Recently I took a course on incarceration, mass incarceration and the problems it presents to the U.S.A. today. It has more than 7 million on parole or in jail. Those actually in jail are somehwat mmmore than two million. The majority of those are black and that is a cause for social resentment. Blacks view the prison system as a racket to repress blacks; and it was after the civil war and until 1923 when convict lease-labor ended.
In some states like Alabama ex-felons can't vote. Nearly half of black men can't vote in Alabama (an approxiation) as a result of being incarcerated at some point and that creates a new class of sidenfranchised Americans. If it were a small number it might be understanndable, when a large number it indicates a social problem ( if blacks convicts in Alanbama want to vote maybe they need to move to another state after completing parole).
With a 70% recidivism rate the correction system of the U.S.A. has an inefficeincy standard as high as congresssional budgeting. Prison is also very costly for the nation at about 80 billion annually. Can't something be done to change the way the criminal justice system is structured so it provides real education and does not train criminals to commit crimes or be wise guys?
The following essay was a simple course end-of-module reply to a couple of question. I would think my earlier posts onthe incacerations status have more information that isn't focused on the topics here.
One can one do to learn about the criminal justice system? I took a couple of law courses and did visit a courtroom. Actually I lived in a state capitol and walked past the Supreme Courthouse quite often. I watched news for criminal activity and read the papers. Later I spent a few years visiting a homeless shelter right in the middle of the bar district (alcohol not legal) and learned something about those traveling through and those involved with the local legal system as offenders.
Sometimes those on parole are placed in good jobs. It can be easier for those released form prison to get those than for the non-criminal homeless. Sometimes those from halfway houses gang together awaiting bus transport and show a lack of socialization skills ordinary in the middle class.; how would one provide them that without putting them in the middle class?
I did not learn about that female government worker's rare yet flaky practice of embezzlement-a crime that seems to be in the news featuring women more commonly than men. Neither did I learn about the big-time drug smuggling of people that enter the state often from California with a suitcase of drugs worth a lot. I learned something about the hard times and hard face of being down and out in a cold place such as Anchorage. In Anchorage the homeless shelter is just a brief walk from the ‘county’ prison and the cold of winter creates a tough life for the homeless and those without jobs. People out of jail and from rural Alaska too, as well as visitors and substance abusers are concentrated in a place where they sleep on the floor shoulder-to-shoulder; some with frostbite. It tends to have violence now and then.
Restorative justice as described in module six seemed an effort to create circle-soviets at the community level that would enable black male criminal offenders from receiving criminal convictions or sentencing. The justification for that would be that black males are discriminated against by a white criminal justice system and greater, supremacist power structure. The prison system was described as a new slavery. I am not sure if that is true in the south, though I am fairly certain that is not true everywhere.
The state of Washington where I grew up for example, was more than 90% white when I was growing up. Today whites are fewer than 62% of the population. Schools were desegregated and students of color bussed to white schools and vice versa. Affirmative action placed women in minorities in good jobs and admittance to colleges. Legal action forced equal pay for equal work metrics on government. There were innumerable policies created to reduce white advantages or privileges and promote newly arriving and expanding non-white populations.
I suppose law enforcement and the criminal justice system might be slower to change that some other government department such as transportation, yet I cannot imagine that circles or little Soviets composed of non-working adults presumably- maybe housewives if they still exist or homosexual partners not-working, could replace standard criminal processing structures. Maybe it works for certain classes of juvenile offenders. One of its implicit problems is putting power in the soviets and not in objective legal rules that can be reviewed by anyone and that do not provide any advantage in theory to anyone.
It is understandable that power to the soviet-circles would be desired as a way to defeat objective legal justice and the flip side-objective legal rights of individuals. It is not reasonable however to expect working adults to give up their free time to commune with someone or persons that committed crimes upon them, or that did them ‘harm’ as the ‘round-table participants preferred.
Neither are all adults stationary and sedentary as might women with government jobs or non-profit posts that pay and would like to spend time leading soviet-circles. Truck drivers moving about the nation might not want to spend Tuesday evenings in Nashville participating in requisite meetings of a local Soviet to help correct some guy that burglarized his trailer.
I see two parts to the problem of breaking up an inefficient social system-or rather a malfunctioning one, informally regarded as the cradle to prison pipeline. One is education and the other is corrections.
The round-table people for reformative soviet justice tended to agree that schools and rules coerce individuals into acceptable social behavior and force them progressively toward prison by degrees if they resist. Government does have an obligation to provide mass social education however as it is regarded as essential for any modern state to have an educated populace.
For schools to exist they require rules of behavior and guidelines for graduation. They did arise in an era before the Internet though and might be obsolete. Killing two birds with one stone might be achievable. Schools that send black men to prison could be abolished and individuals could attend school and advance through dedicated government education Internet servers. Then the discipline and behavior problems of school could be obviated entirely. Students would be individuals that would need to be self-motivated to advance through on-line courses.
It is difficult to fore students to learn that don’t want to. Legally students must attend school until the 8th grade. Forcing students to advance through Internet coursework until the 8th grade might be easier than trying to keep them sitting down in a little student desk-chair until completing the 8th grade.
Internet public schools would be supported by safe public student-study cubicles where any student could do homework without interruption or receiving counseling services or mentoring on homework assignment. I think it could work and entirely defeat the high cost and ineffective condition of public schools.
Since soviets need something to do, perhaps they could run grades 1-6 as teacher-circle correctors of the little kids, and train them to be Internet students of excellence.
The corrections problem is something else. Plainly the present ways are ineffective with a 70% recidivism rate. Though the average most common age of whites is 55 and of blacks, 24 and of Hispanics 8, and as prosperous people using dope don’t need to steal to pay for buying dope as might the poor, the number of black men in prison even so is high.
Just 17% of black men are college graduates while for whites it is 30%. Forty-eight percent of black men have attended college though the number is somewhat higher for whites. Getting a job that is stable in the rapidly changing modern American economy is difficult for many males of any race. Correcting adults that are convicted oft crimes requires several levels of advance from detoxing prisoners to educating them and keeping prisoners themselves from becoming victims of crime while in state custody.
New methods of educating prisoners is certainly possible, and it too must develop volunteering in convicts to want to help themselves in positive directions and provide the means to do so while incarcerated. However institutions are not at the leading edge of society. They are slow to change for a number of reasons. Public schools have not changed their paradigm since creation; simply continued to expand instead. Thus if public schools have not developed an Internet server neither have public prisons. Forrest Gump said I believe; stupid is as stupid does.
In S.E. Alaska where I have spent much time, I have encountered a number of criminals at a public shelter, There is a prison in the city, and a bus is the pipeline to the prison from the shelter and the bars up and down the street.
From what I have seen drugs and alcohol are the most common elements in crimes. People are arrested for crimes while under the influence at least a little and given a jury trial after adequate legal representation. Most of the sentences are not too severe. Even so some repeat offenders have 30 or 40 arrests for minor offenses. Eventually they tend to get a larger sentence for some greater offense.
The city does have a nice, free micro bus ride to a detox center for drunks that want to go. The shelter gets a lot of calls both for police when someone punches someone else and for medics when someone has a medical emergency. All those calls are probably rather expensive.
For adults breaking up the cycle of substance abuse is a key to stopping criminal behavior and that can be really difficult. Circles would not fix PTSD. They are complex problems that need excellent veterans counseling that wasn’t available locally.
I may write a little more an d publish at my blog ideas about changing corrections policies. Sometimes even legislators might catch a glance at a blog story I guess. However changing things in Alaska is very difficult.
The Alaska establishment just wants to keep things the way they are; profitable for themselves. It isn’t particularly racist at all, instead it is an economic establishment that most people want to be in, and it has an existing well-established corrections structure with existing policy and methods that would be difficult to change. One may evolve things, yet actually changing government structure is very rare. F.D.R. accomplished some of that in emergency circumstances perhaps.
Governments and establishment forces are made of average uncreative individuals that have risen to their level of incompetence and they do not entertain ideas of change. I will continue to write when I can, yet even opportunities to publish on the Internet are limited by the fact that Internet writing sites can be taken down by wealthy corporations and corrupt influence. Even Google's blogger may disappear one day with enough pressure. In Alaska writing opportunities to communicate with the public are actually limited. Newspapers are owned by corporations from the east coast etc. One must afford advertising, and that is expensive, to even get anyone to take a look at anything published.
Poor honest intellectuals have it better today that did people in imperial states of the past however today with a billions of blogs and Internet sites it is challenging even to get a local public to read anything written in the state.
Trying to change public policy in some way by providing a better idea and disseminating that idea is probably the best way to change and upgrade the corrections system of a state. Alaska already sends convicts at great cost out of state for incarceration lacking bed space in state. It might be possible to show that it is cost effective to keep convicts in-state with newer, faster, cheaper better correction methods.
