Prison Map
prisonmap.com
prisonmap.com
America lacks any proper mental health care for the poor, a political decision. America lacks proper treatment programs for drug addiction, a political decision. America prides itself on being "tough" on crime, a political decision. America is swamped in guns, turning many minor crimes into accidentally lethal encounters --> political.
The prison problem starts and ends with US politics.
As a general rule, US "jails" house people awaiting trial and/or serving short sentences. "Prisons" house people with more than one year to serve. Prisons are generally much nicer places than jails.
(I went to a US law school, spent lots of time dealing with low-level offenders all of which were drug related. It's a horrible horrible system.)
Take a look at this infamous jail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Towers_Correctional_Facili...
If this piqued anyone's interest, you can see this in a little more detail in Louix Theroux's "Miami Mega Jail" two-part documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSM_UvZ-Jic (part 1 only, if you enjoy you should be able to find part 2). Like the GP I originally thought jail = prison, but it's definitely not and could even be a good deal worse in some cases.
The big way weed gets you to jail is because it's a conviction that breaks your parole and you get sent back for your previous crime.
Or are we talking about awaiting a bail hearing?
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, as they say.
I find it really hard to feel sorry for criminals that are selling so much drugs that they can live comfortably on drug money. That's a significant amount of illegal activity.
They knew about the risk, and they took it. Now they have to live with the consequences of their decisions.
The fact that an unjust law is still on the books just means that politics and law move too slowly.
I don't know how anyone can stand behind an unjust law "because law, duh," and that's why you're getting downvoted.
No one questions that. The question is over what amount of HARM was done and what is a reasonable response to that.
In other words, if you accept the existing laws at face value, then this is, indeed, terrible "drug kingpin" behavior deserving of severe punishment. And (ducking Godwin's law) if you accept the laws of North Korea, then thousands of people deserve lives of horror and torture for the crime of being born to a prisoner at a re-education camp. The question that I believe we should be asking is whether such laws are just and the punishment appropriate.
Oligarchy is responsible for the biggest abuses of the prison system, NOT "dictatorship by an elected government".
The fundamental driving forces of the high number of prisoners is the push for more draconian policies by corporations that build prisons (> profits) and corporations that use them as a cheap source of labor (> profits).
>America prides itself on being "tough" on crime
"Tough on crime" was the marketing message used to ensure compliance by the electorate. Like all sales pitches, it did not accurately depict the actual product - e.g. mandatory sentencing for non-violent drug offences.
As soon as you stop allowing to turn prisons into profits with inmate occupations guaranteed by the DoJ but instead come back to a different understanding and deliver various social functions and protections of our societies in the way they are intended to be (Not for profit as a service to society that you finance / support with your taxes) this will change and together with it most likely the stop of "unnecessary arrests" as they have recently be called by the NYPD will become more permanent.
Otherwise soon the "Ministry for Information" might charge you for "information retrieval" and the cost of your execution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_%281985_film%29)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/magazine/what-a-tv-show-ca...
How that interacts with the costs of keeping them etc I don't have any feeling for
Edit: Pretty cool why/how he got satellite imagery of all 4,916 facilities (http://prisonmap.com/about)
It was posted 4 times previously to HN, including twice 3 years ago, but has not had significant attention.
Whatever explanation is given, it seems unfathomable that a democratic country could end-up with higher incarceration rates than the worse dictatorships.
Or on a more personal note, how about a 79 year old man with the early stages of alzheimers and dementia put in prison, isolated, and denied a phone call, access to lawyers or even being able to let anyone know this has happened for 3 months? Innocent until proven guilty doesn't even apply, let alone basic justice.
What a perversion.
Then in the next step add some charts, user login, connect to a payment service and make it a really cool prison investment exchange! Maybe you could issue some prisoncoins based on the profit numbers. Of course do not forget to publish your own javascript framework that evolved while building it...
However cynical this can get, I doubt that most people will understand that the US model of 'society' is deeply br0ken.
To add something useful: a collaborative data collection of human right violations like e.g torture might be a good tool for triggering a positive change. I am sure there are many other issues that could be attached to the basic gis data collection [1]
Please crowdfund this, so it can grow.
This seems reasonable to me, considering how people end up in jail and college, respectively.
College is something people generally go to voluntarily, with the consent of their family, and generally at a time when they are transitioning from living with the parents as a dependent to living as an independent adult. They are looking forward to their adult life, and putting childhood behind. They often seek a college away from their home region, as part of asserting their independence.
Most people who end up in jail didn't get there voluntarily. Sure, we could reduce the number of jails significantly. The majority of them are fairly small local facilities, serving a city or a county, and their population often is mostly people serving less than a year, or people who have not even been convicted yet but either could not make bail or are being held on charges too serious to allow bail. It would probably be more efficient to close all of those and move those prisoners to a few big facilities.
I don't think most of the affected prisoners would like that, though. It would make it a lot harder for their families to visit them. It would make it harder for those awaiting trial to meet with their lawyers.
I think it would be best if we had enough jails and prisons to allow most prisoners to be kept somewhere within a couple hours travel from their family, so that their spouse, kids, and friends can reasonably visit them every visiting day.
The best theory I've seen put forth is that prison's are a booming for-profit industry in the U.S., and profits breed corruption. Consider the "Kids for Cash" scandal from a few years back in Pennsylvania.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
To sum up, a judge was found guilty of accepting bribes to sentence minors to a specific jail for minor offenses. The child incarceration rate was apparently not naturally high enough to support the prison, so steps were taken.
If a top to bottom examination of the U.S.'s justice system were made, there is little doubt that prison time is handed out more liberally than is warranted to deter and rehabilitate criminals. So, the fact that there are more prisons than colleges in your nation should seem alarming rather "reasonable".
I'm Canadian, and we're starting to see american style prisons, longer sentences, and a correspondingly higher incarceration rate with higher security prisons and, worst of all, proportionally more prisoners in solitary confinement. Our politicians make hay on being "tough on crime" even when all evidence suggests longer sentences provide no deterrent to first-time or repeat offenders. There is increasing evidence that solitary confinement, besides being inhumane, acts against the interests of rehabilitation. Canada, and many other nations as well, need to observe what's gone wrong in the U.S.'s justice system so that they can avoid making the same mistakes. In Canada, there were two private correctional facilities, but both have reverted to government control. This is good, but private prison companies continue to lobby the government for contract business. They must be denied. Private enterprises may be more efficient at many things, but the justice system must prioritize results and a lack of corruption above all else.
Corruption need not be direct, or directly for profit. The Corrections Officers' Union in California is a formidable force. They can make sure that only those "tough on crime(tm)" get elected; and until recently, they were all for prison expansion, harsher sentencing (remember "three strikes"?), etc.
But, thankfully, recently they seem to have been shown to be defeatable: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/09/california-prison-g...
On the other hand: we are spending about $35K per prisoner per year, which is more than we spend on college students...
I think if the payment system shifted to this we would see better prison conditions improve fast and much more education focus... or is something like this in play already?
I'm familiar with the GMaps API, but not with how one would do that? Is this run inside a browser/PhantomJS?
Does anyone has an idea how to do this as simply and "cleanly" as possible?
How can the world's proudest democracy answer the simple question that Kim John Un poised ?
How is that a productive distinction when the problem (as you admit) is that there are too many laws which are too vague and too broad? "You only go to prison if you break the law" is useless consolation if it's not possible for generally honest people to live their lives without breaking the law. It causes enforcement to be at the whim of the government. You're already a criminal, so whether you go to jail is based on whether they decide to prosecute you. Which is clearly not entirely based on whether you committed a crime.
> false convictions are statistically rare
How do you even propose to measure that?
The reason why this question is important is because We generally do not recognize North Korea's sovereignty. We have this notion that we are orders of magnitude more advanced then them.
What I think Kim-John-Un means is we cannot pass value judgement on him. Yes he kills a lot of people but we can judge him for his actions at killing a lot of people. We can even get rid of him because of that. But we cannot make the argument that our way and implementation of governance is way superior to his.
America does have far fewer innocents and political prisoners. If you question Obama your whole family won't get thrown in jail for 3 generations.
http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2013/jan/14/han...
There is societal value to housing criminals that pose a danger to society. I'm more than happy to have psychopaths locked away from my life. The question is how many of these people are actually dangerous, or would remain dangerous given some basic education and/or life support.
When you are in hospital after a bad car crash you don't want to be treated by a Doctor who 'feels your pain'. You want that cold and calculating mind to take decisions based on facts rather than emotion. Most psychopaths find their niches.
"He who opens a school door, closes a prison." - Victor Hugo
Read the 'about' page, and it explains the methodology, where the data comes from, as well as the percentage of prisons depicted.
An improvement to the website would be a CDN (faster loading of images) and using 'infinite scroll' to load all (~4000) images.
One can use a piece of js to only load images in the viewport.
Could also add a small placeholder text shown (instead of black) before the image is loaded. E.g. the coordinates, or county/state, or the size of the facility in square meters (or yards or whatever).
In any case you think infinite scroll would be useful, what you really want is a link at the bottom of the page that says "elements per page: 25 | 50 | 250 | unlimited". Infinite scroll makes it painful to reach the end of a large list on a machine with low memory. It deprives the user of the ability to record your place in the list if you want to come back tomorrow (or switch to another device or restart your computer etc. etc.), or send a link to someone else. It breaks the web.
Technically, you can use history.pushState & replaceState to automatically update the URL to the current position without having to reload the page. Demo: http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items