sigh

can we go back 40 years and cancel the war on drugs

Some (I am sure not all) of the inmates in Supermaxes are really vile people though, would would prey on the rest of the prison populace, or the public. They also run criminal enterprises on the outside, via coded messaging.

I don't have answers on this one. I have wondered, for years, whether Crescent City has been changed by the presence of Pelican Bay Prison. I would not be crazy about having that facility in my neighborhood. . .

But Silverstein contends that if people understood the grim context in which the killings at Marion took place, the snitch games and psychological warfare and organized violence of prison life, they wouldn't be so quick to demonize him.

This is interesting stuff. I often wonder how about the scale of prisoner-on-prisoner/guard violence. It'd be interesting to know how much of the time being served by current prisoners is for crimes committed while in prison. And then what the prison population would look like if there were no prison crime.

I could probably look up these stats, but I'm already procrastinating on stuff I need to do.

the NYer article is good

Funny how the whole 'don't ratchet up consequences ineffectively' thing doesn't get through people's heads

That New Yorker piece is one that has stuck vividly in my mind since I read it. Especially the parts about how the human brain, with its mirror neurons, actually relies on contact with other humans in order to even function at a basic level. That's fascinating stuff - the idea that simply removing someone from contact with other humans tears apart their own humanness, making them in essence unhuman.

Our prison situation is an international disgrace.

The Devil's Chair

Miko, I think the average person also forgets that to the extent it is a disgrace, the whole nature of law enforcement and imprisonment in the U.S. has changed very rapidly in 20-30yrs as a result of very distinct laws, procedures, politicians etc. Of course I wasn't around through this whole period but from what I read, especially in policing there's been a huge 'militarization' (not to mention lack of consequences for increasing collateral damage.)

SWAT teams are called out about 40,000 times a year in the United States; in the 1980s, that figure was 3,000 times a year. Most "call-outs" were to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5439

Oh, I agree. It's a pretty recent phenomenon (although any study of prisons in America is a shocking thing to engage in; to their crecit, they were actually developed by Quakers as humanitarian endeavors in the first half of our country's history (humane in that they were the alternative to hanging death, and aimed at rehabilitation). But it's been a long road since then. The prisons of the Reconstruction/nadir South were unjust and horrifically tortuous places as well.

But the outscaling of the prison system and the increasing corporate investment in prisons is making it orders of magnitude worse.