So we can have movies like these.
Posted on 11/26/2004 7:15:03 AM PST by FNU LNU
Why Have Penitentiaries Anyway?
Most people realize that the court and penal systems in North America are seriously broken and must be fixed, yet contemplating doing away with penitentiaries sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Barely 200 years ago, an experiment began which has cost us untold billions of dollars. Just last year, this experiment resulted in 1.4 million adults incarcerated in federal and state penitentiaries (a figure which has quadrupled since 1980) at a cost of nearly $40,000 each.
As Alan Elsner pointed out in a recent Washington Post article, 2.2 million people are engaged in catching criminals and putting and keeping them behind bars, and "corrections" has become one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy, employing more people than the combined workforces of General Motors, Ford and Wal-Mart, the three biggest corporate employers in the country. In many "prison town" counties, the number one employer is the Department of Corrections. This is a staggering expense of over $50 billion, an amount that increases by additional billions for each year of the last 25 years of explosive prison growth. As the prison population ages, the taxpayer is paying for medical procedures he can't afford for himself, and the victims of these criminals realize no compensation at all.
Few realize that the first penitentiary in the world was founded in Philadelphia in 1792. Jails had always existed for the purpose of holding the accused until trial, after which the guilty would pay a fine, make restitution to the victim, be banished, be executed, etc. However, the concept of warehousing criminals to cause them to repent was entirely new.
Imagine a criminal justice system where penitentiaries didn't even exist, but where a person paid for his crimes rather than having society pay to keep him incarcerated.
One such nation existed. If you stole someone's property, say a sheep, and were caught with the animal in your possession, you repaid the victim with two sheep, but you didn't go to a penitentiary. The victim also got a financial settlement, satisfying the desire for victim restitution in our time.
If you sold the stolen sheep, thereby being more involved in the crime, you paid the victim four sheep.
If you committed a capital crime, (murder, rape, kidnapping, etc.) you paid with your life, but you didn't go to a penitentiary. Such facilities didn't exist in this nation. They were not needed.
Such a system would completely do away with our newest growth industry, penitentiaries, and restore the victim of crime financially.
I'm not going to tell you where I got the idea for this system, but it's from a reliable source. Of course, it will never happen here because a powerful lobby has grown up around the prison system that will fight hard to protect the status quo. Correction officers have formed powerful labor unions, and their financial contributions to our politicians will easily outweigh the will of the people. I know, I know, I'm such a young man to be so cynical.
Oh goody. Instead of regular state pens, we can go back to Europe's "Debtors Prisons". Mix the defaulted student loan guys with the bank robbers. Yep..that'd work.
Why not put them in "house arrest;" . . . in the home of liberal judges and lawyers, and the rest of the libs.
So we can have movies like these.
Wasn't it Richard Prior who said, "I been to the penitentiary. I talked to the brothers. Thank God, they got penitentiaries."
Since government isn't comfortable with allowing citizens that degree of control over their own destiny, they have given us the penitentiary system as an alternative. Which provides the government a number of other benefits - they can disarm us, they have a place to put us when we become politically dangerous, and they can make a fortune on kickbacks from construction contracts and guards' unions.
The penitentiary system is broken, but it isn't going away any time soon.
I am in favor of prison work farms. If done right the prisoners learn a skill, and the prisons are self supporting. But unfortunately the ACLU sued and stopped this.
Naw, their spare rooms are filled up with all the homeless people they take in.
Obviously this guy was bonging when he wrote this.
1) What do we do about thieves who have no property, as is true of most low-lifes who spend all on drugs?
2) How long till the debtors' prisons are also emptied, because liberal sentiment won't allow it?
If we're trying to come up with radical solutions, how about only one penalty -- the death penalty? For a petty theft, you are sentenced to roll two dice, if they come up snake eyes, you are instantly executed. For robbing and beating someone, you are sentenced to a pull on the trigger of Russian Roulette -- with one or more bullets depending on the judge's perception of severity and/or prior convictions. If you live, you get off scott-free, but with the knowledge of what your lifestyle is risking. And of course, for 1st-degree murder, there's little need for empty chambers.
Yep. Young and **mb. Cost? Until you factor in the benefits you really have no idea what the cost is -- or even if there _is_ a net cost. And warehousing criminals to make them _repent_? _Rehabilitate_ is the word, and that concept didn't come along until bleeding heart liberals foisted it on the world. There had certainly been criminal "warehouses" before, but no one worried about ineffectual attempts at rehabilitation, only about keeping civil society safe from the scum factor.
"Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago started making his prisoners eat bologna sandwiches..."
I Googled this Sheriff. Couldn't remember his name or county. He's moving in the right direction, but:
Seems to me that in the Middle East, if you steal, you lose a finger or hand. Steal again, you die. You murder or rape, you die.
Might help cut back on offenses?
Well, a couple of things… first, it is pretty universally acknowledged that William Penn’s colonial government experimented with the idea as early as 1680-ish.
And, the way I remember it, as late as the late 1780’s laws in America sort of mirrored those in England. And, at some point in that general time there were something like 200+ capital offenses. I recall that they ranged from stealing a rabbit or chicken, picking pockets, or felling a tree on someone else’s property.
I recall that at some pre-penitentiary time, theft of something exceeding $5 (shillings?) was a capital crime while theft of something of lesser value was not.
Even then, you didn’t just re-pay the party. You’d literally be bound to a whipping post and lashed. You can read a lot of accounts where they will say that at certain times “the whipping post was wet with blood,” etc. People have literally been lashed severely enough that they went into shock and died.
Besides lashing they also semi-routinely engaged in branding and mutilation. I just bring it up because the author of the article sort-of makes it sound like it was fun-and-games – steal something and all you’d have to do is return it or something. If that ever happened it was the exception to the rule, from everything I’ve read.
Few realize that the first penitentiary in the world was founded in Philadelphia in 1792.
Walnut Street Jail? I don’t recall. I know their Eastern State Penitentiary was 1829 or so and was the first institution ever to bear the “Penitentiary” designation in its name. Walnut Street Jail preceded it but I forget by how much.
Why have penetentiaries? Using a conservative estimate, one in fifty adult males is a sociopath. Thus, we can expect 4 million adult males to be jailed at one time or another. The more sociopaths in jail, the greater possibility for the reduction of crime -- precisely the situation we have today.
Let's see, forcing a thief to repay his victim. On the surface, it sounds like a great idea but, when you do a little deeper exploration of the topic, it is pretty much an empty glass. If the thief could afford to repay his victim, he wouldn't be a thief in the first place.
But, warehousing doesn't seem to be working, either. Too many prisons have too many perks that make them more desirable than life on the outside for many prisoners.
First, we need to cut the costs of warehousing prisoners. Get rid of the perks (Libraries, TVs, high school and college classes, medical care (other than basic medical care), gyms, etc. Second, stop building jails with individual cells. Erect very secure 100,00 sq. ft. buildings that have no cells, no bunks, a few unbreakable windows and some toilets and showers. There is one guard high up in a tower that allows him to see everything taking place on the open floor below and NO ACCESS to him by the prisoners. Food trolleys are brought in three times a day via a one-way controlled gate and the prisoners are responsible for feeding themselves.
These people can't obey the laws within society, so let them live within a world of their own making and see what happens. I'm tired of prisons being turned into a vacation club. They aren't supposed to be nice places to live and we need to ensure that they aren't. The whole point of prison is to create an environment that no one wants to be in and no one wants to return to.
By taking some of these steps, we can cut that average cost of $40,000/yr to warehouse each prisoner by at least half. Consider the costs as the annual salary paid for a worker. Most don't have the education, training or experience to get jobs paying that much, so why should we be spending that amount of money on them? It's crazy!!
Make a deal with the Russians, reopen Siberia, put their guards back to work, and let them be the custodians for our most feral prisoners. Only the ACLU loses..
That's been tried in California. We don't try to reform prisoners anymore just incarcerate them. Petty criminals go in, hardened, bitter, smarter criminals come out.
Pure genius. I am paying prison guards 100K a year to turn car thieves, pickpockets and dopers into carjackers, bankrobbers, and murderers.
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