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absolutely agree with you OP! I`m from Norway, the death penalty was disestablished in 1979, but we had our last execution as far back as in 1948. Death penalty is primitive, and nobody has the right to kill, even the government. There is a big risk of executing someone who is innocent, and that alone is reason enough to stop this madness.
So Abu Ghraib should be our model? The amenities listed above have been shown to keep the prisoners level of resistence under control better than hiring extra guards in cases where such activities are not offered. In a cell block with 50 prisoners, cable tv is worth 2 or 3 guards. Since the law requires the state to furnish health care for prisoners an exercise room and program is more to the benefit of the state’s taxpayers than it is to the prisoners. Finally, more than 80% of all persons behind bars today will be released back into the general public. What is smart about barbarizing those men? Why not try humanizing instead? Or is it better to release a mad dog? We need to quit thinking DUMB and try thinking SMART.
So you want us to look (and act) like them? Hmm?
It is not the prisoners who delay justice. It is the courts. We have too many cases for the number of judges. We have too few lawyers willing to work for the public defender’s office. We have court rules that only allow ONE ground for complaint to be dealt at a time. All cases must first go through the state system before the Federal system is open to them. Sure, the prisoners are not complaining about the delays. But it is the taxpayers who do not want to spend the money necessary to hasten the final outcomes. Only the victim’s survivors and a few kinky people are in a hurry. People who want to be vigilantes and would likely have been up front in the old Ku Klux Klan days.
I don't think they should reflect in any manor the comforts of a day spa. A couple of cable television sets in a cell block to help keep tensions down is a great idea, as is a place for exercise, and a stock of books. It is prison though, so I think that having the luxury of private televisions, the internet, and a gym that would rival any Gold's that you have ever seen is defeating the purpose.
This was in response to me saying that the reason for the high costs of incarceration and execution was due to us being more concerned with prisoners rights and comfort than their crimes... I'm not sure what your statement has to do with that, but the point I was making is that it is prison, it should suck. If you did something to be put there then you shouldn't be comfortable, you should be miserable.
Yes the courts are backed up, but to say that the prisoners and their attorneys are not actively trying to delay sentencing is ridiculous. As far as equating a person desiring a quicker appeals process with a racist in favor of lynching, that is just a purely ignorant statement.
Guilty as charged. Unfortunately, IMO 4 or 5 of the most prolific posters here deserve no better evaluation than that offered by stereotyping. They’re a perfect fit in other words and I just used shorthand instead of bandwidth.
It is just such non-thinking persons who are played like a fiddle’s strings by the right wing demagogues who want a world in which 1) the rich do not pay taxes, 2) foreigners (mainly Hispanics) are the evil beings, and 3) Star Wars successor will save America. Pure Reagan-esque revisited.
You have run afoul of the Red State mentality up here. You’ll see these fellows driving older Ford F150s, wearing ragged short sleeve denim shirts and maybe a tattoo - MOTHER - or God Bless America - are very popular, and a rifle slung in the rear view window. They favor big belt buckles with a pair of pistols or rifles crossed, and embossed thereon, “I'll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands ... “ quoting from Charlton Heston (1923-2008) the co-founder of the modern NRA.
Red-necks I call’em. Fortunately many of them are too illiterate to register to vote. Thank you God for little things. They are part of the Paliln/Limbaugh Axis of Ignorance. The Republican base. Aside: Sarah better be on watch for middle-aged Lynne Cheney, the dumb but loud-mouth daughter of the Cheney Draft Evading Team, is trying as hard as she can to replace her (demented) father who has worn out his welcome on most talk shows. Dick is a charter member of the Neo Con Movement, but he does no know what NEO means.
As for racism, I admit most white Americans do not see themselves as racists. In fact, those otherwise good folk have generally replaced old time, Jim Crow era exploitation and suppression with a healthy dose of paternalism on the cheap. All of which substitutes are race based. Unless one subscribes to the fallicious notion that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, then what other explanation can be offered to explain their plight?
I submit slavery and its aftermath. I’m waiting for another offer.
So Abu Ghraib should be our model? The amenities listed above have been shown to keep the prisoners level of resistence under control better than hiring extra guards in cases where such activities are not offered.
Much of the problem with our system is uninformed people wanting to outdo each other in suggesting ignorant ways to humiliate people and continue to think somehow that will make this a better world.
The basic rule how to treat people anywhere including those in prison is to treat them as you would want to be treated in the same or similar circumstances. Being there is punishment enough.
The basic rule how to treat people anywhere including those in prison is to treat them as you would want to be treated in the same or similar circumstances. Being there is punishment enough.
This initially looks good on the surface until you realize that most of the folks in prison got there because they did not treat people how they themselves wanted to be treated. Rocket material or 5th grade material. Hard to tell the difference when one is stuck on emotions to justify. It becomes easy to cloud the reality with such thought processes based on a faulty premise.
Most of them are there because they did not treat someone else how they wanted to be treated. Don’t let anyone lose sight of this thought ...and cloud the reality of what happened with such drama techniques often under such sublime logic and reason. They got there in prison by not treating others as they themselves wanted to be treated. Thanks, Orangetom
What brought a person into the penal system is really not relevant to the treatment he or she received while in the custody of the state.
You’re saying the obvious. “Most of them . . . . “ Is that a rationale for overlooking what goes wrong in the system and the penal institutions?
So you want us to look (and act) like them? Hmm?
Well we are just going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
I spent 4 months in the county jail before being transferred to a state penitentiary. The prison that I was in for the remaining 12 months treated people much like what you seem to think is the best way, Quite frankly it did nothing that I could see as far as deterring future offenses. The county jail however sucked. I wasn't tortured there, but I had 3 crappy meals a day, 3 tvs for 70+ inmates in the pod, and an hour of rec per day. Other than that it was a metal bunk, a hard mattress, and no pillow.
I am fairly sure that I'm not going back to prison, but not because of the nice treatment I got in the prison. It is because I never want to see the inside of a jail again. I wholeheartedly believe that if the state, and federal prisons where as bad as the county jails, the number of repeat offenders would drastically drop.
I'm asking myself if you have the makings of a politician. Does this come up at parole board meetings?? What brought a person into the penal system.
What do prison inmates think of child molesters?
I cannot remember that guys name...the Sheriff in Tucson..or Phoenix who is so popular with the electorate there. Now many politicians don’t like him and neither does the ACLU.
Our children are beginning to conduct themselves with the same mentality learned through television programming et al. How to humiliate others. How to humiliate others in order to make ones self look good. ..bullying. .guilt techniques. Even our political process is showing the same signs in self justification. .treating others how they would not want to be treated themselves. Selling the souls of the public for power and votes.
DP cases are indeed more strictly scrutinized. This is relegated to the state levels where it should be ..not the federal levels.
I don’t like the parole board system. A parole board member is asked to assess the inmate’s past, review his conduct during incarceration and from that to deduce what he or she will be most likely to do in the future. This sounds more like a resume for a financial adviser, say like Bernie Madoff?
IMO, instead of parole, early release ought to be straight forward and based on the inmates conduct in prison. Example: a 1st offender should get 3 days OFF his sentence for each day served without incident. A second offender gets 2 days off and the 3rd or more frequent repeater gets 1 day off for each day served. This is a simple method for early release and is totally fair and it gives the inmate on-going incentive to “act right” during his stay behind bars. Which is great for staff!
Which is great for staff!
I also favor a geriatrics rule. Any prisoner who attains age 65 and has served more than 5 years prior to his birthday, would have his sentence automatically cut in half but in no case would he be held longer than 50% of his life expectancy.
As for what other inmates think about a child molester, what does that have to do with anything. Who runs the prison? The state or the inmates.
I’m having grave misgivings about the POST sentence treatment of sex offenders anyway. Proscribing where they can live. Making them subject to police interrogation at any time. Posting public notices about their past crimes. It is flagrantly against our long held legal customs and traditions.
All of that is also UNCONSTITUTIONAL. It violates due process. It ignores the amendments 4, 5, 6 and 8. You will profit if you read those. In similar circumstances in the past when I have complained that to do that you need to amend the constitution, having in mind my idea the citizens would not do such a thing, but now I’m not so sure about the citizens. Maybe it's better to hope that as soon as we can get a Supreme Court free of the Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, Scalia and Thomas types we can undo this mess and get back to basic justice in America.
The grand standing dumb-ass super egotistical press-hound sheriff of Phoenix (Maricopa county) is Joe Arpaio. But what the hey, he’s in Arizona isn’t he? Very close to Texas
Well, as long as FOX and Rupert Murdoch can have protection from the First Amendment - free speech - but NOT free IRRESPONSIBLE speech - it will go on. If enough citizen viewers will write 1) to the sponsors and 2) write to their congressman, things will change. But that’s too much like work?
You have it backwards. The STATE level of justice is very poor, and is replete with graft and corruption not to mention incompetence. States are basically law and order courts offering hang’em high justice. Good justice is found only in the FEDERAL system and it is not found everywhere there. Justice in America is hard to come by.
Donwhite. You do like drama. Someone should have been reviewing Bernie Madoff precisely like this and checking his conduct against his resume.
..It must have been racism . ..why Chicago was not chosen for the Olympics. ..I cannot think of another reason.
the problems social engineers and politicians have is that the American public is not as liberal or left leaning as someone out here would like us to be in order to bring about the social change they would like.
I do not however think that the Olympic Committee would be doing Chicago any favors by bringing the Olympics there. Neither do I think the Olympic Committee will be doing Rio De Janeiro any favors by holding the Olympics there as well. May as well be strapping Rio De Janeiro with the United Nations. No difference in the outcome. However...
I also know by still listening to shortwave and Amateur radio ... what a paper curtain is over America in news and information. thanks, Orange Tom
Ex-inmate dies in crash - one month after leaving death row
A former US prison inmate who spent a decade on death row has died barely a month after being released from jail after a car accident, Texas police said on Monday.
Michael Toney, 43, died when he lost control of the car he was driving on a Texas road on Saturday and was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.
Toney received a death sentence in 1999 for his conviction in a 1985 car bombing which left three people dead.
He maintained his innocence over the years and was finally freed after a key prosecution witness in the case recanted.
A Texas Appeals Court ultimately overturned Toney's conviction, ruling that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence, and he finally won his freedom on September 2, barely a month before the fatal accident.
Sad, sad days indeed. At least this man got to have his case reheard in a courtroom, many of those who are on death row do not get such chance. There are many horror stories of men on death row pleading for their cases to be reopened based on new evidence who are denied the right to defend their innocence - even some of the ones who can prove their innocence without a shadow of a doubt.