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in response to a few good questions in death penalty thread, if i may digress....weightlifting has been banned in prisons. because these guys were bulking up to be more intimidating. TV..in jails it is only on 4 hours per night on PBS. long-termers in some prisons have TV. it's an opiate. as to the level of imprisonment. we have supermax prisons for the very dangerous. and we have mental facilities in some states for the criminally insane. they are the new mental hospitals.

We still have weights in prisons where I live - and yes they come out all gooned up. It doesn't help that steroids are as easy to get as a candy bar in our correctional facilities. I won't even get started on the inmates' easy availability of acquiring and using hard drugs!! :-5

I had the opportunity some time ago to visit San Quentin Prison and the California Medical Facility in Vacaville California. Got the grand tour, ate in the dinning hall and had a chance to visit with some lifers that conducted the tour. The California Medical Facility is a prison in every sense of the word but houses prisoners with medical conditions that need treatment on a regular basis. Visited Alcatraz after they closed and was made into a National Park. None of these facilities were places that I would care to spend anytime in. I just don't understand the high rate of recidivism. One would think that one tour would be enough.

weightlifting's been banned from prisons nationwide? that would be good news.



sport i mean spot in another topic mentioned our high rates of incarceration. i would posit that the explosion in prison populations correlates with the exceedingly harsh mandatory sentences for drug sentences that arose in the 1980's due to the crack epidemic. there are unfortunately large populations of otherwise non-violent people incarcerated for drug use.



the one area where i tend to fall pretty seriously libertarian is with regard to drug use. if an adult wants to get high in the comfort of their own home, then it should not be illegal. the minute they get in a car - bust em. they minute they they leave their minors alone while they're out drug seeking - bust em. but ultimately, i'd prefer to see most mind alterants decriminalized. make them legal, over the counter 'meds' for adults. true, it would make it easier for minors to get ahold of them. kind of a frail argument considering the ease with which youth can get ahold of illicit drugs. at least if decriminalized, the purity of the drug would be uniform, the risks could be stated just like on a standard prescription drug, and we'd not be filling our prisons with non-violent offenders.



i'll have to do some research and find out what proportion of those incarcerated are for drug offenses. i'd bet our incarceration rates are not far from those of other nations if corrected for that.

on the drug issue, i agree with Paul. i don't care how smashed you are. until you rob the 7-11 or leave your baby in the car while you give some idiot a BJ. then i am going to bust your nasty butt.

This is veering off topic - the drug issue should be started in a new thread. But I agree with the loosening not tightening of the penalties for personal drug use for many reasons I feel outweigh the negatives.

in jails it is only on 4 hours per night on PBS


That's more than a lot of their victims get.

Paul i will be interested in your findings.the collective cop 'we' are not speaking of having a bit of MJ on their person anymore. it's crack rocks and oxycontin. which account for 89% of the crimes i see. serious crimes. violent and murderous crimes. not some head eating bags of chocolate chip cookies.

lady cop wrote: Paul i will be interested in your findings.the collective cop 'we' are not speaking of having a bit of MJ on their person anymore. it's crack rocks and oxycontin. which account for 89% of the crimes i see. serious crimes. violent and murderous crimes. not some head eating bags of chocolate chip cookies.
indeed. however, if the profit motive of black markets were removed, much of that ancillary crime would be reduced.



on the other hand, having tasted freebase cocaine and had my own little, very brief love affair with it some twenty years ago, i know that crack cocaine is one of the surest ways on earth to take your life, wad it up, and flush it down the toilet. so i'm....conflicted....with regard to decriminalizing something that potent. heroin, on the other hand - surprisingly enough - is quite benign, the heroin addict supplied with clean pure drug can function perfectly normally within society, with the worst side effect being chronic constipation.



but i digress.

so you're saying the heroin addict is full of shite? i agree with you, heroin is not the problem since the intro of cheap crack that certain classes can easily afford. it's highly addictive and inexpensive. but the most important thing you said is the point about ancillary crime. that is my point. it's mostly crack-based. and includes murder.

lady cop wrote: so you're saying the heroin addict is full of shite? i agree with you, heroin is not the problem since the intro of cheap crack that certain classes can easily afford. it's highly addictive and inexpensive. but the most important thing you said is the point about ancillary crime. that is my point. it's mostly crack-based. and includes murder.
sure, i don't doubt it. having smoked the stuff, i know exactly what it does to the mind. the first and most significant is it imprints the word

MORE

in the thalamus. "get more". "want more". "need more". with each puff, you hope to reach that moment of sublime, total satisfaction the first puff created. but since you're depleting your brain of serotonin faster than you can empty a glock of ten rounds, you can't get back there.



concommittant with

MORE

is "don't share" (since it's anathema to 'more'). a rather heady mix sure to create disputes.

yep..."disputes" involving leaving one's own footprints in your own grandma's blood because you had to kill her with a hammer to get her VCR to pawn.

right. and the libertarian stance is of course absolutist - decriminalize them all. but like much of libertarianism, it's grounded in utopianism, thus lacking pragmatism.actually, the same can be said for the extremes of any political ideology, left, right, martian, whatever.



but, uh, i digress.

why Anastrophe, you never digress!........... however, back to prison life...many are institutionalized, and very demanding of their rights as wards of the state. medical care is costing citizens huge $$$$$. corrections officers spend hours a day on med pass with the civilian nurses. and they demand dental care as well. when in fact they never took care of their teeth before. i have arrested so many scraggly-ass crack queens with three teeth.

My brother did a 5 year stretch for shooting the thumb off a man who had stolen his tools. The fact he often forgets is that he was drinking and doing crack at the time of his "payback" to this man. I doubt he would have taken the law into his own hands had it not been for the drugs. He believes he should be able to all the drugs he wants and can't wait to get off parole. My worry is that someone will cross him when he doing his recreational drugs and they might not be so lucky.

I can only confess to know about SC state prisons. As Lady Cop said, weights are out. But inmates here have all the network stations to choose from. They are even allowed to stay out past lock down to view sporting events on TV. They have three meals a day. But not always hot. Depends on if they are locked down or not. It is so amazing that Inmates never worried about any ones rights, until they are locked up. Prisons can not rehabilitate, and are not allowed to punish. If you want to fix the problem you have to change the rules.And don’t get me started on their medical care!

I'm glad to hear that weightlifting is being phased out. It's just common sense, you don't take a criminal and deliberately make them stronger and more aggressive and them release them. :-2

I`d like to see prison life made harsher, and also more work done by the criminals in order to pay their victims compensation

Here in the UK prisoners have more rights than their victims. Is this the same in the USA. sarah janexx