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.