Consider raising taxes. On the surface, doesn’t it make sense that if you raise taxes, you rake in more cash? Sure. But what happens when you think the problem though? You find that raising taxes causes people to change their behavior and not do the thing that is being taxed, ergo no tax revenue.

Similarly, if you lock someone up in prison when the commit crimes, that means that the rest of society doesn’t have to deal with them, ergo the problem is solved. But when the issue is thought through like you have done so clearly here, we see that is not the case.

The first two areas to consider are work good time and behavior good time. I have been in systems where your work accounted for good time and was a incentive to work. Missed work was missed good time as well, as missed work is not being paid.

Behavior good time a a system of rewarded behavior modification, which the greatest benefactor is the institution, not the inmate.

But under the current system, work good time is not true pay because if you violate in most cases you owe the time due on your sentence which is not reduced by either your good time or your release time. (I realize different states have different codes)

I am all for having the option to serve your time and getting out from under the system the day you leave. In many ways the current system actually manipulates the sentence and extends it because if I get a 3-7 today, serve three and have four, am out three , the board can send me back in some venues for the owed time. In other words the sentence does not expire seven years from the date it was imposed.

I saw something different, having a violent offense. I saw many violent criminals come and go and the drug offenders there for a disproportionately longer period. Ok for the cowboys, but many times it was just the runners and the do boys pulling more time than armed offenses.

I’m in a bit of a different situation, but with some similarities. I live in rural Korea, and I only see one person a day who speaks any English, and it’s broken, at that. If I’m lucky, I run into one of the other foreigners once a week, on the street, but other than that, my life is very surreal. I’m virtually silent, as I can probably speak no more than a dozen words of Korean, it’s almost impossible to make anything resembling western food, as the local grocery store is smaller than a Walgreens and doesn’t even stock flour, and I can’t even understand anything when I turn on the TV.

Once in awhile, though, I have evenings where things *almost* feel normal, and I’m able to forget my situation for a moment. Sometimes I find fresh lettuce and can make a salad and some chicken breast and have a meal that is something resembling something I would have back in the states, I break into my box of western goodies that charitable friends have sent me or that I have gotten in one of the two black market stores in the country (that I know of, anyway) and have some cookies, and I stick on some pirated US television on my computer. If my boyfriend were next to me on the couch (instead of waving from a webcam), I might be able to actually forget about where I am.

At times, I feel like a bit of a non-entity. The rest of the world moves around me, while I stand mostly still. When I get back to the states, my friends will have progressed in their lives, whereas I will simply be picking up exactly where I left off, almost as if for this year, I ceased to exist.

Sorry for rambling, but this entry (as well as some of your other writing) resonated with me a bit.

I stumbled pretty randomly on your blog, and you seem to have interesting things to say. My boyfriend is in graduate school in criminal justice, and for awhile he was specializing in prison reform, though he had to stop that specialization, as he found it too depressing – like beating your head against a brick wall, he said.