Ramen noodles 'are most valuable US prison commodity', study finds
bbc.com
bbc.com
> Finding their jailhouse diet bland, monotonous, and insubstantial, inmates in the California penal system invent alternative meals. “Spread,” the generic term for these creations, describes the inmate-created foods most often built around a single ingredient, instant ramen noodles. Beginning with this noodle base, the inmates concoct variations that approximate their favorite foods on the outside, often those with distinctive flavorings and textures.
:P hahaha .... :( ....
We need a lot more compassion in the world in general. Is there some technique to make people or the world more compassionate?
It's hard to imagine anything else is cheaper than dried noodles, especially when purchased in the sort of bulk quantities that prisons would buy. We're talking a few cents per meal.
They're easy to prepare and like the article says: "cheap, tasty, and rich in calories".
It's still pretty cheap (depending on what you put in of course), and it's not that bad in terms of nutrients. But hey, it's more expensive than the "bricks 'n goo" they serve these days.
> It’s not that the authorities haven’t noticed the blandness. The food lacks strong flavoring and other distinctions by design. To appeal to the widest possible population, spices are added sparingly; even salt is omitted because of some inmates’ dietary restrictions.
However, it's also made to be nutritious and I don't think ramen would quality.
> While jail food is undeniably bland, it is nutritious, at least according to the standards followed by Title 15 regulations based on Section 6030 of the California Penal Code.
[1] http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/...
EDIT: Or a charity which distributes these.
It sounded like the inmates got just enough calories to survive, and often supplemented their diet by purchasing additional food with whatever money was given to them by family or was earned through jobs (which paid 10 cents an hour or something ridiculous like that). Ramen is cheap, has lots of calories, and lasts a long time, making it very popular.
They also made their own alcoholic concoctions by storing fruit and various other things in their mouths and spitting it into a plastic bag, letting it ferment over time. That was referred to as "pruno". Pruno was considered contraband and would be confiscated upon discovery, so it was hidden in places like the toilet to prevent discovery. Pruno often turned out to be toxic in some manner, and sometimes made inmates very sick. It didn't stop them from making it though.
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/matt-foley-in-p...
It was actually surprising to read that prisons in my home country Norway, which are significantly more humane are not really much more expensive than American ones. There prisoners often get to cook meals themselves. In some prisons they have their own unit with a proper kitchen. I guess part of the reason American prisons are relatively expensive despite the horrible treatment is that they spend so much money on heavy security measures. Norwegian prisons attempt to create an atmosphere that reduce the propensity for violent behavior and thus reducing the need for heavy fortifications.
Being humane can actually be cost effective!
Growing up in Denmark, I recall an incident on the news where someone drove a bulldozer through the wall of a prison. Only a handful of prisoners actually ran. The others decided to stay inside.
They are quite happy to do things that will allow prisoners to reintegrate. For instance, a friend of the family did something quite stupid and ended up in jail. He was still allowed out on weekends to teach me how to swim. With supervision of course, but his crime was violent you wouldn't expect someone with that sentence to be let out in the US system.
The flipside of course is you get a guy like Breivik. He basically gets the maximum, but for a nutter like him it's almost not even a punishment. He's like nothing more than his own suite, a playstation, and peace and quiet to write his ideas.
Denying him any chance to rightfully complain about prison conditions is probably the most effective punishment you can come up with.
When the Baader-Meinhof gang was thrown into inhumane solitary confinement, it and their hunger strikes and suicides made them martyrs to their cause, spawning a new generation of terrorists that picked up their banners.
Meanwhile, Breivik complaining that his PlayStation is too old and that he can't play the newest games makes him a joke figure.
Obviously this doesn't translate to all prisoners, but in cases like Breivik's, the priority is containing his ideology, not punishing the person.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/23157/how-superman-defeated-k...
This seems to have become a standard idea in American TV shows. It's usually something along the lines of a cop threatening a suspect into cooperating..."You wouldn't want to go to jail, a pretty boy like you would be reeeal popular in there."
I've noticed it even in mainstream shows that are otherwise not particularly violent or shocking. I'm pretty sure there was even a line like this in The Simpsons once. These references seem to go unnoticed by the same people who go crazy whenever anyone jokes about female rape.
Now I'm not saying that popular culture is necessarily an accurate reflection of reality, but it's terrifying to imagine that it might be, and even more scary to think that the American public are ok with that.
There isn't a lot that can be done about him though - a more punishing regime isn't going to change him for the better. At least in his cushy little suite he is kept away from the general populous reducing the harm he can do as much as (humanely) possible.
I'm sure he would still hold the same views, maybe even more so if he was made to live in Squallor. It may make people feel better, but I don't know if that is enough.
Also remember that people thought that what we call "white torture" today wasn't torture. Many people today, if you ask them, probably wouldn't think it is torture.
Did they ever think that this also include women prisoners -- and even teen prisoners?
It's a sick, twisted ideology that permits this.
I agree: you don't get my comment.
Note how I never wrote that "an adult male [being] raped is a lesser problem than either a teenager or a female [being] raped". Note also how my comment was an argument against prison rape.
What I alluded to is that most of the people who casually joke about prison rape, would never joke about female rape or teenage rapes.
So, what I meant is that they should consider prison rape under the same light, since it also includes those things -- which is an easier sell to make them see the brutality of the situation, even those that don't particularly care about a murdered being raped, etc.
The sentiment is worded much better that way. The other wording could too easily be interpreted as implying that the rape of men is better than the rape of women and children.
The death penalty can be abused, but there are some clear cases where it is the most reasonable solution. Charlie Manson has been in jail for 45 years; probably Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be kept alive for decades as well.
That's the (small) price society pays because:
> The death penalty can be abused
And history has repeatedly shown that there is no level of evidence that can stop someone being wrongly convicted.
And the death penalty is "the most reasonable solution" in those cases because? It's "too much" to keep people alive?
In that case, maybe don't have a system that gives life sentences with wild abandon -- e.g. for BS "3 strikes offences", etc., and has the biggest incarceration rate in the world by a wide wide wide margin.
Three strikes laws are idiotic, as are most manifestations of the US criminal justice system. I object to the knee-jerk reaction that the death penalty is inherently bad, in all cases, under any circumstances, and if you don't think so too, you're a terrible, awful, probably racist bigot.
Society can do much more than we give it credit for. Not all societies hold primitive eye-for-an-eye beliefs or worse.
>I object to the knee-jerk reaction that the death penalty is inherently bad, in all cases, under any circumstances
Well, societies that abolished it don't think so. At least their legislators and majority don't. Outliers will always think whatever they want (and grieving relatives of victims and such are the last that should be asked in those matters).
For me the death penalty is not different from things like torture, slavery, judicial rape, etc. Wrong under any circumstances.
Fine, then let's legalize euthanasia. Convicts who really prefer to die could do so. No need to the death penalty.
This is purely a power play and money machine of the political class (the true one percent). Prisons, if not the whole police state, are all products of the political class. It is there means to spread money to constituencies that they favor, punish those they don't like, and put away people they don't want to deal with. Oh, it also makes tons of money for local, state, and national, politicians.
The idea we put people in prison for drug use, financial improprieties, and such, never fails to depress me. Prison should be only for violent offenders. People who willingly harm others should be locked up. Then they should be prevented from harming fellow prisoners and also stopped from forming gangs/violent associations within.
However that later issue is overlooked because it feeds the cycle. Prisons make many people worse and that sends them right back to the system to make even more money.
tl;dr Prisons are profit centers of the political class.
In Europe, prisons are more focused on rehabilitation, whereas US prisons are more focused on punishment.
This can also be seen in the different sentences. Whereas in Norway (maximum sentence 21 years) or Germany (mostly out of prison after 15 years), you can be sentenced for life or even death in the US.
It obviously works out more expensive and doesn't seem really fair, but bad people must be punished!!1
Things are not that clear cut, you can't get "hard" sentenced to life (or death) in Norway but you can be sentenced to indeterminate-length "preventive detention": the sentence can be renewed for up to 5 years at a time indefinitely.
In the US, it's possible and not even that rare to end up with life sentences for things like non-violent drugs offenses and repeated petty theft (three strikes), so there are >150,000 people with actual life sentences. Plus all the people serving something like 80 years, which is notionally definite, but in practice also a life sentence.
If that's not manifestly unjust, I don't know what is. I have no idea how 3 strikes laws and mandatory minimums are constitutional in the USA, I'm no constitutional scholar (or American), but I'm fairly sure that it violates separation of powers.
Regardless, the above link is a very good reason for judicial discretion, among other reasons.
Not all of Europe. Here in the Netherlands we have the high security prison in Vught where there are no guards during airing time. So the guards put all kinds of nutters, murderers, and psychopaths in a big field together, lock all the gates, and stand on the other side looking. If bad happens, sorry can't do something about it, wouldn't be safe for the guards.
I'm deeply ashamed of this. We Dutch like to be so enlightened and moralistic but this sort of shit really kills it. We need to adopt the Norwegian system.
It's because American at its core is the place built by descendants of the religious nuts that were rightfully thrown out of Europe. As for new immigrants, they usually just adopt the prevalent national ideology...
Personally, I'm surprised and relieved that the federal government has recently decided to abandon private prison contracts.
It's a very positive and unexpected development, no doubt. But I'm disillusioned by the inevitability that public prisons will implement many of the same cost-savings with a priority over humane methods to decrease recidivism.
Most importantly, despite the federal sentencing guidelines, even many minor offenders will be incarcerated for sentences vastly exceeding your Nordic standards. Evidence shows that this is counterproductive, but it is supported by the voter, and won't likely end soon...
However the amounts of bail could be recalculated to be relevant to a specific prisoner's condition. A million dollar bail to a poor person might as well be 100 billion which is the same as no bail. That same bail to a rich person would be the equivalent to a $1000 bail to a poor person.
So bail shouldn't be eliminated but scaled appropriately to the financial situation of the prisoner.
The UK system also allows another person to stand as guarantor without having to put the money up front, which means there's none of the short term loan shark business of "bail bondsmen".
American prisons implement an underlying revenge culture. (Or "justice" as it is called).
You can argue all you want about cost and effect, but it all boils down to a fundamentally different way of viewing human beings that have made mistakes and what society wants from them.
/s
Do you think deterrence is ineffective?
Not as much as you'd expect. There are plenty of studies that confirm this (I'm too lazy to google them for you). The problem is, that when crimes are done, one does not usually think rationally or does not expect to be caught (or else he wouldn't do that in first place). Another big category of crimes (especially violent ones) are the ones committed out of passion, where severity of sentence does not play significant role either.
(It's also important that people are not punished when they're not guilty, which the US tends to forget. The other side of reinforcement learning. The tendency of US police to administer adhoc punishment up to and including execution on the street is a problem. You can't say "don't commit crimes or you'll be in trouble with the police" when simply driving while black can get you in trouble with the police.)
The evidence supporting it is very weak, especially the assumption the more punishment always leads to more deterrence. The more effective deterrence in many cases is increasing the probability of getting caught, not increasing the punishment for the few that do get caught.
When even The Bloody Code[1] didn't stop people from offending, you have to question the effectiveness of future punishment as a reason to not commit a crime.
The real question is not whether rehabilitation-based prison systems give better outcomes across factors such as reoffending and reintegration into society (they do, but at a perceived higher cost), but how to transition from a punitive system to a rehabilitative system.
These people have to put up with living in high crime areas where laws are generally not enforced, most people have no legal jobs and instead criminals and gangs set the rules for everyone.
What makes you believe that what you are doing in your culture is automatically applicable to certain US subcultures?
I can tell you from the experience we had here in Austria and Germany with Arab immigrants that our way of handling such issues does not work at all with them.
While a typical German is afraid of consequences should he get into conflict with the law and will stop and rethink what he is doing an Arab immigrant often wont.
That's because they are used to a much more cruel enforcement of laws, thus they regard our way of punishing them as a mere slap on the wrist and will continue with their behaviour.
You would be amazed if you knew how many of them got convicted 6,7,8 or even more times within the first year of arrival.
Just look at whats going on in neighbouring Sweden at the moment. Does this kind of liberal law enforcement work there?
Edit: Genuinely curious why this has 5 downvotes and no comments? It's on topic.
Also, the Arabic in your multilingual animation is gibberish, because all the letters are in their isolated forms.
It's fine for established HN users to bring up their projects/products in an on-topic way, as long as they don't overdo it participate on HN for more than just that.