The second piece by Rachel Barkow, looks at the
eight amendment of the Constitution and how it might relate to the current
problem of imprisonment in the U.S. Despite the repeated claims to being the
land of the free, the U.S. leads the rest of the world in the number of people
in prison, which as she points out is made up of significantly larger portions
of minority groups in the country. Certainly the profit motive is still alive
and well at least, because running prisons has become a profitable industry as
of late, led by corporations like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)
which also lobbys the government for longer prison terms and less leniency, not
because it feels threatened by criminals, but because shorter prison terms
would mean less business. The U.S. is also the third largest in terms of the
number of executions carried out by the justice system behind only Saudi Arabia
and China.
The reason I chose this section is because as a substance
abuse counselor I personally know many people who have suffered long sentences due
to mandatory minimums which have done no good and in many cases have done a
great deal of damage and it my strong belief that mandatory minimums need to be
abolished and that the entire prison system needs to be completely revamped. Mandatory
minimums do not do any good for anyone except for the prison system itself whether
public or privatized; it has become nothing more than a very profitable
business with little or no regard for rehabilitating people.
In New York State the prison system is most often referred
to by the acronym DOCS, which translates to Department of Correctional
Services. But this name is little more than a sad joke since there is little if
anything at all that justifies the prison system as being correctional in any
way. If you wanted to be more accurate
it would simply be called the Department of Detention because that is really
all they do. Few if any come out of the prison system as better people and of
those incarcerated the longer the sentence the less likely they will be better
suited for society because they have become institutionalized and no longer
know how to function in the outside world.
The United States currently imprisons more people per capita
than any other country in the world.
Although US citizens make up only about five percent of the world’s
population we currently house more than twenty percent of the world’s prisoners,
the majority of those being people of color. (Slate.com 2010).
In addition to the record number of incarcerations is the
number of people who are imprisoned for incredibly long and unjustifiable
periods of time for what are indisputably minor infractions, many of these
involving drug sales or possession. This leads to the statute of mandatory
minimums. It is unfathomable to me as to
how this concept makes any sense at all. The whole idea of having a judge hear
a case is so that should the jury find a person guilty, or in the case of trial
by judge, if the judge deems someone guilty of what he has been accused then he
should have the ability to lean on his good sense and experienced, guided by prior
case law to impose a sentence that he deems appropriate. Having mandatory
minimums reduces a judge to little more than a Parking Enforcement Officer –
park in front of a fire hydrant you get a $50 ticket. That PEO doesn’t have the discretion to say “Well
the car is only half way into the hydrant area so I’ll make the ticket only $30
dollars, that should be sufficient.” Under the statutes of mandatory minimums a
judge has no more ability to decide proper punishment that a PEO. The whole concept is ludicrous.
One of the best examples of this abuse of power over
sentencing is the Rockefeller Drug Laws.
The main idea of these laws was to send drug felons to prison with very lengthy
sentences even first time offenders caught with small amounts of
narcotics. The sentences were mandatory
and leniency was unacceptable (New York Times).
One example of the outrageousness of these laws was a 45 year old man
who was arrested in Jamaica, Queens in 1995.
He was arrested for selling while holding six $10 bags of crack. For this offense he was sentenced to 12½ to
25 years. The felon himself said that incarceration didn’t help. Drugs are readily available in prison and you
are more focused on day to day survival that you are on changing yourself (NY
Times 2009).
In 2009 under Gov. Paterson and the Democratic legislative
leaders these laws were amended to restore sentencing discretion to judges
especially in lower-level drug possession crimes. Judges would be allowed to send offenders to
treatment programs instead of prison.
This is just one example of how sentencing laws and mandatory minimums
have gotten out of hand and how and why this discretion must be returned to
judges where it belongs.
One last thing that I would like to address
although it was only briefly mentioned in the article is the idea of executions
as a form of punishment. As the article states, the US comes in third as far as the number of executions performed, exceeded only by Saudi Arabia and China - Now there is a group we want to be associated with when it comes to how we treat our citizens... In this all I can say that it is my belief that
execution is wrong on every level. No
doubt society has a right to protect itself but it does not have the right to
be vengeful. It has the right to punish
but it does not have the right to kill. I cannot think of any way to put it more
concisely than this.
