Lindsay Lohan illuminates a depressing reality about US the prison system

Miscellaneous General
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So unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 6 years, you know Lindsay Lohan has been having some troubles. Basically she does something against the law — be it drugs, crashing cars into things, stealing expensive stuff, or being on probation for all of those things and doing them again — and ends up going to court, getting a sentence, and then never serving it, getting more probation, failing more probation requirements, and then ending up back in court again…basically every 5 weeks.

Not kidding. As of May of this year she had been to court 10 times within the previous 12 months…and I haven’t run the numbers but I believe that trend has continued. (For a full timeline of this up to that point, see here. Check the Lindsay Lohan tag at the bottom to follow up with all the updates since then.)

From this:

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To this:

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So the saga continues, as two weeks ago Judge Stephanie Sautner ruled that Lohan has violated her probation (again) and told her she must complete at least 32 hours at the LA county morgue before her next hearing two weeks later. If found guilty (which she is), Lindsay could get as much as 18 months in jail. But of course since everyone knows that won’t happen, the L.A. County Sheriff had no problem telling Good Day LA that, despite the over crowding issues that has led to her early release every time in the past, he will find room in his jail for next time and he thinks she should go in for at least 60 days.

(Did you catch that? She’s committed so many crimes at this point it’s hard to sort them all out and even know what this one is for…and she’s been released every time because of overcrowding. And on top of that, the Sheriff thinks 60 days is the brutal punishment she deserves. Again, check out that timeline.)

So yesterday it was reported that the Los Angeles City Attorney and the Los Angeles County District Attorney would ask the judge to formally revoke Lohan’s probation and send her to jail for at least 90 days.

Today marked the end of those two weeks and she was back in a court room for her hearing. Wanna guess what happened?

Lindsay Lohan was sentenced to 30 days in jail today after admitting to violating her probation, but that will get knocked down to 6 days of actual jail time due to overcrowding. After that she must adhere to a strict timeline for completing her community service (all of which must be served in the county morgue now) or she will receive an additional 270 days in jail.

Oh but wait…not a few hours later we find out:

Despite all the tough talk and stern looks from the judge today when she sentenced Lindsay Lohan to 30 days in jail, the apparent reality is that she will, once again, be released almost immediately and not spend even one day in jail because of overcrowding.

And here’s the money part:

Two Sheriff’s Dept. officials tell us … if someone receives a misdemeanor sentence of 90 days or less, they are routinely processed in and then released. As one of the officials put it, “She’ll be out without even having to change her clothes.”

The L.A. jails are so crowded that you can actually get a 90 day sentence and be released immediately. If this is not complete proof of a total failure of the system, I’m not sure what is.

More on this topic:

The American Prison State

Prison Nation

Decriminalize the Average Man

The Police State Abolishes the Trial

Why Legalize Now?

The Economics of Prohibition

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If this is not complete proof of a total failure of the system, I’m not sure what is.

We obviously need more funding.

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I’ve been thinking about this and related issues a lot lately.

I was intrigued by this story out of Germany earlier this month: German police find explosive devices on Berlin railway. Now, I don’t know if the people who did this were Muslim extremists but it doesn’t look like it to me. And then I thought for a minute about the amount of free time and disposable money a person has to have to put together such devices and plant them all over the place and I thought about what a soulless sort of person you’d have to be in order to wish harm onto random strangers you’ve never met. And it struck me that public subsidy would be a major help in this.

No, I’m not saying that whoever did this is on welfare. I’m saying something slightly more politically incorrect: a long history of public welfare must tend to amplify the antisocial elements in society that would otherwise have been weeded out by natural ostracism (severely anti-social people generally have a hard time keeping down a job). Instead of dying in a fistfight over a sandwich scrounged from a dumpster, these people go on to not only survive but have children. Iterate that over a few generations and you have something resembling a social problem.

This is basically an application of Bastiat’s principle of the unseen. Sure, when you transfer wealth from the wealthy to the poor, the seen effects are that the poor get fed and the wealthy take a small dent in their capital appreciation. But the unseen is that many of those poor who were anti-social and would have been otherwise unable to reproduce have just been granted a new lease on the evolutionary tree and I think that’s problematic. We tend to forget that poor people are usually poor for a reason and those with more money (I’m not talking about the political parasite-class) tend to have more money for a reason. The sloth is constantly mooching off others and has to tolerate squalid conditions because he’s a sloth. The industrious businessman can afford an annual trip to Maui with his family because he works his ass off.

Sociopathy is a real condition with which some people are apparently born or maybe acquired during early development or a combination of both. Scientists have done studies where they show an array of photos to a person, ranging from the nice and pleasant to the grotesque and violent, while simultaneously taking fMRI images of the brain. A certain portion of the brain tends to “light up” when a person is experiencing the feeling of deep revulsion and disgust. Shown a range of images, the ordinary person’s “revulsion center” lights up when shown photographs of violent and grotesque acts. People in prison convicted of violent crimes are far less likely to have this region light up and in those for whom it doesn’t light up, it tends not to light up at all. Apparently, there’s some gene or some developmental switch that never got flipped in these people and they don’t experience the same visceral feeling of revulsion at the depiction of gore and violence that the ordinary person does. This explains why a very small percentage of people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of interpersonal violence, whether in the battlefield, on the beat, or on the streets.

Welfare makes the woman’s choice of who she will choose to father a child less connected to that father’s ability or willingness to contribute to raising the child. Sociopaths, in particular, are less likely to be able to contribute to raising a child by virtue of the economic consequences of their anti-social behavior (you can’t hold down a job when you keep pulling a knife on the boss whenever he tells you something you don’t like, or spit in your customers’ food, and so on). But this is less important to a woman when choosing a father for her child in a society where welfare support is readily available. I believe this goes a long way to explain the bizarre phenomenon of women marrying convicted murderers while they’re still finishing out their sentence, and so on.

Disconnecting behavior from its natural consequences is ludicrous but our society is filled with such disconnections.

Clayton -

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I have often heard the average man in any Western country, the kind considered a “law abiding citizen”, unwillingly breaks at least three laws each day. And I am not talking about driving over the speed limit. In such a situation is pretty logic jails are bursting at the seams. To solve jail crowding issues Portugal recently depenalized most cannabis-related crimes: it doesn’t mean pot is legal, but simply that people won’t be persecuted for owning up to a certain amount of drug. This is as close as Portugal could go to “legalisation” without incurring in the ires of the US holy crusaders and their European cronies, the same people that keep threatening the peace-loving Swiss and Dutch for legally smoking a fat one and who turned Mexico into a veritable hellhole.

Of course the solution to jail overcrowding is obvious to people with more than seven brain cells still functioning: legalize drugs. If I remember correctly most inmates in the US and European jails are there for non-violent drug related crimes, mostly possession with the intent of sale. What defeated Al Capone and his fellow mobsters was not the FBI, but the abolition of the Prohibition. Irish and Italian “booze barons” were replaced by friendly mom and pop’s liquor stores and the State could also fatten itself by collecting taxes on firewater. It was a win-win situation.

But we may argue the problem lies in what I call the anti-drug industry. It is often said the Colombian, Bolivian and Mexican druglords move billions each year, but how much money is the anti-drug industry worth? Just look at all the people it employs: police officers, judges, lawyers, wardens, probation officers, mandatory rehab counselors… it dwarfs even the infamous Santa Marta and Los Zetas drug cartels combined.

Yet in the end the biggest problem may lay in what Mises called “the tyranny of public opinion”. The public opinion is trained like Pavlov’s dog to salivate when the words “war on drugs” are uttered. The only solution is more of the same: thougher and longer sentences, more policemen, more air surveillance. People don’t even pause for a second and think that, despite spending far more money on the “war against drugs” than two decades ago drugs are not only more plentiful but also considerably cheaper. I live in an area nicknamed “cocaine country”, not because people grow or refine the thing but because of the enormous consumption: cocaine was once the “rich man’s drug”, meaning it was impossibly priced. Now it’s as cheap (if not cheaper) than hashish, which used to be the drug of choice of penniless students and working class people. Yet there isn’t a day when there isn’t a drug raid, with drug confiscated and people dragged away in chains. People get thrown in the slammer for just owning a few cannabis plants, barely enough for a very moderate personal consumption. Helicopters equipped with state of the art IR sensors fly overhead, looking for indoor greenhouses (I may be next, sa I have an indoor greenhouse for warmth-loving perennials like Verbena ) . Yet they are achieving nothing.

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Just came across this and had to add.

30 Signs That The United States Of America Is Being Turned Into A Giant Prison

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Lindsay Lohan is playing the system. I can only give a bit of respect, but then I realize it’s only because she has the money and celebrities don’t get jail. Jails and prisons over crowded? I doubt they say that to some low time drug dealer.

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I don’t think anyone can deny that as far as the court system goes, in L.A., laws don’t apply to celebrities. But again: Two Sheriff’s Dept. officials tell us … if someone receives a misdemeanor sentence of 90 days or less, they are routinely processed in and then released.

Now they may be making that up to cover their ass and not make their unequal application of the law not so overt, but I’m not completely sure. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised it actually were the routine case.

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A quick search shows that it’s pretty common. A July 2011 story shows that Californians rather have criminals released early than pay more into the prison system.

The ailing economy far outweighs crime as the top concern for most people today, the pollsters said. That, along with the court order, could help explain voters’ new receptivity to changes long sought by prisoner-rights advocates:

— More than 60% of respondents, including majorities among Democrats, Republicans and those who declined to state a party preference, said they would support reducing life sentences for third strike offenders convicted of property crimes such as burglary, auto theft and shoplifting.

— Nearly 70% said they would sanction the early release of some low-level offenders whose crimes did not involve violence.

— About 80% said they approve of keeping low-level, nonviolent offenders in county custody — including jails, home detention or parole — instead of sending them to state prisons. The same percentage favors paroling inmates who are paralyzed, in comas or so debilitated by advanced disease that they no longer pose a threat to public safety.

The pollsters noted that people don’t generally favor the release of convicted criminals. But “when it comes to prisons,” said Linda DiVall of American Viewpoint, “voters are looking for solutions that don’t raise taxes or take money from other priorities like education.”

We can see that there is some over crowding issues.

A 2008 article on a similar note talks about the Ministry of Justice releasing 36,661 prisoners due to overcrowding.

A total of 2,486 prisoners were released early in August, among them a sex offender, 60 robbers, more than 200 burglars and 100 people convicted of drugs offences, the ministry said. The sex offender had been sentenced to less than a year and his crime was not serious enough to require him to sign the sex offenders’ register.

Of those released early last month, 42 were sent back to jail after committing further crimes. Of the total number released, more than 100 are on the run after being ordered back to prison to complete their sentences.

To follow up that story from a 2009 article.

More than 50,000 criminals have been released from prison early under a Government scheme aimed at reducing overcrowding, Ministry of Justice figures revealed today.

Since June 2007, 52,117 prisoners have been let out up to 18 days before the halfway point of their sentence. The figure includes more than 10,000 violent offenders.

Criminals getting released early, but I’d be happy to see that non-violent offenders would be getting off for something that’s not really a crime (I wonder how many of those in jail were for marijuana or other minor charges and nothing more on their record).

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Well there ya go. Good searchin. (especially since it was done in the face of being proven wrong )