http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/mag...ison041104.phpAmerican streets are much safer today than they were thirty years ago, and until recently most conservatives had a simple explanation: more prison beds equal less crime. This argument was a fulcrum of Republican politics for decades, boosting candidates from Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush and scores more in the states. Once elected, these Republicans (and their Democratic imitators) built prisons on a scale that now exceeds such formidable police states as Russia and Iran, with 3 percent of the American population behind bars or on parole and probation.
Now that crime and the fear of victimization are down, we might expect Republicans to take a victory lap, casting safer streets as a vindication of their hard line. Instead, more and more conservatives are clambering down from the prison ramparts. Take Newt Gingrich, who made a promise of more incarceration an item of his 1994 Contract with America. Seventeen years later, he had changed his tune. “There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential,” Gingrich wrote in 2011. “The criminal-justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it.”
None of Gingrich’s rivals in the vicious Republican presidential primary exploited these statements. If anything, his position is approaching party orthodoxy. The 2012 Republican platform declares, “Prisons should do more than punish; they should attempt to rehabilitate and ins ute proven prisoner reentry systems to reduce recidivism and future victimization.” What’s more, a rogue’s gallery of conservative crime warriors have joined Gingrich’s call for Americans to rethink their incarceration reflex. They include Ed Meese, Asa Hutchinson, William Bennett—even the now-infamous American Legislative Exchange Council. Most importantly, more than a dozen states have launched serious criminal justice reform efforts in recent years, with conservatives often in the lead.
Skeptics might conclude that conservatives are only rethinking criminal justice because lockups have become too expensive. But whether prison costs too much depends on what you think of incarceration’s benefits. Change is coming to criminal justice because an alliance of evangelicals and libertarians have put those benefits on trial. Discovering that the nation’s prison growth is morally objectionable by their own, conservative standards, they are beginning to attack it—and may succeed where liberals, working the issue on their own, have, so far, failed.
"lockups have become too expensive"
Repug solution: privatize to CCA, etc, which costs even more, and gets a tier product, but the PIC is a huge Repug $$$ contributor.
IBIWISI that old white Repugs ever say punishing blacks and browns is too expensive when those expenses are going to for-profit corporations.
I've got a better solution. Quit doing crime.
http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.co...n-statist.htmlStaffing woes at several isolated, rural Texas prisons leave legislators with three options: A) Increase pay to attract workers in areas where TDCJ competes with active oil fields and fracking operations for employees, B) close understaffed facilities and consolidate employees in fewer units to relieve understaffing, or C) do nothing and wait for violence or litigation to force state action after the fact where it could not be moved based on reason or foresight.
A recent news story portrayed understaffing at Texas prisons as having reached a critical juncture: According to the Texas Tribune's Maurice Chammah, "Leaders of the state’s prison employee union say that officials are leaving Texas prisons dangerously understaffed. On Wednesday, they renewed calls for better pay, noting that the holiday season is a particularly dangerous time in Texas prisons." The union wants "to shorten the amount of time it takes to get from minimum pay, $27,000, to maximum pay, $37,000, from eight to five years. 'We’re trying to get these new boots [newly-hired officers] a light at the end of the tunnel,' [AFSCME executive director Brian] Olsen said."
Notably, pay hikes for guards were not among the "exceptional items" requested by TDCJ in their biennial Legislative Appropriations Request. Still, that doesn't mean the Lege can ignore the problem.
Obviously, the union's preference would be to keep the same number of employees or increase their ranks while paying everybody more. Let's call that the "statist option," or Option A The main problem: Increasing pay at 111 units statewide makes little sense when understaffing is isolated to 7-8 specific units. Most COs benefiting from the pay hike would not assist the state in staffing these few, problem facilities and boosting pay for everyone would be costly. Option B - reducing incarceration rates and closing prison units to consolidate understaffed guards in fewer facilities - harks back to Ronald Reagan's strategy as Governor of California to reduce state prison costs. Call Option B the "Reaganite option." Option C, of course, is simply what happens when the state fails to anticipate trends, muddling forward into this predictable mess without a plan until the vicissitudes of fate leave the state with no real choices at all. Let's call that the "Oops option."
Of America's incarcerated population, only 7% of them are violent offenders. Private prison lobbyists funnel tons of resources into keeping programs like the war on drugs in place so they can keep their prisons filled due to bull laws.
Newt is dead on here, but he's kidding himself if the Republicans are gonna be the party that ends the war on drugs. The fact Obama has been an asshole and kept it going stronger than ever tells me nothing short of a miracle will end the war on drugs.
crime rates are way down from 30 years ago, so why do we continue to lock people up at a rate exceeding that of China and Iran?
Your username makes sense.
If you keep black people in prison, white people don't have to look at them.
If we were to take the money spent on the drug war and instead use it for medical care which is what these people really need then I can only imagine what we could do with that to make this nation a better place.
The economic ramifications of reducing the demand for law enforcement and incarceration are obvious. It is a significant enough component of GDP to at least consider however it is obviously money much better spent on more worthwhile causes.
obviously someone entered in the data wrong
translation: I do not want to believe this so I will simply dismiss it out of hand.
Your type is dragging this country down by acting on what you want to be true rather than what is true.
or, the LE bureaucracy, like all others, seeks to enlarge itself beyond all rationality.
I'll go with "B".
What if part of the reason crime rates are down from 30 years ago is that the people who commit crimes are kept locked up?
Note I said PART of the reason. My understanding is that another big part of the reason crime rates are way down is nationwide legalized abortion. The big drop in crime rates came out of nowhere in the late 1980's to early 1990's just about the time the generation of criminals that would have been born in the 1970's would have reached their teens and the beginning of their criminal careers.
And now we are at a point where a second generation of criminals is not being born.
Even though economists and statisticians have researched this hypothesis and found support for it ad-nauseum, I'm eagerly waiting for one of the right-to-lifers on this site who has no background in statistics or economics whatsoever to see this post and dismiss the studies done as atheist propoganda.
"reason crime rates are way down is nationwide legalized abortion"
drop in crime late 80s and after was the huge dropoff in crack cocaine epidemic.
But I figure you'd be be thrilled if black and brown future criminals were aborted in the 70s.
all very plausible, but it's unclear how locking up more and more non-violent drug users decreases violent crime.
Pre-emptive incarceration.
I am unaware of any correlation between the two, but supposing the rate of pre-incarceration be high enough -- and perhaps in the US it is -- I can see how that might work.
via The Atlantic
Sources: Crime data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, family structure from the U.S. Census Bureau.
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