Cell phones are a particular problem because it has been shown that some in prison continue to engage in criminal activities with those outside including witness intimidation or worse.
[0] https://allongeorgia.com/georgia-state-news/ga-dept-of-corre...
Reference: https://hackaday.com/2017/05/11/tearing-down-the-boss-phone/
(it is actually "B.O.S.S.")
How do we expect people to join back to society when they can't use literally the number one most important thing?
Maybe give them phones with no cameras and monitoring of use, but just nothing seems very inhumane.
It is whether the US is looking at the results achieved by other countries and whether the US is trying to emulate successful strategies.
As a sweeping generalisation, I see that the US says "that doesn't apply to us", always finding some weird excuse. Your invalid response is kind of an example.
It's a fairly common sentiment that the U.S. penal system is heavily skewed toward retribution than reformation.[1] But identifying a problem on the one hand, and quantifying and addressing it on the other, are two entirely separate tasks. The latter is typically much more difficult.[2]
[1] Justice Anton Scalia admitted as much in court, "Well, I thought that modern penology has abandoned that rehabilitation thing, and they--they no longer call prisons reformatories or--or whatever, and punishment is the--is the criterion now. Deserved punishment for crime." Oral argument, Miller v. Alabama, 2012.
[2] Thus the quip, "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." A reformulation of a Charles Dudley Warner quote, who, interestingly, also seems to have been an advocate for prison reform in his time, among many other civic and political reforms. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dudley_Warner and https://books.google.com/books?id=ktwRAAAAYAAJ&q=+%22little+....
If you look at this recent paper[1] by the lancet on "The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence" (coincidentally it's about the corona virus) then you might notice that the effects of isolation are exactly what prisons are designed to do[2]. For quarantines it's a huge dilemma ofc.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I’d love to find corroborating evidence for this, because I find it completely facinating.
I also think they should be allowed to grow their own weed.
Maybe require only open source software and no crypto except for authentication but confiscating phones is stupid and lazy.
Counter-argument: seeing the world pass you by is a good way to become suicidal, and the state (at least here in the US) has an obligation to protect those in their custody.
Receiving broadcasts e.g. radio signals etc. is fairly low risk (exceptions include coded one-way transmissions), but bidirectional communication is a good way to increase the risk that a prison may face a life-critical challenge at some point.
Instead of Prisons: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapte...
Anyone looking for some Netflix/Chill which is also edutainment about prisons and that doesn't paint the problem as binary (good vs evil) I highly recommend Oz https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/ or (a more recent show about the streets and problems in LE) The Wire https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0306414/ <-- needs at least 2 or 3 times watching because it's incredibly dense!
Edit: this is also an incredibly good read https://mises.org/library/defending-undefendable