Get Tough & Smart - How to Start Winning the War on Drug Addiction

President Obama wrote me a letter today, thanking me for sharing my "thoughtful suggestions" (about putting prisoners to work, prison reform, etc ., as you may read on this weblog).

U.S. Representative Spencer Bachus has forwarded my prison reform suggestions to the House Judiciary Committee, the committee with jurisdiction over federal laws regarding penitentiaries.  He believes this prison reform initiative has value.  In a nutshell, I contend w e can create a million new American jobs by wiping out the enormous restrictions on prison industries and letting prisoners manufacture goods in America that are now made exclusively overseas.   American employers hiring prisoners to work for less than minimum wages can compete with foreign manufacturers, increase child support and restitution payments by prisoners, and reduce correctional expenses and recidivism.   This will inevitably create jobs outside prison due to the multiplier effect of manufacturing plants.   Everyone in America can win.   If you support this reform, please write your Representative in Congress and ask them to support it!  The main idea is summa...

Today, I mailed letters to various elected officials concerning a prison reform concept I’ve been working on for a few years.  Here is the letter I sent to President Obama, Alabama’s U.S. Senators, my U.S. Representative, Sen. Jim Webb (D.-Va., who has expressed a desire for reform) and a U.S. Congressman I know from law school: *     *     * After years of study and publication of a book on the subject, I see a way to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States from foreign countries.  We can boost the American economy by using a massive undeveloped human resource, American prison labor, to make products now made exclusively overseas .  Under this proposal, rehabilitation prospects and tax revenues would increase, while recidivism and government expenditures would decline.  Prisoners would pay more restitution and child support.  Everyone in America can win! As you know, our nation has 2.3 million prisoners, ...

Modern incarceration, sometimes called New Age slavery, is far worse than antebellum slavery when we compare the average American prisoner to the average antebellum slave. The average slave was not directly abused by his or her owners, other than the intrinsic injustice of slavery and the pervasive limitation of opportunities. A significant minority of slaves gave rise to the true horror stories of slavery. Almost all prisoners face loneliness, boredom and the threat of violence on a daily basis in the sick prison environment, punctuated of course by modern horrors. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage prisoners face is the absence of the opposite sex, which frustrates and encourages violence and deviancy. Antebellum slaves were encouraged to have sex from an early age and their owners frequently played the role of matchmaker. All prisoners are completely removed from their friends, families, spouses, communities and familiar surroundings and thrust into a terrible moral e...

The El Rodeo prison in Venezuela was built to handle 750 prisoners. At the time of the 2011 riot there, it held 3,500 in filthy conditions. Venezuela's correctional system as a whole contains almost four (4) times the number of inmates it was designed to incarcerate. Overcrowding always causes problems, whether it takes place in prison or in a laboratory testing white rats. Overcrowding reduces the level of control wardens have over conditions, increases tension, brings about an exponential increase in violations of personal space and promotes gang activity and violence. Divided into Unit One and Unit Two, El Rodeo Prison holds some dangerous criminals. But over half of the Venezuelan prison population is being held before trial, because of the slow Venezuelan judicial system. In the case of the Venezuelan correctional system, officials often let gangs run the prison while the guards mainly keep people from escaping. This uncaring procedure has through the years given rise to mul...

Hey, Politicians! Your predecessors got our prison systems in a terrible mess.   We stacked up many more prisoners than other nations, and at much greater expense, with disastrous consequences.   Paying more for prisons and less for education is a sick trend.   Each prisoner costs us about $50,000 per year, and that cost must be multiplied by 2,300,000. You may have heard that it costs less than this to feed, clothe, house and provide medical care to prisoners, but that lower figure does not include the astronomical lost opportunity costs. Locking up that many people and not providing useful work for them means that the value of their labor is lost, too.   On the average, each prisoner is able to make about $25,000 per year if put in a regular job.   Add this to the direct outlays $25,000 per year, and the cost equals $50,000 per year.   This does not count the increased welfare costs outside prison, the social costs of breaking up families and marriag...

Many prison advocates regard incarceration as a form of oppression by the racist and capitalist system against victimized criminals of color lacking education and jobs. Left-wing prison reformers seldom address personal responsibility for crimes, unless they know of someone wrongfully convicted. They dislike mass incarceration and the New Jim Crow that follows it, but the plight of crime victims and society in general tends to be slighted in their discussions. They often refuse dialogue with conservative reformers. The biggest avoidance mechanism in progressive discussions of prison reform is to generalize the problem instead of proposing practical solutions. Progressives want to "create a movement," eliminate poverty, create jobs, improve education and end racism before facing the stark realities of crime and punishment. This approach favors dreams over answers. A red flag for this leniency is commonly an emphasis upon incarceration for marijuana possession. Empha...

California Prison Crisis Cure by John D. Gleissner      Profound reforms most generally follow disasters, major crises and first-class fiascos. The State of California is therefore ready to solve its prison crisis with the following reforms:      1.   With regard to manufactured goods now made exclusively in foreign countries: (a) repeal the federal statutes that killed prison industries (Hawes-Cooper Act of 1929, Ashurst-Sumners Act of 1935, Walsh-Healey Act of 1936) and any state statutes that bar the sale or transportation of prison-made goods, (b) exempt and provide immunity for prison industries and employers from and against all labor and employment laws, wage & hour requirements, ADA, FMLA, discrimination laws, and all other worker protections; except OSHA should remain in full force and effect, (c) encourage secure private work communities and workhouses run by private businesses and religious organizations providing spir...

     Many people today are appalled by the idea of whipping a human being, but a couple hundred years ago, that's what they often did rather than lock people up in prisons.  The prison as we now know it was unknown when the U.S. Constitution was written and the 8th Amendment later adopted.  Generally speaking, prison has failed of its original purposes everywhere they've tried it -- and judicial corporal punishment has worked nearly everywhere they've used it.  Please consider what the following ex-slaves said about a subject they knew well:             One of the most successful ex-slaves was landowner Henry D. Jenkins of South Carolina, who credited his later success to the discipline of the whip: “ Henry D. Jenkins lives in a four-room house, which he owns . . . on a tract of land containing four hundred and eighty (480) acres, which Henry also owns. . . . ‘Yes sir, I doesn’t deny it, I got many...

The Prison Crisis Responsible Prison and Criminal Justice Reform The Waste of Solitary Confinement Everyone Is For Prison Reform The Myth That Prisoners Have It Easy Sentencing Reform Cure Prison Overcrowding With Corporal Punishment The Prison-Slavery Connection The Incapacitation Effect of Incarceration Two Criminal Punishments in the Bible Common Myths About Judicial Corporal Punishment Non-Violent Mentally Ill Prisoners Should Work Race Has Little to Do With It California Prison Crisis Cure The Prison-Industrial Complex Free the Departments of Correction The Optimum Prison Industry Work and Crime Are Opposites Some Reasons Why Incarceration Does Not Work Very Well Georgia Prison Strike Against Slavery What's So Bad About Prison? How the American Prison Population Grew The Thirteenth Amendment Today Why Judicial Corporal Punishment Is Better Than Incarceration Prison - A Failed Social Experiment White-On-White Crime Debts to So...

The fairly new term, "mass incarceration," means that the U.S. has 2.3 million prisoners, more than any country in the world. A greater percentage of the U.S. population is in prison than in any other nation. The U.S. has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners. The entire U.S. correctional population, including those on probation, on parole and awaiting trial, is 7.3 million Americans. These eye-popping numbers came about for many reasons: mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes legislation, illegal drugs, gangs, immorality in all its modern forms, the war on drugs, the decline of marriage and families, high rates of recidivism, incarceration of the mentally ill, the decline of capital punishment, problems with the criminal justice system and all the forces pushing tough crime policies. Difficult economic times focus attention on the increasing costs of keeping all these people - 93% of them men - behind bars. Each prisoner costs about $25,...

Everyone is for prison reform... they just don't know it yet. People of all beliefs and philosophical stripes need and want prison reform in America. The Tea Party is against government spending and waste. Correctional expenses have grown exponentially over the last 50 years, crowding out educational and other worthy expenditures. Libertarians want more freedom and less government control over our lives. Prisons restrain 2.3 million Americans. Over 7 million are in the entire correctional population, which includes those on probation and parole and which would be our 13th largest state by population. America is supposed to be the land of the free, but we imprison a greater percentage of our citizens than any other nation in the world. Republicans want to curtail welfare costs. Our prison and jail populations are the largest group of full-ride welfare recipients in the nation and cause welfare costs outside prisons and jails to increase. Democrats want to stop corporate welfare an...

There is no satisfactory answer to why people become criminals. Theft crimes, for example, rise and fall with unemployment, but that's only one of many factors. Trouble sometimes begins with birth into environments of physical, sexual, or substance abuse, criminal activity, divorce, head injuries, poverty and ignorance. But none of those precursors causes crime. Most people with those disadvantages do not become criminals. Criminals also come from the better side of the tracks. In his book Inside the Criminal Mind , Dr. Stanton E. Samenow, a clinical psychologist, powerfully demolishes much of the conventional wisdom portraying criminals as victims of their parents, poverty, mental illnesses and life circumstances. Instead, Dr. Samenow found that criminals are defined by how they think; and they definitely think differently than law-abiding people. Most criminals are manipulative, use people as they please, fancy themselves in control, con others successfully, posture as tough guys...