shermanstick posted:The biggest constraints on the construction of new prisons are all budgetary and states like California have built in measures that require them to start freeing prisoners when they reach a certain level of overcrowding. Since prisons have to be ordered to be constructed so far in advance, it makes the individual Departments of Corrections have to do forecasting and this cost-benefit analysis of whether or not they can release prisoners/continue overcrowding/change policies/build new prisons. Prisons are crazy expensive to build and staff, but small towns lobby heavily for their construction and right now the new craze is actually prison privatization where companies like Wackenhut or some of the other large security corporations take over existing prisons or build private prisons.
If you have any specific or directed questions about crime, imprisonment or other related issues I can answer those.
Wackenhut is now called G4S Secure Solutions - all part of the G4S corporation.
G4S also does prison and immigration services - removals of overstayers, breaking up families etc etc in Britain.
Can I ask a simple question: Which struggles against imprisonment sentencing and new prisons have actually succeeded?
Like when you go on Prison Activist Resource Centre - based in Oakland (what looks like very a radical neighbourhood, certainly has lots of mythology) - http://www.prisonactivist.org/
It has lots of stuff but nothing followed up, and zero collective successes for prisoners or families. Also, has anything been done about people in US having to declare they have convictions when looking for work?
Do the major liberal organisations like ACLU have success with campaigns like
Growing Up Locked Down?
http://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/growing-locked-down-youth-solitary-confinement-jails-and-prisons-across-united
Slowly here in Britain, the imprisonment rate is increasing and unlike in the 1970s when there was a recession and sentencing was eased slightly for some crimes especially Class C drugs, this time the imprisonment has just increased.
9 times out of 10, youth imprisonment creates stunted, semi-paranoid, at times pretty narcissistic (deep-down frightened but threatening and abusive to others) young people - I suppose this is the aim.
I see mainland England turning into something like the city-heavy American states: subsidised farming done by immigrants, no jobs no work for most young people, drugs, property rackets, food banks except with knives instead of guns for most of the young drug gangs.
Being honest, I'm having trouble understanding all the responses here. I'm not part of the twitter generation, I post occasionally on UK-based boards, but they're not as wild as you people are. I don't get twitter - it means nothing to me, I don't use the n word and would discourage everyone from using.
Squalid posted:All of those things are driven by the working class, especially the Chicago teacher's strike. Basically everyone not in a union hates unions in the U.S.
Are working-class people - not in unions, in hard to organise sectors - behind the teachers' strikes or are their unions and their strikes also hated?
How and why are the anti-union Green Dot/Charter schools growing so rapidly in poor areas?
We have something very similar called Academies/Private Academies, except there aren't as many, although they are growing.
discipline posted:I mean if I had to sum up this generation in two words it would be "commitment averse." People have no desire to settle or commit to anything, because we are constantly being told that we can have it all, and this is what drives the Man (aka system). People don't marry but will live together for years because of fear of commitment, nobody will sign up to any political program because of the same thing. Obama really utilized that - campaigns were low-pressure, could pick up their phone and put it down at will. Even if they are riding your ass at work, you have the illusion of being able to work from home or remotely, you can float projects. You throw away your clothing once a month, your smart phone once a year. People buy disposable cheap furniture. How many people do you know read a book from start to finish in the last year? This is reflective of our system of economy that demands a constant realignment with a new thing or cause to keep production moving. Multitasking is reflective of a changing workforce and focus of life. Accordingly, our political movements are expected to be ADHD friendly, we are supposed to be able to indulge as much as we like and no more, take no responsibility and make no commitment. Accordingly, sticking to one thing is considered strange and old-fashioned. If you're not able to throw away your life at the drop of a hat then you are obsolete. The new generation and our ideologies are hypermobile, quickly changing, creative destruction on overdrive.
I think I understand this.
What I found most annoying in recent protests here is the assumption that you have to go to city centres - to be visible, when that's very expensive because tickets are so expensive.
People are expected to do instantly mobilise at the drop of a text message to go to a secret location to do a hippy-type happening protest.
tpaine posted:Here is what *I* think about Operation Wall Street:
I can't see it.
Edit: I mean what you wrote.
Edited by dalston ()
ggw posted:D&D discussion is a prime example why OWS failed. You have like 3 people in the discussion seeing that the only way to make real change is to completely redo the system/abolish capitalism, but then you had 200 other shitheads saying that capitalism is good and we just need to reform it with regulations and laws and that the reason why OWS failed was because it wasn't liberal enough and the "radicals" ruined everything.
What was D&D?
All in all, has not had any lasting impact?
Weren't some days of Wall Street activity wholly blocked and aren't participants - after having gone through it themselves - now more wiser, more grown up about what NYPD and the Democratic Party means.
The only reason I asked about Doug Henwood was because the article made him appear as a crucial, significant force and Malcolm New Inquiry's response to him was rude, although Doug's response back was even ruder.
I'd like to see the editors of the New Republic, mother Jones and the Nation be rude to one another - it would make a change from the mud within the movement.
dalston posted:What was D&D?
.
D&D or "debate and discussion" is a subforum on the something awful message boards. the attributes that are relevant for this comparison are:
- immature but on average overeducated userbase, technology addicts, mostly american
- procedural inflexibility that is exploited by both insincere and sincere-but-stupid/liberal people
D&D is also ultimately under the authority of a small business owner from missouri who cut his teeth on internet shock humor in the late-90s/early aughties and kinda rode that mother out for all it was worth, and something awful is generally overmoderated b/c its business model is dependent on banning members. not a relevant comparison for OWS but good for understanding what the D&D is
thirdplace posted:but good for understanding what the D&D is
not like you'd want to, good lord
dalston posted:Wackenhut is now called G4S Secure Solutions - all part of the G4S corporation.
G4S also does prison and immigration services - removals of overstayers, breaking up families etc etc in Britain.
Can I ask a simple question: Which struggles against imprisonment sentencing and new prisons have actually succeeded?
Like when you go on Prison Activist Resource Centre - based in Oakland (what looks like very a radical neighbourhood, certainly has lots of mythology) - http://www.prisonactivist.org/
It has lots of stuff but nothing followed up, and zero collective successes for prisoners or families. Also, has anything been done about people in US having to declare they have convictions when looking for work?
Do the major liberal organisations like ACLU have success with campaigns like
Growing Up Locked Down?
http://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/growing-locked-down-youth-solitary-confinement-jails-and-prisons-across-united
Slowly here in Britain, the imprisonment rate is increasing and unlike in the 1970s when there was a recession and sentencing was eased slightly for some crimes especially Class C drugs, this time the imprisonment has just increased.
9 times out of 10, youth imprisonment creates stunted, semi-paranoid, at times pretty narcissistic (deep-down frightened but threatening and abusive to others) young people - I suppose this is the aim.
I see mainland England turning into something like the city-heavy American states: subsidised farming done by immigrants, no jobs no work for most young people, drugs, property rackets, food banks except with knives instead of guns for most of the young drug gangs.
Being honest, I'm having trouble understanding all the responses here. I'm not part of the twitter generation, I post occasionally on UK-based boards, but they're not as wild as you people are. I don't get twitter - it means nothing to me, I don't use the n word and would discourage everyone from using.
AFAIK there have been zero public successes in stopping the construction of new prisons. The only impediments to the construction of new prisons are purely financial. Don't get it wrong, people try to stop the construction in individual communities, but in my region (the South) there has been no successes and if anything, prison privatization has accelerated.
There are clemency offices in individual states that deal with records but no states have made an attempt to vacate felonies or remove these types of questions from employment. Most people don't care about discrimination against felons so it's a non issue and if you try to talk about it people reach for the worst case scenarios and claim you're trying to protect murders and child molesters and shit like that. There are programs in some states that designed to re-acclimate felons and provide them with jobs and in a couple of states (IIRC) there are jobs programs that are intended for recently released prisoners.
Organizations like the ACLU make an impact on individual cases but nationwide they don't do much. One thing you absolutely must realize with American Criminal Justice is that we rarely have nationwide or even regional changes in criminal policy without it being major news or some kind of near earth-shaking event like how legalization is proceeding in Washington or how medicalization has gone of the past decade. Individual successes might be easier to find but you're not going to find a state suddenly deciding they've wronged a bunch of prisoners or an organization finding a state at fault because it opens this huge can of worms. I think in the UK the successes are much more visible because your sentencing policy can be effected by bottom-up change, whereas in the US most changes in sentencing policy occur from the top-down meaning that the politicians make decisions that might appear independent of what the public is calling for and and are closer to the party line.
The US is trying to shift away from it's massive youth imprisonment, but we've just been on a binge for so long that it's difficult to actually put the money up to commit to any programs. US prisons are over-crowded, under-funded and really serve more to warehouse than they do to rehabilitate.
I can recommend you some books or journal articles if you're interested in learning more about imprisonment in the US but the main thing you have to keep in mind is that what is going on right now is the product of a 30 year period where we instituted harsher and more punitive terms for almost all crimes and drastically increased our prison population, so we're still learning how to deal with it. Americans are really afraid to make any major changes to our criminal justice system because we don't want to unwittingly unleash a bunch of super-predators.
The first article you should really check out which set off a whole wave of research in my field and is also from the very beginning of this binge of imprisonment is usually referred to as "Nothing Works" by Martinson (1974), but it's actually drawn from "The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment: A Survey of Treatment Evaluation Studies" (1975) and this article goes over all of the different strategies that had been tried to that point.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=19591
This is a good article for gaining perspective of how important Martinson's article was at the time http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/rehab.html
Edited by shermanstick ()
i know the rhizzone is anti-liberal & contrarian to the point of semi-ironically lionizing fascism but we have to start somewhere.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
tpaine posted:damn ninja have u no soul
dalston posted:ggw posted:D&D discussion is a prime example why OWS failed. You have like 3 people in the discussion seeing that the only way to make real change is to completely redo the system/abolish capitalism, but then you had 200 other shitheads saying that capitalism is good and we just need to reform it with regulations and laws and that the reason why OWS failed was because it wasn't liberal enough and the "radicals" ruined everything.
What was D&D?
All in all, has not had any lasting impact?
Weren't some days of Wall Street activity wholly blocked and aren't participants - after having gone through it themselves - now more wiser, more grown up about what NYPD and the Democratic Party means.
The only reason I asked about Doug Henwood was because the article made him appear as a crucial, significant force and Malcolm New Inquiry's response to him was rude, although Doug's response back was even ruder.
I'd like to see the editors of the New Republic, mother Jones and the Nation be rude to one another - it would make a change from the mud within the movement.
hey fwiw my Position on henwood has changed quite a bit.
deadken posted:the tea party was pretty awesome imo, challenging the corruption and cronyism of representative democracy and prefiguring a genuine mass politics. you can tell how utterly it confounded the liberal media establishment by the fact that their only response was grotesque class chauvinism and unfounded accusations of racism
also i'm pretty quickly coming around to the American position on guns....the more outrage and repugnance i hear about it from liberals and social democrats in europe/australia, the more i realize that a lot of it is based on jealousy and feelings of inadequacy
Ironicwarcriminal posted:also i'm pretty quickly coming around to the American position on guns....the more outrage and repugnance i hear about it from liberals and social democrats in europe/australia, the more i realize that a lot of it is based on jealousy and feelings of inadequacy
it's true. that's why they try to copy us in nearly every single way
ggw posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
also i'm pretty quickly coming around to the American position on guns....the more outrage and repugnance i hear about it from liberals and social democrats in europe/australia, the more i realize that a lot of it is based on jealousy and feelings of inadequacy
it's true. that's why they try to copy us in nearly every single way
yup
"ugh, Americans are just so tacky and excessive and oblivious"
*buys SUV, McMansion, spends evenings watching box set of Greys Anatomy*
ggw posted:IWC when are you purchasing your first gun?
it's a hassle here, you have to show "legitimate purpose" or some shit and then if you want to keep it in your house have to keep it locked in a safe with the gun and ammunition separate
i only want one if i can have an AR-15 propped up in a guitar stand next to the TV or whatever
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2253337/Americans-pose-Christmas-tree-guns-got-gifts.html
there's a doco called A Cross the Universe about Justice' first American tour and their manager (very french) buys a gun as soon as they get to America and then just carries it around with him the whole time.....in Denver the cops come and arrest him at gunpoint in a restaurant because he's just like showing it to people and resting it on the table and stuff.
but open-carry is cool, those guys with don't tread on me shirts who walk into police stations with guns and stuff are cool
"live free or die" is more vital and alive than most attitudes in the west these days
getfiscal posted:in canada you need to get a special gun license after taking a course and you can't get approved if you're mental (sigh). and that license is only for like lame ass hunting rifles to kill a beaver or two. if you want a pistol you have to get a special restricted firearms license which is harder to get than the other one. and there are a lot of rules, like you can't keep the gun loaded, the ammunition needs to be locked up separately, and there are gun-free zones in cities i think. so sad.
that explains this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Tim_McLean
The week following the attack, Greyhound Canada announced it was pulling a series of nationwide advertisements which included the line, "There's a reason you've never heard of bus rage." The incident has led to numerous calls and petitions demanding increased security on intercity buses.
discipline posted:does anyone have a blog here? I'm filling out my blogroll
me Lol. hk's got one 2 and uh imppers tumblr?
