This Thanksgiving, Most of All
Like most Americans, I have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.
What I'm most thankful for is that I'm not in jail eating processed turkey on a plastic plate.
I'm thinking about the children of the incarcerated. There are more than 2.4 million kids with parents languishing in our jails and prisons due to legislators who insist on being tough rather than smart on crime.
America, Prison Nation, has been a costly and harmful failure.
The number of Americans in prison has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul.
The report, by the JFA Institute, a Washington criminal-justice research group, "included eight criminologists from major U.S. public universities" among its authors.
The report said the prison population is projected to grow by another 192,000 in five years, at a cost of $27.5 billion to build and operate additional prisons. At current rates, one-third of all black males, one-sixth of Latino males, and one in 17 white males will go to prison during their lives.
Women represent the fastest growing segment of the prison population. The long-range consequences are enormous.
The result is increased social and racial inequality. "The massive incarceration of young males from mostly poor- and working-class neighborhoods, and the taking of women from their families and jobs, has crippled their potential for forming healthy families and achieving economic gains," it said.
This Thanksgiving, as I sit down to a bountiful meal with friends and family, I'll be thinking of these inmates and their children on the outside.
I hope you will too.
Jeralyn Merritt blogs daily at TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime.
Follow Jeralyn Merritt on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TalkLeft
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The prison-industrial complex is almost as
interesting as the military-industrial complex...
I am thankful that I am not diving in dumpsters for nutrition. This is a phenomenon that has transcended the homeless and has entered thw world of mainstream america.
Ohg.
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Private industry gets a whole lot of cheap labor out of prison, though, just like they do 3rd world countries. For the ever proud free market worshippers - this a great situation! The tax payers pay the expense while the corporations reap the profits! Similar to the corporate welfare system.
Jeralyn Merritt: What I'm most thankful for is that I'm not in jail eating processed turkey on a plastic plate.
===
Processed turkey on a plastic plate would be manna from heaven for several hundred million of the world's most wretched tonight - or any night.
So let's keep our sense of perspective here, and have an intelligent conversation, and not just an impassioned one.
Victimless crimes (personal drug use, prostitution, etc) should NOT be prosecuted. The drug war is (as another poster mentioned) a complete and utter failure. Even the founder of modern conservatism, Bill Buckley, says so.
On the other hand - those who are TRUE sociopaths and psychopaths, and act on their reptilian impulses without restraint SHOULD be kept apart from society forever in some sort of humane, but fully restrained, fashioned.
Prison gangs are racketeering enterprises and need to be utterly smashed using such tools as the RICO act.
THose who are salvagable as human beings should be given much more opportunity - both in and out of prison - to re-enter society than they have right now.
"Eating processed turkey on a plastic plate". In the eight years I spent in Federal Prison, I never had that experience. Food is considered to be riot insurance in prison so some of it turns out to be surprisingly edible. Some of it!
But we at least ate real turkey at every Thanksgiving but one. And that time we ended up with bird, but it just didn't happen on the right day.
The kitchen hack that had the crew assigned to cook the turkeys on that one occasion wasn't as careful as he should have been, shall we say. He got the birds in the oven, but did not get them thoroughly thawed first. And we're talking here about enough for 700 guys. Anyway, when you make the mistake of cooking half frozen turkeys, at least if you only cook them for the regulation time period, they don't don't get done in the middle. Next, if you want to know how to really ruin the Thanksgiving dinner, leave the birds out for a number of hours before breaking them down to serve.
Long story short, the crew went back about eight hours later and those things were so putrid that the whole kitchen smelled like decomposing corpses for days. The holiday meal was late, the hack got demoted to the perimeter truck, and the rumor was that the Warden docked his pay to buy the replacements.
But, yeah, Thanksgiving in prison sucks pretty much the same as the other 364 days of every year served.
I'm thinking about Irve :)
It truly is insane to me that we are so bent on locking people up rather than rehabilitating them. Three strikes has put people in prison for life for petty crime while child molesters get short sentences. Some states actively resist drug rehabilitation programs that are known to have results and push instead for cramming yet more bodies into overcrowded jails. White collar criminals who steal far more and often do much more harm than their blue collar counterparts, if they do time at all, do shorter terms in cushier conditions. It's an insane, unequal and counter-productive system, ruled by unequal representation and unequal punishment. It's a system which is really broken and which I suspect is adding to the problem it was allegedly designed to correct.
California is cited a lot as a trend setter, but all states should look to us as the exact wrong trend on prisons.
Many of us voted for 3 strikes to keep the sociopaths in prison and to act as a deterrent. It has worked as a deterrent (no matter what anyone says otherwise) but I doubt the majority who voted for it wanted shoplifters put away for life.
We got very good at throwing people into prisons and keeping some very bad people there but never stopped the cycle by giving people schooling, drug rehab and training while inside. Although I do not believe everyone can be rehabilitated, you can't get around the fact that people get out of prison and if you do not have some kind of skill sets for them, you could be setting them up for more crime.
We saw a very interesting documentary on Swedish prisons, that we would consider too cushy because of all the services given, but their recidisim rate is so low, almost no one goes back to prison.
Maybe now in California everyone has seen what a failure the last twenty years have been, someone can actually get elected on reforming prisons rather than just promising to build more of them.
You think of the inmates. I'll be thinking of their victims.
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