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Jewish World Review
May 30, 2012/ 9 Sivan, 5772
Writing a book? Beats prison
By
Jay Ambrose
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
America is sticking people in prison like it's a frivolous contest when instead the numbers add up to a great cruelty that achieves minimal good.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina used a better means to arrive at a better end, sentencing a white-collar criminal to 75,000 words worth of writing. I think it was the kind of call other judges should make.
A May 15 Wall Street Journal story tells what happened. Andrew Bodnar, an executive at Bristol-Myers Squibb, pleaded guilty to giving phony information to regulators. On top of a $5,000 fine, the judge said he must spend two years of unsupervised probation while he composed a now-completed, 253-page book showing others how they might avoid similar conduct.
Sounds weird, maybe, but to my mind, that's a much better, more sensible sentence than it would have been to toss him in a federal prison at a taxpayer expense of something more than $22,000 a year. Cost is one of the issues in a country that beats all others in incarceration rates. We spend an estimated $75 billion a year on federal, state and local incarceration, hitting taxpayers hard while taking money from other purposes, such as education. But the true evil is the cruelty.
In a Jan. 30 New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik writes powerfully of the prison experience as being one of "attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia -- anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog." Prisoners, he wrote, see "time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with." During my one visit to a prison, the punishment struck me as torture without cessation, much worse than some searing, momentary pain. And yet we imprison madly and gladly.
"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today -- perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850," Gopnik writes. "In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system -- in prison, on probation, or on parole -- than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under correctional supervision in America -- more than 6 million -- than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."
The facts all by themselves say a lot, as in a July 2011 Reason magazine article reporting that there were 1,524,513 prisoners as of 2009, up to 2,284,913 when local jails are thrown in. Our incarceration rate of 743 per 100,000 is the world's highest, with 217 in Poland, 96 in France and 32 in India. From 1880 to 1970, the magazine said, we ourselves kept rates at something between 100 and 200 per 100,000.
The main excuse for where are now -- that this excess was necessitated by excessive crime -- is undone by studies, not least of all one by a Berkeley law professor, Franklin Zimring. He showed how New York City dramatically reduced its street crime rate between 1990 and 2010 through police strategies, a key one being to concentrate cops where crime was concentrated.
The city did not send more people to prison like much of the rest of the country, which turned to incarceration as rescue from a crime rise now gone, and guess what: New York reduced crime much more than any other city.
While Reason magazine reports findings that longer sentences for more convictions did account for 25 percent of the national drop in violent crime, we know that prisons provide an education in crime that too many released convicts put to use. They can't find jobs, they cheat and steal, they go back to prison.
Let's fight crime the New York way and also extend judicial discretion to locating more and more Bodnar-style, crime-deterring but productive, non-expensive means of dealing with non-violent criminals as possible. Let's let those convicted of crime contribute to the rest of us without us contributing to their upkeep.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.
Previously:
• 05/23/12: Student loans fail students
• 05/21/12: Europeanizing America into crisis
• 05/16/12: Obama a bully, too
• 05/15/12: Walker recall vote could swing national pension policy
• 05/07/12: Bumbling, fumbling, benighted, old Washington near tipping point where freedom is done for
• 05/02/12: The Communists cannot be happy
• 04/30/12: There's no objective truth, least of all concerning behavior
• 04/25/12: Forgive the extremist?
• 04/23/12: Educational excellence is a game
• 04/18/12: Obama's interventions help a few by the most autocratic, complicated, ineffective means possible, yet hurt many more
• 04/16/12: Overregulation strikes again: The nanny state threatens to turn us into children
• 04/11/12: Obama is not bonkers
• 04/04/12: Will America vote against authoritarianism?
• 04/02/12: 'Tipping point' on federal restraint approaches
• 03/28/12: Obama truth from an open mike
• 03/21/12: The progressive campaign for voter fraud
• 03/19/12: Public pensions will get us if we don't watch out
• 03/14/12: Politics needs reporting, not speculation
• 03/12/12: Home of the free, the brave, the endangered
• 03/07/12: Obama used Limbaugh as scapegoat
• 03/05/12: Campaign substance lost in media melodrama
• 03/01/12: When Big Brother drowns
• 02/24/12: Obama goes gaseous on gas
• 02/22/12: Political tears for trust in personal empowerment --- except in the bedroom
• 02/17/12: Of cut-off ears and silenced mouths
• 02/15/12: Obama is a joke whose antics aren't funny
• 02/10/12: An energy boom looms, despite Obama
• 02/08/12: Obama's assault on faith
• 02/03/12: Can Romney get serious?
• 01/27/12: Obama is like an Italian ship captain
• 01/25/12: Newt Gingrich's first 100 days
• 01/20/12: Obama's Keystone pipeline lies
• 01/18/12: Critics worse than urinating Marines
• 01/13/12: Ron Paul is a cartoonish character
• 01/11/12: Newt Gingrich upset by Mitt Romney's brilliance
• 01/09/12: How about regulating presidents, too?
• 01/04/12: How America smothers itself
• 12/30/11: A tax break that helps break the nation
• 12/28/11: Watch out for the banana peel, Newt
• 12/21/11: A tale of two men
• 12/16/11: Strange happenings in Russia
• 12/14/11: Tim Tebow is a man of character
• 12/09/11: A populist, envy-mongering fraud divisively exacerbating resentment among different groups of Americans
• 12/07/11: Tax games threaten nation
• 12/05/11: Why Wal-Mart serves us better than Barney Frank
• 11/30/11: Not writing off Newt
• 11/28/11: Answers to the Iranian threat
• 11/23/11: Failure of the incumbency investment
• 11/18/11: Occupiers: Chop off their heads!
• 11/16/11: Obama asks jobless to sacrifice
• 11/09/11: Michael Moore's insufferable occupation
• 11/04/11: Political tipping point is coming
• 11/02/11: Idealogues versus 7 billion
• 10/28/11: Obama games on student loans
• 10/26/11: Wit and quick moves v. humanity and thoroughgoing honesty? It's no contest —- or at least shouldn't be
• 10/07/11: Baptists, bootleggers and Wall Street protesters
• 10/05/11: Federal law will get you even if you watch out
• 09/28/11: Leftist bugbears on the march
• 09/23/11: Still hope for coal to help us
• 09/21/11: Obama's Madoff ploy
• 09/19/11: U.S. can't afford to wait until it happens
• 09/14/11: Defending -- and strengthening -- gung ho collectivism
• 09/12/11: A pipeline to better times
• 09/08/11: Obama just keeps destroying jobs
• 09/06/11: Ultra-feminists thwarting justice
• 08/31/11: Corporations are people? Yes, Count the ways
• 08/26/11: What an earthquake tells us about debt
• 08/25/11: The tyranny of scientific consensus
• 08/23/11: Fracking hardly a public health threat
• 08/17/11: Why Obamacare won't control births
• 08/15/11: Balanced budget amendment unbalanced idea
• 08/10/11: Kerry's war on citizen speech
• 08/05/11: Upside to the compromise leaving the door open for obnoxious maneuvers
• 08/03/11: The people who may save America
• 07/29/11: On making deals, Obama is no LBJ
• 07/27/11: The threat behind the debt
• 07/23/11: Mean opposition to means-testing
• 07/20/11: Leftist babble makes debt crisis even worse
• 07/18/11: Time to raise demagoguery ceiling
• 07/13/11: Obama treating treaties badly
• 07/08/11: Is decline of U.S. exaggerated?
• 07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery
© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
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