How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Jessica Kent explains her experience being locked up alongside a transgender inmate with mental health issues and how the inmate was treated.



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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

Post by Budai »

Prison is a tough place, and just like your cafeteria at school is unfair to you in this Saha world, so is by even more of a magnitude, multiplied by a large threshold, prison is unfair as well. It is not always the fault of the people there, in either place, but there comes a time when one just has to take care of themselves and abide by the laws of their country. Doing one's duty as a citizen is taking care of other citizens. If someone is being treated unfairly, and a human right is abused, in any way, one must do something about it to the fullness of their own ability and safety. Such is the duty of the Bodhisattva.

To me it is very unfair how many are treated in prison. At the same time, without prison many violent offenders and worse people would roam the streets. Therefore I believe it is most important to use the Dharma in Buddhism to save others from drowning in the ocean of material existence. I have a firm belief that if someone achieves Buddhahood in prison, they should be pardoned for their crimes. However, and if someone isn't living by the standards of morality and care towards others, but commits wicked crimes, they should go to prison and stay there until it is safe for them to leave. We need prison reform, but that can only be done through Spirituality, or basic prison realities will stay the same or get worse for hundreds of years. Everyone must be given Love at all times, by everyone they meet. If we go by this basic principle, life will be saved and the threshold will return all the way back to the beginning, before craving and lust arose, and then instantly bloom into the Enlightened mind. That is my true belief about what will bring one's mind to Buddhahood: Bodhisattvic Compassion. Aum.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Brahma wrote: Sat Jan 23, 2021 12:38 pm We need prison reform, but that can only be done through Spirituality,
Maybe so, but abolishing privately-owned prisons is certainly a step in the right direction..
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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tingdzin wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 12:55 am
Brahma wrote: Sat Jan 23, 2021 12:38 pm We need prison reform, but that can only be done through Spirituality,
Maybe so, but abolishing privately-owned prisons is certainly a step in the right direction..
We need a great deal of prison reform. Prisoners in the United States are slaves. Abolishing private prisons was a pro move by President Biden. Rates of violence are 65% higher in private prisons.

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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Brahma wrote: Sat Jan 23, 2021 12:38 pm Prison is a tough place, and just like your cafeteria at school is unfair to you in this Saha world, so is by even more of a magnitude, multiplied by a large threshold, prison is unfair as well. It is not always the fault of the people there, in either place, but there comes a time when one just has to take care of themselves and abide by the laws of their country. Doing one's duty as a citizen is taking care of other citizens. If someone is being treated unfairly, and a human right is abused, in any way, one must do something about it to the fullness of their own ability and safety. Such is the duty of the Bodhisattva.

To me it is very unfair how many are treated in prison. At the same time, without prison many violent offenders and worse people would roam the streets. Therefore I believe it is most important to use the Dharma in Buddhism to save others from drowning in the ocean of material existence. I have a firm belief that if someone achieves Buddhahood in prison, they should be pardoned for their crimes. However, and if someone isn't living by the standards of morality and care towards others, but commits wicked crimes, they should go to prison and stay there until it is safe for them to leave. We need prison reform, but that can only be done through Spirituality, or basic prison realities will stay the same or get worse for hundreds of years. Everyone must be given Love at all times, by everyone they meet. If we go by this basic principle, life will be saved and the threshold will return all the way back to the beginning, before craving and lust arose, and then instantly bloom into the Enlightened mind. That is my true belief about what will bring one's mind to Buddhahood: Bodhisattvic Compassion. Aum.
We need prison reform, but that can only be done through Spirituality,
The US is an insanely carceral nation, and we could empty a *huge* portion of the prison population by simply decriminalizing the act of using drugs, and putting that money towards treatment, education, etc. This is, in different measures, what other nations with a better track record than us (read, every other first world nation) have done. That combined with better public mental health policy,( so that we do not incarcerate the mentally ill as criminals, among other things) all around would ease a huge amount of suffering. The idea that a large part of people in prison pose some serious physical danger to others is nonsense, though certainly a small portion do.

Here's some data:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/817 ... in-the-us/

Look at the number of people imprisoned for drug use in our time vs. 1980, it's shocking.

As someone who has both treated people with substance abuse issues, as well helped facilitate Dharma groups with incarcerated people with the same issues, I find this claim to be ignorant of what the US prison system is, and how it functions. People have been recommending concrete steps for reforming our broken justice and incarceration system for a long time, and much of how it would happen is no mystery at all, people in the US just don't give a crap about what happens to the bottom part of society, for the most part.

I have spent 100's of hours at this point with people both in jail and at a prison as part of job duties and volunteer work, as well as working in a therapeutic court setting...I can tell you straight up that 1) lots of people with mental illness sit in jail for a long time while the system figures out what to do with them and 2) a huge number of people end up with patterns of lifetime incarceration due to charges that are nothing more than using drugs, and 3) truthfully (to be fair to the the other side of the video) it is not that cut and dried figuring out who does and does not have significant mental health disorders, especially when drugs are involved, which they are a big chunk of the time...especially when corrections people are unqualified to understand mental health.

Anyone who thinks the way the US incarcerates people is about "keeping society safe" should educate themselves more, there is no way to hold onto that idea at all once you are actually meeting enough of these people...unless of course you are some "law and order" type not interested in there reality in the first place.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

Post by Budai »

You're right about the drug thing and for what you do I applaud you for your work. Drug addiction is a disease of addiction, not a moral failure, and even in it's most hurtful form it is a disease of addiction that needs to be treated with Spiritual Therapy of some sort. NA or AA is useful. Dharma is even more useful in the long run. And sending people to prison for being sick due to a dependency on a chemical isn't fair. The crime associated with the drug use can be a problem, but if that is solely focused on instead of the addiction aspect as a crime, the addiction is focused on as a disease of addiction that can be healed Spiritually, even by far with the Dharma, society will get better.

Of course it isn't good that there are a lot of dangerous drugs on the street, many that kill many because they are highly laced to get the user addicted quickly. It's a real danger. So it's important to keep the serious dealers of heavy drugs off of the streets, but it must be done with kindness, and also with a rehabilitory manner.

What I tend to notice though, sometimes, is that the dealers of heavy drugs are so caught up in their money and own desire to be very rich materially that they tend to commit a lot of wrongdoing, such as murder and violence, often against other drug dealers and such, so there are a lot of indescrepancies in their lives. They need the Dharma more than anyone, and they too are often addicted to hard drugs and this clouds their judgment.

So what I mean is, that people need a Spiritual, Dharmic approach towards prison and of course drug offenses fall under this kind of paradigm. If people treat drug users with compassion and keep them out of prison, to help them rebuild their lives with community programs, that would be great progress. There are already such things but they need to increase, greatly. And with regards to the flow of hard drugs into this country and the people who are arrested for them and go to prison, I would let them out within a day with the proper Spiritual counseling if they were open to it, if they decided to change their ways. Forgiveness can be the most powerful Buddhist Metta when faced with situations of such kind.

Prison is a last resort for stopping destructive behavior. One of the last resorts. And it is a very fallen last resort. We live in an age where even the restaurants we eat in are Dharmically lawless according to the Buddha's Teachings, so how much more prisons? We cannot currently shut down all of the restaurants in this country that go against the Mystic Law though, because of circumstance and worse situations that would appear, and we also cannot shut down US prisons for the similar types of reasons, it would create a level of chaos and violence. But it would be greatly okay to help the drug addicted out of prison, by the tenets of NA. Om.

And of course there are millions and more of other great things that can be done to improve the system. The important thing is to follow the Dharma wherever we go, that Way we will make the world a much better place. :namaste:
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Some of the assumptions in this thread are challenged by this think tank:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Per the site, 4/5 people are locked up for non-drug offenses, and only 9% of prisons are private, only 1% are used for commercial labor, etc.

The aggregating mind always seeks simple solutions, I suppose (including mine).
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Matt J wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 2:45 am Some of the assumptions in this thread are challenged by this think tank:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Per the site, 4/5 people are locked up for non-drug offenses, and only 9% of prisons are private, only 1% are used for commercial labor, etc.
Likely because there are so many ancillary crimes related to drug use. Nonetheless, many people enter the system due to crimes which are simply about drug use, and end facing repeated sanctions and longer sentences due simply to things like failing urine tests. So I don't know what they count something like probation violation as here.

So, even if people are in jail or prison for non-drug related crimes, such as minor thefts, etc. their incarceration career began with getting locked up for, and facing sanctions due to their drug use.
The aggregating mind always seeks simple solutions, I suppose (including mine).
The solutions are simple, the US is the only country with this rate of incarceration...its' not complicated, we criminalize being poor. I'll take a look at their stats but right off the bat, 1/5 is still 20%. that's a crapload of people dude. IIRC the one I've volunteered at is around 30%. Add to that the amount of resources communities spend making jail into a revolving door for addicts, and the cost is amazing, on many levels.

Similarly, "violent crime" is huge range of things.

At any rate, there is no dispute that since the beginning of the War on Drugs, we have massively ramped up incarceration of drug users.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Johnny Dangerous wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 3:22 am
The solutions are simple, the US is the only country with this rate of incarceration...its' not complicated, we criminalize being poor.
Just so. According to the BBC, the world's prison population is about 9 million. Of that, about 2.2M are in the US. We certainly don't have a quarter of the world's population, so something is seriously out of whack. Our prison population per capita is the highest in the world, and it's not especially close. In California, where I live, the prisons were so overcrowded that the US Supreme Court ordered them to reduce their populations to "only" 137% of capacity.

Maybe we aren't locking people up just for ticky-tack drug charges, but unless we're willing to accept that Americans are not just more criminal but VASTLY moreso than any other country in the world, we're doing something badly wrong.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Well, it’s not just poor people; our justice system is racist.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Malcolm wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 4:16 am Well, it’s not just poor people; our justice system is racist.
Yes, American racism is omnipresent, but the effects of it compound the further you go down the socioeconomic scale. If you were to do a survey of the average household income in prison, I'll bet it would bare that out. But yes, spending time at a prison/jail also makes the realities of racism in the justice system really clear, it's evident even in surveys of sentencing, etc. I don't think that's news to anyone here though.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Matt J wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 2:45 am only 1% are used for commercial labor, etc.
This video is a good response:



This also speaks to the point about the racist justice system.

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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Prison Policy Initiative wrote:Nevertheless, 4 out of 5 people in prison or jail are locked up for something other than a drug offense — either a more serious offense or an even less serious one.
So yeah, I think I'd take issue with this, and the seemingly implicit claim being made that somehow not that many people are locked up for drugs. At a minimum, on the surface it seems to be a very limited way of understanding the effect of the War on Drugs and the incarceration resulting indirectly from drug policies. They seem like a good organization but IDK, this just seems like a very misleading stat to me.

The organization I think understands this to some degree, where here they talk about some of the very things I am saying:
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/drugs.html

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2016/ ... ll_matter/

In fact, they seem to care about a lot of the same stuff I do.

I've seen enough firsthand to say "ha" emphatically to the implication that 80% of people are incarcerated for reasons unrelated to drug use. I could go into more detail here, but crimes like simple assault and DV can be zealous prosecutors going after dumb family squabbles that happen as a result of SUD or mental health issues...you get enough of these and bam, you're in like Flynn.

I haven't looked at their data sources yet, but I will give you a basic example of how people with mental illness or drug issues end up in jail (and possibly, eventually prison) or long term involvement in the justice system due to stuff they do:

Scenario 1:

1) guy does some meth

2) Guy gets arrested sleep in parking lot coming down from meth, gets charges for possession and intent to distribute or something because he had some money on him too. FYI, lots of people on drugs 'deal' in a pretty small time way.

3) Guy gets probation, is in work release or something, is good for 6 months, fails a UA, gets scared of going back and books it...get caught, now has new charges, including his evasion of justice, probation violation etc.

By this time, no matter what this guy does his record is full of drug and non-drug offenses, he's possibly in debt 1000's of dollars in court fees, depending on where he lives there might be alternative sentencing, but lots of places there's not..and the longer he's locked up, the more entrenched in the system.

Scenario 2:

1) Guy has schizophrenia and is having delusions about being the messiah

2) Guy self medicates with marijuana and alcohol, eventually crashes into something and gets arrested for DUI.

3) Guy has a hard time with probation simply because he has schizophrenia, and cannot manage it well by himself. This opens up the door to the same kind of stuff from 3) above, especially because his judgement is impaired beyond normal at times, and even when resources are available, the state does a poor job of assigning someone to help him through his justice system-related tasks and responsibilities.

3) Despite his comparative lack of judgement, guy basically gets treated like a normal DUI case and the system is (if you're lucky) set up to compel him into drug treatment, but to pretty much ignore his schizophrenia. Among other things, that means possibly putting him in jail for periods of time with no mental healthcare, causing him to de compensate and worsen his condition.

In both these scenarios (based on things I've actually seen by the way, over and over again) the issue is primarily mental health and/or drug use, and the person ends up with a rap sheet that might contain all sorts of stuff well beyond those things, and they might very well be in jail for one of those things...DV is a good example of a charge that often just means someone is poor and has substance abuse issues and impulse control issues..though certainly not always, and that's not to make light of DV at all, only to say it's another the system often handles terribly.

The people end up in debt for years and often being permanent wards of the justice system...which at best just doesn't know what to do with them, at worst out and out abuses them. The way the justice system is set up to provide a punitive response and posture to the use of drugs (rather than actually helping people with substance abuse issues) causes a huge amount of damage..whatever amount of people are "officially" incarcerated directly for possession and/or intent - which i"m assuming is what they counting with the 20% figure...which like I said, is still pretty high.

I've literally worked with people who had to go through a years worth of alternative sentencing for stealing a frigging candy bar. And I mean...that is the "good" outcome, lol, because they get to lose the charge with no jail time and it's like a kinder, gentler probation.

The state I've worked in is one of the most liberal, alternative sentencing programs, suboxone in jails recently, so I'm in a -good- place and I see this kind of stuff. I can't even imagine what a state like Arizona is like, as one example.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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I would take issue with the notion that we "criminalize being poor." Are you familiar with Bridges Out of Poverty? That is a very disempowering narrative that poor people have no choice (choice being a middle class narrative, of course) but to turn to crime. And yet, most poor people do not turn to crime, although I would wager that they are most likely to be victims of crime. If you want something that unites people in the system, it is being male. And as far as I know, it is not even close. More than 90% of prisoners are men. Shall we say there we criminalize being male?

I've noticed that people tend to reduce things to whatever their field tends to be. Domestic violence counselors tend to see everything through the lens of abuse and trauma; mental health providers via mental health; and drug court folks see everything through the lens of drugs. It is a well-known cognitive bias that we tend to give our anecdotal evidence more weight than it deserves. Focusing on any one of these to the exclusion of the others is not the way to go. There are combinations of all of these. It would be far easier if we could have a simple solution.

Having been on both sides of the issue (prosecution and defense) in multiple jurisdictions, I am fairly convinced that most people who are convicted of crimes have in fact committed crimes at the rank and file level. Nearly everyone in the system pleads guilty. I have managed to get many "not guilty" verdicts, but that is because we let the guilty person go rather than charged an innocent person (and I would often take advantage of cognitive biases in order to do that). I know this isn't a very "woke" thing to say, but it is often overlooked. Most pleas, in excess of 99% are guilty pleas. However, will I say that my anecdotal evidence is proof positive, and cannot be challenged? Definitely not, because I am aware I have my own cognitive and class biases. Now I think this skews a bit when you get to capital offenses, but that is another story.

I am also very convinced that nearly every "criminal" is in fact a good person who made a bad decision--- even the "really bad ones." Now if you want to argue that poor and minority people are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and receive a longer sentence, I would heartily agree based on the data rather than feeling. But to say we "criminalize being poor" strikes me as an appeal based on emotion.
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 3:22 am The solutions are simple, the US is the only country with this rate of incarceration...its' not complicated, we criminalize being poor. I'll take a look at their stats but right off the bat, 1/5 is still 20%. that's a crapload of people dude. IIRC the one I've volunteered at is around 30%. Add to that the amount of resources communities spend making jail into a revolving door for addicts, and the cost is amazing, on many levels.

Similarly, "violent crime" is huge range of things.

At any rate, there is no dispute that since the beginning of the War on Drugs, we have massively ramped up incarceration of drug users.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Johnny Dangerous wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 5:08 am
Prison Policy Initiative wrote:Nevertheless, 4 out of 5 people in prison or jail are locked up for something other than a drug offense — either a more serious offense or an even less serious one.
So yeah, I think I'd take issue with this,
And rightly so, a significant majority of people (I can find a stat, but not right now) in American prisons who are incarcerated for non-drug related offenses were intoxicated when the offense was committed.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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When you say intoxicated, are you including alcohol? Because JD claim was that decriminalizing drugs would empty out the prisons. In this case, AFAIK, alcohol is legal in the U.S. presuming you are over 21.

Again, I'm not saying there is no problem, my claim is there is no easy, one-trick solution.
Malcolm wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 5:12 pm And rightly so, a significant majority of people (I can find a stat, but not right now) in American prisons who are incarcerated for non-drug related offenses were intoxicated when the offense was committed.
Last edited by Matt J on Fri Jan 29, 2021 7:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Matt J wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 7:06 pm When you say intoxicated, are you including alcohol? Because JD claim was that decriminalizing drugs would empty out the prisons. In this case, AFAIK, alcohol is legal in the U.S. presuming you are over 21.
Malcolm wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 5:12 pm And rightly so, a significant majority of people (I can find a stat, but not right now) in American prisons who are incarcerated for non-drug related offenses were intoxicated when the offense was committed.
Sure, booze may be legal, but it sure is at the root of a lot of criminal behavior.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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JD's claim was:
The US is an insanely carceral nation, and we could empty a *huge* portion of the prison population by simply decriminalizing the act of using drugs, and putting that money towards treatment, education, etc.
Obviously decriminalizing alcohol won't impact the prison population.
Malcolm wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 7:08 pm Sure, booze may be legal, but it sure is at the root of a lot of criminal behavior.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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I think they said drug offenses. You're now expanding that to "reasons unrelated to drug use," and apparently, tossing alcohol into the "drug" mix.

I'm also not clear on how many people are being incarcerated as a result of DV and simple assault, which are usually misdemeanors. I would wager not very many, unless the damage is bad enough to tick it up to felony levels. And as for them not being serious offenses--- if you're suggesting that violence to one's spouse or children should not be regulated by the Government, you're certainly not going to win me over. You should go spent some time at a women's shelter and talk to victims of domestic violence.

It sounds like your position is simply to defund the criminal system. I doubt that will get any more headway than the misguided "defund the police" movement.
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 5:08 am I've seen enough firsthand to say "ha" emphatically to the implication that 80% of people are incarcerated for reasons unrelated to drug use. I could go into more detail here, but crimes like simple assault and DV can be zealous prosecutors going after dumb family squabbles that happen as a result of SUD or mental health issues...you get enough of these and bam, you're in like Flynn.

[snip]

In both these scenarios (based on things I've actually seen by the way, over and over again) the issue is primarily mental health and/or drug use, and the person ends up with a rap sheet that might contain all sorts of stuff well beyond those things, and they might very well be in jail for one of those things...DV is a good example of a charge that often just means someone is poor and has substance abuse issues and impulse control issues..though certainly not always, and that's not to make light of DV at all, only to say it's another the system often handles terribly.

The people end up in debt for years and often being permanent wards of the justice system...which at best just doesn't know what to do with them, at worst out and out abuses them. The way the justice system is set up to provide a punitive response and posture to the use of drugs (rather than actually helping people with substance abuse issues) causes a huge amount of damage..whatever amount of people are "officially" incarcerated directly for possession and/or intent - which i"m assuming is what they counting with the 20% figure...which like I said, is still pretty high.

I've literally worked with people who had to go through a years worth of alternative sentencing for stealing a frigging candy bar. And I mean...that is the "good" outcome, lol, because they get to lose the charge with no jail time and it's like a kinder, gentler probation.

The state I've worked in is one of the most liberal, alternative sentencing programs, suboxone in jails recently, so I'm in a -good- place and I see this kind of stuff. I can't even imagine what a state like Arizona is like, as one example.
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Re: How Mentally Ill Prisoners are Treated in the United States

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Matt J wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 4:11 pm I would take issue with the notion that we "criminalize being poor." Are you familiar with Bridges Out of Poverty? That is a very disempowering narrative that poor people have no choice (choice being a middle class narrative, of course) but to turn to crime. And yet, most poor people do not turn to crime, although I would wager that they are most likely to be victims of crime. If you want something that unites people in the system, it is being male. And as far as I know, it is not even close. More than 90% of prisoners are men. Shall we say there we criminalize being male?
Yes I'm familiar with bridges, it's a good program in some ways, but there is some very valid criticism of it out there too. Poor people -are- disempowered and have -some- of their agency to fix being poor removed by being poor..I don't know why that would be controversial.

Here's some examples of criticism of the model:

http://www.edchange.org/publications/Sa ... ridged.pdf
Savage Unrealities wrote:As we review Payne’s failure to address systemic classism and her reliance, instead, on a deficit approach to understanding poverty, the emerging framework reflects compassionate conservative thinking rather than equity and social justice. In a common conservative reframe, she blames poverty on what are actually outcomes of and not reasons for poverty. She says, “Poverty is caused by interrelated factors: parental employment status and earnings, family structure, and parental education” (2001, p. 12). In fact, parental employment status and education do not cause poverty. They reflect the impact of poverty (Rank, 2004). Similarly, she repeats the often-espoused claim that while people in poverty value education “in the abstract,” they don’t value it “as reality” (2001, p. 59). She identifies this attitude toward education as a component of the culture of poverty. Research refutes this claim (Rank, 2004). She also argues that people in poverty inherently distrust authority. (Her negative connotation of this distrust also reflects a conservative framework. The real equity concern today, in my opinion, is a lack of distrust for authority among students.) Misrepresentations and connotations aside, Payne provides no
Savage Unrealities: Uncovering Classism in Ruby Payne’s Framework 5authentic causal analysis; she never discusses the inequitable and hostile environments that many kids in poverty face at school and in the larger society. As a result readers are led to believe that these characteristics result from poverty and not, if they result at all, from educational and other conditions that cycle poverty
http://sites.nd.edu/poverty-cap/files/2 ... itique.pdf

https://www.socialworker.com/feature-ar ... ted-equal/



I could go out today and commit the same crimes that lots of people face years of justice system involvement for (lets say DV and possession for instance) and I would get a comparative slap on the wrist because I have a little money these days and I'm white. For that matter, I could, in various ways, pretty much pay my way out of my legal problems in a variety of ways that poor people cannot. Beyond that, as you admit later on, I'd likely face more lenient sentencing just due to my color, at the least.
I've noticed that people tend to reduce things to whatever their field tends to be. Domestic violence counselors tend to see everything through the lens of abuse and trauma; mental health providers via mental health; and drug court folks see everything through the lens of drugs. It is a well-known cognitive bias that we tend to give our anecdotal evidence more weight than it deserves. Focusing on any one of these to the exclusion of the others is not the way to go. There are combinations of all of these. It would be far easier if we could have a simple solution.
I don't know why you picked my statements as a place to lecture about practicality, but I wasn't trying to say that we could just decriminalize drug use and everything would be great tomorrow. Clearly it's more complex than that. However, tracking incarceration rates with the War on Drugs at the very least shows a serious correlation between our drug policy and incarceration rate. I don't think I need to qualify my opinions by saying that I can't really fix everything by having an idea about decriminalizing drugs. I think everyone already knows that.

Secondly, I have a close loved one that has worked in the justice system for years, and generally have all kinds of exposure to it, in multiple states..both professional experience and personal. I have seen enough to have some serious conviction in the idea that many aspects of the justice system are grossly unfair the further you go down in income, especially for non-whites. I don't know how anyone who has been in involved the US justice system at a practical level could dispute that honestly. If you do, we simply have hugely divergent world views.
Having been on both sides of the issue (prosecution and defense) in multiple jurisdictions, I am fairly convinced that most people who are convicted of crimes have in fact committed crimes at the rank and file level. Nearly everyone in the system pleads guilty. I have managed to get many "not guilty" verdicts, but that is because we let the guilty person go rather than charged an innocent person (and I would often take advantage of cognitive biases in order to do that). I know this isn't a very "woke" thing to say, but it is often overlooked. Most pleas, in excess of 99% are guilty pleas. However, will I say that my anecdotal evidence is proof positive, and cannot be challenged? Definitely not, because I am aware I have my own cognitive and class biases. Now I think this skews a bit when you get to capital offenses, but that is another story.
I didn't say the incarcerated population was innocent or anything, in fact, I never broached that subject at all. I've read some ugly stuff on police reports and been around some people who I think actually -should- be in prison too, so I don't think that somehow everyone is guiltless. I talked about how people become semi-permanently indebted to and involved with the justice system in a "revolving door" manner based on some charges like DV, simple assault etc. combined with a substance abuse problem. That doesn't mean they aren't guilty of the things they are charged with, it means that the way the justice system handles them often does nothing to solve the problems that brought them there.
I am also very convinced that nearly every "criminal" is in fact a good person who made a bad decision--- even the "really bad ones." Now if you want to argue that poor and minority people are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and receive a longer sentence, I would heartily agree based on the data rather than feeling. But to say we "criminalize being poor" strikes me as an appeal based on emotion.
Honestly, if you've worked in the justice system to that degree, I'm amazed you would want to dispute that at all. It sounds like you don't though, and just object to how I'm saying it? Sorry my words don't meet your standards.

Someone can just walk into a prison or a courtroom and examine the demographics to see that in some sense we criminalize being poor (poor and dark especially), we could go into court fees and financial obligations and all too (something which I know people are working on, but which is a real problem). So I don't really get why you think something self-evident is so hyperbolic.

I'm getting the impression that you can't accept the way I talk about these things, so perhaps we can just call it good.
Meditate upon Bodhicitta when afflicted by disease

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when sad

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when suffering occurs

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when you are scared

-Khunu Lama
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