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

from PROLOGUE to Prison & Slavery - A Surprising Comparison   Prisoners are the least popular segment of society and prison the most disreputable place. As a result, few think or talk about prisons or prisoners. Most of us never see the inside of a prison or talk with anyone who readily admits to having lived there. Offenders deserve punishment, so why should we care?  The United States now has over 7,300,000 people in its correctional population, an economically and socially debilitating number of convicts and offenders. With only 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25% of its prisoners. If the correctional population were a state, it would be America’s thirteenth largest state by population. Grossly inefficient state slavery, which is what incarceration amounts to, is worse than people think, and is bad for the public, taxpayers, crime victims, prisoners, the economy and the families of the victimized and incarcerated. We can reduce the number of Ameri...

I just read a great article about the value of educating prisoners.  It's true.  Education in is one of the few good things that happens in prison.  The problem is that it costs money .... and it is not available on the outside to Joe Sixpack at the factory, who wishes he had finished college.  Under the powerful principle of less eligibility, the public will in the end refuse inmates the benefit of advanced schooling, because they never tolerate for long a better lifestyle in prison than in the free world.  High  school diplomas, yes; but college is not likely in many places. 

Fair & Balanced Criticism OK, I was pretty tough on the left wing in my last post, so now I will try to even things up a bit.  Your conservative prison reform advocate will now take some shots at the right wing on the issues of criminal punishment.  Before doing so, I'd like to point out that the liberal versus conservative balancing act is not evenly arrayed on the issue of what to do with convicted criminals.  Many folks who are liberal on other issues support conservatives on law and order issues.  You will recall that the Congressional Black Caucus initially supported super-tough penalties for crack cocaine.  Many of the opponents of mass incarceration are from the left end of the left wing.  Many law and order advocates are otherwise considered to be liberal.  This is why opposition to mass incarceration has to expand to the right, in the conservative direction, and at least take up the entire moderate center...

A "Get Out of Jail Free Card" Will Not Work    Most of America's prison reform advocates only approach the issues from the standpoint of the prisoner-as-victim.  Law enforcement policies under the prevailing liberal view are characterized as the main cause and perpetrator of mass incarceration.  We rarely hear these folks tell us what punishment the guilty should have or how criminals should accept the consequences of their crimes.  Many times they propose drug treatment, Drug Court, therapy, commitment to mental institutions, rehabilitation, "alternative sentences," and the extremely general solutions of fairness, equality, education and "community corrections."  Most critics of mass incarceration focus on the process, not the substance of the problems.     The process is flawed, they say, because of the failed War on Drugs, inadequate indigent defense, excessive prosecutorial power, mandatory sentences, exce...

Is some form of "slavery" inevitable?   It depends, of course, upon the definition of slavery.  We see something approaching chattel slavery today in the form of human trafficking. When chattel slavery is abolished,  peonage, serfdom or pauperism may arise.  In the U.S., we now have New Age Slavery, a term borrowed from Angela Davis.  New Age Slavery is mass incarceration followed by the pariah class known as The New Jim Crow, the title of Michelle Alexander's book. When slavery was "abolished" in Europe, it was followed by serfdom and later by the chattel slavery of Africans taken to the New World. After emancipation was encouraged by the Koran, it continued for many centuries, until the 1960s in Arabia and later in parts of Africa. The number of African Americans incarcerated in U.S. prisons is now equated with the American slave population in 1850.  Socialists believe total and immediate dependence upon wages is "wage sl...

Mass incarceration will not be ended by prisoner protests, celebrated cases, communist and socialist ideas or people perceived as soft on crime. The very term "mass incarceration" carries a class consciousness that the left wing loves -- but in reality it must be dealt with one sentence at a time. We have to change the sentences, not simply adjust the amount of time of incarceration. There is e ntirely too much complaining about the situation and not enough practical ideas.  Some people are merely part of the complaint industry and have other agendas. The one practical idea that will can cut the American prison population in half is judicial corporal punishment, an effective punishment for non-violent drug and other offenses. It has never been held unconstitutional and is not abolished for ineffectiveness. Traditional judicial corporal punishment, in public and witnessed by the sentencing judge, actually works, and does not have the same downsides as pris...

Why is it so difficult to change existing prison systems and the entire regime of incarceration?   There are many reasons.  Here are 21 of them: 1.  Prison systems throughout history have been slow to change. 2.  Prisons literally hide the problem -- without trying -- simply by location, security, isolation, architecture and procedures.  3.  "Out of sight, out of mind."  Most folks spend very little time worrying about prisoners. 4.  Prisoners are the least popular segment of society and have little voice. 5.  Many members of the public want prison to be a terrible experience or lack sympathy with the plight of prisoners.  The public through the principle of less eligibility continually demands that prison be worse than the lowest free lifestyle. 6.  Taxpayers do not often enough reflect upon the great costs of incarceration and the potential financial, economic and fiscal advantages of ...

My Two (2) Basic Ideas : (1)  Private prison industries should be free to manufacture goods currently manufactured exclusively outside a nation, on a laissez- fai re , employment-at-will basis, paying prisoners a negotiated wage, subject to claims for incarceration expenses, child support and  restitution, allowing released prisoners to leave prison with some savings. (2)  To reduce the size and expense of the current prison population, and improve rehabilitation, traditional judicial corporal punishment should be re-introduced.

I wish to welcome readers and followers from Russia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Germany, Canada, Venezuela and China.  We are all in the same boat with incarceration, though some have more passengers than others.  In all of our countries, prisoners do not work productively as much as they should, want to and could if the laws were changed.  And in each of our countries, effective alternatives to incarceration have a long history.