Prison system hit Democracy Now finally

[Asgaya Dihi]

I posted about this on General Discussion but it moves fast enough I'm afraid many won't see it and this is too good a resource to let go unnoticed. There was a recent report on the prison system that is finally making "official" what we've known for ages. It's a good report, though it concentrates more on the system itself than on the problems around it and the commission is still ongoing so there should be more. It's linked at the bottom. I'll copy my post to GD here to make sure anyone who could make use of it has it.

Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, was interviewed on Democracy Now on Tuesday about a report by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. Link to segment info including both video and audio links.

He is director of the Vera Institute of Justice which put together the Prison Commission. From 1995 to 1998, he served as the New York City Correction Commissioner. Before that he served as New York City’s Probation Commissioner. He is a former professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the author of "Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration."

A few random quotes on the US prison system from the segment, all by Michael Jacobson.

Largest prison population in the world, and we incarcerate the greatest percentage of our population of any country in the world, and as you said, it's still growing. One of the central findings of the report is that it's simply too big. Too many people in prison. Too many people with mental illness who shouldn't be there. And those that are there are not getting the treatment they need. There are correctional leaders in this country who are trying to do a great job under incredibly difficult circumstances. They don't have the resources they should have. The correction officers aren't paid as well as they should be. It's a very tough, demanding job. And their legislatures keep passing tough on crime laws that keep filling up their prisons, and there's a disconnect between the resources these administrators have to do their jobs, and the number of people that they have to supervise.

Sure, well, California is by far – well, not by far, California and Texas are the two biggest prison systems in the country. California's prison system now houses about 165,000 people, at an annual cost of $8 billion a year. It's the -- it has the budget of a small country. A federal court recently took over the California health care system in their prisons, and one of the allegations that the judge found was true was that one prisoner each week was dying as a result of medical malpractice. That's a huge issue, obviously. And going be a very big challenge for the federal courts to handle. Health care is a gigantic issue in the California prison system. It's not been handled well for years.

But Louisiana, like a lot of states, pays their officers incredibly low wages. So they have very high turnover. People come in and out. I believe Louisiana is one of the states where one of the drawing cards for being a correctional officer is that your salary is so low, you're still eligible to collect public benefits.

The full report by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons can be found here.