Posted on 03/14/2014 2:47:35 AM PDT by Red in Blue PA
BETHLEHEM, Pa. - Imagine there are no prisons; it may be hard to do.
Yet that is exactly what social activist Angela Davis challenged an audience of about 725 people to do Monday night at Lehigh University in Bethlehem.
The program’s topic was “Mass Incarceration: The Prison Industrial Complex.”
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She also is the author of eight books, including “Are Prisons Obsolete?” and a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex by “challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wfmz.com ...
I will be the first to agree that there are a lot of people in prison who shouldn’t be there. But there are a whole lot more who need to be locked up. The trick is identifying the first group from the second.
I have long said that most prisons should be closed. Prison creates monsters (and yes, of course, there are some monsters there who were like that before they went to prison).
In order for the Jim Noble close all prisons plan to work, 3 things need to happen:
1) Radical expansion of the death penalty.
2) Physical punishment for property crimes and drug offenses
3) Creation of an offshore island isolation facility for lifelong incarceration for certain violent crimes (those where the offender is not executed).
WOW!
“Prohibition did not work, and neither will the war on drugs, no matter how much money is spent.”
I draw a lot from Prohibition. When a serious percentage of the population says “We don’t care what the law is, we’re going to do it anyways” then the law becomes virtually unenforceable. We had it with alcohol. We now have it with various and sundry mind altering substances.
How many prisons do we need to fill? How much money do we need to spend on enforcement? How militant and overpowering do we need to make our law enforcement? At this point, am I more worried about some guy in my neighborhood firing up a joint every now and then or the myriad, various militarized local/state/federal agencies using unreasonable force wantonly to “protect me” from that guy?
Seriously.
No behavior disappears just because engaging in it can lead to a prison sentence. But the fact that making a behavior illegal fails to stop it does not mean it should be legalized. Legalizing the behavior only leads to a lot more of it.
Gun laws too punish those far too often punish those who have done no wrong and are not enforced equally (see example of David Gregory for that). Repeal all gun laws so in fact there are zero gun laws, and all drug laws......government’s role should be very limited.
Unfortunately we have gotten to a point where we expect the opposite.
Forgot to add.....what is the harm with doing away with all gun laws or all drug laws?
Will you suddenly go out and start pumping your body with drugs? I know I will not, nor will anyone in my family.
In fact when Czech prisoners had appealed for her support (having heard of her opposition to prisons in the US) the Commie lackey refused them. Her history of being only against prisons in non-Communist countries is a fact that only a propagandist could ignore.
Davis as honored guest of regime members of the East German Communist prison state.
Angela Davis is a despicable hardcore Communist who made a very nice and comfortable living off the system she abhors.
When she no longer draws breath, the world will be a better place.
That she now deludes anew generation is abhorrent.
” Legalizing the behavior only leads to a lot more of it.”
Maybe to some marginal degree, but, on the whole I can’t agree. Alcohol is cheap and legal to the U.S. population but does everyone go around drunk all day? No. Why? There are clear and severe punishments to misusing and abusing it. Not possessing or buying it, but, to misusing it. Drive drunk? Go to jail. Come to work drunk. Get fired. Practical restrictions that people understand and feel in their day-to-day lives.
Make some drugs legal and I don’t see any serious percentage of the U.S. population en masse going out and getting “baked.” Largely I believe that those who are interested are already doing it and those who have no interest in it will not suddenly be lured by it. I have no interest in something like marijuana and not because it’s illegal but because it just doesn’t appeal to me in any way. I’ll have some drinks on you but that’s about all. Were we to suddenly reenact Prohibition I can guarantee you that I’d still find a way to have those few drinks regardless of what any damned politicians voted for.
Again, I’m a law-and-order straight laced kind of guy but I am increasingly less concerned with the occasional recreational user (with sufficient laws in place for misuse) than I am the state apparatus that grows and feeds on the industry of keeping me “safe” from it.
Which is worse?
Her giving a speech on closing all prisons with her violent background?
Or Lehigh University paying her to come and speak to young minds? (and applauding her)
Without a justice system that works, folks will rezort to vigilante justice.
A man’s wife gets raped? Perp is going to do the oak tree neck stretch. Someone steals my car? I burn down their house.
That’s one way to cut down on the number of incarcerated black criminals.
“Will you suddenly go out and start pumping your body with drugs? I know I will not, nor will anyone in my family.”
No, no interest. Change the law and my interest level will not change. I suspect that represents a serious percentage of the population as well. You either want the sensation it provides or you don’t, law really matters little.
What matters here is where our national priorities are, what we’re spending tax dollars on, how we’re altering society with those policies..........and whether or not we’re truly better off as a society for it.
War on Poverty? Utter. Failure.
I can’t say the “War on Drugs” is substantially any better.
Truly,I think the latter, as she is afforded an opportunity to affect a new generation of skulls full of mush.
Another 60’s radical turned criminal turned academic. What varied careers they have.
So Angela, release violent predators into the population? Brilliant /sarc
I agree with that, but protect kids from drugs. Have providing kids with drugs still be a crime.
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.
Samuel G. Dawson
Alcohol is a fairly benign substance. You don’t take a sip of alcohol and become permanently brain damaged from it. Typically, to be damaged by it, someone needs to drink fairly heavily for years. Our bodies have evolved mechanisms for dealing with alcohol, for the reason that it is a common adulterant in foods through microbial activity (not so much an issue these days, with modern food preservation techniques).
Many drugs physically change the brain, even after one use. They cause damage that drives a person to seek out more of that drug, because one of the parts of the brain damaged controls self-restraint. Marijuana affects a person’s initiative—pot-heads become incapable of doing anything besides look for the next joint. Different people are affected differently in how much brain damage they receive. The fact is that it doesn’t matter how much someone swears they will only try a drug one time, or they will only use it “recreationally—that single use is enough to addict some people. Some drugs are so potent that everyone who tries them becomes addicted (look up “krokodil”).
Legalizing these drugs can only lead to more addiction and more of the related problems. The best way to prevent drug addiction is to prevent people from ever trying the drugs.
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