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This guy is getting a following though. Our new sheriff now feeds everyone in the jail one bologna sandwich and a few boiled carrots three times a day now. No pink underwear yet, but then again our prisoners go without underwear if they don't bring them themselves. And yes, a lot of them have not been convicted, but most actually have and are anxiously awaiting prison beds. They'd rather be in the pen than in our jail. Our prisons are as overcrowded as our jails. Hardly anyone in the jail is actually serving a jail sentence. Almost all of them are either awaiting trial or waiting months at a time for prison bed space to open up.

Prisons can't let people out fast enough to keep up with the number of new convicts even though our legislature is bending over backwards to come up with ways to let more and more out earlier than before. It's really getting ridiculous. They keep passing tougher laws to send more people to prison for longer sentences than ever and at the same time they have to keep coming up with ways for them to serve smaller and smaller percentages of their sentences because we can't afford to keep adding new prison beds at the rate we've been adding them the last couple of decades.

Shoot, overcrowding is so bad now that our parole board has all but given up on revoking parole. People practically have to kill someone to get their parole revoked nowadays. Burglarizing a home, stealing a car, forging a hundred checks, none of that is enough to get parole revoked for more than a piddly 60 day "technical violation" these days. To get a real revocation takes a death penalty offense or an offense in the next highest statutory classification below a death penalty crime now because our prisons are so overcrowded. The average sentence people actually serve is now actually decreasing rather than increasing because we've gone too nutty with locking people up and used up all the bed space on stupid minor offenses in recent decades. And those committing misdemeanors for which they would have rightfully gotten jail time for only a few years ago are now getting slapped on the wrist instead because since the prisons are so overcrowded our jails are now overflowing with people awaiting prison beds. Someday hopefully it will dawn on us that prisons and county jails are a limited resource that we should use wisely.

When we lock up a greater per capita percentage of our people than any other country in the world and have in fact more people in total behind bars than any country in the world, includinhg huge countries like China, Russia, and India, we're going to feel the financial impact of that. My God, our people make up about 5% of the world's population yet about 25% of the people behind bars are locked up right here in the land of the free. This doesn't come cheap. This "liberal" use of prison is not "conservative." It's not the old way from the "good old days."

What we are doing now is entirely unprecedented, a radical departure from our old ways. We now lock up several times more people than we ever did in our entire history prior to 1979 or so. This is a fad, an unhealthy one at that. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is nothing but a publicity hound riding the wave. He has populist support for his tent city jail, but in real life we can't keep this crap going. We can't keep locking people up at the ever increasing rate we've been locking them up. This is costing us a fortune and at least from what I'm seeing a probably most of the people we are locking up are coming out worse than they were to begin with. Prison especially rarely turns a bad person into a good person. In real life what is more likely to happen is that a screwed up person goes to prison and comes out even more screwed up than he ever was before. He's likely to be raped and violated in a variety of ways. He's likely get jailhouse tattoos from head to toe and come out even less able to get a decent job than he was before. If he's black he'll join the Muslim Brotherhood or some other gang for protection. If he's white he'll join some meth dealing white supremacist group or another gang for protection. Mexicans and others do the same. Almost all of them seem to come out with even worse attitudes. The rarest of all is the guy who comes out changed for the better, especially when it comes to those going to state prisons rather than those who spend a little time in a county jail. I'm telling you, from years working in the criminal justice system what I am seeing is that the only thing prison really does well is keep the really dangerous guys away from the rest of us as long as they are kept there. Sentencing more and more to those places and having to let them all out earlier and earlier to make room for new convicts is counterproductive.

Right now the the most apparent problem with what we are doing is the hefty financial price. Mark my words though, as time goes one we'll see that we pay much higher societal costs on top of these financial costs for sending so many of our own to institutions of higher criminal learning where they learn new criminal skills, make new criminal contacts, suffer deviant behavior inducing abuse, and further develop that criminal attitude of taking what they can get no matter who they hurt and blaming others for the bad situations they find themselves in rather than taking responsibility for their actions and making the appropriate changes in the way they conduct lives. I see this over and over again. Prison tends to make people worse people than they were before they went in.

It's time for us to start putting some science into this and really start thinking about what we are doing. There are people who should be locked up for the good of us all, the longer the better. In order to up as long as we possibly can those who really should be locked up for the good of us all, we are going to have to start prioritizing a lot better than we do today. I hope to see us do just that, and therefore am glad to see us struggling in my county and my state with prison/jail overcrowding. That makes people have to start thinking realistically. So far though people around here still only seem to be thinking about the county jail, which we all pay for with property and sales taxes. If the city and the county had to pay for all or at least a part of the costs of putting so many in our state prisons, we'd probably see a lot more prudent decisions on the part of local jurors and judges with respect to prison sentences meted out. If I were king I'd make county governments share in state prison costs for those sentenced to prison from the respective counties. If that happened we'd see a lot of changes in the way we decide who should go to prison and for how long. As it is our county can and does sentence people to prison at a rate far higher than either the state's per capita average or the national per capita average. If locals could see that that actually costs them money, that would change in a heartbeat.

"When we lock up a greater per capita percentage of our people than any other country in the world ..."

Cry me a river. We happen to have more freedom than the other countries you mentioned, so you can expect more scumbags to take advantage of it. You want less crime, then let's see you advocate for more machine gun carrying cops on every street corner -- more intrusions, more searches, less freedom. Yeah, just what I thought, you gutless wonder.

Second, countries like the UK have this concept called a "caution", wheby first offenders don't even see a court, much less serve time. This applies to assault, burglary, robbery, fraud, criminal damage, AND sexual offenses. Download child porn, a caution.

Now, you want to free up space, again, let's see you advocate for a similar sysytem here in the US. Let's see you advocate for letting robbers, sexual offenders, and those who physically assault others off with a ~~slap on the wrist~~ verbal no-no, never even seeing a courtroom. Boy, your job would be easier, now wouldn't it?

And stop your God-awful whining.

Well and necessarily said. The genesis of the current problem is not the petty criminal but rather, the toady politician. They each engage in the "I can be tougher on crime than my opponent," rant. It means nothing and is counter productive and results in the morass that your wise post illustrates. Morons like these politicos pander to the simple, easy, uncomplicated and wrong solution.

Next comes the standard response by non-thinking adults who wouldn't know an intelligent or analytical thought if one bit them on the ankle. They come back with the brillant retort like: "Well, hey man, if you can't do the crime, don't do the crime." How wise and overwhelmingly sagacious. But, these are the same idiots to whom the politicians pander. They represent the lowest common denominator of the dull normal segment of our population; a majority of the common voter.