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Tag: prisoners

  • Bar the doors! Board the windows!

    Bar the doors! Board the windows!

    Halloween is coming! 6,000 inmates are about to be released from prison. Most got about 2 years cut from a 10 year drug sentence.

    Think of it: 6,000 roving marauders. Pirates! Barbarians!! Thugs!!! They’ll be Shanghaiing our youth, raping our maidens, and pillaging our homes! At least that’s what I’m learning from some on the Right. (See me on Bill O’Reilly.)

    Don’t believe the hype.

    6,000 is less than the number released from prison every goddamned week in the US.

    You know what will happen when, during one week, that number of released prisoners goes from 12,000 to 18,000?

    Absolutely nothing.

    Update: I just heard on public radio that close to 2,000 of those 6,000 are going to be immediately deported to Mexico (Nothing like investing half a billion dollars on incarcerating people before kicking them out of the country). So the actually weekly increase of people getting out of prison will go from about 12,000 to 14,000.

    Only semi-related: Here’s a nice pie chart from PPI. It’s rare to see things broken down by why you’re there, and include immigrants and juveniles:

  • Felon Who Fought 3-Strikes Law Kills

    Well this is going to set back sentencing reformfor a while!

    I suspect this seventh strike will put him away for life.

    A multiple felon who campaigned against California’s three-strikes law and was free after managing four times to escape its harsh sentencing guidelines has been charged with murdering four people in home-invasion robberies here this year.
    …
    Mr. Ewell was in courtrooms again this summer after three arrests, accused of switching price tags on a vacuum cleaner and other items at Home Depot stores. The judge postponed his 32-month prison sentence so Mr. Ewell could undergo “prescheduled eye and stomach surgery,” said Jacquelyn Lacey, an assistant district attorney in Los Angeles. Prosecutors said Mr. Ewell spent a month of that grace period — from late September to late October — robbing a string of homes in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County and killing four people he either strangled or beat to the point of a heart attack.

  • Back Home

    I’m back from my whirlwind tour of southern Mexico. Yucatan, Chiapas, Campache, Tabasco, for two weeks, I ate and drank everything in sight with no ill effects.

    Then on my first night in Baltimore I get sick. It put me off my game slightly today at the crab feast. But I still had a good time. Plus I won $50 in a raffle!

    Thanks for all the good discussion while I’ve been gone. Mexico was great, but it’s good to be home.

    Unless, of course, you happen to call this prison in California your home. Bad riots there. I can’t say I’ve ever experienced a prison race riot. But I can’t imagine anything much worse.

  • Prison Cigarettes

    Oh, Onion… how do you manage to keep being so funny?

    All joking aside, the price for a singlecigarette inside Rikers (last I heard) is $20. This black market was created, of course, after smoking was “banned.” Most of the supply comes from C.O.s. Hell, for hundreds of dollar profit per pack? I might, too.

  • Child killers. Child prisoners.

    Jessie Rankins killed a five-year-old. Rankins was 10. The story by Gary Marx in the L.A. Times.

    As he walked out of prison a free man last month, Jessie Rankins barely greeted his wife, exchanging only a few words without kissing or hugging her. It was their fourth wedding anniversary, and he hadn’t seen her in 2 1/2 years.

    “I’ll feel better when I see my dog,” he said a short time later.
    …
    In 1994, he and a friend abducted 5-year-old Eric Morse, dangled the screaming boy out a 14th-floor window at a public housing high-rise and dropped him to his death. Eric had refused to steal candy for them, prosecutors said.

    This story won’t have a happy ending.

    (And how prisoners like this find girlfriends?)

  • Save our Prison? Shame!

    “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.

    I’ve said it before: prison guards don’t get a say in sentencing reform. Prisons are needed to keep dangerous people away from non-criminals. That’s it. Talking about prisons as any form of economic boost to the community is immoral.

    The purpose of prisons is not to provide jobs. I don’t want to pay poor white people to lock up poor black people. Prisons only make prisoners worse. There’s got to be a better way.

  • Cali must free 58,000 inmates

    Read the story by Denny Walsh in the Sacramento Bee here.

  • Maybe next time they can split the bill?

    A Sheriff in Alabama was jailed for “blatant” violation of past court agreements that prisoners be properly cared for. It seems he had been, legally mind you, profiting from the leftover money allocated for prisoners’ food (all of $1.75 per person per day!). Here’s the story in the Times.