Brainstorm #2 – No More Prisons

• Last Week’s Brainstorm – Being More Productive
• Interesting Fact – Prisons Today.
• This week’s brainstorm – No More Prisons Tomorrow.

Just in case you missed it, we featured our first weekly brainstorm on our Facebook Page last week. Our Spade Question was:

What can I do to get more important work done in less time and with less effort?

Here are some of the answers we came up with. (Note how the general ideas begin radical and are then tempered to produce practical, reasonable solutions).

1. Get excited! Make work something to look forward to. Make it fun and reward yourself.
2. Slow down time! Get the pre-liminary stuff done during off-hours, then execute powerfully in your most energetic time slots.
3. Beat bureaucracy! Get people to respond quickly to rapidly developing projects (phone and meetings, over text and email.
4. Let the work do itself! Make repetitive tasks turn-key by using frameworks and templates. Delegate what you can.
5. Batch! Pool similar tasks with each other and execute in 50 minute spurts of complete focus and attention.

Prison

This week we based our Spade Question on an interesting fact I came across this week:

The United States puts 0.7 % of its population in Prison – a vastly higher percentage than any other nation. This means that at any given moment there are over 2 million people incarcerated. One can imagine that this does very little to fix an ever growing problem. Is the United States truly safer than ANY other country? Is there no better way to spend the $22,000 – the cost, per inmate, per year?

Think about this one: An individual sentenced to five years for a $300 theft costs the public more than $100,000. Only in America.

Most prisoners come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Most have not completed high school. Many can barely read. Roughly one-third were been unemployed before imprisonment. Another third had annual incomes of less than $5,000. How can months or even years in prison correct this?

It’s no wonder that 52% – half – of prisoners who are released from prison are convicted and sent back within 3 years.

This all begs to question: Are all these “correctional facilities” really correctional?

How can we eliminate Prisons and Incarceration within 10 years?

Here are some ideas we came up with:

1. Death Penalty! How could we use the death penalty for petty crimes while still being civil? We can fine them “to death” by charging exorbitant fees for crimes – just like we now do for speeding. Everyone hates tickets, why? Because they work!
2. Tell on them! What if we told everyone who they know what they’ve done. We know that embarrassment isoften the greatest restructuring of a con. A great change occurs when unsympathetic arrestees gain a deeper understanding as to the effects of their crime. This requires education, not imprisonment.
3. Nuke the lower class. What if we “nuked” the lower class with education that helped them understand the severity of their crimes or that explained how their talents could be put to better, less risky, more profitable use. What if we explained in simple English (or any other language) that selling TV’s can make more money than stealing them (and then selling them).
4. “ConStraints”. A new device that would act as an “ankle weight” with properties that a) alert law enforcement of the constant whereabouts and up-to-date information on the “prisoner” b) is able to shock the con (similar to taser) – in the event they compromise the safety of their environment. Different features could be added for various levels of the crime committed.

A case for lesser stringency for second convictions: State prisoners with the highest re-arrest rates were those jailed for stealing cars (70%), possessing stolen property (77%), larceny (75%), burglary (74%), robbery (70%), or those possessing illegal weapons (70%). Within 3 years, only 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for homicide. These are the lowest rates of re-arrest for the same category of crime.

Sources:

http://www.heartsandminds.org/prisons/facts.htm

http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&contentId=14835

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/rpr94.htm

“The Causes of Recidivism in the Criminal Justice System and Why It Is Worth the Cost to Address Them.” Nashville Bar Journal. Dec 06/Jan 07. (April 21, 2009).

Tags: brainstorm, constraints, conviction, creativity, crime, death penalty, imprisonment, justice, prison, problem solving, Productivity, spade question, United States, work