So sorry folks ... here is the proper link to the comment. 

http://www.laitman.com/2008/03/whos-the-judge/

My own take on Laitman is that he is describing what I prefer to call “self-indulgent infantilism” and write about from time to time on my own blog:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/06/learnin g-to-be-stupid.html

My primary interest is in how the world in which we live seems to be holding us down in this state.  Needless to say, I think that our excessive dependence on technology has a lot to do with the problem!

America has now hit a record but statistics around the globe indicate that this is not only an American problem.  However we make up the ratios, the figures are alarming and indicative of society’s rapid degradation.  Our value systems and personal life experience lead us to support incarceration or death penalties or argue for more humane and sustainable approaches to the rehabilitation of offenders.  Recidivism rates clearly indicate the inability of correctional service to provide any real correction.  Even the more creative options suggested by transformation specialists, deal only with the symptoms of a fundamental problem in society.

Commenting on the initial report, Michael Laitman (http://www.laitman.com) explains that human ego has evolved to such a point of excessive reception that people disregard the rules of the society in order to satisfy the ego.  Ego resides in all of us whether we have been caught or not.  As this ego evolves more and more, we will see increasing disregard for the law resulting in further increase the prison population.  This in turn will increase the frustration we have in the current tension: “the more we incarcerate, the higher the expenses for society while the less we imprison, the higher the crime.”

Currently, we are still able to choose between budget and safety.  However, we will in time be forced to adjust the way we relate to others and the environment so that our society, our laws, our civil codes and our values will change to reflect a paradigm whereby we exit the egoistic nature - which is the root cause of the problems we face.

INTERESTING........!

Hi.  Just wanted to let you know that we used one of your articles for our show today on moblogic.tv (http://www.moblogic.tv/video/2008/03/13/one-out-of-a- hundred/).

Here’s the link to our blog post. (http://www.moblogic.tv/blog/2008/03/13/were-number-1/).

We’d love it if you checked it out.  Please let us know what you think (good or bad).  Your opinion means a lot to us.

Thanks!
Amanda Elend
moblogic.tv

By joy, March 10: “...you learn how to survive on the lowest level, instead of learning ways to be a better person you learn to trust no one, to believe in no one and realize that when your debt is paid back to society you will still be ostrisized and treated like a second class citizen.....  Prison these days is about revenge and with that attitude more people will come out worse than when they went in...”

The righteous need a floor to tread on, joy, to elevate themselves because thay are unable to so so by themselves. That is, they have to find a way of smearing, denigrating and degrading others so that they can somehow appear to shine.

Thus there is no justice and, as you say, you never finish “paying” for your “crime”. And the crime itself is merely a construct in many cases. That is they way of a society based on a punisment mentality - and has been for the past 1,000 years.

All this happens quite separate from “karma” which must be worked through by all involved. Again, you cannot pay for your crime or recompense either victims or survivors by being locked up. You are made helpless and useless by the state.

The victims and their families will go on suffering and you will suffer other abuses. Neither amounts to justice or to healing. Nobody really gets what they genuinely deserve and no-one except the pretentious and pompous judiciary gets a kick out of it all.

Good point.  Well, perhaps there’s merit to the idea.

Yes, the English settlement was first established there for that reason and many Anglo Australians have “convict” blood as a result.

But that was simply their solution to the overcrowded jails in England which first saw them putting convicts in prison ships moored permanently in the Thames River, etc etc http://www.pilotguides.com/destination_guide/pacific/a ustralia/convict_australia/transportation.php

Of course, they did that in the American colonies, too, uhh http://longislandgenealogy.com/prison.html

It all goes back to the imprisonment mentality of their glorious empire and the ‘plantations of Ulster’ and the Scottish ‘highland clearances’....

Kath:

Re absurd sentencing, just consider that, at least in NYS, a first-time offender on a drug-related charge - either possession or sale, of as little as a couple of ounces of pot or almost any amount of “hard” drugs - would serve 10 years, while a person who mugs someone and perhaps even physically harms them will only serve 3-5 years.

If that’s not Kafka-esque, I don’t know what is.

Peace.

Yes, that was the island i was referring to.  But a little known tidbit of American history is that Georgia was originally designed as a penal colony.  Something like 60,000 British prisoners (mostly debtors) were sent to N. America in the 18th Century...or nearly 1/4 of British emigrants.  The whole thing was managed by a private, prison industrial complex, and the new arrivals were auctioned off to work the fields.  Australia became the penal colony of choice after the American Revolution made shipping prisoners to N. America rather impractical.

I just noticed the opening of this piece:

“So much for the ‘war on crime.’”

I didn’t know there WAS a “war on crime.” However, if there is, one thing is sure: the minute we create a “war” against something (crime, drugs, terror, etc.), we are CERTAIN to have little or no effect in that “war” - and will probably even screw it up royally, creating even MORE problems.

Peace.

JS:

Actually, wasn’t Australia the penal colony for England for some time?

Peace.

Debtors Prisons will be next...and then we’ll just need to find a nice island to send all the prisoners to, or maybe Georgia...like the English did.

Marshall:

“How and who decides “why” people broke the law?  Sounds like you’re saying the punishment should fit the intention, not the crime.  Is this the case?”

Actually, a jury decides “why” as well as “whether”; i.e., in addition to the “facts” of a case, a jury also considers “intent.” I have been on juries (I am sure many of us have), and although we are instructed to consider “only” the facts, this means as opposed to feelings, speculation, etc. - NOT as opposed to “intent,” which is the other aspect of jury deliberations.

As well-intentioned and common sense as Kath’s idea is, it clearly could not be implemented at this point, given the current state of the justice system.  But she definitely has the right idea.

Peace.

CY:

God forbid I should agree with you again (LOL), but, assuming your facts and figures are correct, you make excellent points.  They do not negate the points made in other regards, but they certainly add food for thought.  Thank you.

Peace.

A couple of things (as if anyone cares)…

First… “most societies with small prison populations are homogeneous check Japan, Denmark, and Canada.” Japan, maybe. Denmark, a little less so. But here in Canada we are anything BUT a homogeneous society… we are every bit as multicultural as is the USA.

Secondly, I’m sure I’m not the only one who views the judicial “system” as sheer folly for the most part. In Canada, fully 33% of our national GNP is somehow related to the “justice” system - ONE THIRD!

The making of more laws DIRECTLY RESULTS in more lawbreakers. More lawbreakers means we need more prisons, courts, lawyers, judges, social workers, wardens, etc., etc., etc., It’s a HUGE BUSINESS… which, like all other businesses in our mindless, myopic capitalist system, MUST GROW… therefore we need MORE CRIMINALS. So we just make them.

There is NO WAY our “justice” system will seriously entertain any suggestion that we MAKE criminals by the way we concoct our taboos and by our head-in-the-sand approach to poverty and lack of opportunity.

No one in charge ever asks WHY so many “criminals.” They do not want to know and even if they did, they wouldn’t do a damn thing to alleviate the problem. There’s just TOO MUCH MONEY TO BE MADE by everyone involved (except the poor schmuk who gets caught with a joint of marijuana in his pocket).

How and who decides “why” people broke the law?  Sounds like you’re saying the punishment should fit the intention, not the crime.  Is this the case?

Kath:

You have FAR too much common sense.  LOL.  Nobody would ever go for it, no matter how logical or even implementable your idea might be.  Too bad.  ‘Cause you basically hit the nail on the head.

Brava.

Peace.

Rowdy:

You certainly live up to your name...LOL.

Peace.

you are a fucking idiot.

While that idea may sound innovative on the surface, the fact of the matter would be, were that idea to become law, increased racial bias and a huge number of poor families enslaved to credit card companies. Can you imagine taking a mortgage because your son accidentally killed someone? Would you have to choose if he dies early depending on what you can afford to give?

That idea is not practical. Decriminalization of substances, rehabilitation and education are the only solutions to crime. Those are all the things Bush Republicans refuse to pay for.

Being incarcerated to the uninitiated may seem to be a terrible experience; however, the human mind is a wonderful thing----it has the capacity to accept and adjust to adverse environments and sometimes thrive in such!  Once a person has adjusted to prison life they just bide their time----they get full room and board, medical, dental and eye care, mail service, a library, computers, and even sometimes conjugal visits. You may get cornedbeefed once in awhile, but even that you can adjust to!

White collar criminals really have it sweet especially at the Allenwood Facility in PA----why I know people who have improved their tennis game while at Allenwood, though I believe they have stopped such athletic programs since.

One way to stop crime is to make the individual and/or his/her family pay totally for the cost of the prison stay.  Once you hit people in their pocketbook----they do think twice.

All:

Lefty correctly noted that “60% of all federal prisoners and 30% of all state prisoners are in jail for non-violent drug possession/sales related crimes.”

This is a significant fact: that if we did not have mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenders - even first offenders - the prison population (federal and state) would likely be reduced by about 40% overall.

The other fact not brought up here is the percentage of these adults who are black or hispanic versus those who are white.  I do not know the exact numbers (anyone who can provide these would be doing a service), but I do know that it is hopelessly lopsided.

As Steve Smoliar points out, if ALL accused criminals had equal access to and equal justice under the law, we would be having a very different conversation.

Peace.

I’ll praise the day when we finally get common-sense laws in this country. If we ended victimless crime laws and reforms our drug policies, the number of imprisoned would shrink dramatically. A whole lot of these folks are locked up for nothing. If only we had better education and actually showed some humanity to addicts.

Good post Stephen.

Politicians love to bask in the limelight of justice issues, Kiwi. But that is one of the problems. Social policies become twisted towards producing so-called ‘law + order’ outcomes which actually solve nothing.

That leads to corporate benefits from building more prisons and then they have to be filled. Thus laws have to be written and approved by governments to ensure that there is (a) guilt, and (b) penalties. Then the penalties are made harsher and harsher....

In actuality, the judicial system has little to work with but fines or imprisonment and thus the punishment mentality is forever perpetuated. Judges are happy with that as it gives them power and a perverse kind of authority.

Perhaps the mentality behind that goes back to the days of horses and ‘breaking’ them and forcing them to wear bridles and to always be controlled in such a way? It still seems to permeate the attitudes of many peoples’ towards others.

As I recall, many young Fijians once went to New Zealand to earn money to build churches and schools in their villages back home. Those were fine motivations. So much must have changed since then.

>> By the way, Kiwi, interesting to note that you will have one more person in jail there soon courtesy of the Chinese community in the USA,

Yes, Douglas. This is one of the biggest news stories in NZ today. Even the Prime Minister has said publically how pleased she is and thanked those involved.
to pick up on your other coment some of our biggest ethnic issues are between Maori and Samoan groups Large numbers of Samoan people came to NZ in the 1960/70s to do the lower paid jobs (european) employers couldnt get Kiwis to do. Like with the conflict in Fiji between Fijians and Indian peoples it was the european colonialists who brought the Indian people to Fiji to work in the sugar plantations.

The problem doesn’t start with “the lower class”, Tim, so much as shows up there eventually.

It actually STARTS with the upper classes who are effectively in total control of what goes on. Thus, what they do - or don’t do - equates to public policy, whether they call it that, or admit to it, or not.

That is, most of your “good folks” are the ones who were guilty in the first place, uhh......

By the way, Kiwi, interesting to note that you will have one more person in jail there soon courtesy of the Chinese community in the USA, uhh http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1& objectid=10495281

That’s just like saying that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor for no reason, DDude. The fact that they (and the Chinese) had a 100 years of imperialist expansionary aggression from the USA to choke on was, of course, irrelevant.

Well, it wasn’t irrelevant to them as it turned out. Nor were the 80 years of latter imperialism in the M.East plus what the British and Europeans had already done in any way relevant to the people who supposedly master-minded 9/11.

What goes around comes around..... that’s YOUR karma!

Congratulations on speaking up from the ‘other’ little white mans’ paradise of the South-West Pacific, Kiwi. This is “settler society” and it is eating away at the human race and the planet......

I totally agree with you Douglas Chalmers
Living in a country of 4 million people I worked out we would have 40.000 in jail if we had US statistics
What we do have is about 7,000 (July 2007 7089)
Do we have massively more crime? Well the media are shouting “outrageous” because we had 11 murders in January - the highest ever. As punishments have got tougher (life a decade ago meant parole in 10 years, now it is usually 15-17 years) the rate has gone up. As in the US it is the poor and non european ( for us that is Maori and Samoan) who are much more likely to end in Jail for any type of offense.  Money spent lowering the levels of poverty, of drug abuse and increasing spending on education would be far more more productive than so much spent on punishment

i live in a city large enough to have it’s own NFL team. it’s not exactly podunk. as my life has trickled by and the city has grown, we have been inundated by thousands of new laws, called “city code”. you can be put in jail for having grass higher than 6 inches. you can be put in jail for installing your own sprinkler system. enough, as i said thousamds of these codes. this is true in virtually every city in the country. several months i came across a story about a 70 year old woman arrested and put in jail because her grass was dead. she did live in podunk and there was a drought going on. i started looking for absurdities like this, and allow me to assure you i found enough to fill volumes. we have a law against virtually every form of human activity. this must be the most insane country on the planet.

If we want to “get real,” we need to compare the numbers of those who broke the law with the numbers of those too impoverished to afford “equal justice under law” (and, just to balance the scales, the numbers of those rich enough to buy their way out of prison).

I rarely agree with non-credo -but today is an exception. What the heck kind of a meanspirited society we have become! And of course we are breaking the budgets of the states as well.

Oh! I see we Americans put them in jail because we
just love to put people in jail. Get real people they
are there because they broke the law.

Well put.  I have to wonder whether “sending more lawbreakers to prison” really means “sending more IMPOVERISHED lawbreakers to prison.” Having written on my own blog about people being restricted by the medical care they can afford, they are equally restricted by their ability to afford proper legal services.  In other words this is another front in the War Against the Poor.  Only the prison business benefits on this front.

Calls to diminish our magnificent prison-industrial complex are woefully misguided. Doing so would lead to the loss of countless, good-paying jobs for loyal American: judges, lawyers, cops, bail bondsmen, bailiffs, prison guards, prison construction workers, cement makers, etc., and it’d lead to closure of myriad businesses that have grown up around prisons - coffee shops, restaurants, motels, gas stations, etc

In California, for example, a prison guard starts at about $85,000.oo per year and, with a few years under his/her belt and some overtime, it’s common for them to make upwards of $140,000.oo. Where else can the non-college educated patriots pull down that kind of dough - as much as 4 times what teachers make?

Since aggressive imprisoning creates so many good jobs, we shouldn’t be talking about backing off our imprisoning, but expanding it! If we doubled the prison population, why we might be able to achieve full employment in this country and those employed would be making a hell of a lot more than they make in most of the “productive” sectors of society today. And just think of how much prosperity we could spread around if we could roll over those bleeding heart, leftist loonies and triple or quadruple the prison population!

Among the new laws we could pass and enforce I suggest we consider making it illegal to disagree with the government - whether on war, on illegal spying on citizens, on Medicare and social security cutbacks, and especially on plans to expand the prison population.

And since only a minority of Americans now believe in that anti-Christian evolution nonsense, we might be able to get a law to put the knuckle-dragging Darwinists into the slammer.

For if nothing else worked to pack our prisons, surely a law like that would not only help bring the country closer to Christ’s truth, it’d provide a bumper crop of good jobs enforcing respect for authority and Christian morality.

Win-win!

If many of the current administration and their cronies in Halliburton, KBR, Custard Battle and the like ever get prosecuted, it would fill quite a few cells.

This is the judicial version of the military-industrial complex, uhh. More inmates, more prisons. Search Wackenhut and private prisons, etc etc.......

The other main imperatives are the concepts of a punishment mentality and an imprisonment society. That was something that the WASP’s learned from the Norman invaders 1,000 years ago in England.

How much per year is spent on each prisoner which could have been spent on helping find solutions to problems in the first place? Helping people never seems to come to mind......

These satistics are horrifying.  Instead of spending all this money on prisons or the war it would be well spent on education and getting people out of poverty.