Chagur
Given that we've clashed before on subjects like drugs & justice, I'm curious about your opinion:
I was under the foolish impression that society breeds the criminals who are then incarcerated to 'protect society' ... The society that bred them.
You and I both know that some people ... you just can't change the evil they will commit. Among these are often murderers and rapists, but also the white-collar criminals who steal people's life savings and so forth through embezzlement, fraud, and other means. Of course, these white-collar criminals often learned that their actions are right because of social demands. When the profiteers of the 1980s started dropping like flies for their crimes (I reiterate that, in the end, over 100 of Reagan's people served prison time for their actions), Trudeau noted in
Doonesbury, through the voice of the senior Slackmeyer, "Hell, most of the time we didn't know we were breaking the law." What, I wonder, are we teaching people in business school? When I was at the University of Oregon, it was Sun-Tzu. Of course, this brand of criminal gets the tennis court and the spa in prison, and such factors are used to decry the luxury of other prisons.
But then I stop to consider a young boy (kindergarten or first grade) in the northwest who brought a gun to school and killed a little girl. The investigation of how it happened turned stomachs. He lived in a crack-house, surrounded by crackheads and guns, and one need not even be inundated with a certain archetype in order to accept its propriety. Thus, whatever the dispute was between the boy and his classmate, his only known solution was to take one of the many guns around the house to school and shoot her dead. It is a little extreme of an example, but bear with me, I beg you.
What is a young boy living in relative poverty supposed to think? When I was in high school a local druglord/pimp/gun-runner died in a shooting at a Nendel's Inn motel. It was apparently a drug-related accidental suicide, though the ballistics were sketchy toward that end. Nonetheless, this known druglord, pimp, and gun-runner packed a church with thousands, packed the streets with thousands, and had thousands outside the cemetery as he was laid to rest. That is, despite the fact that he was a scumlord, he was looked up to by a good portion of the community because he had found a way to material success.
Sounds twisted, eh? But it is true. I've even seen the attitude on HBO in the last couple of years; a number of interviews with pimps and the young men in their community pretty much demonstrated that, with nobody else to look up to in the neighborhood, pimps, drug dealers, and gun-runners can become role models.
Quite sick, I agree. But enter Midnight Basketball. As silly as it sounds, making basketball courts available to youths in gang-risk zones in the middle of the night had the effect of reducing gang-related crime by 1/3. Now, I'm not going to engage the argument of whether the
federal government should be paying for it, but since I agree with paying for performance art ... well ... but yeah, I do understand Newt's point on that one.
So away went the late-night basketball games and up went the gang-related crime numbers.
What we're looking at, then, are rising generation in poverty, with no clear role models, moving toward the money and the glamour in that all-American way, with nothing else to do with their lives. I am curious about the fact that people would rather spend their tax money locking up criminals instead of figuring out how to reduce the number of criminals operating in society.
And to make a point about the drug war itself: here is where prisons breed criminals. With the rate of possession-related incarcerations skyrocketing, and many of these nonviolent criminals being housed among violent criminals, the prisons do breed new criminals. So Johnny gets busted with a rock of crack and gets five years. At this point, his only known crime is possessing cocaine. After his hard-time five years, Johnny emerges a lean, mean crime machine, having done nothing but lift weights, seethe with anger, and fight off every threat that comes his way. With a crack conviction, no education, no rehabilitation, and a serious, serious attitude problem, this druggie who might have been diverted to more useful endeavors is now holding up convenience stores, beating women in order to get laid, and very possibly landing a stolen Cadillac in your front yard as he runs away from the police.
With nothing else to learn in prison, then, this possession convict learns the way of the hardened criminal, and emerges with skills related to such endeavors.
In many cases, the no-good-sons-of-bitches had much help and encouragement toward making their poor decisions. In some cases, they never understood they had a choice. And this is not just stupidity on their parts, but a lack of any apparent alternatives.
I mean, really ... take a guy and throw him in prison for possessing dope and a single Tylox; lock him away for a decade if you want, twenty-five years as some sentencing structures have it. Are we gambling that he will die in prison? Or, if he survives long enough to be released into society, what kind of person are we releasing?
But, you know, we can always throw them back in prison, or gun them down on the streets. After the Dorismond shooting in New York (a black man, 26, killed by police for not having any drugs on him), Hizzoner Rudy Giuliani went before the press to defend the NYPD as having dealt with a career criminal. In order to establish that, though, Giuliani opened and released (illegally) juvenile court records showing Dorsimond's crime career: a single petty shoplifting charge at age 13, never prosecuted.
It sounds nice to condemn criminals with a broad stroke, but reality doesn't reflect that portrait.
thanx much,
Tiassa