“Raymond V. Liedka, of Oakland University in Michigan, and colleagues have found that the crime-fighting effects of prison disappear once the incarceration rate gets too high. “If the buildup goes beyond a tipping point, then additional incarceration is not going to gain our society any reduction in crime, and may lead to increased crime,” Dr. Liedka said.”
There is nothing unintentional about what has happened with our incarceration rates and prison system in this country over the past 2 decades or so. Since the latest scheme of enslaving people has taken root in this country, everything has gone exactly according to the plans of the slave-owners, a.k.a. the private prison industry- which is supported and funded by the very legislators we elect.
To call the current system a ‘poverty trap’ is an understatement…it isn’t an accidental trap; it is intentional and well planned. Every time something is proven to reduce recidivism rates, that *something* is magically removed from the equation. Strong outside ties help prisoners? Well then, let’s move prisoners farther from home, charge outrageous rates for phone calls and then…ah yes…let’s go ALL out and mandate that prisoners only be allowed to receive 1 postcard a month instead of long letters from home…
And if poverty increases incarceration rates well by all means…let’s make it impossible for anyone even arrested to ever rise above the poverty and earn their way out of the system via legal employment. There is no profit to be made by allowing people to serve a short, fitting sentence for actual crimes (vs non-crimes such as drug use) and then letting them return to the free world and get on with the business of earning a real living wage and becoming part of productive society and our legislators (you know, those folks who own stock in prison companies or at the very least, accept bribes campaign contributions from prison companies) damn well know it.
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US incarceration timeline (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Excerpts, NYTimes- “The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime. But now that America’s incarceration rate has risen to be the world’s highest, many social scientists find the social benefits to be far outweighed by the costs to those communities.
“Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society.”
Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.
No one denies that some people belong in prison. Mr. Harris, now 47, and his wife, 45, agree that in his early 20s he deserved to be there. But they don’t see what good was accomplished by keeping him there for two decades, and neither do most of the researchers who have been analyzing the prison boom.
The number of Americans in state and federal prisons has quintupled since 1980, and a major reason is that prisoners serve longer terms than before. They remain inmates into middle age and old age, well beyond the peak age for crime…
…Epidemiologists have found that when the incarceration rate rises in a county, there tends to be a subsequent increase in the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy, possibly because women have less power to require their partners to practice protected sex or remain monogamous.
When researchers try to explain why AIDS is much more prevalent among blacks than whites, they point to the consequences of incarceration, which disrupts steady relationships and can lead to high-risk sexual behavior. When sociologists look for causes of child poverty and juvenile delinquency, they link these problems to the incarceration…” Full Story Here
Reblogged this on The Nonconformist.
I think loads of people are just really vindictive …forgiveness is for sale, of course.
You can only has forgiveness if you has the cool million or so to contribute to someone’s campaign fund…
I haz failed
It is damn near impossible for anyone with anything on their record to find a job now that most every employer runs background checks and uses even the most minor offenses to eliminate canidates from the selection process. Incarceration not required – you are right about that. Anyone can be arrested, doesn’t matter if released as innocent, the arrest record stands.
It’s infuriating and more so because it is all done by design now and not some random accidental thing that couldn’t be changed if lawmakers so desired. I got hit with a misdemeanor for possession of a pot pipe years ago – should have never even gone on my record but that stupid charge turned up time and again on background checks. It even nearly prevented me from becoming a victims’ rights advocate some 4 years after the fact! I can’t imagine what it is like to walk out of prison with the $100 they give you and try to set up a life with so many obstacles intentionally set out in your path. Kudos to those who succeed in the midst of such insanity.
I nominated you for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award!
Thanks so much!!
You’re welcome!
Looking good over here. You’ve been a busy bee.
They’ve been out for a body count for the last 25
years, at least.
I’m sure they’d like to convict everyone of a felony
at least once:
For one thing, they get paid for that. I was standing
in the middle of a closed-chamber federal court pro-
ceeding one day, and took a good look around me.
There must have been a dozen assorted individuals
in attendance. And the thought suddenly struck me:
“I’m the only idiot in here not getting paid to be here.
And if it wasn’t for me and those like me, Not one of
these people in here would be receiving a paycheck.
Then, it strips one of their right to vote and bear arms.
Can you say “Baaaah”… You’re through.
On top of that, they get to build an entire dossier on
you right down to your DNA.
Then they get to charge the taxpayers $30,000 a
year to keep you up at an actual cost of around $10
a day while you make them a mint by working in their
slave-labor sweatshops for 35c an hour pumping out
thousands of dollars worth of military contract items
each day, but they get every penny right back be-
the only store available to shop in just happens to
belong to them.
I probably left something out. But if there’s 9 ways
to skin a cat, there must be 1,009 ways to skin a
prisoner. And they are getting skinned, be they pub-
lically or privately kept. At the end of all that, bet
your bottom dollar they’d like to see us ALL run
through the mill at least once.
We are the serfs of an evil empire — period.
Alana…I’m sorry, I missed your comment until now. Thanks so much for laying things out more clearly for people. It stuns me when I encounter people who still don’t even know that we have things like private prisons or those who shrug and say well, “private industry IS more efficient than public sector”…it isn’t that simple and people are still frightfully unaware how big, expansive and threatening our *ahem* Justice System is or why it needs to be stopped. You nailed it in the last line – we’re serfs. Whatever freedom we think we have is illusion created and maintained by our masters; that illusion will crumble as more people get fed into the gears and when people start resisting/rioting they are going to be stunned at the force with which they are crushed.
Yeah.
Reblogged this on 201010blog.
this is an article that needs to be read by all. It is very good and filled with wonderful information. thanks for taking the time to post and share with me
Thanks for taking time to read, Terry. I understand not everyone feels compassion for prisoners and that’s fine but…people should care about what we are doing to society, the money we are wasting that would be better spent on education, etc. More prisons, more convicts, more poverty…I don’t think America needs to keep heading down a road that only leads to more and more of all of those things!
what I try to do is look behind the scene. what caused the person to be in prison? how can we help reform them? there are many reasons that the prisons are over populated. Too much time complaining and not enough time solving the real issues
Agreed. It’s not a one-dimensional issue/problem but people tend to simplify it into convict=monster when reality is that these days, convict could equal someone that sold raw milk to a neighbor. Step 1 to solving the problem is to stop criminalizing everything under the sun. Drug addicts need treatment; prostitutes need counseling and job training, etc. No one benefits from our willy-nilly way of just throwing everyone into one category – or prison.
i agree with you 100%
The Prison-Industrial complex is one of America’s fastest growing industries. One of the few growth industries in this hollowed out shell that used to be “The Greatest Nation On Earth” (I wish Obama would stop calling America that. The world knows it’s not true, it’s embarrassing and delusional in a country where half the citizens live at or near poverty, and ranks 32 out of 34 developed nations with obscene depression era inequality.). The means by which to maximize its highly profitable revenue streams, a.k.a. poor people, is being expanded, codified and normalized more and more every day via over criminalization, undue lobbying influence and wall street /government investment. Imprisonment facilities, once an eyesore for communities are now seen as economically attractive investments that bring good jobs. The Slave Labor force that built this country has been changed and adapted to become more “Market-Friendly”. There are more Black men in prison right now in 2013, than were slaves in 1865. Such is life in a violent, hyper militarized, over criminalized, crypto-facist police state, such as the good ol U.S. of A. When it becomes acceptable to name entertainment stadiums after prison-corporations, you know something is terribly terribly wrong in this country.
I’ve been tracking/writing about the growth of the prison industry for quite a few years now. I used to hold out hope that once ‘the masses’ got wind of things like private prisons for profit and lawmakers that accepted bribes to pass more laws to fill those prisons that there would be outrage, anger, fury…righteous demonstrations…Here we are half a dozen years later and now private prisons are out in the light and openly discussed…and the only public reaction has been..? A shrug of the shoulders at best.
Several communities have been stung by the false promises of economic growth prisons (particularly private ones) make when they approach local officials and make their pitch. There are plenty of economically hard-up places to feed on and so they just pack up and move on once their mess is made. And the beast just grows and grows, unfettered and free to catch as much human product as needed to keep them profits rollin’ in.
The “Greatest Nation” is about to name a college sport stadium after a prison…Three Cheers for Freedom, eh? :-/
Huxley Said it best “…soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.” Soma is ubiquitous in this profoundly sick society (It’s not accident that Americans are the world’s most voracious consumers of psychotropic “medications”). One only has to look at the galling non-reaction to our president claiming dictatorial powers to constantly surveil, indefinitely detain and kill Americans without due process or explanation of “legal rationale”. Dissent, anger, outrage, fury, righteous demonstrations, have all been digitally neutered via the atomizing and lobotomizing effects of social media and it’s requisite “personalization”. Our own personal “Filter bubbles” make self/peer-group-censorship fun, as we are rarely exposed to dissenting view points, and when we are, we attack them mercilessly with no critical thought. I’ve been out in the streets demonstrating with the occupy movement and their ilk, and I’ll tell you, the Soma Junkies either ignore like good sheep or look on in disdain that their Soma coma has been disturbed; as if we’re mad. It’s very frightening, the aggressive apathy that is expressed by the masses.
Interesting about what it is like to be at the demonstrations; I’m in a small community and we only have a few sign waves now and then that don’t rile much of anyone really. I’ve seen the hostility in online forums and I hear it in the tones of family members now and then but have had little first-hand exposure to the hostility that the Soma Junkies demonstrate towards the folks that protest. It’s disturbing because the junkies seem to be the majority…I don’t like the idea that we have to fight through our neighbors in order to get to fight the PTB.
The apathy and unwillingness to step beyond socially acceptable comfort zones side of things, I am all too familiar with. From victim’s rights advocacy work, working with the anti-death penalty movement, prisoner rights advocacy work to 3rd party political work this past season…I’ve heard every excuse under the sun as to why no one has time, ability, money, yada yada yada and why no one can help with anything more than pasting memes and sharing repetitive feel good posts. Online advocacy/activism is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? On one hand those of us who utilize the techno-tools we have can connect people from far-flung places that create a positive change…on the other edge, it allows far too many people to play at activism and feel good on a superficial level with no real effort or thought required.
For a wide variety of reasons, I find the times we live in to be both terrifying and interesting. People are being manipulated, drugged and trained to stand against each other instead of at the System…and when it all explodes..? I fear it but almost welcome the change that will have to follow the initial chaos.