My life after 44 years in prison
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I saw this also when I was a teacher. No amount of detentions or removal from class would change the behavior of some students. Saying clever thing to them however, would. Many people respond more strongly to their animal instincts than to logic. You could trick a student into not distrupting class (eg offer them two choices and a minute to make a decision - they somehow forget they really have more choices), but for many, you couldn't incentivize them.
To expand on this, people with proclivities towards committing serious crimes tend to be highly irrational.
Thus, employing a deterrent that relies upon the rationality of such individuals makes about as much sense as using a flamethrower to mow the lawn.
For people that commit crimes that are highly disruptive to society, on any level, from assaults to massive ponzi schemes, be these 'not particularly rational' individuals or otherwise, the sentence is a deterrent on the one hand, and on the other hand a deterrent as well, but one with a guarantee, because if they are in jail they are not going to be committing more crimes that are disruptive to society.
So the criminal justice system still serves a purpose. If the prospect of jail, or just the desire to be a good human didn't stop someone from impulsively raping or murdering someone, then they belong in jail where they can't act out their impulsive rapes or murders on society at large.
If anything, you're disproving your own argument.
The upsides to crime for some people are very high, and the downsides of going to prison are again for those people, not all that high. I think that's pretty obvious.
The problem is that you're taking the beliefs about prison that you hold and applying them universally. That's not the correct way to look at it.
A person with $1mm in the bank is going to look at a Porsche and a Camry very differently than a person with $5k in the bank.
A person with a criminal record who understands how stacked against him/her society is, is going to look at crime from a much more calculating position than a person with a spotless one. A person with a spotless record has something to lose by committing a crime; the possibility of losing the spotless record. The person who already has a criminal record has very little to lose at least from a reputational perspective.
>A person with a criminal record who understands how stacked against him/her society is
I would argue that society being stacked against convicts is not congruent with the goal of reform.
At the risk of "taking the beliefs I hold about prison and applying them universally", I'd say the U.S. criminal justice system today resembles a vindictive meat grinder that excels at taking deeply troubled people and placing them in an environment that's detrimental to their rehabilitation.
It's hard to argue in favor of tough sentencing when the correctional system effectively operates as an overflow for other failed systems—be it mental health, political, education, social welfare, or public safety.
Most of the time they just have a very different set of assumptions and givens about life.
Imprisonment isn't just a loss of reputation, not by a long shot. The loss of reputation is one of the lesser reasons to avoid prison.
The point I was trying to make is that to the normal person who has a clean record and isn't barred from any jobs, can own guns, etc etc keeping their record clean is actually very, very valuable. It's much, much harder to make $100k a year and generally participate in society with a felony record than without.
So if you take $60k a year loss in earning potential times the rest of your life you're talking about maybe $1mm or $2mm a year that you'll probably lose if you commit a crime and get convicted. That's a pretty big deal.
But if you've already got a record that ship has sailed and your earning potential is already much much lower. The spectre of losing the possibility of that life is gone and so there's much less incentive not to commit more crimes.
You say that the reputational loss is a lesser reason to avoid prison but I suspect that most people would argue that a couple million dollars is actually a pretty big deal.
With all respect, I don't see how this sentence is relevant to what I wrote. I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence, but I don't see how it does that either.
Extremely long sentences just don't add much to the mix.
They do actually. You can look at the length of a sentence as corresponding roughly to a cost benefit analysis pertaining to the given crime. The cost being the cost to incarcerate the person, and the benefit being the person's inability to commit a similar crime for X number of years. So for really bad crimes that carry a really long sentence, the benefit to society of there not being a potential recurrence of the criminal's acts outweighs the cost of the incarceration.
> They do actually.
The US has extremely long sentences. It has an incredibly high incarceration rate - higher than South Africa in it's apartheid prime, higher than China or Russia ever had, and yet crime there is no better than in it's contemporary developed-nation allies. In fact, for the one crime that is most directly and easily comparable - murder - the US is atrociously higher than it's contemporaries (a rate of ~4.8 vs ~1.0-1.5). The ridiculously long sentences in the US are not making the US any safer than it's contemporaries.
ok, I see.
the US is atrociously higher than it's contemporaries (a rate of ~4.8 vs ~1.0-1.5)
What is that a rate of, murders per 100k or something?
Maybe the US just has a population and/or conditions that are more prone to committing murder, that doesn't mean the country should scale back it's punishment of murderers. It's highly doubtful that the longer sentence length(is the US's longer on average?) is somehow contributing to a higher murder rate.
What did you think about how I described sentence length as being a function of cost-benefit analysis?
That isn't to say that I think all sentences are optimum, or even near optimum, some have gotten completely out of whack, or altogether unnecessary, drug crimes for example.
More men in prison -> more broken homes -> more people with more damage in their upbringing -> more crime
^^ that's just one potential mechanism for having demographic-sized populations of people locked up. About half a decade ago, it was estimated that one in nine black men in the US were either imprisoned or on parole. That's a lot of families missing an important member (even if not a father, a missing husband/son/brother is also an issue).
One of the problems with discussing crime (particularly in the US) is that people tend to focus on the criminal as a single individual, and not about the demographic-scale effects.
> What did you think about how I described sentence length as being a function of cost-benefit analysis?
Extremely long sentences haven't been shown to be an effective deterrent, and if anything, they mean that the prisoner is more likely to cause problems inside (if you're jailed for life, you can basically kill with impunity in the jail, for example). Long sentences mean more prisoners inside costing the taxpayer, less workers outside generating tax dollars, fewer families with present parents, and a broader 'criminal class' (and higher recidivism - if the only thing you know how to do is crime, because your skills have rotted...).
The justice system as a whole is meant to keep society running smoothly, and the penal system is part of that - it doesn't stand alone, separate unto itself. If rehabilitation and shorter sentences means that society runs better, then that should be targeted. The equation isn't as simple as "crime X costs Y dollars damage, incarceration costs Z dollars per diem, calculate for recidivism". Imprisonment has a lot of social knock-on effects.
politically it's much safer to promote harsh sentencing rather than opposite, plus no Amnesty international is going to bribe (to call it correctly - hire lobbyists) US politics into shorter sentencing.
If you believe the criminal justice system to be about reform rather than punishment, then the first question to ask is "Is this person reformed, or should they remain in prison?".
If the answer is the former, and they're still behind bars, then something's very broken with the system. There are innumerable accounts of genuinely reformed prisoners—completely changed people—that pose no danger to society, being left to rot in prison on the account of their unduly harsh sentencing.
This is just my kind of off-the-cuff theorizing, but I had that factored in to the cost column as well. I wasn't speaking about a purely monetary cost. Things like the cost to society of having the person locked away, the cost or not of a society looking at itself and knowing it is a society that locks people away for offense X for Y years.
Another cost to consider outside the above cost column is that crimes of many sorts incur huge costs, both monetarily and through things like social cohesion to a society. And it is in mitigating these potential costs that the benefits come from in the above cost-benefit analysis.
I don't particularly think of myself as an über-rationalist, but ethics more or less comes down to cost-benefit as well. How do you arrive at your ethics, by weighing certain things against other things[1], or do you just go with your gut?
The question of reform is surely one that pulls at the heartstrings if your prone to having your emotions played on.
How can reform be adequately determined? I have no answers for that.
Do you believe that sentences are levied with the expectation that minimal reform will occur or do you think that judges take that into consideration? I'm going to leave this one to the people that devote their lives to it, judges.
I have heard of people released early for 'good behavior,' so this is not an unheard of thing. It's understandable that as you move up the offence ladder, the possibility of a commuted sentence on the grounds of 'good behavior' or 'reform' would become more and more remote.
[1]here is something of an ethical brain teaser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
I think you're generalizing a bit. Utilitarian ethics come down to cost-benefit analysis, but that's only for people who are perfectly rational. Even then, this really only works for a definition of rational that comes down to essentially evaluating mathematically the costs and benefits of things without accounting for inherent irrationality.
To complicate the (overplayed) trolley car problem and perhaps see what I'm thinking on this subject, consider it likes this:
If instead of one person you had push two skinnier people instead of one fat person onto the tracks to save the other four, would it change the decision you made? If you do nothing, the trolley driver is responsible for the involuntary manslaughter of four people but you are innocent. If you push two people, you are guilty of the voluntary manslaughter of two people and will serve 50 years in prison.
If there was only one person to push, you would serve 25 years in prison for their voluntary manslaughter. But does this affect whether or not you push people? I doubt it. From a selfish point of view, the best course of action is to not do anything. However, I suspect that for people who are willing to kill fewer people to save more, the number killed does not matter so long as more are saved.
Applying the law to an ethical thought experiment is inherently fraught and I don't mean to imply that this is an academically defensible suggestion however I hope it serves to illustrate why I don't agree with you.
Do you know if prison systems that have more of a reform focus have reduced recidivism rates? If so, what can be learned from these systems?
If it has been shown, that certain methods lead to better outcomes, what are the obstacles to implementing these changes in the US, or other countries?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/1...
> I would think your not saying that [...] I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence [...]
I offer this feedback in the spirit that writing well is important and valuable to practice.
_You_ may be able to. But most people who commit crimes, don't. They're experiencing brief or not-so-brief lapses in their planning capability, and they're not looking more than five minutes into the future; Extra sentencing is useless as a deterrent to these people, because they're resistant to any consideration of sentencing. They're just not looking that far ahead. Organized crime is the exception to this rule.
Notably, they're not immune to the effects of a high arrest rate. If someone has a 90% chance of 1 year in jail, it is an inordinately more powerful deterrent than a 10% chance of 10 years in jail.
The cost being the cost to incarcerate the person, and the benefit being the person's inability to commit a similar crime for X number of years. So for really bad crimes that carry a really long sentence, the benefit to society of there not being a potential recurrence of the criminal's acts outweighs the cost of the incarceration.
This is a different consideration. This is "incapacitation" rather than "deterrence". It's explicitly giving up on the ability of a prisoner to make decisions, either before the crime or after the sentence; A criminal is thus destined to commit crimes, and 'taking them off the street' is the goal. That's basically how we've approached this for the last ~40 years of progressively expanding incarceration rates, unlike most of the other countries around the world. And that's a fairly inhumane, morally questionable view to take, not least the end of the racial persecution of minorities for being minorities dovetails precisely with the racial persecution of minorities for being criminal in some way, living in a place with high criminality or being tangentially involved in the drug war. Broken windows policing, where crimes may be invented, or activities criminalized, in order to get "at-risk" individuals into the system, where they are never permitted to fully leave.
We talk about lynching as some sort of widespread historical horror, but it only happened to 5000 or so individuals. There are over a million black men in prison, and a lot more than 5000 dead as a result of things like the drug war and racialized pushes for ever-expanding sentencing.
Why do I bring race into it? Because repeated waves of contentious race relations are the big sociological delta between our country, and most of the rest of the developed world. And overt or not, it's been central to how we've done any number of things differently, from the suburbs to the prisons to welfare to the healthcare system to our present political dysfunction.
The yakuza basically never carry guns around anymore because the charges for carrying around a handgun are so high that it's just not worth it.
We always say that "well if someone wants a gun they're gonna get it", which is pretty true. But some deterrents can slow down the transition from " I don't like that guy" to "I'm going to kill him" (hell, if we stop at "going to beat him with a bat", that's still a bit better).
People aren't rational, but things like advertising works, so some form of deterrents must work too I think.
The criminals shooting at each other weekly where I live are all 18-25yr old drug delivery drivers working for established bosses they clearly aren't rational or else they'd realize a few thousand a week isn't worth life in prison. Plenty of these guys get caught but there doesn't seem to be any shortage of violent replacements.
Actually, they are pretty rational. You can't say no to the boss. You say no to the boss, you die. So they either deliver that drug, or die. They choose to deliver the drug, even if it means getting caught and doing life in prison. That's better than the boss killing you for not delivering the drug.
>The criminals shooting at each other weekly...
Again, they're not being irrational here. If you don't shoot, the other guy will shoot you. You either shoot, or you die because the other guy shoots you.
Actually, they do. For example, when a criminal steals, he's acting purely in his own interest. He doensn't care about anyone else's interests. He doesn't care about his victim's interest. He only care about his own interest. Which is why he steals. For his own self interest.
The problem is, society also has it's own interest. And it's in the best interest of society to jail the thief.
Anyway, I think you meant to say that criminal doesn't think about the consequences of their actions. Again, because everything criminals do are for their own self interest. Even doing something stupid like drugs, is for their own self interest (in this case, he does it because his interest is to feel high).
"Johnson’s release date was originally scheduled for earlier, but he ended up serving an additional eight months at the age of 69 for a juvenile shoplifting charge he received when he was 17."
How in any reasonable society is this justifiable? I re-read the sentence probably five times because I simply couldn't believe it.
American law sure favours punishment.
Maybe the judge decided in this case that the sentences should not be concurrent. We don't know what judge had in their mind.
I hate to go all PC (I swear I am not one of them) but I wonder whether mandatory sentencing isn't all bad. Perhaps mandatory sentencing is the most effective way to bring down sentencing rules and guidelines to make them more humane.
This is getting a little off-topic but I don't have much sympathy for violent offenders (I'll lower the bar to those who actually commit battery or robbery as opposed to a threat). As far as non-violent crimes, especially victim less*, crimes go there should really be no jail time at all.
I don't have all the answers but I think we really ought to limit our criminal justice system. Specifically (sorry for going off topic) copyright and such topics should not belong to the criminal justice system. Let those be civil lawsuits between two private entities.
(To be clear, I'm not trying to defend victimless 'crimes' here; rather, I don't understand why you would distinguish between someone stealing from you at gunpoint vs. raiding your home while you're out).
Edited: With the obvious exception that the mugger is endangering your life by pointing a loaded weapon at you. Is that the only difference?
But in both cases the theft of property is morally equivalent to the thief enslaving me to produce the stolen items for him.
If it took me a day to work to earn the money to buy my phone, and you steal it, you've just stolen a day of my life.
Why not do both? Put him under house arrest, and compel him to buy me a new phone.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/thanks-to-the-mus...
Bankrupt him? Poor odds for rehabilitation then.
Enslave him? Tempting, but as others have pointed out there's a world of corruption and market distortion awaiting you.
I'm really not sure what the answer is.
This stuff is hard to get right.
I do think false representation, fraud, malpractice are serious crimes. If someone sells you a copy of Debian Linux or Microsoft Windows and they sell you a compromised copy, they deserve to have their pants sued off of them. To me that is the same level of crime as a pharmacist selling placebos as real medicine. I imagine there has to be a balance somewhere between discouraging fraud and abuse while not coming as too heavy handed.
I certainly won't claim to have the answers. Perhaps I am kicking my position further to the extreme than what I believe is a reasonable compromise. Sorry if I come off as silly or self-contradictory. Part of me writing is to discover and learn what my positions are.
Would you expect to serve time for being caught riding a bicycle on a pavement? No. Otherwise would not seem fair, particularly if there were no warning signs...
The law is a system with predictable penalties if you a) don't live somewhere with utterly absurd laws and b) can put yourself in the shoes of the person doing such a crime and think about the expected outcome of getting caught.
I've seen someone charged with kidnapping get it lowered to a misdemeanor (in that particular case it was appropriate).
Did he shoot harmlessly in the air during a robbery, and then get 44 years for "attempted murder" because he's black? Or did he leave a police officer in a coma for life after torturing him for days? Or did he get 8 years for attempted murder and then commit additional crimes while in prison?
We don't have enough information to know.
Or are you suggesting that the badness of the attempted murder might be such that the 44 years was inadequate and so the additional 8 months is acceptable as additional punishment for the attempted murder?
Your wording is somewhat ambiguous. I can tell there are some scenarios that you believe are possible and which justify the additional sentence, but I'm not sure what exactly those scenarios are.
I don't think it's vindictive to have a fixed sentence for a crime, shop-lifting say, and apply that to all shop-lifters who are convicted regardless of any other crimes they may also have committed and been convicted for.
Imagine two people stabbed identical twins in the same spot with the same intent at the same time. One dies, one lives. Should they get different sentences? It's just a roll of the dice.
Whereas, by contrast, the absence of death is the unintended consequence of, say, a shooting or stabbing (in any vital area of the body).
We can't go easy on an attempted murdered just because, luckily, the victim didn't die.
We also can't go easy on someone who killed using a punch just because death was unintended; the fact is that the victim died, and the fact is that not all punches are the same. They vary in intensity and area of delivery. A punch which kills (directly) must be quite a wallop, backed by a lot of rage.
My understanding is that logically there's that basic framework of required specific intent, then there are a few crimes that allow prosecuting for negligence, then very few crimes with strict liability.
I'm originally not from US so I'm probably still getting used that the latter two categories are quite common in US law (and that strict liability is even possible).
Just in case anyone was thinking that 44 years for attempted murder is a light sentence.
It was different in Stalin's time, though. Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma tales tells a very different story. But even he survived after having served 15 years.
The MPC approach is logical. Criminal law punishes moral culpability, not bad outcomes. That's why the act of killing another human may be anything from murder to no crime at all depending on the killer's intent. A would-be murderer's moral culpability is not lessened by the fact that he is thwarted from actually accomplishing his objective.
For the sake of future discussions, just remember that these people are real, and there's mostly likely tremendous misfortune behind such a heinous act as murder.
No one gains anything from these 44 year long sentences.[0] He's been incapacitated for his entire life, and because of that, is seemingly going to be it for the rest of his life.
[0] Obviously if he's diagnosed as completely deranged there might be an issue of public safety.
If I shoot you purely by accident most people will agree that I shouldn't go to prison. It was an accident, I'm not a danger to society.
If I mean to murder you but my aim is off, or modern medical science manages to keep you from death, how is society better off exactly by keeping me in prison for a shorter time just because I wasn't successful?
The rational reason to put people in prison in the first place is because we consider them a danger to society. Am I less of a danger to society just because I was slightly incompetent on my first murder attempt?
That probably depends on how reckless you were. Stupidity combined with fondness for dangerous objects can be dangerous to society. Jail-time might be good idea.
> If I mean to murder you but my aim is off, or modern medical science manages to keep you from death, how is society better off exactly by keeping me in prison for a shorter time just because I wasn't successful?
Results surely must play some role. Let's imagine a world when tech is so advanced that murdering a person is really hard. Should all who attempt be punished same way as those that really put in the effort to get the job done?
Should a person be punished as if he murdered you if he was trying to kill you using voodoo magic or consciously trying to give you heart attack with insisting on you eating additional burgers?
> That probably depends on how reckless you were.
My point is that most people do recognize the importance of intent and future outcomes.
> Results surely must play some role.
Why do we put people in prison at all? Revenge is not an actual reason, which is where outcomes would matter. Future deterrence and security is a good reason. Killing someone isn't primarily a crime against /them/, but a crime against society made up by people who'd like to not live their lives surrounded by likely murderers.
If that's the goal it makes no sense to say "oh he stabbed that guy, but missed the heart by an inch, that's OK then". No it isn't.
> if he was trying to kill you using voodoo magic
Which is a valid form of argument. He's showing you how absurd what you're saying is if applied literally. You don't get to duck out and claim he's off topic, you need to address his point which is perfectly valid. If intent is all that matters, then a superstitious person who believes voodoo works should according to you be charged with attempted murder; that's the logical outcome of your position, you owe him a real answer.
> The more I think about it I don't think they should.
Murder is very extreme example because it's very easy to kill a human if you decide to do it and even if you fail with a bit of luck things might have played out differently. Also murder is sharp. You can't kill a person just a little.
But consider theft. Someone who stole your insulin pump should be treated differently from someone who took some money or someone who tried to enter your house but couldn't open the lock and gave up. Or consider assault. Trying to hit someone shouldn't be punished same as hitting. I think mostly because you can hit someone to no effect (should be punished somewhat anyway) or you can kill with one hit. You'd have a problem to estimate what was attempted and what the punishment for attempt should be. ... you could have a rule that attempt is punished same as most harmless possible outcome.
...unless you are making a point just about murder and attempted murder. Then I'm inclined to agree that serious attempt and murder should be treated same if you can show that the attempt was to murder not just wound.
At least until we have technology that will make most deaths just temporary nuisances and there will be spectrum of how much you can murder someone.
>> if he was trying to kill you using voodoo magic
>Now you're just entering the realm of the absurd.
You are right. I just wanted to bring into focus some (very small fraction) of murderers that are so stupid that they attempt to use methods that couldn't possibly kill anyone and suggest that as technology progresses there might be more such people.
> Why do we put people in prison at all? Revenge is not an actual reason
That's the actual reason we put imprisoned people to death.
And I agree. In a perfect world, justice would be only about intent. But we can't read people's hearts, and we can't explore all circumstances that would lead one to a punishable act. Worse, imperfect attempts at this can easily be abused by evil people to harm innocents. Therefore our legal system sticks to the only thing it can reliably measure - outcomes, sprinkling in some consideration for intent when the latter is obvious.
In a perfect world, we could probably also separate compensating victims from punishing the perpetrators. If I steal and wreck your car to save my wife who needs to get to the hospital ASAP, then in a perfect world I should go free and pay exactly nothing, but you should get a new car (or monetary equivalent) plus some reasonable opportunity costs compensation. Who would pay? The society, out of "shit happens" fund. But to work, this again would require probing intent, in order to avoid turning stealing cars into a replacement for taxi service. Since we can't reliably probe intent, we're stuck with punishing outcomes and creating incentive structures preventing such perversions from developing.
To prove a moral equivalence between 'murder' and 'attempted murder' the law should have to prove that person A tried to kill person B and failed, and then also prove that they would've repeated their attempts until success if they hadn't been stopped by law enforcement ...
If I try to murder you, fail, and then stop trying to murder you, I've inherently done something 'less' than if I had succeeded in murdering you.
This would also avoid creating a legal incentive for Person B to take extra action to complete a failed murder attempt which they might otherwise not take. If the punishments for murder and attempted murder are equivalent, then a criminal should never stop until the victim is dead once reaching the point of 'attempting' murder -- the not-dead person can testify against them making it (in general) far easier for the law to successfully convict than it would be if the victim had died ...
He attempted to murder a police officer, so why should benefit anything from it?
>He's been incapacitated for his entire life, and because of that, is seemingly going to be it for the rest of his life.
Of course. That's the point. That's the whole point of what a punishment is. You can't punish if you don't punish.
I understand. You don't want to punish criminals. You want to teach them how to become good. The thing about criminals is that they have no respect for nice people. So when nice peoples try to teach criminals to become good, the criminal feels like, "Why is this weak ass person trying to lecture me? I would break his neck if I am not in these chains. Talking as if he's holier than me."
Okay. You might say, "Well, if a criminal won't listen to a nice person, let's just have someone not nice teach a criminal how to become good."
Asshole: "Hey criminal, you need to be a good person." Criminal: "Fucking asshole, I'll break your neck."
Not gonna work either.
However, organized crime have found a way to do it (does not work guarantee to work 100% of the time).
The Boss: "Lowly criminal, I need you to be a good boy and not try to kill my family."
Lowly Criminal A: "No." The Boss's 30 henchmen kills him. Lowly Criminal B: "Okay. Fine. I will not try to kill your family."
Only death can deter a criminal, and that's not even guarantee to work 100% of the time (criminals back stabs their boss).
Anyway, as you can see, the above is even worst than our prison system.
However, if you feel you have a method of installing goodness into criminals, please feel free to share.
> Criminal law punishes moral culpability, not bad
> outcomes
Probably depends on the state, but where I grew up (Ohio), murder of an on-duty officer is one of the few crimes where capital punishment is possible.
Attempted murder of a head of state, maybe 25 years or so? Assuming pre-meditation. Attempted murder of myself, 10 years at most, if not pre-meditated, otherwise if it was pre-meditated then some more, but with a chance of parole given good behaviour and maybe psychiatric observation.
Aggravating or other circumstances should be taken into account too, I'm sure that those judges would do their best.
44 years is excessive, by any measure. You're simply not talking about the same person any more. 22 -> 66, that's a life gone. Does the guy in that article look like a serious threat to you? To the officer he tried to kill? To anybody else?
All I see is an old guy who made a really bad dumb move when he was a lot younger, and probably a whole angrier than today. I also question the extra months after he served the many many years for a shoplifting charge when he was 17. That's just revenge, it has nothing to do with justice or having the best of society at heart.
Well he's old now, that was probably the point of his sentence.
> I also question the extra months after he served the many many years for a shoplifting charge when he was 17.
He did allegedly try to kill a cop afterall, I have no doubt the judge was not kind to him for that.
He's rehabilitated now, but you're right that 44 years wasn't necessary. I'd also say 25, tops.
Likewise, the 25 year sentenced individual might wholly repent after five years, and thus sit in prison for another twenty with no rehabilitative meaning, he just rots to serve as an example to others.
You need informed decisions in the process of removing people from society and when to reintroduce them. It is not something to write down on paper or try to set universal rules. You need extensive oversight to prevent exploitation of those given the power over the lives of others, but you need informed and intelligent decision makers with multiple opinions deciding when the dangerous are fit to participate again in society, not arbitrary number guessing.
And no, its not cheap. But its more expensive socially to have the redeemed rot and the vengeful run free.
I'll take that chance. For every how many people that just spent a decade in jail do you think there will be one that manages to squeak by observation and hearings for a decade?
How many people would you be prepared to jail to save one life of an innocent person?
A lot of them never should, that never repent and would always be a threat to others. But then you have those that rot in jail for decades after being completely rehabilitated by policies like mandatory minimums and extended sentencing like mentioned in this article waste their lives and our tax dollars on something that a board of active professional psychoanalyists should be able to see is a shut case.
It is easy to deceive an inefficient, corrupt, or lazy system when given per-case inspective authority. But it is not easy in the presence of a rigored well implemented system. Rather than try to simplify criminal justice to sentencing based on crime committed with fixed sentences taken from a textbook, we should appeal to reach the global maxima of justice, which includes curtailing the injustice of keeping those no longer dangerous behind bars perpetually.
Don't prisons have common areas with TVs, radios, or magazines? It worries me that inmates don't have access to basic development as a human/society.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/affluenza-dui-case-deposition-tapes...
I'm sure there are many cases with people getting away with murder.
The libraries depend on the prison and are usually spartan with just law books and religious material, and magazines like National Geographic are considered contraband in some prisons.
Radios they have in some state jails not sure about federal. You have to buy an approved radio that can't be taken apart to make any weapons or hide contraband in, and they are very expensive considering most prisoners make hardly anything, and sometimes are forbidden any income at all such as TDCJ.
"Oh by the way, your RSA keys have been worthless for a couple of decades."
Title was basically clickbait. Article was really about the politics behind this issue.