“In 1971, a time in the U.S. political environment where there was a tremendous amount of hopefulness, change and reform in the air, there was a sense we were making the country a more fair and just place,” Haney said. “But by the mid-1970s and by the late ‘70s, all that began to change. There was a ‘tough on crime’ movement that had overtaken the nation at that point. What had been a moratorium on prisons in the U.S. became a massive prison construction."
Chris Haney is a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz (America's Wackiest University). This week he gave a talk about the evils of having criminals in prison. The campus paper, City on a Hill Press, has the glowing report.
http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2015/04/08/an-obscured-world-of-punishment/
As I commented in the reader thread, it probably has never occurred to the learned professor-this so-called luminary- that the reason we have mass incarceration is because we have a lot of criminals in our society, something that has gone way over Haney's head.
3 comments:
Gary--with all due respect, I am glad I have only visited CA and never lived there. Just think, if that had happened, my kids could possibly have gone to college there.
The universities are bad all over the country.
You're wrong Gary. What is wrong with our prison system is that we do not make sufficient effort to distinguish the guilty from the innocent, and then do not make a serious effort to let the punishment fit the crime.
First, lots of people who don't need to be in prison are there, and they make great political cover for those who really should be locked up.
Second, we need to replace "off to prison" with a network of smaller, specialized institutions. We might even make some sentences LONGER, based on running really humane institutions for first time offenders who really need to be isolated from the bad company just waiting for them out on the streets.
You also miss out on the economics. Once money has been invested in building prisons, there is an incentive to keep them full, especially if many of them are run by private companies, and others built by states expecting to rent the extra cells to other jurisdictions.
You hate unions... how about the California correctional officers union, which throws huge gobs of money into lobbying for mandatory minimums to keep its members employed, whether it keeps us all safer or not?
elwood is not from California? Gee, he writes just like a Californian.
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