If you sit on a jury, don't vote to convict on drug "crimes" or other prison-stuffing non-violent offences short of fraud and larceny on an epic scale.
I feel that the core argument of the article is that we cannot fix the problem through non-violent inmates. There are not enough of them. The biggest problem is with violent inmates who none of us really want back out in society; the problem is that the damage caused by imprisoning them is so much larger than the improvement experienced by everyone else.
> the problem is that the damage caused by imprisoning them is so much larger than the improvement experienced by everyone else.
Is it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the US prison population just 0.00730843528654% of our country's total population? 0.99269156471346% of the US population experiencing lower violent crime is a larger improvement than the crimes suffered in prison. Wouldn't it be more effective if we just decriminalized drug possession and just ended the drug war entirely?
Quote: "According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2011 – about 0.94% of adults in the U.S. resident population.[4] Additionally, 4,814,200 adults at year-end 2011 were on probation or on parole.[8] In total, 6,977,700 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2011 – about 2.9% of adults in the U.S. resident population."
This means your provided figure is (a) wildly exaggerated as to its accuracy, using far more digits than its source can justify, and (b) flat wrong to an astonishing degree.
> Wouldn't it be more effective if we just decriminalized drug possession and just ended the drug war entirely?
Absolutely, many agree including me. But your figures are still wrong.
How is this wrong when even children benefit from keeping violent criminals isolated from the general population? Besides accounting for just adults still doesn't detract from my main point: the vast majority of people in the US benefit from keeping violent felons locked up
I don't know offhand, and I kind of wish that I did.
I imagine that you could probably talk to parole officers or local-nonprofits and ask for more information. If you hear about somebody getting out of the clink, offer to help I guess?
I assume it's basically like trying to setup help for any other underserved demographic. Identify them, identify their needs, and see if you have or know something worth contributing.
This seems like such an obvious solution and, with the advent of things like MOOCs, something that needn't be particularly costly. (Setting aside the fact that even 'costly' but effective rehabilitation is demonstrably cheaper in the long-run.)
As well as the obvious benefits of equipping offenders with skills that will make them more employable upon release it seems intuitively true that the struggle for self-improvement would make them all-round 'better people'. For those who argue that self-study isn't enough, another component could be pairing up inmates of differing attainment levels and having effectively having them teach one another -- again, the act of teaching and helping a stranger has got to be a positive experience.
Is there a big problem with any of this? Have studies been conducted that indicate my intuitions are incorrect? Have I massively underestimated the difficulties and costs associated with such a scheme? ...Or is it simply a combination of lack of imagination on the side of the administration, coupled with a strong urge for punitive justice on the side of the electorate?
If I recall right, education for education sake did not lowered recidivism much. It made prisoners better behaved while in prison (e.g. there was less violence and less problems in prison).
I suspect that part of the problem with practical education for prisoners is that everybody else have to pay for it. So, law abiding (or not caught yet) citizens get all jealous about the perk they are not getting.
