> In other words, when Snow focuses on making prison safer and cheaper, he’s working on the wrong problem...If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change. Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans and avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness and structural racism.
He later goes on to dismiss worries about violence in prison, and chalks up the fear to people like Shane imagining the people in prison as being "so other." Prison violence is a very real problem, and it's hard to feel like someone actually cares about the prisoners when they're casually dismissing it like this and acting as if it's misguided to try to make prisons safer. The other issues he talks about are important, but they don't negate the importance of improving prisons. It's like arguing that the worries about the Boeing 737 Max are unimportant because we should be riding high speed trains instead of flying.
Furthermore, there seems to be a severe lack of imagination. For instance, he writes:
> Furthermore, will contact with humans through virtual worlds mitigate the mental problems prisoners face in isolation or exacerbate them? How do we answer any of these questions ethically, given the restrictions we’ve put on experimenting on prisoners in the wake of Nazi abuse of concentration camp prisoners.
He's not wrong that switching prisoners who are used to human interaction into isolation with VR seems like it would end up badly. But a mere two paragraphs before this, he writes about how there are already supermax prisons (among others) where the prisoners are isolated. We wouldn't need to do Nazi-esque experiments to see if VR has potential, we could offer it to prisoners who are already isolated. I can't see how it wouldn't be an improvement for most of those who are already isolated.
Again, I don't disagree that the original article was extremely goofy. But this response doesn't seem to be much better, especially for someone who teaches courses on social change.