What Is Going On With Federal Prisons? Nothing To Prevent Crime

The politicians whip us citizens up about crime - the blacks are coming for you, or the Latin American gangs have control of your city - and that they can save you. All that needs to be done is to get tougher on crime. And tougher and tougher. We've been getting tougher on crime my whole life, but still we have crime. We had Donald J. Trump talking about carnage in our cities during his First Inaugural. He is now sending ICE gangsters into cities because they are rampant with crime, decent people cannot leave their homes, and the local governments are under siege. Why anyone thinks he is now suffering from dementia is beyond me - there was no more carnage in our major cities during his first term than there is now.

But if the politicians were truly interested in making Americans safe, they would take care that when inmates return to their homes, they have the means to a different future.

That is, if the crime issue is not used to gin up campaign contributions and edge us closer to a police state. Power and money - the addictions of politicians.

Read Canceled DOJ Grants Threaten Bipartisan Work to Support People Released from Prison (Brennan Center for Justice) and decide for yourself what the politicians mean by getting tough on crime.

Republicans and Democrats have long agreed on the need to help people leaving incarceration find work and stable housing so they can contribute to their communities and avoid returning to crime. But in April, the Trump administration terminated grants initially valued at $40 million aimed at implementing the bipartisan Second Chance Act — a law first championed by President George W. Bush — which seeks to improve outcomes for people returning from prison and jail. 

Every year, more than 450,000 people leave prison and return to their communities, and millions more pass through local jails, typically staying for just over a month. The Justice Department’s cuts affect not just these people but their families and communities as well.

While some key federal support for reentry remains, it rests on shakier ground — both politically, as cross-partisan support seems suddenly more tenuous, and programmatically, with money and talent leaving the field.

I suppose this is why I will be spending my own money on the irrelevant polygraph examinations.  

Now, consider Legalizing Cocaine Is the Only Way to End the Drug War (The Intercept) 

After all, U.S.-led authorities around the world have tried everything else, and to great human cost. Coca fields across the Andes, where cocaine’s main ingredient grows, have been sprayed with harmful herbicides like glyphosate, harming the local Indigenous people for whom coca holds unique spiritual and nutritional value, and killing anything that tries to grow in the contaminated soil. Consumers and traffickers of cocaine have been imprisoned en masse, helping to create a prison–industrial complex which serves as a university of crime for its incarcerated and a fertile recruitment ground for armed drug gangs.

The war on drugs is not just a political metaphor — in many places, it’s a full-blown, militarized conflict with vast numbers of casualties. It has fueled unparalleled bloodbaths in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed across the world, notably in Colombia, Mexico, and most recently Brazil, where a police raid on a cartel-controlled favela in Rio led to more than 130 deaths in one night in late October. “This was a slaughter, not an operation,” one bereaved mother told The Guardian. “They came here to kill.”

***

Today, cocaine is one of the world’s most reliable commodities. It’s a multibillion-dollar market serving around 50 million global consumers. Production in the Andes is at a record high. Purity is the highest it’s ever been. Cocaine is cheaper, stronger, and more accessible than at any point in history. From bankers to bricklayers, everyone is at it — and the interests of cartels all over the world are enmeshed with the legal economies.

This state of affairs represents a totemic, catastrophic policy failure. It’s high time for a grown-up conversation which acknowledges that the drug laws — by funneling untold riches to violent criminals — are more harmful than the drugs themselves, as research increasingly shows. 

Yeah, I find it hard to see our Drug War as making money for drug dealers, politicians, and bureaucrats, including the police. I see no benefit for anyone else. 

Outrage Coda by Decarceration hits on the complicity of American citizens in the dehumanizing treatment of the incarcerated.

In prison, you don’t see a lot of rich people. There are some white collar guys, but many of them have already blown through their money. Most people come from hard times, and they’re going back to hard times. Much of this stems from the resources the government places towards arresting and prosecuting people in low-income environments and economies. But it also comes from a natural social slant the public has towards the upper class. The idea is that the unhoused deserve to be reprimanded for their social status, but when we talk about the wealthy, it’s considered a dirty word. “Socialism”. “Class warfare”. The idea that the rich can buy their way out of an indictment has gone from a cynical take to accepted fact.

When asked, the public won’t have the same knee-jerk reaction towards the unhoused as they would towards those convicted of a crime. But they have the same desires, which are that they want them out of sight, out of mind. In fact, the roots of treatment are similar for both. No one wants to address the cause of criminality, just as no one wants to observe why people might end up without a roof. They just wish to sweep streets clean. This is not about quality of life. This is about treating people, and a problem, like trash that has to be brushed to the side. I say this as, yes, part of the trash swept to the side. There will be more. Notable is that this is an excellent opportunity for a company to pursue profits. Never let a crisis go to waste.

A little off the track, but another news item from my BOP alma mater is hard to resist. Inmate dies at Fort Dix prison (The Philadelphia Inquirer) surprises me not by someone dying at Fort Dix FCI, but that the Bureau of Prisons admits someone died there. When I was there, it was commonly thought by us inmates that the BOP escaped scrutiny by having inmate deaths occurring at the closest hospital. Coverups are either not working, or BOP no longer cares about scrutiny about its operations.

A 25-year-old man died on Saturday at the federal prison at Fort Dix in New Jersey, prompting prison officials to notify the FBI, officials said in a statement.

Jarrette Morales was found unresponsive at 2:15 a.m. at the Federal Correctional Institution Fort Dix at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in Burlington County, according to the statement. He was pronounced dead by EMS officials.

Prisons are human warehouses. They are not designed to change anyone's behavior - unless the inmate wants to change and has the means spiritual and intellectual. This blog is a record of what I have done to atone for my criminal acts. Nowhere has the federal government aided or encouraged my efforts. I was lucky because I did have a reason and the means to change. What is to become of those wishing to change without any idea of how to accomplish their goals?

sch 12/4