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

We face a massive prison crisis in the United States, and some thinking outside the box is necessary. Earlier in American history, incarceration was rare or non-existent. Shouldn't we figure out what they were doing right? Dostoevsky believed the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Prisons today resemble declining civilizations in that prisoners spend an inordinate amount of time planning, avoiding and participating in violence directed against each other and very little time working productively. Our prisons in many respects might signal national decline. The era of American ascendancy from about 1650 to 1800 saw zero mass incarceration and very little incarceration at all as the ultimate punishment for crime. Back then, communities were more vigilant. Punishments included more judicial corporal punishment, banishment, hard labor, indentured servitude, death and public shaming. We humans like to flatter ourselves that society progresses...

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...