Nothing new here. But it’s good to have a refresher course every now and then. It’s too easy for prisoners to be out of sight and out of mind. (plus these are the neatest diagrams I’ve found in the subject) Now it’s 2,300,000 behind bars. The increase is all since 1970 and the war on drugs. It has little relationship…
In a Heritage Foundation foundation report by Charles Stimson and Andrew Grossman, I learned a very surprising fact: Convicted persons in the United States actually served less time in prison, on average, than the world average and the European average. Among the 35 countries surveyed on this question in 1998, the average time actually served in prison was 32.62 months.…
Nicholas Kristof sounds offabout our absurd priorities that funds incarceration instead of school and health care. Did you know a black boy born today has a one-in-three chance of serving time in prison? That’s right, not arrested, but prison. It wasn’t that way a generation ago. It’s not crime. Crime hasn’t gone up (it’s gone down). It’s the war on…
In Mexico, on the road between Merida and Campeche, you pass a large prison (filled with people from Mexico City, they say). Lining the highway are a dozen or so stores selling hammocks and other labor-intensive hand-crafted good. They’re made by prisoners. Why don’t we have this?
At any given moment, more than 1.5 million children have a parent, usually their father, in prison. … Among those born in 1990, one in four black children, compared with one in 25 white children, had a father in prison by age 14. Risk is concentrated among black children whose parents are high-school dropouts; half of those children had a…
The story by Suzanne Smalley in Newsweek: A prison may not seem like the best place to raise infants. But researchers are finding that it’s better than the alternative. Joseph Carlson, a criminal-justice professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney who recently completed a 10-year study, says he thought such programs were “strange” when he began his research. Now…
Senator Jim Webb wrote a piece for ParadeMagazine: With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different–and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter. … Justice statistics also show that 47.5%…
“This is a major impact on a small community,” said Paul Lashway, a Norwich resident and prison guard at Camp Pharsalia for the past 10 years. He is also a steward for the local corrections officers’ union. “I thought we were trying to save jobs,” he said. “Here, they’re trying to take ’em.” Here’s the story in the Washington Post.…
Be a prison guard at the Eden Detention Center in Texas and work for the private (publicly traded) for-profit Correction Corporation of America. Get paid $14.99/hour (about $30K/year). Must be willing to work all shifts. GED and valid driver’s license required. According to their website: CCA houses approximately 75,000 offenders and detainees in more than 60 facilities, 44 of which…