Change “or” to “and” and you have a true statement.

The next person that conflates anarchy with chaos is going to get an eyeful from me.

For the sake of all rational people here, please read about anarchy before posting the word. PLEASE.

Insert “ostensibly” in between “government” and “exists,” and you have a true statement.

Government exists to institutionalize the power and wealth of the ruling class. It is a protection racket on the grandest scale.

Please wise up.

“reforming the U.S. prison system”

HOPELESS. J. Edgar Hoover said, ““The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.”

In the case of the U.S. prison system, the conspiracy is easily believed — it consists very publicly of legislators and judges of all levels of government, state-licensed attorneys, unionized law enforcement officers, unionized prison guards, and favored corporations who are granted government contracts to build and supply prisons.

Jim Webb is going to “reform” this system. Good fucking luck. I’ll be he gets to define his level of success too. And if it’s abject failure, well, he’s always got his good intentions to rest on. Motherfucker.

Reform changes nothing. Abolition is change.

Webb is a statist like any other. They are all power-hungry by the definition of their actions.

I’ve been practicing criminal defense law for 6 years now, and the only time I’ve ever seen someone spend any time incarcerated was a single case of a guy who was on probation for distribution violate his probation twice. Wait, I take that back, there was a kid who was charged with felony distribution and was offered probation, but we negotiated it to a misdemeanor plea but with 30 days in jail.

I can pretty much guarantee a client that if they are charged with distribution of marijuana that they won’t see a day in jail unless they have some serious criminal history, or they violate probation.

As for the feds, they won’t even touch marijuana cases. Its not worth it to them. The federal sentencing guidelines (http://www.ussc.gov/guidelin.htm) require either a serious criminal history or a staggering amount of marijuana (100 pounds sounds about right) to trigger any incarceration. Round here, the feds don’t want em if its not crack or meth; anything else doesn’t trigger enough time in prison for them to bother, so they leave it to the state level prosecutors.

Thats just my experience. I’m staunchly opposed to the drug war at all levels and would favor ending prohibition 100%. But I’ll be the first to point out that marijuana possession or distribution will (at least round here and at the federal level) not merit any jail time barring some significant contributing factors.

Absolutely! Good for you, Sen. Webb. There is no inherent contradiction between supporting fairly aggressive, smart law enforcement tactics (decoy operations, crime suppression stakeouts, “bait car operations,” monitoring of career criminals, fugitive apprehension squads, etc) as I do, and pointing out aspects of the system (the war on drugs/vice, police militarization, a narrow-minded focus on incarceration over community based alternatives, such as restitution) that don’t work, damage our civil liberties, and call into question the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. The “tough on crime” movement is a sham and I thank Mr. Webb for calling bullshit.

http://blog.norml.org/2008/09/15/872721-marijuana-arrests-in-2007-up-52-from-2006/

There’s a significant segment of the mainstream criminal justice theorists that outright reject the idea that deterrence is a legitimate goal (in and of itself) of the criminal justice system. At its worst, deterrence theory is rank consequentialism. Taken to its logical extreme, you can justify punishment of an innocent person provided the deterrent effect to others is significant enough. On a more pragmatic level, it can be used to give legitimately “guilty” people disproportionately harsh sentences. Presumably, if imprisonment is justified at all, it’s justified entirely by (and only to the extent of), the crime actually committed. To add an additional period of imprisonment for the purpose of deterrence is to overpunish.

On a less mainstream note, there are some, notably (but not at all exclusively) Randy Barnett, that favor collapsing the crime-tort distinction. On this view, the only legitimate “crimes” are those which involve violations of the personal rights of others, and which are more accurately characterized as torts now. Usually bundled with this idea is the idea that punishment, the deliberate infliction of suffering on another person, is philosophically unjustifiable, and the only legitimate form of “punishment” is in fact restitution.

On the latter view, if Maddoff is guilty of actionable fraud, the legitimate course of action would be to allow his victims to obtain as much financial restitution from his property as is possible, and that’s pretty much it, as far as legitimate coercive responses go.

Madoff committed fraud on an epic scale, and no one will argue that he doesn’t deserve a great deal of time in a PMITY prison.

Brandon, I’m sure you were using hyperbole to emphasize your point, but I certainly hope that any prison reform includes some effort to prevent prisoners from being “pounded in the ass.” That this aspect of prison life has somehow become a celebrated part of our popular culture represents, to me at least, a fundamental problem in the way we address the penalties of criminal activity and the state’s role therein. You could argue that some criminals certainly deserve such treatment for their crimes (at least in terms of vengeance), but the fact that rape/torture has become the de facto treatment as dictated by the state, which takes very little pains to prevent it, is a travesty of an already deeply broken “justice” system.

It’s far more than enough that the state can strip you of your property, your freedom, your future employability, your family’s security, etc. To say that state-sponsored rape should be part of the state’s purview and, even worse, to laud that fact as a “feature” of the system is utterly base and vile.

Are you serious? Madoff is worse than a serial killer? WTF is wrong with you! He certainly committed an epic crime of fraud, but holy shit dude! Would you really weigh the theft of billions as worse than one sadistic murder, as if you can really put a price on anyone’s life? I hope you don’t really believe that and that it was just an ill thought out statement.

Hell yeah! And if you sell someone a car and they wreck it into a school bus full of nuns, you should totally be liable for the actions of another person, too.

Oh, wait, no, that’s utter bullshit. Sorry, I just got caught up in the moment.

MikeT: I’m not sure simply imprisoning Madoff is the best use of his skills. Clearly, at the very least, he’s got a head for money. It might make a lot more sense to have him work at something, (under stringent supervision, obviously) at, say, a 75% “tax” rate (so he still has some incentive to do well) with the proceeds going to reimburse his victims.

Restitution would seem to be a more logical goal than simple punishment, and Madoff is likely to be able to better compensate his victims doing something productive in the real world for 20 years, than spending 20 years making license plates.

Yes, obviously, there are holes in this plan large enough to drive a supertanker through, (where’s he going to get seed capital, for one) butI think the idea potentially has merit.

But the movement is alarming to drug enforcement advocates. Tom Riley, spokesman for the Office of National Drug Policy Initiatives, said it has become an “urban myth” that the nation imprisons vast numbers of low-level drug offenders.

People are often surprised to learn that less than one-half of 1 percent of all inmates are in for marijuana possession, he said. And those offenders were caught holding, on average, 100 pounds.

Madoff deserves to be thrown in jail. The kid caught with a joint doesn’t.

Speaking of primarily imprisoning violent criminals, I know a lot of people here think that only violent criminals should ever serve jail time. i certainly agre when it comes to things like drugs, but I wanted to ask what people thought of the Madoff situation and if you can properly punsih someone like that WITHOUT making them serve jail time.

Realistically, someone like Madoff is worse than a serial killer. If you were to weigh the amount of damage he did to his victims in light of how many victims he had, it would come out to far more than even a Manson, Dahmer, Son of Sam or BTK Killer sort of guy. Logically, subjecting such a white collar criminal to the same sanctions as a violent criminal is entirely justified. Even life imprisonment or execution would be justified for someone like Madoff.