Bad conditions in American prisons

If you commit no crime and hurt nobody, you don't get to prison, but the lack of economic opportunities put you on the street. Then, on the street, you must commit crime to survive. So your next step is prison.

Then, we spend more tax dollars on prisons than anything else.

It would be interesting to find out why prison business is more profitable than finding a way of not cornering out everyone out of economic opportunities.

 

Racial segregation would put an end to most of the prison rapes, and is much more humane than castration. Progressives are stupid for refusing to consider this option. see http://www.politicalforum.com/race-relations/243789-epedemic-black-white-prison-rapes.html

Castration is a very very severe cruel punishment; only serial rapists that refuse to stop reoffending deserve to be castrated.

 

What a lovely imaginary world you inhabit .
Naturally I apologise if your post was intentioned good humour and light satire .

 

I can't imagine what it is like to be castrated, but I guess anything is better than spending endless years locked together with a hundred explosively violent individuals in one tight room.

 

I don't think that the prison conditions are that bad in the USA. Otherwise, you would see a lot more gunfights during arrest protocols.

 

A point to ponder in that regard is the fact that some of the guilty Abu Ghraib troops were prison guards back home. You have to wonder why they didn't think the goings-on were unusual.

 

There are frequently gun fights when a criminal thinks he is in danger of being arrested. Far many more in the USA than anywhere in Europe. Most of the criminals that put up a fight have either already experienced prison before, or have heard multiple first-hand accounts from one of their bad-influence friends. There is a common mentality amongst many criminals in the USA, that they would rather die than spend their life in prison. Suicide is one of the leading cause of death in American prisons. In 2009, 201 prisoners committed suicide in the state prisons alone.

There are estimated to be over 300,000 cases of cases of rape against males every year in American prisons and jails.

also see
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235210001194
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_States
http://www.bravemantherapy.com/articles/prison.htm

 

Clearly not enough gunfights. Have you seen the prison population statistics? I don't commit crime as I do not need money nowadays, however, nobody is going to take me anywhere. Someone breaks the door down to my house and there will be a fight to the death if I am in the house. As a non-criminal, I would have to surmise that most criminals either can't fight very well or are voluntarily going to prison. Part of your responsibility as a USA citizen is the preparation for currency collapse, illegal incarceration, crime against you and the consequences of the actions and decisions you have made in your life.

 

Wish the conditions in our prisons were a lot tougher. Elderly folk in the UK often have a harder life than the cons, and many of them fought in or survived two world wars yet have sometime to choose between heating or eating in the winter months while the cons have everything at their fingertips, Heat, Food, TV, Computers, Games, Libraries etc. Aye It's a tough life in a UK Jail....Not.

 

It's been my observation that religious people are the most unforgiving toward criminals. They always want to execute the sinners.

 

I suppose some prisons are bad but for the most part, they get law libraries, internet under supervision, some get conjugal visits, weight rooms, education classes and 3 squares a day. They get climate controlled clean living spaces.

One of the local prisons almost had a riot when they changed to more healthy diets.

If you have not spent any time in a prison, and I have for maintenance, you would not know that you can only trust about 20% of what a prisoner tells you in prison. Lying is probably the most common thing. Also a lot of prisoners don't talk to each other so when there was a problem, I would get prisoner after prisoner ask me the same thing, even though they might be standing next to each other. Most prisoners are there for a reason and often a violent one. Showers are watched by guards. Rooms have nothing that can be removed and yes, they have manufacturing. One new one I was in made uniforms for prisoners and soap.

My daughters husband had an uncle get out of prison after 17 years for killing a store clerk. He and three others tied him up and executed him. I rent a house I had to him and when I had to ask for the rent, he started trying to trash my by lying to the neighbors, all who knew me because I used to live there. I was glad to get him out of there.

One prison I was in had a nice weight lifting room that was gone the next time I went. One of the prisoners went on a rampage and used one of the bars to start trying to break the security windows. Most of them were broken but held together by the imbedded wire grid. One guard told me they had the right to shoot him, but didn't.

 

There has also been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors’ prison, which should serve as an ominous sign of our dangerous reliance on prisons to manage any and all of society’s problems. According to the Wall Street Journal, "more than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can't or won't pay to be jailed." They found that judges "signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties." In some cases, people have even been sentenced to life in prison for shoplifting: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23strikes-t.html?_r=1


Exploitation of Prisoners

Prior to the 1970s, private corporations were prohibited from using prison labor as a result of the chain gang and convict leasing scandals. But in 1979, the US Department of Justice admits that congress began a process of deregulation to "restore private sector involvement in prison industries to its former status, provided certain conditions of the labor market were met.” Minimum wage laws do not apply to prisoners. Over the last 30 years, at least 37 states have enacted laws permitting the use of convict labor by private enterprise, with an average pay of $0.93 to $4.73 per day.

Federal prisoners receive more generous wages that range from $0.23 to $1.25 per hour, and are employed by Unicor, a wholly owned government corporation established by Congress in 1934. Its principal customer is the Department of Defense, from which Unicor derives approximately 53 percent of its sales. Some 21,836 inmates work in Unicor programs. Subsequently, the nation's prison industry – prison labor programs producing goods or services sold to other government agencies or to the private sector -- now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company (besides General Motors), and generates about $2.4 billion in revenue annually. Noah Zatz of UCLA law school estimates that:
“Well over 600,000, and probably close to a million, inmates are working full-time in jails and prisons throughout the United States. Perhaps some of them built your desk chair: office furniture, especially in state universities and the federal government, is a major prison labor product. Inmates also take hotel reservations at corporate call centers, make body armor for the U.S. military, and manufacture prison chic fashion accessories, in addition to the iconic task of stamping license plates.”

Some of the largest and most powerful corporations have a stake in the expansion of the prison labor market, including but not limited to IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, and Target Stores. “In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria's Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace 'Made in Honduras' labels on garments with 'Made in the USA.'

In Wisconsin, prisoners are now taking up jobs that were once held by unionized workers, as a result of Governor Scott Walker’s contentious anti-union law. Cheap and, in some cases coerced, labor pushes down wages for everyone. In Arizona, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” Joe Arpaio, requires his Maricopa County inmates to enroll in chain gangs to perform various community services or face lockdown with three other inmates in an 8-by-12-foot cell, for 23 hours a day. In June of this year, Arpaio started a female-only chain gang made up of women convicted of drunk driving. Prison labor is frequently utilised to make office furniture, especially in state universities and the federal government, which is a major prison labor product.

 

So prisoners are paying their debt to society creating office supplies for the government. The cheap labor they provide keeps the costs to the government down, cutting the need for taxes and offsetting the cost of their incarceration.

How is this a bad plan?

 

It takes jobs away from law abiding Americans.

 

And cuts the tax burden of other law-abiding citizens.

 

They're not "burdened" by taxes if they don't have jobs.

 

Prisons should support themselves as much as possible by growing their own food, dowing their own laundry, etc.

But prisoners should not be used to compete with working Americans.
We not only have the pressure of jobs overseas but competition from underpaid workers in our own country.

And when people have little or no money to spend how will the general economy improve?

 

If this source didn't exist, the government would just end up buying fewer supplies. Right now budget are being cut, so no department would increase spending on office supplies just because costs went up.

Any gains in jobs caused by the elimination of this program would be offset by jobs lost from all of the suppliers that produce the raw materials currently used by Unicor - all of which are produced domestically and do support American jobs.

Something similar to this argument was made a few years ago in New York (and has been repeated many other places.) The school ground in New York were getting run-down and overgrown. The school districts just didn't have enough money to pay for ground maintenance. A bunch of parents got together one weekend and decided to perform a big cleanup, gathering trash, trimming shrubs, etc. The union sued the school district because these parents were taking union jobs. The truth is that there were no jobs to take. If the parents hadn't done this, none of the work would have been done. The school wasn't going to hire union labor to do the work, so those jobs weren't taken.

An even closer example was an argument on one Air Force Base. They had a minimum security prison on base, and paid the prisoners a tiny amount to perform grounds maintenance - mowing, edging, etc. A couple of local landscape contractors complained that they should get the contract and do the work. The response was simple - if the prisoners didn't do it, the uniformed members on base would. There was no contract to win. Hiring prisoners just allowed for the military to use its members for their actual jobs - in this case training new officer recruits and supporting the Air Force communications network.

I agree that prisoners shouldn't be used to eliminate jobs, and nothing that prisoners do or produce should be available in the open market or for the public, but if prisoners can be used to increase the services the government can provide, I'm all for it.

 

I saw a program on workers in prison.

They were raising Tilapia, and making western saddles, among other jobs.

I think they paid 60 cents an hour.

 

The prisoner should be paying restitution to the victims of his crimes. "Debt to society" is socialist rhetoric intended to make those who have committed no real crime of force to fraud to be "indebted" to the collective as punishment for violating the dictates of the political class. Since a "debt to society" is incalculable, it can be argued that everyone owes such a debt and can be lawfully and morally forced to work for the good of society for any period of years deemed appropriate by government. Only when the laws that allow for punishment of individuals reflect crimes of force or fraud and do not criminalize behaviors which are peaceful and do not have an identifiable victim can it be considered moral to charge a prisoner for the cost of his incarceration and require him to make restitution to his victims.

 

Like the old saying goes,"Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."

 

This is really just another way of saying prisoners deserve whatever abuse they suffer in prison.

The punishment should fit the crime. People who have committed very different degrees of crime are thrown together into the same prison. Some of these people deserve to be slowly and painfully tortured to death, while some of the others may have just made a one-time mistake in their life that we can sympathise with.

We often hear stories about fathers that took justice into their own hands when a rapist that raped and murdered his wife/daughter escapes justice based on a technicality of the law. While such fathers should still be sent to prison, that does not mean they should have to suffer bad conditions.

If you are advocating prison abuse as part of the punishment, at the very least the prisoners should first be separated into two groups, based on whether they deserve to be abused or not.

 

Prisons used to be places of punishment. They were there to hold people who were to be tortured as their punishment. Anyone still okay with that?

From the 19th Century on - and this took place in both the US and in Britain - reformers saw rehabilitation as a possibility for prisoners so reform of character became an objective.

Me I just see a prison as somewhere to keep criminals to give society a rest. I fully support attempts at rehabilitation and education of prisoners, may as well give it a go, it might work with some.

Conditions in prison should be such that prisoners are kept manageable, remember people who staff the prisons on our behalf are working with very dangerous people. I'd keep the bastards fat and lazy, give them junk food and cable, anything to make sure they don't represent a threat to staff.

 

a typical American prison spends less than $2.50 per day on food per prisoner.

Appalling Prison and Jail Food Leaves Prisoners Hungry for Justice
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/(S(...articleid=22246&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 (link)



I do not think I could bring myself to eat this wretched food.

abuse?

 

There are plenty of inmates who will eat it for you. Then you starve.