Maybe we should try that policy; smoke a joint, take a bullet to the head.
Well, this wasn't just a little doobie smoking. And it wasn't "the next day" when they whacked them. They did the crime in 1998, stole a cargo ship and killed the crew of 23, were caught and tried in '99, and 13 of them were whacked in January of 2000. They don't spend a lot of time on appeals in China.
Don't China and Russia just whack most of their criminals? I seem to remember when China caught a bunch of pirates they just took them out and shot them the next day. That does help keep the prison population down.
Maybe we should try that policy; smoke a joint, take a bullet to the head.
Don't China and Russia just whack most of their criminals? I seem to remember when China caught a bunch of pirates they just took them out and shot them the next day. That does help keep the prison population down.
You know in some ways I really admire the Chinese. They probably sent the bill for the shootings to the family members too.
Don't China and Russia just whack most of their criminals? I seem to remember when China caught a bunch of pirates they just took them out and shot them the next day. That does help keep the prison population down.
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world—more even than China or Russia. Prof. Daniel J. D'Amico explains that as of 2010 more than 1.6 million people were serving jail sentences in America. Professor D'Amico suggests that "prisons are not what we think about when we think of America, and they shouldn't have to be." According to D'Amico, a free country should not have 1.6 million people in prison, and a fiscally responsible country cannot afford to. As Prof. D'Amico points out, it is time for Americans to recognize that the U.S. criminal justice system is desperately in need of reform. Learn More:
1. "The Caging of America" : Wide ranging New Yorker piece, discusses history, ethics, everyday prisoner experience. Explores a few theories as to why our prison system is the way it is.
2. "The Business Ethics of Incarceration: The Moral Implications of Treating Prisons Like Businesses" : Professor D'Amico addresses the economics and morality of prison and prison privatization.
We don't feed prisoners fajitas! Didn't see where they mentioned dog meat, just pet food. When you comin' to visit Richard? Would you like a nice Chianti?
But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency...
So what’s really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else?
One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies hired to operate prisons, schools and more.
Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case.
But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?
Now, someone will surely point out that nonprivatized government has its own problems of undue influence, that prison guards and teachers’ unions also have political clout, and this clout sometimes distorts public policy. Fair enough. But such influence tends to be relatively transparent. Everyone knows about those arguably excessive public pensions; it took an investigation by The Times over several months to bring the account of New Jersey’s halfway-house-hell to light.
The point, then, is that you shouldn’t imagine that what The Times discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.
I wouldn't be surprised to see an offshoot industry whose purpose is researching people and finding "criminals". I can even see contractors being given access to all your private info to sift through and question.
i think for-profit prisons are a terrible idea. regular prison is tough enough. i also read an article that said that a for-profit prison "company" was trying to get a contract and part of the deal was that the state had to guarentee it would stay something like 95% full. very scary thought.
