Jails aren't cruel and unjust. Overcrowded, undersized jails are cruel and unjust.
A national news story is the fate of the people locked up in D.C. jail because of their roles in the January 6 attack at the Capitol. They claim the place is a hell hole. They complain it is overcrowded, noisy, and dangerous. In fact, those inmates have it relatively good. They were moved from the D.C. Central Detention Facility (CDF) to the lower-security Central Treatment Facility (CTF) across the street. But I do not doubt that their situation is still miserable. That is the nature of jails in America.
 |
| Jackson County jail. Nice from the outside. |
The committee listened to jail architects on where best to place guard stations so there would be sight lines in multiple directions, thus reducing staff requirements. We looked at issues like natural light, prisoner safety, prisoner hygiene, visitation spaces. The committee had consensus that we wanted a humane jail, not a hell hole. Our intentions were practical, too. A good jail is easier to manage and staff, the inmates are less troublesome, and legal liabilities to the county are smaller. Many people in jail are not convicted of anything and are presumed innocent. Yet they are incarcerated because they are not suitable for bail release. They require confinement, not torture. The committee considered the right size. We shocked the commissioners by advising a much larger jail than the presumed range Jackson County needed. I was part of that consensus. The county scaled it back. The county built what it had money for, not what it needed.
In 2020, Jackson County voters resoundingly defeated a proposal for a new jail. It was controversial for its proposed size. Anti-tax people voted, as always, against anything that involves taxes. But people in liberal circles also opposed it. A presumption circulated that police, prosecutors, and judges would fill a jail with some mix of jaywalkers, underage teens caught with marijuana, alcoholics, homeless people illegally sleeping under bridges, and people who were mentally ill. The idea was that American society was so eager to criminalize discrepancies to public order that we needed a big jail to sweep society's issues under the rug and out of sight. I heard it repeatedly: We need addiction recovery programs, we need affordable housing, we need mental health workers, not jails.
But we need jails, too. Sometimes my liberal friends have difficulty acknowledging that some people are dangerous. It offends their--and my--presumption that people are inherently good, or at least reformable. It offends their--and my--presumption that broader social forces of poverty, discrimination, bad parenting or schooling, childhood abuse, or something else, was to blame for their anti-social behavior. Therefore, a "punishment" mode like jail is a form of blaming the victim, and morally wrong.
Insofar as criminals are really victims-in-disguise, it just affirms my point that jails must be large enough to be humane. Inadequate jail space guarantees overcrowding and misery. Liberal resistance to jails is not humane. Its result is cruel. There is a sad reality that some people are dangerous. They need confinement where they cannot hurt others. Maybe at some later point in their lives they will be well-behaved and good neighbors, but for right now, they need to be off the streets.
Public safety should be a Democratic issue. The people most hurt by crime are poor and working people. The big progressive issues that motivate Democratic activists--climate, racial justice, misogyny, access to education and health care--only rise to prominent issues when the first-order issue of personal safety is secure. People who rob and burglarize are dangerous. People who drive 123 miles an hour on public streets will kill innocent people. The jail has a public list of who is incarcerated today and what they are charged with. Take a moment. Browse. Some have been found guilty. Some are awaiting trial. Start with the letter "A": Arson. Rape. Felon in possession of a firearm. First degree sexual abuse. . . . Pick a letter of the alphabet of surnames and scroll.
It isn't cruel to get dangerous people off the streets. It is cruel to let them be arrested and immediately released because there is no place for them in the jail.
[Note: For daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. The blog is free and always will be.]
11 comments:
Peter said:
But we need jails, too. Sometimes my liberal friends have difficulty acknowledging that some people are dangerous. It offends their--and my--presumption that people are inherently good, or at least reformable. It offends their--and my--presumption that broader social forces of poverty, discrimination, bad parenting or schooling, childhood abuse, or something else was to blame for their anti-social behavior. Therefore, a "punishment" mode like jail is a form of blaming the victim, and morally wrong.
I harbor no such presumption. As far as I know, there is no evidence available to either support or contradict that presumption.
Some people are evil and destructive. However they got that way, whether they were warped after birth or born that way, we have every right to defend ourselves from them.
We would like to give our modern societies a monopoly on the use of force, but that gift is a two-way street; going the other way is society’s obligation to use that force monopoly to protect us from crime.
Many liberals advocate “soft on crime“ policies, leading to a failure to protect us from crime; see New York’s recent “bail reform“ policies for an example. You could look at liberal policies and easily come to the conclusion that liberals want to keep us from defending ourselves from the crime they refuse to prevent.
That’s not a winning political position, and it’s why crime has become such a huge issue for the Democrats.
We can’t forget that every inmate, other than those who received life sentences, will be released at some point. If they are not rehabilitated then there is a good chance they will continue to do what put them in jail in the first place. Jail shouldn’t be a fun place, but years of misery and mistreatment and violence won’t make anyone a better person. It will make them resentful. Then they’re let loose onto the public. What could go wrong?
Yes, Vote for the jail. I'm not sure exactly why anyone would vote it down.
I would hope anyone who considers themselves a Progressive has thought through the law enforcement issue and comes to the conclusion that until there is a consensus on more humane solutions that prisons are a necessary evil. They are expensive and have no value as a long term solution to crime, drug addiction, and other dangers to society, we do agree on that much.
Fun Fact:
"As of January 2023, the incarceration rate of the United States is the sixth highest in the world, at 505 per 100,000 people. Between 2019 and 2020, the United States saw a significant drop in the total number of incarcerations."
Our county has about 250,000 people...the jail holds about 400. The proposed facility would be for 750.
So just to be in line with the overall statistic Jackson County would need to be able to house about 1000.
Unfortunately, jails are infrastructure and have to be updated just like roads and bridges. Being in favor of jails is not mutually exclusive with believing crime is a public health issue and should be approached humanely.
It’s my understanding that sociopaths, psychopaths, and child molesters are NOT reformable.
Peter, your tale about Jackson County sounds very similar to our jail fiascos in Josephine. Our new jail was the result of a federal judge deciding that our old one resulted in cruel and unusual punishment.
I’m not a hard ass on people who are incarcerated, especially those who haven’t been proven guilty of a serious crime. However, the judges ruling, based on the number of square feet per prisoner, seems rather bizarre.
I say this because, running the numbers, JOCO's old jail had more room per occupant than my barracks in boot camp. And we Coasties hadn’t even been accused of any wrongdoing.
More ironically, my “personal space” on my ship, USCGC Sebago was a”hammock” about18” wide. I couldn’t fully bend my knees due to the steel railings on each side, and due also to my fellow coastie's hammock being 16-18” above mine.
Furthermore, the hammock was so short that, that, with my head against the steel railing at the head of the bed, my legs hung off the other end from the knee down. So my personal space, in total, was about 7 1/2 square feet!
Again, I wasn’t even a suspected criminal. Maybe all the USA's ships should be scrapped, and larger ones built. Or simply kick 98% of the crew off the fantail.
You were compensated for your service.
Well, I worked in Alaska prisons for 30 years, so I do have some opinions on the subject. The courts have taken over a large proportion of the running of jails due to lack of funding of staff over incarceration per room. I have experienced a room with two bunk beds and a plastic boat for the third bed in a room of 10x10? The plastic boat for the bed had about a 6 inch clearance from the steel toilet in the room. You wouldn’t want to be that inmate I can assure you. The United States takes care of the mentally ill by incarceration. Go into a prison and you will find significant numbers of mentally ill who are kept there because jail can’t say no to the police officer who recognized an intervention was needed. Psychiatric hospitals do say no all the time. My other thought is that some people require society to say no to them or they will do very bad things.talking to them, medications are not going to change or stop them. Only limiting their freedom will protect society. Many jails cost over $100 a day to house each inmate. My thought is incarcerate the violent ones, provide adequate community mental health services for the mentally I’ll, and increase probation officers who can really monitor those inmates out on probation or parole rather than just seeing them once a month for 20 minutes. Some people require society to pay attention to them one way or the other.
The good ol’ US of A, the self-proclaimed Land of the Free, has the highest incarceration rate in the world. We’re also the wealthiest country in the world and yet some of our prisons are hellholes. There’s really no excuse for such willful cruelty, but it’s hard to feel any sorrier for those insurrectionist “patriots” than for anybody else.
Most people think that the County jail is full of convicted criminals serving their sentences. Not so. Most jails comprise about half of their population of charged individuals (presumed innocent) awaiting trial. Look what Detroit did to reduce pretrial populations:
https://www.bridgedetroit.com/wayne-county-jail-sees-dramatic-population-decline-heres-why/?mc_cid=c1aeaaff5e&mc_eid=ef3a65a796
Corporate prisons began building new facilities while private prisons were still illegal in California. ; corporations had enough clout to go ahead and build them, knowing they could get laws changed. Then they convinced the legislature to pass three strikes laws, providing them with lots of bodies to profit off of.
Sometimes relevant facts are needed. The county jail census as of today was 309. The jail was built to hold 292. It may have expanded in some way to hold 315. Thus, if the jail is overcrowded, it isn't by by much. Whether it's a hellhole could only be determined by inspection, but I haven't done that, and I don't think Peter or any of those making comments have done so.
When a proposal for a new jail was placed on the ballot in 2020, the plan was to build a facility that would house 896 detainees. That was so much larger than the current jail that we could only wonder whether a lot more people would have to be incarcerated to justify the expense.
At the time, I was part of a coalition that not only opposed the ballot measure, but proposed decriminalizing small amounts of all previously prohibited drugs and adopting a plan similar to the CAHOOTs program in Eugene to use mental health professionals rather than law enforcement officers, to handle disturbances involving mentally ill people. Oregon did do the former, and Jackson County is moving slowly to institute the latter.
It may be that we need an upgraded and expanded jail, but not one that triples capacity.
Compensated, Mc? What’s your po int, sir?
I’m not complaining about my tight quarters; read my bloody post.
I did get paid, tho pretty little, e since this was not VOLUNTARY servitude. I don’t recall how much I was paid when I was discharged, but going in I got the following American bills: $20, $10, $5, $2 and $2 again. Total $39, every two weeks. Working, or generally getting tortured for 16+ hours per day. Of course, we also got fairly decent feed.
I understand the voluntary military gets a bit higher pay. I suppose they have to pay more, since they are no longer conscripting people.
Post a Comment