Addicted to Incarceration / Huffington Post

Movable TypeSam SlovickSam Slovick

Here’s my new HP post; Addicted to Incarceration about last weeks CA prison -Supreme Court Decision, L.A. Law Enforcement and the Prison Industrial Complex.

A sharp divide in the recent Supreme Court ruling ordering California to drastically reduce its prison population represents a deeper national division.

33,000 inmates are court-mandated to be released over the next two years. Governor Brown wants to transfer inmates to local jails but doesn’t have the budget to cover the migration. Former Senator George Runner predicted that it will result in “flooding our neighborhoods with criminals.” Neither mentioned the 249 California inmates sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for crimes committed as juveniles.

America’s prison population topped two million for the first time in in 2002. 7,248 inmates under 18 are in adult jails. The report published this month by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics says one in 31 adults was incarcerated or under supervision at the end of 2007. Black American males are incarcerated at a rate more than 6.5 times that of white males.

America is addicted to incarceration. The Texas Control Model, eye-for-an-eye carceral paradigm that pummeled the rehabilitation movement in American prisons has bloody footprints leading all the way back to the plantation. Along the path, countless families decimated by the wars on drugs, crime and gangs waged utilizing profit-driven law enforcement ideologies born in California under Nixon, Reagan and Bush.

  • Read my entire HP blog here: Huffington Post
  • This week in my LA Weekly series, Pavement, I follow a 19-year-old fugitive that brings the result of institutionalized alienation into sharp focus in a very personal portrait.
  • [LA Weekly / PAVEMENT VIDEO/PODCAST]

 

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There is 1 comment

  1. Stow it, Rat. Way to illustrate Mr. Morton’s point about vonetleur zealots not being as interested in public safety. Who’s actually worked with fed. prisoners & understands that it’s part of the mission of Corrections to help violent offenders try to get a handle on their anti-social urges & that those who help them do that are thus doing a service to the tax-payer? And that many of those who don’t respond well at all to psychologists may do so with religious counselors? And who’s just being a troll running interference on Opposition blogs whenever the Conservative Ministers do something stupid again?

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