[rockdoc123]

Bring the boys home from Iraq, send the criminal prisoners over in their place. The former would love to come home, their hearts probably aren't in it anymore, the latter are nasty and immoral enough to get the job done. Tell the criminals that there is a full pardon and free dope for the one who finds Bin Ladin....problem solved. Money saved from not having to incarcerate the criminals is put to funding alternative energy programs run by the returning soldiers.

Dang....if I were an 'merican I'd run for senate!

[Memysabu]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jlw61', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JohnM', 'F')rom what I've read, seen and heard, in the past 10 or so years prisons have become their own thriving industry in the US. According to this Washington Post article, the prison population is about 2.2 million, and 7 million have been in and out of prison ... in 2005.
Apparently people are being incarcerated for the most trivial reasons like smoking pot or shoplifting.
To me this is surreal. But it seems to be quite real.
My personal philosophy on this, is that by putting this many people in jail, and allowing the incarceration of people to be an industry, you'll only be breeding more criminality.
I mean, employers will be wary when hiring someone with a criminal record, however trivial their crime has been. This could lead to the said person commiting more crimes, maybe even serious crimes, because her or she can't get any real work.
I reckon these huge prison populations will be quite hard to deal with when the initial PO crap starts hitting the fan. Many might even have gotten used to a life of crime and this might cause some undesireable situations to emerge when these jailbirds flee the coup and want to survive.
However, down the road it won't make a big difference, I think.
What are your views on this?

[patience]

The same thinking of people demanding that doctors "do something" for their cold or flu, led to overuse of antibiotics, and now to "superbugs", resistant to any antibiotic.

Any time we ask for govt to solve our problems, they will do something, but we probably aren't going to like it in the long term. The nature of the problem doesn't seem to matter.

[Memysabu]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rockdoc123', 'B')ring the boys home from Iraq, send the criminal prisoners over in their place. The former would love to come home, their hearts probably aren't in it anymore, the latter are nasty and immoral enough to get the job done. Tell the criminals that there is a full pardon and free dope for the one who finds Bin Ladin....problem solved. Money saved from not having to incarcerate the criminals is put to funding alternative energy programs run by the returning soldiers.
Dang....if I were an 'merican I'd run for senate!

[mmasters]

It's about socialism. Soon the economy will have shrunk to the point that many of the middle and lower classes will have nowhere to go but to working camps and or the military. The working camp concept has been well tested and refined by way of our prison system.

[Kingcoal]

Prisons are expensive and energy intensive, no doubt American policies towards locking people up need to be reanalyzed. While I agree that violent and petty criminals need to be locked up, our drug laws need to be relaxed. Marijuana in particular seems to be over penalized and the laws enforced with a strangely high priority. America's "war on drugs" seems to me to be a huge waste of money, resources and produces misery for a lot of minor offenders. Drugs should be regulated, however the emphasis should be on their immediate health danger to the user and people around them, not some social agenda based on anecdotal theories concerning "gateway drugs", etc. In other words, marijuana should be legalized and regulated like tobacco and alcohol. Drug addicts should be treated as a person with a health (mental and physical) problem, not like criminals. Doing that alone would sharply reduce the prison population.

Post peak, we won't have the money or resources to play around with mandatory minimum sentences for minor infractions of the law. We will return to using prisons to house people who society needs protection from.

[hopethreat]

Once someone has a felony on their record, they no longer have the right to own a firearm. Just another way to disarm people.

"They're trying to build a prison...for you and me" - SOAD

[Cog]

Post-Peak oil we won't have prisons as we know them now. Only holding cells for people awaiting trial and execution.

[PrairieMule]

Well the Nazis used cheap labor to help help convert coal to deisel in WWII. Perhaps a new form of labor pool is being created for something similar? What's cheaper than chinese workers? Incarcerated americans. Maybe in a not so distant future Barbie's butt will say Made in Sing Sing or Folsom?

[Byron100]

Yeah, this is the one of the things that make me ashamed to be an American.

We have more prisoners than ANY other country in the world, and there is just no logical reason for this whatsoever. And as the saying goes, once a criminal, always a criminal, as there is really no way of living a normal life once you've been in jail, even it was for something so petty as having a joint in the car.

At this rate, we'll eventually be a nation of nothing but criminals, as there won't be anything else going...

[Denny]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'P')ost-Peak oil we won't have prisons as we know them now. Only holding cells for people awaiting trial and execution.

[JohnM]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'P')ost-Peak oil we won't have prisons as we know them now. Only holding cells for people awaiting trial and execution.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Byron100', '
')We have more prisoners than ANY other country in the world, and there is just no logical reason for this whatsoever.

[Ferretlover]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JohnM', 'H')owever I read somewhere that a former subsidary to Halliburton has built detention centers around the US capable of holding up to 100k people each, ordered by the US govt. I dunno if it's true, though.

[anador]

What is the most likely scenario in prisons once the shtf?

They are certainly an institution the gov. will try to hold on to for a long time for propaganda reasons, but once the county police forces fall apart, how will that situation unfold?

Also, abandoned prisons are practically fortresses, they would make wonderfully defensible compounds for the ambitious peak defensivist.

[Laromi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')lso, abandoned prisons are practically fortresses, they would make wonderfully defensible compounds for the ambitious peak defensivist.

[ReverseEngineer]

Prisons in their current form are way too expensive, and in the short term the solution is to try to reduce the prison populations. Read that CA with a mandatory release of like half its prison population over the next couple of years.

However, with the economic spin down, crime will obviously increase, not decrease. So eventually here you get the cheaper form of Prison, the Concentration Camp. You can detain way more people in Camp then you can in a modern prison. No worries about 2 to a cell or anything like that. Your main objective these days is staying OUT of prison. At some point, somebody might decide to just "eliminate" all the criminals in your prison, even if your crime was stealing a loaf of bread for your starving child. As homelessness increases, just Vagrancy can of course land you in prison, so you are in danger the moment you get foreclosed on and start living in your car. So far, they aren't imprisoning the Carsteaders, but that probably won't be the case forever.

Insofar as the use of current prisons as Fortresses, its possible but most of them are in the wrong locations. More likely I think will be the use of abandoned Malls and Shopping Centers. There are many more of them of course. The sanitation in these places witll be the main problem, with no electricity and the water cut off probably. That will be the big problem for any use of a building from the modern era during the spin down. You can Squat there, but if its not being supplied with power or water, its not a real good location for very long.

Reverse Engineer

[anador]

Regarding power and water, don't prisons have extensive backup systems? Not saying its a perfect solution, but many diesel systems can be disassembled and made to run gassified wood, albeit at a much lower power output.
and many prisons are sited in places where they have to use well water, which only requires modest power to run the pump.

True many malls have similar construction habits, and they are more plentiful, but they are located in areas close to population centers unlike most prisons. Many will be susceptible to raids and break ins unless they are modified pretty significantly.

Malls also have large windows and doorways framed in glass. Prisons are designed to keep people in... which also serves to keep people out.

Malls are designed to get people in. Malls also use cheap styrofoam and lightweight steel frame for everything except the outer walls, which makes them only defensible at the entrances where prisons can fail in their external wall but still be defensible in the warren of cast concrete rooms inside.

Not that malls arent good solutions for post-peak communities, they basically are town-style grids with a roof over the streets and no second floor, but i think they pose alot of defensive risks.

heres a link where they are actually modding a dead mall to become a town.

http://www.doverkohl.com/project.aspx?id=20&type=5

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('anador', 'W')hat is the most likely scenario in prisons once the shtf?

They are certainly an institution the gov. will try to hold on to for a long time for propaganda reasons, but once the county police forces fall apart, how will that situation unfold?

Also, abandoned prisons are practically fortresses, they would make wonderfully defensible compounds for the ambitious peak defensivist.

[Cloud9]

The chain gang will come back and the prison work farm will come back. When times were hard, prisons made money for their states. They are a primary source of slave labor. I suspect they will grow in size rather than decline.