A pacifist's plan to survive the violent world of prison
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
Focusing on helping addiction not ignoring it and shaming people will go a long way to breaking the cycle
It isn't just about breaking a cycle, though not shaming addiction is helpful. It isn't just addicts that do drugs: I've met folks that do cocaine twice a year, for example. Few folks are addicted to LSD, and most folks only take MDMA occasionally. There is more than one way to take heroin, and folks do use occasionally. All drugs I wouldn't take are safer if folks know they are getting, strength and purity are verified as much as possible.
Legalisation takes some strength away from cartels, which hopefully means less human trafficking.
As a bonus health of patients(addicts) is not deteriorating so rapidly due to crap they take along with actual drugs, so bonuses go back to whole society in form of lower costs of general healthcare. Imagine cigarettes that would be killing 10x more slowly/less often. Smokers would often die of old age and not in 1-5 years of super expensive agony. Safer methods of applications can be used.
The benefits just mount for whole society. All it takes is general acceptance that there will always be some part of society that will want to get high / calm the existential pain, be it physical of psychical.
Surely decriminalization is an improvement.
For this reason, I try to bring it up in conversations about decriminalization.
Would “drug courts,” where offenders are not prosecuted provided they complete treatment not also be an improvement?
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-28/aguanga-...
The other issue is that there are conflicts between state and federal law. Not being able to bank easily is a major hurdle, and these sorts of things need fixed.
Edit: someone already mentioned it and provided evidence.
My anecdata contradicts this.
I know a lot of musicians who say "Yeah, they lied to us about pot. So, I assumed they were lying about everything else, too. And they were--except heroin. Do NOT do heroin--that's a path you do not want to be on."
I don't know of any who use it "recreationally" and control it. It just doesn't seem to work that way.
> All drugs I wouldn't take are safer if folks know they are getting, strength and purity are verified as much as possible.
I agree with this 100%.
Ok, this might not really contradict you since it is more about being able to use it regularly and still be functional.
I'm in favor of decriminalizing all drugs, because I don't think getting high should be a crime by itself; because I don't think the government has any right to control what people do with their own bodies; because the war on drugs costs a fortune and doesn't do anything to prevent drug use; because unregulated drugs are more dangerous than legal ones; and because our prisons are overflowing with people whose only crime was possessing the drugs themselves. But if someone breaks into my house and steals my shit to feed their habit, I still want them locked up. It's a terrifying experience to be victimized, and it's not always just a property crime; there's a lot of violent crime too.
It _could_ have helped in this case because maybe Ryan M. Moser would have gotten help and broken his addiction with a treatment center that didn't have shame and felony crime associated with it. Maybe Ryan M. Moser would have sought help. Maybe. And at least Ryan M. Moser would have had the option if the drug addiction treatment centers were more accessible, walk-in style.
Also (infer no adversarial tone), he seems to imply that he needs to be prepared to defend himself against attack, ostensibly using his lingering Krav Maga skill and instincts. Does that violate his pacifism?
Maybe "pacifist", in this context, should be understood to mean "unaffiliated with any gang".
I consider myself to be a pacifist, but not to the extent that Buddha or Jesus where pacifists, I would be hard pressed to not defend my children or my wife if they were being attacked. For me personally, if I were assaulted, I would try to reach reason and understanding before the violence escalated. If I were being attacked, I would defend myself to the extent that I could get away from the assailant.
My approach would not work against somebody significantly larger and/or more skilled than myself. Nor is it effective against a group of assailants. Flight is not an option in confined quarters. I'd probably resort to more harmful techniques if I thought my life was in danger. And I'd significantly regret doing so.
And then there's the transgender thing -- I've experienced a big uptick in unwanted attention from the public, ever since I came out. Not just a "bad neighborhood" thing, I've had a dude try to follow me home in a sleepy burb, too.
Of course, the best martial art is de-escalation and the next cross-country, but if you're cornered and there's an unbalanced distribution of force, you're kind of screwed regardless of what you do.
> You are threatened by someone for your wallet. First and foremost, place your wallet on the ground, and run like hell when they bend over to pick it up. If they step over the wallet, incapacitate then run like hell.
The "step over the wallet" moment is when the decision is made that if you don't do something, you're probably going to be killed.
> if you're cornered and there's an unbalanced distribution of force, you're kind of screwed regardless of what you do.
This is where martial arts and self defense come it in. No matter how big the other person is, it's really hard to catch up to someone running away with a broken knee.
Yep, Bernie Madoff should have walked, albeit with a felony strike and ruinous restitution.
The alternative is our current gulag.
[EDIT] And the subject of tfa is, apparently, not a first-offender.
It is also fundamentally, systematically, and intentionally racist.
And you are wrong about the 'extreme' mainstream opinion. From making certain drugs illegal on forward...it is discussed, reported, and legislated in racist ways.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5121004/ [1] https://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war ...I can really keep going here...
Off the cuff and reducing a complicated discussion to somethign simple you can start here:
https://medium.com/equityorg/reefer-madness-the-racist-roots...
The early representations used to vilify marijuana were part of jim crow efforts to ensure racial hierarchies. They included representations (later reused with crack cocaine) of Black and Hispanic people using drugs and then being sent into a violent frenzy where they murder and kill white people.
The modern versions of this are more subtle, because they aren't being made explicitly but rather are part of a narrative societal norms is built on, which makes the entire discussion fuzzy and implicit. C.f. ...
the magical negro, and white people's belief that Black people actually have magical powers and super human strength - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/194855061455364...
and as an extension...
excited delirium, which is an invented thing used to justify violence by police and drug people and is often correlated with a presumption of drug use - https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/08/10/how-ex...
With excited delirium, 'symptoms' may include "attempts at violence, unexpected strength [see previous paper]...Complications may include rhabdomyolysis or high blood potassium". Those complications happen to also be side effects of narcotics people are injected with...the 'diagnosis' is much much more likely to be applied to Black people (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28990246/)
it is a disease, invented by police, that only seems to occur when police are involved and suspect drug use, that is disproportionately applied to people of color, to provide a post hoc rationalization for violence comited against them.
Murder rates were 5x higher in 1990 than today. It was a big, big problem. It was believed that drugs drove a lot of that and funded gang activity...some of which was absolutely true. Some of which was absolutely exaggerated.
The victims of crimes are on the other side of this equation of justice. They also deserve justice and consideration. The ideal of our system is for the law to apply the minimum sentence to prevent the crime from re-occurring again. I think it unfortunately oscillates with the moods of the moment, but if murder rates were to suddenly return to NYC 1990 levels in your town, and someone you know or love was murdered, you might be singing a different tune.
Nobody cares about weed anymore for the most part.
Crack is mostly a non issue as that epidemic has already ran its course.
Perceptions of coke are relegated to jokes about white collar professionals and crazy parties.
Heroin and meth are the two drugs people really look down on these days and they're stereotypical white people drugs.
Attempts to cast everyone who wants some sort of stricter drug enforcement as closet racists is naive at best. And this is coming from someone who thinks meth should be available at Walmart just like caffeine pills.
Bigger issue: Is it very common to house non-convicts, people not found guilty of anything, alongside violent actual convicts. Go to any US jail. The number of people literally waiting for their day in court is usually greater than those convicted and serving time.
(Note I said jail, not "prison". Prisons are for longer sentences. Convicts in US jails are generally serving less than a year.)
But we can all agree that we should help people who need it.
By all means, let us get rid of all of these things.
So the question becomes how do you reconcile the secretly dark desire to wipe undesirables off the face of the earth forever vs a legal system that says that people do have the right to live normal lives after they've paid their debts to society. There isn't really a viable middle ground here. The current status quo is to just spend ungodly amounts of tax dollars deferring the dilemma to X years in the future. But when the time is up, either you wait for a relapse and go through the whole thing again, or you just accept that society wants undesirables banished and just kill them all all the time to free resources, or you come up with some reasonable reintegration strategy where people are ok living near ex-cons. Most people would probably balk at the idea of unconditional life/death sentences, under some tautological idea of justice. You can see small scale cases where reformed murderers claim to have found god and built families, and whatever. The challenge is that there's a lot of very strong stigma as soon as you leave tight social circles and that's where the relapses often come from.
You may put a rapist in a prison but then they serve their sentence and might go on to become your neighbor, regardless of whether they repent or are willing to rape again. Where do you put them then? Who gets to decide who's unrepentant? You see how the question gets uncomfortable?
I get that you're trying to just imply that some criminals should just rot in prison, but that's exactly the blindsidedness that I was talking about when it comes to discussions about prison systems.
If you scroll elsewhere, you can see I also mentioned that one could spend weeks fruitlessly debating what constitutes a criminal beyond redemption and that that does add extra layers of touchiness when it comes things like capital punishment.
You may not like capital punishment (and I'm neither condemning nor advocating for it), but it is a real punishment framework that addresses tax burden and the problem of discomfort of having to live near a sex offender. Does it have flaws? Absolutely. As you said yourself, justice systems make mistakes. When I said "tautological idea of justice", what I'm deriding is the double standard some people fall into when making an argument that boils down to "killing innocent people is wrong because it cannot be undone" and use that as a differentiator in opinion between capital punishment and long prison sentences, since one can also make the same argument about innocent inmates (the "silver lining" type of argument is usually callously oblivious to the horrors of prison life, as well as stigma, trauma, loss of opportunity and health, etc and the fact that this damage cannot be undone, no matter how much one thinks saying "oops, sorry" is good enough). One can flip the silver lining argument as such: "at least he was put out of his misery quickly". (Again, not advocating for it, just reiterating that side of the debate)
A lot of anti-prison folks will argue that the better option is reintegration, which involves skill development, counseling, etc. This gels well with the vast majority of inmates who are in prison for small crimes. The flaw, of course, is that you can't really proactively stop the odd psychopath. Trade-offs, trade-offs.
Prisons existing is not a societal failure. You can't have a society with 330 million people and not have at least 1 murderer who is relentlessly violent, who needs to be physically confined to protect everyone around them. As soon as you have 1 individual like that (which is almost guaranteed by the law of large numbers irrespective of how good that society is), you've already agreed that some kind of prison (whether or not you label it as such) is necessary.
Every large country has some kind of supermax prison, including Scandinavian countries, because it's a simple reality that individuals like the above exist in small numbers.
How many of these people are the Dexter type murderer?
I'm focusing on the part I think we can all agree on and therefore is solvable.
It can be a historical running dark joke - "Sadly <x> still qualified as an improvement." such as slavery technically being a bit better than early human warfare ending in genocide either directly or indirectly (forced out of all territory capable of sustaining themselves).
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better (ones with far better recidivism rates should be a model for one) but given the history it isn't a failing in itself - that would suggest a shift away from widespread killing and mutilating people was a mistake.
Unfortunately the American people voted otherwise. See what Harris was up to in CA. Expect it to be rolled out nationwide. Biden created the laws that made it possible. They are a right pair.
Our criminal justice system is broken where innocent people should fear getting incarcerated because: 1. Almost everything is a crime and 2. Every crime is prosecuted harshly for political points. (look at me, I'm tough on crime, I imprisoned 300 criminals).
As an European the United States needs proper reform of its judicial/law system, or whatever you call the dreadful thing where you can imprison a person for 10 years because of non-violent property crime. Unfortunately I've read that the new VP had built her career partially on being tough on crime, hope that those people were wrong/lying or (if they were correct) that she'd be able to see that that's not the best road going forward.
They should. I don't think this is something I'm willing to change my mind on.
Prisons are literally one of the worst things we've made. They serve no purpose other than to dehumanize, rape, assault, and other fucked shit to "undesirables." It allows us to put problems to be solved to a later date, instead of addressing them head on and making sure it doesn't happen.
Prison should be an optional rehabilitation option for people, with it potentially being forced on a very very small minority of the population. No more than 0.01% of the population should be in forced rehabilitation, and no more than 1% in optional rehabilitation.
Come on, you know that's not true.
Prisons exist primarily to control threats from society. And secondarily to punish people for getting caught breaking rules, partially for vengeance and partially for deterrence.
Societies have tried other methods of controlling threats beyond imprisonment, including (but definitely not limited to) ankle bracelets, public shaming, shunning, exile, offender registries, altering brains via chemicals, brainwashing, torture, or surgery, altering bodies via sterilization or mutilation, death, even collective punishment.
So prisons aren't great, but they're better than many of the alternatives.
On a personal note: that crime of any kind is even possible in a 100% controlled environment speaks to the malicious incompetence of those administering the prisons, and to our shameful collective thirst for vengeance. As with people, judge a society by how they treat the least powerful.
On top of all that, it gets severely overused, not the least because of this broad assumption that it's "better than many of the alternatives", even when that's not actually true - in many cases, prison sentences that replaced one-off corporal punishments for minor crimes can be a lot more disruptive for the life of the person undergoing them.
There are appropriate use cases for prison, and violence in prison will be inevitable. The very least we can do is take that more seriously, and stop shoving addicts into the same place as violent murderers.
Isn't this already partly achieved by the delineation between low security & high security prisons, as well as delineations within the same prison complex (general population vs SHU)?
There are places in europe, for example, where they focus on developing skills so that someone trying to integrate back into society has a more legitimate shot at being successful. Others have implemented non-policing systems such as drug addiction rehab programs, effectively diverting funds from a policy of handling certain types of issues as policing/legal issues and instead treat them as public health issues.
I also recall reading about a small town in US that was composed almost entirely of ex-cons, where they could start a normal-ish life in preparation to jumping back into the regular society, stigmas and all.
The topic of punishment of "lost causes" is itself sometimes a hot button. Some societies consider death penalty acceptable while others do not, for example. There's even differences in laws regarding things like involuntary manslaughter in driving accidents, for example (notoriously, the case of core.js maintainer going to prison for it). We could probably be here all day debating what is "beyond redemption" or not, and not come to an agreement, and we can see from the ratio of small crime inmates that we tend to err on the side of far too much caution / vengeful spirit.
You cannot treat miscreant behavior as if it was a movie, where you beat the bad guy and get a happy ending. Real people are complex beasts and life goes on after the credits roll.
Farming and nature isn't a cure, and does nothing to help someone adapt to the city they will likely be living in upon release.
Last time I checked unusual punishments were prohibited.
The guy in the article is in for 10 years for burglary due to a drug habit.
What about the other prisoners and guards who don't smoke having smoke imposed on their lungs? Isn't that ridiculous? I'm suggesting we make this fairer, by not forcing inmates to breathe poisonous fumes in addition to serving their sentences. What makes prisons special compared to every other indoor public space (in most western countries) where it is banned - why are they exempt?
This is like saying "OMG, <thing that is regulated by the states> isn't illegal in the US". Prisons are run by the states. Jails are usually run by the counties. Banning tobacco across the board for prisoners and staff is common because it becomes one less potential avenue of illicit trade between the guards and prisoners. Just because there isn't a law against doesn't mean it's not usually prohibited in practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_ban#Effects_of_prison_...
But, that UK hacker that got arrested after black hat was in non-violent section.
It looks like he's on his third go-around, and was probably jailed immediately on a parole or probation violation on his third offense (which explains how he's been away for 6 years despite his current sentence being 5 years). I don't know if he's also going to have to serve more time due to probably having violated his parole for earlier offences.
I hope he gets his life together, for his sake and the sake of his family. It's a shame that he couldn't have been diverted into a first-offender program and rehab many years ago back at his first offense, rather than doing what looks like a 'revolving door' run through prisons.
There are two common ways to get a crazy prison sentence.
Drug and/or gun possession often acts as a multiplier on sentencing guidelines for whatever the underlying crime is.
Multiple contacts with the system (three strikes laws and parole/probation violations) tend to have compounding sentences so screwing up on parole or probation can net you an additional sentence than in addition to time served adds up to longer than whatever the longest sentence you would get as a standalone is.
The three-strikes law is pure abomination, I've first learned about it watching "Oz" (the TV series) in the early 2000s, couldn't believe that that was real (I don't live in the States). 15 years have passed and there is still no real conversation about abolishing it.
Why? I don't have a well-formed opinion on this type of policy but there is a balance between prioritizing justice for victims and rights of victimizers. Behind every single strike are innocent people who have been hurt by the individual and at some point, you have to take steps to protect them from someone who just doesn't want to stop.
You also can't take away all agency from that individual. Those strikes are collected through many years and multiple prison sentences - at that point, it's a decision to continue.
>just an example I thought of myself right now but I'm pretty sure it's real
You're pretty sure it's real eh?
I understand what the arguments are, and I agree with the length of sentences ... to a point, but I'm always frustrated that victims are ignored in these arguments and the focus is always on the rights of the abuser. The context for 'three-strike' type of policy is the high level of crime in America and an attempt to protect and provide justice to law-abiding citizens who are victimized by these individuals.
This is why the initiative to decriminalize all drugs in Oregon is important, because it is setting up treatment centers to treat the addiction. It won't save people from stealing but could give many the treatment they need to not be in such a position to begin with.