Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Treating Mental Illness Prevents Crime and Saves Us Money

June 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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How much are we willing to pay, as a society, toward preventing crime and easing the burdens on our prison systems? How much are we willing to pay to provide help to people struggling with serious mental illness, the kind of illness that makes it hard for them to cope with daily life? The results of a study out last month in Psychiatric Services might give some insight into how to think about the intersection of both of those difficult questions. A research team at North Carolina State University looked at the impact of routine outpatient treatment for adults with serious mental illness on ... Read More

More like this: Health
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Is Drug Trafficking Worse Than Murder?

May 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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In Ecuador, an impoverished woman plans to sell 335 grams of a drug she cannot even identify. She’s caught. Her sentence? Eight years in prison. In Mexico, a woman finds heroin planted in her suitcase. Her punishment? Twenty-two years behind bars. In Bolivia, a man stomps coca, the first step in the process to make cocaine. His penalty? Ten years. Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador are nations where the minimum and maximum penalties for drug traffickers are longer than those given to murderers. For years, Latin American governments have been dishing out increasingly harsh punishments to people ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Study: More Black Juveniles Sentenced to Life Without Parole

February 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Three weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles convicted of homicide to life without parole, the first-ever study of youngsters serving these punishments has been released. The Lives of Juvenile Lifers, a survey of more than 1,500 prisoners who were sentenced prison terms of life without parole (known as JLWOP) when they were between the ages 13 to 17 was compiled by The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group for sentencing reform that opposes JLWOP. “Although it does not excuse their crimes,” the report sums up, “most people ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Legal Affairs
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Overcrowded Prisons Giving Old Inmates New Life

February 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Anthony Montoya has spent the past 32 years — more than half his life — in prison for burglary and second-degree murder. Based on his crimes and long institutional existence, it’s no surprise that a Colorado parole board has denied Montoya 11 times, and a corrections board has shot down early release three times. Last August, as the morning sun streaked through the windows of an 11th-floor conference room, the Denver Community Corrections Board considered Montoya, who is 57, for supervised discharge into a new county work-release program. “Anthony Montoya,” the chair of the ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Magazine Feature Story, March-April 2012
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Private Prisons Can’t Lock In Savings

January 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Back in 1999, private prisons housed 3,828 federal prisoners in America. Now that number is more than 33,000, a more than 800 percent gain. In the state of Arizona, the comparable figure went up 285 percent in a decade, in Idaho — 459 percent. States, and even the federal government, increasingly have looked to private companies to house and manage America’s expanding prison population. Three decades ago private lockups were nearly nonexistent in the U.S. Over this period, while the number of prisoners in the U.S. grew by 17 percent, the population inside the walls of fully privatized ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The Idea Lobby
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War on Drugs Remains at Stalemate After 40 Years

June 24, 2011 • By •

The headlines, commission reports and op-eds have been singing in chorus this month around the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s declaration of a national war on drugs. “Panel Calls War on Drugs a Failure," reads the Wall Street Journal headline on a new high-profile report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy. “Law Enforcement Study: War on Drugs is a Failure,” announced the release of another analysis from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Next came “U.S. Mayors Call U.S. ‘War on Drugs’ a Failure.” And just to underscore the bipartisan nature of all this ... Read More

More like this: Culture, The Idea Lobby
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Lee Baca Wants to Educate L.A.’s Prisoners

April 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca wants to teach criminals a lesson — literally. The top cop of America's most populous county is launching a new initiative aimed at offering education to every one of the 160,000 inmates who pass through his lockups each year. Liberal reformers have long advocated such a course, citing studies showing lower recidivism rates among prisoners who learn while locked up. But it's extraordinary talk coming from the man who runs America's biggest jail system. Baca's Education-Based Incarceration initiative officially launched last year but is still in the ... Read More

More like this: Education, Legal Affairs, May-June 2011, Views Reviews and Interviews
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Budget Idea: Divert Money From Prisons to Schools

April 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Click the graphic for a large version of the map, which details Los Angeles County prison admissions per 1,000 adults by zip code of home residence. The graphic also shows the zip codes with high and low high school math proficiency rates.

Solving state and national budget woes is going to demand a painful set of decisions on where to carve out money — from public services, public safety, environmental protection? — no matter where legislators look. But an unlikely coalition of organizations, including the NAACP, ACLU and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform,* is rallying around a common target: Why, they ask, are we spending so much money on prisons? Over the last 40 years, America's inmate population has quadrupled, from 500,000 to 2.3 million, giving the U.S. 5 percent of the world's population, but 25 percent ... Read More

More like this: Education, Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Life in Prison Begins at 16

February 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

It's difficult to choose the most heartbreaking scene in Dan Birman's documentary Me Facing Life: Cyntoia's Story. But a case can be made for one in which the 16-year-old central character, who is awaiting trial for murder in a Nashville, Tenn., criminal court, shows us her "sex list." It's a handwritten rundown, scribbled on a lined piece of notebook paper, of the dozens and dozens of people she had sexual relationships with during her troubled adolescence. In a detached, analytical tone, she proceeds to sort them by category: rapes (there were many), consensual encounters, those that ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, March-April 2011, Views Reviews and Interviews
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Convict Commodification

December 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Like corn and computers, convicts have become commodities in America, produced en masse in concentrated locations. But America hasn't always produced bumper crops of inmates, sociologist Bruce Western explained last summer at the annual American Sociological Association convention, speaking with fellow Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson to highlight a special issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The issue presented the work of 15 scholars — and two poets — who examined America's culture of mass incarceration and its effects on neighborhoods that ... Read More

More like this: January-February 2011, Legal Affairs, Offline Diary
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