Why rich convicts hire prison consultants | Hacker News Reader

Why rich convicts hire prison consultants

bbc.co.uk

64 pointsiamben67 comments

>"After the trial is done and the sentence is passed, ensuring placement in a good prison is key, and a large part of the programmes all these consultants offer."

I am imagining the dinner table conversations. "Oh, you went to Otisville? How exclusive. Our nephew tried to get in there but he's from the other side of the family, so just didn't have the right connections unfortunately."

Wonder if it's harder to buy your way into a good prison or the ivy leagues.

Maybe if you donate 20 million to build the Prison hospital your descendants can get in as a sort of legacy sentence.

https://justdetention.org/

This is a charity dedicated to ending the prison rape crisis in the US.

There's discussion in some threads about prison rape and rather than replying there I think it's better if this is a top level comment. These folks are doing good work to try to remedy at least one aspect of the awful conditions in many US prisons.

They propose nearly nothing that would change anything. All I see is offering free tampons, with the claim that female prisoners are trading sex for tampons. (we call this prostitution, not rape) Unless there is something I missed somewhere, that charity looks to be busy collecting donations for nothing.

There is exactly one solution that will work. People can't get raped if there is nobody to do it. The people in solitary confinement are not getting raped.

As I understand it, most prisoners are denied solitary confinement. Supposedly this is a kindness, but cost seems to be a more likely reason. I know I'd be terrified of a cellmate, and would thus suffer sleep deprivation at minimum, so I'm not seeing the kindness.

Spending between $495 and $2,000 to learn how to avoid being raped and getting faeces smeared on you seems like a good investment. Even when you are not rich.

The fact that this is considered a possibility is abhorrent and should be addressed immediately. As a society how can one accept such realities as normal but at the same time condemn other countries that have gulags and prison work camps?

I totally agree.

I'm appalled about about the lightness with which prison rape jokes are thrown around.

The punishment doled out by a judge is the removal of freedom. It shouldn't include additional abuse or even rape.

How is it even constitutional to send someone to a place where rape is a strong likelihood? I hope some of the political energy we have for sexual freedoms could be spent in this area, which clearly needs public discussion.

> How is it even constitutional to send someone to a place where rape is a strong likelihood?

If the state controls the environment how is even a "weak possibility" acceptable?

Does the state control the environment [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_comp...

Yes, it holds the contract.

I think we decided that it wasn't constitutional, in most cases, to keep prisoners safely isolated from each other. Somehow, having the safety of a private cell is considered cruel, while having to sleep in a cell with a convicted criminal is not.

> I'm appalled about about the lightness with which prison rape jokes are thrown around.

That often happen in US and not in many other societies.

I'm even more appalled that in some states the family of a murder victim is allowed to witness the execution of the perpetrator. They even cheer.

It's all connected to the "just world" fallacy and the idea that people that cause suffering "deserve" to be punished and made to suffer.

I think there is some reversal of cause and effect. The fact is that the US has always been much more violent and less stable than Western Europe. The murder rate in the US was 5-10x higher than in the UK over the entire 20th century. That includes during the period before prohibition and between prohibition and the drug war, and before there was meaningful gun control in either country. So it may be that US attitudes are the result of a more violent and less stable society.

Good evidence for that is the fact that there was a trend toward increased focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment in the 1960s. Capital punishment was illegal in the US from 1967-1977. But crime started to skyrocket at the end of the 1960s. Following about a decade behind that, particularly in the 1980s, you saw a “war on crime” that led to longer sentences, increased incarceration, etc. But all that was a lagging indicator—it was a response to increasing crime rates. The increase in incarceration rates followed behind the increase in crime rates, and incarceration rates didn’t actually catch up until violent crime peaked in the 1990s. That all suggests that harsh attitudes towards punishment are a reaction to high crime rates.

You are not providing any evidence that links desire for punishment with high crime rates.

You are talking about "longer sentences, increased incarceration" and that's not the point.

Ironically, large part of modern psychology and neurology has developed in the US.

Stuff like that really doesn't happen as often as internet comments would make you think. Most people in prison are just there do do their time and GTFO. Unless you choose to hang out with the crowd that's responsible for most of the physical violence odds are you will never be a victim of physical violence... just like in the normal world.

>It really doesn't happen as often as internet comments would make you think.

How about the US Justice Department?

>"After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008"

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-13/politics/raise-the-crime-ra...

There are over 2.2 million people in US correction facilities and probably more if you count over a whole year. That gives a rate of under 10% which is high but supports the previous comment of the vast majority of prisoners not being assaulted.

Exactly. If you assume the population in general is "people caught up in violent crime", "people unlucky enough to be caught for petty crime" and "everyone else" then take a sampling of the first two groups (i.e. prison) and then re-check your crime stats of course it's going to look bad compared to the overall population stats.

That doesn't mean the risk of becoming a victim of violence for the "people unlucky enough to be caught for petty crime" group goes up anymore than it would if they suddenly found themselves in equal contact with the "people caught up in violent crime" group outside of prison.

I suspect that victims of rape in prison are not chosen through mere association any more than they are outside of it.

A large number of people are in prison for multiple years.

10% of prisoners are serving 10+ years making that “10%” risk each year rather scary. Actual lifetime risks of the median prisoner are hard to calculate, but may exceed 40%.

Thank you for making this point. Am amazed (and not in a good way, I have been biting my tongue) at how dismissive people seem to be of a ten percent risk of being raped in a given year.

So about one in ten prisoners. That’s not good, but if you can avoid serving time in a medium or high security institution that chance is a lot lower, and of course a lot higher if you can’t.

  prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

Did you catch the shift in targets?

"Prevalence of sexual abuse" (undefined)..."prison rape".

I've been unable to find the DoJ report this is coming from to find their definition of abuse, but the 216,000 number is thrown around a lot in the press - but never with a traceable reference I can find (and details vary - sometimes 2008, 2011, sometimes "at least", etc.)

One other factor is that a large amount of the abuse is guards/staff abuse of inmates, so it isn't just "criminals in close association with criminals".

This. Been there, seen it.

I spent over 10 years in various prisons. Never once during those ten years was anyone raped in any of them.

Prisoners joke about it, threaten it, but will not do it, for the one reason called DNA evidence. It would really suck to become a sex offender while you're in prison.

There is also another saying from prison - "If you don't say 'No', it ain't rape." Most guys who get into trouble (typically from debt), end up selling their ass.

> I spent over 10 years in various prisons. Never once during those ten years was anyone raped in any of them.

I doubt it.

> Prisoners joke about it, threaten it, but will not do it, for the one reason called DNA evidence. It would really suck to become a sex offender while you're in prison.

Plenty of people in prison are already sex offenders, or are never getting out in any case (so that being required to register as a ex offender when they do is moot), so while that may dissuade some, it's clearly not going to be a universally applicable deterrent.

Of course, even where it applies, that's more of a reason to assure that a rape isn't reported and investigated, which can be done by means other than not committing it, such as being sure that the victim is sufficiently afraid of violent retaliation if a report occurs.

> There is also another saying from prison - "If you don't say 'No', it ain't rape."

That may be a saying in prison (and one which serves to discouraging reporting of rapes), but it's not an accurate statement about the law.

> That may be a saying in prison (and one which serves to discouraging reporting of rapes), but it's not an accurate statement about the law.

We are talking about people who don't respect the law.

> Of course, even where it applies, that's more of a reason to assure that a rape isn't reported and investigated, which can be done by means other than not committing it, such as being sure that the victim is sufficiently afraid of violent retaliation if a report occurs.

So by your logic, just because there aren't reports and investigations, it actually proves it is happening.

> So by your logic, just because there aren't reports and investigations, it actually proves it is happening.

There are reports and investigations (the reports actually increasing rapidly; investigations and even moreso authorities validating the reports less so, but then the authorities are themselves the most rapidly increasing set of alleged perpetrators), but (just as in the non-prison world, though the multiplier is higher) there are more incidents reported in anonymous victimization surveys than are reported non-anonymously in ways which enable investigation, but also retaliation.

The bureau of Justice statistics estimates 200,000 cases of sexual abuse in correction facilities annually.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/25/prison-rape-al...

But abuse is not a rape. The former also includes things like touching the victim.

And a bunch of dudes in prison are going to be a lot more physical about enforcing the pecking order than the outside population will be.

> But abuse is not a rape.

“Rape” is not a federal legal category, and in many state laws includes only nonconsensual penis-vagina intercourse. The common-use terms “prison rape” corresponds more closely to the category used here (which seems to mirror the way things are tracked in DoJ reports of sex crimes in the broader public, which justifies the comparison made to the overall total) than any other one would expect in an official report.

DoJ use their own definition of rape for statistical purp[oses.

> “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition...

It depends a lot on your security classification too. If you are in a level 1 (federal system does levels, states do max, medium, or low) prison, with other short-timers and non-violent offenders for the most part, it's not as bad. When you are on a level 4/maximum prison yard, like FCI Beaumont aka "Bloody Beaumont" or San Quentin, then you are surrounded by true predators and need to prepare yourself accordingly.

Unless you hang with the violent crowd, or the violent crowd decides to hang with you.

Which is why people who can afford it hire these consultants on advice how to avoid that fate. Just doing your time isn't a simple choice. You need to know how to. do that.

At some level, you have to understand the fact that people who go to prison are generally very bad, violent people, and putting them together in the same place is bound to cause problems. Some things about prison conditions you can definitely control and those should be fixed. For example, the treatment of pregnant prisoners in US prisons is often horrible. (You hear stories of women going into labor and being forced to delivery in their cell.) But other things you can’t fully control because they emerge from interactions between the prisoners.

Look at schools. We live in a school district that’s extremely proactive about addressing bullying. Yet, our friend’s kid recently had water poured over her head on the bus. If you can’t banish physical violence in schools, among normal children, is there any prospect of doing the same in prisons?

> At some level, you have to understand the fact that people who go to prison are generally very bad, violent people, ...

No. The vast majority are in for drug offenses and are not, generally, considered violent or bad.

Edit: I was wrong. Federal prison have way more drug offenders than violent offenders. State has more violent offenders than drug offenders. The way they're classified too is that the worst offense is the one on record. So if you are on drugs and hit someone, stats will tick up one more violent offense but not a drug offense.

No they're not. According this this[1] article drug crimes account for only 16% of inmates in state prisons. Violent crimes account for 54% of inmates.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-better-approach-to-violent-cr...

The difference is coming from the fact that convictions for drug crimes are shorter than conviction for violent crimes, which could explain why there's more drug-related convictions but less drug-related inmates

Only 20% of the total incarcerated population is in for a “drug offense.” Many of those are also very bad people. Almost all federal drug offenders are traffickers. Even if you don’t think that selling harmful substances to people is bad, there is the fact that many of these drug traffickers are involved in violent conduct. But the conviction often won’t reflect that conduct. Most violent and property crimes, unless performed on federal property, are state criminal law issues. Drug trafficking is usually the hook for federal law enforcement jurisdiction. The federal government doesn’t have jurisdiction to enforce state criminal laws. So someone may be incarcerated for a federal drug offense, even though there are state law violent and property crimes that could have been charged. (And states have little incentive to prosecute the state-law crimes for someone who is going to federal prison anyway.)

In order to get a more accurate picture, you have to not only look at the offense for which the prisoners are incarcerated, but also at prior criminal histories. (And even that will exclude situations where a first time drug offender is charged with a federal drug offense but there are also state violent and property offenses that could have been charged.)

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-numbers-dont-lie-its-...

> For example, in a forthcoming Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) study of the complete adult and juvenile criminal histories of prisoners from Milwaukee, WPRI analyst George Mitchell and I find that 91 percent of these urban criminals had one or more convictions for a violent crime. First-time drug offenders were less than 2 percent of the population. The imprisoned drug offenders had multiple arrests, bouts on probation, and adult and juvenile crimes, including auto theft, burglary, robbery, retail theft, domestic violence, sexual assault, drunk driving, jumping bail and, of course, drug dealing too.

> For example, in 1990, Harvard economist Anne Morrison Piehl and I studied a large sample of the Wisconsin prison population. We found that in the year before they were imprisoned, these prisoners committed a median of 12 crimes, excluding all drug crimes. In 1993 we studied a large sample of New Jersey prisoners and found exactly the same thing—they committed a median dozen crimes a year, again excluding all drug crimes. (Empirical studies by analysts at the National Bureau of Economic Research and elsewhere indicate that the average number of non-drug crimes that prisoners commit when free may be higher than twelve a year.)

State prisons also house six times as many people as the federal prison system does, so the argument that the "vast majority are in for drug offenses" is essentially the opposite of the truth.

And then you look countries outside of the US and you wonder, what the hell happened?

Yes. For so many problems, I hear "see, it's impossible because of this or that", while ignoring that it's being done elsewhere just fine.

America is very different from other countries. For example, at the dawn of the 20th century, the US had a murder rate 10x higher than the UK. That was before prohibition, before the drug war, before significant gun control in either country. The best we ever did was in the 1950s, when the UK was shattered by WWII, and the US was enjoying an unprecedented economic boom. Even then our murder rate was 5x higher than the UK’s. (And note, that was after prohibition ended and before the drug war began.) That statistic says something really fundamental about Americans and the nature of American society.

People assume you can just look over the pond at policies used in Western Europe and get the same results here. But over and over it’s proven that’s not true. For example, we spend way more on education per student than the UK, but get much worse results. Conversely, some of the states in the US that have the most guns and loosest gun laws, like Idaho, are also the only ones to even come close to having murder rates as low as Western Europe.

For example, the treatment of pregnant prisoners in US prisons is often horrible.

As far as I know it's not just pregnant woman, but depending on the state there's a whole laundry list of additional abuse and cruelty doled out.

Abusive nutrition[1] and virtual slavery[2] come to mind.

While I can agree that a prison stay should not reflect guest services at the Ritz such abuses, and, as good example, people like Joe Arpaio[3] really shouldn't be part of the package.

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

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio

edit : format of links

> Look at schools. We live in a school district that’s extremely proactive about addressing bullying. Yet, our friend’s kid recently had water poured over her head on the bus. If you can’t banish physical violence in schools, among normal children, is there any prospect of doing the same in prisons?

Pouring water on someone's head !== rape (obviously).

Saying that we can't do anything about extreme, widespread violence in the prison system because we haven't yet managed to completely eradicate the mildest forms of physical bullying in schools is a ridiculous argument.

If the problem really is the interaction between prisoners, then we should simply stop those specific interactions taking place (or change the circumstances, so that they don't result in violence).

I'd like to live in a society where we prioritise (funding for) that over pranks in schools.

I suspect most people would favor improving school outcomes over prison inmate outcomes, when taxation and funding decisions are put to them. I’m not saying your point is not a virtuous one, but it’s likely an uphill battle to make that the majority opinion.

If you forced me to pick exactly one (not the actual choice society faces), I probably lean towards schools as well.

Obviously the outcome is worse. And obviously prisoners are capable of much more extreme violence than school children. But all that is a function of the prisoners and their choices and actions, not the government. The kind of violence that happens in prisons isn’t easier to detect and prevent. A stabbing can happen in the blink of an eye.

I don’t see why you think funding is an issue. Our prisons are extremely well funded.

> But all that is a function of the prisoners and their choices and actions, not the government.

Seeing as the prisoners are in government custody, I don't see how the government can be ruled out as a factor of the aforementioned function.

> The kind of violence that happens in prisons isn’t easier to detect and prevent.

It is easier, though. A prison is a (comparatively tiny) sealed environment with strictly controlled borders, above-average monitoring (CCTV), and an extremely limited population.

The fact that, given these constraints, stabbings can still happen in the blink of an eye, or that rape can still happen, is (I believe) the entire point.

> Look at schools. We live in a school district that’s extremely proactive about addressing bullying. Yet, our friend’s kid recently had water poured over her head on the bus.

You can justifiably argue that schools are "prison light" - in particular in countries that have compulsory school attendance.

Watch any of the Louis Theroux documentaries with the topic of US prisons. It's pretty harrowing.

Having done time in state and federal prisons, I chuckle at this. A prisoner who befriended me when I first went to federal prison told me, "The only guys who get hurt in prison are the ones who deserve it."

It boils down to a simple set of rules for surviving prison:

1. Be very respectful of everyone. You don't have to be friends, but you need to be courteous when it is required and practice avoidance when that is required, also.

2. Don't associate with the wrong crowd. In the federal pen, a new convict started hanging out with the AB's (a white supremacist gang). About 7 months later, someone in the law library stumbled across the new guy's case during some research. The new guy was in for running a child prostitution ring. The AB's murdered the new guy. They really didn't have a choice in the matter, as they would be seen as weak to the other gangs if they didn't.

3. Take care of your own problems. If someone disrespects you, you sometimes have to man up (after trying to resolve the issue with the gang bosses) and fight the guy. Typically in this situation it is a fist fight. Even if you get your ass beat, the whole population will respect you better because you don't take crap.

4. Don't ever, ever, ever (did I emphasize this enough?) go into debt to any other convict. Not for drugs. Not for alcohol. Not for cigarettes. Not for anything. This always ends bad, with either a knife in your kidney or you exposing your family on the outside to extortion. It is hard to get out of debt on prison income, and very easy to borrow from a friendly loan shark.

5. Get your routine and stick to it. It makes the time go faster. It helps you stay clear of the chaotic elements of prison population.

6. Hear nothing, see nothing. Don't spread rumors. If you get pegged as a "rat"/"snitch", you will never shake it, and your life will become pure hell during your entire prison stay.

Those are the main ones for avoiding 97% of trouble in prison.

Does anybody ask how people can be equal under the law, but it's worthwhile to spend money on a lawyer and a prison consultant?

you got it the other way around, it is "the law is equal for everyone" not "everyone is equal for the law"

addndum:

law is neither gender nor race neutral. pretending everyone is equal under the law is just wishful thinking. and yes the law corpus is the same for everyone... as long as you are in a specific place, because not even that is a given, since not everyone lives in the same place under the same law.

you'd expect this community to have some spark in it but no, people around here don't seem to engage in critical thinking anymore.

I fully comprehend the lexical and logical distinction you’re making ... but I’d push back that these two things are one in the same.

it's evident that people are not equal under the law. minors have a different set of rights, women enjoy a different set of protections, minorities have their own special laws (heck, you have a federal law titled "Indian Gaming Regulatory Act")

Not according to the UDHR

Not everyone receives UDHR info as canon.

"Equal under the law".

Basically the law is implemented by people and people are subjected to it by those people. There's a lot of neutrality in the rules but in the end personal biases and privileges can creep in at any point.

If judges (and juries) were 100% rational, objective and unbiased, lawyers and attorneys wouldn't exist. But that's an impossibility even technology can't solve.

The problem isn't that there's bias, the problem is the bias is predictable and exploitable.

Suppose every lawyer was paid the same, and cases where given by lottery instead of by auction?

Just a thought, not saying that doesn't have problems either.

There used to be a joke about that. Everyone is equal under law. Both the poor and the rich are legally forbidden from panhandling under bridges.

Wasn't this the plot of some comedy film?

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