Video - Billie Holiday at the 1958 Monterrey Jazz Festival
STLBeacon | There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons and jails. Some view that statistic as an alarming indictment of our criminal justice system. Others -- like myself -- find it alarming that we have so many criminals. In either event, the number represents well under 1 percent of the total population.
A fashionable criticism of this state of affairs is that we are wasting scarce resources by jailing nonviolent offenders, especially drug users. Before you make up your mind on this issue, Beth, I'd like you to consider two points. One concerns the way in which we classify offenders; the other pertains to the actual cost of crime.
Although criminals sometimes have a distinctive M.O., crime is not a union job. Yesterday's common thief can be today's burglar or tomorrow's stick-up man. We define a criminal by the offense for which he was most recently convicted. Because most convictions are the result of plea bargains, these classifications can be misleading. The violent crime of robbery, for instance, may be negotiated into the nonviolent offense of stealing from a person, thus rehabilitating the offender by a fiat of semantics.
Drug users are the poster children of bleeding hearts who argue that these souls need treatment, not punishment. Two awkward facts tend to refute that notion: The cure rate for addiction is dismal at best and users steal to support their habit.
A heroin addict is not a guy who wants to party but is too lazy to work. The junkie steals for the same reason you get vaccinated -- he doesn't want to get sick. Imagine a severe case of the flu: the muscle ache, joint pain, throbbing head and most of all the nausea -- the overwhelming, all-consuming, sicker-than-a-dog nausea. That's what a day without junk is like for a heavy user. He doesn't necessarily want to hurt you, but given the alternative, he'll do whatever it takes to get his fix. He can't possibly support a several hundred dollar a day drug habit by honest labor, so he becomes a one-man crime wave.
And at what cost to the rest of us? The city of Detroit has been virtually decimated by narcotics use and the crime it spawns. Some now contemplate converting broad stretches of the inner city into farmland. Farmland! What price tag do we put on the loss of a major American city?
Without discounting the humane values of compassion and empathy, the best argument for incarceration is that it works. Every day the offender is confined is another day that he is unable to ply his trade. Compared to the true cost of crime, I would argue that prison is a bargain. Fist tap Big Don.
18 comments:
Prison may be a bargain if we say that this population of addicts are just the extreme of a addicted society, or a deficits of human nature/ecology. Some of us have a little addicted personality, for wanting to have something that feels good or the enjoyment of an alternative consciousness. I don't argue that there would be no instuition of placing sick or pococurante folks away; this 18th Century system has gone mad, especiall when it comes to the mentally ill, given also what we know about human nature. And common folks ain't stupid, they arm for good reasons, also.
The fact that "whitey boulder" can show how the powerful play at this "crime game", and how in other nations as Doc shown, just kill the fucked. Then this is a weak premise for independent thinking, it reflection a lack of connectivity for what is known now. If we want some order, from the youngers, put their ass to work. The states can not maintain 75k a CO, and we know that you need a good paid person,or, our prisons would look like something out of the 1700's.
The
founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they
might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest
practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and
another portion as the site of a prison.
NATHANIEL
HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter
The
founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they
might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest
practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and
another portion as the site of a prison.
NATHANIEL
HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter
overdue time to decriminalize then legalize all of it - not because TPTB experience a quantum leap in their humanness, rather, because the externalities incurred on their system of governance by super-rich narcotrafficantes is making for some deadly serious governance challenges. TPTB are breeding up their own most dangerous competitors through parasitically profiting on money laundering and other legitimating phases of prohibited narcotics revenues.
"Compared to the true cost of crime, I would argue that prison is a bargain." The arithmetic required to refute this is so simple that elementary school kids can do it. Willful ignorance is on proud display with this. One might ask how on earth all the other nations of the world manage to get by with just a tiny fraction of the US incarceration rate? They must be missing out on the huge "bargain" offered by imprisonment.
So, the "war on drugs"...how's that been working out for you?
Even Buckley came to a strong position against the "war on drugs". For example, http://old.nationalreview.com/12feb96/drug.html.
Do you ever get the feeling that there's a collective hoax being perpetrated?
Like there are simply legions of folk who KNOW that there's no Santa Claus, but they absolutely and violently insist that you pretend right along with them, or else?
Or are the legionnaires just genuinely and sincerely insane?
@Rembom - Suppose your wife and kids get T-boned/killed by a driver stoned out of his skull on pot/H/crack/whatever.
What's the True_Cost of *THAT*...??
Based on the FBI's Uniform Crime Report the person driving the car which t-bones anyone is most likely to be a white male whose faculties are impaired due to alcohol (legally-sold) consumption.
As Michelle Alexander points out in some states, 80-90 percent of the drug offenders serving time in prison are Afrikan Americans. Are we supposed to believe that white people in these states are not using and selling drugs--bullshit! It's all about the way communities are policed and prosecuted.
Tim Wise notes that in 1964 America's prison population was 65 percent white and 35 percent people of color. By 1991 those percentages had reversed. Are we supposed to believe that white men suddenly stopped committing crimes at the same rates while Afrikan Americans and Hispanics suddenly went berserk? Per Wise, the FBI data show that crimes committed by Afrikan Amricans have remained steady over the past 18 years, while their numbers in prison have tripled. Racial incarceration obviously serves the interest of America's oligarchic psychopathocracy, and that is not going to change until the psychopathocracy is overthrown.
Incarceration rates are also driven by dire economic straits. We recently had a situation over in Gastonia, NC where a 59-year-old white man robbed a bank for one dollar hoping to be arrested and sentenced to prison so that he can receive medical care. Given the pending economic doom and gloom, those types of crimes of desperation are likely to increase.
Makheru, You have entered the BD zone.
@BD "wife and kids" - I would expect your "war on drugs" policies to prevent that sort of thing...if those policies worked. But since they have not worked for 40 years, of course the only sensible thing is to double down, right? We must not be locking up enough people, missing out on a big part of that "bargain".
@Mak - You make BD's point: So if you legalize all drugs, those Af-Ams otherwise in prison for drug offenses will now be out driving around stoned and the number of T-bone crashes will double. Which is one good reason not to legalize...
Tom, what is the BD zone?
Don, the the NHTSA estimated that 17,941 people died in alcohol-related accidents in 2006. Secondly, DUI/DWI arrests for alcohol versus narcotics are approximately 4 to 1. Are you advocating a ban on the sale of alcohol? Finally, if your concern is removing potential drug-using drivers from the streets, I would suggest that you demand that white communities are policed the same way as Afrikan American and Hispanic communities. That would increase the prison population to around 5 million and the total number of people in the criminal justice system to from the current 7 million to over 10 million. Are you for mass incarceration, or just mass racial incarceration?
Makheru, Named after Big Don, the BD Zone is a strange dimension where time and space, fact and fiction collide.
I just don't understand the second-guessing of Big Don's motives and aims here..., I just don't see how anyone would ever question his good faith intentions of keeping the Bradley's safe from T-Bone an'em....,
There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man.
It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition. And, it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the BD Zone.
Must be something esoteric, b/c I don't how this classification relates to anything I've written. Please explain where fact and fiction collide in my statement.
Oh, I see, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding! No, the opposite, what you said sounded sensible and realistic.
And so I felt Big Don would surely try to twist your comment into something unrecognizable. I was likening you to the normal Earth Human about to be subjected to unpleasant extradimensional distortions.
Re: DUI. BD is for Summary Execution of folks caught DUI, mandatory on first offense, regardless of race or any other parameter. Video the arrest, the field sobriety tests, run 'em in for breathalyzer, draw blood for confirmation, and if it all holds up present it to a local, and a state judge for review, then straight to the lethal injection gurney. Zero tolerance policy, no exceptions. With a mandatory flow time not to exceed one week. Point is, this would NOT lead to mass executions. Rather, after a handful of executions demonstrating the new "teeth", all this DUI horses__t would come to a screeching halt. Instant 17,000 fewer deaths per year (and a ton more serious injuries), many of them totally innocent folks...
So, Makheru, I was just commiserating, not criticizing.
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