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London School of Economics and Political Science

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Land of Political Idealism:Mass incarceration

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Bernie Sanders the Puppet teaches kids about some horrible truths involving our justice system.

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Shows the prison being overflowed with prisoners and the us justice system being the culprit of this problem.

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The cartoon is pretty straight forward.  Our country wastes tax money on these so called "dangerous" criminals , usually minorities, are being locked up more and more and the numbers increase "day after day" and "Year after year"

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Video

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Formerly Incarcerated & Convicted People 's Movement

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When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" 50 years ago, he had no idea Jim Crow would be replaced with another oppressive system: mass incarceration and the drug war. WATCH "Our Turn To Dream": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=janfMPqLXqI&list=PLQ9B-p5Q-YOP2tFOMafIteWNlFfeJPrqE&index=1 SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy1UzIJf_Dog0vzLJUPLXHA?sub_confirmation=1 It's our turn to dream.

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Academic article

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Article

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Stop Flows of Arms that Fuel Abuses

A global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) became international law on 24 December 2014.

Every state that has signed-up must now obey strict rules on international arms transfers. This will at last help to stem the flow of weapons that fuel bloody conflicts, atrocities and state repression around the world. It's rare to get a direct win that will help save thousands of lives, but after relentless lobbying and campaigning since the early-1990s, Amnesty and its partners have done exactly that. The Treaty's rules are simple - if a country knows that the arms about to be sold will be used for genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes, then they must stop the transfer. The work doesn't stop here. The ATT gives us crucial ground rules for the global arms trade. Now we must make sure that it is strictly put into action and more states get on board.

The problem

Every day, thousands of people are killed, injured or forced to flee their homes because of violence and armed conflict.

Conflict

The majority of casualties in armed conflict are civilians. Weapons such as missiles destroy hospitals, homes, markets and transport systems - pushing survivors into poverty. People's lives are destroyed. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, it is estimated that more than five million people died indirectly because of armed conflict since 1998.

For every person who is killed in armed conflict and armed violence, many more are injured, tortured, abused, or kidnapped at gun point.

On the streets

Weapons aren't just on the battle fields: they often end up on the streets, fuelling violence in communities. Three-quarters of deaths cause by armed violence take place in non-conflict situations. In places like Central America, domestic violence and killings of women are frequently committed with small arms bought on the black market.

"The poor and under-privileged innocent bystanders - women, children, old men - always lose. I have seen the prolonged misery and suffering of these poor people in DRC and it is truly heart-rending,"

Mujahid Alam, retired Pakistani Brigadier General who served on UN Peacekeeping missions in the DRC and Kosovo.

State repression

Weapons are also a tool for state repression. In too many countries around the world, security forces use firearms against unarmed peaceful protestors, or to commit other human rights abuses.

Amnesty is calling for

Government who are serious about stopping the abuse need to:

Ratify the Arms Trade Treaty.

Create or amned national laws to reflect the rules of the treaty.

Implement those laws effectively.

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Military, Police and Arms - Amnesty International USA

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Stop Flows of Arms that Fuel Abuses A global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) became international law on 24 December 2014. Every state that has signed-up must now obey strict rules on international arms transfers. This will at last help to stem the flow of weapons that fuel bloody conflicts, atrocities and state repression around the ...

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For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America's now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the destructiveness of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over climate change.

In both cases, overwhelming evidence shows a crisis that threatens society as a whole. In both cases, those who study the problem have called for immediate correction.

Several recent reports provide some of the most comprehensive and compelling proof yet that the United States "has gone past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits," and that mass incarceration itself is "a source of injustice."

That is the central conclusion of a two-year, 444-page study prepared by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Justice Department and others. The report highlights many well-known statistics: Since the early 1970s, the nation's prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the world's biggest. That is five to 10 times the incarceration rate in other democracies.

On closer inspection the numbers only get worse. More than half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes, and one of every nine, or about 159,000 people, are serving life sentences - nearly a third of them without the possibility of parole.

While politicians were responding initially to higher crime rates in the late 1960s, this "historically unprecedented" growth is primarily the result of harsher sentencing that continued long after crime began to fall. These include lengthy mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses that became popular in the 1980s, and "three strikes" laws that have put people away for life for stealing a pair of socks.

And even though the political climate has shifted in recent years, many politicians continue to fear appearing to be "soft on crime," even when there is no evidence that imprisoning more people has reduced crime by more than a small amount.

Meanwhile, much of the world watches in disbelief. A report by Human Rights Watch notes that while prison should generally be a last resort, in the United States "it has been treated as the medicine that cures all ills," and that "in its embrace of incarceration, the country seems to have forgotten just how severe a punishment it is."

The severity is evident in the devastation wrought on America's poorest and least educated, destroying neighborhoods and families. From 1980 to 2000, the number of children with fathers in prison rose from 350,000 to 2.1 million. Since race and poverty overlap so significantly, the weight of our criminal justice experiment continues to fall overwhelmingly on communities of color, and particularly on young black men.

After prison, people are sent back to the impoverished places they came from, but are blocked from re-entering society. Often they cannot vote, get jobs, or receive public benefits like subsidized housing - all of which would improve their odds of staying out of trouble. This web of collateral consequences has created what the National Academy of Sciences report calls "a highly distinct political and legal universe for a large segment of the U.S. population."

All of this has come at an astounding economic cost, as tallied by a report from the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project - $80 billion a year in direct corrections expenses alone, and more than a quarter-trillion dollars when factoring in police, judicial and legal services.

Many of the solutions to this crisis are clear, even if the political path to them often is not: Reduce sentence lengths substantially. Provide more opportunities for rehabilitation inside prison. Remove the barriers that keep people from rejoining society after they are released from prison. Use alternatives to imprisonment for nonviolent offenders, drug addicts and the mentally ill. Release elderly or ill prisoners, who are the least likely to re-offend. And since more than 95 percent of inmates are eventually released, rate prisons on their success in keeping former inmates from returning - which as many as two-thirds currently do. Some states have already taken smart and effective steps in these directions, but there is a long way to go.

The insanity of the situation is plain to people across the political spectrum, from Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who agree on the urgent need for change. The research is in, and it is uncontestable. The American experiment in mass incarceration has been a moral, legal, social, and economic disaster. It cannot end soon enough.

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For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America's now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the destructiveness of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over climate change.

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OP-ED

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" Mothers in Prison," by Nicholas Kristof (column, Nov. 27), repeats the deincarceration lobby's mantra that America's "most catastrophic" policy was mass incarceration, which, Mr. Kristof says, had devastating consequences for families, and costs the average American household $600 a year. This view of imprisonment policy is built on selective memory.

The crime wave that led to increased incarceration was the real catastrophe. From 1970 to 1995, more than 522,000 Americans were murdered, and nearly 37 million people were injured in violent crimes committed between 1973 and 1991. A 1992 study found economic losses to crime victims in that year alone totaled $1.4 billion.

Between 1980 and 2009, drug offenders accounted for about 21 percent of imprisonments, while violent criminals explained more than half of those incarcerations.

We need to face the realities of imprisonment if we are going to downsize in a rational and safe way.

BARRY LATZER

New York

The writer, professor emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, is the author of "The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America."
To the Editor:
It is important to note that the trajectory of the number of women behind bars is not only one of growth but also disproportionate growth. The incarceration trends for men and women have been very different: Jailing women was once rare but is now commonplace.

While the number of men in jail has risen nearly fivefold since 1970, the number of women has risen 14-fold. This is not only an urban problem: Three-quarters of American counties did not jail a single woman in 1970, but today few counties are immune from this trend.

Nicholas Kristof rightly points to drug-related crimes as one of the causes and to treatment as one of the solutions. Drug-related incarceration disproportionately affects counties that don't have the admirable treatment and diversion resources, like the Women in Recovery program in Tulsa, Okla., featured in the column.

The striking disproportionate growth in the number of women in jail points to the fact that the jail is too often the place where the county's social problems land when there is not an adequate investment in health and human services.

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Opinion | Behind the Reality of Mass Incarceration

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" Mothers in Prison," by Nicholas Kristof (column, Nov. 27), repeats the deincarceration lobby's mantra that America's "most catastrophic" policy was mass incarceration, which, Mr. Kristof says, had devastating consequences for families, and costs the average American household $600 a year. This view of imprisonment policy is built on selective memory.

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LEO MUHAMMAD

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News Article

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Washington - THE growth in the nation's prison population has been nothing short of staggering. The United States' incarceration rate is now more than four times the world average, with about 2.2 million people in prisons and jails. Of those, roughly 200,000 are federal inmates, double the number from 20 years ago. This substantial increase occurred even as violent crime was falling sharply.

Now Congress is considering bipartisan legislation to loosen tough sentencing laws. The bill faces resistance from some lawmakers.

As economists who differ on many issues, we both agree that cost-benefit analysis provides a useful framework for analyzing complicated questions. And in this case, we agree that the verdict of such analysis is clear: Our sentencing rules are failing and need to be changed.

On the benefit side of the equation, prisons and jails play an essential role in managing violent criminals and reducing crime, particularly helping people in poor communities who are the most likely to be victims of murder, robbery or other violent crimes.

But a general rule in economics - the law of diminishing marginal benefits - applies to incarcerating additional people or adding years to sentences. Research finds that more incarceration has, at best, only a small effect on crime because our incarceration rate is already so high. As the prison population gets larger, the additional prisoner is more likely to be a less risky, nonviolent offender, and the value of incarcerating him (or, less likely, her) is low.

The same general principle applies to the length of prison sentences, which in many cases have gotten longer as a result of sentence enhancements, repeat-offender laws, "three strikes" laws and "truth-in-sentencing" laws. Longer sentences do not appear to have a deterrent effect; one study finds, for example, that the threat of longer sentences has little impact on juvenile arrest rates. Other studies have found that sentencing enhancements have only modest effects on crime. They are unlikely to meaningfully affect the overall crime rate or generate meaningful gains in public safety.

Moreover, in many cases the analysis suggests that adding prisoners or years to sentences can be harmful. A growing body of research shows that incarceration and longer sentences could increase recidivism. Individuals may build criminal ties while incarcerated, lose their labor-market skills and confront substantial obstacles to re-entry after release. A new study finds that each additional year of incarceration increases the likelihood of re-offending by four to seven percentage points after release.

The bottom line: The putative benefits of more incarceration or longer sentences are actually costs.

Those costs are not confined to the prison population. Time in prison not only means a loss of freedom, but it also means a loss of earnings, risks to the health and safety of the incarcerated, and prolonged absences from family that can strain marriages and increase behavioral problems in children. The probability that a family is in poverty increases by nearly 40 percent while a father is incarcerated.

Economic hardship often continues after release: A criminal record creates substantial obstacles to employment that could increase with the amount of time served, and incarceration decreases earnings by 10 to 40 percent, compared with similar workers. The fact that so many states have rules (including unnecessary and unnecessarily inflexible occupational licensing restrictions), and companies have practices that make it harder to hire former prisoners compound the economic and human damage.

Finally, more than $80 billion is spent annually on corrections, or over $600 per household. The annual cost of imprisoning one person averages approximately $30,000 for adults and $110,000 for juveniles, higher than the cost of a year of college. At the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons budget grew 1,700 percent from 1980 to 2010 and now devours more than 25 percent of the entire Department of Justice budget.

There are other tools that can reduce crime more cost-effectively, including promoting employment and wage growth and investing in education. That is one reason that between 2008 and 2012, a majority of states were able to reduce incarceration and crime.

Incarceration plays an important role in promoting public safety, and imposing prison sentences for criminal conduct has moral and practical dimensions. But the criminal justice system should be designed to ensure that the benefits of incarceration exceed the costs. Individuals incarcerated for nonviolent drug crimes - 50 percent of the federal prison population - pose a low risk, and the costs of incarcerating these people outweigh the benefits. Similarly, since criminal behavior declines and costs increase with age, releasing older individuals who have already served lengthy sentences is also likely to yield net benefits.

Congress has the opportunity to rationalize our criminal justice policies and reform sentencing for individuals who pose the least risk. Reform is imperative, not just for its economic or budgetary benefits, but for individuals who deserve a second chance and the families and communities who stand beside them.

Jason Furman is chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Douglas Holtz-Eakin is president of the American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Mass Incarceration Doesn't Pay. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | Why Mass Incarceration Doesn't Pay

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Washington - THE growth in the nation's prison population has been nothing short of staggering. The United States' incarceration rate is now more than four times the world average, with about 2.2 million people in prisons and jails. Of those, roughly 200,000 are federal inmates, double the number from 20 years ago.

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News Article

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See all the wonderful things A Cupit has made