Cutting Costs.

[Nur]

Socod Badane

 

You write:

 

That being muslims are either mired in (to greater or lesser degree) the same activities commonly attributed to the spread of HIV or are as susceptible as any other people

 

 

Not to " a greater degree " for sure, rather to a much-lesser-degree, is the right choice of words here, and let me show you intuitively how:

 

Promiscuity, Sodomy and premarital sex have been identified as the main cause of AIDS, and to a lesser degree intravenous drug use and accidental blood transfusions in Kidney Dialysis machines and blood donation.

 

Muslims in general do not engage in these acts due to religious prohibition unless they are fully aware that they are sinning, thus exposing themselves to a Divine curse to befall on them spoiling the PARTY. It was reported that no nation legalizes promiscuity without risking the spread of diseases not know to their forefathers . In other words, when Muslims cross the moral red light, its followed by a moral pain and guilty conscious.

 

However a percentage of Muslims do cross the decency line out of lust and end up in the same situatioin of non Muslims.

 

But the greater majority of observing Muslims do not entertain the idea of promiscuity, nor premarital sex, nor soddomy, which makes Muslims as a religion the least infected with AIDS. Because like I said, Alcohol, drugs and social faithlessness are the drivers for such deseases, If a throrough survey was made today in countries with majority Muslims. I can bet that in black Africa Somalia is one of the least infected countries with AIDS if not the least ( Our European and US suported Warlords did the killing for a change, the drugs and promiscuity business which was also their thriving enterprise, unfortunately, the Islamic courts had to stop this business to make the whole UN's Kofe Anan mad )

 

I am sure that you agree that sex is a natural thing when done in a marital relationship ( except for soddomy), but one does not have to risk his/her life for it, even computers get viuses when they are open to all users.

 

 

Time will tell and show that Islam was right in every aspect of human endeavors, Social ills, and deseases are best solved with islamic solutions, so are economic and Banking ( Banks in Muslim countries, and some non Muslim countries are switching to islamic instruments like Muraabaha and istisnaac for its profitability and Barakah factor), in short, the more you walk away from Islam, ( Socod Badane), the more you face stark truth that Islam wa right.

 

Fa ayna tadh-haboon?

 

Socod Badeane, You are running away from your maker like a zebra in the Serengeti Park running away from a lion, but no matter which direction you go, you will run to Him, because: he is surrounding everything ( Kulli shey-in muxiid)

 

 

Nur

[Viking]

Originally posted by Socod_badne:

Attenuating factors like decent public health system, public awareness and education etc etc. The West is best example. Here is a society where casual sexual encounters with strangers is not too uncommon and yet has warded off the spread of AIDS to alarming levels.

 

All in all, the take away message from this report is this: AIDS doesn't discriminate on religion, race, political idealogy etc... everyone is vulnerable!

The bleeding obvious...anyone who believes that AIDS discriminates religion or race needs virology 101. You say that AIDS doesn't spread as much in western countries because of the health system, public awareness and education. Fair enough, I don't see anyone arguing against that. But why is AIDS not as rampant in Muslim countries as it is in other poor nations? Do you have a theory?

[Nur]

Viking Bro.

 

You write:

 

Nur,

 

I understand what you are getting at but some conditions have to be met before hadd is imposed. A future islamic govt in Somalia has to put in place a social welfare system, a working healthcare and education system before cutting off limbs. Naden has a point when she says you have to drain the dirty water to get rid of the mosquitoes.

 

 

Couldnt say it better, however the magic of the Sharia is not in the actual chopping of hands, its the powerful dterrence, all the past criminals are in Mogadishu as I write this response but they are so afraid to commit a crime under the ICU from what they have heard, a living proof that the stern message has done the trick, no need for actual chopping.

 

 

Nur

[Dhagax-Tuur]

Gentlemen and ladies, nomads, qaxooti's and all the wonderful people here, thanks very much for the beautiful discussion. I must say I enjoyed every second of it. It was amazingly intellectual and stimulating mentally, maansha Allah.

 

It is really very simple (at least to me): Allah created human beings with His wisdom therefore Allah knows what is in their interest hence the Shariah. Voila. Simple as A B C, innit?

[Nur]

Nobel Peace Price for Sheikh Sharif and the Islamic Courts, to:

 

1. Recognize the miraculous effort that ended the bloodletting of the Warlords at Baidoa.

2. Encouraging Peace and Productivity

 

 

Foreign Troops are needed in Gazza to protect poor palestinians from Israeli Army. Not in peaceful Somalia.

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

Nomads

 

I must admit my utter disppointment of the results of the Nobel Peace Prize: It did not go o my candidate: Sheikh Sharif of the Islamic Courts Union.

 

For six months, Mogadishu under the ICU leved the most peaceful days in our history, even the Pirates in the news these days playing hide and seek with their bigge Country Pirates ( US Navy), were afraid to commit crimes of the high seas.

 

Well, the march must go on for a just world, in which the right people get recongnied fr the right causes.

 

 

Nur

[Kashafa]

Well, the march must go on

Trust and believe, brother. This march will go on until victory is achieved , inshallah.

[Nur]

Kashafa bro.

 

Victory has many milestones, the final victory is when Allah the almighty judges mankind according to His standard of Justice, not theirs, that day, will some emerge victorius forever, and some doom forever, life's glitter can fool, but a heart filled with faith (iman) can see farther than the present disadvantages we face, a lot of what we see greatly depend on what we are looking for, if we are looking for delivering on our covenant with Allah, we shall see victory at the end inshAllah.

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

The Hidden Casualities of America's "War on Crime"

By MARLENE MARTIN

 

The number of people behind bars in the "land of the free" is grown as large as the combined populations of Atlanta, Miami, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Kansas City and Pittsburgh.

 

That's the shocking fact in a Pew Center on the States report showing that one in 100 adults in the U.S. are in prison or jail--more than 2.3 million people.

 

When it comes to locking up its people, the country that claims to be the "world's greatest democracy" is far ahead of every other nation--ahead of China, ahead of Russia, ahead of all the tyrannies that the U.S. government supports around the world--both in absolute numbers of prisoners and the rate of incarceration.

 

As has always been the case in a country founded on slavery, the inmates of America's prisons are disproportionately people of color. Among African American men over 18, one in 15 are in prison--between the ages of 20 and 34, fully one in nine Black men are behind bars. When those on parole, probation or otherwise involved in the criminal justice system are included, that statistic rises to one in three.

 

As staggering as these facts are, the stories of the individual human beings behind these statistics--men and women whose lives have been destroyed by the criminal justice system--are even more horrifying.

 

Mark Clements is one of them. Mark was 16 years old when Chicago police officers and detectives picked him up on suspicion of setting a fire that killed four people. The white cops worked for Jon Burge--Mark became one of the hundreds of African American suspects tortured until the "confessed" by Chicago police under Burge's command.

 

Mark was kept in lockup for a year until he was old enough to stand trial as an adult. During his sentencing, Mark pleaded before the judge for more than two hours that he didn't commit the crime--that the police had beaten him into confessing. The judge sat with folded arms, staring straight ahead--and after Mark was done, he imposed the "mandatory" sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

 

Mark is 45 today. He has spent two-thirds of his life in prison. And if the state of Illinois gets his way, he will die there.

 

 

* * *

 

For the past two decades, crime rates have been in long-term decline, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the prison population has exploded during this same time.

 

To put this into proportion, between 2005 and 2006, the U.S. prison population rose by more than 65,000, an increase of almost 3 percent, which is on the low side for annual figures over the past 25 years. By contrast, in 1972, the total U.S. prison population was 196,092.

 

Who accounts for the vast number of people warehoused in America's jails and prisons? According to Justice Department statistics, more than half the people in the federal prison system and one in five inmates in state prisons were drug offenders--almost half a million in total.

 

Many of these prisoners were convicted of nonviolent offenses. More than a quarter of drug offenders in state prison are serving time for nothing more than possession. According to the Sentencing Project, arrests for marijuana possession accounted for 79 percent of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990s--despite the fact that not a single death has been attributed specifically to marijuana use, unlike such legal drugs as alcohol and tobacco.

 

David Ciglar pled guilty to growing marijuana seedlings in his garage in Oakland, Calif.--and received the state's mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years.

 

"My family is devastated," says David in the book Shattered Lives: Portraits from America's Drug War. "My wife is living every day wondering if she can make it financially and mentally. My kids don't know why their dad was taken away for such a long time. I have not even bonded with my youngest daughter. She was 2 when I left her."

 

Richard Nixon officially declared the U.S. government's "war on drugs" in 1971, but the drug war didn't really get under way until Ronald Reagan's presidency in the 1980s. The casualties have been mounting ever since.

 

One of the drug war's chief weapons has been the 100-to-1 rule that governs sentencing in convictions for possession and distribution of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. Under the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and another law passed in 1988, possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine (about the weight of two pennies) results in a mandatory sentence of five years, while it takes 500 grams of the powder form of cocaine to yield the same sentence.

 

Behind the disparity is an openly racist double standard: African Americans account for most of those convicted and sent to prison for offenses related to crack cocaine--including 82 percent of those prosecuted and jailed at the federal level--even though they are a minority of users.

 

Those ensnared in the drug war aren't typically high-level dealers, either, according to Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project. "By and large, these defendants are not the kingpins of the drug trade," Mauer wrote. "Data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission document 73 percent of the crack defendants had only low-level involvement in drug activity, such as street-level deals, couriers or lookouts."

 

The drug warriors' justification for the 100-to-1 rule was that crack was so highly addictive, and that its users became super-violent. Many of these stereotypes have been proven untrue, yet the bias in sentencing remains.

 

According to Carol Brook, deputy director of the federal defender program for the Northern District of Illinois, "These disparities exist, even though we know that the physiological and psychoactive effects of crack and powder cocaine are virtually identical. They exist even though the effects of prenatal exposure to crack and powder cocaine are identical. They exist even though the epidemic of violence and rapid spread to youth that crack was suppose to create never happened."

 

Despite the countless reports and studies, and the pleas from drug-war victims, their families and activists, Congress to this day has failed to change the 100-to-1 rule--though the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted last year to modify penalties for crack cocaine offenses.

 

 

* * *

 

The terrible impact of the "tough-on-crime" crusade can be seen in another disturbing statistic disclosed by the Pew report: More than half of all released offenders end up back behind bars within three years. Some commit another crime, but others are guilty of minor violations of the terms of their release--according to federal statistics, more than a third of people who entered prison in 2005 were arrested for parole violations.

 

This reality isn't altogether surprising given the 20-year trend of dramatic cuts to education programs for prisoners, which have been shown to be the single-most important factor in reducing recidivism.

 

Such programs grew widely as a result of the Attica prison uprising in 1971--as of 1995, there were still 350 programs that allowed prisoners to earn college degrees. But thanks to "law-and-order" measures passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton, they began to disappear. Only 12 of these programs exist today.

 

There are finally some cracks appearing in the "lock 'em up and throw away the key" mentality of lawmakers. Sadly, however, many of the proposals under consideration now aren't driven by a change of heart, but by the financial crisis caused by states facing the burden of paying for incarcerating ever-growing numbers of people.

 

According to the Pew study, five states spend more of their budget on prisons than they do on higher education. Overall, between 1987 and 2007, "state spending on higher education has increased 21 percent, while corrections spending had more than doubled, increasing 127 percent," the Economic Policy Institute reported.

 

This economic burden is forcing some welcome policy changes. In Texas, for example, some drug offenders are being put into treatment programs instead of prison. Other states are also considering early release programs, and the guidelines on crack cocaine offenses accepted by the U.S. Sentencing Commission are being applied retroactively.

 

This is a move in the right direction, but it is taking place too slowly--and the lives of 2.3 million people are wasting away in the meantime.

 

Earlier in March, the writers of the HBO drama The Wire spoke for them in an essay in Time magazine. If asked to serve on a jury in a drug case, they would vote to acquit, the writers said. "No longer," they concluded, "can we collaborate with a government that uses non-violent drug offenses to fill prisons with it's poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens."

 

MARLENE MARTIN is national director of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) and a frequent contributor to the Socialist Worker.

[Nur]

" The 350% crime increase during the past 40 years can be tied directly to immorality. Immorality is the embryo stage of crime. An Alcoholic did not begin as an alcoholic. He or she took their first drink and it escalated on them and they became addicted to alcohol. Then they became the DWI killing more people than in all of our wars combined. The drug addict did not begin as a drug addict. He started with a little marijuana and it escalated on him and he became a drug addict. The drug addict then began committing crime to support his habit. The Porn addict did not begin as a Porn addict. He read his first Playboy or passed by his first porn web site and it escalated on him when he would not leave it alone. He then became a Porn addict finally acting out his addiction in rape and violence leaving the shallow graves of our women and children. Click Here (CA-1).

 

It is time to call evil-evil. It is time to call addictions bad personal choices. We have hordes of terrorist monsters in our society and we need to deal with them as monsters-get them out of society permanently. The touchy, feely culture employed for the past few decades has miserably failed the American people and put a nation at great risk. Lawyers and sociologists attempt to dismiss the terrorist acts of some of these monsters by blaming a bad childhood. Hogwash! Millions upon millions of Americans had a tough childhood but they did not turn to crime and terrorize their fellow beings"

 

 

Sammy Sorrell

Author and Radio Talk Show Host

National Crusader for Legal Justice Reform

and against the national threat of crime in America

NATIONAL DIRECTOR & FOUNDER OF UCLR

United Citizens For Legal Reform

[Nur]

For Sheikh Shareef to earn back his credibility with the Somali resistance, it would have been a counterweight to his credit in his negotiations with the Americans to demand an economic offset concession to apply Sharia Law in Somalia in exchange for granting the Americans oil exploration rights. The American Oil companies want oil, and their government opposes any move for an Islamic governance apparatus in Somalia, a difficult task by all measures!

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

Nomads

 

Fours Somali teenagers have been sentenced by the Shabaab administration to amputations for Xiraabah crime, NOT Theft. What is Xiraabah?

 

Xiraabah is the Islamic analogue of Organized Crime, a group of young men well aware of the crime who take control of passage ways at night to rob, rape, and kill at will anyone who falls captive in their hands.

 

In Islam, this crime is more severe than murder, it causes chaos ( Fasaad fil Ard) which remains to be the end objective of the Criminal warlords who give drugs ( Qaat) to these kids to terrorize the public on their bahalf.

 

 

My advice for the Shabaab is for them to pardon the kids this time around, since the stern word has reached all would be criminals. A campaign of awareness is badly needed to highlight the severity of such crimes in society and Allah's ruling on their punishment. After such campaign, let the law of Allah take its course, its far cheaper to cut limbs of criminals than to make all of society hostage to pay ransom to these drug gangs.

 

Anyone who doubts fairness of this ruling should walk in the shoes of a raped or robbed-at-gun-point victim.

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

Somalia: Al Shabaab Puts Mogadishu's Rapists And Robbers On Notice

 

Charles Onyango-Obbo

 

6 July 2009

 

Nairobi — A few days ago Somalia's radical al Shabaab insurgents, who control large parts of the country and might well overrun the fragile government in Mogadishu, made an example of four teenage thieves.

 

The rebels, who follow a strict form of Islamic law, cut a hand and a leg each off the teenagers as punishment for robbery. Earlier, they stoned a rapist to death.

 

To the human rights community, and to the East African middle class, this is barbarism.

But, I suspect, in the crime-riddled slums, working class quarters, and countrysides in many parts of the region, not to mention Africa, these bloody measures are winning al Shabaab many brownie points.

 

Abhorrable as al Shabaab's extreme actions might be, and their alleged links to al-Qaeda notwithstanding, they would probably win elections against many sitting governments in several African countries if the contest was based on the single issue of crime.

In Kenya, in parts of the country like central Kenya where citizens are besieged by criminals and extortion gangs, highly lethal vigilantes have been formed to fight back.

 

The methods they are using against suspected members of the outlawed Mungiki sect, for example, make al Shabaab's amputations look like a sweet scent-filled massage.

 

In South Africa, another country whose towns have been all but taken over by vicious criminals and rapists, not too long ago a popular people's vigilante group, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD), emerged to clean up the streets.

The reason vigilantism is finding appeal, is that people know that rogue elements in the security services are keepers of the law by day, but at night they are leaders of criminal gangs.

The appeal of citizen action against crime can thus only grow.

 

For example, though I am a pacifist and oppose the death penalty, I am extremely conflicted where rapists and mass murderers are involved because I think the level of these and other crimes in Africa has reached levels that could destroy our societies

 

If al Shabaab had asked me whether the rapist who was stoned to death should be spared and given a life sentence instead, I probably would have offered an ambiguous answer that gave them the impression that I favoured the stoning.

The greatest "instability" that an al Shabaab regime would cause, therefore, might not be through spreading the al Qaeda menace in East Africa, but in showing up the other governments.

So Al Shabaab takes power: It beheads hundreds of thieves, chops off a hand and leg from every Mogadishu pickpocket, hangs rapists in the market squares, blinds all bribe-taking policemen, and drowns the pirates who have become a menace in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, and clears khat off the streets.

 

Mogadishu could become a mini-paradise where people don't have to lock their doors, and little girls can walk from their grandparents' house two streets away back home at 7:30 pm without fear of being molested.

 

Pressure would grow in other fear-ruled East African capitals for al Shabaab-style crackdowns on crime. That would be tricky for some governments, because they need crime and corruption to survive.

 

Charles Onyango-Obbo is executive editor for the Nation Media Group's Africa Media Division

Copyright © 2009 The East African. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.co

[Nur]

One in 28 US Kids Has a Parent in Prison: Study

 

By Daniel Tencer

 

October 01, 2010 "Raw Story" -- The US's exceptionally high rate of incarceration is causing economic damage not only to the people behind bars but to their children and taxpayers as a whole, a new study finds.

 

The study (PDF) from the Pew Research Center's Economic Mobility Project, released Tuesday, reports that the US prison population has more than quadrupled since 1980, from 500,000 to 2.3 million, making the US's incarceration rate the highest in the world, beating former champions like Russia and South Africa.

 

This means more than one in 100 Americans is in prison, and the cost of prisons to states now exceeds $50 billion per year, or one in every 15 state dollars spent -- a figure the study describes as "staggering."

 

According to the authors, one in every 28 children in the US has a parent behind bars -- up from one in 125 just 25 years ago. This is significant, the study argues, because children of incarcerated parents are much likelier to struggle in life.

 

A family with an incarcerated parent on average earns 22 percent less the year after the incarceration than it did the year before, the study finds. And children with parents in prison are significantly likelier to be expelled from school than others; 23 percent of students with jailed parents are expelled, compared to 4 percent for the general population.

 

"Both education and parental income are strong indicators of children’s future economic mobility," the survey notes. "With millions of prison and jail inmates a year returning to their communities, it is important to identify policies that address the impact of incarceration on the economic mobility of former inmates and their children."

 

In all, 2.7 million US children have parents behind bars, and "two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses," the study notes.

 

Not surprisingly, the statistics show large disparities when broken down by race. Among black children, fully one in nine, or 11.4 percent, have a parent in jail. For Hispanics, the number is one in 28, and for white children it's one in 57.

 

The study also finds that the US now has a prison population larger than the 35 largest European countries combined. The incarceration rate in the US is five times that of Great Britain -- 753 inmates per 100,000 people, compared to 151 inmates in the UK. Even the British incarceration rate is high compared to some countries: 96 in France and 88 in Germany, for example.

 

The cost of such a high incarceration rate hasn't been lost on lawmakers in this era of budget deficits. Over the past few years, numerous states have released prisoners early to reduce incarceration costs. California granted early release to some 1,500 inmates this year, and the state hopes to reduce its prison population by a total of 6,500.

 

But those early releases have proven controversial, both for political and public safety reasons. The New York Times reported earlier this year:

 

In February, lawmakers in Oregon temporarily suspended a program they had expanded last year to let prisoners, for good behavior, shorten their sentences (and to save $6 million) after an anticrime group aired radio advertisements portraying the outcomes in alarming tones. “A woman’s asleep in her own apartment,” a narrator said. “Suddenly, she’s attacked by a registered sex offender and convicted burglar.”

 

In Illinois, Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, a Democrat, described as “a big mistake” an early release program that sent some convicts who had committed violent crimes home from prison in a matter of weeks. Of more than 1,700 prisoners released over three months, more than 50 were soon accused of new violations.

 

An early release program in Colorado meant to save $19 million has scaled back its ambitions by $14 million after officials found far fewer prisoners than anticipated to be wise release risks. In more than five months, only 264 prisoners were released, though the program was designed to shrink the prison population by 2,600 over two years.

 

With concern growing about the cost -- both economic and social -- of incarceration, lawmakers have turned an eye to sentencing reform. But prospects for wholesale changes to sentencing in the US are dim, primarily because of the difficulty of selling "weaker" criminal punishments to a skeptical public.

 

This year, the Obama administration backed sentencing reform for crack cocaine, reducing the disparity between crack sentences and powder cocaine sentences on the basis that they discriminated along racial lines. But, as law professor Andrea Lyon noted at the Huffington Post, even that reform allowed for large disparities in sentences. "What was a 100 to 1 disparity is now 'only' an 18 to 1 disparity," she writes.

 

In Missouri, an innovative new law gives judges access to information about incarceration costs before they decide on punishment, as well as access to information on recidivism rates for various crimes. Lawmakers hope it will result in a more consistent application of the law.

 

Marijuana law reform could also have an impact, by simply reducing the number of crimes for which people can be jailed. Last year alone, there were more than 858,000 arrests in the United States for marijuana. That's down from a peak of 872,000 in 2007, but still near record highs. More than half of all drug arrests involved marijuana.

[Nur]

How to Waste Money and Lives: The American Prison System

 

By Celia Chazelle

 

March 30, 2011 "MichaelMoore" -- -In 1970, fewer than 200,000 Americans were incarcerated. Today, with some 2.3 million in prison or jail, the US has more people and a higher percentage of its population locked up than any other country. Adding those on probation and parole, over seven million are under penal supervision. Although much of the growth stems from tougher drug laws, increased sentencing for most offenses has played a large role, too. According to criminologist Todd Clear, prison sentences in the US today average almost twice as long as thirty years ago. American prisoners now endure sentences twice those of the English, four times those of the Dutch, and five to ten times those of the French for the same crimes.

 

Our penal system affects more middle-class white Americans than we might realize, yet the impact on them is tiny compared with that on minorities – especially young black men from impoverished urban neighborhoods. Over 90 percent of inmates are male, and while 12 percent of the U.S. population is African-American, over 40 percent of prisoners with sentences longer than one year are black. The toll on black families has been incalculable. From the end of slavery until 1970, most black children lived in a two-parent household; now, the majority are cared for only by women. While not the only factor at play, the numbers of black men behind bars have left an entire cohort of girlfriends, wives, and female relatives to raise their kids alone. In minority urban ghettos, where the effects are concentrated, so many men are incarcerated that children think of this as a normal part of adult male life. Many barely know imprisoned fathers. With most prisoners sent off more than 100 miles from home, family visits can be next to impossible. An added irony is that the prisons support the economies of distant, mainly rural and white locales, while the inner cities bearing the brunt of crime remain impoverished.

 

The costs of our incarceration binge fly in the face of economic sense. From 1982 to 2006, the amount spent on corrections rose by 660 percent. The 2009 bill for jails and prisons was over $60 billion; New Jersey, where I live, spent about $39,000 on each state prisoner in 2009, far more than the cost of tuition at a state college. Some states have cut corrections budgets in response to the economic crisis, but others have increased them, as has the federal government. Our enthusiasm for locking up people raises important moral questions about ourselves. Dostoyevsky was right on the mark when he wrote, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” But even if we focus only on dollars and cents, we must consider the lost opportunities to invest resources in schools, free clinics, afterschool programs, transportation, and other public goods. Politicians and the media have everyone in a frenzy about deficits. Two obvious ways to balance government budgets are to tax the rich and cut defense spending, but it would certainly help if we reduced the populations behind prison walls. Some states have made small moves in this direction, aided by recent declines in crime. But politicians are generally fearful that if they advocate policies to reduce prison populations, they will appear soft on crime.

 

Despite our harsh prison sentences, however, most released inmates are rearrested within three years. Many get charged with parole violations, but the majority with new crimes. If incarceration is supposed to deter people from illegal behavior, it is not working for ex-prisoners. One reason is that most return to the jobless inner cities they came from, where criminal activity can seem the only way to make a living. Another is how corrections budgets are allocated.

 

I tell students in my medieval history classes that for all our lip service to rehabilitating offenders, it is striking how much less this goal seems reflected in our penal policies than in those of European communities in the early Middle Ages, from about 500 to 1100. This is not to deny that early medieval justice could be brutal. Kings and lords condemned countless enemies to execution and dependants to be branded, blinded, or lose noses or ears. Judicial courts ordered torture and threw offenders into dungeons, where they might stay in chains until they died. It is no wonder the era is often called the Dark Age. Yet offsetting this nasty picture was the widespread practice of addressing an array of offenses, sometimes even murder, not through arbitrary judgment but as if they were disputes requiring negotiations. In these cases, negotiators worried less about formal law than restoring the peace by reconciling offenders with victims, victims’ representatives, and anyone else who felt wronged. Offenders were punished, but a key aim of the punishment was rehabilitation. This might require that they pay reparations, undergo penance, or perform a public ritual of humiliation. Such penalties were designed to repair the broken social bonds and ease the offenders’ reintegration into their communities.

 

By contrast, criminal justice in the twenty-first century US gives rehabilitation short shrift. Many inmates suffer from mental illness and addictions, yet treatment programs for them are underfunded. So, too, is education; yet education may be the single most effective means to rehabilitate offenders.

 

While not every prisoner needs substance abuse treatment, all could benefit from education. Most prisons have education programs, but they reach a fraction of their populations and average only 1 to 3 percent of state corrections budgets. The Center for Prison Outreach and Education that I co-direct provides college programming in New Jersey prisons thanks to federal grants and private benefactors; most notably, we have generous support from Doris Buffett’s Sunshine Lady Foundation. It has taken a lot of work to collect this extra funding. Despite the reluctance of state governments to fund prison education adequately, dollar for dollar, educating inmates is a more effective tool of crime reduction than building new prisons. Ex-prisoners face major barriers upon release; education increases their ability to navigate the hurdles and makes them more employable. One study estimates it lessens recidivism by 29%. Another revealed a 44 percent drop in recidivism for inmates who earned college degrees. Another suggests that $962 spent on academic education for inmates saved $5306 in future criminal justice costs. Along the way, educational programs also reduce violence inside prisons, improving security for both inmates and staff.

 

African-American men who do not finish high school have almost 60 per cent chance of doing time by age forty. For those with high school diplomas, the rate plummets to 18 percent, and for those with some college education the chances are less than 5 percent. If we genuinely want to enhance public safety, help poor minority families, AND have more money to spend on public services for everyone, a truly cost-effective strategy would be to put substantial energy and resources into prisoner education.

 

Celia Chazelle is chair of the History Department at The College of New Jersey, a co-founder and co-director of its Center for Prison Outreach and Education, and also co-editor of a forthcoming book, Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice.

 

© 2011 MichaelMoore.com