How to “disrupt” the American prison system?
I definitely agree with your comment. But for the sake of the discussion, I would like to point out that Europe also has prison problems, but at a way lower scale:
- UK's Belmarsh prison has been criticized extensively and regularly compared to Guantanamo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3714864.stm. As an aside, Julian Assange spent the past 1 year there.
- France and Norway prisons have very high suicide rate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6066090/. Though no country is even close with the USA. Citations from the article: "We excluded the USA in one analysis (for incarceration rates) because it was an outlier, with an incarceration rate of more than eight times higher than the majority of other countries." and "Rates of prison suicide compared with rates of incarceration - Data are for men and women combined. USA was not included in this analysis because it is an outlier (appendix p 17)."
The fact that there are issues in European prisons doesn't change the situation in US ones. You also also say no other country is close - which is just an indirect way of affirming the parent post (that Europeans find the American system hard to understand). They're hardly going to agree and understand with the American prison system if their own is equally as bad?
You're right, they're not a dichotomy - so why bring them up?
Animal rights aren't dichotomous to the problem of the American prison establishment either. They're also irrelevant to the discussion except as a diversionary tactic too
That's definitely not irrelevant to whatever discussion you feel the need to enforce, if people from the US want to improve fight against their prison system by promoting the European models, they should be aware of its shortcoming. In any case that's worth discussing.
Anyway, I'm not that interested in justifying my previous comments, I don't see why I should have to. So I will stop here. Have a good time for the rest of the day.
1. If you go to prison, innocent or otherwise, you're not getting hired afterward. This leads to desperation, desperation leads to...
2. In prison, you become socially reliant on criminals to simply get by. This results in cultural transference. Someone getting in trouble for shoplifting learns about the joys of [insert more lucrative criminal activity here]. Combine this with point 1 and you get repeat offenders who become 'hardened' criminals. Basically, they get better at crime, because crime involves skills just like everything else in life.
3. Poor prison conditions result in psychological trauma. This, in turn, leads to anti-social behavior.
In short, we pay a lot of money to create better criminals who are highly motivated to commit more crimes.