The Inmate Reduction Project
This is what we are up against:
Prisons in the United States are operated by both the federal and state governments as incarceration is a concurrent power under the Constitution of the United States. Imprisonment is one of the main forms of punishment for the commission of felony offenses in the United States. Less serious offenders, including those convicted of misdemeanor offenses, may be sentenced to a short term in a local jail or with alternative forms of sanctions such as community corrections (halfway house), probation, and/or restitution. In the United States, prisons are operated at various levels of security, ranging from minimum-security prisons that mainly house non-violent offenders to Supermax facilities that house well-known criminals and terrorists such as Terry Nichols, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Richard Reid.
The United States has among the highest incarceration rates in the world. More people are behind bars in the United States than any other country. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole. Of the total, 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million, even though China has many times more inhabitants than the US. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[1]
An operation of this magnitude has to be self sustaining. The inmates are going to have to become a community within itself; meaning people who want a better life for themselves have to be separated from those who have no intentions in doing the right thing.
There has to be legislation changes all the way to the Code of Federal Regulations concerning HUD, Education and Employment. We have to start back the education system within the prisons and make an incentive to drive people in prison to this direction during their incarceration. We have to invest in Forensic Housing programs. Personally with the way prisons are ran whereby inmates have to work for peanuts, they should get 4 to 6 months of unemployment when released after doing a two year sentence or more at the rate of an E-2 of the military or it can be based on their total average earnings while in prison. I think such a system will allow convicted felons who are released from prison a degree of independence.
I think this is a multi-billion dollar operation, however it has to be self sustaining meaning as one inmate is released from prison he/she has to help the next inmate who is released. Please do not bullshit me; if you did it you did it. If you sold drugs and got busted on a day you was clean and say I was innocent and did time for a crime I did not commit, get over it. When I was in prison I did not meet one person who was guilty; everybody was innocent. But we are all guilty under the law.
If we invest in the area of $1 Billion in such a project, the personnel being the incarcerated and released have to turn this billion into $5 billion through labor. If they can work for peanuts while in prison they can do for themselves when released. This has to be a movement operated by the victims and not the Radio Personalities and Civil Rights Activist who really never did any time; it has to be self sustaining or I cannot be a part of it.
Frank Paul Gambino
