Riverside on $142 a Day

I see the good people of Riverside County are going to charge you for the privilege of spending time in their stony lonesome, to the tune of $142 a day.   Huffpost puts it in perspective  with some  insightful comments about how much it costs you to get good help down at the jailhouse any more.  Still in  a sense, I'm surprised that anybody treats this story as news.  I believe it is the Chinese, after all, who will follow up on your execution by sending the family an invoice for the cost of the bullet.

The usual mantra at this point is "privatization." I say the idea has promise but perhaps not in the usual manner.  That is, usually we talk about auctioning off the whole prison system.  But there may be an easy way: from Orbitz I see that the Loma Linda Inn just up the road is offering rooms as low as $66 a day, although there is a nonrefundable $35 pet fee.  But why stop there?  Here's a  nice golf resort at Cathedral City for $135 a day which could leave you seven a day left over for food.

But I still think our imagination is too cramped.  That same $135 will get you the Principessa Isabella, a four-star on Via Sardegna in Rome, including breakfast.  Actually, I think that price buys you a double. Sheriff, are you listening?

Social Notes from All Over: Voyevodsk Prison

In Voyevodsk Prison are kept those convicts chained to wheelbarrows. There are in all eight of them here. They live in common cells together with other prisoners and spend their time in complete idleness. At least, in the 'Register of distribution of convict-exiles to varieties of labour', those chained to wheelbarrows are numbered among the non-workers. Each of them is shackled in hand and foot irons; from the middle of the hand irons stretches a long chain three or four arshins long in length which is fastened to the bottom of a small wheelbarrow. The chains and barrow hamper the prisoners, he tries to make as few movements as possible, and this undoubtedly has an effect on his musculature. The hands become so highly accustomed to every movement, even the very slightest,being accompanied by a sensation of heaviness, that even after the prisoner has been separated from the barrow and hand irons, he still feels awkwardness in his arms for a long time afterwaards, asnd without any necessity makes strong and abrupt movements; when,for instance, he grabs hold of a cup, he slops the tea all over the place as if he is suffering from chorea minor. Art night, whilst asleep, the prisoner keeps the barrow underneath the bed-board, and so that this should be more comfortable and easier to do, he is usually placed on the edge of the common board.

All eight men are recidivists who each have already been sentenced several times in their lives. One of them, an old man of sixty, was chained for trying to escape, or as he himself put it, "for stupidity". He was obviously suffering from consumption, and the former Prison Governor had ordered him, out of pity, to be placed a little nearer the stove.

--Anton Chekhov, Sakhalin Island 135 (Oneworld Classics ed. 2007

Children Serving Life Without Parole

Land of the Free, Redux:

Dozens of Children in US Face Life in U.S. Prisons

Link

The U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for minors in 2005 but 19 states permit "life-means-life" sentences for those under 18, according to a study by the Equal Justice Initiative

In all, 2,225 people are sentenced to die in U.S. prisons for crimes they committed as minors and 73 of them were aged 13 and 14 at the time of the crime, according to the group, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama.

Elsewhere in the world, life sentences with no chance of parole are rare for underage offenders. Human Rights Watch estimates that only 12 people outside the United States face such sentences.

…Not all those serving life-means-life sentences for crimes committed as minors are convicted killers.

Antonio Nunez was convicted of multiple counts of attempted murder and also aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to life without parole for his role in a kidnap, police chase and shootout in April, 2001, in which nobody was injured.

Nunez, aged 14 at the time of the crime, grew up in a part of Los Angeles where gang activity was common. In 2000, he was wounded and his brother killed in a gang-related shooting.

Land of the Free Redux

Well, now here’s a surprise: one in 100 U.S.adults is now behind bars, per the New York Times.(link). Only one in 355 white women (35 to 39) but one in nine black men (20-34).

Okay, I jest. But this is a surprise, at least to me: incarceration rates are going down in 14 states, including the largest—Texas, California and New York. Is there some kind of policy shift here or is it just systemic bloat—unless we start treating them like cargo, there simply isn’t room enough?

Here are some other places where the prison population is going down: New Mexivco, Oklahoma, Kansas, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Michigan, New York and the leader, Montana, with an ’06-’07 drop of 3.9 percent. The biggest increases: Kentucky with 12 percent (whoo, must have been a stiff gubernatorial race back there); New Hampshire; Iowa. If you can see a general pattern there, tell me about it; certainly not obvious to me.