The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
Ideally you'd think those who made those decision would be disciplined, pensions would be cut, etc. But nothing like that is gonna happen. Even if the family wins the lawsuit, it will be taxpayers paying for it.
One a deeper level, I wouldn't be surprised if many of those involved in running the prison would be thinking things like "well good, less people less worries. So what if he kills another one". Even more perverse, in some countries, prisoners who are known to kill and attack their cellmates are used as a coercion tool. That is effective against political prisoners and other undesirables who need to "confess" or be punished -- "behave or you'll end up in Sesson's cell <wink-wink>". On paper it looks completely by the rules and clean.
Our prisons are routinely at 1.5x, 2x, 3x capacity. Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one, people living on cots in a gymnasium with no privacy whatsoever, in such close quarters that even the most patient people would be at each other's throats.
Until the prison population actually declines, we ought to at least be building prisons fast enough to stay at design capacity.
Google your state - you'll be amazed. Prisons aren't designed to be comfortable, but they sure as hell get a lot less comfortable with too many people in them.
But then again, doing any of that is a lot harder then egging on the narrative that prison is actually meant to be a mad max wasteland, and pretending we're totally not responsible for turning a blind eye to the rape, murder and gangs we let happen there.
I think I found the double-think.
But absolutely, incarceration is used as a tool of suppressing "undesirables" according to the writers of law. The co-conspirator of Watergate is making waves online again this past week for having talked about how the Nixon administration planned the war on drugs as a means to destroy hippie and black communities through mass incarceration and prosecution.
In order to be lucid about the situation though, it's important to realise that a very large part of the prison population is in there for violent offences. Even knowing this, I still believe we should be reducing sentences (I have a hard time justifying putting anyone in a cage for 15 years as a punishment...) but there probably needs to be some alternative things going on too.
* Bureau of Justice Statistics says 53% of state prsionsers and 7% (what?!) of federal prisoners (2014): http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14_Summary.pdf * Federal Bureau of Prisons says 46.5% drug offences (no specification on violent v. non-violent) and 9.2% immigration as the third largest group. Second largest is more violent sounding, though: Weapons, Explosives, Arson 16.9% (2016): https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
I don't think non-violent crime should always mean no prison, but I suspect there are better ways of dealing with the majority of them.
Also, since you mentioned shorter terms, here are the BOP's numbers of sentence length: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_sente...
Drawing such a sharp distinction between violent and non violent crimes omits many real-world factors.
What kind of criminal is this person is different from what was this criminal convicted of. I can be a part time drug dealer, shooting rival gang members, robbing houses and pimping whores. But land myself in prison for 10 years due to my 6th possession charge. If you draw a hard distinction statistically, I fall into the 'I can't believe we imprison people for having a little pot'
Additionally, what is a non-violent crime? Looks like good chunk of prison inmates are property crimes, larceny, burglars, thief. What percentage do you suspect of these non-violent offenders were armed during the commission of their crimes? What percentage would have turned violent if confronted during their crime? I suspect that these people who steal your car, break into your home and business and steal your things are effectively violent offenders.
"You" are a strawman invented to support strict drug laws. How about we jail people for crimes we can actually prove they did, rather then assuming that if you sell pot, you must be "pimpin hoes" and "shooting rival gang members".
> What percentage would have turned violent if confronted during their crime? I suspect that these people who steal your car, break into your home and business and steal your things are effectively violent offenders.
I suspect not, but either way, I don't particularly feel like throwing them in prisons helps things at all. Read up on the gang presence in prisons: its its not like giving someone 10 years for stealing cash from your car is going to rehabilitate them very effectively, and certainly not with the state of prisons being what it is.
When that's 100%, then other things can be explored, but a large part of the prison population is also not violent and that's a place to make change.
The most interesting part, to me, is the "public-order" criminals. When my girlfriend worked corrections, she noted that at the state level, the vast majority of prisoners were in for violent crimes - rape, robbery, murder, arson, etc. At the county level, however, a large number of prisoners were in for what she termed as "criminalized insanity." They're too mentally ill to function, so they live on the streets until they get arrested for doing some small crime - loitering, public urination, trespassing, etc. They get locked up for a few days, get a court date, and get released. Then they go right back to the streets, miss their court date, get arrested again for a bench warrant next time they have a run-in with the law, get sentenced to a slightly longer stay, get released on probation, violate probation, get arrested again the next time they have a run-in with the law...
Wash, rinse, repeat. All of this is really short-term... and yet they're forming 13.8% of the incarcerated population. We're spending an enormous amount of resources on what amounts to impromptu, ad-hoc, half-assed mental healthcare, and none of it works. But eliminating it entirely and saying, "Go forth and sin no more" is going to do absolutely nothing unless there are corresponding programs that can actually help such people.
That kind of coordination - saying, "Okay, we're going to have to spend $x million extra dollars extra for a few years until the mental health benefits start to decrease the cost of jails and prisons" - is extremely difficult, if not impossible to accomplish.
Regarding drug pushers and prison - I constantly swing back and forth on this issue, mostly because they are morally degenerate for exploiting human weakness for profit. If you google Whiteclay, Nebraska and go to images[2], you'll find a whole bunch of pictures of wasted Indians lying in alleyways right outside the (white-owned) liquor stores. It's created an enormous amount of frustration in the community, and the response from the government is "Well, it's not illegal to sell alcohol to alcoholics."
I give pause to the folks who demand unrestricted drug use for everyone, (which is what decriminalization is - if something's restrictions have no teeth, namely incarceration, it's unrestricted. Same exact reason why financial laws are flouted so often - no teeth) because this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale.
The real question, and one that I can't even begin to unravel because there's so much goddamn bullshit on the Internet from agenda-pushers on both sides, is "Is this state of affairs, where a large portion of the population is incarcerated for vice, preferable to a state of affairs where vice is openly permitted?"
Personally, as someone who lives in a relatively affluent suburb, I'd say that legalizing everything would be a massive boon to me. My taxes will go down, and more importantly I'm insulated from the consequences by a lack of public transit and vigilant cops who are, er, unfriendly to the lowlives who occasionally wander away from the city. The folks in the city and poorer towns, who actually get to deal with the massive consequences of widespread addiction, might beg to differ.
[1] http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteclay+nebraska&client=ub...
That's a good question, but it's still the wrong question. The right question is who owns my body, me or the government? Drugs should be legal not because it results in a better society, but because it in results a free society where a person can't be jailed for what he does to himself.
There are plenty of middle ground options between criminalization and total freedom. And in fact, if you look at the way alcohol is handled, you see a lot of those. It isn't illegal to possess alcohol in large quantities or to drink to excess, but in some places, public intoxication is illegal (or seen as something of a public nuisance that police are expected to humanely help with). It isn't illegal to sell alcohol, but sometimes it is illegal to knowingly sell it to a drunk person. There are age limits. It's banned at certain events. So forth.
There are a lot of rules, and they vary a lot, and I wouldn't go so far as to say they are rational, exactly, but some are humane. And some do strike a good balance between allowing people to choose to enjoy responsibly (or even irresponsibly), while limiting the danger and nuisance to the rest of society, and while -- on the third hand -- limiting how predatory you can be in selling it and preying on human weakness.
It would probably be naive to suppose that the exact same set of rules would work for all substances, but it does suggest that outright criminalization and junkies on the sidewalk aren't the only options.
Are you proposing that selling alcohol should be punishable by imprisonment?
> this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale.
I think that you're engaging in hyperbole. A liquor store or bar is not unambiguously evil. Most _users_ of the drug alcohol are not _abusers_ -- they consume at least somewhat responsibly, are not addicted, do not impose a burden on society, and get a net positive amount of utility from their use of the drug.
You can s/alcohol/pretty much any other drug/ in the previous paragraph, though it's certainly the case that some drugs have lower total utility across society than others.
What would happen if the laws were amended so that, should someone be sentenced to prison time, and all prisons within a reasonable radius are at capacity, that either the person with the lowest amount of time to serve in that prison (barring violent offenses) is automatically set free, or the sentence is commuted to probation or such?
There's an argument to be made here that cramming two people into a parking-space-sized cell is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, so the state really should have to decide if placing Joe Potsmoker in for a year is worth releasing Bill Burgalar five years early. Just saying "fuck it, throw 'em all in" shouldn't be an option.
(This is assuming that prison has any reformative value at all, of course...)
The careers of the politicians responsible are eviscerated, spectacularly, when the people they released go on to commit violent crimes.
if you are the leader of a big gang, and still have power on the people outside, you can make enough gang-newcomers go to jail until you are free.
Also 'Make a gang of 4000', sure...
You've definitely identified the crux of the problem, though - prison capacities need to be treated as hard limits not to be exceeded, and not some nominal "design" number, which is routinely exceeded without limitation. If more people need to be incarcerated than there is capacity for, the solution needs to be building a new prison.
To be unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, a punishment needs to be well, cruel and unusual. Prison overcrowding may be cruel, but it's not unusual.
if you trace whom prison guard unions support you'd notice that it is the prison-industrial complex who is a major player responsible for incarcerating more people. Having crowded prisons helps a lot to overcome any opposition to new prisons exactly because of the logic like yours.
Is there any evidence that people "against the prison industrial complex" are directly responsible for the rate at which new prisons are being constructed? I'm not sure but I'm inclined to think that this would have more to do with strained budgets than any successful activism.
Edit: I looked into this a bit with California as an example.
In 2011, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that required California to dramatically reduce its prison population.
"Justice Kennedy, citing the lower court decision, said there was 'no realistic possibility that California would be able to build itself out of this crisis,' in light of the state’s financial problems."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html
The opinion of the lower court:
"Relying on expert testimony, the court ruled that the California prison system, the nation’s largest with more than 150,000 inmates, could reduce its population by shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole, which they said would have no adverse impact on public safety."
I've not met anyone who is against prison construction that is not also against long sentences and against sentences for trivial crap. It's the state's half-arsed job that's responsible, not the people who are trying to make the place better.
We definitely shouldn't be building prisons just for capacity, because then when they are slated to close, it become another political football: "jobs", "soft on crime", so on and so forth. The solution is to stop jailing people to such a ridiculous degree - in the US it's basically j-curved since the '90s.
Source?
Soviet Russian here -- that's just ... false.
I doubt that. The people running the system don't decide how many inmates they get or how many beds they have. They put people where they have to put them. And they have to deal with this kind of fallout. They're doubling up because they don't have room to do anything else.
There's probably a memo that went up the chain saying "This is a bad idea. We really shouldn't do it." If it made their jobs easier, guards would be perfectly happy with 1300 sq ft hot-tub-equipped town house cells. They're government employees, after all.
But nobody wants a prison in his town. For most people, inmates are out of sight, out of mind and that's the way they like it. That is the problem.
then they shouldn't admit them.
You know, I've been all over the world and in many third world countries as many people who can get on the bus, just get on the bus. The driver allows it because he gets a dollar for everybody who gets on. In my rich western nation, there is a number posted high up near the ceiling. This number is the number the bus is licenced to carry, and the bus driver gets paid an hourly wage for driving the bus about. When there are too many people at the bus stop, he says he can't allow them on as he would lose his job and he drives away. The potential passengers have to wait for the next bus, or walk. This causes angst amongst the populace who complain to the bus company, or the local government which may effect change.
In the USA, it seems, when more and more prisoners are served on a prison, they just take them and cram them into smaller and smaller spaces.. because they get paid for each one and there is no rule against it. The prison should be licensed for a certain number of inmates, and if more prisoners turn up then they should NOT be accepted (under pain of losing their license), and they would remain in the custody of the persons bringing them. That would quickly cause a problem where the local police were too busy babysitting prisoners to go out in the streets and find more for the courts to convict, and THAT is when the populace will suffer angst and demand some change.
They don't have any choice. Judges send them people in prison vans, and then it's their problem.
This isn't a tech company hot desking staffers or pulling in home workers to save money. These are people sitting on a powder keg - I wonder why any of them do it and the best two responses I can come up with is that either no one will ever give them any other job or alternatively that they are doing their best to do good as they see it. I think option 1 is a clear product of having a situation like 162% we should thank the heavens above (and the people concerned) for option 2.
I doubt that there's a penny of bonus money in play.
I'm not sure I understand all of your comment, but the answer to this part is clear: release them and another 80% on top of them. Almost nobody (statistically speaking) in prison actually belongs there.
> I wonder why any of them do it > I doubt that there's a penny of bonus money in play.
You have discounted mental illness as an explainer. Some people who work in "corrections" exhibit signs of serious psychopathy, and the job seems to be a way of self-medicating.
I was flagging the challenge faced by administrators forced to deal with overcrowding. They do not have the mandate or authority to release any of their wards, but if they did I broadly agree with your approach.
I would argue that there are numbers of people who should be in prison, but I agree that the USA and UK appear to incarcerate vastly more people than necessary.
>You have discounted mental illness as an explainer. Some people who work in "corrections" exhibit signs of serious psychopathy, and the job seems to be a way of self-medicating.
I am biased as my mother worked as a prison officer for a while and I met some of her work mates. They did not appear to be divergent from the population. I am sure that there are some people in the prison administration system who are evil or mad, there are people like that in all organisations, but I doubt that they have the sway that is being attributed to them in the OP. Evil and madness on the part of prison staff is not responsible for the great part of the suffering inflicted by the system.
I don't think there's an easy answer. From a systemic perspective we are locked into a socio-political ratchet. It is far easier to argue for harsher treatment for "criminals", with zero political downside, than to argue the opposite. As long as prison seems to be something that happens to other people: darker, poorer, less educated, there is an empathic gap that exists that makes it hard for the average schmo just trying to get by with his 60 hours a week of work to care very much.
I can only hope that someday we'll look back on the fact that the United States had the second highest incarceration rate in the entire world as an absolute black mark, right up there with slavery and genocide, or colonialism.
It's plainly the Drug War that's filled prisons.
Sorry about your friend :(
There's a good piece at The Marshall Project discussing this, with an interesting interactive that illustrates how difficult it would be to dramatically reduce the prison population by only focusing on nonviolent drug offenders:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the...
The drug war was a massive overreach. It's not 100% of the overcrowded prisons problem though, they're related but somewhat independent challenges.
I suspect that much violent crime is also Drug War related. Robberies to buy drugs. Bad influences while imprisoned for drug-related offenses.
Few countries imprison such high percentages of their populations. What else could be accounting for that? Lead poisoning? Dysfunctional culture?
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/23/us/3-strikes-law-in-califo...
I may be somewhat biased. My mother was murdered--brutally and deliberately. The man responsible also threatened grandma. He's serving life in prison now. I have good reason to fear for myself and grandma if well-intentioned people let him free.
If intentional, cold-blooded murder isn't a good reason to keep someone away from others, then I wonder just how society is supposed to integrate that behavior.
But yes, ordinary non-violent offenses are not a good fit for prison, in general.
> Then they themselves also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?' Then He will answer them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me'. These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
America has a horrible problem with incarceration. It seems obvious but if the state takes away someone's rights (freedom) the state assumes a duty of care for those individuals. And a duty of care isn't extinguished because it costs too much or would be difficult to comply with or would be politically unpopular.
Specific to costs... if incarceration is costing too much then do something about the underlying root causes that result in incarceration.
Yes, some of these people have done unspeakable things, but they are being punished already. Does society itself need to continue to do unspeakable things to those convicted? Honestly, I thought we were beyond that, but I guess not. Is it any wonder that we accept torture of foreigners now when we've always accepted torture of citizens?
This is what happens when you put the prison service out to the lowest bidder.
And lets not even get into the part where the private companies running the prisons now have a vested interest in hiring lobbyists to provoke tougher sentencing.
But perhaps it would be easier simply to stop at Society doesn't think.
Talk to a US consular officer who's been at the job more than five minutes, then we can make some comparisons. Blaming privatization is a red herring.. Venenzuela prisons aren't a place I even want to spend five minutes as a visitor.
But do you really want to compare your country with the third world, or the first?
Isn't it time we stand up and simply fix something which is so clearly broken?
We are animal.
And some of us has more "animal" side of behavior. That's it. Please do not misrepresent my statement...
Your statement is dehumanizing. If you don't want it to be interpreted as such, then make better statements.
We can't tolerate or condone antisocial behavior, but it is a mistake to feel safe in the thought "we" are better than "them."
We are they, they are we.
This, so much this.
It's so easy to turn it into 'us' and 'them'
So many stereotypes, so much historical(and, of course, current) violence and bloodshed because someone convinces a population how 'they' are different than 'us', 'we' are better, therefore 'they' must surrender(and become like 'us') or 'we' will force 'them' to.
My favorite example? Extrajudicial killings of non-us citizens unilaterally declared to be terrorists. And since it's 'them', somehow it's moral. Terrorism is bad, but doesn't give us the right not to afford another human the protections of things we have declared to be owed to all men.
If 'We hold these truths to be self evident..." then why do we only apply them to US Citizens? (And then, take them away from some US Citizens, the ones that have been declared to be 'them' no longer 'us')
That said, I do think that the conditions described in the article constitute cruel and unusual punishment, at least by today's standards. I'm not sure what the framers had in mind; I'm sure 18th century prisons were not rose gardens either.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Snap-Understanding-Circuit-eboo...
and although a boring read, "Sex and War"
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-War-Biology-Explains-Terrorism-ebo...
for a different perspective on your statements. The violent impulse is probably available to all humans, and it is plausible to say that all humans under the right circumstances can manifest extreme violence.
So it becomes details. How are the various impulses moderated under various conditions. It is the precise opposite of black and white, in my opinion.
edit: I am not excusing violence or advocating we tolerate antisocial behavior. I am urging compassion and empathy for people whose brains have made one or more decisions devastatingly incorrectly as a result of what may be an extremely tiny variation in programming, or an edge case that caused their brains to make the wrong decision.
When I say "animal", I mean human as a kind of "animal". In terms of people killing people, that is a reflection of the "animal" side of human. Thus I use "animal".
If you think I mean they are "animal", and I am not "animal"; and I am better then them. Sorry, I do not possess that prejudice.
My question simply is: How we treat the "animal", which are people showing high-degree of animal instinct of a human, who killed other human?
That's not an implication that they should be treated as "animal".
That intent is naturally lost today - the mass incarceration of drug users being only a portion of a larger pie of injustice and horror committed on a daily basis in the US that includes other atrocities such as police brutality and civil asset forfeiture.
Obviously in cases where prisoners kill one another, in a sane world, the constable and other administration of the prison would be held accountable, as would any officers who betrayed their duty to let it happen. It is always someones fault you put individuals who we deemed untrustable in the presence of others to be placed in circumstances to harm others again.
Unsurprisingly, the reality is that locking people up is incredibly expensive. We spend more per prisoner than we do per dozen students in public schools each year. The practical costs of incarceration are huge, let alone the social and economic ones. It should be unsurprising the people are less receptive to tremendous taxes to pay for, by far, the highest incarceration rates in the world.
Do you have a source for that? The Code of Hammurabi seems to talk about imprisonment as the appropriate punishment for defaulting on your debt, and the ancient Greek seem to have used it for that reason as well.
The intent of modern incarceration, at least in civilized nations, is the recognition (through study) that punishment is not rehabilitative or particularly beneficial for society as a whole. To use prison as a punishment can only act as a deterrent, not as a remedy.
I think you could have looked that up yourself, but you're not here for answers. You've already made your mind up.
urban legend (the same type of BS like cats decimating bird population in Golden Gate park when it is mostly people who gather the eggs, and sometimes rats who proliferate when cats population is actively controlled).
Instead of eating prey himself, a cat may bring prey back into the den/house for the rest of the pack/pride (which in case of a house cat may be the humans living with the cat instead of other cats like it would be in wild). Just observe a pack of feral or wild cats. Obviously such behavior has nothing to do with "fun". And the killings here about prey. There is nothing about killing other cats. Btw, know any animal who developed cannibalism?
That is one of the main problem with attempts to address violence in human society - the typical starting point is thinking about it as a lost control over "animalistic urges" and having such a 110% wrong starting point it just goes nowhere. Like in AAA, the very first step is to recognize the truth - the violence has been natural driver and result of the development of our brain (chimps for example also demonstrate some types of "human" violence) - and from here we could finally start to move onto the next steps.
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/animal-cannibalism/
Do cats bring home prey as gifts? Yes. However, kitty cams have shown they also often kill and leave their prey.
These prisons are a way of training people to be criminals.
Most murders are unplanned and unrepeatable - the wife who snaps after years of neglect or emotional abuse. The husband who kills his 90 year old wife, of 70 years, in the old people's home. The argument between lifelong friends and an unlucky punch. (All cases I recall hearing in the news in the last few months).
Apart from anything else it's very unlikely they'll ever kill again. It's probable few, if any, of them expected to ever kill... Until they did.
They need rehabilitation, perhaps anger management or support, before they become unemployed, unemployable and institutionalised in a brutal prison system.
The pre-mediated murder or mass shooting are somewhat different as they required thought, perhaps much planning.
Of course they need imprisonment, but equally need rehabilitation, perhaps education, perhaps mental health issues, perhaps anger management.
The simple fact is prison, in and of itself, does not work. Other than as training at being a better criminal. In the US prison system I suspect it trains you to solve far more of your problems with violence - not fewer.
It might not be fashionable to suggest therapy, treatment, rehabilitation and education. It costs money after all. To not offer those, as a matter of course, is helping create lifelong criminals.
Of course there will be recidivism after rehabilitation. Mistakes too. How many people who leave prison now go on to commit more crimes? Most of them.
I think it's important to internalize this idea.
Whenever you hear of a violent and sickening act, ask yourself: under what circumstances would I do that?
Answering 'never' is a failure of imagination. Engaging honestly with this question is the path toward solving the problem of our capacity for harm.
There is still plenty of time to mobilize disenfranchised voters to perform a "regime change" to ensure that the people who gave us private jails, funding cuts for schools , increased corporate welfare, "war on drugs", and "tough on crime" hypocrisy are voted out.
It should also be very alarming how many primaries in the Democrat primary this year have demonstrated extensive systemic corruption of the party. Be it 7 "random" wins in Iowa, to past presidents using their authority and influence to shut down polling locations in Massachusetts for hours, to just this past week Arizona having its polling locations cut by 70% that produced waiting lines over five hours long, on top of mass relocation of voter registrations and many voters losing their party membership recognition in a closed primary.
While of course I will still vote for every position I can for the person I want to win (and never for the lesser of two evils as I am provided by the establishment) the system is not orchestrated to enable the people to actually do anything any more. It would require a tremendous amount of public action, and for almost all issues - including the ones this article brings to light - Martin Niemöller's quote "First they came ..." rings true moreso today than I could imagine possible. There is tremendous apathy in America, as people only become aware or active when it is too late and their liberties and freedom have already been taken, and for the rest as long as it is not impacting their lives they will ignore it because it is "too much work" to do anything about.
Programmer rails against randomness because it doesn't suit him. Film at 11.
> to past presidents using their authority and influence to shut down polling locations in Massachusetts for hours
Neither the Boston nor New Bedford locations at which Bill Clinton appeared (and I am setting aside whether it was right for Clinton to do so, because it appears to have not been illegal and the fine for such being all of $20 anyway) were closed at any point. Both remained accessible at all times.
But you know that, or you should if it matters to you.
> just this past week Arizona having its polling locations cut by 70% that produced waiting lines over five hours long
This is the result of the VRA being gutted by the Roberts Court and the Maricopa County government (hint: really really not Democrats) choosing not to establish nearly enough polling places.
But you know that, too. Or you should, if it matters to you. Because you are entitled to your opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
> the American people will once again be
> given only two choices for president
Not an American, but between saying that cons have it easy and the fact of mass incarceration in the first place, it seems that there's a certain mercilessness in American culture.
There's also a disturbing attitude towards (largely male) prison rape. It is completely acceptable to joke about it, even on national late-night television, and the attitude is clearly one of "prisoners are terrible sub-humans and deserve to be raped by their peers". It's really messed up.
Lots of results, most highly misinformed. People imagine that most/all prisoners get 3 meals a day, television, etc. Not true.
In Nigeria, incarceration rate per 100,000 people is 30. In Mexico, 196. In Brazil, 193.
In the US, 737.
I don't understand multiple occupancy cells in prison. Dangerous convicts are in prison usually for something unpleasant or violent that have done to another human being. Putting them side by side in a hen coop sounds like absolute stupidity. Unless of course the whole plan is to have them slowly kill each other off to remove the problem prone from society.
Do cells not have cameras? I would think it'd be feasible to detect fights with basic motion detection.
"The space itself appeared to be decomposing.
The front wall, next to the door, was made of corroded metal.
The paint on the wedge-shaped shelf had almost completely chipped away;
the beds were caked in rust;
and the floor underneath the toilet was stained brown and black.
Dust and crumbs accumulated in every corner."
Introduce less and shorter prison punishments into the laws so that there are simply less inmates?
This happened: http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2013/03/inmate-who-gave-b... (tldr, inmate delivers her baby in a cell, with no medical oversight, at all)
No criminal charges. They did shut down the jail, but likely for other reasons.
After the first inmate murder there is no consequence for further murder, you're there for the rest of your life anyway. It doesn't matter if you kill one or twenty cellmates.
For the prison this is probably a boon because their overcrowding problem is "solving itself".
I would also hope a commercial prison would be fined if inmates die while in its care.
The point of solitary confinement is to punish troublemaking prisoners.
But the US doesn't give a fuck about law, justice, or the Constitution.
The people should stop giving a fuck about their corrupt government. These problems will not be solved politically or non violently.
This is the consequence of having any person like the two highlighted in this article living and breathing and having the ability to interact with any other human. If you are going to lock them up and never let them interact with anyone ever again, then that is considered torture as well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-the-tort...
So the choice is to either let them kill each other (you can try to stop it, but so long as they have physical access to other people they will kill them for no reason), or you don't allow them that access and this is torturing them. Seems like a Catch-22.
For my money putting horrible people like this together is a way of letting them solve societies problems by killing each other. It's certainly not desirable to have this happen, but clearly nobody is solving it in any other way.