In Britain, even jails have a class system
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> Atkins: It was so ubiquitous. You could tell straightaway if someone was on it, they’d be zombified, with glazed eyes. They’d just be lying on their bed in a vegetative state.
> I think [spice users] are used to smoking strong cannabis. And you can't really get away with that, because of the smell. But spice doesn’t smell. The sniffer dogs can’t get it.
> It’s the law of unintended consequences. An older screw [prisoner officer] said, it used to be that inmates would smoke weed. But then [jails] brought in drug testing, and marijuana stays in the system for a month. So they stopped doing that, and started to do spice, which makes people vegetative and violent.
There's hundreds of laws like this outside of prison. You take one thing away [with good intention] and then people find a new thing. But the new thing leaves society worse off (in this case crazy and violent off spice).
I personally believe the whole obsession with prison time for punishment in the US is a good example of this. The general public gets very vindictive, then you send them to con-college and they come out a worse criminal. With difficulty finding a job but plenty of new friends in the criminal world and a reputation as a tough-guy.
Consequently the whole war on drugs is the perfect example of unintended side-effects. Creating a hundred-billion dollar black market funding the worst cartels and street gangs. And hey we have thousands of tough guys coming out of prison in need of work.
Zoning laws are another good example of something that sounds like a good idea that ultimately hurts communities more than it helps - resulting in the mass suburbanization of America and urban ghettos [1]. Now people are moving back to cities with a serious lack of housing density, food deserts [2], driving to work becomes mandatory, etc etc. Then there's the War on Terrorism.....
I could go on.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-Transportation-M...
The only answer is corruption of the prison staff. That has to be the root cause.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/rise-in-pris...
Clearly there does not seem to be much political will to do so. It's easier to pretend and, after all, the victims are only inmates.
At least in the US, most people are not fond of the idea of spending more money with the prison system.
1. Them being alive. Obvious fix but not useful or moral. 1a. The less omnicidal but potentially more niche in practice answer is "get humans out of the loop" - that worked quite successfully with automated phone switchboards. 2. Their incentives being misaligned with the nominal goal. The easiest fix there is a "sarcastic AI" goal of making the corruption the explicit legal goal aligning them. 3. Lack of effective oversight - they can only be corrupt if they can get away with it without sufficient negative consequences. Certainty and speed is more important than magnitude and not being enough to be worth doing anyway in spite of punishment. 3a. Enforcement in practice suffers from "turtles all the way down" with who watches the watchers. Transparency and multilateralism can help but well international law is only a series of guidelines because of it being multilateral between powers.
In fact, this issue is becoming more and more of a challenge today as drone technology advances and decreases in price[0].
0: https://www.npr.org/2017/11/15/564272346/prisons-work-to-kee...
As for drones, let me try to fly a drone over GCHQ or the Pentagon and let's see what happens... But over a prison and then actually drop something? "Oh well, what can we do? Can't even find what they drop..."
The point in all of this is that no-one cares too much so it happens, but it is avoidable.
I was expecting a bit more of a can-do attitude on HN instead of accepting this sorry state of affairs!
...or effective procedures would toss human rights into the bin. Client-Attorney communication secrecy and visitation rights are one point, body cavity searches and visitation rights for close relatives of inmates another.
Prison guard - standing all day with rifle, anyone can do that. Nurse - giving pills and injections, what is so hard about it? Software dev - sitting behind computer all day lazy slob, he could get some real job :)
If you give people enough time of course they will do that what you couldn't imagine possible in 20 seconds.
> The only answer is corruption of the prison staff.
But what you're describing here seems just as likely to be a resourcing and procedure issue.
For example, do you think it's fair that all visitors must undergo a full cavity search before being allowed to see an inmate? Even attorneys? If not, then should the inmate go through that procedure after every visit? Will we all be happy with the increased costs to hire additional staff?
The creativity of prisoners is much higher than you expect. To 100% eliminate smuggling into prisons, you'd need to operate every facility as if its SuperMax.
Once they busted the main supplier at Morgantown people got desperate and started trying the visitor's room. One poor guy in a wheelchair got busted with 2 cell phones, 4 packs of cigarettes, and pills coming out of visitation. Absolutely stupid. You could definitely get in suboxone or a couple of cigarettes. Anything bigger than that it wasn't going to work. When you go back in they pat you down, but randomly you can get a significantly more thorough search.
The only place where the guards are an issue are mediums. A $6 pack of cigarettes becomes $20 at a minimum, $50 at a low, and $100+ at a medium. At low and above you'll often find they're selling little matchstick sized cigarettes that are rolled up from the person responsible for cleaning up after guards. It's usually "used" chewing tobacco.
At the medium level you don't get to talk to visitors face to face normally. That makes even visitation smuggling impossible. It can only filter in from guards or from the satellite minimum security camp.
There are a lot of ways you can get drugs in to prison without the aid of guards.
- Repeat offenders used to getting arrested (particularly drug dealers) would carry their drugs in what is termed a cock sock, which is as you may guess, a sock worn around the male bits to hold things. They would tie pre-weighed bags of drugs up in balloons, and if it smelled they were going to get arrested they would make an attempt to dig them out and swallow them, and then erm, retreive them later in the jail.
- A more creative way was for spouses/relatives to soak certain types of paper in a liquid solution in which had been dissolved drugs like meth, and then allowed to dry. The paper was then written on like a regular letter, and sprayed with perfume (which is a very normal thing in jail/prison) to mask any trace scent of the drug and the fact that it looked like it had been wet and dried.
- Inmates that were in the lower-security units such as day workers, in which they were taken out during the day to perform community service under supervision, would devise elaborate plans to smuggle things in. There were certain work areas that had things like public restrooms, and they would phone a girlfriend/wife the day before to go drop a bag of drugs in the ceiling of the bathroom and then retrieve it while working there the next day. They would place it you know where to avoid having it found when they were strip-searched when taken back to the unit. This was rare though, and more common was that they would pick up cigarette butts as they worked, empty out any remaining tobacco, and then stash it you know where in some sort of balloon/saran wrap to bring back to the unit to smoke. This was done by popping a socket, which is where you use pencil lead stuck inside of an outlet to spark a piece of paper (typically from a book or newspaper) rolled with aforementioned garbage-tobacco.
IF I HAVE ANYONE'S ATTENTION:
The American criminal justice system is one of the most dehumanizing, corrupt, and inhumane places I have ever seen.
I saw inmates have bones broken by guards for saying things they didn't like. They are not allowed to throw punches or kicks during restraints, so what they do is put 3-4 guards on a man and will repeatedly knee/elbow them, particularly in the head, whilst screaming STOP RESISTING, despite there being zero resistance.
It was a common tactic for them to strip a person to their underwear, and put them in a restraint-chair [0] with a hood over their face so that they cant see or move any limb, and then wheel them off to a back room and accidentally forget about them for 4-8 hours.
I don't have anything else to say besides the fact that I want to raise awareness for any of you who may not know what our justice system is like.
Unfortunately that trespassing was the lowest-class felony so it has made it one hell of a time for me getting a job later in life, with HR policy in most places and the fact it never leaves your record.
I was very fortunate when I first got home. I went to a fairly good, borderline great, engineering school. I was lucky enough to be picked up back in my same field. Once I can get my security clearance back or even just naval base access it'll be better.
So this. There's an entire stack of industries that thrive on this inhumanity, too e.g. Corrections Corporation of America, all the medical, legal and culinary/janitorial staff, lawyers and their retainers...
Then again, I've heard jails in other countries are considerably worse, with dirt floors and 20 people in a cell, like Brazil. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the criminal justice system here in the US and decrease the abuse of basic human rights in its correctional facilities, though.
The state of prisons is avoidable and due to society not caring enough. Is that a false and ignorant claim? Why? I think you should explain because I think that may claim is patently observable and a matter of fact.
> The only answer is corruption of the prison staff.
> Smuggling is impossible unless staff turn a blind eye, or procedures are sufficiently lax
Here's an example: these two statements are false.
Trying to present opinions as facts makes you non-credible, you should avoid doing it.
There were over 800 of us and around 10 staff on actual security detail at a time. There were maybe 40 searches a week and they were normally targeted on the people that they had suspicions about. It happened to me one time and they guy found my camel crush. Thankfully I had been there less than 3 weeks so he just assumed someone stashed it there since I moved into an empty bunk. After that I never had another issue.
Spice is horrible. We'd have people vomiting regularly. They'd get "stuck" outside when we got called back into the units. It's really gnarly stuff that I would not willingly ingest. The most popular drug was definitely suboxone. The drug tests were not working for subs when I was still there. Supposedly they were just starting to come out with some for it that the BOP used.
Every thing went in a cycle. One guy would run most of the smuggling for the white people. I'm not going to name names here, but his balance sheet showed about $75k in profit over a rolling 6 month period. Another ran it for most of the African Americans. Eventually runners would get caught or the ring leader would get busted with a cell phone. That gives you an immediate upgrade to the next highest level facility. Prices would jump until someone was crazy enough to start it all back up again.
Right before I left the biggest person got caught with a sim card. Prices for cigarettes went up to nearly $15 each. That was if you were remotely lucky enough to find one. A guy came back on probation violation and luckily enough I was his bunk mate. Things went back to regular within a couple of weeks. He made more in Morgantown than he did on the street...
Subs/meth/vape juices could be applied to paper inside of books or letters. Anything liquid and dried usually could come in that way, but in a minimum it's not even worth the hassle.
At higher levels things start to go more and more by the car system. You only associate with your race and your number. You get an ID number, which in my case is #####-083. The last three digits represent where you are from. 083 is Hampton Roads in Virginia. You ONLY hang out with your race and your area. It can go above just the city into more regional things. You only go outside of your car for business.
I also found out about "making spread" and was amazed at the ingenuity of some folks and what they could do with ramen, water, some crumbled up cheetos and a pound cake. And how this was used in the internal economy. Fascinating stuff.
On the negative side, most of the people were in there for petty drug offenses, e.g. victimless crimes not involving violence which upset me greatly. Such a shame since most of these guys were obviously above-average IQ and otherwise nice, sometimes charismatic people. What a waste of tax dollars and lives.
So many stories just from my short stay there.
There was one night nurse who didn't watch you take your pills so tightly. Most people who had the prescription didn't share it.
There is a lot of creative food. I don't know if I'd eat the cheesecake on the street, but it is good when you haven't had anything for a while. We'd occasionally get street food inside, but it was like McDonald's breakfast, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, or chicken wings.
There was not a lot of petty criminals at Morgantown. Simple possession rarely lands you in federal prison. The worst of the worst is conspiracy. It doesn't take much for you to be linked to a conspiracy. The mandatory minimums don't make sense for that kind of crime. There's a lot of marijuana + money laundering. I'd say around 15% of people really had no business having anywhere near their actual sentence length.
In one federal medium I was at, the guys from maintenance had broken through the wall behind a urinal and installed a still in the wall. They used a hot plate from a coffee maker. They covered it up by replacing the tiles and "caulking" between them with the institution issued tooth paste. I used those urinals for months without ever knowing about it.
It was dismantled after the unit orderly snitched about it. That guy was murdered the next week. It turned out he had also snitched on some co-defendants for a reduced sentence.
I heard the hooch from that still was stronger than whiskey and pretty nasty tasting.
Most guys just tried to make alcohol with some bread and oranges in a trash bag stuffed in a locker or under a bunk.
There's no avoiding that...
Of course it's avoidable. But no-one cares enough: As long as it is hard enough to escape then the public does not care too much whether inmates use drugs, rape/fight each other, or what not, especially if stopping that would mean spending more on prisons.
The fallacy (or hypocrisy) is to pass off lack of will as practical impossibility.
The UK and the US are among the richest countries on Earth and they are democracies. There is no escaping that the state of their prisons represents the collective decision of society (us all).
a better option, and one more befiting of these rich democracies is to just let them have some of those affects and get on with it. controlling every inch of their lives is the opposite of the democratic ideal
It’s nice because it’s the future generations that will have to pay for it.
This is a serious problem. Lots of people openly support violence, torture, rape and murder as long as they happen to prisoners. It's all part of the punishment.
By this point, the war on drugs was in full swing and the prisons were filling up as fast as humanly possible.
Rehabilitation implies they want the criminals to be part of their society to begin with. They most likely want to keep dehumanizing and exploiting those groups.
People are also completely misinformed about recidivism. Not only does keeping someone in prison for longer increase their risk of reoffending, the sort of crimes people are most afraid of tend to have some of the lowest recidivism rates. For instance, murderers are the least likely to reoffend out of any criminal category (2). Of course, this does have to be balanced against the seriousness of the offense if they do reoffend. But unfortunately, solitary and isolated instances of the best approach failing are turned into big political talking points -- i.e., the murderer who is released on parole and kills someone else a day later. Things like this are extremely rare, but the risk they carry as political hand-grenades means that the worse approach gets enacted almost universally.
And don't even get me started on the human rights disaster that is capital punishment. A barbaric punishment, outlawed by most developed nations; which unintentionally kills innocent people; which is more expensive than life imprisonment; and which does absolutely zero good in (a) preventing future crimes -- it has provably no power as a deterrent -- and (b) bringing back the victims who have died. We kill people because it's "what they deserve," as if the state has any right to decide whether its own citizens live or die.
(1) http://apps.urban.org/features/reducing-federal-mass-incarce... (2) https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html
Sounds about right.
True justice is to undo the damage caused by the perpetrator. Unfortunately, it's impossible to do that. There's no way to restore a murdered person back to life or restore people's ability to feel safe in their own homes after it's been violated. Some damage always remains and it just can't be completely fixed.
So it's all about revenge, making people pay for what they've done and causing just as much if not more damage in return. For some reason, people can't just accept that things happened and that there's no fix. There must be balance in the universe and they can't move on with their lives if something isn't done to the people who hurt them. So we have judges, people who literally count infractions and calculate punishment. People who perpetrate sanctioned violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice...
It's not a lack of ability, it's a lack of desire. The lack of desire is directly attributable to a toxic culture.
It's not simply just about revenge, as I noted in my comment, about there's a hundred examples outside of jail including zoning laws where we're taking this same good-intentions approach to solving the problems we see and having either nothing happen to things leaving us worse off.
The fundamental problem is fear-driven policy making by people who think they know what's best for a community and having zero tolerance for the natural chaos that is natural to society.
The more we try to tamper that chaos and create an endless series of laws without thinking (or grasping) the unintended side-effects the more this will keep happening.
I think plenty of the worst stuff in our societies results from our creations, often from idealistic attempts to make the world a better place, which in fact have had the opposite effect.
Every time we create a new law or ban something or get vindictive we need to think back to all of the times that didn't work or had the complete opposite effect.
Cities and life worked better in the post-war 1950s because we didn't have a thousand laws and projects running simultaneously trying to make the world a better place. It embraced the chaos naturally, before the NIBMY brigades and busy-bodies created a system where "they know what's best for other people" when they really didn't
For example, when the "hippies" started smoking weed, people freaked out, but maybe it really wasn't the end of the world causing all of our problems. They were normal kids just like their parents going through a phase. Then the billions we put into stopping it has left us worse off.
Likewise we need to at what other moral panics (and lesser pancis) resulted in systems that are hurting us.
I don't know exactly what the solution is but I feel like as a society we need to take a good hard look at the various systems we put in place since the post-WW2 decades and ask if it's really made the world a better place.
The highest priority of all in the US (IMO) is prison reform since that is the population numbers are the glaring massive difference that other western countries don't have. And they don't have super violent cities like the US does and maybe there's a cause and effect here, or at a minimum the vindictive nature of it all is doing nothing to actually help the problem.
The second priority is the myriad of drug laws which have so obviously backfired, then our backwards approach to building/housing which has become a massive problem in every urban area in the country.
We need to embrace the chaos again and stop trying to control every little detail like we know what's best for other people.
Actually we know now that Nixon was explicitly targeting blacks and hippies, so not a great example—it seems to have worked pretty well.
I don't assume that you want to live near a tannery, or a brothel[1], no?
What you're referring to and which was an utterly racist policy is red lining[2]
[1] Legal in a lot of places in an appropriate zone.
Problems with zoning laws are independent of red lining.
Tannery would be fine as long as it doesn't smell. Externalities are reasons for regulation and licensing, but zoning is just one extremely crude tool for enacting such.
It was anything but unintended.
How could it be otherwise? Even ignoring the likely correlation between psychological problems and incarceration... Prison is a terrible environment by its nature and by design.
Would we be surprised if concentration camp or gulag inhabitants had mental health issues?
Effectively, psychological injury is part of the punishment.
It's strange to think that prisons are relatively new.
Usually, yes. But not necessarily.
A prison could be more like a residential college or a boarding school.
Wandering through New Zealand's Korowai Manaaki youth detention centre, you can't help but notice the basketball court, veggie patch and classrooms — it feels more like a high school than a prison.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-27/nz-youth-detention-ce...
You get users who due to habit get dealers into their homes and they call it cuckooing, though sadly they hand that excuse out to all users, even ones that know exactly what they are doing and keep getting away with that same excuse.
It is this lack dealing and victimhood blanket upon all users that keeps the market buoyant and the gang turf wars in which you see runners (those who deliver the drugs) being the brunt of knife crime victims.
Sadly, this enables a situation in which they keep targeting the effect and not the source. Sure they put a few members of a gang away, those left soon rebuild and seen this happen so many times it is beyond painful to see this play out time and time again.
Then you have the rehab failings that equally do not help users get clean, this see's the NHS suffer and numerous services abused as they are just too soft. Sure there are legit victims and you could say all addict are victims, but when many addicts are the source of daily shop theft, burglary, fraud.... You see just see the flames fanned with petrol.
But some initiatives have worked better than others: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-39179504
Whilst not a solution for addiction, has stymied the knock on effect of crime.
But the lack of proper rehab facilities and support just ends up with the NHS handing out methadone (more addictive) as a solution and even that get's abused and they all know somebody who can provide clean piss for any tests and with that, still use heroin, just augment usage with the methadone.
Then this all gets down to the addict - actually wanting to give up. Many don't and will often only go thru the motions to appease some judge and with that, they are great at gaming the system.
Now, if they would legalise the less dangerous drugs like canabis in the UK and tax that, then they could use that money to finance education, and more so proper rehab.
Equally, poor area's, they are and always will be the source of driving people towards drugs and that's because their reality is just depressing, this see's such area's often become drugs hotbeds.
But sadist part is the police depend upon information from the public, alas been so many instances in which that is misused and ignored to the extent that anybody informing is soon known by those gangs and users and they resort to making false reports to the police and I've seen many good honest people in my area driven away and suffer. That is a bigger issue than the media care to acknowledge.
But let's step back and think - if drugs are a big issue in prisons, what hope has society when they can't control an environment they have totalitarian control over!
As ever, it gets down to money and again - if they was to legalise some drugs and tax those as they have done with alcohol and tobacco, they could use that to fund all this and equally, make things better for all.
Sadly, many people see the issues and even those in a position to have a voice that is heard, but alas they soon shot down by those who just want to be seen to be doing their job, over actually doing it. That is very much prevalent within the police and again - all based upon experience. So you end up with a system that tackles the effect and not the root cause of what is responsible for the bulk of crime we see on the streets.
So in effect to fix the prisons - they need to fix the reasons why people are in those prisons.
But yes - rehab needs to happen, but equally it needs to be done right and properly - if they can't do that right in prisons, then they have no hope in society and that is exactly how it is alas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice...
Class is as much cultural and, in terms of upper class, hereditary here in the UK. I could never be upper class as I don’t have the right ancestors.
It's more a combination of social graces and breeding. In the USA, someone like Donald Trump would be considered upper class but would never be considered so in the UK.
I was presented with the temptation to commit the same crime that sent this guy to jail.
I made a movie with my brother and dad. We figured, how different could this be from software? (it wasn't really) Things got financially very complex, when more money got spent than we had. (I was not the one that spent it) Things got even more complex when my dad signed a deal with a production company to get us out of the hole (without my brother or I agreeing he could do this) They put in some money to pay invoices, and agreed to pay us ~$300,000 but as I recall being told, when it came to paying the money they wanted invoices for about a million worth of fake spend.
according to one of their staff members, they themselves were in the hole after making a movie with an oscar winner who'd who'd spent the whole shoot blitzed on coke. I didn't speak to them ever again after a confrontation on the last day of the shoot. I heard they were shocked when we refused to provide fake invoices, incredulous, that we wouldn't do something they considered film industry normal. (it's common, it's not normal)
What happened after that I can only piece together from rumours, which as I understand were:
They had assumed that we would provide the invoices and already submitted tax claims for film producer tax incentive payouts.
These supporting invoices were requested and they fled the country.
Every now and then someone tells me that they recognise me from tv.
TLDR: I got no money, but I didn't go to jail
This almost nails it. The reality is that the British lower classes can have all the stuff they want; trainers, watches, cars are within the grasp of anyone above the poverty line. But wealth is almost unattianble for the lower classes in the UK. It just doesn't go in that direction.
...often supplied with predatory loans.
PS4 Pro, 1TB, Fortnite edition: £799 ($1033 USD) over 108 weeks. https://www.perfecthome.co.uk/detail/index/sArticle/3170
My favorite part. They don’t realize that capitalism itself is regressing to a class-based system. People like Trump, Johnson, Cameron can fake invoices, but the interviewer, just an ordinary member of the public has to play by the rules.
Capitalism has always been a class-based system. There's the people who work for wages, and the people who live off rents from their capital.
There are of course differences in the degrees of inequality.
Examples of class-based systems. India's caste-system that disadvantages lower-castes. Pre-civil war America's racially implemented Constitution that disadvantaged non-whites (and women?). Fundamentalist Sharia Law systems that disadvantage non-muslims and women. You can tell you live in a more class-based capital system when the top slots are occupied more by birthright vs other systems.
BTW I think it's clearer to narrow talk to specific policies that make a system more class-based vs more meritocratic, and to remember to define them in terms of which particular groups of people they target. Because then we can see that meritocratic capitalism, boosted by the major revolutions we celebrate around the world, slowly gets eroded by things like redlining in the States, or low inheritance taxes etc.
Oddly, this quote seemed appealing: "Prison moves at a glacial pace. As you adapt to the environment, you start moving at a glacial pace." Probably because I'm not rich.
> He was released in December 2018.
Theses 5 years were pretty fast
Sadly this whole automated 50% discount upon your sentence has made many people despair at the whole system and often see headlines of some heinous crime and how they are out after a few years.
Of course this whole process was from what I can tell a accounting way to cope with prisoner numbers and with that, curtail building more jails.
But many sentences are a joke already in the public eye, without the addition of some automatic 50% discount.
Today, they are trying to end that 50% discount for certain types of criminals - terrorist types being one and in the UK, been two well news instances this year of criminals of that category being out early and committing violence that in the first instance, led to deaths.
I will also add that many career criminals know the legal and law system better than those that enforce it and with that, know how to game the system and how to play it. With that personally I have no faith in our police at all, though that is based upon experience of drug dealers moving into the flats below and the police being beyond useless, even with hard evidence and literally passing on details of those who informed upon them onto the criminals - be that having a word, passing on statements, lapping up their lies.
One case, they called round to raid the place and knocked on the door whilst the gang was there, they were made to wait 5 minutes whilst the gang flushed the heroin and crack cocaine down the toilet - took 3 flushes to get rid of it. Then they let them in, surprisingly they found nothing.
I literally had to take the law into my own hands in the end and built a contact microphone and wired up the walls and recorded their activity and literally blackmailed them to bugger off, I then got evidence against the corrupt police and had a wee chat and they are now no longer with the police.
I tried all the legal avenues and did all the right things and got utterly and totally shafted/ignored and frankly after 50 years, utterly lost faith in the police in the UK these days. Which still saddens me and brings a tear to my eyes. I won't even touch upon the health impact of noisy neibours and the associated antics of drug dealing but let's just say, PTSD comes from many forms.
So I'm just fine with them doing it and if anything, you could say they are a bit soft upon that front.
I'd add that until these twitter crimes see twitter pay a fine for each instance, they will carry on. Sure it won't be fair, but the unfairness has been one-sided too long and not just twitter - all social media platforms.
[EDIT ADD reference to pertaining communications act] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003
This superceeded the 1984 laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_1984
But they both cover communications that will cause offence.
What has changed perhaps is what people define as offencive. Now that is a matter of debate that will go on for ages, but I don't hold any disdain for the police in that respect, not do I have any experience upon that matter to draw upon.
Sometimes, rarely, it's the police having a discussion to let someone know what the law is in order to prevent that person committing an offence. And even this discussion with potential offenders is probably going to end after the police mishandling of the Henry Miller case: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/miller-v...
How do you feel about US police arresting six year old children for misbehaviour in class? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-51638871/six-y...
I rarely hear about those. Almost all of the cases that make international news are about police "checking someone's thinking" or arresting someone for posting lyrics or satire.
>How do you feel about US police arresting six year old children for misbehaviour in class?
Sounds exactly like something I'd expect from the US. Over policing is a problem that have over there. I was asking the parent poster about this specific point, because they were disappointed with how the police use their resources. I was curious how they felt about police resources being used to deal with tweets instead of something else. Personally it would annoy the hell out of me if the police weren't doing their jobs actually doing police work, but somehow still found the resources to police mean tweets. Those priorities seem backwards to me.
https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/about-sentencing/senten...
> A jail sentence means more than just time in prison. If an offender is sent to prison, the judge will decide how long he should spend in custody, but time in prison is just one part of the sentence. Offenders always complete their full sentence but usually half the time is spent in prison and the rest is spent on licence. While on licence, an offender can be sent back to prison if they break its terms.
> The system of serving half a sentence in prison and half on licence was introduced by Parliament, and is not something that judges or magistrates have any control over.
https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/about-sentencing/types-...
> Offenders sentenced to two years or more will serve half their sentence in prison and serve the rest of the sentence in the community on licence. While on licence an offender will be subject to supervision and the licence will include conditions. If an offender breaches their conditions, they may be recalled to prison.
The supervision will continue for longer than the sentence.
And of course saying that hierarchies should be mitigated is far from unreal. It was the central message of the people who started America. They put a great deal of effort into checks and balances on power both at the federal level (between the 3 branches) and in having local, state, and federal governments, none of which have a hierarchical relationship. They put a strong emphasis on individual rights, which are counter-hierarchical as well. And let's not forget the freedoms of press and political speech, first among the Bill of Rights, which is very much a check on hierarchy.
I was under the impression that US federal law trumps state law. Is this not the case? And wouldn't that imply a hierarchical relationship?
From this system design, you can deduce that there _does_ exist a hierarchy in the theory of US government — the Constitution is the law of the land and all other actors and subsystems are subordinate to it. Modifying the Constitution requires significant effort at multiple levels of government usually including (by state law) extensive popular support and supermajorities of representatives.
Hierarchy is the rule of men, not of laws. So even if there were a hierarchical relationship between bodies of law, that doesn't require a hierarchical relationship between people.
In the US, federal law can supersede state law, and state law can supersede county and city law. It does have to be written that way of course. In practice, many laws are written to allow jurisdictions to self-regulate within broad limits. For example, in California it's legal to open a marijuana store. But localities get to decide whether it happens in their city. And it's technically illegal federally, but that's currently unenforced.
But the president has no direct authority over governors, and governors have no direct authority over mayors. However much Trump dislikes a variety of San Francisco policies, he cannot just order them changed. Instead he would have to persuade both the House and Senate to pass a law, and San Francisco could challenge that law in the courts.
So it's as I said: we have to look at our natural heritage and decide which parts are good. Natural does not equal good.
I was more trying to say hierarchies are not always wrong, but I realize now that's not exactly what he was claiming. You're right they're often abused and should always be challenged. Nothing about nature is good or evil it just is.
As I explain elsewhere in this thread, one alternative of hierarchical authority is carefully limited, distributed power. There are historical examples of it working pretty well for hundreds of years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22415807
How did that work out for them?
* The abolition of the English monarchy led to the brutal military dictatorship of Cromwell, which ended only with the reestablishment of the monarchy.
* The abolition of the French monarchy led to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, which ended in a cataclysmic continent-wide war and the reestablishment of the Bourbon monarchy.
* The abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies led to Hitler.
* The abolition of the Russian monarchy led to the Soviet Union and the mass murder of tens of millions.
* The abolition of the Chinese imperial monarchy led to a half-century-long civil war between Nationalist, Communist, and warlord factions, leading ultimately to a Communist dictatorship and the mass murder of tens of millions.
Hierarchical power is a human universal, and trying to abolish it without recognizing this fact only leads to its reemergence in even more violent forms within the space of a few years, decades if you're lucky.
Hirschman describes the reactionary narratives thus:
- According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.
- The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent."
- Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.
If we're going to talk about the abolition of monarchies, how is it that some of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world today are constitutional monarchies? Norway, Australia, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Japan, Luxembourg, and Spain all rank within the top 25 of countries by HDI as well as the top 25 of countries by Democracy Index. All of those countries are monarchies.
And you still haven't addressed the historical fact that the styles of radicalism that led to the abolition of monarchies in England, France, and Russia utterly failed to make things better and, in fact, largely made things worse. That doesn't mean it's futile or counterproductive to improve society, but merely removing the existing hierarchy and attempting to install something bespoke in its place has historically been a failing proposition, while reforming and improving an existing system has historically been much more successful.
If anything, they're a fine example of the kind of dealing realistically with our heritage I'm talking about. Actual monarchies have a track record I would generously call mixed, and perhaps more properly call horrific. But being half-evolved primates, humans seem to like having an officially recognized big monkey to rally around. So we keep the Queen of England around as something akin to a hood ornament on the car of that nation. It works, even if it's not particularly rational. But then, neither are we.
And now that monarchy has a lot less power than it did.
>* The abolition of the French monarchy led to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, which ended in a cataclysmic continent-wide war and the reestablishment of the Bourbon monarchy.
And now France is a roughly-democratic republic.
>* The abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies led to Hitler.
Same for Germany.
>* The abolition of the Russian monarchy led to the Soviet Union and the mass murder of tens of millions.
Not so much the same for Russia, but I'd take the Russian Federation or some parts of the USSR over the Tsarist dictatorship.
It's worth a strong mention that many countries which freed themselves of imperial control by the monarchy or republic of another country didn't end up in a disastrous state. The United States, Ireland and India are good examples.
>Hierarchical power is a human universal
Some kind may be, though it shouldn't be confused with monarchy. Hierarchy is not equal to a monarchy, and modern republics show that power can be distributed at least a little better, with success.
>its reemergence in even more violent forms within the space of a few years, decades if you're lucky.
And then the emergence of freedom, apparently - when most monarchy is abolished or minimized to the point of being powerless, we benefit. Arguably, the abolition of monarchy is not sufficient to do away with the unjust power of the state, but it is sufficient to do away with a certain unjustified power of man over another man.
To overcome gravity requires a deeply precise and intricate understanding of gravity. So it is with human nature: the point of a deep understanding of our biological nature and evolutionary baggage is not to succumb to them as fait accompli, but to increase our agency and efficacy within those constraints, such that we become able to transcend them.
To me the two poles here are the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy. The former is basically "what is natural is right", and the latter is "what is right is true". Both of them for me are Mencken's "clear, simple, and wrong".
"Natural" is basically a billion years of historical accidents, so there's no reason to expect it to be optimal from our perspective. We need to think about what we truly want the world to be. But we can't assume that the world is just going to be like we want. As when building anything, we must look closely at the characteristics of the raw materials and work with them to achieve our goals.
Any group of humans will naturally form social relations. Some of these relations will be power-responsibility relations, where people trade responsibilities to do things which maintain the society in exchange for the power to choose how the things are done. This does not entail hierarchy, because it does not entail rootedness; there need not be any single person nor group of people who hold ultimate power and responsibility.
Interestingly, you know what does naturally form hierarchies? Capitalist markets, especially those which alienate laborers from the profits of labor. It is straightforward maths to show that markets tend to accumulate wealth in a few lucky individuals, and that wealth alone can be used to manipulate markets arbitrarily.
A deeply historically-entrenched class system is to a natural hierarchy bias is as an ocean is to a pond. I grew up in the UK, and the upper class were quite literally a different type of human, placed by history and the structures of society above us in every way. In my local town, even their school was physically placed to look over us. They spoke with different accents. Their schools were allotted places in the top universities. We were allotted places in local farms. Their failed children were given positions (often in the old colonies) which guaranteed them lifelong ease and comfort. This was all a long way removed from 'natural hierarchy'.
British ones contain one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Fed
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Turner
I'd say this is fraudulent writing but it would be stating the obvious since written by someone literally convicted of fraud. The "stuff" comes before wealth for most people in all systems but it is actually in socialist societies where personal wealth does not generally exist that the acquisition of basic consumer goods is given central significance, gifting them becomes an accepted and expected way to get people dispensing nominally free or fixed-cost social services to deliver first preferential and later merely adequate service.
Anyone with basic penology background will consider it a textbook success on progressive grounds - the default in most places is that the prison "upper class" are the violent career criminals who keep the population in check for the prison guards as the white-collar prisoners pay them protection money.
The Atlantic's breathless headline is misleading as usual.