Fw: [Peace-discuss] socializing an industry -- good but also bad

[Jenifer Cartwright]

Some/lots sure as hell are, but are there decent rehab programs, job training programs, and jobs waiting for them so they don't go back into The Life? (rhetorical question, not looking for an answer).
 --Jenifer

--- On Thu, 12/11/08, Stuart Levy <slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:

From: Stuart Levy <slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: Fw: [Peace-discuss] socializing an industry -- good but also bad
To: "E. Wayne Johnson" <ewj at pigs.ag>
Cc: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008, 11:14 AM

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 12:19:08AM -0600, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> It's really a lot of leaping to a lot of conclusions about what you
think 
> that I really think. :-)
> But a lively discussion is good.
>
 [...]
> I do believe that able-bodied persons who are imprisoned should work for
> their keep rather than have the full burden of their provisioning placed
on
> the backs of those not incarcerated.  It seems to me to be more immoral
and
> unfair to have them waste their lives in incarceration than it to impress
> them into productive service.  I do think that we have too many people
> uselessly and meaninglessly imprisoned in this country wasting their
useless
> and meaningless lives and I suspect that the majority of them should be
> freed.

A problem is that, once the prison system becomes powerful enough (as it long
since has here in the US, at least), people get to be imprisoned *because*
the system needs more prisoners (for cheap labor, support for the prison
industry, giving the political impression that crime will not be tolerated....)
not necessarily because they've done something so wrong that the society
needs them locked away.

(Larry Niven has a cute SF story along these lines.  Once organ
transplantation becomes widely available and a key to a long and healthy
life, committing repeated parking violations becomes a capital offense.)

> I am persuaded that we are all too quick to incarcerate in this country
and
> the incarceration does little to provide the "Corrections" that
are
> advertised by that peculiar line of business.

Hear, hear.

I don't know whether penitentiaries were ever seriously intended for
their inmates to be penitent (as they were originally named for),
but they surely aren't now.

Reform of the criminal justice system -- including promotion of 
of restorative justice as opposed to the current US norm of
retributive justice -- is a key activity of the proposed
Department of Peace.
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