Building Prisons Without Walls Using GPS Devices 545
Hugh Pickens writes "Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic that increasingly GPS devices are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. 'By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace,' writes Wood. But new devices such as ExacuTrack suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might do away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. 'The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers,' adds Wood. 'The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.'"
Why stop at "prison"? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the future, everyone will have to carry a GPS, not just "prisoners," and you won't be allowed in Beverly Hills without an appointment.
Why not just embed everyone with GPS at birth (Score:4, Insightful)
That way if they do something wrong it will be easier to prove and the "incarceration" can be switched on remotely. Add an integrated taser and you've got the ultimate means of population control.
Maybe the problem is the laws are fucked up??? Maybe their incarcerating for things that should be a summary offense? Maybe there are too many laws?
The people in 1984 had it easy.
Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:5, Insightful)
Roughly 25% [commondreams.org] of people in prison are there for non-violent drug offenses.
We could implement this GPS plan and fund a nice chunk of corporate socialism for the industry around it.
Or we could get the stick out of our ass, end the war on drugs and start making our deeds better match our words about being the most free country on the planet and in the process shave 25% of the taxpayers' prison bill - maybe even more considering how much violent crime is derivative of the drug trade.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like a great story for an SF movie, too bad it was done before, back in 1987:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
Might have something to do with the facts that:
1. Criminals aren't tagged at the time of release, but sometime later.
2. The tags are handled by private companies, not the government.
It's like there was a competition, "How badly can we screw this up?", and everyone tried their hardest.
A cell with one cellmate is... (Score:5, Insightful)
... often far safer than "open time" in the quad, and yes, I write from experience.
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:4, Insightful)
While I'm at it, I'd like to point out that more people die of drug overdoses from legal prescription drugs [hhs.gov] than do from illegal drugs like cocaine, heroin, meth (~8700 vs 10K-13K in 2005 a steadily increasing trend for the decade beforehand while the rate of illegal ODs stayed roughly flat).
If the war on drugs is about stopping people from hurting themselves and the people who depend on them, then what fuck are we doing?
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:3, Insightful)
The statistics are skewed. The amount of people who take illegal drugs is not equal to the amount of people who take legal drugs - therefore there's no link.
Similarly, the amount of people who die every year driving cars is less than the amount of people who die every year from jumping off the leaning tower of pisa with bombs strapped to them while wearing large pink hats. Therefore jumping off towers with bombs wearing pink hats is safer. QED.
Its too cheap (Score:2, Insightful)
Everyone breaks some laws in modern life. It can be as simple as speeding to not filling a form out correctly.
This makes "jail" cheap enough for everyone. Also I suspect over time it would evolve into something like what released sex offenders have to deal with. At least prisoners get food and medical care.
Just put a collar on some one, tell them they are not allowed to go anywhere over 5 miles away. And not to a list of prohibited places and let them go... Who will hire them?
How will they eat. What about places where GPS does not work...
Soon everyone who does not have money for a lawyer would have a tracker attached.
Re:Prisons are fail. GPS is fail, too (Score:3, Insightful)
Violent offenders would still be locked up.
(Obviously, I thought... why do geeks have to be so "all or nothing"?)
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow I seriously doubt it would be "less than 1 in a 1000000" that got "zapped" wrongfully. Underpaid, bitter and plain nasty remote operators would most likely love the excuse to "zap" a convict. Add to this that there will most likely be some sort of manual "zap" capability as well and you're more likely to see random convicts getting "zapped" simply as a way to amuse the operators...
Failed Prisons? (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA claims that prisons have failed. I don't entirely agree. The way I see it, prisons have three roles: one is reeducation, when we release someone from prison, they should come out as better citizens, not better criminals. In that respect, you could say that prisons have failed.
The second role of prisons however is punishment: prison SHOULD be an unpleasant experience for someone who has committed a crime. It should be a deterrent, something they will never want to experience again. Also, if you're a victim of a crime, you want to know that the criminal actually gets punished and doesn't get off with just a slap on the wrist.
Finally, the third role of prisons is protecting society, taking dangerous individuals out of the loop for a considerable amount of time so that they can't do any harm.
It seems to me that while GPS tracking devices may help somewhat with role 1, they don't do anything for role 2 and 3. So in my opinion, they shouldn't be a replacement for a prison system, but an addition to it, for instance in combination with the parole system.
It's a social not a technological problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a notion. Why not try to figure out what is wrong with your society that causes so much crime and then deal with it. Then you won't have to put so many people in prison. The U.S. is the land of the free, yet it has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Surely someone must be asking, "Hey, why is that?"
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
You're so sure technology cannot be polished and that everything's going to fail, then why risk driving a car?
I didn't say the tech would fail. Also, I don't drive.
why risk going on a bus? the under paid bitter driver might smash into a wall for fun.
Well, considering that most humans have some basic sense of self-preservation and the newspapers aren't exactly filled with reports of crazed bus drivers driving into walls for shits and giggles, I think I'll be fine.
Or why eat out? the underpaid bitter waiter might poo in your food for entertainment.
I rarely eat at restaurants. However, I do occasionally order pizza but I am friendly with the guys who run the local pizza place and I doubt it would be in their best interest to defecate on the food since they want repeat customers. It is also in their best interests not to do anything that would get the health inspectors to shut them down.
Why aren't police officers shooting people for fun?
Actually, it seems that powertripping police officers beating up, tazing and macing people for no good reason isn't all that uncommon. We recently had an incident around here where a group of police officers decided that a drunk man in his 20s was best dealt with by beating him severely, handcuffing him and finally leaving him to die on the floor of their van...
How about requiring an authorization password from the operator - which immediately logs the operator name, time and the location of the prisoner - to guarantee accountability? no. liberal hippies are no better than small minded bigots.
If you can't see how the system can still possibly be abused often enough that your claim of only 0.0001% wrongful "zappings" seems naive then you should probably consider the possibility that you are either biased or a troll.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:2, Insightful)
The way I see it, the only way a GPS-based system would be implemented as anything but a pilot program would if there were huge amounts of money to be made. If saving money was the issue, we could reduce crime, costs, and prison populations starting tomorrow simply by writing each offenders a monthly check for a portion of their incarceration cost. Last I heard, that would give each evil do-er a comfortable middle class existence.
Heck, you could go a few steps further and implement proper educational and social welfare programs. Kinda hard to do that and pretend to be "tough on crime" at the same time though.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop crying "liberal!" it's making you look seriously retarded. When you were young, did your dad bang on about how communists are trying to take down the US? It's pathetic.
Anyway, the people you are decrying are people who simply spotted a serious and counter-productive way this new suggestion could be misused, and pointed that out. So I guess in your mind "liberal" == "someone who's paying attention".
It must suck to be you. Seriously.
Re:Yeah, Right... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Your arguments would be more persuasive if they didn't immediately resort to inane labeling of anyone who might take issue with them. It's the rhetorical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "I can't hear you because you're a liberal hippie!" Labeling the opposition is a cheap and lazy way to avoid addressing what they have to say.
(For what it's worth, I am not a hippie and most decidedly not a liberal.)
100% -- is that so? (Score:4, Insightful)
You sound very confident, do you have a source for that "near-100%" statistic?
I'm asking because in my opinion this "sex offenders / serious violent offenders always do it again" myth has been debunked quite thoroughly. Rape and homicide especially are not repeated very often -- recidivism percentages are in the 1-10% bracket for the typical 3-5 year data period. Harris&Hanson calculated that in 15 years 3 out of 4 sex offenders have not been rearrested -- this is a very good figure compared to just about any other form of crime. See "Predicting Relapse" by Hanson and Bussiere (collects data from 61 international studies), or the half a dozen DoJ studies on recidivism for starters. There are some sub-types of sexual offences that seem to be more prone to repeating (and I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for homicide) but that wasn't your point, was it?
Another widely popular myth is visible in your "Homie da Gangsta gang-rape" idea. Most sexual assaults (80-90%) are committed by someone known to the victim (you can find this in DoJ statistics as well, can't remember the exact ref).
Re:Failed Prisons? (Score:3, Insightful)
prison SHOULD be an unpleasant experience for someone who has committed a crime.
Thing is, most of the really nasty people don't have too bad of a time in prison. The people who really suffer are the minor offenders who end up as Bubba's bitch (and Bubba quite enjoys breaking in his bitches, making them suffer helps him relieve the boredom and he gets free sex whenever he wants it).
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
imagine something that would deal an extremely painful, incapacitating electric shock whenever one steps out of his allowed boundary.
I can imagine that abducting people with such devices would become a popular sport.
Yeah, let's not blame bad laws where it starts (Score:5, Insightful)
"War on Drugs" anyone? They eventually backed down from prohibition of alcohol, so why not other substances? There is a lot of stuff that should be legal and no point in going into a discussion about it. We have even more laws that need repealing as well such as those associated with prostitution and other activities. These aren't "nice" things to do and I probably wouldn't engage in any of them, but I don't think they should be illegal either. People are going to trash their lives no matter what laws are written. The impact on society that turning them into felons has is fewer voters and a lot more bus boys and career criminals. (No one will hire a felon for a good job. Not ever.)
Fix the laws, there will be fewer criminals.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
As a not-liberal not-hippie I think I would prefer prison.
Not only could your devices go wrong by triggering early, they could also go wrong by not triggering at all, or by being temporarily removed (which happens a lot in the UK). I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
All of which have been ironically enabled by misguided "prison reforms", and are apparently now considered an inevitable consequence of prison, which apparently also "inevitably" makes people worse. I cannot understand why it is now considered impossible to keep order within a fucking prison. A hundred years ago our ancestors had no trouble keeping absolute control of prisoners.
It's like the basic idea of prison has been forgotten. We put the bad guys in prison so that the rest of us don't have to live in a prison. We subject the criminals to authoritarianism so that the rest of us can live in freedom. Why is this hard to understand?
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
What about using prison labour to provide cheap goods and services?
This is already done, but it's a terrible idea. Prisoners, who are working very cheaply, compete with free people who are working for a reasonable wage, distorting market prices. Maintaining the supply of cheap goods requires maintaining the supply of prisoners, giving the state an incentive to create more laws that poor people will routinely break so that they can be put to work at below the market rate.
You already have this system in the USA. You also have the highest proportion of your population incarcerated of any country.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you by any chance edit for conservapedia?
Cause that's the only place I've ever seen anyone else throw around the term "liberal" in such a wierd manner or blame everything bad with the world on liberals.
Someone called you out on a absurd figure of 1 in 100000.
five 9's reliability for a system that is expected to opperate outside a controlled environment is wishful thinking at best and self delusion at worst.
Have you even thought about how such a system might opperate?
if this thing is based on GPS or radio then you have the problem that you have to deal with the signals actually getting to the device.
there are 2 situations you have to deal with.
1: Someone who while wearing one of these devices wraps it in tinfoil and goes to mexico.
2: Someone who while wearing one of these devices walks down into his basement or as part of a job (gainful employment is good isn't it) has to carry stuff into a metal shipping container or for any reason at all legitimately ends up either underground or inside a metal cage.
In both cases you completely loose all signals too and from the device.
So what should the device do in such a situation?
Do you have it administer a crippling shock to them when the device loses signal?
Well you've going to have a hell of a lot of nasty car accidents in tunnels.
The more time you give them the more time they have to get over a border or to get somewhere where the device can be safely removed.
If widely used you can be sure a black market would spring up for removing these things.
Want to go across town and kill/rob/rape someone? find some legit reason to be inside a metal cage or anywhere else where elecromagnetic signals are blocked, wrap it in tinfoil and be sure to remove the tinfoil at the spot you were in when you put it on.
And if it's GPS based it'll lose track of you anywhere inside.
If it's based on positioning with cell phone towers then anywhere with no cellphone signal is good.
And you dismiss offhand the idea that the system opperators will go sadistic yet that's a real posibility.
the stanford prison experiment was a lovely illistration that power really does corrupt, put normal nice people in a position of power over others and many of them will, in a short time, become sadistic and cruel.
If prisoners getting shocked happens a lot then pretty soon people stop paying attention to the logs and after that people would start doing it for shits and giggles.
I'm all for technology but I can spot a poor idea when I see it.
this tech would probably be fine for really low level offenders, kids who shoplift, petty criminals or white collar criminals you simply want to track reasonably but if that's your goal then quietly making a deal with the cellphone companies to get the positions of their phones would be almost as effective (especially if they don't know you're doing it and as such they don't know to leave their phones at home).
For any significantly dangerous person this system is useless no matter how big a capacitor you stick in it.
Sorry , you're wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Drugs such as opium and heroin WERE legal but they caused so much misery and strife that they were banned in almost all nations. People who thing legalising drugs will somehow make addicts and the problems they cause vanish are living in a dream world. Perhaps you might like to check out the number of deaths either through violence , drunk driving or liver disease from alcohol - that well known legal drug.
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds nice, but when 1/4th of the prison population turns up in neighborhoods across America with their tell
-tale "I took/take drugs" GPS collar, anklet they might find it a little bit hard to find a job, and they could easily find themselves treated as a new social leper, joining the registered sex offenders who have to live a certain distance from schools, playgrounds, etc (to protect the children). So, once you have turned out 25% of the prison population and branded them unemployable, how will they live - either from Gov't Subsidies or by committing crimes - all you've done is shift the cost from prisons to welfare and their next victims.
And how long until someone implements the ever-popular "exploding collar" as seen in countless sic-fi movies? (Wedlock, Escape from New York, etc.?)
The same people that don't want to live near a prison won't want to live next to a current prisoner.
Also, I take issue with this meme that 25% of all those incarcerated are locked up ONLY for non-violent drug charges. For that to be true, it would require that ON AVERAGE one in for convicts behind bars was guilty of either using or selling drugs, without any associated crimes, like robbery, assault, possession of a gun, etc., and that is simply unbelievable.
Drug users poison themselves, and I find very few possession charges of "individual use" quantities of drugs that carry mandatory prison time... Drug dealing poisons not only the dealer, but also the community, and almost always carries mandatory prison time - as it should. If you are counting parolees in your 25% figure, then your number is inflated because parole isn't prison.
The real problem with drug statutes is the involvement of elected officials in defining mandatory sentencing guidelines for certain offenses, reflecting the "tough on crime" stance of coveted blocks of voters - disparate punishments for, say, crack cocaine, were not implemented to destroy certain racial communities, it was a sincere attempt by well-meaning, but ill-informed public that stiffer penalties reduce crime AND that crack cocaine was a more devastating drug than 'regular' cocaine. The do-gooders that tried to help poor inner-city families wound up destroying them, and once politicized, stiff drug penalties will never be walked back, lest the politicians be viewed as "soft on crime."
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you're weird. It sounds to me like you have an issue with authority in general, as you immediately suspect that operators would gladly abuse their power to zap convicted felons.
Many, many psychological experiments have shown this to be the case. In fact, some of them are among the most famous psychology experiments that have ever been conducted. Perhaps you should look them up?
The "zapping" is particularly relevant here, as we have seen how Tasers have been massively abused by police forces. Non-lethal weapons in general appear to encourage abuse.
Nobody agrees that people should be beaten by the cops for no reason.
Yet it happens every day, every hour, every minute.
The police kill innocent people much less often than criminals kill innocent people.
Now, that's a completely different thing. When a cop kills somebody it usually comes with a pretty serious investigation. That's why non-lethal weapons are so popular among sadists. It enables them to get their kicks without being punished themselves. It's too easy for police to claim that they had to restrain or Taser somebody. It's a lot harder to claim that you needed to kill them.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Liberal hippies?
I'm more worried about this from a libertarian perspective. Once the cost of "imprisoning" someone is low enough, then its a lot easier to increase sentences and criminalize a lot more stuff.
"It seems you're missing a tail light... the penalty for that is being tagged for 20 years."
Even as expensive as prisons are now, the US has almost 2.5 million people imprisoned. Make it cheap and how long will it be before anyone busted for possession of weed in their early 20's has to to be tagged until they're well into their 40s?
It wouldn't take too long before you'd have a sizable underclass which would have no rights, but still be able to do various manual labour jobs. It wouldn't very much different than slavery.
Yes prisons are expensive, but in a way thats a good thing. That means there is a cost to making all sorts of stupid laws that everyone is in violation of sometime in their lives. Or have you never smoked a joint, pirated a song, attended an anti-government demonstration, or drove over the speed limit?
Re:Why stop at "prison"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Although this sounds like it will help with a few of the issues that are faced with managing the criminal population, I don't see any way of preventing it's eventual use to control society as a whole. Though if history has taught us anything it's that the eventual measures of control which are used will be more insidious than we could imagine from looking at this technology now.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone goes to prison and stays there, the objective of stopping them from committing more offences is met for the duration of the imprisonment. The objective of punishing the person is also met. The objective of getting them back to a useful role in society is up to the offender.
If someone gets a portable GPS+torture bracelet as punishment, I don't see how the rest of the community is spared from the risk of immediate reprisals or further offences.
On top of that, it actually opens the door to vigilante-type initiatives. The neighbourhood watch (or the opposing gang) finds that someone is carrying the bracelet, take him on a van and just watch as he gets zapped by remote control. Not fun.
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:4, Insightful)
No they're not, the poster and the article talk about total drug deaths, there is no underlying assumption of equality in the size of the populations.
The article referenced is also focused on the trend : a rapidly increasing number of deaths from prescription drug overdoses, which presages a significant problem in the years to come.
To use your example, and using the numbers in Jah-Wren's post, its as if 8700 people died from car crashes and 10-13K people jumped off the tower wearing a pink hat, and the 10-13K is increasing rapidly year-on-year. That's a pink-hat-and-tower problem, regardless of how you slice your statistics.
Not likely (Score:1, Insightful)
shave 25% of the taxpayers' prison bill - maybe even more considering how much violent crime is derivative of the drug trade
What's in that for government?
Drug prohibition is a billion-dollar business. There is simply no way the elite at the top of the pyramid are going to give that up, especially considering how prohibition is a self-sustaining source of endless revenue. The more violence on the street (a direct result of prohibition), the more money needed to "fix" the problem, the greater the level of prohibition, and (surprise) the more violence on the street. It's a perfect self-sustaining money-making machine, and when you're in a position to control that flow of cash, you are in a position to exploit it for personal gain.
Did I just imply that morality, safety, and indecency are merely the smokescreens of drug prohibition, and the real goal is merely cold hard cash? You're damn right I did.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:1, Insightful)
Why not put new police officers through those tests? Because the police (of every country, even) is proof that a significant amount of those people do get hired in positions of power.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
The USA has 0.75% of it's population in prison (and growing)
These people are often used as cheap labour in prisons
Prisons are generally considered unmanageable, contraband of all types is freely available and discipline is poor at best
When was slavery abolished in the US ?
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds to me like you have an issue with authority in general, as you immediately suspect that operators would gladly abuse their power
Actually, it's pretty much guaranteed. If there is ever a proposal to increase the authority one human has over another, the first question should be:
How will/can this authority be abused?
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
If someone goes to prison and stays there, the objective of stopping them from committing more offences is met for the duration of the imprisonment. The objective of punishing the person is also met. The objective of getting them back to a useful role in society is up to the offender.
I agree with most of what you said, but the part quoted above throws me for a loop. For anyone sent to jail for a period that is less than half of their remaining life expectancy (as a somewhat arbitrary place to draw the line), that third objective seems to be the most valuable for society. Let's say a healthy 35-year-old is imprisoned for 5 years for some non-violent crime, for example. If I had to pick only one of those objectives to be fulfilled (with no other concerns like cost, possibility of failure, etc), then I would pick the 3rd; whether they are physically prevented from committing another offense for the next 5 years is less important to the health of society than whether they are likely to commit another offense during the next 10 years. Do you see how the latter of those considerations has the same motivation as the first (i.e. overall reduction of crime)?
Based on your "harder to keep under control" statement, I get the impression you might prefer the current system partly because it is reliable -- in most cases, imprisoning someone for 5 years will pretty reliably prevent them from committing offenses during that 5 years (or at least offenses that directly affect the rest of society), whereas trying to consider whether someone is likely to commit crimes in the future involves statistics and guesswork. However, that's what cost-benefit analysis is for.
You also seem to dismiss society's role in that thrid objective as a matter of principle (when I read your comment, I heard an implied "It should be the offender's responsibility, therefore I refuse to consider whether this new option is more or less likely to produce repeat offenders than the current system."). In contrast, I suggest taking a practical outlook. I don't care who should be responsible for whether they commit another offense after their prison term is up, I care about what will be best for society (all costs and benefits considered, as well as we practically can).
To be clear, I'm not saying I think this proposed system is better -- I haven't stated my opinion one way or another on that. I have simply objected to your dismissal of considering whether a given system is more or less likely to produce repeat offenders versus upstanding citizens.
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Criminals must thank naive citizens and activis (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that isn't how this has worked out historically. Non-violent offenders are not generally housed today with violent offenders anyway, so this would have no effect. What is highly likely is that problem prisoners that are difficult to manage within a prison environment get pushed out the door with monitoring so they are no longer a problem.
The immediate effect is that we are once again pushing mentally disturbed folks out on the street. In the 1970s we closed the hospitals and pushed the people that were confined there out. They were supposed to go to halfway houses and residential treatment centers. But in large measure they walked away from those and became the first wave of homeless. A lot of them ended up in prison, where today they get little or no treatment and are very difficult to manage in a prison environment.
This would be an absolutely wonderful outcome for all of those prison wardens who wake up every day wondering what they are going to do. They do not have the staff to control these people and they don't have the tools to do it either. So of course you have all sorts of unmanageable behavior - everything from inmates peeing in the hallway to attacking each other. Yes, wonderful idea to push them back out onto the streets with some tracking so they can easily be found. Home? Well, that might be a problem as these folks don't have homes. Or a family that can manage them.
The mistake was dumping these people out of the hospitals where they had the staff and tools to manage these people. It was viewed as cruel and inhumane to keep them locked up. A bunch of made-for-TV movies exploited the concept of nice people locked away for no reason at all. There was this small side effect - the state hospitals cost a fortune to run and by closing them the states saved all this money. Of course it was an attractive idea to release these people and probably as many as 50% of them did OK.
We are still reeling from the impact of the other 50%. And it continues on today.
Let's say you have a brother that is "developmentally challenged" and has violent temper tantrums. A six year-old in a man's body with all of the self-control and judgement of a six year-old. You might try caring for him in your house but after a few violent incidents it quickly becomes either a lifelong committment without including the rest of the family or pushing the brother into a home of some sort. Unfortunately, unless you are willing to foot the bill (which is pretty darn high) almost nobody will take someone like that. There are no more treatment facilities. There are no more hospitals or "sanitariums". What exactly do you do?
For far too many of these types of people there is the "Fourth and Main" approach which is only slightly different than letting the undesired and unwanted dog out on at the rest stop and driving away. It quickly becomes someone else's problem and the only folks around with any ability to do anything are the police. Trust me, they don't want it. But all it takes is one violent outburst in public and the police have little choice in the matter. As does the judge. So it becomes a Department of Corrections problem. And this is where a good part of the problem in prisons can be pointed at.
So of course they want to push the problem somewhere else - back on the street. Just like in the 1970s.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
How about a compromise? A touchy-feely hippie ultra-authoritarian regime that prevents rape, gang fights, and drug dealing while providing education and therapy.
There's a big overlap between bad guys, people with emotional/psychological problems, and people who have horrible lives with no opportunities for betterment. While we're locking up the bad guys, we might want to try to make them less bad.
Also, let's lock up fewer guys. Legalize drugs, do away with mandatory sentencing. Save prison time for violent offenders.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. I rather dislike seeing IMDB links for this reason. Why not link to the Wikipedia page for the film, or even simply say "the Running man", and hyperlink that to IMDB? It's much more courteous to the reader. Wikipedia links have the benefit of being nearly as easy to search for as IMDB movie links yet still being human-readable.
Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The fundamental problem is not the how-prisons-work part. The real problem is the putting-people-in-the-system part.
Reducing the cost of removing people's freedom will not solve the problem, it will incentivize it and increase it. Just like (a) computers didn't create paperless offices, and (b) increased efficiency didn't lead to reduced work hours, and (c) tasers didn't lead to a reduction police abuse, and (d) helmets don't reduce motorcycle accident rates, and (e) unmanned killer drones don't reduce the length of our wars.
Instead, I propose: re-writing drug laws and incarcerating a fraction of the people we do now.
Re:Sorry , you're wrong (Score:1, Insightful)
If you think that execution of drug dealers and morality police are necessities, maybe you should move to Saudi Arabia, or somewhere in that area. Also, you're a douche.
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
Last I heard, that would give each evil do-er a comfortable middle class existence.
Why not? There are so many laws on file now that we're all criminals to some extent without knowing it. The majority of people in prison are the ones who got caught and couldn't afford a lawyer.
The sad fact about prison is that the people who really deserve to be there (the socio-paths etc) tend to influence the non-socio paths into socio-paths so when they get out of prison they already have contacts on the outside to go commit crime.
Also because of the way background checks work, its very hard for a first time offender to ever be re-integrated back into society so they usually either resort to crime or become a ward of the state.
Potentially (Very) Bad Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Where it works this may be good in the short run, but I see a couple of potential (and sinister) downsides:
1) It makes punishment much more acceptable. I'm not so worried about the deterrent value, but the fact that you might get put under surveillance for unpaid library fines, downloading the wrong file, etc. This yet another slippery slide into a police state.
2) It makes surveillance much more acceptable, and helps fine tune the technology for it. If it turns out that criminals who do not misbehave live perfectly happy lives under the system, and if it is demonstrated that crime goes down when more people are under such surveillance, the "nanny state" types might be pushing for more people to be tagged like this. The typical "if you're doing nothing wrong, why wouldn't want this?" "think of the children" "terrorism, etc." arguments might be advanced by some and swallowed whole by the increasingly surveillance-desensitized public.
2.5) It may make law enforcement lazy, causing them to push for more of this technology (cheaper, more effective, etc). You can draw an analogy with the convenience of warrant-less wiretapping
I'm not sure what the full answer is, but more surveillance (even if it's just for the criminals -- for now --) gives me a very uneasy feeling....
Re:Already used in the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
Heading towards? Heck, man, it was *designed* that way. Check out the 13th amendment:
Doesn't get any more straight-forward and basic than being specified in plain English in the constitution, does it?
Not saying I think it's a good idea (I really don't), but it certainly is the status quo.
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:4, Insightful)
Drug users poison themselves, and I find very few possession charges of "individual use" quantities of drugs that carry mandatory prison time... Drug dealing poisons not only the dealer, but also the community, and almost always carries mandatory prison time - as it should.
What? How the hell is growing a plant and selling its dried flowers "poisoning" anyone? Caffeine has killed more people than marijuana has (which is ZERO.) That's not even to mention its numerous medicinal properties. So tell me, when an A student at an engineering college gets busted for growing a few plants in his closet because some Stasi-style snitch (i.e. neighbor vs neighbor, family vs. family, set up and controlled by the police) ratted him out, and now he's a felon and can't vote or even get a damn job, is that just and fair? Is that the system you want to see continued? Is it because you can't stand the idea of a person deciding to live differently than you, or is it simply because you (like 90% of non drug users) are completely and proudly ignorant as to what the whole thing is even all about? Try smoking a joint some time, see what happens, then get back to me about how just and holy you still think it is for non violent, otherwise non-criminal drug users to be imprisoned, fined, and branded for their "crimes."
Re:Or we could save 25% off the bat (Score:3, Insightful)
What a crock of shit. Let's see:
Drugs are bad and make people do bad things.
You should be free to do drugs, but you should be liable for your actions.
Of course you should be liable for your actions. So when you smoke a big ass bowl of Skunk and clean out your buddy's fridge, you owe him some Cheetos, man.
What the fuck "bad things" do you think are caused by drugs? And how many of these "bad things" are a result of drug usage, as opposed to drug prohibition? Do you think a meth junky is going to rob near as much shit to support his habit if he can get hundreds of 100% pure doses for $10? Fuck no, give that junky $100 and you won't see him for a month straight. Same thing for the crackheads and heroin addicts. Not saying 100% legalization is the right path for all drugs, but clearly for others (such as marijuana) it is the right thing to do.
Do you currently trust the existing laws, enforcement, and punishment to protect you and yours from the fucking druggies? (The correct answer is "fuck no".)
The correct question, why the fuck should you be in such a situation where you "need protection" from the "druggies"? What the fuck is wrong with this picture? Let's work to cure the problems here, not the symptoms.
Or perhaps you disagree and would have no problem living in the meth belt?
Ever heard of Sand Mountain / Marshall County, AL? You might know it from its nickname "Meth Mountain", the name used for the documentary describing this place as one of the top meth producing counties in the US. That's where I'm from. These illegal immigrants (and plenty of skinny white kids I'm sure) are in the business of manufacturing the cheapest, crappiest, most profitable meth they can turn out. Seems like a few times a year a single wide trailer spontaneously explodes or is filled with toxic gas, killing all inside, including babies and small kids in some cases. The illegal nature of this substances means big bucks for those who produce it, and the incentive is to minimize quality and maximize profit. The high price also means those who get hooked on the shit are in many cases driven to robbing their own moms to support their habit. And when they inevitably end up in jail or prison, guess who foots the bill?
The system we have now pretty much ensures that drug addicts end up becoming wards of the state, while at the same time we have to put up with all the negative consequences of their situation (robbery, shoot outs, stabbings, etc.) Compare and contrast that to a system where drug use and manufacture is completely legal, a bump of meth is 5 cents at the gas station with bulk discounts available, and those who are hooked on a substance and need help getting off it, or even those who want to continue using but can't afford to do so, can get help from the government. So yeah it still costs you, but does it cost you nearly as much? And think of all the reduced suffering for everyone. No more (or much less) copper, aluminum, catalytic converters, being stolen, houses and businesses broken into to support habits. No more destroying people's lives by putting through the jail and prison system. You don't realize how much of a racket this shit really is until you yourself experience going to jail for some bullshit, and seeing how they extract money out of you and your family in every possible way. Drug users and minor offenders are how the police and governments support themselves financially, and it's a sad fucking thing.
All this, and how about the people who AREN'T drug addicts? Who are merely peaceful citizens who just like to smoke a joint in the evening to chill out and relieve stress. What about people that are tired of paying the ridiculously over inflated drug war prices for weed, and who just want to grow their own since it's just a damn plant. Some crackhead rats you out to save his own ass and BAM, felony. Why the fuck does a good and law abiding, tax paying citizen deserve to be put through the ringer and have his life ruint over a fucking PLANT? or over a PILL? or any such a stupid and silly thing?
Re:Only killing works (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, "criminal" is a flexible label easily attached to anyone... even you.