My point, again, is that money spent on prisons and incarceration is money falling into a bottomless pit. Human capitol is diminished and tax dollars generate no economic benefit.
A prison model based on retribution and vengeance guarantees continuous expansion of the prison population, no job growth, and the sound you hear is your tax dollars being sucked into a black hole.
This model guarantees that every year more money will be needed for incarceration, and less will be available for education or infrastructure.
Thinking outside the box, a model that reclaims and recycles human capitol at least presents the hope of a prison budget that decreases, and inmates who become tax paying and contributing citizens.
Rehabilitation is not only morally RIGHT but is the only way to turn off the vacuum sucking the general fund into a black hole.
How the ICE stole Christmas. Feel the chill.
this morning was wondering – if not for the family members – whether or not most people would care how strangers deemed unfit for society are treated. I give the Globe credit for reporting this unsexy topic.
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p>By rehabilitation – I am sure you mean real rehabilitation as opposed to the temproary confinement that passes for substance abuse rehabilitation these days.
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p> An indicator of how we are declining as a society: http://hrw.org/english/docs/20…
I didn’t think DOC was doing that well.
Prison rape would seem to be a much more prevalent thing and perhaps a contributing factor to suicide attempts. It would also seem unlikely that one could go to prison, get raped, and then be adjusted in any sense once it is time to reenter society.
inmates are people who 30 years ago would be on the acute units and back wards of state hospitals — working up and then losing priveleges and so on. Many state institutions were snake pits also.
Corporal punishment?
I had to stop reading it. Maybe that’s due to my own phobia about solitary confinement, but I can hardly begin to imagine what people who are mentally ill go through, locked up in a 6 by 9-ft cell for 23 hours a day.
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p>This situation is an outrage, and I commend The Globe for bringing it to the public’s attention. As the article points out, the incarceration of the mentally ill is partly the result of deinstitutionalization of these people in the 1980s and 1990s. Just because deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and mentally retarded has become a trend across the country doesn’t make it the right thing to do in all cases.
The increased number of suicides in MA prisions this year should not be a surprise. The 2004 report of the Governor’s Commission on Corrections Reform Strengthening Public Safety, Increasing Accountability, and Instituting Fiscal Responsibility in the Department of Correction addresses many of the critical issues discussed in The Boston Sunday Globe article on the seven MA prison suicides in 2007.
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p>The report, chaired by former Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, suggests some institutional reforms, resource changes, and accountability measures that would prevent additional suicide attempts from taking place and address the serious mental illness problems found in our state prisons.
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p>Unfortunately, neither Governors Romney nor Patrick nor the Legislature has shown any interest in tackling the serious issues and proposals addressed in the Harshbarger Report.
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p>This an unfortunate development because the rash of suicides and suicide attempts and absence of useful mental health services are an unmitiagted embarrasment to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a personal tragedy for the family members of the deceased. The conditions that led to these suicides and the suggested reforms of the Harshbarger Commission deserve to be addressed by our policymakers and bureaucrats in the near future before the situation becomes even more gruesome.
…was over 3000. Is prison really cheaper then mental health care for us taxpayers? The healthy care for the ill, I thought – but warehousing them in conditions like an 1820s madhouse? There is no excuse for this.