For an earlier post on mass incarceration and family issues, a number of commenters brought up and debated specific reform ideas. To me it was an unusually strong thread. Today George Will’s WaPo column adds something that I don’t think we discussed earlier: the use and over-use of solitary confinement. Final sentences in Will’s op-ed:
Mass incarceration is expensive (California spends almost twice as much on prisons as on universities) and solitary confinement costs, on average, three times as much per inmate as in normal prisons. And remember: Most persons now in solitary confinement will someday be back on America’s streets, some of them rendered psychotic by what are called correctional institutions.
Mass incarcertation as a widely recognized national failure is an issue that is coming. I’m not sure when it will break into the mainstream debate in a sustained way, but I’m pretty sure that it will happen.
Categories: Fatherhood, General
Actually, David, I did argue against extensive solitary confinement in the earlier thread. It seems pointless to knowingly drive people insane. More importantly, I also said that I didn’t have any ideas regarding what to do about violent and uncooperative inmates..
You might want to do a study. Are we turning, say, first time offenders into career criminals? In the alternative, is our prison system a deterrent? If it’s the former then we are creating some – not all – of the maniacs that prison guards have to deal with.
After all, aren’t youthful and first-time offenders at the core of the poverty creation?
David H: Sorry I missed your earlier comment. What you are saying here makes a lot of sense to me.