Brown v. Plata: prison overcrowding violates the 8th Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment.) So 30k prisoners need to be “released” in order to comply.
You can have bilateral retinal cancer and be able to point to which Justices voted for or against this. Scalia, dissenting:
“Most of them will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness,” Justice Scalia wrote, “and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.”
It’s particularly fashionable among the NPR/NYT crowd to hate on Scalia, and he often trades compassion for a quip, but he’s not just making this stuff up for a WordPress account he’s starting. He’s considering– yes, through his own biases– the entire course of American’s history.
Where do you think all of these released prisoners will go? Home? To work?
They are being offloaded to psychiatry. To rehabs, to “involuntary outpatient,” to probation and their weekly/monthly drug tests and verification of medication compliance; to SSI.
I will grant you that it is much better than prison for those individuals. But this process justifies, institutionalizes, government control of individuals while in the public realm. It becomes that much easier to justify X or Y in the service of monitoring. Psychiatry becomes a willing (happy) tool of the government, because it pays.
If we want to talk about the things that can be done about prison overcrowding, or about changing the reasons for such high incarceration rates, we can do that. But to offload the entire mess to the psychiatrists is the kind of madness that will destroy everything that America was supposed to have been standing for.
No related posts.
We’ve had probation, at the very least, for generations. I’d argue the Great Society was barking up the same tree as well, though I can accept that a lot of people think it’s different when the treatment isn’t formally considered a punishment. The same goes for single-payer healthcare, universally conceded to be a sine-qua-non of civilization itself.
Civil society is when the government gets involved in your life, isn’t it?
So what’s new? And what’s the problem?
What’s the problem? The problem is that you are a fish, swimming around in a fishbowl, asking “You surely must be a crazy person — what is this ‘water’ theory you are talking about?”. The problem is, you are already in the water, thus you are unable to see it.
Civil society is *not* when the government is involved in your life. Civil society is the categorical *opposite* of that. Civil society is when the government does not intrude in your life.
But, of course, you have already been living “in the fishbowl” for far too long to understand that there used to be a time when random strangers with guns had much less influence in people’s lives or authority to shoot them for made-up excuses (“laws”, you would call them). In fact, you do not know any alternative to the fishbowl; you have been living “in the fishbowl” for so long, educated by the “fishbowl” Owner so throughly, that you have concluded there must be no life outside the fishbowl and, by extension, that whomever speaks of an “ocean” must necessarily be a crank, because how could anyone see Owner as a bad person when Owner gives us free food, and how dare these thankless cranks speak bad things about Owner?
Now multiply that by three hundred million other clueless people.
Therein lies the problem.
And that is why you don’t find anything wrong or unusual with expansions of government power over the individual.
There are a lot of uncivil things that can happen without the government, therefore I don’t think civil society is the opposite of governmental involvement. Even if you define all government as the use of force, sometimes the use of force is justified to deal with an injustice.
Sorry, when I equated government intrusion to civil society, that was sarcasm. An exaggeration (at least I hope it’s an exaggeration) of the views of a lot of people I disagree with about the role of government in society.
Personally I think civil society is the peaceful, voluntary, and productive interactions of free people. One of the legitimate and indispensable roles of government is to maintain the rule of law, which allows those pleasant things to happen. I am alarmed by the view that government and “civil society” are synonymous, for reasons that I think you would understand pretty well.
As a purely technical matter, I hope people understand that Supreme Court decisions like this one result from the Court claiming (and people refusing to challenge the idea) that the 14th Amendment gives it the same role in setting state policy that it has in setting federal policy. (See also: Chicago v McDonald.)
Are you questioning pre-emption based on the 14th, or do I misunderstand you?
I disagree with the Court’s doctrine of Incorporation.
Also, because the Court’s opinions are driven more by internal politics than anything, this could be a sign that Kennedy is finding a comfortable place in the Court’s left wing as the Court heads toward the debate over Obama’s signature health care law. Or it could mean that Kennedy is siding with the liberal Justices now in order to deflect criticism for siding with the conservative Justices later.
My bet is on the latter.
I must be getting slow the older I get, but why the soylent green reference? I remember it been about making food out of dead people and overpopulation and having a really great idea about what ‘fully furnished’ means. Is TLP suggesting eating our way through the US prison population?
Legalize all drugs, include about 100 other offenses to the death penalty deserving list and outsourse prison location and management. Problem solved.
A stupidly large percent of inmates are due to non-violent drug offenses so that would clear out a lot of space, but if I understand your post right, death row is pretty much worst use of resources and time possible. Running more people through the years and dollars entailed by a death sentence would only make the situation worse.
Privatized prisons exist in some parts (in the South?) of the US and the idea is being played with in more places. Unfortunately, I’m not sure there’s any way to do away with the prison bureaucracy without running the risk of prison contractors eventually being seen how defense contractors tend to be.
What we need is a war that gains us a new colony, so we can put off the problem for a few decades by sending convicts to Australia or the moon.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure there’s any way to do away with the prison bureaucracy without running the risk of prison contractors eventually being seen how defense contractors tend to be.
That’s already happened: Wackenhut has been the subject of some extremely unflattering news stories.
I think the Soylent Green reference was kind of a riff on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” , where Swift satirically makes the point that if having lots of poor people in society is inconvenient, the well-off should just eat them (poor children being especially tender and juicy).
In response to Dravot-JohnJay-Rudd-o thread about the role of government in society, it would be legitimate if there were a decision by a democratically legitimated legislature to deal with some criminal justice problems differently (e.g. reduce minimum & maximum sentences, shift drug use into the public health system, cut school lunches to build more prisons, summarily execute every 3rd convict, etc.). That would make the decision as proper as it could be given the current system, and responsibility for the outcome would be easier to determine (the legislators done it – on their electors’ behalf). Equally, letting the medical establishment deal with those cases that have a genuinely medical infirmity would also be legitimate. The problem comes from taking a social problem and shifting it to the medical system. This absolves anyone from responsibility because the legislators will have passed the buck to the intelligent, unimpeachable, trustworthy and caring doctors, who pass the buck to ‘science’, which is the last refuge of a scoundrel with bootlegged copy of Stata/Mathlab. (N.b. There is a lot of good science, but a lot of psychiatry seems to ebb and flow with the seasonal collections on show in Milan). Nobody is the bad guy, and nobody will be to blame when the fit hits the shan. Plausible deniability. Thing is, it has no resemblance to anything Americans signed up for in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, i.e. the social contracts.
“They are being offloaded to psychiatry…”
With their magic potions, pills, and therapeutic incantations, we all wish the good wizards of the psychiatric industrial complex could exorcise the demons from our civilisation’s most troubled souls.
I must admit that I don’t have a good grasp of what our plumbers of the spirit can realistically achieve and I wonder if the policy elite has a better grasp of what they can do.
Civilise savage criminals?
Eliminate anti-social sexual appetites?
Hell if these are possible, then even those homosexuals looking for treatment to “cure” their harmless desire might not be wasting their time. Granted I suspect the good doctors can achieve a lot, but I don’t think we appreciate the limits to your profession.
Even if they could make all those criminals harmless, I don’t believe there would be much ethical debate. Most would prefer having any number of clockwork oranges in their neighbourhood to a few ex convicts listed in the sex criminal registry.
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The Supreme Court has one job: determining whether legislation passed at local, state, or federal level passes Constitutional muster. Pretty simple actually.
With all the stress placed on multitasking , the Supremes have now volunteered to also dispense policy decisions based upon failure of a quasi-state (Calif.) to guarantee felons certain Constitutional rights, to release X number of felons from secure prisons to [county jail, house arrest, psych care, Ensenada, etc.] where it will be up to [fill in the blank] to supply those missing Constitutional rights. All fine and dandy, except that order isn’t a remedy the Supremes can legally make. Remedy comes from Congress or state legislature.
Solution: Let’s reopen some State Hospitals or build some new ones. When you let all the non-persistently mentally ill people out of jail, that’s what jail becomes anyways-Byberry 2.0. If we’re looking to release people who are just going to be a burden on society anyways, we may as well keep tabs on them.