On the subject of prison reform in the age of Obama, I came across this: Senator Webb's Act of Strength

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Now Senator Webb is poised to establish a commission with a broad mandate to examine issues like drug treatment, effective parole policy, racial injustice, education for inmates, reentry programs--the myriad of issues intertwined in wasteful, ineffective criminal justice policies. Look for him to lay out that mandate with specificity in the coming weeks, and make an aggressive push to bring this issue to the forefront in both Congress and the media, much as he was able to do with the GI Bill.

Webb sent me an e-mail saying, "I feel very strongly about the need to put the right people behind bars. But we're locking up the wrong people too often all across our country. Mental illness isn't a crime. Addiction isn't a crime. We need to make sharp distinctions between violent offenders and people who are incarcerated for non-violent crimes, drug abuse and mental illness. We must raise public awareness about the need for criminal justice reform and find viable solutions. My staff and I are finalizing proposed legislation that could be introduced in the next two weeks to establish a national commission that will take a comprehensive look at where our criminal justice system is broken and how we can fix it."

While it's critical that Senator Webb is raising these issues at the national level where they have received so little attention, Marc Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project, points out that 90 percent of the US prison population is incarcerated in state prisons and only 10 percent in federal prisons. Mauer said there is a growing awareness at the state level that our drug and sentencing policies have "gotten out of hand" and that the fiscal crisis presents an opportunity to do something about it.

"The fiscal crisis gives governors and legislative leaders the opening to do what many of them have known should be done for some time, but [they] didn't have a political comfort level to do it," Mauer said. "Now they can talk about issues like excessive sentences for drug offenders, and too many people being sent back to prison for technical violations of parole."
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Quote:Original post by King of Men
My words were not sufficiently exact. At the moment the prison's incentive is to put people in whether they are innocent or guilty. Under the payments for rehabilitating, the incentive is to put innocents in and keep the guilty out, on the theory that it's much easier to 'rehabilitate' someone who wasn't a criminal in the first place, and also easier to rehabilitate people if you don't put them in small rooms with a lot of dang thieves and murderers. So their incentive to put innocent people in remains the same, but their incentive to put guilty people in drops like a rock. That's the difference.

Thanks for clarifying. This viewpoint makes more sense to me. But it seems like it would be insanely difficult for a prison to influence the TYPE of people that go to jail. How do you avoid putting guilty people in jail? Do you bribe the police and prevent them from arresting people in the first place? Do you bribe the prosecutor to drop cases?

Worst case, if they keep putting away innocent people then the rate that the average person re-offends would drop again to take this new incentive into account. Unless they spent time preventing re-offenders from going to jail again, giving them a 'get out of jail free' card. Which would probably involve conspiracy-level efforts to achieve.

I'm not saying there's not a bucket-load of potential issues with implementing this. As far as I know this was never really tried... anywhere, ever. In any case I doubt the public would go for it. If the public wanted intelligently run prisons I'm sure they'd exist already.

If the public wanted intelligently run prisons I'm sure they'd exist already.

Believe it or not but American prisons were once the model of the world. Other nations actually looked to the United States for pointers on how to intelligently run prisons. And it all came about through public agitation. Here's one account: Prison Reform in Pennsylvania. That was back when America's leading Christians actually took the challenge of Christianity seriously: "I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'" -- Matthew 25