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COMMENTS:
LMAO
More people in prison means more people learning how to be better criminals.
As to the so call 'crime wave', you only need to ask yourself, why is it in the interests of government to ferment such fear?
Crime has existed since we crawled out ofthe primordial soup, crime will will always be with us.
If prisons worked, why are we not living in a Utopia where crime is something that has gone the way of the dodo.
Dostoyevsky said, you can measure a country by the sort of prison population a country has.
I believe the US prison system speaks volumes.
If the fire department worked, why do we still have fires? Obviously we need to get rid of all our fire departments.
We still have crime because people still commit it. The purpose of jails is not to eliminate crime, this will never happen, it is to hold and punish those people who do commit it. No nation has ever been free of crime, ever. This is inherent in human nature. Good governments take steps to capture and punish people who commit legitimate crimes and remove them from society, at least until they are 'cured'.
It seems to me that there is a short-term lowering of the crime rate when we arrest and jail more criminals for longer periods, but there is a severe, and potentially catastrophic loss in the long-term.
Let me explain: From about 1987 forward, the federal government and the vast majority of states passed laws which increased the penalty for virtually every kind of crime on their books. It was politically expedient to do this, after all, everyone is against crime (even prisoners don't like to be assaulted, stolen from, etc.), but was constructed on faulty logic. The absurd calculus which the public was fed went something like this: a criminal considering crime "A" will know it carries a larger sentence than crime "B" and opt for a less serious crime. Absurd logic 2: Locking prisoners up for longer periods will convince them of the futility of crime and lead them to become lawabiding citizens.
As a result of this silly reasoning, many more criminals were locked up in prisons for longer periods of time.
The first problem with the new draconian sentencing policies soon emerged: We had to build more and more prisons, hire more and more staff, and feed and house the sudden massive influx of prisoners.
Here in Colorado, we jumped from about 1,300 prison inmates and three prisons in the 80's to over 16,000 prison inmates and 16 state prisons, with more housed in private prisons at incredible cost. The cost to the state is incredible: We are now spending a huge fraction of our annual state budget on prison, and this impacts everyone. There is less money available for every program in the state, including education, roads, etc.
Second problem with doubling and trebling sentences: The cost of the building and maintaining the prison infrastructure (prisons, staff and inmate care) also consumes much of what would ordinarily be spent on rehabilitation programs for inmates.
So, the net effect is that inmates are "warehoused" for some years, not provided adequate treatment opportunities, and when they are released some years later (as the large majority ultimately are), they are generally much worse than they were before they entered prison. They have no marketable skills, no money, few resources, and a suit of cheap clothes. What is the most logical outcome for such a released prisoner? You tell me.
The really stupid part of this equation is that we accomplish virtually nothing but the creation of a time interval between us and the prisoner, and he is coming back to our communities much worse than he was when we locked him up.
At the beginning of this vicious cycle, we did experience a downturn in the crime rate. Now, according to the news, the pipe has filled up, and inmates are being released at the rate of 600,000 a year in perpetuity.
So, locking more folks up for more time is hurting all of us. All of us can agree that violent felons need to be locked up for long periods, but I think we need to come to our senses about drug users and non-violent offenders. This latter group can be diverted into community programs at much less cost than prison, and perhaps repay the cost of their crimes and required therapy.
Sorry about the length of this comment. It just struck a cord. I've had clients of the criminal justice system, and they are a mess when they get out.
Thanks for a great ballot.
One small addendum: If crime were a rational process, criminals would never commit a crime in the first place (the risk/reward ration is imbalanced), and an even more important insight of these not-too-bright felons: They are irrational optimists: they think they can outthink the police forever.
These folks are not likely to be impacted by increased sentences.
They've just joined the Bush Administration.
The crime rate is significantly lower in most European countries, but the per capita prison population is much lower than the US. Obviously, the Europeans are doing a better job. Kudos to them.
exactly my thoughts, here in the UK most first time burgulars dont even get sent to prison, no wonder our crime levels are rising so quickly
Not necessarily. Crime stats are based on *reported crime. Less reported crime doesn't always mean less crime. For example, a crack house or meth lab emerge in a nice middle class neighborhood. Slowly but surely undesirables enter the picture. Typically, what occurs next is massive crime reports based on an increase in crime. After a time of no results people give up or move and pretty much quit reporting because it's a waste of time. Yet on paper, it looks like the crime rate went down.
I fail to to see how youcan use the fire department analogy when it comes to the prison population.
Then I realised who made the comment and it was obvious that if Herzog cant answer it, Herzog will throw a meaningless analogy or cliche into the debate and hopes noone will notice.
Herzog, that's like saying more terrorists killed=less terrorism. WRONG. More people in jail doesn't mean less crime. The city slums train new criminals from the age of 5 and as years pass the number of active criminals increase on the streets. Crime for whatever reason seems to be the way of life in these parts and that's not gonna change until the government does something about it. With that being said there is no correlation.
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