. These included showing the public what happened if you were convicted of these crimes, and to punish the person who committed serious crimes. He also says that public punishment and execution served to display the power of the government. The reformists in France then created a more gentle punishment system, where convicts had to perform hard labour in order to help the community and to display the punishment they had to endure publicly. Focault finally claimed that prison was by far the most beneficial to society, claiming that they allowed the incarcerated to perform their duties in things such as government and other work.

This relates to my topic as while a lot of research I did seems to paint prisons as a bad institution and wants to focus on rehabilitation, Focault shows the benefits to having prisons in society.

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/more-subjects/criminal-justice/sentencing/theories-of-punishment

“Let the punishment fit the crime” captures the essence of retribution. Proponents advocate just deserts, which defines justice in terms of fairness and proportionality. Retributivists aim to dispense punishment according to an offender's moral blameworthiness (as measured by the severity of crimes of which the offender was convicted). Ideally, the harshness of punishments should be proportionate to the seriousness of crimes. In reality, it is difficult to match punishments and crimes, since there is no way to objectively calibrate the moral depravity of particular crimes and/or the painfulness of specific punishments. Retribution is a backward‐looking theory of punishment. It looks to the past to determine what to do in the present.

This theory says that punishment should be equal to the crime committed. It focuses on justice for the victims.

This relates to my topic because it describes the purpose of punishment as to be retribution to the victims and society for a person's actions. This is different from what I had researched which focused on the prisoners themselves.


A popular reason for punishment is that it gets criminals off the streets and protects the public. The idea is to remove an offender from society, making it physically impossible (or at least very difficult) for him or her to commit further crimes against the public while serving a sentence. Incapacitation works as long as the offenders remain locked up. There is no question that incapacitation reduces crime rates by some unknown degree. The problem is that it is very expensive. Incapacitation carries high costs not only in terms of building and operating prisons, but also in terms of disrupting families when family members are locked up.

This again relates to my topic as it focuses on viewing criminal as dangerous and that they should be put away for the benefit of society. This contrasts many view I had seen previously calling for rehabilitation.


Monday, December 8, 2014

Introduction


As I sat in the Suffolk county jail lobby I was more bored than anything. In front of me stood Sergeant Manning, a hard nosed guard with a scowl on his face. Manning surveyed the room we stood in and looked at all of the new faces. After a few moments, he gruffly said, "alright let's get started". All of the people in the lobby slowly sauntered though the reinforced iron doors. As I heard the doors shut behind me my boredom turned into nervousness. The realization dawned on me that once you entered this jail there was no leaving. The dark corridors made way into an illuminated cell block, where inmates lounged about in their 6 by 8 foot rooms barred by iron doors and a small plexiglass window being their sole connection to the outside area. I was in jail solely for a class field trip, but I couldn’t stand being in jail for four hours, let alone years. The United States prison system is a mess, and its about time we did something to fix it.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

15 Books

1) The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice among the Worst of the Worst Hardcover – November 19, 2013

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Response to Comment

Great question Cian. I believe that jail should be for rehabilitation mostly. I think it is more beneficial to help people become productive members of society than to toss them in a cell for a few years and give them no support when they get out. This is especially true when more than half of the people in jail are there for drug offenses. However, I do think we should sprinkle in a little suffering here and there. I think that we should punish those who have committed serious crimes against society, particularly if the person is sentenced to jail for life. Jail should be both a place for rehabilitation and a deterrent to future crime in my opinion.

Monday, December 1, 2014

3 More Articles

http://online.wsj.com/articles/federal-prison-population-drops-1411469837

This article claims that federal prions are actually shrinking due to lesser sentencing for non-violent offenses. However, this comes with an uptick of incarceration at the state level. It seems that while removing a lot of the mandatory sentencing that comes with non-violent crimes reduces the amount of people in federal jail, they just end up with shorter sentences in a state jail. This is not a good solution.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21583680-eric-holders-ideas-lockig-up-fewer-americans-are-welcome-do-not-go-far-enough-one

This article has some good statistics on the US prisons. The United States has 5% of the world population but 25% of the total prisoners in the world. It costs us $80 billion a year to maintain this, or nearly $35,000 dollars per inmate. Federal prisons have grown by 800% since 1980. These statistics fit in nicely with the other information I gathered.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/05/us-prison-population_n_4214626.html

This article again gives some interesting statistics. There are more prisoners than school teachers in the US. It also says that the amount of prisoners is in decline since its peak in 2009. It again cites that many are trying to do away with the mandatory sentencing that many drugs had. I agree with that, but I think that the root of the problem is the addiction to drugs that keeps people going back to jail. While I agree that we should eliminate harsh mandatory sentencing for non-violent crimes we should also focus on rehabilitation.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Norweigian Prisons

Norway is renowned for its progressive views on the prison system. Unlike the U.S. prisons' concrete cells with hard communal toilets, Norway's prisons instead have been compared to "Holiday Camps". The prisons run a sort of "open campus" format, where they are not forced to stay in the building and they can do activities such as fishing in their spare time. Norway also has no death penalty or even life sentences in their penal system. Even Anders Breivik, the shooter who killed 77 people in Norway, only received the maximum sentence of 21 years. However, it should be noted that Norway has the lowest recidivism rate in Europe at just under 30%. This is much lower than the United State's rate as well, which is around 70%.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Recidivism Rates

The Bureau of Justice Statistics released the following data about our prison system:
  • 3 in 4 former prisoners go back to jail within 5 years
  • Sentence lengths have only gone up in the past 15 years
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=17

CBS also ran a piece on Recidivism:
  • 82% of property offenders arrested for another crime
  • 77% drug offenders
  • 74% of public order offenders
  • 71% violent offenders
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/once-a-criminal-always-a-criminal/

What does this data tell us? It shows that our prison system does not actually rehabilitate inmates. If we have 3 out of every 4 inmates coming back to jail within five years then we have a major problem. If we instead focused on rehabilitation then we would save money and have less crowded prisons, even if it meant putting more money into it right now. As of right now, we are wasting money by having people go to jail over and over again.

Monday, November 17, 2014

New York Times on Capital Punishment

On September 8th, Daniel Lachance of the New York Times wrote a scathing piece on the current penal system, eviscerating the policy of our country having the death penalty. The article began with,  " To opponents of the death penalty, recent accounts of botched executions and DNA-based exonerations of death-row prisoners have revived hope that judges and voters will finally see capital punishment for what it is: an intolerable affront to human dignity." Lachance then calmed down a bit and delved into his reasoning. He cites the inability of the government to put down death row inmates quickly. "As late as 1959, most of those executed spent less than two years on death row...inmates put to death in 2012 had waited an average of almost 16 years for their execution date." He goes on to say that this is because not enough lawyers want to take on these cases, so inmates will have to wait years for a government appointed lawyer while they appeal. Lachance's main point in this article is that if we are going to convince others to abolish the death penalty it will not be through the argument of morality, but rather the argument of money. He says that we should argue that the death penalty is a waste of our own tax money, and by abolishing it we would save a buck, which is easier to get behind than "save the mass murderer because the death penalty is unfair".

I personally agree with Lachance on this piece. Waiting 16 years to be executed is absurd, especially when you take into account the cost of housing a criminal for that time just for them to die at the hands of the state. It is also a bit strange that capital punishment is up to the state to decide. Is a murder in Texas really worse than a murder in Massachusetts? I think that the supreme court should have decided in 1972 to either make it legal or illegal, not declare it unconstitutional but leave it for the states to deal with. Now we have a national debate that really should have been cleared up years ago. Either way, I agree with Lachance in that the death penalty is not worth it for the cost it has.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Privatized Prisons

A hot new topic in the field of crime and punishment is the issue of private prisons. Contrary to what many people believe, the government does not run all of the prisons in our country. Instead, private agencies are springing up and taking over the prison market. From 2002 to 2009, the amount of private prisons in the country increased by 37%. Many are not too sure about this new influx of private prisons, and they have began to advocate against them. Others believe they are a good, necessary implementation and that private prisons are here to stay.

Those who are for the private prisons have one main argument for them, and that is that it is much cheaper to run a private prison. Private agencies claim that they can run a prison much more efficiently than the government can as they have the ability to cut unnecessary expenses and hold to tighter budgets.

People who are against it claim that these private prisons are a bad thing. Some private prisons have cut certain rehabilitation programs in order to make more money. Another problem is that these private agencies are making money off of people's incarceration. Is it really moral to make money by locking people up? These agencies want more people in jail so they can increase their profits. It seems unfair to prey on those who make poor decisions in life, especially when the prison does not really rehabilitate its prisoners.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Immigration

Immigration is a hot topic today, as the influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico and other countries has created quite a polarizing issue. I chose this topic as a possibility because of the amount of press it has gotten and also because everyone seems to have an opinion on the issue. It would be interesting to see the statistics that comes with this topic and to possibly dispel certain notions that others have about illegal aliens as well to form an educated view on the matter.

The blogs on immigration were surprisingly scarce, but I did notice that the people writing them had an agenda they wanted to push. Some believed that it should be easier to immigrate while others thought that harsher immigration laws were for the better.

Crime and Punishment

I chose the topic of crime and punishment because I believe it is the topic that has the potential to alter your life the most. Most of the blogs I looked at were opinionated pieces about Capital Punishment or the fact that we have too many people imprisoned. I decided to take a stab at this style of blog:


Many people today see America as a place of freedom and prosperity, a place where liberty and justice are valued by the government. It is the land of the free after all.

 But how accurate is this?

While we make fun of Russia and their commie country and their bears riding on unicycles we are also ignoring a rather large elephant in our proverbial room. The United States has the highest incarceration rate out of any country in the world. We are higher than Russia, China, and Mexico. Even North Korea sends fewer of its citizens to prison than us. We currently have 716 out of every 100,000 people imprisoned. One out of every 9 African American men will be incarcerated between the ages of 20 and 34. Over 50% of inmates are there for drug charges. Is it fair to champion ourselves as the pinnacle of individual liberty when we lock our own citizens up in a concrete block because they decided to smoke a plant?

Is this really what the United States was founded on? Should we really be wasting money keeping people locked up in jail for victim-less crimes when there are so many different things we could spend our tax money on? That's up to our nation to decide, but if you listen closely you can faintly make out the sound of Thomas Jefferson softly crying in the distance.