Blast from the Past

I graduated from High School in 1997. Early on in my HS days, my older brother and his girlfriend got robbed right before Christmas. The crooks got caught a couple days later and all items were retrieved. They had apparently pulled a couple robberies that night and so there were excellent descriptions of the perpetrators and their vehicle which made catching them easier.

The other day a letter came in the mail addressed to my brother. It turns out that one of the perpetrators had been up for parole in fall and this letter was to notify my brother that parole had been denied.

This got me thinking about what has all happened between that night and today. My brother is now married, was in the army and is now in the reserves, and is a completely different person than who he was way back when. A life time has passed since then.

More often than not you hear people argue that we need to have stiffer penalties on criminals. Even though i don't remember much of anything about the backgrounds of the defendants, I do remember that they weren't murderers, rapists, or hard core thugs. Just some punks that were out trying to pull a fast one because they were stupid. This person has lost a significant portion of their life because of their actions. The fact that parole was denied for this individual implies that he hasn't exactly been behaving himself while in prison. I find myself wondering how this person will ever transition to the outside world if/when he finally gets released.

The reality is that when someone like this is finally released, the world is drastically different and so mere suggestion of a smooth transition from 1996 to 2009 is a laughable. I'm not advocating for the release of an individual who was recently denied parole. My intention is to put weight behind the numerical value of a sentence. The threat of a 10 year sentence sounds rather light by our "truth in sentencing" standards but we need to take a step back and put things in perspective. Where were you 10 years ago? What were you doing back then? Did you know you'd be in the place you're in right now? Removal of an individual from society for 10 years is close to being a life time in terms of mentality. This is not an auction where the highest bid wins. These are individual lives we're talking about. People who could do much more important things in our society like consuming and producing goods and thus part of the greater organism that we all live in.

I sit here thinking back to that long ago incident and how heart broken i was when my brother was robbed of what would eventually be christmas presents. I was so young back then. So naive. So much has changed in both his life and mine and yet the individuals who did this sat and idled their lives away. I'm sure they learned their lesson a long time ago, but i wonder when it was that they forgot what they were supposed to learn?

Racial disparity in Milwaukee in drug cases among worst

Always nice to see something that i feel is obvious spelled out in black and white. Definitely worth a read even if the source is the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Consider this a follow up to these previous posts:

http://naughtatnull.blogspot.com/2007/12/crack-vs-powder-disparity-is-questioned.html

http://naughtatnull.blogspot.com/2008/02/one-in-100-us-adults-behind-bars.html

One in 100 US adults behind bars

According to recent news article the United States:

More than one in 100 adults are now behind bars in the United States, home to the world's largest penal population, with a startling one in nine young black men incarcerated, a study has shown.

The prison and jail population rose by 25,000 to 2.3 million last year, out of a US adult population of 230 million, bringing the incarceration rate to one in 99.1 for the first time in US history, the Pew Center on the States said.

By comparison, China, with a population of one billion people, was second in the world with 1.5 million inmates, followed by Russia with 890,000 people in the slammer, the study said.

America also has the dubious distinction of leading the planet in the rate of incarceration, which is higher than nations like South Africa and Iran, the study said.

(continued...)

This is obviously a subject i'm very passionate about. A friend of mine and i talked about this briefly and he questioned what the results would be if you exclude all "white" people. Sad but true.

What bothers me the most about this is how do we as Americans allow this to happen? Are we so blinded by fear that we believe "criminal" is an ax wielding maniac who is going to loot and pillage because they've been convicted of a crime? Have we bought into the whole "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality that we would rather live in a police state than actually show empathy towards a fellow human?

This being an election year, one of the reoccurring issues is how a candidate deals with crime. Candidates will bend over backwards in local elections to demonstrate that they are "tough" on crime. Heaven forbid if they ever showed any leniency in the past. Ironically, these are the same people that we as citizens will be begging for leniency from if/when we find ourselves caught within the judicial system.

What's most disturbing about this news is that it reflects our society today. As wide spread as the results of this study have been, I have seen no attempts to put it in context. How exactly has the US gotten to this point? It's not as though we collectively locked up that large of a portion of our population over night. The reality is that these results took years to attain. An undeniably large factor in these total incarceration numbers is the Federal Sentencing Guidelines which have recently been recently overturned. The fact that one in 100 US adults is currently behind bars has been over 20 years in the making.

My biggest fear is that people will be too shortsighted to truly grasp the bigger picture. The knee jerk reaction that we collectively have is "we should do something about this." The problem is, in a couple days we will watch the news and hear about how a young black male shot someone while robbing a liquor store and only received 18 months in jail despite their history of being violent. The belief that this "menace" should be "locked up in order to make our streets safe" becomes everyones new attitude. Never once is it mentioned that this alleged menace has a history of substance abuse, physical/sexual/psychological abuse, and that this individuals father is currently incarcerated for 10 years for possession with intent to distribute (drug dealing) courtesy of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

After reading the article in question, I ask that you ask yourself why these numbers are so steep. As frightening as they are, now I ask that you consider the number of people that are on extended supervision (parole, probation, work release, or pending trial/conviction/sentencing).

Do the math.