That Lock Up shit has got to go.

I can't believe I'm hearing this on a supposedly progressive website.

Skyrocketing US incarceration rates, disproportionately tilted far toward Blacks and Hispanics, is IMO the same kind of issue for the 21st century US as slavery was for the nineteenth century.

I think MSNBC should be applauded for their long devotion to the moral issue of our time, rather than dismissed as you've done so casually. No other network==not even Al Gore's--has given this issue even 1/00th the coverage MSNBC has. They're all missing the REAL inequality/injusice story of our generation.

Please read these statistics:

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States :

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world (743 per 100,000 population), Russia has the second highest rate (577 per 100,000), followed by Rwanda (561 per 100,000). As of year-end 2009 the USA rate was 743 adults incarcerated in prisons and jails per 100,000 population. At year-end 2007 the United States had less than 5% of the world's population and 23.4% of the world's prison and jail population (adult inmates).

By comparison the incarceration rate in England and Wales in October 2011 was 155 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents; the rate for Norway in May 2010 was 71 inmates per 100,000; Netherlands in April 2010 was 94 per 100,000; Australia in June 2010 was 133 per 100,000; and New Zealand in October 2010 was 203 per 100,000. ...

According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the total prison and jail population in 2009. According to the 2010 census of the US Census Bureau blacks (including Hispanic blacks) comprised 12.6% of the US population.

Hispanics (of all races) were 20.6% of the total jail and prison population in 2009. Hispanics comprised 16.3% of the US population according to the 2010 US census. In 2009 black non-Hispanic males were incarcerated at the rate of 4,749 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents of the same race and gender. White males were incarcerated at the rate of 708 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents. Hispanic males were incarcerated at the rate of 1,822 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents.

Is lockup a show about the injustices of the us penal system?

I was under the strong impression it was a Cops-ish show about how bad all these prisoners are, with an unspoken undercurrent of "aren't you glad they are taken away and locked up so you can be safe from them..."

That's not what I saw. I saw hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars being wasted on constructing and staffing abusive institutions -- little plantations devoted to breaking men down and restricting their access to family, meaningful work, education, and training. All for the profit of prison guard unions, corporations, and mainly backward surrounding communities.

I guess what a person perceives reflects what that person knows feels and believes.

In any case, no one besides MSNBC is shining lights into these dark places that, like homelessness, exploitative wages for the 99 percent, disinvestment in cities, and many of our other ills, flow from the transformative election of 1980.

I guess I would have to watch a full episode of Lockup to see if my vague memory from several years back is correct or not. But the brief moments of it that I saw before being disgusted and declining to subject myself to more seemed to focus on the prison guards and how they have to be careful, because all the inmates are killers who have contraband and weapons and will throw feces at them if they are not careful.

While I agree with you that its an issue that deserves scrutiny, I don't think that's the audience that show was going for, or what most people would have taken away from that show. I think it was going for the "titilate viewers with the disgusting and dangerous". Just like cops or the "real crimes" shows, where LE are the good guys.

Scrutiny it's not getting regularly anywhere on Cable TV in any form except MSNBC's LockUp.

My only direct contact with this issue came briefly one Friday evening several years ago when I was in Manhattan. I love to walk, and at the edge of Central Park, at Columbus Circle, I was stunned to see hundreds of people slowly being loaded onto tour buses. I asked someone what was going on and she said all of them were riding all night to visit relatives imprisoned Upstate, hundreds of miles away, and that they had to pay high bus fares to do so.

This was a real eyeopener to me. I had stumbled upon part of a hidden subculture of separated families of prisoners. I doubt you have any family members in prison, and I certainly don't. But, based on the Wikipedia stats in my post above, tens of millions of Americans do have family members in prison. Maybe it's this subculture that has supported "Lockup" on MSNBC all this time. Another GD thread (on Pat Buchanan's removal from tha network while he's pitching his recent senile racist book) has the factoid that MSNBC has the highest African-American viewership on cable.

Later, I learned that it is official 'correctional' policy in NY, Pennsylvania, and other expansive states to imprison men as far away as possible from their hometowns, ostensibly to try to break their ties to unsavory local influences.

But to me that makes no sense to me whatsoever! Prisoners are being sent where unsavory influences are at their highest concentration. What is being taken away from prisoners is any possibly civilizing influence of their children, their women, and their familes. And the prisoners are not the only ones being punished. Children are growing up with very little contact with their fathers, while their fathers are being brutalized hundreds of miles away.

And the predominantly red areas where prisons are located get more political representation in Washingtom and in their state capitals because of their large and exploding prisoner populations. This is exactly the same reason why many of our early Presidents came from the Commonwealth of Virginis, only this time the slaves are counted at 100 percent rather that at 60 percent.

That is a scam I never would have dreamed of. Thank you for teaching me something.

As to the rest... now I am curious. If I still had Cable TV, I would be checking out the lockup reruns tomorrow to see if my memory was inaccurate. I did not watch much of it. All I remember is a cell raid where the guards then showed off all the homemade weapons they found, an interview with a prisoner talking about how he was happy to kill anyone who got in his way, and someone talking about how the inmates would collect feces to throw at guards they didn't like. That was all I could take.

Ive never heard the argument that those shows are actually educational/informative before. Now I am curious. I kinda want to give it a second chance. But then I would have to pay for cable again.

Their entry on "Apportionment" cites a jounal article by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. ( See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment .)

Apparently, this person is a Duke University expert specializing in this arcane topic of shifts in political influence due to prison location decisions.

Googling her name got me an article she wrote in 2004 for the Christian Scince Monitor. Here's a snippet about her research:

From http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0517/p09s02-coop.html :

"The prison effect on political landscape By Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman / May 17, 2004 DURHAM, N.C.

The US prison boom of the past 30 years - which has nearly doubled the number of state prisons to more than 1,000 and increased the nation's prison population from 218,000 to 1.3 million - has had widely recognized economic, political, and social effects. But one important political effect of the forced relocation of millions of inmates has been largely overlooked: The dilution of the urban black vote to the benefit of rural white communities. A new Urban Institute report shows that inmates tend to come from regions that are demographically distinct from those in which their prisons are located. And because the Census Bureau counts prison inmates as residents of the legislative districts in which they're incarcerated, the relocation of inmates - who are not allowed to vote in 48 states - skews both the distribution of government funds and the apportionment of legislative representation. This is a particularly grievous injustice in an era in which presidential and legislative races are won by razor-thin margins. The distortion in representation caused by enumeration of prisoners tends to favor rural residents, whites, and Republicans, at the expense of urban residents, blacks, and Democrats.

In most states, prisons are disproportionately located in rural areas, yet most inmates come from urban areas. For example, in four state house districts in Connecticut, inmates make up more than 10 percent of the population. Each of these districts has low population and is disproportionately white - except, of course, for the inmate populations. And because of the presence of inmates, these districts effectively get about 10 percent more representation than they ought to.

Similarly, in Florida, statistics show a correlation between gains in representation from the presence of prisons and partisan affiliation of voters. Counties that gain population by importing prison inmates - and thus increase their congressional and state legislative representation - tend to vote Republican. Meanwhile, counties that lose population and legislative representation because a share of their population is imprisoned in other counties tend to vote Democratic.

Besides affecting representation inside a state, prison location has the potential to affect congressional apportionment between states. Wisconsin, for example, contracts to send as many as 10,000 inmates to prisons in other states. Wisconsin politicians were so concerned that the state would lose a congressional seat after the 2000 Census because of this practice that Republican Rep. Mark Green actually introduced legislation to count those inmates as citizens of Wisconsin. (In the end, the legislation didn't pass, and the seat was lost -though because of a larger margin of population loss than the inmates accounted for.)..."

The need for prison reform is obvious!

Have you watched much LockUp?

I've seen mainly the beginning of Lockup episodes when I neglected to change the channel after Rachel Maddow's Friday shows had ended.

I find it overwhelmingly depressing.

Lockup or whatever that stupid "show" is called? How will they run enough hours of that show, with her butting in?

really irritates me and I'm surprised she was given her own show.

Yes she is intelligent, but something about her presentation is bothersome.

When another MSNBC panelist called someone a "girl", I liked the way she interjected, "Grown woman" in a sing-song voice. Who else on TV would do something like that?

And did you catch her recent book-talk on BookTV? Her book has many subtle layers of meaning.

Lots of substance, but awkward delivery. Her affect is a little off--
good snark, but her sarcasm seems rehearsed and not off the cuff, imo.

I have such a crush on her.

I did! I did!

it may likely lead to a virus. if that post is no longer there - the mods have removed it and you can ignore this.

there would not have been 2 more posts by the spammer.

yeah i said when i was on a jury about it that it was a TOS violation. even though the post is hidden - i'm going to leave my warning up since if someone were to click "show" on his post the spam link leading to - who knows what - could still be seen and clicked on. yeah i hope people realize in the future when it's something like this - they really should click on TOS violation when alerting.