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

We have now harnessed hi-tech means to conclude what Baron Auckland concluded in 1771, namely that incarceration is not wise punishment: Finding Work: A Smartphone Study of Job Searching, Social Contacts, and Wellbeing after Prison Author:  Naomi F. Sugie Sponsoring Agency:  National Institute of Justice US Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs United States of America Format:  Document ; Document (Online) Document URL:  PDF     Publication Date:  September 2014 Pages:  171 Type:  Report (Grant Sponsored) Origin:  United States of America Language:  English Grant No.:  2013-IJ-CX-0007 Annotation:  This study examined parolee efforts and attitudes to finding work, obstacles to finding work, and subsequent work experiences after reentry in Newark, New Jersey. Abstract:  The immediate months after prison are c...

In a 1935 House of Commons debate regarding British air power relative to Germany , Winston Churchill expressed his dismay with the British government ' s failure to act upon the growing threat of German air power , a threat the government had concealed from the British people .   Government inaction ( and even dishonesty ) in the face of the growing peril ,  Churchill said , fell into  ' that long dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience, and the confirmed unteachability of mankind .'  Institutional inertia often keeps governments behind the times .    Democratically elected governments naturally dislike spending more money than they can afford ;  priorities are always debatable .   British leaders before the Second World War were very concerned about employment , economics , spending and b udgets .   One distinguishing characteristic of the American prison cris...

How to Discourage Gangs and Stop Them by John Dewar Gleissner The secret to ending gang popularity among young American males is simpler than many realize. A host of scholars seek the answers in more understanding, better policing, government programs, better education, less discrimination and any number of ideas to make society better. All of those are worthy goals and undertakings, but the problem of gangs persists. Organizations study, assess, recommend, heighten awareness, make reports, classify, communicate, coordinate and advocate reforms. Initiatives spring forth to attack the high crime rates caused by gangs. The decline of stable families is an obvious cause of gang popularity, along with urbanization and poverty, but those conditions and trends today are almost impossible to reverse. Mix in the allure and power of money from illegal drug sales, and the weapons used to survive in the illegal drug business, and the current disaster survives all initiatives to s...

  A Prayer for Prisoners from The Book of Common Prayer (1790) O God, who sparest when we deserve punishment, and in thy wrath rememberest mercy; We humbly beseech thee, of thy goodness, to comfort and succour all prisoners. Give them a right understanding of themselves, and of thy promises; that, trusting wholly in thy mercy, they may not place their confidence anywhere but in thee.  Relieve the distressed, protect the innocent, awaken the guilty; and forasmuch as thou alone bringest light out of darkness, and good out of evil, grant to these thy servants, that by the power of thy Holy Spirit they may be set free from the chains of sin, and may be brought to newness of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen .  

Orange Is The New Black provides a powerful look inside prison, even if through the eyes of embellishing TV writers, producers and directors.  Since most commentators rarely stay in prison overnight, this view of prison life is invaluable in portraying the seedy, violent, hateful and depraved aspects of incarceration.  Many of the scenes and scenarios depicted really happened in a U.S. prison, normal Hollywood exaggeration excepted.  The series compresses those events into installments, making it tough to tell how prevalent and representative each special disaster and characteristic is.  Prison conditions obviously vary from prison to prison, but we on the outside cannot very well tell how much.  We need shows like this one.  Orange Is The New Black tends towards the awful and hopeless aspects of prison life, which is fitting for an institution that has rarely succeeded in achieving its original goals of repentance, renewal and rehabi...

Incarceration Reform Mega-Site recommends " Orange is the New Black ," a Netflix series depicting the problems, horrors, sickness, abuse and violence of a contemporary prison for women.  Of particular interest is the analogy between human trafficking on the outside and modern prison.  Watching this show might scare a few people to stay out of prison and at the same time make judicial corporal punishment look a lot better.  We will have to watch more episodes to comment further.  

The average cost of incarcerating an American prisoner is about $31,000 per year ... which you can multiply by about 2.2 million. 

Title:  Marriage and Offending Among a Cohort of Disadvantaged African Americans Journal:  Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency   Volume:50  Issue:1  Dated: February 2013  Pages: 104 to 131  (Sage Publications) Authors:  Elaine Eggleston Doherty & Margaret E. Ensminger Abstract from:      NCJRS Library’s Weekly Accessions List (WAL) for the week ending April 26, 2014        Type:  Report (Study/Research) Origin:  United States of America Language:  English Annotation:  This research tests the generalizability of the marriage effect on desistance from crime for African-American men and women. Abstract:  Drawing on Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control, this research tests the generalizability of the marriage effect on desistance from crime. Specifically, do urban African-A...

In 2012, an interesting article appeared in the Smithsonian Magazine , revisiting the perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benign slave master.  Although Jefferson proposed an end of the slave trade, equality and eventual emancipation, and accomplished the end of the U.S. slave trade in 1808 as president, his lofty words slowed down or stopped after he calculated his 4% annual profit on slave births and his healthy profit making nails with a workforce of slave boys aged 10 to 16.  The boys were whipped if necessary to keep production up, as were some of his adult slaves for running away or other behaviors. Jefferson was mighty proud of his nail factory.  Slavery produced nails, starting before first light every day.  His biggest competitor in the nail business?  The state penitentiary . The comparisons between prison and slavery are many.  

Who is Biased Against Prison and Sentencing Reform? by John Dewar Gleissner More people than you think.   Private prison company bias is a no-brainer.   So is the opposition from labor unions for correctional officers.   Politicians naturally do not wish to appear soft on crime, because otherwise they lose their jobs.   Not many prisoners vote or are in the right place to vote.   Some communities need the jobs prisons provide.   The public is biased about crime generally, and believes crime rates are going up when they are actually going down.   Many want prison to be tough and scary.   Crime victims are not too worried about terrible prison conditions, and who can blame them?   Taxpayers are not inclined to spend money on prisons.   Prison walls and fences naturally block the flow of information, commerce and visitors.   Educated, law-abiding and intelligent people do not have much in common with prisoners, and are thus...

A number of icebergs are visible in the vast sea that is correctional America.  Have you heard about Riker's Island in New York ... Julia Tutwiler Prison in Alabama ... the Texas inmates who got too hot and died?  And of course you know about the California prison conditions described in Brown v. Plata .  Those publicized conditions are the tips of icebergs.  Underneath the water are huge populations of prisoners, not visible, unknown to the media, unreported, unheard and often bored or simmering very slowly.  Many beneath the waterline are untouched by physical violence.  They rest in their prison cells, cost a ton of taxpayer money, get older ... and are cut off from everything it means to be a human being .   

Believe it or not, Solomon Northrup, African-American author of Twelve Years a Slave , had some good things to say about some Southern slaveholders!  He wrote :   “While living at the United States Hotel, I frequently met with slaves, who had accompanied their masters from the South. They were always well dressed and well provided for, leading apparently an easy life, with but few of its ordinary troubles to perplex them. Many times they entered into conversation with me on the subject of Slavery.” 1345     *     *     *     “Our master's name was William Ford. He resided then in the “Great Pine Woods,” in the parish of Avoyelles, situated on the right bank of Red River, in the heart of Louisiana. He is now a Baptist preacher. Throughout the whole parish of Avoyelles, and especially along both shores of Bayou Boeuf, where he is more intimately known, he is accounted by his fellow-citizens as a wo...

Foreclosing on Incarceration? State Correctional Policy Enactments and the Great Recession Elizabeth K. Brown 1 1 Niagara University, Niagara, NY, USA Elizabeth K. Brown, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Niagara University, NY, USA. Email:   ebrown@niagara.edu . Publisher: Sage Publications Abstract The economic collapse of 2008 has forced states to reconsider their priorities in punishment and corrections. States have exhibited a wide range of responses to the fiscal crisis. Using data from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), this article reviews briefly the types of correctional policies enacted by states in 2009. This research then evaluates quantitatively the relationships between state-level economic, political, and crime control conditions in 2009 and variable rates of state-level policy enactments in that same year that reduce reliance on incarceration. Findings from a cross-sectional negative binomial model suggest that ...

A total of approximately 6,937,600 offenders were under the supervision of adult correctional systems at the end of 2012. Over the course of the year, the correctional population decreased by approximately 51,000. This decrease during 2012 marked the fourth consecutive year of decline in the U.S. correctional population. Although the correctional population declined by 0.7 percent during 2012, this was the slowest rate of decline observed since 2009, when the correctional population first began to decrease. Approximately 1 in every 35 adults in the United States (2.9 percent of adult residents) was on probation or parole or incarcerated in prison or jail, the same rate as in 1997. An estimated 1 in every 50 adult residents was supervised in the community on probation or parole at the end of the year, compared to 1 in every 108 adults incarcerated in prison or jail. The decrease in the probation population (down 38,300) and prison population (down 21,100) accounted for nearly all of t...

Wisconsin’s Mass Incarceration of African American Males: Workforce Challenges for 2013 Author:  John Pawasarat ; Lois M. Quinn Corporate Author:  University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute United States of America Sale:  University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute School of Continuing Education 161 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Suite 6000   Milwaukee, WI 53203-2602 United States of America Format:  Document (Online) Document URL:  PDF     Publication Date:  2013 Pages:  33 Type:  Issue Overview ; Statistics Origin:  United States of America Language:  English Annotation:  This report explores issues related to the ability of ex-offenders to get jobs after their release from imprisonment in Wisconsin. Abstract:  This report is divided into two parts: mass incarceration of African-American males and transportati...

"General Equilibrium Effects of  Prison on Crime: Evidence from International Comparisons" by Justin McCrary and Sarath Sanga ABSTRACT We compare crime and incarceration rates over time for the United States, Canada, and England and Wales, as well as for a small selection of comparison countries. Shifts in U.S. punishment policy led to a five-fold increase in the incarceration rate, while nearly every other country experienced only minor increases in incarceration. The large shifts in U.S. punishment policy do not seem to have caused commensurately large improvements in public safety. Justin McCrary is a professor of law in the School of Law at the University of  California, Berkeley and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research.  Sarath Sanga is a law student at Yale Law School. Cato Papers on Public Policy , Vol. 2 © 2012, Cato Institute

"How to Create American Manufacturing Jobs" has been published and released by the Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy , a publication of the University of Tennessee Law School.  Citation: Vol. 9 - Issue 2, Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy 161 (Fall 2013), now available on Westlaw.  For those who do not have access to Westlaw, here is a summary: Right now, 50 states and the federal government (not to mention city and county jails) have total control over every single aspect of prison industries.  Total control must give way to more contractual and trade freedom of action.  The United States could create many manufacturing jobs if they would free employers, prisoners and Departments of Correction to manufacture goods in prison free of almost all government employment laws and regulations, and subject to contracts between willing prisoners and willing private manufacturers, who must also contract with the prison systems for space and other accommodatio...