THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF BEING “TOUGH ON CRIME”

[Katashi_itto]

“We’re in this exciting moment where we’ve had 40 years of being ‘tough on crime,’ and we’ve finally come to recognize that it really hasn’t worked very well,” says sociologist Alice Goffman bluntly. “Scientists have shown in the past few years that the relationship between incarceration and crime is basically zip. The crime rate goes up and down, incarceration just continues to grow. It’s not a good way of fighting crime.”

When it comes to talking about jail, Goffman, a teeny tiny wisp of a woman with wide eyes and an open smile, does not mince her words. Sitting forward on a sofa in the Vancouver Convention Center, the day before she is due to give a TED Talk on the problem of using incarceration as a one-size-fits-all solution to crime, she is hopped up at what she sees as the injustice of it all. And she has seen it. As an ethnographer, she lived and breathed with the people in one particular neighborhood of Philadelphia for over a decade, young black men and their families who cannot escape a snakes-and-ladder system that seems like it has been designed to present them with one snake after another.
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“Incarceration is targeted at poor African-American and Latino communities,” she says. “So what you have is not just young people going to prison and returning home, but people dealing with court fees, dealing with probation regulations, dealing with parole, living in halfway houses, on house arrest, going to court date after court date. It’s a very corrosive system that’s way bigger than just locking people up and returning them home with criminal records. It creates this culture of fear and suspicion where young people are looking over their shoulder, wondering when the police are going to come, wondering where they’re going to be seized or who around them is helping the police.”

Young people like Tim, who was placed on probation because his brother, Chuck, drove him to school in a car that it transpired had been stolen in California. Tim was charged with being “accessory to receiving stolen property” and placed on three years of probation. He was eleven years old. “And this is the point where Chuck starts teaching him how to run from the police,” says Goffman.
http://ideas.ted.com/the-unintended-consequences-of-being-tough-on-crime/

[Jefferson23]

1. Disgraceful, counter productive..sickening. n/t

[Doctor_J]

2. it's now a cash cow for politically connected people

Like for profit health insurance, charter schools, nclb and its evil spawn rttb, and the war on drugs, the rich are getting richer from it, so it will never go away.