Jails are replacing visits with video calls–inmates and families hate it
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Anyone caught suggesting something is too much punishment is not "tough on crime". They want the bad people to win (so don't vote for them!). Reducing sentence length, improving prison conditions, trying to actually help those on prison, that's all just weakness, that's not being tough on crime.
Who cares that recividism is more expensive than rehabilitation- the point isn't to save money or reduce crime, it's to punish the bad people. I mean, if we stop thinking of them as bad people, how am I supposed to know that I'm a good person?
It would be interesting to see children struggle with the moral dilemma, is there any movie like this already that I'm not realising?
I remember hearing shouting matches as I left Civil War about who was right, who was on the side of good.
And Infinity War leaves a lot of people with a sense that maybe Thanos wasn't so bad.
I still like the idea of wiping half of life in the entire universe though, it works well from the narrative perspective.
Same goes for the much maligned Marvel's Inhumans, where it's not clear exactly why the Royal Family is deserving of any sympathy.
Most comic book villains lack any redeeming quality (largely on purpose, to remove any chance for empathy and justify the heroes' wanton destruction), but DOOM is refreshingly multi-dimensional for a villain.
Spoliers
Spoliers
Spoilers
Spoilers
Spoilers
Ozymandias did unify the world, after all.
It's great because it divides the present heroes as well, with Rorschach the absolutist morality on one side, Dr Manhattan as the complete pragmatist on the other, and everyone else somewhere in between.
Ironically I'm not sure it makes a difference. I think in a kind of perverse voyeuristic way people like to live through them, but stay safe in the knowledge that they "could never do that". Like the kind of excitement you got from being around the naughty kid at school, without actually risking getting in trouble.
This is also one of the few shows where they try not to kill the bad guy every time.
That's actually fairly common in TV shows. Police procedurals, for one example, where they try to kill the bad guy every time are kind of exceptional.
Lots of movies with bad guys and good guys do that, but mostly just without...
> leaving the viewer undecided on whether they support the good or the bad guy.
(Or, if they do that for a while, they resolve it, for most viewers, by the end.) In fact, any movie with a well defined “good guy” and “bad guy” does so specifically because it either doesn't do that or resolved it before the end. Otherwise you have at best a winner and a loser.
OTOH, lots of movies that aren't action movies are driven by character conflict where there isn't a well-defined bad guy and good guy, and where the protagonist is differentiated from other characters by focus and arc, not by superior virtue, and where it's quite possible to disagree on whether the protagonist or someone with which they had a conflict was more right, because “good guy defeats threat of bad guy” isn't the story model.
Started with a black and white view of good vs bad, but started pulling that apart as by mid way through there was no appropriate label for any side. You began to question what was good and what was bad and why.
If you restrict the scope to just human interaction on ships then you retrieve the good-bad spectrum. A caste system, a military dictatorship, black markets, etc.
Avatar: The Last Airbender the cartoon tv show is a perfect example of this. For kids and adults alike.
Also Star Trek DS9 did an excellent job of getting into the villains heads, spending time with them and showing their perspectives and motives.
And even the "good guys" did some questionable stuff, e.g. in In the Pale Moonlight. But that's my favorite Trek episode ever out of all the shows, so I'm not complaining
For incredible kids TV shows that emphasize empathy for "the bad guys", demonstrate the flaws and weaknesses of the "the good guys", and does so in a way that encourages personal growth, integrity, and compassion over moral nihilism as a response, then you can't do better than
* Steven universe
* Avatar: the last Airbender
Your parent isn't making the "for kids" a requirement, which explains many of the suggestions here, including "The Wire".
> *"I would love a popular movie (maybe even one for kids)"
Kids is also relative: you need to take the kids themselves into account to know what may be appropriate for them.
I appreciate you including that. When media does trend towards "reality is complicated" very often it feels like to me its ending with the lesson 'everybody hurts everyone so just get used to it and stop classifying anything as wrong or right.'
Has society gotten so corrupt that we can't see that almost all the "good guys" are total villains compared to the moral and ethical norms from even as recent as 30 years ago?
Go back further, and the good guy "sacrificed" himself or his own interests for the benefit of others.
Edit: Rocky isn't a great example, but leaving it in because at least it was inspiring to try and rise above his place in life honestly.
I added a few examples in another comment. Even Rambo sacrificed his own safety and freedom to help rescue POWs.
Modern day heroes are all a bunch of whining self-centered children. Just go watch any super hero movie today for a good example of that.
It's almost a badge of honor to be morally ambiguous. Compare a list of protaganists, how many are anti-heros? Do we even have any real good guys in movies and tv these days? Even Superman has been turned into a murderer for this generation.
A few examples from popular TV:
Walking Dead: everyone is a murderer. Murder is justified consistently.
Billions: It's hard to know who to root for, they are all rotten. The righteous people are the "bad guys"
Scrubs: All the characters are morally bankrupt (compared to 30 years before it's time)
Ironman: A selfish rich asshole.
Batman: (ok, he was always an anti-hero from day 1)
Deadpool: Do I need to explain this one?
Wicked: A play about how the evil witch is misunderstood.
The Shield, The Wire, modern Star Trek vs old Star Trek, the list is too long...
There has always been corruptions, lack of morals. That's not my issue, it's that today, there simply isn't even close to a minority of actual real main protagonists that are selfless.
I think people find good people trying to do what is right just boring these days.
/rant
You call Iron Man a selfish, rich asshole. But this is the character who shut down his defense contracts worth billions because he found out that his weapons weren’t being used the way he thought. He also sided with the UN (or whatever equivalent) against his team, in deference to traditional hierarchical authority. If anything, his morals are simpler than many other modern characters. He’s just not as flat as the Superman written for Reeves.
This is one of the reasons why I actually like the X-Men movies a lot (at least the 1st ones), while I hate most superhero movies. I find the character of Magneto, with his backstory and his relationship with Xavier really interesting.
It's called Magica Madoca. It completely flips the roles by the end.
Grendel, Grendel, Grendel[0] Superb children's animation from the 80s. Though you might be very hard pressed to find it. A retelling of Beowulf from the monster's point of view whilst paying homage to Monty Python. He's big, bad, misunderstood and ultimately dies when our human hero Beowulf ambushes him. Never full of Disney shmaltz and cute, deep enough to give you plenty of talking points.
The big scary Ogre comes to the rescue instead of Prince Charming. Something about government plans for land and evil fairy God mothers.
--- And then there is Frozen,
A Girl is taught to conceal, not feel, and turns the whole place into an icicle and is in many ways considered the wicked person.
Painting a good VS bad worldview has been heavily used for mass propaganda and it became very effective starting from WW2 due to television and movies.
[1] https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/07/the-just-world-falla...
And it's not necessarily just because of the shape of post-WW2 society either: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/03/beware-covert-war-mora...
- torture is okay if someone is a suspect
- jokes about being raped in prison
- all of the shitty treatment suspects get in police procedurals and detective shows, at the hands of the ‘heroes’
Even if they turn out to be innocent, it’s still like they’re guilty of not being innocent enough which justifies the abuse, while the apparent good guys are celebrated for being utterly sociopathic.
Or to put it another way, assuming that I share a common moral sense with my fellow citizens, I would much prefer a legal system that is strongly associated with morality than one that is not.
If your objection is that the law feels to retributive, then that is a separate issue.
To maintain existing power structures
Perhaps it's meaningful the other way around, too. So many people I see don't want more rigid tax laws, because morals are enough. I argue that morals guiding tax laws only cause to harm those good enough to have morals following the tax laws.
It would seem morals should perhaps guide the desired end result of the law, like no killing your neighbor, but the laws to get to that end state might be counter intuitive. Something Americans suffer greatly from grasping.
The issue with morality based laws is that morals are subjective. I would prefer a legal system with absolutely no morality - instead being based off of reason and logical conclusions. Being explained well enough in layman terms that people can see why the law is the way it is. "Pay your taxes for schools and roads. Don't kill you neighbor because you wouldn't want to be killed. Don't steal because you wouldn't want to be stolen from."
Morality based laws is how you end up with "It's criminal to be a homosexual. Skirts must pass the knee. Cannabis and alcohol are only for bad people. You must be [religion] to be moral, because only immoral people aren't part of [religion]".
Reason and logical conclusions are not contradictory to a citizenry's moral intuitions, but are orthogonal to them.
Existing laws in the US are largely based on protestant morals. That's kind of the point I was going for: morality based laws can change on a whim once the publicly held views of what is moral changes and that should be seen as a bad thing and it is unfortunate our current laws are so heavily rooted in morality instead of reason. Also, the two can overlap! I'm not saying they never can, I'm saying they sometimes don't. And the times in history where they don't overlap is where you'll see many of the largest crimes against humanity committed simply because it was "legal (and by extension: moral)" to do so.
So many people seem content in their assumption that the state is essentially benevolent and wise and on their side.
Even with the recent spate of ridiculous arrests and prosecutions we've had over freedom-of-speech issues (which some of us find terrifying), you get this attitude of "well, it seems a bit harsh, but he did break the law!"
I like to remind people that you don't need to look very far back for examples of when the state got it very, very wrong (by modern standards of morality). The illegality of homosexuality, and the cruel punishment inflicted on people like Alan Turing, is the most obvious example of this.
But in any case, as Manuel De Landa says, all real systems are combinations of both meshwork (associative freedom) and hierarchy (imposed structure) -- that often transform into each other. http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
This manifests itself in viewers electing politicians who are more tough on crime than the last election.
Without empathy, and very little attention to the matter , could you expect any different result ?
The action is under consideration because it causes some benefit, worth $A.
The action may cause some public-relations fallout, which in turn will cause some amount of lost business (or analogous malus). The total losses caused by public-relations effects are a continuous random variable; and a complicated one, because the causality chain between action and the final losses involves multiple random events.
But, it has some expected value, $B > $0. (Disregard outliers, so as to better approximate the median outcome rather than the mean outcome.)
Finally, the action will inevitably cost some resources to implement, worth a total of $C.
(Again, all three quantities $A, $B and $C are nonnegative.)
We can then evaluate whether the action may be taken. That question is equivalent to the following:
"Is it legal? And if so, then does it hold that $A > $B + $C?"
(In the larger context, then, if multiple actions may be taken, then choosing which single one should be taken is a matter of maximizing that same inequality rather than truth-testing it.)
* * * * *
Why should we use any decision-making process other than the above?
Equivalently: why should we take into account any further "morality", beyond merely legality plus long-term expected-value for oneself?
That's why.
That logic is exactly the rational thing to do, provided that settlements are the only consequence of that flaw.
If, on the other hand, this being the real world, there is some probability that customers will discover this flaw (e.g. reading a news article about such a crash-and-burn) and thereby demand fewer cars, causing fewer or cheaper sales ... then that also affects the calculation.
So, aside from this quote representing some degree of sloppiness, which can't be solved with "morality" ... I don't see the problem here.
Your proposed framework would make for a silly Ayn Rand book or two, but little more.
If they were important, then there would be economic value to them.
(And to some extent this is in fact the case: even once the de Havilland Comet's metal-fatigue issues were compensated-for and recalls completed, nobody wanted to fly on it, so it became a commercial flop, and now the air-transport leader is Boeing not de Havilland.)
What justifies this statement? It seems nearly mind-bogglingly false to me so I would be interested to hear support for it.
If there are two alternate (competing) goods, and one is cheaper but the other is "Produced Ethically in Accordance with X Standards", then each person chooses whether that certification - and the qualitative difference it signifies - matters to them enough to pay the difference in price between that product and its cheaper competitor.
Or, to use another example elsewhere in this thread: if someone is in the market for a car, and one of the cars that meets their criteria is the Pinto, then it is up to them to decide whether the reduction-of-risk of fuel combustion justifies buying a more expensive vehicle that isn't a Pinto.
In either case, the macro-level effect will be that some portion of customers will buy the inferior product, and some will buy the superior product, and if there is sufficient disparity in the quantity-demanded, then the suppliers have greater incentive to produce the product with the higher quantity-demanded (but any quantitative mismatch between supply and demand will cause temporary fluctuations which will quickly self-correct, preserving the equilibrium in the long run). Ergo, if a good is superior in some way such that that superiority is "important", then that good will outsell any competition that lacks that quality.
How do you think Ford communicated with pre-sale consumers re: their product's inadequately reinforced rear end, insufficient crumple zone, "essentially ornamental" rear bumper, and increased risk of death secondary to fire or combustion? Under your scheme, how do consumers who wish to avoid death by fire learn of these defects? What economic interest does Ford have to disclose the problem if the deaths are cheaper than fixing it?
"In the [Pinto] memo, Ford estimated the cost of fuel system modifications to reduce fire risks in rollover events to be $11 per car across 12.5 million cars and light trucks (all manufacturers), for a total of $137 million. The design changes were estimated to save 180 burn deaths and 180 serious injuries per year, a cost to society of $49.5 million."
If people read the news, some nonzero amount equal to the amount of lost Pinto sales. If the competition has been crash-tested and the Pinto isn't, then Ford was already continually losing money by losing the "non-cheapskate" market segment.
> Under your scheme, how do consumers who wish to avoid death by fire learn of these defects?
Read the news, be mechanical engineers, prefer products that have been given favorable ratings by independent crash-test firms, or start an independent crash-test firm.
(No, I have no idea whether crash-testing was already a thing when the Pinto came out. Regardless, such things are, generally-speaking, how one solves these information problems.)
I think we can end this here. The idea that average Americans should "be mechanical engineers" just to not die in a preventable fire is insane and really not worthy of further discussion.
Thus, the "economic" in "economic value" is actually redundant.
And if something has no value, to anyone ... what importance could it have?
(except perhaps in the history books, e.g. the now-bloodstained clothes that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria wore when he was assassinated)
This seems rather elementary/tautological/Econ-101 to me.
If it does, it's only because you're deliberately engaging in tautology.
Not all human value can be expressed in monetary terms. At a minimum, market forces cannot and will not raise the dead any time soon. In death there is no recourse that will make you whole. No amount of money will restore the value to you. That's why regulation and prevention exists – because the market can't cheat death.
Now, they did do a recall for a problem with the cruise control cutoff switch possibly leaking brake fluid. But not included in that recall was any damage that leaked brake fluid might have done to the anti-lock brake control module, or any of the other electronic or electrical components located beneath the potential leak site.
Such parts can be corroded by leaked brake fluid, causing electrical shorts and burnt-out components. And the brake fluid is itself quite flammable. Your Ford Windstar can burst into flames while you are at speed on a highway. Or it could simply light itself on fire sitting unattended in your driveway and turn itself into a total loss. Most of the time, it just drains its own battery or kills all the instrument gauges in the dashboard.
No recall for this problem. And yet, the vehicle has already had several previous recalls, including one for the rear axle potentially breaking in half. This leads me to believe that there is another term, D, for the estimated dollar amount for a loss to brand value due to doing another recall.
But then again, "Found on Road, Dead" didn't come from nowhere, so I'm not sure how much value is left there.
Did you pick that example because of the Ford Pinto case? In case you didn't know about it, that's exactly the cost/benefit analysis that Ford did when they discovered that the gas tank on the Pinto would rupture if the car was hit from behind at 31 mph or greater. Here's the infamous internal memo:
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/tortsprof/files/FordMemo.pd...
Look at Table 3 on page 6. Paying $200,000 per death would cost $49.5 million. Strengthening the tank at $11 per car would cost $137 million. Clearly it was cheaper to pay settlements on the deaths.
That merely shows that tort settlements at that time didn't have an accurate price on human life. $200,000 is about $1.13 million in today's money, which is only about 7 years of senior-dev salary. An early death usually costs more than 7 years of healthy life.
If we assume that the median car-fire death actually had 20 years of healthy life ahead of them, instead of 7, then we can conclude that typical settlements should have cost about $500,000 (in the same 1973 money) instead of $200,000.
This would have raised the total tort cost estimate to $123 million, at which point the two figures are close enough that the entire discussion would have ceased to be worth the amount of C-level labor that must have gone into it.
(The above also assumes that one's own life is worth as much as one can earn prior to death-by-natural-causes. I have yet to find evidence to disprove this hypothesis with respect to my own life ... but some people feel that life is even more valuable. If those people were to perform the same process as I did above, then their conclusion would be even more powerful than mine.)
When you underprice something you have, don't be surprised to find yourself in a drastic shortage of it.
It avoids the hard question grandparent asked. Legality only partitions behaviors into legal and illegal. Morality is more like a partial order which lets you compare behaviors.
Morality then is clearly more general and must inform legality not the other way around. Which is to say, just because you aren't breaking the law doesn't mean you are a good person. And further, how should we construct legal systems which are moral?
Yes, it is. The comment I was responding to, appears to assert that there is something more to it; some kind of "morality". I question the purpose of following it, when it can only possibly cause one to make decisions with lesser expected-value (i.e. self-sabotage).
This process is still achievable (called 'perekovka' by the Soviets), but it can take whole generations, and a great deal of power.
Besides, when the law isn't anchored in commonly shared sense of morality, you'll basically have no other option but a politically oppressive system (to balance this factor out).
Which of course is reminiscent of how other exploited people were dehumanised - people of color (slavery), jews (pre-WW2), Japanese (WW2, off to concentration camps after Pearl Harbor), "enemy combatants" (off to the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp and numerous unmentioned 'black sites', clear violations of any international convention but everyone turns a blind eye), etc.
The US as a whole is a dick.
For all of them? What about the wrongly convicted? We know that a certain percentage of those found guilty of murder are later found to have been innocent. Victims of rape sometimes, years later, admit that they lied.
When your loved one, your child, is wrongly found guilty of such a crime, should we give them the death penalty immediately, or let them rot in a hellish prison for a few years first?
Nothing is a simple as you'd like it to be.
Sometimes they lied, sometimes they identified the wrong person, sometimes they were coached into it by someone else. Ex-wives frequently accuse their ex-husbands of rape, and also evil parents sometimes coach children to allege the other parent of molestation.
A huge part of justice system is exactly that, justice for the victims. They want the offender to be punished and pay for harm they caused. It would be unfair to the victims if govt was easy on the offenders.
Edit:
Depends on which end of spectrum you think humans are responsible for their own actions. Between,
1. People are merely the product of a zeitgeist.
2. People are 100% responsible for their own actions.
Most people think human nature is somewhere in between and our justice system reflects that thinking. Any rant saying only 1 is the right way to think about justice system has never been personally victimized or brutalized and would be singing a different tune if their loved one was a victim of some senseless/sadistic behaviour by another human being. People who live in crime free neighborhoods love to theorize about how we can be so kind of criminals and that will bring the best out of human beings.
Also wondering if ' there is a lot of evidence' proving that rehab works long term in reducing crime.
What good does that do anyone? How does that make a net-improvement to the world? How does that "payment" work, exactly?
The victims' right to sadism should not trump society's right to reduced crime in the future. What we do to prisoners today increases recividism, increases crime.
The idea that a victim would feel better by knowing that the perpetrator is suffering is exactly revenge by proxy.
Nothing like the good, old reductio ad absurdum. Two can play that game, but it prevents any meaningful discussion.
Let me simplify it then, with no logical fallacy: If harming those who commit crimes is a good thing, why not do it more? Why not make it worse? And who gets to decide how much is enough?
Because proportion is a good thing, too - and is pivotal for the whole concept of justice.
> And who gets to decide how much is enough?
The same instance that decides what is and what is not a crime. Ultimately: society, in one way or another. "Implementation details" depend on the era and the civilization.
It's absolutely the case that an effective justice system needs to make bad actions much more expensive than good actions. This is there it discourage people from taking a potentially easy-for-them-but-bad-for-victims-and-society approach.
But it's also the case that there are people who simply lack the facilities or resources to recognize this situation. Or people who's situations are so dire that these deterrents don't matter. For those people, rehabilitation is the only path forward.
The more rehabilitation we can offer, the less brutal our punishments need to be. And the more opportunities we can provide people to succeed within our modern social framework, the more compelling modest punishments will be.
Do we really have the right to the victims that they have an attitude problem if they don't forgive their offenders. The comfort of our crime free existence is partly possible due precisely 'medieval attitude' .
> more rehabilitation we can offer, the less brutal our punishments need to be
Is there any proof to this. Would you personally accept possibility of higher crime in your neighborhood to carry out these experiments?
> the more opportunities we can provide people to succeed within our modern social framework
This is such a non solution. Yea we want to provide more opportunities for everyone, yea we want to live in crime free societies.
People who haven't been personally victimized by a brutal crime have no right to take moral high ground about the attitudes of victims. I cannot even begin to imagine the range of emotions victims go though.
People who have the moral ideals about this topic are ironically the people least affected by crime in general. Its a privilege to be on a moral high ground, who wouldn't want to be there, feels so good.
Pardon me, perhaps you're in a country with a "crime free existence." In my country, every week brings new atrocities and mass shootings. I'd expect such an effective strategy to perhaps have a lower total incarceration rate for victim-less crime and be better at prosecuting things like rape and murder.
> This is such a non solution. Yea we want to provide more opportunities for everyone, yea we want to live in crime free societies.
"Lock people up because it makes victims feel better" is equally unproductive, and we need only look at America's prison population vs our crime rate relative to our peers to see it.
> People who haven't been personally victimized by a brutal crime have no right to take moral high ground about the attitudes of victims. I cannot even begin to imagine the range of emotions victims go though.
> Its a privilege to be on a moral high ground, who wouldn't want to be there, feels so good.
Actually, it is an awful burden. But I don't think that pointing out "a failing, unfair system is not working" is a moral mountain to lecture down from. Your mileage may, of course, vary. But if you think you can browbeat me by suggesting that we must only listen to the most extreme opinions on violent crime by victims of said crime? It's both my right and duty within the context of my citizenship to disagree. I understand some people may passionately disagree, and I accept that conflict. I'm sorry if it's troubling, but I believe punitive justice is observably and obviously flawed and I will not support it simply because you say so.
> more rehabilitation we can offer, the less brutal our punishments need to be
Do you have anything to back your main position on this matter. I am curious to learn and open to changing my position.
My buddy firmly believes that the system is broken, just like myself. Yet, he believes it's broken by being too lax on criminals. He thinks we should be more like his home country, where "They leave their doors unlocked at night because if you steal, you lose a hand".
While I disagree with him, I'm not actually aware of facts on this. I know some countries have great success with rehabilitation methods, but what about more "harsh" countries? Is it compared often?
Jail is just modern version of that practice: hands are not cut, but whole body is jailed (temporary).
A spouse who kills after finds their partner in bed with someone else is what is traditionally called a 'crime of passion'. Maybe they would have committed that crime even if a policeman was looking over their shoulder.
A person who pockets a cell phone left unattended in a bar may be an equally spur-of-the-moment decision - but we wouldn't consider it a crime of passion. If a policeman was looking over their shoulder, they'd have resisted the impulse.
If people aren't being deterred from the second type of crime, we've got to ask whether the chance of being caught is too low, whether the punishment is too small, or whether the person isn't being rational about the expectation of punishment. Which probably varies from one crime to another.
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jun/19/local/me-12244 [2] https://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/473004950/new-orleans-man-fac... [3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/cruel-and-unusual...
Are these rules and punishments are good for people of North Korea? I don't think so. Will I obey law, when I will be in North Korea, even if I think that it is wrong? Of course.
In my non-expert mostly Nth hand (where n>=2) observation countries where everyone steps in line out of fear are generally better at getting people to step in line when someone's looking but when nobody's looking or people think they can get away with it there's less rule following
Treat people like idiots and they will
I'd rather have to lock my doors at night and take other action to insulate myself from other's poor decisions and personal freedom to make my own decisions than live in an authoritarian society where nobody makes the "wrong" decisions because of the reliability and harshness of law enforcement.
I'm much too lazy to type out the entire quote, but the author references the case of Willie Horton, convicted murderer, who was let out on furlough, who went on to reoffend. This caused outrage and the book doesn't go into more detail on whether the furlough program was suspended, but the author does reference a study at the time affirming that:
> the program may have reduced the likelihood of such incidents. A report at the time found that the recidivism rate in Massachusetts had dropped in the fifteen years after the program was introduced and that convicts who were furloughed were less likely to go on to commit a crime than those who were not.
in Paul Bloom, Against Empathy (2016), chapter 1, pp. 34–35. See also: Massachusetts Department of Correction, "The Massachusetts Furlough Program", May 1987, https://static.prisonpolicy.org/scans/MADOC/Furloughposition...
This example is used in the context of a chapter where it is posited that rationally, we might best continue the net-positive furlough program, whereas our empathy with the victims might lead us to abolish it after a statistical outlier causes atrocities to happen. I'll avoid commenting further on the book as i haven't yet read it completely.
Other than that very specific reference off the top of my head, i'd recommend looking at anything published about the Norwegian justice system. I believe it is quite progressive and mainly focussed on rehabilitation instead of punishment.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/federal-p...
You would think the recent examples of Meek Mill and Khalif Browder would open eyes to the fact there are a ton of people in jail because they either can't afford bail or for minor infractions.
Now, even most Christians see this as horse shit. But the deep seeds of this reasoning are everywhere in Western culture, hints here and there. Harry Potter is my favorite example- that sorting hat, man, it's never put a bad person into Griffindor, has it? (I haven't read the books in years, so go ahead and remind me about that one time it did...).
This is the kind of thing that leads to hidden biases, sort of like unconscious racial or gender biases. And like those other two examples, there are people who 100% believe that it's true, right, etc.
Edit: removing a clause that didn't make sense.
The "prosperity gospel" people make me ill. It's almost the exact opposite of Christianity, in my opinion. The combination of black-white morality and a belief that some divine agency guides the fortunes of mortal humans results in a twisted view, wherein bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good people.
If a bad thing happens to a good person, well they must have done something sinful to deserve it. It's just sick. People like that always blame the victim.
Yet somehow there are huge portions of Christianity that take the complete opposite lesson. It's like if there was a sect of the Open Source movement that went around telling people "the best thing about Open Source is that nobody can use your software unless you give them permission."
>It's like if there was a sect of the Open Source movement that went around telling people "the best thing about Open Source is that nobody can use your software unless you give them permission."
Richard Stallman's main gripe about Open Source software vs Free software is that it only grants you permission to view and modify the source, and doesn't necessarily grant you permission to use the software. Most open source licenses also grant you usage rights, but they don't technically have to.
Actually, one of the reasons is to spend money on private prisons. Private prisons, bigpharma, lawyers make a lot of money on defending AND putting people to prison for stupid things, things that were delegalized by sponsored bills. We've known for years that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than marijuana, yet, there are lobbies that benefit a lot from jailing people for having 5g of weed.
[+] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
This is really off the mark.
Having prisons and jails owned by the government does not mean that there's no incentive to increase the inmate population - in fact, the US is proof positive of that, because, for all the press that private prisons get, the number of them is quite small, and most of the worst abuses occur in state-run prisons.
This isn't going to be a popular opinion here, but I should point out that, in general, people tend to underestimate the extent of the prison-industrial complex in Western/Central Europe, and particularly its effect on ethnic and religious minorities. It doesn't help that a lot of the countries that have problems with this also make it either difficult or illegal to access that data officially, so it's not discussed nearly enough.
How are food, clothes, supplies, etc. sourced? Who builds the prison? Is this all done by the government down to the farmer? Or is there a supply chain that makes profit by selling to prisons? If so, there is a prison industrial complex.
How about the staff? Are they paid? Do they have a union?
If there is a profit motive, there is a potential for political lobbying / corruption.
I'd say you are now pretty clearly arguing for diluting the meaning of the "military-industrial complex" context to nothingness.
However, in the US it is common for major inter/national firms to service entire state prison systems. This is surely a representation of the prison industrial complex, and that's what I was getting at.
Simply having publicly run prisons does not preclude this type of situation, a major firm holding large contracts and thus having an incentive to grow the criminal population, unless it would be wholly socially and politically unacceptable to do so.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who want to reduce the amount of crime that happens, and then they are more concerned with if the justice system actually achieves this goal. Pain based justice plainly doesn't.
The other 92% doesn't lobby for laws that result in more prisoners, but a billion dollar industry does.
So the 8% statistic is a red herring.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/07/us/political-gains-by-pri...
For example, the 6 states with the lowest incarceration rates (New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Maine) have no private prisons. And 9 out of the 10 states with the highest incarceration rates do have private prisons.
- Percent of privately incarcerations: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
- Incarceration rates by state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incarce...
The private prison issue is one of reddit's favorite topics to blow out of proportion. Can we not bring it here as well?
I've never seen such thread on reddit.
The idea that lawyers are part of a conspiracy to make _money_ by running more people through the criminal justice system is completely senseless.
To start, criminal justice is easily in the running for least highly remunerated category of law. The median pay for public prosecutors with with 11 - 15 years of experience is only $81,500. For public defenders (who handle roughly 80% of all felony cases [1]), the median pay for someone with 11 - 15 years of experience is only $62,550. Oh, these fat, fat cats in criminal justice! And if anyone here thinks the work life balance in SV companies leaves something to be desired, I encourage you to read about the bat-shit hours that the average criminal attorney puts in. 20 hours of overtime a week would not raise any eyebrows.
And basically those salaries are not affected by caseload. Whether 100 or 50 people go to prison makes no financial difference to lawyers on either side. Some prosecutors have bonuses contingent on conviction rate or volume, but such agreements are rare and when they do exist, the bonuses are never contingent on sentencing, so there would be no incentive to send people to prison. There is no equivalent for defense attorneys.
And all of the above just speaks to your claim's stunning lack of circumstantial evidence, to say nothing of the lack of actual evidence that lawyers are intentionally putting more people in prison to make money.
The US justice system is rife with problems. But the idea that a root cause of those problems is lawyers trying to make more money just doesn't make sense.
That's strange of you to say. Haven't lawyers conspired to do just that before?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
> To start, criminal justice is easily in the running for least highly remunerated category of law.
Is it not well understood that people who are less highly remunerated are more prone to seeking out illegal sources of additional funds? This is the justification for extremely high ministerial salaries in Singapore - to avoid such corruption.
Are you really making the argument that lawyers all across the US are systematically making deals such as the ones that took place in Luzerne County, therby leading to high incaceration rates? Do we have evidence to lead us to believe that the kind of deals found in Luzerne County are widespread? Honestly, I find the suggestion preposterous.
The criminal justice system in the US is in dire need of reform and it's infuriating that discussions of said reform are often distracted by these kinds of baseless conspiracy theories.
If you ask me, the US's world leading incarceration rates probably have much more to do with the outsized sentence lengths, drastically underfunded public defense funds, mandatory sentencing requirements, lack of due prosecutorial discretion, overcharging and abuse of plea bargains, and insane drug legislation to name a few things.
Oh, but that's so complicated. It's probably just all those greedy criminal lawyers. /s
I also don't think you're right about your blanket statement: five seconds on Wikipedia revealed a very broad, bipartisan prison reform initiative organized by the Koch and MacArthur Foundations and many other groups including the ACLU. So there is a lot of support for making the penal system better. And there is ample recent evidence of politicians advocating for reform: California and Massachusetts vacating low-level drug convictions; Governor Deal's reforms in Georgia; The First Step Act (just passed committee last week); even Trump hosted discussions in Jan. Sure, none of those are perfect but it's a mile away from your alleged harsh 'American "justice" culture.'
A moment's reflection opens up a the possibility of a slightly deeper analysis, which is that actually it might be a function of money and business inserting itself into the public sector: cash-strapped state budgets, privatized prisons, a pattern of contracting-out basic services, and a literally captive customer base create a perfect environment for this kind of predatory nastiness.
With that said, I am completely against video calls. Having interaction with their friends and loved-ons is a important for moral and hopefully aids in rehabilitation.
Until somebody hurts your family and you start to think differently.
In my locality, we're going a step further and dehumanizing the accused. Any push for bail reform gets met with the same toxicity.
This seems evil. Actually evil. Inhuman, sick, psychopathically twisted, demonically evil. This is a contract that literally obligates its signatories to destroy other human souls: to deprive them of all touch, eye contact, the natural timbre of a loved one's actual voice. I cannot imagine how a person, peddling such a contract, could possibly sleep at night.
Simple: because they're evil, psychopathically twisted and demonically evil, just like you said.
And the government officials who agree to these contracts are just as demonically evil.
I really think that estimates by mental health professionals that psychopaths are only 5% of the population are probably far, far too low.
Or for the employees on the lower rungs, by pretending they aren't being horrible
I highly doubt that most people who rob cars, burglarise people or commit fraud are simply mentally ill people who need someone to talk to. Some people only respond to punishment. And in the case of those people I think that a short and painful punishment (whipping) is better than a long and life altering punishment (jail).
I don't say prisons are useless but you could probably cut prison population by 70%+ and have a safer society as a result. And a psychologist isn't expensive compared to a 1 year prison sentence.
https://outlookzen.com/2016/06/18/we-need-cruel-and-unusual-...
Let's just say it wasn't well received. Few people presented any logical arguments against the proposal, but the majority found it "unpalatable".
When you deprive prisoners of meaningful interactions with people on the outside, you are isolating them more and more from the "civilian" population, and civilian life. Which invariably means you're pushing them closer to other prisoners and prison gangs. As a direct result of this, when they leave prison, they won't have anyone else to turn to, in order to get their life back on track. The only option they know, and can easily access, is a life of crime together with their prison-peers.
By not helping prisoners integrate into normal society, you are directly contributing to robbery, gang violence and homicide. That's the very opposite of being "tough on crime".
Most robbers will reoffend. That really isn't OK. People get badly hurt and even killed in many cases, often including the robber. The robber may be safer in prison.
Making money off keeping people in prison, you have to be a cold-hearted SOB in this industry.
This is yet another problem that would be solved or mostly mitigated if the groups of people who shape, administrate and enforce the rules of society had to take their own medicine. It's much harder perpetuate an inhumane system for the purpose of screwing over people who screwed up when you and the people around you would have to face that same system if you screwed up.
Criticism is a lot more effective when it's not hypocritical.
Let us strive to be less hypocritical but still vigilant in pointing out human rights violations elsewhere.
This is better put. Hypocrisy should not blind us all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
"Tu quoque or the appeal to hypocrisy is an informal logical fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s)."
The diplomatic arm of the government publicly complains about violations abroad because that's essentially its job, for better or for worse.
"The United States had permitted the execution and life imprisonment of juvenile offenders, in contravention of the Article 37 of the Convention."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...
I will say that the silver lining in all of this is that incarcerated peoples can finally still have visitation if someone is unable to physically come to them. Video calls have been commonplace for a quite a while, so maybe (though I'm not holding my breath) some jails and prisons will actually put them to good use.
Sometimes I want to believe that common decency will win.
Since this is about the inmates, they do it without much resistance , for heavy pockets
And prisioners should be able to call home any time in addition to normal visitations.
This article makes me think about and why I will never leave the north: http://www.businessinsider.com/an-american-warden-visited-a-...
You didn't study for years just to end up making the world a worse place.
You are correct, I didn't study for years just to make the world a worse place. I'm not some cartoon villain.
But I also didn't study for years just to make the world a better place.
What I did study for years, was to obtain a valuable skill and a credential thereof. I expect that my lifetime earnings will be significantly higher on account of my education, compared to if I had not perused any undergraduate education; else I would have not spent so much time+tuition+effort.
And if my skill becomes more valuable and rare for certain companies, on account of nothing more than the irrational bias of my peers? Not taking advantage of such an opportunity, is leaving money on the table. It's as irrational as being biased against them in the first place.
> your sanity
I don't understand. Do people actually go crazy whenever their company isn't Robin Hood reincarnate?
After years of difficult math and physics, it can be easy to forget that the most important equation: More Money = Good!
In my experience, there are many opportunities to make a quick buck in life, but taking those opportunities doesn't necessarily lead to a better the world, and can very often make it worse.
If your only concern in life is getting mo' money, don't be surprised when you have plenty of money but a lack of meaningful relationships and personal fulfillment.
Once I'm dead, literally nothing matters to me.
Also, seems like a pretty self-centered way to look at the world IMO and doesn't exactly lead me, as a fellow human, to think that you care at all about my well-being or anyone else's.
Point is - you're assuming that none of it will matter, when the facts are that 1) none of us have no clue what matters or doesn't matter after we're dead and 2) we can identify what matters to the rest of us about someone once that someone is dead, which is more concrete information than you can give me from assuming what you'll care about or not after you die.
TL;DR better safe than sorry. You're playing with fire - regardless of whether or not you believe in hell.
And by the way - I'm speaking from personal experience, as a twenty-something who makes more money than I know what to do with yet feels extremely unsatisfied and unhappy with life.