{"id":11,"date":"2013-03-25T12:29:25","date_gmt":"2013-03-25T16:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/prison-gang-violence.html"},"modified":"2013-03-25T12:29:25","modified_gmt":"2013-03-25T16:29:25","slug":"prison-gang-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/prison-gang-violence.html","title":{"rendered":"Prison gang violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nThis is what eventually happens in\n\na country with 5% of the world’s population yet 25% of the world’s\nprisoners<\/a>,\nin a state that has\n1 in 13 adults<\/a> in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole): prison violence the prisons can’t deal with,\npossibly including\n\nthe mysterious violence at Valdosta State Prison<\/a>.\nWhen we stop locking up so many people by ending the war on drugs,\nwe’ll have plenty of money to adequately secure the few remaining\nreal violent offenders.\n<\/p>\n

\nRhonda Cook wrote for the AJC Saturday,\n\nGang violence in prison is increasingly deadly<\/a>,\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\n

\nIn a little more than 10 months, 12 inmates and a guard have been\nstabbed to death in Georgia prisons, a dramatic uptick in violence\nthat law enforcement officials and human rights advocates agree\npoints to increased gang activity.\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe cannot remember a time like this when we were getting this\nvolume and severity of violence,\u201d said Sara Totonchi,\nexecutive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which\nmonitors prison violence.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nPeople who go into such prisons, if they aren’t already violent,\nare likely to be taught to be violent, and some just don’t come back out.\nYet those that do get out can be bad for the rest of us:\n<\/p>\n\n\n

\n

\nAdded Sarah Geraghty, an attorney at the Southern Center, \u201cThe\nviolence reaches outside prison walls to the families of\ncorrectional officers who are injured, and to the taxpayers who pay\nhundreds of thousands of dollars in medical care for injured\nprisoners. Moreover, most prisoners will be released to live among\nus some day, and we are all less safe in a society that tolerates\nthis level of trauma and violence in its prisons.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nAnd \nfurther militarization of police<\/a> outside of prisons is not the\nanswer to that problem.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe AJC story focuses on the specific issue of violence in prisons:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\n\u201cIt is important to note that the offender population is\nbecoming increasingly violent and the department remains committed\nto ensuring the safety of the public, our staff and, to the extent\npossible, the safety of our inmates from each other,\u201d DOC said\nin the email.\n<\/p>\n

\nSara Geraghty, an attorney with the Southern Center, said gangs fill\n\u201ca security vacuum.\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201cCell doors (at Hays State Prison) have been left broken, some\nfor more than a year,\u201d she said. \u201cPrisoners routinely\nslept in cells to which they were not assigned. Prisoners were able\nto move undetected across the prison campus to areas in which they\nare not authorized to be. Stabbings and beatings have been routine.\nGang leaders exercise control over housing assignments and were\npermitted to expel prisoners they no longer wanted in their\ndorms.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nGeorgia’s prison population is actually \nplummetting<\/a> because of costs,\n\n<\/a>\nEven Gov. Nathan Deal says\n\nthe state needs to rethink locking up nonviolent offenders<\/a>.\nEven Grover Norquist is recommending\n\nrehabilitation and drug treatment instead<\/a>.\nThe majority of the American people are for\n\nlegalization of marijuana<\/a>\nand that’s not\n\njust for Portugal anymore<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\nIn November\n\nColorado and Washington state became the first governments in the world<\/a>\nto fully legalize marijuana use,\nwhile then-president of Mexico Felipe Calder\u00f3n\nsaid it was impossible to end the drug trade and called on the U.S.\nto reduce the flow of drug money toward Mexico, a feat that can\nonly be accomplished by ending the war on drugs, thus\n\ntaking away the source of money for drug gangs<\/a>.\n\n<\/a>\n\nProhibition didn’t work for alcohol in the 1920s,\nand it doesn’t work now for other drugs.<\/a>\nIt’s well past time to Legalize, tax, and regulate them,\njust like tobacco and alcohol,\nEnd the war on drugs and that will stop locking up non-violent drug\noffenders, plus it will take away most of the drug-related crimes,\nfreeing up the vast majority of prison cells, leaving plenty of\nmoney to adequately secure the real violent offenders.\n<\/p>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is what eventually happens in a country with 5% of the world’s population yet 25% of the world’s prisoners, in a state that has 1 in 13 adults in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole): prison violence the prisons can’t deal with, possibly including the mysterious violence at Valdosta State Prison. When […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,70,71,8,2,72,20,21,22,73,74,3],"tags":[77,8704,8728,78,8729,8701,8699,84,8730,8702,8710,80,12,7,81,83,8711,8712,75,79,8731,8732,8700,6,76,82],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-ethics","category-gdoc","category-georgia","category-government","category-incarceration","category-law","category-planning","category-politics","category-safety","category-security","category-transparency","tag-drugs","tag-economy","tag-ethics","tag-gangs","tag-gdoc","tag-georgia","tag-government","tag-guerra-de-las-drogas","tag-incarceration","tag-lake","tag-law","tag-leap","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-marijuana","tag-no-mas","tag-planning","tag-politics","tag-prison","tag-prohibition","tag-safety","tag-security","tag-transparency","tag-valdosta","tag-violence","tag-war-on-drugs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}