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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,220,300 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails in 2013 – about 0.91% of adults (1 in 110) in the U.S. resident population.[2] Additionally, 4,751,400 adults in 2013 (1 in 51) were on probation or on parole.[2] In total, 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2013 – about 2.8% of adults (1 in 35) in the U.S. resident population.[2]

Can people in prison read books?
http://www.quora.com/Can-people-in-prison-read-books

What are the different ways to kill time in prison?
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-diffe ... -in-prison

an idea: isolate prisoners from each other in order to prevent the spreading of bad social behaviors, and then have each prisoner spend his time on a computer interacting with some video stream of a person who would get the prisoner to adopt healthy behaviors

i spoke with a former mafia guy who came to talk at my college and i asked him what he would change about the prison system, and he said he would have those guys working constantly, teaching them the skills they would need to succeed once they leave. he said they dont do that now.

http://www.quora.com/Prisons-and-Prison ... -countries

2008.12 - Bruce Western @ Harvard - From Prison to Work: A Proposal for a National Prisoner Reentry Program
http://www.brookings.edu/research/paper ... rk-western

Quote:
Around seven hundred thousand mostly low-income and minority men and women are released from prison each year. Returning to lives of low wages and high rates of unemployment, about two thirds will be rearrested within three years. I propose a national prisoner reentry program whose core element is up to a year of transitional employment available to all parolees in need of work. Transitional jobs are supplemented by substance-abuse treatment and housing after release, expanded work and educational programs in prison, and the restoration of eligibility for federal benefits for those with felony records. The program costs are offset by increased employment and reduced crime and correctional costs for program participants. By shifting supervision from custody in prison to intensive programs in the community, the national reentry program improves economic opportunity and reduces prison populations.

2014.08.04 Jalopnik - Never Speed In Virginia: Lessons From My Three Days In Jail
http://jalopnik.com/never-speed-in-virg ... 1613604053

Quote:
Mostly, jail is boring as sin. There were no books to read. There were no weights to lift. There were no clocks inside either, not that time matters much. They locked us in our cells for at least half the day and we spent the rest of the time milling around a common area or a walled-off half basketball court. The food is barely that, meeting only the minimum amount of state-mandated daily calories and nothing else.

I guess you're supposed to just sit around contemplating what a burden you are to the taxpayers, which was about $104 a day in my case, if you're curious.

My time inside wasn't some horrible, hell-on-earth situation, but it wasn't a pleasant experience. If your only experience with jail is what you've seen on TV or in movies, you don't have a clue how much it sucks. On the plus side, the RSW Regional Jail was a new facility, one that just opened this summer and was nice as far as jails go.

This also meant it had plumbing issues and a staff who didn't know what they were doing yet, which led to a lot of confusion among inmates about exactly when and how they were supposed to be released.

2014.08.21 - Forbes - How This Man Built A $3M Business A Year After Four Years In Prison
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hollieslade ... in-prison/

Quote:
A big gripe for the 2.3 million doing time in the US is keeping in touch with friends and family on the outside. There’s no internet in prison so all communication is through snail mail or the phone. Calls are often expensive and long distance. Relatives and friends, leading increasingly digitized lives, write less and don’t get around to sending photos for weeks on end.

“It was a pain point I experienced firsthand,” says Hutson. “I’m very close with my family and I knew they cared about me but even with knowing how much they cared about me they were still sometimes unable to send me photos.”

Transitioning from digital to analog is tough, says Hutson. It’s hard to sit down and write a letter now but simple to text or email. What if you created a website that printed out emails, texts or photos from your computer, Facebook or Instagram and mailed them for you in the plain white envelopes these institutions favored? [great idea]

The idea for Pigeonly was born. Essentially, it’s a platform that centralizes the myriad state-level databases making it a quick search to find where an inmate is in the system – Hutson himself was moved eight times during his stay – as well as a way to communicate. “People get lost in the system all the time,” he explains. “We have attorneys contacting us trying to find their clients.”
[...]
Hutson thinks prisons are a natural pool of entrepreneurs. “When you take away that seven percent or so that did something violent that people are afraid of, people who we need to have locked up, most of the other guys were selling drugs or involved in some kind of scam or did some kind of wire fraud, or white collar crime that was motivated by finances,” he says. “So you just really got the business model wrong, you got the product wrong, the goal was wrong but if you can apply that same drive and bottom line principles to something positive then now you have a viable business.”

He learned a lot from his fellow inmates inside. “In some facilities that the classes they have aren’t taught by people outside, they’re taught by other inmates,” he says. “So you’ll have a guy who has a white collar crime who might have embezzled 40 million dollars and he knows something about business because he ran some listed company and now he has a 36 month federal sentence for tax evasion – he’ll teach a class on how to form an LLP or start a balance sheet.”

Still, getting prisoners ready to reenter society isn’t a big priority, thinks Hutson. “Most institutions are geared around containment,” he says. “Most are based around ‘you don’t leave and you guys don’t kill each other while you’re here’ – that’s their priority number one.”

With reoffending rife – one study tracked 404,638 prisoners in 30 states after their release from prison in 2005 and found 68% were rearrested within three years – some organizations are already turning to entrepreneurship as a way forward. For example, the Houston-TX-based Prison Entrepreneurship Program, which trains around 250 prisoners a year in launching a business says instances of inmates reoffending once they’ve completed the course is only 5%.

2014.09.28 - Brother of Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde describes Sunde's life in prison
http://cheapassfiction.com/2014/09/28/m ... s-illness/

2014.11.05 - The Guardian - Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde: 'In prison, you become brain-dead'
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2 ... -in-prison

Quote:
We ask Sunde about a typical day in prison. He quickly rattles off his schedule: breakfast at 7am. Lunch at 11:30. Dinner at 4:15 PM. “Then you sleep.”
The hour he is allowed to spend outdoors each day is a highlight. Sunde points out of the barred window behind us towards a fenced-in gravel field a few yards away. Behind the barbed wire is a patch of green grass and a volleyball net, he says.

At 7pm, cell doors are closed and locked. After that, Sunde has only his television set and the books in his cell to entertain him. He hasn’t been online since he was arrested, he says. At 9pm, lights are turned off.
Sunde does not work during the daytime, as many other inmates do. Instead, he has been given a textbook in Spanish. Formally, that means he is pursuing studies while in jail. That pays him SEK 13 an hour, money that he is free to spend on phone credit, fruit or food in the prison kiosk.

A few days before our visit, Sunde’s brother, the author Mats Kolmisoppi, wrote a long Facebook post about his brother’s life at Västervik. His post went viral and was picked up by major newspaper. In it, he tells of enforced urine samples and humiliating body searches. How inmates are routinely locked up too early in the evening (so that guards won’t have to work overtime), are denied parole and subject to derisive comments from prison staff.
[...]
What is most difficult to cope with is the boredom, Sunde says. The days in prison merge into a grey mass, indistinguishable from each other. Sunde has trouble sleeping at night. “You become brain-dead in here,” he says. “A guy who has been here a long time said it best: what I miss most are new memories.”

2014.11.06 - NYT Blog - You May Have Missed It, but There Was an Election Debate on Criminal Justice Reform
http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/1 ... ce-reform/

2014.11.07 - NYT - ACLU in $50 Million Push to Reduce Jail Sentences
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/us/ac ... .html?_r=0
- this may be a social wave coming. it may be worth trying to ride it. And maybe look to George Soros for help.

Solitary Confinement

Wikipedia - Solitary Confinement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement

2006 - The University of Chicago Press - The Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prison Inmates: A Brief History and Review of the Literature
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/500626

Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement
http://law.wustl.edu/journal/22/p325grassian.pdf

2014.02.23 - Solitary confinement: 29 years in a box
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/23/health/so ... sychology/

http://solitarywatch.com/facts/faq/

Quote:
What are conditions like in solitary confinement?

For those who endure it, life in solitary confinement means living 23 to 24 hours a day in a cell. Federal prisoners in disciplinary segregation, for example, typically spend two days a week entirely in isolation, and 23 hours a day in their cell the remaining five days, when they are allotted 1 hour for exercise. Exercise usually takes place alone in an exercise room or a fenced or walled “dog run.” Some prisoners are escorted, in shackles, to the shower, while others have showers within their cells. They may or may not be allowed to leave their cells for visits or to make telephone calls.
Solitary confinement cells generally measure from 6 x 9 to 8 x 10 feet. Some have bars, but more often they have solid metal doors. Meals generally come through slots in these doors, as do any communications with prison staff. Within these cells, prisoners live lives of enforced idleness, denied the opportunity to work or attend prison programming, and sometimes banned from having televisions, radios, art supplies, and even reading materials in their cells.

How much does solitary confinement cost?

Not only do solitary confinement units cost more to build than the average prison, but it also costs significantly more to house someone in isolation than it does to hold someone in the general population. Nationally, it has been estimated that the average cost of a year in solitary costs taxpayers $75,000.
For example, the California Department of Corrections released the following housing costs for Pelican Bay State Prison:
$70,641 per SHU prisoner
$58,324 per GP prisoner
$171,857 per PSU/EOP prisoner
$77,740 per ASU prisoner
$43,640 per Level l prisoner
In 2003, the cost of housing a level 5 Administrative Maximum, or “supermax,” prisoner at Ohio State Penitentiary was $149 daily and $54,385 a year. The cost of housing someone in maximum-security was $101 a day and $26,865 a year. For people held in general population, the cost was $63 a day, or $22,995 a year–less than half the cost of an Administrative Segregation prisoner.
In addition, solitary confinement has been associated with significantly higher construction costs per cell. For example, Wisconsin’s Boscobel supermax facility was built to house 500 people at a cost of $47.5 million (in 1990 dollars), or over $95,000 per bed. Even more significantly, Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois cost $73 million to build in 1998 and was designed to hold 500 prisoners, giving a construction price tag of approximately $146,000 per bed.
Solitary Watch has released a fact sheet on this issue with more specific data on various states

Prisons in other countries

2015.08.07 - NYTimes - What We Learned From German Prisons
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/opini ... .html?_r=0

Adjusting the prison population

Protective Custody

Woman: So you're wanting to go back?
Prisoner: Well, if there's a way I could do all the GED and vocational and welding and get one of the boat job or telemarketing job and be in PC I'd like to do that.
Woman: That's not gonna happen.

Recidivism

Articles / Videos

2014.01.27 - YouTube - Fresh Out - Kidnapped and TORTURED by a Cartel for 16 days
- This is an incredible story.
2016.01.21 - YouTube - Vice - New York's Former 'Top Cop' Bernie Kerik Calls for Criminal Justice Reform
- This is pretty interesting.
- The reporter comes off as a little combative. Later in the interview it turns out the reporter had actually interviewed the guy before he'd gotten sentenced to prison and had his change of opinion.

My Thoughts on Various Topics

Prison

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