I Iove me a good conference. And the American Jail Association‘s 29th Annual Training Conference and Jail Expo (going on now at the convention center) has the fixings of a good one. Conference attendees are from 44 states, the District of Columbia, several tribal nations and Singapore and Bermuda. There’s a vague yet inspiring theme (“Building Bridges over the Rivers of Change”), swag, and of course: a money shower.
Oregon spends more dollars on corrections than on higher education, so I thought I’d see where all the money went. Turns out, there are a lot of different gizmos you can buy for your prison, at very, very high cost.
We’ll start with the classic problem: you need furniture for your prison that can’t be taken apart. The parts could be used as weapons or hiding spaces, or flushed down the toilet (see upcoming product). Norix Intensive Use Furniture has chairs, beds, even 5-seater-individual-stool picnic tables with checkerboards on top, that are solid and surprisingly comfortable solutions. You can get a $400 desk, a $600 lounge table—really not unreasonable for furniture that needs to be indestructible by creative means, easy to clean, and comfortable(ish).
There are more exciting, unique, and expensive things after the jump.
My next adventure was into the changing world of prison visititation. Strike industries have been working since 1995 on video visitation infrastructure. Prison visits require staff to escort prisoners from one part of a facility to another, or bring visitors such as family members, clergy or lawyers into the facility. Video visitation allows jail managers to set up a visitation station where the prisoners already are, at a cost of $3000-$7000 a unit. Strike VP Michael Black recommends 1 unit per 20 inmates. The inmates can then talk to their visitors, who are located at another facility where there are also visitation kiosks set up (no, not through Skype at home… that would be cool, though.) The calls can be recorded, if inmates and visitors are informed, and Black estimated that 60 percent of clients did record at least a portion of the calls made through their visitation infrastructure.
I know you’re curious about my comment earlier about flushing things down toilets. It is a prison problem: people flush things-“even bedsheets” down the toilet, and that’s just going to clog everything up. Fortunately, you no longer need a separate chopper to rid your pipes of bedsheets or whatever else is being flushed down the waste hole, thanks to Vaughan Co., Inc.’s chopper pump. Thank God there’s the rotomix, a $12,000-$15,000 piece of equipment that pumps and chops at the same time! There was a demonstration, in which the nice salesman fed rope and plastic into the machine, which created a fine rope-and-plastic colored sediment that rose to the top of the water on the other side. There are lots and lots of applications. Seriously.
Aurora Ministries was not selling anything at the conference: just advertising their service as a producer and distributer of free resources for correctional chaplains of the christian persuasion. The Florida-based company also hosts conferences and training seminars for chaplains, “promoting effectiveness in ministry.” Aurora Ministries’ pamphlets weren’t fancy and their booth wasn’t sleek, but the message really did seem genuine: “Helping chaplains bring God’s light to those who sit in darkness.”
What is the point in comparing inmate dollars to college dollars? Society does not need to be protected from over-read, unemployable children.
But a society does need to be protected from state government’s whose fiscal priorities are obviously backwards.
Yes it does – but just who will protect us from them?
I believe the quote is – ‘Liberty is when the government fears the citizens. Tyranny is when citizens fear their government’
I was wondering what was going on at the Convention Center! Thanks for the information!
It’s okay to drop your soap in the Money Shower.
There is a major distinction between Prisons and Jails. Prisons are run and funded by the state and hold inmates for years (think drug dealers and rapists). Jails are run and funded by the counties and hold inmates rarely more than a couple weeks (think DUIIs and Meth heads).
In Oregon we spend more on prisons than we do education – but the jails don’t factor into that number. Most people don’t distinguish between the two, but they are fundamentally different things and places.
What does all this mean? That we spend even more money on incarceration in Oregon than people commonly cite. Go us.
And I would argue that money works much better protecting the public than the education dollars do teaching them.
1 out of 3 in Oregon graduate high school – 53% in Portland.
Multnomah County spent $79 million on corrections this year. Mostly on the 547.67 FTE positions.
“And I would argue that money works much better protecting the public than the education dollars do teaching them.
1 out of 3 in Oregon graduate high school – 53% in Portland.”
You could also argue that its the lack of education funding that contributes to this…
But of course, such a drop out rate goes a long way to helping fill up those prisons, so a win-win!
“Protecting the public?” Are you high, D?
Oh. No. You’re not. If you were, you might be in prison.
Studies vary slightly, but close to an average of 20% of prisoners are incarcerated for marijuana-related charges.
That’s 20% of the prison budget we could cut right now. That’s like saying 20% of prisoners are in prison simply for drinking beer.
20% we could take and use instead for education or better police or a reduction in your taxes.
Don’t kid yourself that prisons = protecting the public.
Prisons are a major for-profit industry that spends your money faster than any pointy-headed classics teacher from Harvard who just wants to buy new oboes for the marching band.
While it is counter-intuitive, Scandanavian prisons have much lower recidivism rates, even when adjusted for race. They accomplish this with lighter sentences and posh prison conditions. Of course, this is political suicide to the “empire building” American experience. The American system, also has a huge liability issue: the looming costs of greater and greater medical procedures for their aging prisoners, which they are entitled to. I am a foreign correctional service provider and can see the issues from both sides. But the taxpayers are paying these bills, so why not focus on the violent offenders and scale the rest back and save the money for people who really deserve it? Here’s a new prison in Haldon, Norway that is about to open up. I guarantee (much to the dismay of others) that is prison will render lower recidivism rates than American jails, but it’s a political hot potato in America:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiZUvDMdnik