HOLDER PROPOSES CHANGES IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

[symple19]

Should I even be cautiously optimistic about this?


WASHINGTON (AP) -- With the U.S. facing massive overcrowding in its prisons, Attorney General Eric Holder is calling for major changes to the nation's criminal justice system that would scale back the use of harsh sentences for certain drug-related crimes. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HOLDER_SENTENCING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-08-12-00-07-22

[symple19]

Sorry about caps in the title...Copy/paste

[AaronY]

http://www.amazon.com/The-Colossus-Huge-Dildo-Pounder/product-reviews/B00564A3JS/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 imo

[boutons_deux]

strict minimum sentences and the Rockefeller NY drug laws are an abomination.

but the worst are the mj laws. it must be legalized so cops can't utlize it to "fry" n!gg@s and hispanics. So much fucked up deeply and widely in the criminal justice system.


also:

America’s Disappeared

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_disappeared_20130812/

[boutons_deux]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/US_incarceration_timeline-clean-fixed-timescale.svg/693px-US_incarceration_timeline-clean-fixed-timescale.svg.png


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States

PIC is totally out of control.

[DUNCANownsKOBE]

lol privatized prisons
lol libertardians who claim to hate nanny states but love :cryprivatization:cry

[DUNCANownsKOBE]

Should I even be cautiously optimistic about this?
No.

Obama has been as big a marijuana nazi as any jeebotard Republican has been yet never gets criticized for it.

[jag]

Weren't some of those NY drug laws put in place to give the city leverage against the mob?

[boutons_deux]

Weren't some of those NY drug laws put in place to give the city leverage against the mob?

maybe, but no mention of mob target here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Drug_Laws


As usual, there were effectively for "end user" targets and racist:

White people were using a lot of drugs in the 1970s and committing a lot of crimes, yet the people being arrested and sent to prison under the Rockefeller laws came almost entirely from poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/14/171822608/the-drug-laws-that-changed-how-we-punish (http://www.npr.org/2013/02/14/171822608/the-drug-laws-that-changed-how-we-punish)

[boutons_deux]

I note how the huge ramp up in prison population started under diseased, useful idiot St Ronnie, just another 1% racist taking care of his own PIC corps.

[boutons_deux]

Landmark ruling: NYPD’s stop-and-frisk deemed unconstitutional (http://www.salon.com/2013/08/12/stop_and_frisk_practices_ruled_unconstitutional/)


With a landmark decision in a historic trial, federal judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices were (as many civil liberties advocates and community groups have long argued) discriminatory and unconstitutional.


During the lengthy Floyd vs. City of New York (http://www.salon.com/2013/03/18/stop_and_frisk_goes_on_trial/) trial, both victims of undue NYPD stops and officers themselves gave evidence. It was revealed that the police worked with a quota system, which encouraged officers to target young black and Latino men in poor areas in order to hand out tickets and make arrests on drug charges, based on stops made without probable cause.

The New York Times noted (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-practice-violated-rights-judge-rules.html) on the judge’s decision:

These stop-and-frisk episodes, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, according to the ruling. It also found violations with the 14th Amendment.

To fix the constitutional violations, Judge Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan said she intended to designate an outside lawyer, Peter L. Zimroth, to monitor the Police Department’s compliance with the Constitution.


http://www.salon.com/2013/08/12/stop_and_frisk_practices_ruled_unconstitutional/

[angrydude]

lol privatized prisons
lol libertardians who claim to hate nanny states but love :cryprivatization:cry

I don't know of any libertarians who like privatized prisons.

[boutons_deux]

libertarians hate govt and govt regulation, love unregulated "free market", so govt giving prisons to corps is consistent with libertarian hating.

[DUNCANownsKOBE]

I don't know of any libertarians who like privatized prisons.That's because the libertarian randian ideology has countless intellectual contradictions and holes (which is generally the case when you oversimplify things as much as libertarians do).The main principle of libertarianism is that shrinking government as much as possible and letting the private sector control as much as possible is the best solution because the private sector is highly efficient and lowers costs while the gubbamint is inefficient and corrupt. The idea of government outsourcing the incarceration of inmates to private corporations is a libertarian wet dream whether they admit it or not as it goes hand in hand with randian ideology.

[boutons_deux]

Corporate America's New Profit Center: Put as Many People in Jail as Possible

Up until 1980, Republicans said you waited for the market to absorb the surplus of workers, while Democrats said you proactively used the powers of government to put Americans back to work.

But then Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and everything changed.

When Reagan stepped foot in the White House, he said the job of the government was not just to ignore a surplus of workers, but to figure out ways to make a buck off of them. Reagan lived by the notion that profit was king. If America’s businesspeople always and only did whatever made them the most money, that would magically cure all ills with supply-side fairy dust.

He fundamentally changed the way that we deal with surplus workers. Instead of ignoring them, or having the government put them to work, there was now a third option.

Make a profit off of them.

There are a variety of ways capitalists make a profit off of poor and unemployed people, from payday lenders, to “rent to own” furniture stores, to the most radical of them all: Turn them into prisoners.

That latter is the most radical, and has turned out to be the most profitable for America’s capitalists.

It’s almost elegant in its simplicity.

Turn unemployed Americans into criminals. Track them, punish them for any crime possible, take away their rights and throw them into for-profit prisons.

Once thrown inside a for-profit prison, an inmate needs food, housing, healthcare and other services. This means huge profits for capitalists. They’re raking in tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner per year – hundreds of percent more than Roosevelt paid to simply put them back to work.

And turning unemployed Americans into very profitable prisoners is a booming business.

From the beginning of America until 1980, the incarceration rate in America remained fairly steady. While Nixon declaring his war on drugs in 1971 did slightly increase incarceration in the United States, the increase was nothing drastic.

But then Reagan came to Washington, and his buddies realized they could make a buck off of unemployed Americans.

The nation’s incarceration rate took off like a rocket (http://www.classwarfareexists.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/US_incarceration_timeline.gif).

Thanks to Reagan elevating profit to a religion, between 1980 and 2009, the state and federal prison population in the U.S. increased by over 700 percent.

Since the for-profit prison industry started aggressively buying Congressmen 15 years ago, the number of people thrown into for-profit prisons has exploded.

And Americans sitting in jail make a very exploitable, very profitable, slave-like labor force.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the minimum wage for a prisoner who works in the UNICOR program, the federal government’s prison industries program, is 23 cents an hour. The maximum UNICOR wage is $1.15 an hour.

Across all state prisons, the average minimum wage for prisoners for non-industrial work is 93 cents per hour.

And some states, like Georgia and Texas, are completely upfront about their slave-labor camps. They pay absolutely nothing to prisoners.

Because the Reagan Revolution changed America’s value system, we stopped asking, “What’s the best way to deal with surplus workers?”

Instead, we started asking, “How can we make the most money off surplus workers?”

The logical answer was a return to slavery, and it has been embraced by capitalists with a vengeance.

http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/thom-hartmann-what-do-you-do-when-you-no-longer-need-your?paging=off


Rather than provide min wage jobs at $30K/year, taxpayers pay PIC $30K/year to lock them up.

[angrydude]

That's because the libertarian randian ideology has countless intellectual contradictions and holes (which is generally the case when you oversimplify things as much as libertarians do).The main principle of libertarianism is that shrinking government as much as possible and letting the private sector control as much as possible is the best solution because the private sector is highly efficient and lowers costs while the gubbamint is inefficient and corrupt. The idea of government outsourcing the incarceration of inmates to private corporations is a libertarian wet dream whether they admit it or not as it goes hand in hand with randian ideology.

Yes, an ideology which opposes violence, wants fewer laws so fewer people go to prison, and at times borders on anarchism wants market forces to streamline incarceration and make it more profitable to put more people in jail to increase human suffering.

[angrydude]

BTW Ayn Rand was an objectivist, not a libertarian

And again, you're so smart, the "libertarisnism" is so much more inconsistent than either liberalism or conservatism.

[boutons_deux]

http://www.statista.com/graphic/1/262962/countries-with-the-most-prisoners-per-100-000-inhabitants.jpg

[DUNCANownsKOBE]

Yes, an ideology which opposes violence, wants fewer laws so fewer people go to prison, and at times borders on anarchism wants market forces to streamline incarceration and make it more profitable to put more people in jail to increase human suffering.
Sounds about right tbh. Libertarians are all about the market streamlining everything.

[boutons_deux]

Libertarians have the fatal fantasy that the market and everything else is trustworthy and self-correcting. Libertarians are luckily never going to obtain serious power to apply their fantasies to the real world.

[MannyIsGod]

The move is good, but its time for them to actually pass legislation on the subject and not these half measures.

[Jacob1983]

Do you think Holder has any regrets about the time he gave bomb making materials to Tim McVeigh?

[boutons_deux]

The move is good, but its time for them to actually pass legislation on the subject and not these half measures.

Repugs everywhere will attack, ridicule any move to lighten sentencing as "soft of crime" (iow, reducing the prison population costs PIC $Bs). I'm sure ALEC is preparing to dictate to Repugs how to get "on message"

Obama could by executive order an amnesty nationwide all non-violent drug possession prisoners, but he won't.