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Comment by ythn | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how you can have a humane prison not be a criminal university. I mean, in the old days, they would just throw you in cell and leave you there for years. Your meals would come in through a slot in the door and you would poop and pee in a pot. No face-to-face interaction with other prisoners. No shared cells. No recreational time in open areas where you can form cliques. The only communication that happened between prisoners was via tapping or other coded acoustics.

Allowing prisoners to interact face to face in open and closed environments is going to introduce these extra complexities of prisoners "poisoning" other prisoners.

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"I don't see how you can have a humane prison not be a criminal university."

By having it promote positive improvement and rehabilitation rather than purely punishment.

Here is what a humane prison looks like:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35813470 http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison

"A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members" ~Pope John Paul II

By treating prisoners humanely, a society is showing how it treats those who are at the bottom rungs of it. It is a reflection on the society itself.

A lot of people call those prisons "dorms" and they say that prisoners live in better conditions than a lot of people outside of prison.

And yet, they don't make the jump to the idea that maybe people shouldn't be living in worse conditions.

Definitely, I am a big believer in Housing First and affordable housing by allowing high density development, as it is a viable path forward for cities and it defends suburbs from pressure to redevelop much more destructive low density redevelopment.

I'm getting off-topic here but can you share some resources on how low density developments are much more destructive? I'm usually very pro low density housing (and also very anti high density housing) so I'd like to have some new perspectives on this. Thanks.

Consider this: My local road takes up ~40,000 square metres of space all in (road, front yards, houses, back yards). That houses 660 families. Near the local train station they'll be housing that same amount in <2,000 square metres of high density housing.

So to handle twice the population, we could either free up ~2,000 square metres, or re-develop the entire road two have twice the density, leading to the loss of most of the single dwelling houses and private gardens.

It's not so much that low density is bad, as that not having high density takes choice away once there's no more space and you have to start increasing density anyway, often in all kinds of suboptimal ways.

Maybe city planners should borrow some ideas from CS, namely how to handle destructive operations while maintaining O(1) average cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_array

Why can't we consider expanding to new non-developed areas in this scenario?

The main reason I'm anti high density areas is it's unhealthy: people are stressed, there's no sense of community, commerce space is scarce and extremely expensive to rent so { banks, supermarkets, estate agents } take all of them making any new commercial idea almost impossible to put through thus less employment too. I don't know much about this though, it's just my thoughts after living in very different areas and cities and how I feel about it.

>people are stressed

You ever asked us?

>there's no sense of community

Says who? Ronald Reagan?

>commerce space is scarce and extremely expensive to rent so { banks, supermarkets, estate agents } take all of them making any new commercial idea almost impossible to put through thus less employment too

I guess I'll go tell all the shops and such in Davis Square that they don't exist.

> Why can't we consider expanding to new non-developed areas in this scenario?

Because a lot of people want to keep relatively untouched nature too.

> people are stressed

I don't see any evidence that this is caused by high density living.

> there's no sense of community

Most suburban areas, in my experience, have little sense of community. Maybe small villages are different, but in the suburban areas I've lived, at most I knew my immediate neighbours. People often tend to drive too and from the places where they are involved in community activities. If anything, I feel more connected to communities that form separate from the residential areas, and there tend to be more of them in high density city centres.

> commerce space is scarce

Is it? Near me, the densest areas have plenty of available commercial units cheaply available.

More importantly: Building densely allow for far more flexibility with the rest of the space.

Ain't gonna happen.

It's a long chain of logic, but fractional reserve banking, at the levels we're seeing, prevents it.

Most of our money supply is created through debt. As a result, housing is bought through debt rather than owned. The competition for better homes drives prices astronomical. The only way to actually get affordable housing is to either move people where there is no competition (e.g. desert of Arizona), or to reduce reserve limits.

Fractional reserve banking generates trillions for big banks, and the electorate doesn't get it. It's not going away.

I implore you to take some time and read at least one or two credible papers on the subject, because your understanding of fractional reserve banking is frankly too misinformed to unpack in the space of a forum comment. Suffice it to say I've certainly never seen any indication that removing easy availability of credit results in positive outcomes for the classes who already lack in capital. I'll include some links for you to get started at the bottom.

What can be addressed is the concept of affordable housing. Housing, to a certain degree follows a pretty tight supply and demand curve; put simply if you want affordable housing, pressure your local government to green light permits to build affordable housing[2].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_theory_of_money [2]http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-cities-see-apartment-rents-f...

Not many here in Norway say that because here it is demonstrably untrue. Pretty much the only people who have to live in significantly worse conditions are illegal immigrants begging on the streets and sleeping rough.

It's not that socializing is the problem, it's that there is no enforcement -- your safety inside is guaranteed by nothing; so participation in a gang is inevitable as an outgrowth of the lack of safety.

In short, punishment should be banished away. Not banished to a certain location.

We as society wants that certain people do not live among us. But that does not imply they have to live in worst condition. So the solution, instead of prision have contained societies. Both private and public run. So then going to prision would mean relocating to one of the contained societies [1], completely upto the the "offender". In these societies they will have their own system of governence.

[1] They would also would be allowed to move to another country.

> They would also would be allowed to move to another country

If those countries are having them, that is. In medieval times banishment for the most part was equivalent to death (or turning to a life of crime as a bandit).

While a nice idea in theory, how would a contained society actually work? Prisons already are miniature societies (just generally not very humanely run ones). It'd still be a prison, albeit a larger one, wouldn't it? Worst case it'd be something like Manhattan in Escape from New York.

I'm not saying it couldn't work but it's not an easy thing to get right.

> how would a contained society actually work?

If a society is understanding enough to have CS, it safe to expect they would also not use CS for non-violent crimes.

So now what would CS for violent criminals with no skill look like ? Ok so this would be a prision/rehabilitation-center in traditional sense but with a twist that they can also leave provided the country have them.

That's wrong. It's false that prison was like you describe in "the old days". In fact, any statement about historical fact that begins with "in the old days", generalising wildly different realities across time and space into one short anecdotal tidbit is most certainly going to be wrong.

Take a look at humane prisons that work in other countries. If treating people humanely meant that folks learned more criminal ways, Norway would have an awful time with this. The opposite is true, however. For the most part, folks are committed to trying to make the prisoners a good neighbor upon being releases - from day 1 of being released.

What you describe - some of the prisons of the "old days" also produced ex-offenders that were seriously mentally ill. That is very easily the effect of having solitary of that sort for so many years. Even if you do wind up being able to mentally withstand the place, you get released with no knowledge of what has happened - which happens now, actually.

Can you provide a source that in the "old days" all prison was solitary confinement?

Eastern State Penitentiary is considered the first "true penitentiary" Wikipedia[1] has pretty good coverage of its history, including starting with an all solitary system.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_State_Penitentiary

* in the US.

We've certainly had prisons before 1829 elsewhere in the world.

Sure, there were prisons in ancient times too. I think the 1829 example may be more relevant.

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