HM Prison – A Survival Guide (2015)
prisonism.co.uk
prisonism.co.uk
IMO, the whole idea of prisons is inherently inhumane. We've really got to do better.
Obviously this brings up questions of the "dangerous to society" variety, but a minuscule percentage of prisoners are dangerous psycho killers.
[1] Most people think Marv is crazy, but I don't believe that. I'm no shrink and I'm not saying I've got Marv all figured out or anything, but "crazy" just doesn't explain him. Not to me. Sometimes I think he's retarded, a big, brutal kid who never learned the ground rules about how people are supposed to act around each other.
But that doesn't have the right ring to it either. No, it's more like there's nothing wrong with Marv, nothing at all--except that he had the rotten luck of being born at the wrong time in history. He'd have been okay if he'd been born a couple of thousand years ago. He'd be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody's face. Or in a roman arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him. They'd have tossed him girls like Nancy, back then.
The raison d'être of the society (and the state) is not to "accommodate" anything, especially not some particular aspects of human nature, but rather to suppress them, limit the "natural" freedoms -- in order to create a semblance of order and harmony among humans, which, in particular, makes it easier to control (and protect) them.
Some of these other views don't credit 'society' as something with a will or a reason, simply as an emergent property. That's not to say 'society' doesn't cause things to happen, but it does imply disagreement with the parent comment.
I absolutely agree that states are primarily instruments of suppression and coercion. I just think that equating state and society is not only incorrect, but also heads down a potentially dangerous path. Societies emerge from being social animals in proximity, states emerge from negotiations, coercion, or some combination thereof.
We are hierarchical creatures, even in a small group of friends hierarchy appears on its own. If you have a hierarchy the rest is just organizational details.
Sin City was a dark film, I never found it a model for cultural structure.
HINT = 15% of the prison population in California are sex offenders.
> HINT = 15% of the prison population in California are sex offenders.
Rapists and child molesters would both fall under the sex offender category, meaning 85% of prisoners are not convicted of those crimes (according to your post, which lacks citation).
Are you indicating that more than one in three California prisoners are convicted of murder? It sounds like you’re making a case for more than 35% of prisoners as murderes (15 + 35 = 50%). I’m not comfortable with that assumption without links to data.
[0] http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information...
EDIT: homicide != murder
I was myself confused by the comment I was replying to. I don't like when people say "hint, most people x".
I wanted to get better information about what the actual statistics were, because I didn't know what percent of the prison population were sex offenders, which was 15%.
This is my source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/16/sex-offender...
I'm not sure what my position on this issue is. But it appears that a decent percentage of people in prison in California are serious criminals, and although some are definitely marijuana offenders that should probably be released, I don't think its fair to call that the majority of the people in the prison system.
A classic example is Al Capone caught for tax evasion. A more recent one is OJ Simpson jailed for some break-and-entering bullshit because everyone wants to punish him for those famous murders.
I'm sorry "breaking and entering bullshit"?
The crime was armed robbery and kidnapping. And it was OJ Simpson who said that nobody could leave the room which brought up the kidnapping charge. All of this actually happened. Nobody disputes these claims. Nothing to do with breaking and entering but much more serious crimes.[1]
If a family member of yours was robbed in their hotel room at gun point would it still be "bullshit"?
Do I have to type that sentence again?
... well, it's not good. But is it kidnapping? My common sense tells me by then the system was biased against him. Mob justice, therefore, even if not from a wild, tar-and-feather variety.
I assume there are also a lot of people in prison that aren't rapists or murderers but still cause a lot of troubles if left to their own device. What should be done with these ones? I agree prison is cruel and inhuman and I'm all for better detention conditions, but I don't think it's realistic to suggest we should leave these people walk freely (or to suggest that they don't exist). What are the alternatives?
Marijuana at least in the US, is an example of where society is actually changing to accommodate people:
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/state-marijuana-laws-map-m...
Also the Opioid epidemic is finally getting the attention it deserves at the federal level in the US. I think we will see an end to the cruel policies that are in place:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-opioid-commissio...
The communists did this in the Gulag system, by putting the rapists and murders -- who had obviously been victimized by the previous system -- in charge.
It was deliberate and ideologically driven. The people who were imprisoned by the previous repressive system must have been innocent victims of that system.
But it's not. Prison is also a punishment for the person who committed the crime, and, if our prison system wasn't so messed up, could be a place for reform.
Merely keeping someone in a cell is a rather gentle treatment compared to how other cultures or other times treat/treated criminals.
Now we can discuss sentence lengths, prison sentencing for certain non violent crimes, etc. But I am sure I am not alone to have no sympathy for the idea that putting criminals in jail is violating their human rights.
I can buy that living without fear of murder or rape or even theft is a human right (we have a right to life, liberty, and property). I can even buy that locking con men away is desirable from the point of view of improving society as a whole. But raising that to the level of a human right seems much.
Nothing in that Wikipedia article says anything about being conned or deceived out of your property, and my question is whether a right to not be conned can be derived from that right. Do I have a fundamental human right to hold onto my property even if I am making a decision to give it up that other people think is unsound? Does that right prevent me from giving up my property? (There are, in general, rights that prevent you from doing things - for instance, I'd say that the right to liberty prevents you from consenting indefinitely to authoritarian government. Is this one of them?) Or do I have a fundamental human right to do with my property as I wish, and a right to not have my decisions second-guessed by the government?
For example, several jurisdictions believe that I cannot give up all copyright claims to some software I write, and that whatever I do, I maintain a "moral right" or "author's right" to the software, and even if I want to promise someone that they can literally do whatever with the software, the laws prevent me from doing that. I think this is a violation of my liberty, but clearly the people writing the laws think that I am being conned.
Also I think that our current system lets white collar criminals off too easily; they should be punished more severely.
This type of evolution is especially dangerous in a modern context because technology and globalization have taken the humanity out of our daily interactions and have therefore reduced the importance of altruism.
states want private prisons. prisons should be to rehabilitate. so pay the prison business only if it delivers. i.e. pay private prisons on a rehabilitation rate instead of simply the number of inmates.
it's not like you're expected to pay for damaged goods in a regular business transaction, so simply stop doing so with private prisons.
A lot of people, regardless of political persuasion, believe that the purpose of prisons is to punish those inside. No more, no less, and any "rehabilitation" is just something that happens alongside (and often in spite of) the real purpose.
Prisons are a dumping ground for people with personality disorders. You can't fix a personality disorder with rehabilitation, or with punishment. (Arguably you can't fix a personality disorder at all.)
Some people are relatively rational. They commit crimes for a variety of reasons, a good proportion of which are a direct outcome of poverty and/or economic abuse and/or racism.
The best way to rehabilitate them is to rehabilitate society so it doesn't push them into a corner, or create subcultures where crime is a reasonable survival option.
The people with psychological issues are much harder to deal with. Keeping them locked and away and occupied is more humane than trying to "punish" them, because the punishment is pointless and will have exactly zero effect.
Running prisons as a for-profit industry instead of a social service is barbarism, and ultimately just puts more criminals on the streets.
The (US) Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual" punishments in sentencing, but in my mind, losing years of one's life, which one will never get back, is significantly more cruel than, say, fifty lashes.
SCOTUS has said about the death penalty specifically that it is without a doubt cruel; however, it is pervasive, and therefore not an unusual punishment. Therefore there is no Constitutional violation. I suspect a similar argument in the inverse rules out corporal punishment. Fifty lashes, even if less cruel than decades in prison, is certainly a cruel punishment. It's also very unusual for 2017 America.
If punishment is rehabilitating, in average, the harder the prisons the nicer the people that come from them. We could check for instance, I don't know, Russia vs. Sweden or something like that.
What I personally appreciate the most is the simple fact of having dangerous people confined so that the danger to others (including myself) is no longer there.
Why do you think this?
It's hard to precisely quantify the violent versus non-violent crimes, so I'll be making some assumptions in my summary based on some educated guesses about the kinds of crimes that land you in each category:
Non-violent: 70%
Violent: 30%
Violent: 47%
Property: 17%
Weapons: 5%
It's not obvious to me that the "vast majority" of prisoners are not dangerous.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/oecd-homicide-rates-chart-201... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_S...
I did a quick calculation based on probably obsolete numbers, but I got a homicide rate of around 4.8 per 100000 of which 2.7 are with guns, leaving 2.1 without which is still higher than most European countries. (check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... )
>Americans stab, beat, and bludgeon more people to death that most countries entire murder rate. The US is a violent country even without counting the guns.
Which is still not backed up. However, I am surprised to see the stats on the murder rate and gun violence all the same.
I'll agree that it's nice having them off the streets, though I hate knowing that we release people knowing that on average, over 40% for reoffend within their first year.
how about: prisons turns thousands of lowly offenders into hardened, violent criminals that will be out in innefective parole a few months down the road?
doesnt that make you more scared than "but at least 5 of them will be back in prision before commiting any seriously violent crime"
When we place all those people together, in a setting where violent assaults are shockingly common -- and, in particular, the constant threat of rape -- we are definitely making you less safe, not more safe. One might argue that at least the "dangerous people" are preying on other "criminals" while they are inside, but how many of those victims end up becoming MORE dangerous to you and your family due to years of state-supervised abuse?
If prisons had to refund the state when there was an instance of recidivism, they'd have an incentive to insure former prisoners were able to integrate back into society again.
At some point I reread Isaiah 61:1, "...to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound...," and it's been bugging me ever since that prison is, as far as I know, not a concept in the Judeo-Christian worldview. Isaiah doesn't want to proclaim liberty to the unjustly captive and release to the unjustly imprisoned; he's proclaiming release to everyone.
All the examples of people going to prison in the Bible that I can think of - Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, John the Baptist in Judea, Paul and Silas in Philippi, etc. - are of "good guys" being thrown in prison by "bad guy" governments. I can't think of an example where God says to build a prison, or where a follower of God puts someone in prison, and the Bible says they did a good thing. (Maybe I'm forgetting something, though; I'd appreciate correction here.)
For all that Western culture seems to be proud of our Judeo-Christian morality, did we inherit this one keystone of our whole thing from pagan concepts of how to run a justice system?
And is it my religious duty as a Christian to fight for release for all the prisoners?
I think it probably is.
Prisons are pretty inhumane: this has been recognized in the modern era by people as disperate as Johnny Cash and Eugene Debs[0] (and many others besides).
The cloak of "rehabilitation" or "correction" is really just a way of making punishment more paletable -- and as others in the thread have commented, that is actually what many people (in the US and Britain certainly) believe prisons are for, and ought to be for. But punishment doesn't improve society: recitivism rates remain very high even with very brutal criminal justice systems, and obviously don't deter. Even the "Bloody Code" in the 19th century in the UK didn't work, otherwise crime would have died out.
The causes of crime are various and complex. If we want to reduce crime and bring about justice and security for everyone, we need to address those causes. And as Debs wrote about rather eloquently after spending time in prison, all the American system has done for hundreds of years, by and large, is take people in desperate circumstances and make those circumstances even more desperate. It essentially exacerbates the causes of crime in countless instances.
Thus the fight for real justice and real peace has to be the fight not just on behalf of victims, but on the perpatrators as well. It prevents more victims, for one. But Christian duty, and Christian compassion, also demands caring attention to everyone, even people that have done truly terrible things. This isn't easy, or even pleasant, but that's one of the real radical roots of Christianity.
That struggle for justice and peace isn't as simple as "open the gates of the prisons, and let people do what they want." A lot of people would try to reduce such an argument to that. It's a process, and a path, and taken seriously, we could find ourselves at the end of that path with a society that is fairer, happier, more peaceful, and which has no need of prisons.
(And as a further aside of personal interest, that question of radical Christianity and the very real attention to the precepts of the gospels was one of the things that led George Fox to found the Quaker movement, which was also for a long time considered insidiously radical, and violently surpressed: largely because the Quakers refused to swear oaths or participate in war. The Peace Testimony of the Quakers -- also often treated in reductive terms along the lines of "oh, so you don't fight to defend anyone then" -- is pretty powerful stuff, that acknowledges the complexities of conflict and violence[1], but also the causes of conflict and violence, and seeks to end violence by putting an end to the causes of it[2].)
[0]: https://archive.org/details/wallsbars00debs
System here is very different in other ways such as being in a 200+ inmate dorm is the standard instead of cells, and there's dozens of rules set by inmates none of which were in this guide. You also get a 'prison consultant' if you can in the US if you are pleading guilty, they help you choose your own prison as part of the plea deal such as Madoff who's prison lets him teach other inmates economics.
I haven't been to prison in the UK or the US however what I've seen of both, the US system seems straight up about making money over anything else. I'd hope the UK system isn't this way although I fear it likely is going that way.
2 in a cell is common.
Until the 90s they never had indoor plumbing either, only buckets in the cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slopping_out
I believe it was the squalid conditions that sparked the unrest.
The two most serious ringleaders are both now free, or were in the most recent doc, and are doing fairl well. One is fond of handing out papers with motivational or philosophical thoughts on them and the other now has his own gym.
I fear the same, for example:
"On 16 December 2016, some 600 prisoners took part in a riot at HM Prison Birmingham, a prison in Birmingham, England, operated by G4S.[71] The disturbance was described as the worst in Britain since the 1990 Strangeways riot." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G4S#Activities
Perhaps the most important single change was the introduction of the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme. Woolf recognised something that seems obvious in hindsight - prisoners on a bread-and-water regime have little incentive to comply with prison rules, because they have nothing to gain and very little to lose. Offering small luxuries like the right to wear your own clothing, access to a games console or a small amount of discretionary spending gives prisoners the opportunity to make rational choices about their own circumstances.
In 2013, the Conservative government made the catastrophic decision to "toughen up" the regime and withdraw parts of the IEP scheme, while also cutting prison expenditure and staffing ratios. The results were entirely predictable - a huge increase in prison violence and disorder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_Strangeways_Prison_riot
http://www.doingtime.co.uk/how-prisons-work/how-do-prisons-a...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/28/michael-gov...
Edit to say that I agree with your point that theft is theft.
I find it hard to believe !
An archer is £2000, the amount Conservative Party deputy chairman Jeffrey Archer was caught paying a prostitute to keep quiet about his allegedly being a client of hers.
I first heard this usage on The New Statesman (the Rick Mayall TV comedy), but it may have originated elsewhere.
It gives keen insight into the cultural mindset of victimization that produces the persistent underclass. From the overview: "Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives."
As Alain de Botton once put it, in England the poor are "unfortunates", in America they're losers.
In Dalrymple's world, elites have a duty to set the tone and the agenda; and they are instead shirking from making judgement calls and saying "good is good, bad is bad".I don't agree much (we have elites telling us how to think as it is), but he points in the general direction of something without hitting the bullseye.
I've known a bunch of people who were on the other side and the common takeaway is, 'Do your own time.'