US rates of incarceration beat those of any European country to include Russia and former satellites of Stalin's Soviet Union. By the time you read this, more than 2.3 million adults will have been locked up in 'big houses' throughout the US. That number far exceeds some 1.8 million adult prisoners representing the total prison population of 36 European countries where the aggregate population is 2.7 times that of the US. A recent Pew study fingers a trend that had been embraced by Bush's Texas --the rapid outsourcing of prison construction and management throughout the US. Over this period, crime rates have risen. It was Texas under the incompetent rule of then Governor George W. Bush that became known as the gulag state of Texas for having turned a social problem into just another GOP scam, a get rich quick scheme, another way in which GOP blood-suckers feed at the public trough. Convicts are no longer people but a source of cheap, slave labor. Guilt or innocence is of no concern to corporate robber barons. It is an Orwellian nightmare of waste, graft, and fascism in which no one is held to account.After months alone in his cell, Scot Noble Payne finished 20 pages of letters, describing to loved ones the decrepit conditions of the prison where he was serving time for molesting a child. Then Payne used a razor blade to slice two 3-inch gashes in his throat. Guards found his body in the cell's shower, with the water still running.It is no surprise that filthy rich, GOP robber barons would find big bucks in the prison business, a process that begins when the 'state' outsources every aspect of penal industry --prison construction, staffing, operation. Profitability is directly related to the number of inmates who are ultimately arrested and convicted, often upon the flimiest evidence. Certainly, the money to be made in the prison business is directly related to arrest and conviction rates. Corporate profits drive the system --not justice The lesson to be learned is that if you don't care about your soul and just want to get rich, forget about real estate! Set your sites high. Operate your own gulag archipelago of robotized prisons to warehouse 'evil doers' to include those who merely fall through the gaping, yawning holes in a 'safety net' that never was.
"Try to comfort my mum too and try to get her to see that I am truly happy again," he wrote his uncle. "I tell you, it sure beats having water on the floor 24/7, a smelly pillow case, sheets with blood stains on them and a stinky towel that hasn't been changed since they caught me."
Payne's suicide on March 4 came seven months after he was sent to the squalid privately run Texas prison by Idaho authorities trying to ease inmate overcrowding in their own state. His death exposed what had been Idaho's standard practice for dealing with inmates sent to out-of-state prisons: Out of sight, out of mind.
It also raised questions about a company hired to operate prisons in 15 states, despite reports of abusive guards and terrible sanitation.
Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press through an open-records request show Idaho did little monitoring of out-of-state inmates, despite repeated complaints from prisoners, their families and a prison inspector....
--Suicide Exposes Squalid Conditions in Privately-Run Texas Prison; Company Operates in 15 States, JOHN MILLER
The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the largest incarcerated population in the world, with 2 million people behind bars as of year-end 1999.2 With only 5% of the world's population, the US holds a quarter of the world's prisoners In the 1990s alone, more persons were added to prisons and jails than in any other decade on record.As the GOP "Enronized" the great state of Texas, an assembly line criminal justice system, in cahoots with a medieval, privatized prison system, proved to be an oxymoron. It was "criminal" but hardly "justice". Despite the GOPs "worst" efforts, crime in Texas, always a topic of much discussion and study, has gotten worse. Texas is big on capital punishment, but even its industrialized application of the death penalty just cannot kill off the criminals as fast as they procreate and multiply. The GOP may be seeking a "final solution"....
In a continued examination of those states that lead the national trend in increasing levels of incarceration, the Justice Policy Institute turns a focus on the state of Texas. The Lone Star State's criminal justice system is particularly worthy of scrutiny at this time, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported in August, 2000 that Texas, for the first time, leads the nation in imprisoning its citizens: Texas now has the nation's largest incarcerated population under the jurisdiction of its prison system. Since 1990, Texas has lead the nation's 50 states with an annual average growth rate of 11.8%, about twice the annual average growth rate of other state prison systems (6.1%). Even more important to the national context, since 1990, nearly one in five new prisoners added to the nation's prisons (18%) was in Texas.--An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State
...by year's end 1999, there were 706,600 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:Texas is called the gulag state for good reasons. Certainly, justice in Texas is applied inequitably. Minorities --primarily black and hispanic --are disproportionately represented in the Texas gulag system but under represented in the State legislature, the various city councils, and the state judicial system. For example, blacks represent only 12% of the Texas population but comprise 44% of the total incarcerated population. Whites make up about 58% of Texas' total population, but only 30% of the prison and jail population.
- There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
- According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.
- The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
- Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population, the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).
- If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
- The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.
- The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.
--An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State
The GOP are consistent to the point of boring. Therefore, what the GOP has done to Texas is a clue to the effect Bush/GOP rule has had nationally, globally. The GOP modus operandi is premised as it is upon delusion, lies, spin, claptrap ideology and bullshit! The increasingly absurd campaign of John McCain is proof of that. Failing to wage an effective "war on terrorism" abroad, the GOP presides over rising crime rates at home, throughout the nation. The GOP has always been fond of waging wars on crime though the party itself is a crime syndicate.
- While one out of every 20 Texas adults is under some form of criminal justice control, one out of 3 young black men (29% of the black male population between 21 and 29) are in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day.
- One out of every four adult black men in Texas is under some form of criminal justice supervision.
- Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at a rate seven times greater than whites. While there are 555 whites behind bars for every 100,000 in the Texas population, there are an astonishing 3862 African Americans behind bars for every 100,000 in the state. This is nearly 63% higher than the national incarceration rate for blacks of 2366 per 100,000.
- If Texas' black incarceration rate was applied to the United States, the number of blacks behind bars on a national level would increase by half a million. There are currently an estimated 824,900 African Americans in prison and jail in the US The new figure, 1,346,370, would increase the number of African Americans incarcerated in the US by 63%.
Five years of crime rates show that murders, robberies, rapes and other violent offenses last year were returning to the peak, set in 2002. Crime dropped dramatically after that, the figures show.Those stats confirm a trend of at least two years. Yet, Justice Department flack, Brian Roehrkasse, called the report "good news", a lie not unlike "we are winning in Iraq". I wonder how Roehrkasse felt about the FBI summary of 2006 indicating that robberies had increased 9.7 percent nationwide, arson 6.8 percent, murders 1.4 percent! It is the situation in Texas, Bush's so-called "homestate", where the effects of the GOP's medieval policies have fallen to Rick Perry.
In 2006, an estimated 1,417,000 violent crimes were committed, a sharp increase from the 1,360,000 reported in 2004 and approaching the estimated 1,425,000 in 2002.--New York Times, Violent Crime Reported Up 2% in 2006
Reflecting a surge in crime in Texas after the dislocations of Hurricane Katrina, Houston recorded a sharp increase in homicides, to 202 for the first half of 2006, up from 158 in the comparable pre-storm period last year. Three Texas cities ranked among the nation’s top 10 in crimes per capita.FBI statistics prove that since Bush seized the White House, crime rates have jumped. Violent crime increased at 2.5 percent in 2005, the highest rate in 15 years. Nevermind! Bush favored a 52 percent cut in law enforcement funding. That's not the worst of it. Bush and the GOP will never admit that GOP policies prove the utter failure, the moral paucity, the complete intellectual inadequacy of the GOP as a party, as an institution. Utterly predictable, the GOP will cite every fact proving their endemic failures as reasons to compound the problem. Having replaced ideas with propaganda, plans with platitudes, the GOP will simply roll out more of the same old GOP eyewash, claptrap, and bullshit!
Homicides in Dallas were down to 101 from 106 but it still ranked as the nation’s most crime-ridden big city, with 3,985 overall crimes per 100,000 population, followed by Houston with 3,444. After Phoenix with 3,436, San Antonio was 4th with 3,422.--An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State
We would call a doctor an idiot who tells you to just keep on doing whatever it is that's making you sick. Yet the GOP does that repeatedly, mistaking the illness for the cure and making it worse with greed and incompetence. Confronted with rising crime and swelling prisons, the GOP will propose even newer programs guaranteed to raise crime rates even as they enrich cronies with privatized prison systems, privatized Blackwater storm-troopers, a robotized surveillance system.
It is but a small step then to privatizing the state police or even the various metropolitan police departments. Blackwater, I am sure, would love to get the juicy contract, the license to kill and get paid for it. In that event, the march toward fascism will have been completed. Life in America will have become a nightmare for everyone but an elite of about one to five percent of the population. The streets will be patrolled by armor-plated Blackwater goon squads and other gung ho gun nuts for whom human life means little to nothing.
In the meantime, the words of the late Molly Ivins seem prescient, a plaintive warning about the breakdown of law and order that follows from the complete and institutional breakdown of the rule of law. We will have the right-wing to blame for having made of America the ugliest police state in the history of the world.
The notorious inability of prosecutors to admit that they are ever wrong is a fact of life. What is far more horrifying is the refusal of judges and courts to look at evidence that proves innocence. Can you imagine how that must feel - to be in prison for a crime you didn't commit and to finally be able to prove it, only to have a court refuse to consider the evidence? Most of this is a consequence of a noxious law that Congress rushed through after the Oklahoma City bombing. Called the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the law was aimed at the ability of federal judges to second-guess state courts and at the ability of prisoners to file endless habeas corpus claims challenging the constitutionality of their convictions.A day after the United States Supreme Court halted an execution in Texas, that medieval state made public more plans to murder more people in the name of state and justice.
Though several other states are halting lethal injections until it is clear whether they are constitutional, Texas is taking a different course, risking a confrontation with the court.This latest outrage points up an interesting and apparent correlation between Bush's failed "war on terrorism" and the equally failed "war on crime" in Texas. Now, of course, Texas' prison virus will spread across the prison nation that Bush and his ilk --the GOP --has made of America.
“The Supreme Court’s decision to stay convicted murderer Carlton Turner’s execution will not necessarily result in an abrupt halt to Texas executions,” said Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for Attorney General Greg Abbott of Texas. “State and federal courts will continue to address each scheduled execution on a case-by-case basis.”--Texas Planning New Execution Despite Ruling, New York Times
The American Gulag: System Failure
22 comments:
Great post Len...and of course the conservative movement has turned this into an economic issue by all of the privatization of the prison systems to one degree or another across the country...this issue is now in the pocket of "big business" lobbies... yet another regressive corporatist clique ripping off tax payers and their civil rights alike...it is fucking amazing how utterly ignorant people are of what is going on around them. All of the spin off industries also love that revolving door, it is the entrance to their economic gravy train, ah la the American tax payer and the unrepresented minority and poor.
My suggestion is, that when the Dem gets a real majority after Nov., American progressives had better lean on them with concerns to issues as this...and don't kid your self, that lobby money may have been spread further then we know, time will tell. Again, you have hit on another key social issue of our time, all of the hand wringing of the seventies is long over, the GOP has forged the path of our prison systems for the past thirty years, and as usual it ends up feeding on the less fortunate and the truly gullible American public.
Although I am not totally sold on the radicalized alternative portrayed in the video (not in theory, but in practice)...It appears to be a system that needs to be evolved into. It is similar to what I call a PETA syndrome, such radicalized change usually triggers reactionary movements, creating a counter productive effort. But, we need to get big money out, justice in, and re-define criminality vs incarceration in general...just for starters. All those efforts that are immediately attainable with leadership that has some vision and the guts to follow through.
benmerc
benmerc sez...
when the Dem gets a real majority after Nov., American progressives had better lean on them with concerns to issues as this
The very worst that could happen is that progressives get control and do nothing! The right wing will merely come back stronger than ever.
I am absolutely convinced that the many failures of the criminal justice system --from the lack of adequate representation or defense to increasingly horrific corporatization of the prisons --makes crime itself worse.
Certainly, reforms in these areas must be considered as parts of the greater gestalt if any progress is ever to be made. Most societies must, of necessity, tolerate an inevitable level of crime. It seems to me to be no accident that the most progressive societies have lower crime rates, a more enlightened criminal justice system et al.
Couple this with the emerging US 'justice' system where it's OK if you are rich, white and Republican, and you get a model that looks like a mix between Orwell and Kafka. The worst of all possible worlds.
Well written as always, and timely too.
Of course, pointing out that Bush has exported texas-style fascism isn't going to do anything, Len.
Exactly where did Texas rate in, say, Education when Bush left the Governor's mansion?
Health care of those in poverty? Hunger per capita? If I recall, they were fighting neck and neck with Mississippi for cellar dweller of the US in most catagories except incarceration.
However, if good journalism can make a difference, you're going to lead the charge.
farang
SadButTrue said...
...a mix between Orwell and Kafka. The worst of all possible worlds.
Gee, sad, when you put it THAT way, it's scary.
Exactly where did Texas rate in, say, Education when Bush left the Governor's mansion?
Dead last...behind even Mississippi!
However, if good journalism can make a difference, you're going to lead the charge.
Thanks, farang! I wish I could always live up to that. I would still prefer not to have to write a daily harangue about Bush and the uncountable crimes he has perpetrated against nation and humanity. It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it.
Len, I've posted here some recent news about the Saudis and 911 that might be of interest to you.
The U.S. has a population of around 300 million. And we have a prison population of 2.3 million.
By contrast, Japan has 127 million people and a tiny prison population of around 70,000.
What's interesting is that, even though America has this gigantic prison population, our crime rates are vastly higher than Japan's.
Another interesting detail is that Japan is probably the most egalitarian society in the world.
CEOs in the U.S. make 400 times what the average workers earn. In Japan, CEOs only make around 17 times what the average worker earns.
I'd suspect that this is a key factor in Japan's low prison population. In Japan, virtually everyone is middle class. The extreme, bottom-of-the barrel poverty that is widespread in the U.S. simply doesn't exist in Japan.
In the U.S., one in five children lives in poverty. In Japan, child poverty is virtually non-existent.
I recall the story a few years ago when a CNN news team arrived in Japan to do a story on the supposedly terrible recession that was plaguing Japan at the time.
The news team sent out their camera crew to get some video of distressed, poverty-stricken areas to go with the story. They returned empty-handed; they simply couldn't find any scenes where people were living in abject poverty.
Bear in mind that I'm not saying that Japan is a utopia (no nation is).
However, I do think our nation could learn a thing or two from Japan.
I also believe that it is unfair to blame today's Japanese people for the crimes of their fathers and grandfathers (just as it's unfair to blame today's Germans for the crimes of their fathers and grandfathers).
They are nothing more than revenue streams for a mutated capitalism gone cancerous. When you really dig into it and if you are capable of the mindfuck of trying to truly understand what drives these bastards it is perfectly logical.
It's just another of the aspects of a diseased system like the medical industrial complex that has no vested interest in keeping people healthy or the military industrial complex that trafficks in death for dollars.
Just my two cents, nice to see that we are finally starting to dig into the rancid roots of all of this.
As usual Len you are on the cutting edge.
EE
Fuzzflash sez...
Len, Damien, Benmerc, Sad, and more recenly Marc and EE, you guys are fucking formidable.
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that what we understand to be Jeffersonian Democracy could well be on its last roll of the dice. Should Obi get POTUSed-up and The Dems control both houses after November, then as Benmerc suggests, if we don't lean on them major then it's all over red rover! Mind you, there are a few big IFs to hurdle before that reality comes to pass. We can hardly expect Mammon and Morloch to cop this one lying down.
So much of the ground work for potential major change after Nov, when chicken-shit Pelosi and her spineless underlings will have no choice, is being laid down on this magnificent patch of cyberspace. Havn't commented too much of late because I'm boxing-on in Oz blogs, helping to uproot the remaining neocon-funded think-tank zealots and their sycophants, and hanging them upside down by their ankles on the outskirts of blogdom that they may serve as a warning to the less discerning who may be swayed by their slimy mendacity. You may recall that the voters of Oz electorally ass-holed John Howard PM, BushCo's downunder poodle in Nov. 2007., but the little scumbag's stench still lingers on to provide plenty of work for Fuzz the pine-o-clean zephyr and other like minded cultural warriors.
Christ knows what The Imbecile and his handlers have in store for America before Nov, but what I do know is that you mob of cyber-desperados and truth tellers make my daily visits a freakin' inspiration.
Len, you've turned around bigtime since the folksier and more humble beginnings of your weblog, but journalistic giants like Maureen Farrell from BuzzFlash achives has been pretty quiet for two years and Sweet Molly Ivans has gone to the big Op-Ed room in the sky. You've shouldered the burden well, comrade, and now's not the time fer quitten'. No Sir, not until we slot BushCo and their aiders and abetters onto the 3:10 to Yuma.
S’orright comrades, here's George Carlin (please cut and paste) succinctly explaining The American Dream and why you're not in it. And remember, if 10 million citizens get enraged enough after the Nov. election should the swine try to pull yet another electoral swifty, they can't put 'em all in the Gulag cos there ain't room.
Democracy en masse is math you can’t mess with.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw&feature=related
Len, I hope you don't mind that I linked this piece on my blog, and on another I am affiliated with, Watching Those We Chose. Great research. The link is on a related post of mine, approached from a different angle.
We're living in a totalitarian regime. With Bush's mental diarrhea and his cohorts goose-stepping to the beat of the neocons drum. Mr. Cult of Personality would prefer that the status quo remain through his use of Constitution wrecking appointees and his signing statements on congressional bills well after his term is over.
As a result of Bush’s reckless disregard for the rule of law, we have a society which slightly mirrors the corrupt GOP (George Orwell’s Prediction). Hence crime is on the rise and the need for more prisons. Bush privatizes the prisons and mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money for his cronies. Plus corrupt judges on the take and people with minor crimes, victimless crimes and innocent people being sent to prison and we have a system bristling with prisoners. Private prisons coupled with a police state and the Bushits hit the jackpot.
I honestly thought that living through the Reagan years was a nightmare but it pales in comparison to this hellish administration. Why the fuck do I have to keep on my toes every time this idiot of a president speaks. I refuse to get scared from his fear mongering rhetoric but I fear for what he may try to accomplish before his term is over. Not a fear for me but a heartfelt fear for the U.S. at what a fool will try to do when cornered. A genuine fear for the demise of a democracy.
It's my understanding that up to half of the inmates in US prisons are there for drug offenses. So if all drugs were made legal, the prison population would be half of what it is now.
The topic of the legalization of drugs has been conspicuous by its absence in the current presidential campaign, and nowhere do I see it discussed even in the blogosphere.
Why don't people in a "free" society have the freedom to imbibe any drug they want, without being thrown into jail for this?
Just as people are free to smoke and drink, why aren't they free to take recreational drugs, even allowing that most drugs are harmful to health?
Shouldn't people in a "free" society have the freedom to do whatever they want to themselves, even though it is harmful?
Shouldn't they be as free as Adam was, to eat the apple from the tree in the Garden of Eden, even though it should lead to evil?
Given the seriousness of the drug "problem", and the ludicrousness of the extremely expensive, and criminally wasteful and cruel War on Drugs, which has blighted the lives of untold millions, not only in the US, but also in Central America and elsewhere, I find it incredible that none of this is even being questioned, whether by Mr and Mrs America, or their elected representatives.
What's goin' on?
The amount of money we waste on incarceration of drug offenders is one of the reasons why the economy sucks so bad.
Marc Macdonald, I agree the reason for many and I many these people being in jail is poverty.
When you explained so throughly Japan, and the contrast of the way people live in Japan and the United States it showed that my feelings and observations of life in the United States today was correct.
Len, thank you for showing me the numbers of people living behind bars in this Country. I also agree that big business has taken over the prison system, Big Time! A person I know is now living in Florida working in the for profit Medical Field. It has become a major business in this Country.
I personally believe we need to come to grips with this poverty in our Country and lack of health care and once again only when necessary to imprison a person,and that these people be cared for by the State, not these privately run for profit Corporations which becomes a facist feeding ground! The for profit prisons creates this continuous need to expand and imprison people simply as a means for profit, for the Corporation. Which is very frightening indeed.
In my comment I mention the for profit medical field, I would like to clarify that and state for profit prison medical field. Nurses, Doctors, Lab. Tech are for profit in many prisons. I'm not sure if they are all managed that way, but today may are run by Corporations. Probably even traded on the NY Stock Exchange.
Ed Encho said...
They are nothing more than revenue streams for a mutated capitalism gone cancerous. When you really dig into it and if you are capable of the mindfuck of trying to truly understand what drives these bastards it is perfectly logical.
Indeed, Ed, the GOP creates the problems they cite in justification for a panoply of absurdities that are literally killing America.
Fuzzflash sez...
Damien, Benmerc, Sad, and more recently Marc and EE, you guys are fucking formidable.
I second that and add to the list: Christopher, CrazyLiberal, libhom, ManifestoJoe, and DianeB.
journalistic giants like Maureen Farrell from BuzzFlash archives has been pretty quiet for two years and Sweet Molly Ivans has gone to the big Op-Ed room in the sky ...
We miss Molly more as time goes by. She was a great writer but it was her radio commentary, done up in a real Texas accent, that hit home. No GOP absurdity escaped her twangy verbal stilleto.
You've shouldered the burden well, comrade, and now's not the time fer quitten'.
Not a chance of that, Fuzz. I may morph somewhat. I have in mind doing more video. And there is talk of radio syndication in Europe. More about that later.
if 10 million citizens get enraged enough after the Nov. election should the swine try to pull yet another electoral swifty, they can't put 'em all in the Gulag cos there ain't room.
I am tempted to write that another stolen election would be evidence of illegitimacy best described by Che when he wrote "...the peace is already considered to be broken." But, in fact, the peace is already broken. Too many Americans have not yet figured that out. The Cherokees and Choctaws, rounded up and marched off to Oklahoma by Ol' Hickory, knew it. Now big bro has come for the rest of us. Bush is in the toilet pollwise ---but this revolution has not yet begun. Celebrants in the Democratic ranks are nuts!
Manifesto Joe said...
Len, I hope you don't mind that I linked this piece on my blog, and on another I am affiliated with, Watching Those We Chose. Great research. The link is on a related post of mine, approached from a different angle.
Don't mind at all, Joe. Let's get the word out. Just let me know how I can help.
CrazyLiberal sez...
Hence crime is on the rise and the need for more prisons.
That's always the result of 'GOP Think'. Typically, the GOP will cite the catastrophic results of their policies as justification for more of the same. At least since the R. Reagan regime, the stats have confirmed by thesis that terrorism is always worse under GOP regimes. The only logical conclusion that one can make is that GOP policies either cause terrorism or, at the very least, aggravate it. But, as it gets worse, the GOP will cite all that as justification for throwing gasoline on the flames. The GOP thought process with regard to Social Security --the government's ONLY success story --is somewhat they same. GOP policies and profligacy are designed to break SS so that they can justify scrapping it with schemes designed to enrich Wall Street insiders and other cronies.
Christopher said...
It's my understanding that up to half of the inmates in US prisons are there for drug offenses. So if all drugs were made legal, the prison population would be half of what it is now.
The GOP has proven itself more interested in exploiting issues than offering up realistic solutions. Weed, for example, is SIMPLY NOT a problem. A 'joint' poses no more risk of cancer or heart diseases than ciggies made of tobacco. Yet, because the Tobacco lobby shares its ownership of the GOP with the arms industry and assorted gun nuts, tobacco is openly advertised. Your cigarette purchases help financed a corrupt establishment but Pot will get you ground up in the Texas gulag system. Marijuana is just an example of a principle. The laws are written by high priced lobbyists whose job it is to criminalize the competition. There is a lot of truth to a great song that appeared on a Simpson's episode of several years ago. It's called "We Do".
Diane B. said...
I personally believe we need to come to grips with this poverty in our Country and lack of health care
Thanks, Diane. You've hit the nail on the head. I have often screamed about the fact that GOP policies exacerbate income and opportunity inequalities; these factors, in turn, make crime worse while exacerbating any number of other 'social ills'. As long as these trends continue, the GOP simply cites them as justification to continue policies that make it all worse. The GOP will continue to use the prison system to enrich their cronies while warehousing people that they don't like. Again --the GOP cannot distinguish between a result and a cause. The rest of us always pay the price.
Forty Three years ago, I left foster care. I had just turned eighteen years old, and I was on my own.
Was it a challenge you bet it was, in fact I have written a few short stories relating to this experience.
After reading Len's article, it made be suddenly aware and wondering, how many young people were in prison after leaving our foster care system at eighteen with out a place to live or the continuing education necessary to create a good life. I remembered my struggles, I realized how lucki I had been never to end up in jail as one of my younger foster sisters had.
Well, I found a very disturbing report 70% of foster care children end up in prison. It costs $200,000 a year per prisoner, yet we can not find the funding necessary to help educate and house these young adults till they have the education to properly go out in the world.
I realize, I was not ready at eighteen, yes I had graduated from high school but I needed the additional skills necessary to go out and be competitive in the work force. Eventually after much struggle, I did but times were easier then, not nearly as difficult as today and I had a bit of luck a person helped me, I was blessed.
I wish, I could say these young people were blessed, but their not and the help they need from our government wasn't there when I was eighteen and is not there today for these eighteen year olds, which is why 70% of foster children end up in prison!
Thanks for sharing with us, Diane. A defining difference between 'conservatives' and 'liberals' is their response to your situation specifically. We know how the conservatives react to these circumstances ---like Scrooge in Charles Dicken's 'A Christmas Carol':
"Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons...then let them die and decrease the surplus population."
—Scrooge
Yes, and no Len, neither the Democrats nor Republicans have revamped the foster care system in our Country. I'm sure you are right the Democrats are better, but there is a major problem especially if 70% of foster care children end up in Prison.
It always amazes me that the Republicans are so anti abortion, but want unwanted children to be born into these terrible conditions.
If both Republicans and Democrats could agree to do the good they need to do, and educate these Young People we would not see us spending $200,000 a year to imprison them later. It just makes good dollars and sense if not done because it is morally right. When I was growing up there were both Democrats and Republicans running the White House and Congress and it never changed, nor has it changed today.
This Country believes anything run by government is bad and everything should be operated privately. I'm sure in the not to distant future they will manage to turn foster care into a privately run business like our prisons. Then we will have even more problems.
These Children and Young adults need care and love and so many times receive none. It is a business foster care these foster parents get paid and it is for profit to them. When you turn eighteen you are on your own. That's it!Most are not ready to survive out there in these very difficult times.I hope I didn't repeat myself, I have always felt passionately about Foster Care Children and was shocked to read such high numbers of Young people end up in prison!
Diane, Scrooge's quote defines 'conservative' regardless of party affiliation. Having said that, there are, statistically, more such folk in the GOP.
Hi great blog so far!
However, it is 1 in 99 adult Americans.
Thanks, but, by now, the percentage locked up is even greater.
Post a Comment