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cal04

(41,505 posts)
Sat Oct 17, 2015, 08:04 AM Oct 2015

Weekly Address: Working for Meaningful Criminal Justice Reform

Source: White House

In this week's address, the President highlighted the problems in our criminal justice system. Our country faces a vicious cycle of poverty, criminality, and incarceration that traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities. There are 2.2 million people behind bars in America today, compared to 500,000 just 30 years ago. This topic isn’t new – the President has talked about the unfairness of much of the criminal justice system since his time in the Senate. And while we’ve taken steps to address this issue, members of both parties agree that we can do more. Over the next few weeks, the President will travel the country and meet with Americans who are working to fix the criminal justice system, from law enforcement officials working to lower the crime and incarceration rates, to former prisoners who are earning their second chance. And he promised to continue to work with Congress to pass meaningful criminal justice reform that makes the system cost-effective, fairer, and smarter, while enhancing the ability of law enforcement to keep our communities safe.






Read more: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/17/weekly-address-working-meaningful-criminal-justice-reform



Transcript
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/17/weekly-address-working-meaningful-criminal-justice-reform
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Weekly Address: Working for Meaningful Criminal Justice Reform (Original Post) cal04 Oct 2015 OP
America’s Recidivism Nightmare. Good luck with that! pocoloco Oct 2015 #1
The article points out some reasonable reasons to think the study overstates the problem. Igel Oct 2015 #3
K&R! BumRushDaShow Oct 2015 #2

Igel

(35,197 posts)
3. The article points out some reasonable reasons to think the study overstates the problem.
Sat Oct 17, 2015, 12:53 PM
Oct 2015

However, the article also decides that the individual is mostly a ward of society and everybody-at-large (which often means "the state&quot when it comes to rehab and reintegration.

The problem is that many of the same problems that let a younger person think crime is a good idea still exist 3, 5, 15 years later. Low skills, low family support, low motivation and a track record that they don't or won't overcome. Low resilience. Couple that with a harmful social network and the problem's fairly clear. Wasn't as bad before, because family structures were stronger and a piss-poor skill-set was less of an impediment.

My cousin isn't too far from being a prototypical example. We lived in Maryland. He got in trouble with the law and with drugs as a teen, and a year or two after finishing high school left home to avoid interference from his (single-)mother and moved to another state to sire his kids, marry and divorce and default on child support, do more drugs, engage in check fraud and petty theft, and get arrested and sentenced and released and arrested and sentenced and released. Bounced from low-paying job to low-paying job when out of prison because (a) he was a truly crappy, irresponsible employee and (b) was convinced he was a great employee but just under-appreciated. When he tried moving home, he immediately contacted his old friends and a short time later again moved to avoid interference from his mother who would eventually say "get a job or get out." She came to this only when he was in his 30s and he'd proven himself a sexist pig--his mother was an old-school feminist, and resented his wife and his two daughters being treated like trash.

He was rehabilitated and reintegrated only when his mother had moved to another state. He was released, moved in with her, and found that his old friends weren't there and he had no choice but tolerate his mother's ultimatum--it was that or homelessness or return to prison. He got a low-paid job and was forced to stick with it, went to community college for training, got some pay increases and was advancing at work.

Then perhaps 8 or 9 years later his mother died of breast cancer when in her mid-80s. He was executor of his mother's estate. Not a large one, but she had a house and some savings. Six months later he was arrested and out on bond. Two months later he died of an overdose, the court dates set. His executor found that he hadn't actually done squat for his mother's estate, and all she did was settle accounts--during that time he'd run up a lot of pointless debts. His old lack of self-control was back, and there wasn't mommy there to exert control over him.

He needed a keeper, a personal private-life warden to keep him on the straight and narrow. He was a semi-ward of his mother.

Note that he was addicted. His father, who left his mother when my cousin was young, didn't live far away. He'd become an alcoholic, chronically unemployed, had a few other kids, and was found dead when they came to evict him from his apt. He was in his early 30s.

The destructuring of much of the lower half of the US economic ladder won't help matters in the least. As with much of the research on social capital, when social capital fails the middle layers of structure vanish. That leaves a bunch of small, unorganized entities at the bottom and a large nanny-structure on top that has to take care of its wards and restructures society for government.

BumRushDaShow

(127,312 posts)
2. K&R!
Sat Oct 17, 2015, 10:56 AM
Oct 2015


Listened this morning and am hoping that this latest effort will bear some fruit. I know back in the '90s when there was the push for more "community policing" after the Rodney King fiasco, the cops were taken out from behind the wheel and started walking (and in many places like here in Philly, "biking&quot the "beat"... That way, they got to know the folks in the neighborhood (particularly the younger residents) and wouldn't automatically assume that someone "didn't belong" there, which often starts the types of confrontations that escalate out of control while obvious and open criminal activity continued in broad daylight (in some cases aided and abetted by self-same LOE). Of course, a good chunk of LOE trained during that period have since retired and a new group, minus the training and enhanced community engagement efforts (which were often cut due to municipal/county budget woes), were unleashed onto the streets. complete with post-9/11 surplus military equipment to strut around with and in.

However this time, with the ramp-up of private prisons, it will be a struggle to battle that dynamic. Interestingly, alot of those prisons were built during the '90s and as the crime rate dropped, some of them began to fold and the communities where they were located (where the workers also lived in those communities) started struggling. I.e., the residents of many rural and ex-burban areas, now lived in what had essentially become "company towns" where the "company" (and biggest employer) WAS the prison. Fast-forward to now, with "3-strikes you're out", "mandatory sentencing", and "zero tolerance", plus all those thousands of small towns needing a revenue stream thanks to their GOP state legislatures cutting their funding, and the prison population exploded - in essence, realizing the "prison industrial complex".

As a side note, one of the co-chairs of that Task Force formed to look at national criminal justice reform is my police commissioner (Charles Ramsey) who just announced his retirement this past week.

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