A close family member of mine was just arrested for possession of marijuana. They allegedly had a sizable amount, more than your normal 1/8th of an ounce, but nothing obscene. Due to a felony 10 years ago when they were a teen, they are looking at 5-10 years. Granted, Oregon is known to go easy on pot offenses, however even 6 months in jail is ridiculous. The real cost however, is not having their prior felony expunged - it will be another 10 years before that is a possibility, well into middle age for this person :( Try finding yourself a job with a felony record. If you can, it is probably paying a wage that will doubtless encourage the same illegal behavior that landed you a felony in the first place. When your only hope the rest of your life won't be utter shit is getting off on a technicality, something is messed up.
> Try finding yourself a job with a felony record.
This in itself may serve to worsen America's problem. I don't know of any other country where employers bother to check such things (not to mention actually having access to such privacy sensitive information), unless it is with very, very good reasons.
How will his wage doubtlessly encourage him to engage in illegal behavior? I've worked plenty of overtime and minimum wage jobs and at no point did that ever cause me to consider committing a felony or engaging in illegal behavior. Your friend sounds like he's in the situation he's in because of choices he made, not because society did something wrong.
Other comments asked how incarceration rates could be reduced in the United States. One way would be for many of the forty-some other states to follow the example of the few states, including Minnesota, which have set up determinate sentencing based on severity of the offense of conviction and the criminal history of the convicted defendant.
I toured a prison in Minnesota in the mid-1980s, as an interpreter for an official visitor from another country. The visitor was amazed to learn that Minnesota then (and now) spends LESS per taxpayer on putting convicted criminals into prison, while spending substantially MORE per prisoner. Only the most serious criminals with long histories of offenses are imprisoned. Most convicted criminals receive sentences that involve community corrections but not imprisonment. Minnesota's maximum-security prison, the one I toured, had a population of inmates 97 percent of whom had killed at least one other human being before being put in that prison. The foreign visitor was a human rights lawyer, and he was actually amazed at how humanely the prisoners were housed and treated in that prison. (He had visited many prisons in his own country, and none were as well funded as the prison in Minnesota.) A prison can be properly staffed and funded, and not too crowded, if a whole state's criminal justice system is geared toward imprisoning only persons who must be kept out of general society, responding to most forms of criminal behavior with sentences that don't include prison time.
I admit I've only skimmed the article and the comments on HN, but I don't think that either have mentioned the CCPOA (California Correctional Peace Officers Association). It's basically a union of prison guards who are heavily pro-incarceration. The quick version is that stricter laws produce more prisoners which leads to more money for prison guards and their organization. The story is better told here:
In 1998 "The Atlantic" magazine wrote a great article about the relationship of Big Business and Prisons, known as the "Prison-Industrial Complex"[1].
Its a sobering read and really brings home the fact that incarceration is indeed big business and there is a lot of entrenched interests in maintaining the status quo. And large rates of incarceration.
Private prison companies such as Wackenhut stand to profit in the billions from increased rates of incarceration. There is absolutely no question about who benefits the most. Please take your blatant anti-worker agenda and shove it.
6 million people is roughly the working age population of some of the smaller countries in Western Europe. Thinking about the massive waste of resources and the cost in terms of human lives extinguished (6 million people in prison translates to ~85,000 peoples lives wiped out every year, and that's only the inmates not the guards and whoever else is involved in the system) is instantly depressing.
Gruesome.
Here is a good graphic to illustrate how bad it really is:
One should probably subtract off a more average incarceration rate first. There is, alas, a subset of people who are behind bars because if they aren't, they truly will net an even larger loss to society.
Before I went to law school, I had a somewhat conservative view of the justice system (they deserve to be in there!) But the more you learn about the prison system in the U.S. the harder it is to see it as anything other than a crime in and of itself.
D.A.'s being elected officials, try to railroad people accused of crimes to get them in jail. Legislatures looking to be "tough on crime" have jacked up the penalties for offenses to ridiculous levels, so much so that most people would be foolish to take their chances at trial instead of pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence. Forensic "science" is anything but, with error rates in finger printing being in the 7-8% neighborhood and rising from there. Handwriting, hair samples, and bite mark analysis have error rates in the 40-60% range.
As the article mentions, the system elevates procedure above everything else. If you have a busy, poorly-paid public defender who doesn't present any evidence in your case and actually argues in favor of the death penalty in the sentencing hearing (a real example) the Supreme Court has no sympathy for you if that attorney also forfeits an avenue for post-conviction relief by failing to make a particular argument at the right time.
The article makes the good point that reform won't happen with one piece of sweeping legislation, but rather with patchwork improvements to the system.
What would you do to reduce incarceration rates?
I would start with a reform of drug laws inspired by Portugal [1]. We're not sure if the same solution can scale to the size of the US, but we can introduce reform incrementally, starting with the decriminalization of Marijuana. (Which I think most would find agreeable.)
Education reform is important too. Obama is pushing reform to get states to increase the age of required education to 18 [2]. This sounds like a good idea on paper...we'll have to see how it pans out. His push for increase utilization of community colleges also makes sense, since they provide a decent education for the increasing number of Americans who can't afford college.
I think that removing the power of prison guard unions is something that will need to be addressed first.
Fore example:
Correction officers’ unions are powerful forces in states like California and New York; they push for the construction of more prisons and for longer sentences for criminals (so that there are more people for correction officers to guard). Their activities in California are a case in point. In the last eight years they have spent $10 million on state politics — either in direct contributions to politicians or in spending on ballot initiatives relating to crime and punishment. They have mounted full-scale political campaigns. For instance, the California corrections union has attacked public officials, such as the Los Angeles district attorney, who supported an alternative to the union-favored “three-strikes law.” Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in February of this year noted that “the three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers’ union and that is sick!” In 1999 the union even successfully opposed a proposal to permit the California attorney general to prosecute brutality in prisons.
Increasing the age required for education doesn't really accomplish anything except put more hopeless souls behind bars. People either drop out of school because they must to survive or because they have lost all faith in the system. Forcing them to stay until they are 18 does nothing to further their ambitions and only tries to solve a broken system built on abuse with more abuse.
> increase the age of required education to 18 [2]. This sounds like a good idea on paper
I would recommend reading Cevin Soling's "Why Public Schools Must be Abolished" for the opposite viewpoint:
While it is possible for a North Korean POW to learn calculus under duress from their prison guard, it is reasonable to assume they will: A) associate math with incarceration; B) despise the inmates who learn for appearing readily complicit with their captors; and C. try to forget the information the moment they are free.
Education reform is important too. Obama is pushing reform to get states to increase the age of required education to 18 [2].
Imagine if you had spent 6 hours a day 5 days a week for 12 years being forced to play sports. If the idea provokes violent horror in you you now have some idea how the people you would be forcing to stay in school would feel about it. And make no mistake; compulsory attendance at allegedly educational institutions is forced. Whether the superior outcomes for those thus compelled outweighs the poorer outcomes and massively less pleasant experience of those forced to share classrooms and teacher attention with sullen youth there under pain of imprisonment is aquestion to be dealt with in ones own head.
Increasing the age of required education to 18 doesn't sound like a good idea to me at all. I knew several people who left school early (aged 16 or so) who wouldn't have gotten anywhere staying at school longer - they were much happier getting started on "real" work. All it will achieve is massaging some unemployment statistics to make it look like some problems aren't so bad.
Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” [...] Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
Funny how this comes up again and again in so many different contexts. Minor bottom-up tweaks are more effective than top-down policies. In one of Joel's classic articles he talks about how small UI tweaks to forum software completely change the course of a community. Tiny changes in economic incentives have massive effects. It's a great lesson to be applied in so many fields.
One problem with putting so many people in prison, and keeping them there for so long, is that you end up with a large number of prisoners with dementia like illnesses.
The routines of prison help to mask some symptoms of those illnesses. And because some of these prisoners are in for serious, violent, crimes it's hard to release them to nursing homes.
By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals.
Very odd to describe this as a "conservative" idea. Most conservatives I know object to this sort of sociological determinism, instead embracing the idea of individual responsibility. If anything, they believe in the power of (slowly) malleable culture and institutions to shape outcomes, rather than accepting bad outcomes as inevitable.
'Sovereign immunity' (states are liable only for what they choose to allow themselves to be liable for), waivers for private prisoners, and probably some sort of 'reasonable precaution' clause in liability legislation would be where I would start looking for the reason why not.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.
If the New York Times is to be believed, the crime rate has nearly halved since 1980 [1]. Obviously it needn't follow that the increase in the prison population caused this, but the author's unwillingness to even explore the idea seems awfully incurious.
This reminds me of an article Time Magazine did on Norway's Halden Prison.
Essentially, when the Norwegian justice system treated their inmates more humanely, their recidivism (crime after prison) rate became 40% less than the US and the UK.
Similarly, in Norway, there are only 69 inmates per 100,000 people, compared to 753/100,000 in the United States.
The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.
"Surely"? Let's start with "hopefully" and rigorously work our way up to "probably."
Reminds me of an Econmist article from a while back [1]. The theme being shared with the two being: systems we set up to punish _criminals_ rarely do just that.
Reading this reminds me of this quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller
and another darker vision: "For if you [the rulers] suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves [outlaws] and then punish them."
Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia, Book 1
Here's an idea for a frighteningly ambitions startup: Kill the prison-industrial complex! How? Fight crime! It costs a lot of taxpayer money and social wealth to keep things the way they are. Ostensibly the goal is to keep people safe from criminals and reduce crime opportunities.
A friend of mine was mugged on the street for his iPhone last night. He was stabbed in the leg when he fought back (mistake but he's ok thankfully). I wonder if a few high-res web-cams on the street would have kept the attackers at bay?
How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state? Found these startup ideas tonight:
If London is any example, cameras don't actually work that well:
a study of London's widespread use of CCTV cameras, found that for every
1,000 cameras installed, only one crime has been solved. On top of that,
when faced with a crime, the CCTV cameras are rarely that useful. The report
found that CCTV cameras were used to catch just 8 out of 269 suspected
robbers.
Perhaps helping to create a society that is more personally fulfilling and with a greater degree of social equality and fairness might be a good place to focus.
So everything from free local arts/education/tech facilities through to high quality affordable group legal insurance.
More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives.
The first step is simple & straightforward. Fix education (or what is preventing them from getting an education) first, then tackle other problems with prisons.
Fixing education will take twenty years, whereas fixing 90% the prison problem could be as simple as pardoning all non-violent drug offenses. Of course, you have to do that across 50 states plus the federal level, however it's a single concept. If we are going to start somewhere, that's easily the most appropriate place.
Your first step is simple and straightforward just like saying "go fly to the moon" is simple and straightforward. Above and beyond the limited resource distribution we struggle with today (where does increased educational spending come from? Medicare? Defense Spending? Police?) there's an anti-education attitude that has worked it's way into lower socio-economic culture. I think combating this culture component is just as large (if not larger) a job as providing the educational resources.
The first step is simple & straightforward. Fix education (or what is preventing them from getting an education) first
That is not simple and straightforward because powerful interest groups don't want education to be reformed along those lines. "The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985)
It would be a distinctly good idea, and would surely reduce crime rates, to reform education along the lines of ensuring that all pupils in schools in the United States learn fundamental literacy and numeracy. According to the PISA international education studies, some countries do much better than the United States in this regard.
I think the problem is systemic in nature “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began”
"Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system": http://www.laprogressive.com/black-men-prison-system/
"As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities."
I read this and think there must be something more complex going on than just graduation rates. Too many interest groups are getting rich trying to fix a perpetually broken education system and the same goes for prisons.
Lack of education is not the cause, it's a symptom of the same thing that causes the incarceration, i.e. it's a confounding variable not an independent cause.
Yeah, but you are still unemployable for at least 10 years if you are in a state with a system to expunge felonies. There is another prison outside of the actual institutions waiting for every released inmate.
[+] [-] cullenking|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickmb|14 years ago|reply
This in itself may serve to worsen America's problem. I don't know of any other country where employers bother to check such things (not to mention actually having access to such privacy sensitive information), unless it is with very, very good reasons.
[+] [-] thematt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesot...
http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm
I toured a prison in Minnesota in the mid-1980s, as an interpreter for an official visitor from another country. The visitor was amazed to learn that Minnesota then (and now) spends LESS per taxpayer on putting convicted criminals into prison, while spending substantially MORE per prisoner. Only the most serious criminals with long histories of offenses are imprisoned. Most convicted criminals receive sentences that involve community corrections but not imprisonment. Minnesota's maximum-security prison, the one I toured, had a population of inmates 97 percent of whom had killed at least one other human being before being put in that prison. The foreign visitor was a human rights lawyer, and he was actually amazed at how humanely the prisoners were housed and treated in that prison. (He had visited many prisons in his own country, and none were as well funded as the prison in Minnesota.) A prison can be properly staffed and funded, and not too crowded, if a whole state's criminal justice system is geared toward imprisoning only persons who must be kept out of general society, responding to most forms of criminal behavior with sentences that don't include prison time.
[+] [-] Nate75Sanders|14 years ago|reply
http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/06/05/the-role-of-th...
The phrase "prison-industrial complex" leads to some interesting reading, as well.
[+] [-] dantheman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ruckusing|14 years ago|reply
Its a sobering read and really brings home the fact that incarceration is indeed big business and there is a lot of entrenched interests in maintaining the status quo. And large rates of incarceration.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-pris...
[+] [-] scrod|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|14 years ago|reply
Gruesome.
Here is a good graphic to illustrate how bad it really is:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...
[+] [-] jerf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
D.A.'s being elected officials, try to railroad people accused of crimes to get them in jail. Legislatures looking to be "tough on crime" have jacked up the penalties for offenses to ridiculous levels, so much so that most people would be foolish to take their chances at trial instead of pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence. Forensic "science" is anything but, with error rates in finger printing being in the 7-8% neighborhood and rising from there. Handwriting, hair samples, and bite mark analysis have error rates in the 40-60% range.
As the article mentions, the system elevates procedure above everything else. If you have a busy, poorly-paid public defender who doesn't present any evidence in your case and actually argues in favor of the death penalty in the sentencing hearing (a real example) the Supreme Court has no sympathy for you if that attorney also forfeits an avenue for post-conviction relief by failing to make a particular argument at the right time.
[+] [-] m0th87|14 years ago|reply
What would you do to reduce incarceration rates?
I would start with a reform of drug laws inspired by Portugal [1]. We're not sure if the same solution can scale to the size of the US, but we can introduce reform incrementally, starting with the decriminalization of Marijuana. (Which I think most would find agreeable.)
Education reform is important too. Obama is pushing reform to get states to increase the age of required education to 18 [2]. This sounds like a good idea on paper...we'll have to see how it pans out. His push for increase utilization of community colleges also makes sense, since they provide a decent education for the increasing number of Americans who can't afford college.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/obama-...
[+] [-] dantheman|14 years ago|reply
Fore example:
Correction officers’ unions are powerful forces in states like California and New York; they push for the construction of more prisons and for longer sentences for criminals (so that there are more people for correction officers to guard). Their activities in California are a case in point. In the last eight years they have spent $10 million on state politics — either in direct contributions to politicians or in spending on ballot initiatives relating to crime and punishment. They have mounted full-scale political campaigns. For instance, the California corrections union has attacked public officials, such as the Los Angeles district attorney, who supported an alternative to the union-favored “three-strikes law.” Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in February of this year noted that “the three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers’ union and that is sick!” In 1999 the union even successfully opposed a proposal to permit the California attorney general to prosecute brutality in prisons.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/432...
[+] [-] zanny|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidhollander|14 years ago|reply
I would recommend reading Cevin Soling's "Why Public Schools Must be Abolished" for the opposite viewpoint:
While it is possible for a North Korean POW to learn calculus under duress from their prison guard, it is reasonable to assume they will: A) associate math with incarceration; B) despise the inmates who learn for appearing readily complicit with their captors; and C. try to forget the information the moment they are free.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/02/27/w...
[+] [-] protomyth|14 years ago|reply
// for the truly weird look at the Cotton Lobby's effect on mj laws
[+] [-] barry-cotter|14 years ago|reply
Imagine if you had spent 6 hours a day 5 days a week for 12 years being forced to play sports. If the idea provokes violent horror in you you now have some idea how the people you would be forcing to stay in school would feel about it. And make no mistake; compulsory attendance at allegedly educational institutions is forced. Whether the superior outcomes for those thus compelled outweighs the poorer outcomes and massively less pleasant experience of those forced to share classrooms and teacher attention with sullen youth there under pain of imprisonment is aquestion to be dealt with in ones own head.
[+] [-] archangel_one|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcantelon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|14 years ago|reply
Fuck the prison industry. Every single politician who cohorts with the prison lobby should be called out and shot.
Yes. Shot.
[+] [-] rhizome|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pshc|14 years ago|reply
Funny how this comes up again and again in so many different contexts. Minor bottom-up tweaks are more effective than top-down policies. In one of Joel's classic articles he talks about how small UI tweaks to forum software completely change the course of a community. Tiny changes in economic incentives have massive effects. It's a great lesson to be applied in so many fields.
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
The routines of prison help to mask some symptoms of those illnesses. And because some of these prisoners are in for serious, violent, crimes it's hard to release them to nursing homes.
Here's one prison's response:
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...)
I submitted it to HN here: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649276)
[+] [-] twoodfin|14 years ago|reply
Very odd to describe this as a "conservative" idea. Most conservatives I know object to this sort of sociological determinism, instead embracing the idea of individual responsibility. If anything, they believe in the power of (slowly) malleable culture and institutions to shape outcomes, rather than accepting bad outcomes as inevitable.
[+] [-] MarkMc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmg8|14 years ago|reply
If the New York Times is to be believed, the crime rate has nearly halved since 1980 [1]. Obviously it needn't follow that the increase in the prison population caused this, but the author's unwillingness to even explore the idea seems awfully incurious.
[1] See the "In the U.S." tab on this graphic http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...
[+] [-] Archio|14 years ago|reply
Essentially, when the Norwegian justice system treated their inmates more humanely, their recidivism (crime after prison) rate became 40% less than the US and the UK.
Similarly, in Norway, there are only 69 inmates per 100,000 people, compared to 753/100,000 in the United States.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00....
[+] [-] feralchimp|14 years ago|reply
"Surely"? Let's start with "hopefully" and rigorously work our way up to "probably."
[+] [-] ineedtosleep|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.economist.com/node/14165460?story_id=14165460
[+] [-] chefsurfing|14 years ago|reply
and another darker vision: "For if you [the rulers] suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves [outlaws] and then punish them." Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia, Book 1
Here's an idea for a frighteningly ambitions startup: Kill the prison-industrial complex! How? Fight crime! It costs a lot of taxpayer money and social wealth to keep things the way they are. Ostensibly the goal is to keep people safe from criminals and reduce crime opportunities.
A friend of mine was mugged on the street for his iPhone last night. He was stabbed in the leg when he fought back (mistake but he's ok thankfully). I wonder if a few high-res web-cams on the street would have kept the attackers at bay?
How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state? Found these startup ideas tonight:
idea: turn my webcam into a security cam [1] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-turn-my-webcam-into-a-s...
idea: millions of sensors / millions of surveys [2] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors-mil...
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
This is without mentioning the privacy aspects; I find it rather worrying how people seem to accept constant surveillance so easily.
[+] [-] rogerbinns|14 years ago|reply
Britain has been doing the experiment for you and is generally regarded as the most surveilled western society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingdo...
Sensationalist article by the Daily Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock-figure...
Some articles on the resulting (in)effectiveness of having the cameras:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CC...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/6083476/CC...
http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/crb97-005.pdf (Warning: PDF)
[+] [-] ktizo|14 years ago|reply
Perhaps helping to create a society that is more personally fulfilling and with a greater degree of social equality and fairness might be a good place to focus.
So everything from free local arts/education/tech facilities through to high quality affordable group legal insurance.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives.
The first step is simple & straightforward. Fix education (or what is preventing them from getting an education) first, then tackle other problems with prisons.
[+] [-] cullenking|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
That is not simple and straightforward because powerful interest groups don't want education to be reformed along those lines. "The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985)
It would be a distinctly good idea, and would surely reduce crime rates, to reform education along the lines of ensuring that all pupils in schools in the United States learn fundamental literacy and numeracy. According to the PISA international education studies, some countries do much better than the United States in this regard.
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/9/49685503.pdf
[+] [-] diogenescynic|14 years ago|reply
"Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system": http://www.laprogressive.com/black-men-prison-system/
"As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities."
I read this and think there must be something more complex going on than just graduation rates. Too many interest groups are getting rich trying to fix a perpetually broken education system and the same goes for prisons.
[+] [-] rsheridan6|14 years ago|reply
It's probably somewhere between difficult and impossible, not simple and straightforward.
[+] [-] hariananth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|14 years ago|reply
Lack of education is not the cause, it's a symptom of the same thing that causes the incarceration, i.e. it's a confounding variable not an independent cause.
[+] [-] unicron|14 years ago|reply
Don't sort out education, sort out the social stereotypes and cultural issues that turn people into pieces of shit. Education will fix itself then.
[+] [-] cgrubb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cullenking|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsns|14 years ago|reply
Another problem is the silly/cruel "three strikes" laws, which might put someone in jail for life for stealing a loaf of bread out of hunger.
[+] [-] eliam|14 years ago|reply