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 ...
and if the convicted is penniless?
” The best way to prevent drug addiction is to prevent people from ever trying the drugs.”
And the current “War on Drugs” is doing that? When drugs are everywhere, prevalent, cheap, and, available in the best of neighborhoods? Has making things illegal prevented people from trying them? No. It has hiked my taxes and robbed me of freedoms I use to have. We wantonly incarcerate tens of thousands and spend untold billions a year for an ideal that has born little out in the real world for the last half century.
While we want the same things our approach and understanding of reality are different.
This woman has been a hard left lunatic for a very long time. How she has a university position when she should be picking cotton is a mystery.
I think I would label your approach “we’ll treat you like an adult unless and until you prove otherwise”. Administrate it like alcohol- buy it, consume it, it’s your business. Show up in public all sloppy drunk/high/stoned and act like a jerk nope, sorry can’t do that. Try to buy more of said alcohol/pot/cocaine while clearly drunk/high/strung out, nope sorry-no more for you(for now). Hurt or kill others while drunk/high/stoned, go to jail- do not collect $200.
That would effectively make it about the persons responsibiity and behavior towards others while consuming said substances and not about the substance per se. Perhaps that’s the way it should be. Just thinking it through.
CC
Imagine a broader use of the death penalty. It’s easy if you try, no ex prisoners preying on society, no prisons needed if they die.
Furnishing alcohol, a legal drug to minors is a crime already so That’s something that should carry over to drugs. Perfectly reasonable.
CC
I can’t believe the University brought this b*tch back to speak again (for a fee). She is an avowed communist ran for Vice President on the Communist Party ticket (not discussed in the article). Maybe while Angea was there she interviewed for University President. Current President is off to London.
“That would effectively make it about the persons responsibiity and behavior towards others while consuming said substances and not about the substance per se. Perhaps that’s the way it should be. Just thinking it through”
Precisely, CC.
Controlling sale and possession has proven a failure. As with alcohol in the past. Punishing behavior and abuse is more effective and realistic in my mind. It’t not about whether the substance or act is truly evil or not but rather about what the practical levels of realistic control are.
Keeping people from having substances they want? Not. Going. To. Happen. Try to control the conduct in which it is used and consumed? More practical and realistic to me.
That's because we don't really have prisons. We have "rehabilitation facilities". People are not punished for their crimes they are only sent to camp for a while.
Prisoners should NEVER have contact with other prisoners. They should never leave their cell until their sentence is served. Lock them up, lose the key. Slide food through a slot in the door.
No more prison riots. No more moslems recruitment. No more sexual acticity in the prisons. We could cut out prison staffs by 80 percent and still have far better security.
Of course we'd need to develop a backbone. Prisoner goes on a hunger strike (for example)? Let him starve. Slide the food in and remove it at the normal time. If he chooses not to eat, not our problem.
The only weakness to this is it relies on having a just government and we are far from that at the moment
Lehigh is formerly a respectable institution. As founded by Asa Packer, the Lehigh was to train young men in engineering and business. If one wanted a “liberal” education, the student could go to Yale or Harvard. Now the largest undergraduate college is the Arts College. Athletic teams are identified as “Mountain Hawks”, a non existent bird, instead of “The Engineers.” Don’t get this Engineer started.
Sounds like one big circle jerk. The sad part is that these clowns take a real issue that should be discussed -- whether non-violent drug users should be in prison -- and overlay their racial oppression fantasies onto it and make the discussion useless.
I would suppose that like any debt that couldn’t be paid under the Mosaic code, you would become an indentured servant to pay it off.
Prisons were established with the largely humane intent to confine and reform criminals. Before the method used to protect society from that element involved a wooden platform, rope of adequate length and strength, and a festive crowd of onlookers. Or, as an alternative, exile to some far away harsh and unforgiving wilderness like colonial America and Australia. Now prisons are just hugely expensive (to tax payers) criminal academies that refine the talents and skills of the condemned so they can wreak even more havoc after release than before. Old options A and B are looking better and better.
Except us taxpayers have about $200,000 invested in each young person via 12 years of public school indoctrination. They can fry their brains after they've paid that back in taxes plus interest and inflation, else we go broke.
Making activities illegal does not prevent them, but it does decrease their incidence. Consider the difference in murder rate between illegal post-birth murder and legal pre-birth murder—the former is barely a statistical blip when compared to the latter.
It is axiomatic that legalizing what are now illicit drugs will lead to a huge increase in their use, with an accompanying increase in drug overdoses, crime, absenteeism, etc. Many people who wouldn’t try drugs because they are illegal would mistakenly think that because they are legal, they are safe, and try them on that basis. I would argue that the cost of enforcing the law is less than the cost of not enforcing it, or of getting rid of the law.
Since illicit drugs have never been legal in our lifetimes, what freedoms have you lost by them being illegal?
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