I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it: if the purpose of prison is to rehabilitate people, then we're going about it in a very strange way.
Lock people away in a cell for a decade, deny them a lot of basic human rights (like books) then when they're good and messed up in the head from it, let them lose on the public. If they re-offend, well, that's clearly a sign that they are just a bad person. Best lock them up again.
The Governor of New York proposed giving prisoners in essence a community college education while incarcerated. Outcry from the public and lawmakers made him shelve the concept, despite studies showing massive drops in recidivism from such things.
The US penal system is shockingly big on vengeance over resocialization. America's Christian fundamentalists like it that way because they claim as their own the worst personality flaws of their ancient Jewish war god. And American politicians know they can easily collect a few more votes by acting "tougher on crime."
As an American Christian I believe nothing of the sort. What is your source for this ad hominem claim?
The bible actually doesn't support the idea of prisons at all. If someone murders, then they need to be put to death. Otherwise, theft, drugs, and all other crimes are best handled outside of a prison system that does very little to help a person recover from their problems.
Christ advocated restoring a person. Secular governments advocate locking them up so they don't have to deal with it.
Pardon the delayed response! I lost sight of this conversation.
Are you a Christian fundamentalist? Well known examples include the Westbury Baptist Church and the Southern Baptist Convention. If you're not like those people then what you believe is irrelevant to what I'm talking about and I don't understand why you're acting offended.
If you're interested, you can read a bit of exposition on the role of the Christian Right in pushing for increasingly harsh punishment in the US: http://www.politicalresearch.org/2004/11/06/calvinism-capita... . Along related lines, I find myself disgusted by the zeal with which Christian fundamentalists engage in the corporal punishment of children, again with solid support from the Bible: http://zakherys.tripod.com/greven.htm
You're correct that the Bible doesn't advocate imprisonment: It goes further by supporting slavery, which combines the loss of personal liberty with the obligation of enforced labor. And while the penal systems of modern, enlightened countries do tend to aim at resocialization rather than vengeance, prisons in the American Bible Belt have re-introduced conditions strongly reminiscent of Biblical slavery. Coincidence? I think not.
However, it appears that the new meaning of "Fundamental Christian" you and some others have assigned actually has nothing to do with this standard definition - and is a often a warped, hateful, version of someone's own imagination.
The "Christian Right" is about as varied as the muslim world is. You have to understand that the only people you hear about are those that are doing it wrong. For example, no one cares about everyone walking normally - it's those that start fights that get the attention.
Anyway, "It goes further by supporting slavery" isn't true either. That is just a sensationalist claim based on the ancient history recorded in the old testament. Jesus and the apostles and prophets actually went the other way and said that Christians should serve others instead of themselves.
Slavery was abolished in Britain and America through work of Christians like William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Not sure if it was a ninja-edit, but the poster appears to be talking about fundamentalist Protestants, who do tend to have a more Old Testament take on things than Christ's teachings.
Moralism aside, there's a point at which prisoner benefits can create an incentive to commit crimes. Not rape and murder, of course, but if you're 18 years old and driftless and already weighing the costs and benefits of, say, a commercial B&E, the fact that your worst case scenario includes a college education will have an impact. I'm not silly enough to think it would make criminals out of people who weren't already, though.
I've come across several cases of people who were not professional criminals committing crimes so they could get access to medical care, although this is obviously not an issue in the UK.
> 80% of inmates at one Colorado county jail are either mentally ill or have serious medical issues that are diagnosed on arrival
The creation of the mental health system in the UK in the first place was a direct result of the observation that a large percentage of people incarcerated were mentally ill.
The US used to have better mental health care but ended up going in the opposite direction to that of the UK, sadly. These two articles provide a decent overview, although they omit some important legal cases.
>Moralism aside, there's a point at which prisoner benefits can create an incentive to commit crimes.
That already exists in our current prison system. Here in Toronto, 'criminals' are found every year standing beside broken windows of downtown businesses late at night because they couldn't stand the frigid cold and the homeless shelters were full. All they usually want is a warm place to sleep and some food that didn't come out of a dumpster.
While the prospect of running a lucrative commercial B&E enterprise with the "worst case scenario" including a college education might be tempting...
You will still be a known criminal to your family and friends, which will take years to change their opinion of you if at all possible. Nobody will feel comfortable leaving you alone in their home. Nobody will allow their children to approach you. Your options for employment will drop drastically once you are released from prison.
You will still lack freedom. Feel like taking a jog in the park? Not for another 10 years, you can't.
Etc.
If the above seem like a better scenario than your current situation, perhaps you need some guidance in a community college type setting.
Since the obvious solution is politically intractable and would require fundamentally altering the way all resources are allocated and collected by the government, you can see why a program to extend that benefit only to prisoners (which, but for the optics, might have been tractable) would cause an uproar.
To me is strange for anyone to choose a life where he is absolutely not free, just to get a college degree. Degree or not, having jail time in your resume will have a (extremely?) negative impact.
You don't lose that much freedom in the military. At least, most of the things you would be permitted from doing are things that you wouldn't need/want to do anyway.
But I suppose you could say the same about prison, for some people.
How pervasive is that attitude? I've worked with plenty of people with records. So long it's not something real violent or something lame/morally questionable (robbing an old woman because you're her financial advisor) the only real question I think of is "why were you caught" and if that is strong evidence of anything else. Like, it could indicate a poor understanding of information theory, or badly calibrated risk assessment.
Someone committing a nonviolent crime to get free room and board and college, of explained, sounds rather clever. Most people end up in significant debt for a similar outcome. (And low security prison in the US isn't so bad, about the same level as sharing a 2 star hotel room with a coworker, from what I've seen.)
Don't underestimate the value of a place to sleep, a roof over your head, and a rudimentary education to a large portion of the least fortunate. Having the certainty of those things could easily beat trying to hold on to a terrible job and keep a place to stay with food on the table.
That's sounds more like a "game theory" statement than a real life decision. The demographic you're describing isn't known for it's long-term planning capabilities, and most crimes are committed with the expectation that you won't get caught.
As they should. If you are going to give away a college education it should probably start with the people not in prison and even earlier before they begin to commit crimes.
I understand the desire to rehabilitate people, but when those in prison have more services and resources handed to them than the general population gets then there is a serious problem. If we started earlier in the education process and young students knew that they would be supported all the way through college / trade school / whatever, they would be far less likely to give up early thinking that they could never 'afford' to go to school so why bother.
> New York State college in prison programs have also proven effective, with only 7.7% of incarcerated people who attended college classes re-incarcerated compared to the 29.9% recidivism rate of those who did not attend any college classes.
A 75% reduction in recidivism will pay for community college many, many times over. It's a tremendous net-win for the taxpayer, but our "hard on crime" attitudes prevent us from saving ourselves billions of dollars in damages, policing, legal costs, housing/feeding, etc.
You assume that the group that did attend community college is the same as the group that did not. This seems, to me, questionable. After all at least those who attempt to get a college education think it is worth the work, which is likely to cause them to reoffend, no?
Ignoring that, how about the effect that if you get caught for your crime you get a free college education? Wouldn't that remove some of the downside of a life of crime.
> Wouldn't that remove some of the downside of a life of crime.
That's a problem if prison it to be primarily punitive. I'd prefer it were rehabilitative, and thus focused on "what's the best way to turn this person into a productive, positive member of society once released?" I'd also prefer a basic, community college-level education be available to all, not just the incarcerated.
The RAND meta analysis at your link (reference 3) rates the quality of the studies it analyzed. Among the groups that were assigned randomly (to have educational intervention or not), the reduction in recidivism was about 40%.
(I had wondered how self selection factored into the numbers...edit to add: I did not mean to suggest that the 40% I quote is directly comparable to the numbers in your post, I meant to share the factoid that the effect was strong when a quality control for self selection was present)
I'm just glad to see that a lot of people didn't read my full comment. Hard on crime was not what I said, what I said was that there is a finite amount of money available and that when we have to choose between educating prisoners or providing an education to people BEFORE they enter the criminal system the net gain for society is even higher because you stand a far greater chance of keeping them from entering the system to begin with. Making everything else irrelevant.
> If you are going to give away a college education
Now there's an idea. Do both, give education away to everyone, including inmates.
During my parents younger days, here in Australia, a university education came at no cost to the individual. Sounds like a reasonable sort of scenario I reckon.
In my day (1980s) I got a CS degree from a decent UK University and it didn't cost me a penny - everyone got their feed paid back then and as my parents weren't very well off I got a full grant.
Turned out to be a pretty good investment for HMG going by the amount of tax I have paid... :-)
In Germany all public universities (which are the good ones) are free. In Holland it is not free, but Dutch citizens a sort scholarship by default. Which is arguably even better.
I see, so all we need to do is link up some pre-crime telepaths with accredited university entrance organizations. I'll get the professors on the phone and you get me the telepaths. We'll have a Kickstarter going by next week.
There are already some attempts to charge those in custody for room, board and medical procedures, even going as far as trying to charge for involuntary procedures involved in searches. Or police requiring $3,000 for property damage for getting blood on their uniforms after beating up a guy with a different middle name as who they were looking for.
I thought that Davis link was the most remarkable thing I'd ever seen. Then I Googled the back story, and found out that the officer lodging the complaint had also sworn in court that the Davis didn't bleed on him when the police department was sued, and then having somehow avoided a perjury charge, received a commendation from Ferguson City Council this year. And that one of the other officers involved is also facing a lawsuit for tasering a man to death.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/15/the-day-fer...http://www.fergusoncity.com/Archive/ViewFile/Item/236
Not to mention about the whole "keeping someone locked with other criminals" thing. You know what they say, you're the average of you're closest 5 friends. If you're closest 5 friends are criminals and murderers for the next 20 years, how is that going to impact your thinking about the world?
The purpose of prison is not to punish or rehabilitate specifically. Prison is part of the legal system, whose purpose is to provide stability and safety to society, with prison acting as a means to apply sentencing. Plenty of people (myself included) prefer the rehabilitation angle, plenty of others prefer the punishment angle - but both arguments see 'keeping society safe' as their target condition for how a prison system is run.
Most of them go back into society with the albatross of having been in jail around their necks, not to mention the gap in work history. Going so far as to give lifers an education (along with the rest of the population) reduces crime. The prison population are still citizens who deserve to be treated well. They don't deserve to be the victims of crime any more than anyone else. The vast majority of people in jail are people with poor educations, poor upbringings, and/or mental disorders. Giving them a hand up is vastly more preferable than leaving them to their own devices and then tossing them back onto the streets.
We could make it much cheaper, if we wanted to. Cages hold a man as well as cells made of bricks, prisoners can work whenever they are not sleeping and things like recreational facilities are just going be used for and by gangs.
We could make prisons much cheaper than they currently are just by choosing either rehabilitation or warehousing. Warehousing would be even cheaper - or maybe split the prisoners up by worth (essentially asking is this person a good person who did something bad, or a bad person) and then have two different criminal systems.
> Removing criminals from society is easy and straightforward.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about prison. Prisons and incarceration do not remove people from society, those people are still a part of society even if their interaction and freedoms are restricted. Not too mention who and what defines criminality is a horribly messed up system.
There are a bunch of reason. Different people rank them differently. Deterrence, Removal from society. Justice. Rehabilitation is a tricky one. It's hard.
But in any case, I think there's absolutely no to torpedo rehabilitation in the way that we often do in prisons.
And ofcourse Mr Grayling has done his best to destroy Judicial reviews that highlight this kind of problem.
Basically if you want to challenge a law, a judicial review is the only way you can go about it (going through the political process, writing to an MP and the like leaves you open to the whim of the press and "public opinion")
If this law goes through only those with significant amount of cash can ever challenge illegal laws. Combine that with the changes to legal aid, mean that only the rich will be able to attain justice.
At what point has the judicial review become merely the means for judges to disagree with government policy? This wasn't a law change, this was a change to an existing policy about what prisoners could receive in parcels. Judicial review seems to have become an all too regular occurrence used by people who don't like what a particular government is doing.
>Judicial review seems to have become an all too regular occurrence used by people who don't like what a particular government is doing.
Could it be because what the particular government is doing is ethically wrong. It's easy to look at the past and say 'why didn't people change these things, it's obvious they were wrong.', but then we look at judicial review and say, 'well, they are just giving the government trouble'. Don't you think that's exactly what the people that defended slavery would have said? Or the people that didn't want women to have voting rights? Or any number of anything we take as rights under the law?
But the point of british law is that no one is above it. A precedence set by the magna carta. (which has now been superseded apart from two clauses.)
This means that if the government changes policy, and that policy change is incompatible with the law, it must be changed. This is the mecanism that would stop the government from passing a statutory instrument(a law that requires no vote in parliament) to allow the Treasury to take assets without due process (something that was protected by the magna carta, but was recently repealed)
How ever for a law to be challenged, a judicial review must be triggered.
Except many judicial reviews aren't about the legality of the decision, merely the way the decision has been made.
"Judicial review is a type of court proceeding in which a judge reviews the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body. In other words, judicial reviews are a challenge to the way in which a decision has been made, rather than the rights and wrongs of the conclusion reached. It is not really concerned with the conclusions of that process and whether those were 'right', as long as the right procedures have been followed. The court will not substitute what it thinks is the 'correct' decision."
> Except many judicial reviews aren't about the legality of the decision, merely the way the decision has been made
But isn't that an essential feature of the constitutional structure of the UK: given that the UK doesn't have a separation of powers system in which various entities within government have limited powers, any decision by government that is within the sovereign power of the government is substantively legally, the only question of its legality is whether or not it is a valid decision of the government, made by the means legally prescribed by the government for the kind of decision it is -- but this can look at like review of the legality of the substance of the decision, because the legally prescribed mechanism for a decision may vary based on the substance of the decision.
(In a sense, this is true of any sovereign government, even, e.g., the US separation of powers system, wherein the "way the decision has been made", in order to be legal, for certain decisions involves a Constitutional Amendment.)
There's a great article about prison radios and MP3 players, and a particular model of Sony FM receiver that is like 30 years old but incredibly popular in prisons due to battery life or something... Gotta track that down.
Devices need to be approved for prison use. 3G but no autoupgrades, or appstore but no external communication, sometimes the cover must be transparent. Probably no competition in that sector, therefore they can charge whatever they decide.
Hence it's not "cheap e-book reader, top of the range tablet", but "expensive e-book device, bottom of the range reader", if you follow me.
I am told that in high security prisons, you can own music CDs. BUT you must buy them from the prison's approved seller (assuming that the CD you want is in their catalog). This is apparently to stop data being smuggled in/out of the prison. I doubt they will be allowing ebooks and ebook readers anytime soon.
The one issue brought up which I think it a legitimate concern is, how do you insure the book is not used for improper purposes. Those would be but not limited to, concealment of prohibited objects, drugs, and messages?
You can screen for some, but I would expect all parcels to have some limited form of search. I would tend to think a better option would be to fix the availability of library services to prisoners, perhaps even only allowing access to the delivered books in a library setting; books are kept by the system in the library for the prisoners.
I understand that idea that reading is fundamental, but controlling what is in their environment is a big part of maintaining a safe and secure environment.
In the uk, prisoners get sent other parcels, they of course are screened. No real reason for not allowing books. This ban was just the prisons minister playing to the tabloid press.
"a better option would be to fix the availability of library services to prisoners" - alas, this is not even a bad joke. In e.g. high security prisons, you might get to visit the library once every 4 weeks. If (or these days, more often than not when) there are staff shortages, supervision of prisoners' library visits is among the first things cut - in which case, you might get to visit again in 4 weeks time, maybe.
Source: 2nd hand info from talking to someone who works in a prison.
The first sentence of the article is "Under the current rules prisoners are prevented from receiving parcels unless they have 'exceptional circumstances', such as a medical condition."
And the article talked about upping the number of books a prisoner can keep in their cell, which seems a better solution for all prisoners than the few who have people who will send them books.
I wonder how many prisoners are being sent the poet laureates work anyway?
A far better solution is to fix prison libraries, perhaps if all the heat being generated by literary types was directed at that, rather than "OMG they banned books" types protests, we might be able to get more books.
For instance there are literary trusts that donate sacks of books to all children at various points in their life in parts of the UK. Why not set up a prison literary trust that donates books to all prisoners? Get it signed off by the state as an "approved source" and a real change occurs.
But then protesters wouldn't get to protest.
Fixing library services to all prisoners is going to be a lot more expensive and take a lot longer than shoving all book deliveries through an xray machine.
Lock people away in a cell for a decade, deny them a lot of basic human rights (like books) then when they're good and messed up in the head from it, let them lose on the public. If they re-offend, well, that's clearly a sign that they are just a bad person. Best lock them up again.