scholarly journals Land of the Free: Prison Reform Following the War on Drugs

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-32
Author(s):  
Megan Tingley

ince its beginnings in 1971, the war on drugs has been largely unsuccessful in reducing drug use. Instead, it has had many unintended consequences, one of which is a huge increase in the federal prison population over the past 40 years. Despite making up only five percent of the world population, the U.S. is home to 25 percent of its prisoners. Since the 1970s, the prison population in the U.S. has skyrocketed due to the implementation of War on Drugs policies. The main reason for the failure of the War on Drugs can be attributed in part to mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Implemented as a part of the Anti- Drug Abuse Act of 1986, these one-size-fits-all policies require a certain punishment based on the amount and type of drug in possession without allowing for flexibility based on context. 

1977 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Cloudsley-Thompson

The term ‘ecodisaster’ may be defined as ‘a global catastrophe of the human species’. Any ecodisasters occurring in the near future will, almost certainly, be caused, directly or indirectly, by the present overpopulation of the world, accompanied by unwise and irresponsible disregard of environmental deterioration.The suggestion is made here that Man's first and, it is to be hoped, last, ecodisaster may already have begun. Although not dramatic, it is taking the form of a steady decline in the standard of living nearly everywhere, coupled with massive pollution, and widespread malnutrition in the under-developed countries of the world. It will persist until world population eventually becomes adjusted to environmental resources.It is ironical that control of the pests and diseases which have inflicted so much misery on mankind in the past, should have helped to engender the present population explosion with all the hunger and privation that accompany it in the under-developed regions of the world.


Author(s):  
Laura A. Meek

This research article critically interrogates the implications and unintended consequences of the World Health Organization’s purported elimination of leprosy as a public health problem. I explore how leprosy has been portrayed (for nearly a century) as something from the past, recalcitrantly lingering on into the present, but surely about to be gone—a temporal framing I call the ‘grammar of leprosy’. I recount the experiences of Daniel, my interlocutor in Tanzania, whose existence became a problem for his doctors. This problem they ultimately resolved by fabricating negative test results in order to record what they already knew: leprosy had been eliminated. I also analyse how researchers working for Novartis (the supplier of leprosy’s cure) continue to push for an always imminent ‘elimination’, while field researchers repeatedly caution about the potential problems of this approach. Finally, I reveal how the grammar of leprosy operates through a complex set of temporal politics, pulling into its orbit and being enabled by multiple interwoven temporalities. I conclude that—due to this grammar, the impossible subjects it produces, and the temporal politics through which it operates—leprosy elimination campaigns may have dire consequences for the lives of people with leprosy today, impeding rather than enabling treatment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-92
Author(s):  
A.A. Garba

The paper reviewed the impacts of population growth and the ways it affects aquaculture and fisheries prices. As the world population  continues to grow arithmetically, great pressure is placed on arable lands, water, energy, and biological resources to provide an adequate supply of food while maintaining the integrity of the ecosystem. In 2010, FAO projected the world population to double from 6.2 billion in October, 1999 to 12.5 billion in the year 2050. This had created serious negative impacts on the aquaculture and fisheries prices. At present fertile crop lands had been lost at an alarming rates while some abandoned during the past 50 years because erosions made it unproductive. Other vices such as food crisis, political unrest and war (Mexico, Uzbekistan, Turkistan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Morocco and Sudan), civil strife and multiple years of draught (Niger, Mauritania and Senegal), impacts of HIV/AIDS Ebola, Lassa fever and Coronavirus the world over, clashes between cattle rearers and farmers and boko haram issues (Nigeria) as well as kidnapping and  corruptions have severely affected aquaculture and fisheries production and accompanied prices. Thus, this review was conducted to raise a cry for farmers and citizens to engage and participate in intensive culture and fisheries practices in order to fill the demand - supply gap so as to make fish food products available for the teeming masses.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Heather Anderson ◽  
Charlotte Bedford

Incarceration rates are increasing almost everywhere and, while women and girls make up only a small percentage of the overall prison population, there has been a significant increase in their representation especially over the past 20 years (Carlton and Segrave, 2013). Despite the fact that societies are locking women up at increasingly high rates, the fundamental understandings regarding prison reform are based on a male norm, and do not meet the needs of female offenders (Walmsley, 2016). This article outlines the findings from the first stage of a grassroots action research project conducted with a support group for women of lived prison experience, based in Adelaide, South Australia, to investigate radio production as a means for supporting women in their transition to life outside of prison. The research found that empowerment manifested itself in a number of distinct ways, through both processes and the products of the project. Through the production of radio, women of prison experience recognised their own expertise and took ownership of their stories, while the radio products educated the wider public and validated the participants experiences.


1966 ◽  
Vol 70 (672) ◽  
pp. 1073-1075
Author(s):  
R. A. Moore

The past few years have evidenced a remarkable increase in the use of helicopters in agriculture. There are any number of individual reasons for this: helicopters are more plentiful, for example, but the primary reason is one of simple economics combined with a capability to meet new demands. The demands have been generated by the overwhelming population explosion. Sometimes hard to imagine and even more difficult to cope with, but the facts remain that:1.25 % of all the people that ever existed on earth are living on it today,2.The world population increases at a rate of 5400 people every hour; and3.This staggering number of people will double again within the next 40 years.


Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 35-67
Author(s):  
Paul E. Chevedden

The story of millennialism extends down the ages from the ancient Near East to the present. In his seminal study on the origins of millennialism,Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, Norman Cohn exclaims, “What a story it has become!”Much theological speculation; innumerable millenarian movements, including those now flourishing so vigorously in the United States; even the appeal once exercised by Marxist-Leninist ideology – all this belongs to it. Nor is there any reason to think that the story is nearing its end. The tradition whose origins are studied in this book is still alive and potent. Who can tell what fantasies, religious or secular, it may generate in the unforseeable future?What fantasies, indeed!All scholars who have studied millennialism have investigated unsuccessful movements, or movements that have yet to succeed, that is, achieve the millennium. This essay explores a successful millennial movement, one that has already ushered in the messianic age. Although this achievement is restricted geographically — to a city — it is nonetheless of major significance. Not only did this millennial movement receive support from the U.S. federal government, but it also accomplished its goal prior to the turn of the millennium.


2017 ◽  
pp. 192-198
Author(s):  
Jagdish Joshi ◽  
Surekha Patil

Female has been dominated by patriarchal society since ages. Her voice does not have any significance or importance in Indian society. Women have all potentialities and abilities like men; still they are not recognized or appreciated as equal to men. This is the predicament of women who confine women in restricted social codes and norms. Her individual self has no reorganization in the patriarchal society. Women’s duties were confined to the specific areas especially household works. Her dreams never convert into reality due to the rigid mindset of patriarchal. Bharti Mukherjee is one of the eminent female writers who write about women and the problems faced by them and so that we can say women are at the center of her texts. Bharati Mukherjee deals with the themes of Indian Women particularly the problem of cross-cultural predicament and crisis. Her work has helped to break the silence on some women's issues which were not discussed in the past due to the fear of prevailing attitude of patriarchy. To raise people's awareness, she writes particular about what she sees around her. She writes how the female protagonist tries to tackle the problem of loss of endeavors to assume a new identity in the U.S. She leaves her country to fulfill her dreams and wishes but reality was totally different. Mukherjee introduces us to the various changes that her novel’s main protagonist Jasmine goes through, as she journeys from the world of rural Indian Punjab to that of America’s Mid-West, discovering her American dream in the process. At last she realizes that self-independence is not to be an Indian or American but to be at peace with herself.


Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Cusac

Beginning in the mid-1970s, enormous changes governed U.S. punishment of criminal offenses, leading to harsher laws and longer prison terms than convicts in earlier decades served for the same offenses. The stark policy shift resulted in soaring prison populations that are disproportionate compared with most Western nations. The United States, with 5% of the world population, has more than 20% of the world’s prisoners. Its prison population rose 700% from 1970 to 2005. Today, one in 34 adults is under correctional control. The rates are disproportionate for minorities, especially less-educated black men (Lee, 2015; Pew, 2007, 2014; U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 2012). Shifts in physical treatment of prisoners accompanied the population boom. Jails and prisons adopted control technologies that would likely have been considered inappropriate and inhumane decades earlier. These included the stun belt and the restraint chair, devices that can cause considerable pain. These also included extensive use of solitary confinement in Supermax prisons, an echo of a method used in 18th- and 19th -century American penitentiaries and discarded because of the dangers it posed to inmate mental health. And, following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, treatment in U.S. prisons seemed to echo overseas in abuse of foreign prisoners in American hands. The Bush administration attempted to declare physical coercion as legal during interrogations, in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions (Shane, Johnston, & Risen, 2007). What caused such a shift? Much of the change appears to be cultural in nature, connected strongly to forces such as politics, religion, pervasive beliefs about evil and children, popular culture, and economic realities. This also means that American punishment is historically more influenced by such cultural forces than by more seemingly related phenomena such as research on effective punishments, prisoner experience, or crime statistics. That American cultural trends strongly influence American punishment also means that American daily lives respond to shifts in punitiveness. Such evidence of American punishment trends appear in popular television shows and treatment of children.


Author(s):  
Arun Kumar

Mother is a radiant nurse, an angel of mercy, a patient teacher, a watchful guardian and compassionate attorney and a fountainhead of courage. Post independence sociologists paid attention towards the women who are traditionally backward, exploited and taken as second-rate citizens. This is obstruction and hindrance in the progress and prosperity of family, community and country. The complete social structure is affected. For the rural development and reconstruction, it is necessary to understand the changing social status and role of rural women who are 48.3% of the Total population of the country. For the study of past enables us to grasp the fundamental psychology behind the present problems and attitudes that uphold or reject them due to which it has come to be what it is. We may thus be enabling to make out the cause and circumstances embedded in the past, which led to the existence and conditions and causes are sure to prove themselves of great help to us in the making up and planning of a figure. Women constitute about fifty per cent of the world population. It is estimated that by A.D. 2000, the total number of women in the world will be more than 3 billion and they will outnumber men by nearly 175 million. At the United Nations Conference in Nairobi in 1985, it was noted that they comprise 35 per cent of the world’s labor force in the sphere of employment and occupied lower positions. Further it is observed that over 60 per cent of world’s illiterates are women, mostly in the developing countries. More than 60% respondents have accepted all the factors mentioned as variables are responsible for the uplift of the status of rural women. But; it is note-worthy that more than three-fourth of the respondents have emphasized especially on urbanization, women welfare organizations and rural development programs; as the tools of uplift for the status of rural women.


Author(s):  
J. C. Waterlow

The Royal Society has in recent years taken a great interest in the growth of the world’s population and has been represented at the two big international congresses on this subject, in Delhi and in Cairo (Graham-Smith, 1994). According to U.N. projections, in 20 year’s time the world population will be between 7.5 and 8.5 billion (Demeny, 1996). There does not seem to be much controversy about these figures. On the other hand, when it comes to the question of whether it will be possible to feed these 8 billion people, opinions diverge widely between optimists and pessimists. McCalla (1995), the director of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Department of the World Bank, in a very illuminating discussion of the controversy, has said, “The economists are always wrong,” presumably because they have to deduce future trends from those of the past. It seemed to us that the best way to make a useful contribution is to look at the subject and assess the possibilities from an objective scientific point of view. The Royal Society has done this twice in the past, with two discussion meetings: one on Agricultural Efficiency (Cooke et al., 1977) and the other on Technology in the 1990s: Agriculture and Food (Blaxter and Fowden, 1985). Now, 10 years on, it is time to have another go, widening the scope of the recent discussion meeting “Land Resources: On the Edge of the Malthusion Precipice?” The late Kenneth Blaxter, in a scries of lectures called “People, Food and Resources,” published in 1986, recalled a quotation from Friedrich Engels, writing in 1844 about the Malthusian dilemma: “Science advances in proportion to the knowledge bequeathed to it by the previous generation and thus under the most ordinary conditions grows in geometrical progression — and what is impossible for science?” (my italics).


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