Chicago Sun Times:

“The harm here is not measured in the value of money and property,” Judge Zagel tells Blagojevich.

“The harm is the erosion of the public trust in government; [people's] confidence in and trust in government,” Zagel said.

The judge is right. Blagojevich is the living embodiment of the corruption in politics that regular people fear. The very worst kind. His so-called “public service” was nothing more than a vehicle for his personal enrichment. He didn’t give a damn what happened to the people of Illinois, he was only interested in what he could trade for money. The way he brazenly spoke about enriching himself on those FBI tapes is horrifying. It is people like Blago who make the American people so cynical about politics.

Another person who should be sitting in a prison cell is Jesse Jackson Jr. He was more than happy to purchase Obama’s Senate seat from Blago. Were it not for the FBI stepping in he likely would have.

Arian gang member and convicted murderer Justin Walker is apparently living the good life behind bars. For starters, he’s in a medium security prison. Why an Arian Brotherhood member convicted of murder is in a medium security prison is beyond me. He should be in a supermax facility. But that’s for another post.

The issue here is what Justin Walker has been doing inside his prison cell. Justin is a big fan of Facebook. He frequently updates his profile from within his cell using a Blackberry. Possession of a cell phone inside prison is a felony.

Walker posted pictures of himself and friends smoking weed out of a large bong, posing with an entire bottle of liquor, posing with and smoking from a large bag of Marijuana, and posing with and licking a large metal shank (if you watch “Lock Up” you’ll know the object as a bone crusher).

So don’t worry kids. Going to prison is not that big of a deal. It will be like re-living the college experience you never had — only with cells…and a lot of dudes.

The college student who hacked into Sarah Palin’s email account at the height of the 2008 election has been sentenced to one year in prison. However, the judge is allowing David Kernell to serve out his sentence at a Knoxville halfway house.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Phillips noted the sentence for David Kernell goes on the books as a term of imprisonment. He said the U.S. Bureau of Prisons could override his recommendation that Kernell spend his days over the next year at the Midway Rehabilitative Center on Magnolia Avenue.

Phillips said Kernell’s actions in 2008 merited some form of imprisonment not because his victim was a prominent political figure but because what he did threatened "the expectation of privacy that we all have."

I think it’s a fair sentence. What he did was outrageous and he deserves to be punished. He’ll be a convicted felon for the rest of his life.

Kernell spoke in court for the first time since being charged:

"I’m not going to make any excuses," he told Phillips in court. "For the rest of my life I’m going to be ashamed and guilty for what I’ve done."

I’m glad to hear it.

Bernie Madoff got his ass kicked in prison according to ABC. The dirty thief was treated at a hospital for a collapsed lung, facial fractures, and broken ribs, all of which are consistent with a prison assault.

The way I see it, Bernie made a deal with the devil early in his life. The decisions he made allowed him to live like a king during his best years. The majority of his life was spent enjoying luxuries most humans will never experience.

Now, he’s 71-years old and must pay for all those good years with his life. Bernie will spend his twilight years doing menial jobs like laundry for 5 cents a day, while dodging convicts looking to make their bones by extorting him, assaulting him, and eventually killing him.

Chances are he won’t live to be that old. For the sake of argument let’s say he lives to be 80. That would mean he spent about 40+ years living a hedonistic lifestyle funded solely by blood money and barely 10 years in prison.

To a sociopath like Bernie Madoff, that’s not such a bad deal.

The Pentagon has released excerpts of Saddam Hussein’s diary that he wrote in daily while being held in an American detention facility in Iraq.

According to his writings, Saddam feared catching AIDS when he discovered that his U.S. military guards sometimes used his clothes line to dry their clothes.

When Saddam found out his U.S. military guards were also using his laundry line to dry clothes, he wrote that he demanded they stop, according to the excerpts.

“I explained to them that they are young and they could have young people’s diseases,” Saddam wrote. “My main concern was to not catch a venereal disease, an HIV disease, in this place.” He said some soldiers ignored his request.

Obviously, Saddam was about 20 years behind in common knowledge about AIDS since he thought it could be transmitted via clothes line.

Also, it’s not like we were gonna let him live long enough to catch anything anyway.

There’s an interesting editorial in today’s NY Times that looks at the U.S. prison system and it’s numerous failures. Currently the United States has the largest prison population in the world. 1 in 100 Americans is behind bars bringing the total prison population to around 1.6 million people.

Nearly every prison in the U.S. is dangerously overcrowded and understaffed which creates an environment that is both deadly to staff and to inmates.

The novel idea of “rehabilitation” is something that has long since left America’s prison system. The idea now revolves around “warehousing” inmates until such time as they can be released, executed, murdered, or die of natural causes.

There is no funding for school, trades, or anything that might better prepare someone for the outside world. Most prisons have a “revolving door” meaning that 80% of those released come right back in less than a year.

I’m not naive, I know full well that there’s a lot of people who belong in prison and should be kept their for the rest of their lives. Anyone who doubts this should just watch a couple of hours of “Lock-Up” on MSNBC.

The roots of the U.S. prison system in it’s present form can be traced back to the 1980′s when the public demanded that prisons be a place for punishment and not a vacation.

This is a valid argument and one that I share. Prisons absolutely should be about punishment, however that’s not all it should be about. We are only doing further damage to our society when people who are sent to prison don’t come out any better than when they went in.

Does anyone really believe that sending a drug-addicted high school drop-out to prison for 5 years is gonna solve anything?

When he gets out he’ll be the same drug addicted high-school drop-out he was only a little older. He’ll also have convicted felon and ex-con to add to his decidedly short resume which will guarantee that not even his local McDonald’s is likely to hire him.

Contrast that with a drug addicted high-school drop-out who undergoes extensive, mandatory drug treatment over his five years of incarceration plus a GED and at least two years of college. A guy like that can leave prison feeling better about his future than he ever has and society as a whole will benefit from having another productive member added to it.

Obviously a prisoner has to want to help himself before anyone else can help him. There will be many who just don’t give a damn and whose anti-social personality is beyond anyone’s reach.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that we know exactly what to do with those kind of people. I also understand that programs like I’m describing will not be cheap and taxpayers dislike the idea of “wasting” tax payer money on criminals and thugs.

However, in the long-run I believe people will come to see it not as wasting money. Right now for ever 1 person released from prison 3 are coming in.

Imagine what are society would be like if fewer criminals were leaving our prisons than were coming into it?

We must save our “punishment only” incarceration for those who cannot be helped, but offer an aggressive rehabilitation/education program for the rest.

-Chris Jones

Three times during his nearly 27 years in prison, Charles Chatman went before a parole board and refused to admit he was a rapist. His steadfastness was vindicated Thursday, when a judge released him because of new DNA evidence showing he indeed wasn’t. The release of Chatman, 47, added to Dallas County’s nationally unmatched number of wrongfully convicted inmates.

“Every time I’d go to parole, they’d want a description of the crime or my version of the crime,” Chatman said. “I don’t have a version of the crime. I never committed the crime. I never will admit to doing this crime that I know I didn’t do.”

Chatman became the 15th inmate from Dallas County since 2001 to be freed by DNA testing. He served more time than any of the other inmates, four of whom were in court Thursday to show their support.

Dallas has freed more inmates after DNA testing than any other county nationwide, said Natalie Roetzel of the Innocence Project of Texas. Texas leads the country in prisoners freed by DNA testing, releasing at least 30 wrongfully convicted inmates since 2001, according to the Innocence Project.

Chatman was 20 when the victim, a young woman in her 20s, picked him from a lineup. Chatman said he lived five houses down from the victim for 13 years but never knew her.

She identified him in court as the attacker, and serology tests showed that the type of blood found at the crime scene matched that of Chatman—along with 40 percent of other black males.

Chatman said he was working at the time of the assault, an alibi supported by his sister, who was also his employer. Nevertheless, Chatman was convicted of aggravated sexual assault in 1981 and sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Mr. Chatman must be an incredibly strong person psychologically, and emotionally because I cannot even begin to imagine what it must feel like to be sent to prison for something you didn’t do.

The man has been incarcerated for more than 26 years!! How do you even begin to right a wrong of that magnitude? More than two decades were stolen from Mr. Chatman that he can never get back.

I think for starters he should get around $2 million dollars for every year he was in prison, which would give him a nice settlement of around $52 million dollars.

Money won’t even begin to make up for losing so many years, but at least he can spend the next 26 years living the good life and spending time with his family.

It’s so important that we revisit old cases where DNA testing is now possible to determine with absolute certainty that an innocent person is not rotting in prison.

-Chris Jones

Former newspaper mogul Conrad Black was sentenced Monday to 6 1/2 years in prison for swindling shareholders in his Hollinger International media empire out of millions of dollars.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that federal judges have the discretion to give “reasonably” shorter prison terms for crack-cocaine crimes to reduce the disparity with crimes involving cocaine powder.

The 7-2 ruling represents a victory for lawyers who argued that crack-cocaine offenders were unfairly targeted under U.S. sentencing guidelines.

Current federal penalties for selling 5 grams of crack cocaine can warrant the same prison sentence as dealing 500 grams of the powdered variety.

The especially harsh prison sentences for dealing crack were established as a way to get a handle on the crack epidemic that exploded in the late 1980′s. The hope was that if dealers knew they could potentially spend the rest of their lives behind bars for dealing crack, they would stop selling it.

The harsh laws may in some ways have helped to curb the crack epidemic, however, the program was largely a failure. We continue to build more and more prisons with no end in sight. We have locked thousands of 18 and 19 year old kids up for for 30, 40, 50+ years in prison for selling crack cocaine.

Not only is that incredibly unfair, but if they ever do get out they pose a significant risk to the community. A non-violent kid who ends up spending most of his adult life in prison does not have the necessary skills to live a normal and productive life on the outside.

What we are in fact doing is turning a misguided young person into a violent felon and then releasing him back into the community after a decade or two in prison.

The “war on drugs” is a joke, our prison system is broken, and something must be done. This Supreme Court ruling is at least one small step in the right direction.

-Chris Jones