Abolish Prisons?

Interesting claim:

U.S. prison system a costly and harmful failure: report

Interesting, but wrong!

Who made such a report?

Commie George Soros, of course!

It was funded by the Rosenbaum Foundation and by financier and political activist George Soros' Open Society Institute.

Their "conclusions":

The number of people in U.S. prisons has risen eight-fold since 1970, [GOOD! -- ed.] with little impact on crime [WRONG! -- ed.] but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul.
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It recommends shorter sentences and parole terms, alternative punishments, more help for released inmates and decriminalizing recreational drugs. It said the steps would cut the prison population in half, save $20 billion a year and ease social inequality without endangering the public.

Reducing the prison population and costs should not be a goal.

Locking up criminals should be the goal!

It makes crime go down.

The Justice Department dismissed the recommendations and cited findings that about 25 percent of the violent-crime drop in the 1990s can be attributed to increases in imprisonment.

"The United States is experiencing a 30-year low in crime, in large part due to the tough enforcement actions we've taken in the last decade," department spokesman Peter Carr said.

The recent little uptick in crime lately can be attributed to the fact that the early "crop" of prisoners is now being released after 15-20 years in jail.

I love this part:

At current rates, one-third of all black males, one-sixth of Latino males, and one in 17 white males will go to prison during their lives. Women represent the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, the report said.

"The massive incarceration of young males from mostly poor- and working-class neighborhoods, and the taking of women from their families and jobs, has crippled their potential for forming healthy families and achieving economic gains," it said.

Oh, boo-hoo!

What, they get improsined for no reason at all?

Maybe if they didn't steal things or kill people, they wouldn't be in jail, did you think of that?

Maybe their criminal behavior is "crippling their potential", rather than the incarceration?

But no, there's no responsibility applied to them.

Soros wants to destroy the fabric of our society so he can recreat and control it.

And idiot idealists who wish to be kind to everyone think it's a splendid idea.

In this they are wrong, as Belmont Club relates in a recent essay:

Counterinsurgency in Pakistan -- and maybe in Iraq as well among other countries -- may consist in making deals with some bad guys in order to fight the badder guys. Maybe diplomats should quit reading Foreign Affairs and start surfing Gangwar.com or peruse Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency, from the Army Stratgic Studies Instute. Recently the BBC ran a breathless article entitled "Boston Miracle inspires UK's gang fight". Look closely at what strategy the police employed to cut down gang violence in the Hub.
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Gang members were invited to meetings with police and church leaders where they were told things had to change. Those who chose to change their ways were offered jobs, counselling and other forms of support to get their life back on track.

Those who ignored the tough new stance were threatened with longer, harsher sentences in federal prisons. And it was no empty threat. Gang member Freddy Cordoza received more than 19 years in jail for possessing a single bullet.

As I've written elsewhere the process of "reconciliation" doesn't mean mindlessly making nice to everybody -- as some well-meaning persons seem to think -- it means making nice "on average". But the process is also accompanied by an increase in the contrast in treatment between two populations; being a lot nicer to the cooperative and the innocent but also being a lot tougher on the bad guys. While the average "niceness" improves greatly, the distribution of niceness is altered drastically as well.
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I wonder how many promoters of "reconciliation" believe the "healing process" actually consists of destroying the contrast between the innocent and the guilty; treating people who wire up their infant children as bombs in the same way as legitimate oppositionists to Musharraf.

Lock up the criminals!

By the way, the notion that "victimless" drug possession arrests are driving the big increase in the prison population is bogus. From Department of Justice statistics,

In 1987 drug arrests were 7.4% of the total of all arrests reported to the FBI; by 2005, drug arrests had risen to 13.1% of all arrests.

An increase surely, but 13% of all arrests does not account for an 8-fold increase in the prison population!

Indeed,

Over half of the increase in State prison population since 1995 is due to an increase in the prisoners convicted of violent offenses.

And guess what, violent crime is way down!



I hardly call that "little impact."

Lock Soros up, I say!