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

My son-in-law says that incarceration creates a vicious cycle :  The prime correlate of incarceration is whether a young person grew up in a family with a father present or absent .   When a father is absent , the youth is more likely by far to wind up in prison .  Gangs supply some of the paternal functions , but in a sick way .  When fathers are incarcerated , they leave whatever family structure exists. Incarcerated dads are not in a very good moral position to tell their children to obey the law.   The sons and daughters of the incarcerated are then more likely to be incarcerated themselves, because they grew up in a family without a father present . The vicious cycle continues ...

Author Jason L. Riley, an African American, wrote a scathing book about the counter-productive effects of left-wing social policies. PLEASE STOP HELPING US - How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (Encounter Books, 2014) outlines the major problems caused by liberal policies such as minimum wage laws, affirmative action and welfare dependency. Mr. Riley contends "that efforts to help blacks have had more pernicious and lasting effects on black attitudes and habits than either slavery or segregation."  PLEASE STOP HELPING US criticizes Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow  of ignoring the much higher crime rates of African American males and the harm African American criminals do to other African Americans.  Mr. Riley's 2014 book opposes the characterization of criminals as victims of discrimination and takes on other liberal agendas such as gun control that avoid the obvious problem of black behavior. Incarceration helps law-abiding African America...

We are indebted to Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute for her excellent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, October 24, 2015, which serves as a warning against the planned one-time release of 6,000 federal prisoners.  She excoriates President Obama for his "preposterous conceit" in equating his own casual drug use with the offenses committed by federal prisoners.  Ms. Mac Donald sets the record straight, with statistics and facts:  The U.S. has much higher crime rates than European nations. Drug treatment programs do not prevent probationers and parolees from committing crimes. Violent criminals and serial thieves make up a large percentage of prison inmates, contrary to one de-incarceration myth. Hispanics, not African Americans, are more likely arrested for drug crimes. Aggressive policing is more likely to reduce crime, but nearly every police and prosecutorial practice is under f...

" Perhaps the most significant improvement in the field of corrections over the last several decades has been the advancement and routinization of risk and risk–need assessment instruments within justice agencies (Andrews, Bonta, and Wormith,   2006 ; Bonta,   2002 ). Actuarial risk-prediction instruments can tell us which offenders are most likely to reoffend as well as whom among the offender population we might want to target for more intensive rehabilitative programming. 1   Adhering to the risk principle by targeting higher risk offenders and matching the intensity of controls and services to risk levels has been found to improve the effectiveness of correctional interventions (Andrews and Bonta,   2010 ; Dowden and Andrews,   1999a ,   1999b ; Landenberger and Lipsey,   2005 ; Lowenkamp and Latessa,   2005 ; Lowenkamp, Latessa, and Holsinger,   2006 )." From Vol. 14, Issue 1, Criminality & Public Policy , "Risk Tells Us Who, Bu...

Why is it that we point the finger of blame at other countries instead of our own? Isn't U.S. demand for illegal drugs the source of the problem?  Sure, the drugs themselves often originate south of the Mexican border, but the drug epidemic starts here in the U.S., which is where the money starts to fund the traffic. Every time we point a finger of blame at another country for our drug and crime problems, there are three fingers pointing back at the U.S. Please take note, Mr. Trump.  

Over the last 20 years, the average price of cocaine has declined. Over the last 20 years, the average price of heroin has declined. The supply of methamphetamine ("meth") has increased markedly over the last 20 years. Our efforts to eliminate the supply of cocaine in South America have failed. Our efforts to eliminate the supply of heroin from various places in the world have similarly failed. Meth has always been fairly easy to obtain. In fact, from its origins as a cottage industry made in makeshift rural locations, methamphetamine is now produced on an industrial scale in Mexico and brought to the United States and sold in very pure quantities as "crystal meth." Nothing we do stops the supply of illegal drugs. There are plenty of up-and-coming drug dealers to replace the drug dealers who are incarcerated or killed. It is little consolation that capitalistic drug cartels and distribution networks are running rings around the government at all levels.  ...

Other writings by John Dewar Gleissner appear at the following websites: Academia.edu Corrections.com Hub Pages Digital Journal EzineArticles.com Westlaw

President Obama recently demonstrated his appreciation of America’s incarceration crisis by visiting a prison, the first U.S. president to do so, and by announcing he will try to provide funding for college courses to some prison inmates. This will add to the ongoing criticism of attempts to circumvent Congress with executive orders. Congress and most state legislatures perennially disallow amenities, benefits and privileges to America’s least popular class. The public insists that prison life be no better than the life of the poorest law-abiding citizens. This is the all-powerful principle of less eligibility.   It will strongly reassert itself against Obama’s plans when a chorus of law-abiding people complain that they have to take out loans for what the president plans to give prison inmates. Our president’s concern for the incarcerated is fully justified. Incarceration is in many respects a failed social experiment of the last 200 years. We see this most clearly in recidi...

Judge Orders U.S. to Release Immigrant Women & Children The impractical dimensions of incarceration are on public display again ... as always ... transcending politics, race, the public versus private prison debate,  and motivation.  This display, the 23,479th such display since 2010 by our reckoning, is a court order from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California requiring the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to release detained immigrant children from one public and two private detention facilities. It seems those agencies had been detaining all female-headed families of Central American origin under a "no-release" policy in an effort to contain the surge of Central Americans arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Despite ultimate motivation to help the new arrivals while a determination of their ...

Work is a Blessing That's what someone who wrote a book said on NPR as I was listening on the way to work.  I could not agree more.  Work is what prisoners are not allowed to do much, not regularly, not for a profit, not as part of a business or enterprise that makes money ... usually as busy-work or to keep the prison running.  Our prison systems are anti-work, despite every prison expert in all of history saying prisoners should work for their benefit and ours.  Now, for the comparison with antebellum slavery: slaves worked hard ... they were exploited for their labor ... but they were never unemployed or unwanted for their skills or labor. Most ex-slaves admitted that work was good for them and taught them how to work for when they were emancipated.  I know we like to think our society is progressing all the time, but in terms of providing work for people to do, for fostering the sense of belonging, for seeing the products of...

Of all the Founders, Alexander Hamilton is said to be the most consistent abolitionist.  This stems from his upbringing in St. Croix and Nevis, where he witnessed the worst of New World slavery.  Slavery in the West Indies was substantially crueler than in the American South, because of the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 in the United States, diseases in the West Indies, and the steady importation of male slaves into the West Indies, which unbalanced the sex ratio there.  Author Ron Chernow in his fine biography of Hamilton concedes that American slavery was relatively benign compared to slavery in the West Indies.  He also notes that Alexander Hamilton advocated judicial corporal punishment.

Research Concept , Proposal or Suggestion for Graduate Students, Researchers or Those Interested in Reducing Incarceration Research concept: In order to determine the acceptability of community traditional judicial corporal punishment in lieu of incarceration, the following research suggestion or proposal is submitted: Visit a prison or jail in any country and survey a significant number of prisoners regarding their preferences, if they had a preference in any future criminal punishment scenario, between one year in prison or jail versus 40 lashes with a leather whip in the traditional American manner, in public, after all current due process guarantees were provided, displaying to the interviewee at the time of the interview a photo of the whip to be used and applied to the back by a healthy young law enforcement official of average height, weight and upper body strength.   The public judicial corporal punishment would be witnessed and supervised by the sente...