The American prison system’s war on reading | Hacker News Reader

The American prison system’s war on reading

proteanmag.com

426 pointsmisiti3780247 comments

I used to be a volunteer teacher for a 3-hour weekly class in a local prison.

One of the things this article misses is that gangs – which are especially active in prison systems – use books to pass ciphered messages. Highlighting, underlining, dogeared corners, scratched out characters, etc. are used prolifically as encoded messages that would appear to be regular wear to a casual observer. The "tradecraft" these guys employ is amazing (albeit for a horrible purpose). We were allowed to have books shipped directly from publishers or known third-party entities (e.g., Amazon) and there was a request form an instructor could fill to add new approved vendors.

All that to say, I understand the policy, even though it's not ideal for those honestly wanting to read. It's hard for most people to imagine but a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes, and there are real cases of warring gangs orchestrating "hits" on other gang members through innocuous looking content.

> a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes

Some of the prisoners are quite bad too

We should probably remove their ability to read, write or speak all together, just in case something bad could come from it.

Less than lethals used during prison riots take eyes out every now and then.

The Clarence Ray Allen argument.

This is a far better explanation for the decision.

It really isnt, people in prison, or people all together will always find novel ways to communicate, and on this case use books, yet the net benefit of them having access to literature is itself good on a whole other level vs the smaller drawbacks which happen from some of them being cuts, this ofc is without getting into the core fundamental that prison is supposed to be there as both a chance of rehab and as a place to separate them from society temporarily let alone this just being inhumane treatment

That doesn't explain the cost for use of e-books, especially the public domain books under Project Gutenberg, nor does it really explain the banning of book donations from registered non-profits. If the issue you describe is prevalent, then I could see the need for vetting non-profits before donation, but not outright blocking them.

The article is pretty clear about all this. Companies make money from this, so it’s done. Guards smuggle in most of the contraband, like cell phones, so banning books is like trying to hold back a flood with a bucket.

Taken to its logical conclusion, private companies are making money hand over fist with private prisons, from the amount taxpayers pay to house inmates, and from modern day slave labor of prison “jobs” making products. Why not ensure you’ve got a recidivist population of that labor by taking away any avenue for someone to escape the cycle.

Truly evil.

Don't forget all the corrections officers jobs and the money that flows into the system.

It's not just private industry. The .gov is very much in on the racket.

> Taken to its logical conclusion, private companies are making money hand over fist with private prisons, from the amount taxpayers pay to house inmates, and from modern day slave labor of prison “jobs” making products.

Given that private prisons cost less than state run ones, do you think taxpayers would prefer to pay more for prisons just so that companies running private prison don’t make a profit? Do you apply this logic also to construction projects? I.e. would you prefer to pay, say, twice as much for a bridge to be build by government construction agency, so long as no private construction company makes a profit building it?

Do private prisons really cost less?

If we wanted to reduce costs we could finally end The War on Drugs and reduce the prison population (and the court costs, etc).

Yes, they really do cost less. In California, for example, state run prisons cost almost 3x per inmate than private prisons do. California recently banned private prisons, which will cost its budget $100M.

But, then again, California is not the best example here, as California cost per prisoner is way, way above national average (despite being below national average 30 years ago). California has pumped its cost per prisoner through the roof, which is then used to justify reduction of prison population, as too expensive. Either way, California is not known to care much for its fiduciary duty to its taxpayers.

In Arizona, private prisons are still cheaper, though the disparity there is only 1.25x, not 3x. Also, state prisons in Arizona are cheaper than private prisons in California. State prisons in California are 5x more expensive than private prisons in Arizona. If California contracted Arizona private prisons and shipped its prisoners there, it could save >$10B annually, more than 5% of its entire budget, which could then be used on schools, infrastructure, and public safety. Of course, this 80% reduction in prison spending will never happen, prisons being expensive is too politically convenient.

That comparison is incredibly hard to make. The following article discusses it in depth, it actually specifically calls out a few reports about California.

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2016/oct/3/apples-fish-...

Also from that article:

Yet a 2010 report by Arizona’s Office of the Auditor General, based on data from the state Department of Corrections, noted that privately-operated prisons were actually more expensive than their public counterparts.

It may have been true in 2010, but hasn’t been true in 2018.

https://corrections.az.gov/sites/default/files/REPORTS/Opera...

Highest cost private prison was cheaper than cheapest state run prison.

That is operating cost, which the article I linked described as one of the ways that comparisons use to skew data.

It might be hard in Arizona, where the disparity is small. However, it’s really hard to paper over 3x difference in costs with even extreme amounts of sophistry.

"and shipped its prisoners there" >> Well CA should just do that then. No need even to put them in prison. Just release at the border. If they make it back to California, consider it time served and they're free to go!

Legalizing drugs would not reduce the prison population as much as you may assume: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Your source isn’t as clear on that matter as you claim:

> Police still make over 1 million drug possession arrests each year, many of which lead to prison sentences. Drug arrests continue to give residents of over-policed communities criminal records, hurting their employment prospects and increasing the likelihood of longer sentences for any future offenses.

> Nevertheless, 4 out of 5 people in prison or jail are locked up for something other than a drug offense — either a more serious offense or an even less serious one. To end mass incarceration, we will have to change how our society and our justice system responds to crimes more serious than drug possession. We must also stop incarcerating people for behaviors that are even more benign.

My interpretation is that releasing drug offenders alone will not reduce the prison population significantly. However—and this is a big however—harsh punishments for drug offenders and crimes related to drug use is a driver of mass incarceration.

It was my understanding that legalizing drugs is more about treating drug addicts humanly and offering treatments over punishments. To offer drug users safe usage sites and other benefits so that they are not forced into commit crimes for acting on their addiction. The legalization is only a part of a much broader policy change which may ultimately reduce criminal behavior in addicts, criminal behavior which includes, but is not limited to, possession.

Your source seems to agree with my understanding:

> For example, the data makes it clear that ending the war on drugs will not alone end mass incarceration, though the federal government and some states have taken an important step by reducing the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses.

> Are state officials and prosecutors willing to rethink not just long sentences for drug offenses, but the reflexive, simplistic policymaking that has served to increase incarceration for violent offenses as well?

TLDR; Your source is very much for legalizing drugs, however it acknowledges that legalization by it self is not sufficient in ending mass incarceration.

> TLDR; Your source is very much for legalizing drugs, however it acknowledges that legalization by it self is not sufficient in ending mass incarceration.

This is the point I was trying to convey when I said, “Legalizing drugs would not reduce the prison population as much as you may assume”.

Thanks for the link!

Hmmm... The fact you present would not surprise me if the complaint about private prisons was that they allocate inhumanely small amounts of resources to prisoner care while extracting the most value possible out of the prisoners and their families as is possible in the pursuit of maximizing profit.

But the primary complaint is actually taxpayer expense, so what you say makes sense.

I'd say, even if you are correct that it's cheaper on a per-prisoner, something I find hard to believe, the incentives to imprison more people are so perverse that I would anticipate the price would catch up, and that's before we even consider the moral ramifications of imprisoning people to satisfy a quota set by a profit-seeking entity.

Of course it’s cheaper, this is a general pattern of government-ran vs. for-profit ran services in US.

> the incentives to imprison more people are so perverse that I would anticipate the price would catch up,

But it’s the state that’s imprisoning people, not private prisons. Private prisons cannot catch, prosecute, sentence and institutionalize people at tax payer dime any more than construction companies can build road and bridges on their own initiative while paid by the state. When government contracts bridge construction to a private company, are you also worried that said company will build 10 extra unnecessary bridges and charge government for them?

> Of course it’s cheaper, this is a general pattern of government-ran vs. for-profit ran services in US.

I do not believe this to be so and it runs counter to what I would logically expect.

At any rate, prison companies do things like write prisoner quotas into contracts, with penalties if the quota is not met, and lobby lawmakers to put more people in prison for committing petty crimes. So really it's nothing like your absurdist scenario.

> I do not believe this to be so and it runs counter to what I would logically expect.

The only counterexample I can think of is elite private schools, which do cost more than public universities, but I think that it’s safe to assume that Yale provides rather different kind of service than University of Kansas. But, if you think that government-ran enterprises in US are cheaper than for-profit ones, I’m eager to hear some examples.

This pattern is also logically expected: for profit companies are incentivized to keep costs low, while government ones much less so. It’s not like citizen can easily choose to change the government they are signed up with for a cheaper, better run one.

> At any rate, prison companies do things like write prisoner quotas into contracts, with penalties if the quota is not met

Sure, because otherwise they’d never commit to run the prison in the first place. Starting and maintaining prison operation is expensive, so if government does not commit to buying some level of service, you’re risking a lot of money.

Imagine an alternative scheme, where government agrees to buy 1000 prisoner-years worth of capacity, and then is free to send as many prisoners as it wants between 0 and 1000. There is no prisoner quota, prison company is paid exactly the same amount regardless of whether it houses 100 or 1000 inmates. Would that arrangement be more acceptable to you?

> The only counterexample I can think of is elite private schools, which do cost more than public universities, but I think that it’s safe to assume that Yale provides rather different kind of service than University of Kansas. But, if you think that government-ran enterprises in US are cheaper than for-profit ones, I’m eager to hear some examples.

Medicare is a blindingly obvious one. Trains. The postal service. Can you actually cite a real example of the private alternative saving money, especially one that didn't involve drastically cutting services?

I also don't think it's "safe to assume" that Yale does much different from the University of Kansas except let you go to school with the kind of people who attend Yale.

> This pattern is also logically expected: for profit companies are incentivized to keep costs low, while government ones much less so. It’s not like citizen can easily choose to change the government they are signed up with for a cheaper, better run one.

No, that is not logically expected, because the entire concept of "profit" is collecting extra money on top of the cost to actually render the service.

> Imagine an alternative scheme, where government agrees to buy 1000 prisoner-years worth of capacity, and then is free to send as many prisoners as it wants between 0 and 1000. There is no prisoner quota, prison company is paid exactly the same amount regardless of whether it houses 100 or 1000 inmates. Would that arrangement be more acceptable to you?

That doesn't really solve the problem; your incentive is still to get there to be so many inmates that there's no choice but to fund a new facility.

> No, that is not logically expected, because the entire concept of "profit" is collecting extra money on top of the cost to actually render the service.

In an ideal world, you are more efficient at the service you provide than the general population, and the profit comes largely from that efficiency reducing costs.

(Of course, we don’t live in an ideal world)

> do you think taxpayers would prefer to pay more for prisons just so that companies running private prison don’t make a profit?

I think they'd prefer to pay more for prisons that prioritize reducing recidivism over increasing profits. And that is logic that I apply to construction projects, if it was demonstrated that private construction companies were making a profit by building structures that collapsed more often and killed people, ultimately increasing the costs of infrastructure by forcing us to constantly rebuild failing bridges, then I would have a problem with that.

That being said, the debate of private/public prisons really misses a fundamental point of how prisons work in America: public prisons are also regularly exploitative, and they also funnel resources/money into private companies and personal/pet projects; resources that would be better spent reducing recidivism rates. Even when private companies are not involved, the State itself has found out that it can exploit prisoners for cheap labor, taxes/fees, federal funding, better census data, and just general political ends.

It is inaccurate to frame prison reform as a debate about public vs private prisons, when in reality prison reform is a debate about how even the State prioritizes prisoners as resources over encouraging their rehabilitation. The State often does this to the benefit of private companies and often with permission from a society with regressive and/or uninformed views about the purposes of prison and how our prison system currently functions.

In both cases, public and private, reducing costs to the taxpayer means reducing recidivism rates. It is always a costly burden on the taxpayer to imprison someone; it doesn't matter where you put them, all prisons are costly. When we look at profits (both private and State profits), we need to ask if it's good for the incentives of the taxpayer and the incentives of the State/companies to be so misaligned. It is undesirable for either a private company or the State to benefit from someone being in prison when both the taxpayer's wallet and society in general would rather benefit from keeping them out of prison.

Tho it's not just private prisons, even federal prisons and state jails have massive rat-tails of private industries servicing them [0]

Nor are private companies the only ones outsourcing labor to prisons, the US military is also doing it [1]

[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html

[1] https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/unicor_about.js...

Just Chinese prison labor get any return at all? Apparently we give 4% back to the prisoners although it is vague as to how.

> Guards smuggle in most of the contraband, like cell phones, so banning books is like trying to hold back a flood with a bucket.

No, it's increasing demand for the C.O.’s contraband racket. It is not trying to hold back the flood at all.

(Yeah, it also narrows competition for the approved sellers, too.)

[edit] just to round out context, this story was told while putting locked down chrome books (better than just books I guess) and secure networking in the prison so that inmates can learn trade skills and even coding (at zero cost for use to the inmates as well). Please don’t mistake any of the below for lack of respect and care

A nearby prison had inmates routinely high, a huge black eye on the warden and staff. For the life of them they couldn't figure out how anyone was smuggling narcotics until one day they caught an inmate smoking a page of the Holy Bible.

So the inmates were getting printed religious materials soaked in heroin (thank you generous spirit) and then ripping them out to enjoy. This prison went the somewhat charitable route to scan all letters, books and documents, but it does go to show that stories / headlines that appear absurd on the surface are usually just as absurd underneath.

What is absurd is banning books because of a few unsubstantiated stories.

I'll guess you're so sure of your worldview that it wasn't worth a google search. SMH

The stories of paper goods (including mail) being soaked is prevalent.

Googled it. I found some vague references to it having happened, or having been stopped in the act, but not like a news report. The more prevalent an idea is without having any actual evidence, the less I trust it.

Seems like a real thing:

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/crime/fl-ne-fugitive-roy-k...

Someone was mailing drugs into federal prisons, disguising papers soaked in MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy), fentanyl, synthetic marijuana and Suboxone, an opioid dependence treatment, as confidential legal communication in order to sneak them past guards.

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/15/1015447281/overdose-deaths-st...

Friends and family can tuck strips of paper soaked with drugs into mail or books, and if they get past the mail room, people in prison can eat them, or roll them up and smoke them.

https://bangordailynews.com/2020/06/25/news/state/3-maine-wo...

Three Maine women have been accused of being associates to a New York City street gang called the Bullies that allegedly used vehicles with hidden compartments and comic book pages soaked in narcotics as part of their multi-state distribution of cocaine, heroin, guns and money between Maine and New York for 3 ½ years.

Found on first page of:

https://www.google.com/search?q=heroin+soaked+book

It's real. It's mostly roach spray though: https://lumierehealingcenters.com/2018/07/12/drug-alert-smok...

I just got out of jail. This stuff is EVERYWHERE.

> The stories of paper goods (including mail) being soaked is prevalent.

I didn't believe it when it was LSD getting to kids : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_star_tattoo_legend and I don't believe it now.

There is no financial reward in giving LSD to kids so that’s obviously fake.

There is an enormous financial incentive to smuggle drugs into prisons by any means, and soaking drugs in paper has been done all over the place. Here are 3 cases:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndoh/pr/eleven-people-indicted-...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdpa/pr/multi-state-drug-smuggl...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdpa/pr/two-sci-inmates-two-all...

LSD gets to kids in e.g. cake sprinkles. There was an incident with students hallucinating at my junior high (a long time ago), and I overheard some of the responsible kids talking about it later on.

Excellent reason to ban all books in prisons.

Not unsubstantiated. See my post above. I saw it all day, every day when in jail. I just got out in July.

Guess what: inmates are going to get high regardless of whether idiotic book bans are put in place or not.

That being the case, it's clearly better to allow the books than not.

You make an interesting point.

> "(As an aside, learn to spell "heroin".)"

Just my 2 cents, but I think that phrasing may come across as harsh. Keeping things civil is a big part of keeping HN's discussions interesting.

You're right, it was too harsh and I have deleted it. I guess I just get a little upset about drug-policy moralizing from people who, well, can't spell the name of the drug in question. But I still should have been more civil

Again, I appreciate your help in this arena. For context, the story was told in 'dope' form, so I did edit that at least. I have no specific morality with drugs and thought it was so sad to see the product of what we have collectively built, so I was happy to play a small part in righting those wrongs.

And yes, written on a mobile device so not the best proofreading, nor am I a perfect writer (re And).

This is absolutely true. There is nothing else to do. The incarcerated people will always, always find a way to get stuff in.

Shit, I even saw one lawyer bringing in weed for his client. That was fucked up. I wouldn't risk my license for that.

And it probably becomes even more true if there is nothing for the prisoners to do all day except getting high.

"secure networking" Hey, that's some great real-world pentesting experience!

The things the users found have been near miraculous

Man, if I was stuck in prison all day every day, I'd want to be on drugs, too. I can't blame the prisoners.

OK, so I just got out of jail. It's not heroin on the pages. It's "K2", but actually no-one I met really knows what the fuck they are smoking most of the time. They tend to assume it is just roach spray on the paper, which actually means it is legal: https://lumierehealingcenters.com/2018/07/12/drug-alert-smok...

At the Cook County Jail, that I just left, it was upwards of 80% of the population that are smoking it on a daily basis in some areas. The effects can be devastating. I saw people "die" and need to be brought back by Narcan. I saw many, many people acting like they were on PCP, going crazy. This is bad for your cell block as if the guard sees it he's going to call in a really heavy shakedown for everyone. I saw many people simply OD and go comatose but eventually recover after having water poured over them repeatedly.

One letter-sized page makes about $8000 for the person that gets it in. They tear it up into what we call "strips" which are about the area of a dime. You get the thin wrapping paper that covers a toilet roll and use that as rolling paper and then tear the strip up into little pieces and light the whole thing.

Never touched the stuff myself.

Oh, and it's basically undetectable, which is the reason it gets into the prisons so easy. The stuff I've seen while I was inside had no colouration on the paper, had no smell etc. The dogs can't sniff it - I was told by the handler that it's because they are not trained in it.

I did the same kind of thing in France, and most inmate found a way to smuggle a cell phone. If it's also the case in the US (which I'd be surprised if not) that'd mean that a rule against steganography in book is mostly here for legacy reasons.

Even this is a lousy excuse. Banning/raising prices of books for everyone just because authorities failed to do their work is regressive and simply lazy. A better approach is to simply detect when these ciphered messages occur and react appropriately.

Note that only allowing certain vendors is no fail safe either. A criminal can set work with a store which sells through amazon making sure that the “correct” copy gets sent to the prisoner, the postage can be forged to look like an approved vendor, a prison guard can be bribed etc.

If there is a will to send a ciphered message to a prisoner, then there are means. Making life miserable for everyone else is not how you prevent this.

Some prisons do do this where the inmates suspected of being active gang members are just put in the SHU arbitrarily.

SHU = Special Housing Unit? Is that another way to say isolation? If so, then please please please don’t do that. Isolation is a form of torture (as defined and declared by the UN[1]) and should never be done except for really rare cases.

If you can’t limit a persons gang activity while they are confined in a prison without resorting to torture, then there is some serious incompetence going on.

1: https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/10/392012-solitary-confine...

Well as Clarence Ray Allen showed, sometimes the only way to stop someone from killing people is to kill them.

> Well as Clarence Ray Allen showed, sometimes the only way to stop someone from killing people is to kill them.

If killing is such a great solution, lets just kill everyone capable of committing a crime. It will definitely lower it.

I mean, your side has won. California doesn’t execute anymore. In the marketplace of ideas, “Clarence Ray Allen should be left alive” is victorious.

I don’t follow.

Clarence Ray Allen was executed in 2006 at the age of 76 by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison in California. Prisoner execution is still legal 27 states (plus federal and military) including in California. Currently there are 697 prisoners awaiting execution in California[1]. So far this year 5 people have been sentence to death in California, which is up from 3 in 2020[2]. Since Clarence Rey Allen was executed, Californian courts have sentence around 170 prisoners to receive the same fate. The only thing preventing California from executing its prisoners is a handful of powerful individuals (particularly Gavin Newsom) that just so happens to be against this practice. If California were to get a new governor and a judge or two with a laxer moral stance surely state executions would continue.

No our side has far from “won”. We have come close. In 2012 and 2016 popular ballot measures came really close to abolishing the death penalty in California. 7 states (including my home state of Washington) have made state executions illegal in the past decade alone. I think it is only a matter of time before California does the right thing here and abolishes this barbaric practice for good. Sentencing people to death—though infinitely more humane then following through and actually executing people—is still a cruel practice, and California should absolutely stop doing that.

1: https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/capital-punishment/condemned-inmate-...

2: https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/capital-punishment/condemned-inmate-...

When it comes to prisons, the people employed at them are clearly not the best from society. I’m not sure if we can really expect more from them. In particular asking them to do more work vs just banning books… it’s an easy decision for them.

Not to mention that none of this is grounds for banning particular authors or genres. This stinks to high heaven of political repression.

it sounds plausible, but I couldn't find any good evidence of this being widespread. I also can't see how this justifies subject- or genre-based bans on new books.

So what. Gangs will pass messages no matter what you do. That looks like a prison administration problem and not a problem with the books.

> So what.

The answer to the problem of "incarcerated individuals are using a resource provided to them to facilitate the murder of other individuals" should never be "so what".

I mean, "so what" seems ok until it's more than a thing a random hn commenter heard from someone when they volunteered at a prison that one time.

So what doesn't call in to question the veracity of the statement, it implies that the situation described doesn't matter. To me it sounds like "Well, the problem is hard, so we should just accept that some people may die and live with it" as opposed to "we don't know how common that is" or "the alternative is worse and here's why".

My objection is to what I see as a cavalier attitude towards the injuries and deaths of those we've incarcerated, which I think we have a clear duty to try to alleviate. We are legally required to not torture and or injure them, and I don't think turning a blind eye towards what happens in the environment we force them to be in diminishes our responsibility with respect to that.

I think you're taking a particularly uncharitable reading of GPs "so what". I read it precisely as asking the other person to make the value tradeoff argument.

Perhaps, but Merriam-Webster defines the idiom as meaning "should not be found objectionable", which squares with how I interpreted it. You're right that it's possible it wasn't meant that way though.

There are infinite ways.

I would write my messages on toilet paper, then fold it up so the message was on the inside and put it in my top pocket. I would take it out at strip search to show the guards that it was just for blowing my nose. No guard is going to touch it.

> a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes

And then we treat them like animals and take everything from them with no chance to improve themselves. Our prison system is broken and not based on outcomes but simply on incarceration. What if people needed to show an improvement in themselves instead?

https://www.skyetravels.com/finnish-prison/

I would love to see something like BYU-I's Pathway program made widely available to prisoners.

That's probably a pipe dream in US society though.

Why are we so eager to treat people according to the worst of them? It’s always “some may misuse it: take it from all of them.” It’s an insane way to treat human beings.

I don’t know how someone can call this justice with a straight face.

"A little bad is all bad," is an instance of hypodescent, the same morality that gave us the one-drop rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

Prison operators are held accountable for crimes committed in their prisons, but they aren't rewarded for teaching prisoners.

Prison operators turning a blind eye to guards openly selling contraband and cellphone access to prisoners is not only criminal but rampant. A federal prison in the southeastern U.S. recently transferred 90% of their inmates to other facilities and banned staff due to the incredible corruption there. And sorry, but teaching prisoners starts with the prisons funding teachers, not 'rewards.'

Was that Atlanta?

We all know it's just a pretext

I'm deeply sympathetic to this viewpoint, and definitely oppose book bans and restrictions. That being said, I think you're misinterpreting OP's perspective. They aren't (at least not deliberately) proposing these restrictions out as some punishment for immorality, they're specifically concerned about safety. If significant numbers of people die that wouldn't die if books were restricted, that's at least an argument for a ban.

Again, I'm not saying at anything near enough people die due to book-organized hits to swing the scales. That seems...unlikely, to say the least. I'd just argue that there's a difference between keeping all the kids in at recess and hits being called.

> If significant numbers of people die that wouldn't die if books were restricted, that's at least an argument for a ban

The same argument is made for guns, and that hasn't gone very well to convince anyone.

It is an argument though, rather than blind word association. However bad these freedom restricting arguments are, the kind of moral panic the commenter I replied to implied the commenter they replied to felt.

Even if librarian gangs were a widespread enough issue, focusing on the medium (books) instead of the cause (we're not living up to our stated purpose of rehabilitation) to me says that the prison isn’t as interested in inmate safety as they’d like to claim.

Oh yeah we're in complete agreement there.

This applies outside the prison system as well. See: Guns, Kinder Eggs, Hate Speech laws.

Does banning used books actually stop any of the communication between gang members? Do we have any idea how often books are used to incite violence versus how often they are just read? What percentage of prison violence comes from book encoding versus other means?

These seem questions you would have to answer before coming to the conclusion that banning books is the right answer here. "a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes" seems to imply that we can justify mistreatment of millions of Americans.

If there are problems with prison violence we should address those rather than just limiting access to books.

> Does banning used books actually stop any of the communication between gang members?

Definitely not, it's impossible to stop unless maybe you go full supermax and utterly isolate every prisoner from every other. And even then, they might still tap out messages to each other through the walls. You'd need very thick walls to prevent that I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code#History

> Does banning used books actually stop any of the communication between gang members?

No, there are unlimited ways to fly a kite.

I don't think books are where we should be putting up the fight to stop covert communication when prisoners can pass messages in so many different ways. Not with the positive impacts that education in prison can have compared to covert communication that's barely impacted at all by such a ban.

Oh my gosh... that is a crazy argument. Reminds me of Bush & Obama that allowed spying on everyone because of a terrorist attack (not sure, but Trump also probably signed an extension of the "PATRIOT" act, and Biden is next.)

>...(not sure, but Trump also probably signed an extension of the "PATRIOT" act, and Biden is next.)

No Trump did not extend it:

>...After President Donald Trump threatened to veto the bill, the House of Representatives issued an indefinite postponement of the vote to pass the Senate version of the bill; as of December 2020, the Patriot Act remains expired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

We will have to see what Biden does.

> as of December 2020, the Patriot Act remains expired

That's great to hear.

Any form of communication is a medium for coded messages. Steganography through e-mail, code words exchanged during visitors' hours. I think it's silly to hold up books as a dangerous avenue for secret communication when there are already so many other ways of communicating with someone in prison.

The only way to prevent secret messages from getting inside prisons would be to cut off all communication with the outside world, and that would be totally inhumane even if it were possible.

Quick question for you. You observed this behavior as a volunteer teacher for weekly classes directly, along with enough context to understand what the codes were used for and how prolific the usage was?

Or you were told at least some of the details in your post by prison administration? the same jolly group of fellows responsible for producing, implementing, and administering the type of policies being criticized in this article?

Also the same jolly fellows that have to deal with the aftermath of the hits.

Not more-so than the prisoners, themselves, and by a large margin.

Having been in jails I've never seen anything of this sort. Although I did set up a coded email system using the commissary food ordering computer which got me labeled as a hacker and eventually banned from using the PCs for school. [I was teaching C# using the compiler hidden away in the Windows folder]

That is a great hack actually! But which compiler is that?

Anywhere that has .Net Framework installed usually has the compiler on hand.

See for instance: https://people.cs.ksu.edu/~schmidt/200s08/findCsharp.html

You have such a strong prior that prison administrators are arbitrarily cruel that you just automatically dismiss any reasonable explanations for seemingly arbitrary policies by assuming they are lies and rationalizations?

>You have such a strong prior that prison administrators are arbitrarily cruel

Yes. Don't you?

Must be from one of those nicer places where that's not the case.

I'll leave it up to the reader to dismiss any claims made in that post. But you must admit there's a big difference between "I volunteered at a prison, and this is what I personally saw happening often" and "I volunteered at a prison, and this is what the warden told me when I asked." The first one is at least direct evidence.

Having spent time in some of the nicest prisons in the world, I’d much rather sit down to have dinner with the violent criminals living in those institutions than the prison staff.

Even in Scandinavia, maybe 20% of the prison staff weren’t downright awful people. The rest? Bullying prisoners was their daily entertainment, nothing but cruelty.

Yeah, quite honestly the gangs can just, you know, talk. Writing in books sounds exactly like the kind of thing that someone would make up, inspired in movies or something.

I dont know why, but this made me laugh. I mean its horrible, the idea of restricting reading in prison based on such an obvious lie.

The elaborate scenario that you would have to construct such that a message encoded into a book was the only way for a prisoner to pass some nefarious message...

Citations? I haven't taught in prisons but I know several people who have and I haven't heard such a claim.

Just as much, I don't see how teaching an 3-hour weekly class would give you inside information about activities this. I mean, even if an inmate said this was happening, I'm not sure how believable they'd be.

I've never seen communications in books like poster says, but I've seen dozens of other ways. (I was just released from jail)

Does it really matter?

As far as I can tell cipher messages are passed around successfully all the time in more or less all US prisons.

Was this what you witnessed or what the BS explanation for the flagrantly racist anti-literacy policies were?

Thanks for your volunteering, but seriously, did you even spend more than a few minutes thinking about how ridiculous that reasoning is? Could be used to ban anything. Taking away books from prisoners isn't the solution to gang violence. Absurd.

This is just more crappy punitive American "justice", no different than the lack of AC in 75% of Texas prisons meant to torture inmates in the summer.

I can validate your statement that prison has some 'seriously bad dudes'.

I used to live in a city with a federal penitentiary, I made friends with several people that worked there. One friend worded it this way: There are a some people that are just there due to circumstances, or bad choices, or whatever. Then there are some people there that will hurt you or anyone else just for the fun of it. You definitely want to avoid the mean ones, because there is no rhyme or reason to why they want to hurt you.

He was describing the people working in the prison, right? That sounds like a pretty good description of prison guards.

Um, no.

Have you ever been around prison guards, rec specialists, medical providers? Some of the best people you'll ever meet. They're working to help others.

Yes, I have been to prison. In Scandinavia, where the prisons are supposed to be the best in the world.

> prison guards, rec specialists, medical providers? Some of the best people you'll ever meet

Some of them, yeah. There’s always a few people who came to work in prisons to make the world a better place. Most of them? It’s just a job they could get, not a particularly cozy one at that.

Arendt shocked the world by writing about the banality of evil, the nazis weren’t monsters. Instead, they were just boring bureaucrats. Most of them were perfectly nice, ordinary people just following orders.

The prison guards obviously aren’t nazis, but even the nazis seemed like perfectly normal people until you paid very careful attention.

Kindles?

What stops them from using codes in any other form of communication? This rationale fails the most basic sniff test.

This reeks of "b..b..but think of the children" levels of discussion.

>.... It's hard for most people to imagine but a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes,

We've heard this before.

I am sure that's the case and I'm sure a no-books policy makes administration easier. But at the end of the day, a "summary execution" policy would be even easier to administer and we all rightly recoil from that one.

Wait, what? Am I reading that right? You're saying there's a community of "naturals" at steganography, and the prison system can't somehow leverage that to find them legitimate work that keeps them from being reliant on a life of crime and perpetually trying to outsmart the legal system for nefarious ends?

And before anyone says it: yes, I know, prison labor, at least as currently done in the US, is abusive. But surely there's a middle ground that allows such tradecraft experts to earn fair wages while they build up useful skills, and which incentivizes them to go white hat?

I see the concern, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with where the books come from. It's no justification for prohibiting books from all but a few approved vendors, prohibiting used books, prohibiting e-books, or eviscerating prison libraries.

There may be other arguments for these other prohibitions. But the coded-message argument is completely without merit.

They can pass info regardless. The guards are the way that most prisoners circumvent rules. Regardless, the biggest security risk is created by overpopulation and inadequate resources/ old buildings. And certain rights are more important than the increased risk of illegal activity or violence.

Could you not solve this by introducting a time delay before the same book can be borrowed again?

It's 2021. Why not just allow a simple e-reader?

they could broadcast the books to different cells by embedded audio

i would have never imagined that, but thinking about it,its actually a brilliant tactic

One of the things that happens with used books being donated is that the paper will be used as a medium for getting contraband drugs into the prison.

An example of this (letters) https://nypost.com/2021/11/05/wisconsin-inmates-to-get-photo...

> Wisconsin prison inmates will begin receiving photocopies of their mail next month as officials attempt to stem the flow of paper laced with drugs into correctional facilities.

> The Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) said paper and envelopes can be sprayed or soaked in synthetic cannabinoids such as K2 and then sent into prisons, where they are torn into strips and smoked and sold to inmates.

> The Fox Lake prison switched to photocopying prison mail in April after nine “potential overdoses” and two incidents of violent behavior connected to drug use. In the months since, the prison has seen numbers in both categories drop before reaching zero in August, officials said.

That's for a single sheet of paper - consider the difficulty of verifying that a couple hundred pages of a novel haven't been tampered with.

One of the easier ways to do this is to have the book be new and come directly from a distributor.

So ebooks then? What bad could possibly done by providing free access to public domain works, and access to library schemes?

Seems dangerous. The external server might base64 some fentanyl and send it along as a header.

That is the approach that is used, though it gets tricky. The items that an inmate can own have to be clear (so they can't be used to store contraband) and tamper proof... and if they're electric, run on regular batteries or wall current.

This leads to things like a clear typewriter - http://www.swintec.com/clear-typewriters/10-2410cc.html

The tablet that meets that requirement is made by JPay - https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgav3m/a-clear-plastic-table... and it does have ebooks - https://www.jpay.com/education.aspx . I will point to their wikipedia page as something to read about them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPay

One of the considerations for this is that no-one is going to give wifi and unrestricted (and unmonitored) access to the internet at large. All of the "this is stuff that you can download" needs to be accessible via another set of servers hosted somewhere with all of the associated infrastructure.

Just give them Internet access. It's malicious not to. Nobody can claim to be rehabilitating prisoners while also not giving them internet access.

Also, weed.

The point of most prisons is cruelty, not rehabilitation.

This is definitely true in the United States. No rehabilitation and trying to make money off them.

I would say cruelty is the byproduct of unchecked value extraction.

Perhaps solve the problem that leads them to being deprived enough to be down to smoke laced paper in a makeshift prison pipe or w/e apparatus they use.

What's the problem with that? We shouldn't even be putting people in jail for using drugs in the first place, much less making drug use a pretense for withholding reading material.

If they're copying all letters that come in and giving the copies to the prisoners, then it seems like an earnest effort to block the medium, not the content. So it doesn't seem like a pretense to me.

I don't think that forcing books to be new and routed through specific, graft-ridden profit centers guarantees that books won't be adulterated at all.

Any supply chain can be manipulated and corrupted for profit.

> used books being donated

> Wisconsin prison inmates will begin receiving photocopies of their mail

Of their mail

So these are unrelated situations. Justifying banning books or monetary exploitation with FUD like this is exactly the kind of reasoning that leads to the incarceration rates and policies we have in this country.

This is an example of paper products being used as a medium for getting drugs into the prison. It happens with used books too. The article that I linked was a specific example of it being used with paper - in that case mail.

Used books or books printed from publishers/distributors where it is possible to introduce drugs into it are similarly problematic - which leads to the "only approved vendors."

The key is it happens.

This particular example isn't about banning reading material - it is about eliminating one of the ways that contraband gets into the prisons.

No, it doesn't eliminate all of them.

The financial criticisms of some of the contracts between states and vendors is completely justified. Some states are better / more fair than others in this regard.

Drugs cost money. Donations through charities aren't going to occasionally contain drugs just as a gift to random prisoners.

"Some of the criticisms are justified but we have to do something" is the start of the FUD I'm talking about. Do we? Examine the premises instead. As the article notes smuggling by guards is apparently an expected vector when running a prison, and yet this comment section is taking these anecdotes at face value without any evidence of, say, widespread drug smuggling through charities donating books to prisons.

Paper was being soaked in drugs. Books and letters are both paper.

I’ve personally bought new books from Amazon and had them shipped directly to a prisoner in accordance with their written policies, where they were confiscated without explanation upon arrival.

They were about the history of civil rights movement and racial discrimination in the American legal system, which I’m sure is just a coincidence.

I’m genuinely terrified of the American Prison system. I had a brief brush with the Law at one point in the past; but reading about what goes on in there and how it completely fucks over people is just incredible.

I sincerely believe that if there’s any one thing that will end the American experiment, it will be its Prison system. Generations of poor people being brutalized and radicalized, creating an incredibly violent culture both inside and out… it’s just not sustainable to keep imprisoning millions of people.

I don’t know what the solution is. I suspect we will need to invest massively in both keeping people out of prisons and creating conditions in society that make it less likely for people to fall into destitution.

I agree. Along with the death penalty, the history books are going to be extremely unkind to us on this, and deservedly so.

“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Yeah, I feel like this article's outrage at the inability of prisoners to get used books is unwarranted. What actually deserves this level of outrage is the violence encountered by many in prison as you mentioned.

Imagine going to prison for a small-time felony, and having to deal with widespread rape[1], gangs[2], and drugs[3]. Many of the people are in prison did seriously bad things, and should be allowed out any time soon. But, the eighth amendment also says people should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment [4]. But perhaps I'm just soft like Tom DuBois from The Boondoks.

[1]:https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/25/prison-rape-al... [2]:https://hcsdmass.org/inmates-join-prison-gangs/ [3]:https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/11/07/the-never-endi... [4]:https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/eighth_amendment

There is plenty of outrage to go around, but couldn't prison conditions contribute to such violence?

It's really fucked up. I just did eight years in county jails which are way worse than prisons as they are designed only for very short holding periods and therefore have none of the facilities of a prison.

For instance, I didn't see daylight or breathe fresh air for most of those eight years.

I suggest reading “federal prisoners handbook” by Chris Zoukis, amazingly informative read. Very dry but it’s well done, he was a prisoner.

Given all these discussions about drug laced paper makes you wonder if a system of shuffling books could be employed. Given the price of media mail, it seems like prisons could just do regular swaps so that the books always came from someone else's collection. Ideally, you'd get a tragedy of the commons where all the books stopped being drugs because no one was getting back what they put into it.

The problem isn't logistical. Numerous solutions exist to make books available in some form that doesn't create much risk. The problem is the lack of desire to create more humane conditions in US prisons. Many large companies depend on prison labor and they somehow found a way to have their whole supply chain go through a prison. I'm sure if they wanted to, they could throw in a few books.

Private prisons. Profit from misery.

Just shows that some very big crooks are within the law

I think some pretty valid explanations have been shared with sources on the way contraband can be transported via the books. Not saying we can't use alternative solutions, but your comment doesn't really support further discussion.

> Not saying we can't use alternative solutions, but your comment doesn't really support further discussion

Sure it does. We can only discuss solutions if we’re willing to accurately describe ALL of the causes of the problem.

The article we’re discussing is entirely about how the “contraband” claim appears to be a flimsy excuse that both doesn’t impact the primary source of contraband (the guards), and obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with issues like:

> With e-books, the situation is even worse, as companies like Global Tel Link supply supposedly “free” tablets which actually charge their users by the minute to read. Even public-domain classics, available on Project Gutenberg, are only available at a price under these systems—and prisons, in turn, receive a 5% commission on every charge.

“Books can smuggle contraband” has no explanatory power wrt marked up access to free ebooks. Profit motive does.

It’s you, rather than the person you’re responding to, who seems to be shutting down discussion of solutions by trying to rule discussion of private for-profit prisons making profit-optimal decisions that may be net-worse for society somehow out-of-bounds.

Seems like misaligned incentives. Perhaps the prisons should be charged a fee for each case of recidivism

So it's ok when the state does it?

The state(s) is just as complicit in all this crap as the private prisons are.

Few prisons are actually private; it just feels better misdirecting the problem.

I've always thought the problem with private prisons is that incentives are misaligned. Because the prison companies get paid by the prisoner their incentive is to get more prisoners. Recidivism is like repeat business for them.

If we realigned incentives I think private prisons would make much more sense. For example, what if private prisons were paid a portion of the tax revenue their released prisoners produced? e.g. Inmate X is released, stays out of prison, gets a good job and the private prison he graduated from gets an annual payment of, say, half X's tax revenue so long as he stays out of trouble.

In this model private prisons would be places that focused on getting prisoners to rehabilitate, learn in demand skills, get good jobs, and stay out of prisons in the future. Investors stack the prisons with the staff and resources to produce big profits in the future. Provided recidivism does decrease governments will likely make a profit on it. Prisoners will get better lives out of the deal. Seems like there is potential for wins all around.

> what if private prisons were paid a portion of the tax revenue their released prisoners produced?

That is a wonderful idea! However... what is the typical tax amount a, say, mc donald's cachier is expected to pay? The number might be just to low...

https://bizfluent.com/info-7890463-tax-rates-minimum-wage.ht...

(apparently, around 2000 US per year...)

also, an inmate seems to cost around 33k a year to keep imprisoned

Could be a "whichever is greater" where one choice is the difference between what the government would expect to pay per year for a former convict all up and what they do pay for a particular convict, and the other choice is the tax revenue share.

This gives the prison operators an incentive to train the incarcerated for higher paying jobs

Or, we could look at what people who've thought about this for a long time suggest: abolish private prisons. Recidivism isn't the only way that incentives are misaligned. Everything from cutting corners on food safety to lobbying for stricter prison sentences results in bad outcomes.

I'm not an expert, but my intuition is that public prisons aren't too much better. I think a prison that was focused on rehabilitation and education (so they could collect additional future revenue) would naturally provide nutrition and safety to inmates. Healthy graduates are more likely to go on to earn than malnourished trauma victims.

Of course the system would require calibration. We can't have the private prisons killing off inmates they expect would be problematic or low earners. This is just a basic concept not a detailed plan.

My point is that I don't think there's anything wrong with private prisons. We just need to make sure we have the right incentives and regulations.

> I'm not an expert, but my intuition...

Do you see how this might not be received well? You admit to not being an expert and not basing your opinion on evidence, and then jump in with supporting something anyway. A quick google search picks up a bunch of results suggesting that private prisons are in fact meaningfully worse.

You have described the majority of internet commenting, but even here on HN where experts in one field opine on others.

To me this comes across as you having an opposition to private prisons and therefore a compulsion to insist that others who don't share your opinions not contradict them. Are you an expert in prisons (and a "quick google search" doesn't count)? If not, why is it okay for you to share opinion as if it were some known fact but not okay for me to share mine?

Speaking of quick Google searches though, lets do one. My top three results are:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...

>But private prisons have turned out to be neither better nor cheaper. They have about the same recidivism rates as their government-run counterparts — nearly 40 percent. And the Government Accountability Office has concluded time and again that there is simply no evidence that private prisons are more cost-effective than public prisons.

Which I sum up as: recidivism is similar between public and private prisons.

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/recidivi...

>Results of multivariate statistical analyses indicated no significant differences in recidivism rates were discovered for adult males and youthful male offenders released from private versus public prisons, which is consistent with previous research on Florida offenders

I take that as meaning recidivism is similar.

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/may/5/report-says-...

>Several studies have found that incarceration in private prisons increases the risk of recidivism by almost 20 percent. [See: PLN, Feb. 2014, p.14; Dec. 2009, p.11]. Other research has determined that violence in private prisons is significantly higher than in government-run facilities, often due to understaffing. Lower numbers of staff in private facilities, of course, increases the profit margin for private prison operators.

I take that as comparisons are complicated by confounding factors (e.g. private prisons more likely to be in areas where visitation is difficult and visitation is a predictor of violence in prison which is a predictor of recidivism). In part because of the confounding factors it is hard to exactly say and studies show different things as regards recidivism.

I hope you can see why your comment might not be received well. You make it seem like there is some consensus on a matter that is actually debated. Further, you conflate the current reality, where private prisons have misaligned incentives, with what I'm proposing, which is aligning their incentives with society. If private prisons now were substantially worse than public prisons, and I haven't seen any evidence to that point, then that would be an argument in favor of aligning their incentives, not against it.

The pattern of our conversation is: I have an idea which I share as a casual comment on a forum. You have a vague reference to "experts" who resoundingly disagree with my idea. Only, you can't cite those experts and when I follow your recommended google search I discover that the experts do no such thing.

Private prisons aren't some abstract thought experiment about how tuning incentives can produce lower recidivism rates. They are real human institutions that inflict cruelty on a daily basis.

Here is the ACLU saying to get rid of them [1]. Plenty of other groups agree [2][3][4]. They clearly wouldn't want that unless they felt private prisons were worse than publicly run ones, a direct contradiction of your original claim.

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration... [2]: https://www.justiceeducationproject.org/post/opinion-why-pri... [3]: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso... [4]: http://wesleyanargus.com/2018/02/02/the-problem-with-private...

First, I want to call attention to the fact that when I provide sources mine are academics and government agencies studying a problem disinterestedly with facts, statistics, and published analyses. Your sources are partisan activist organizations expressing opinions and an opinion letter to a college newspaper. None of these sources even attempt to contradict I wrote and linked to sources to support.

When I use sources I excerpt the source and explain what I think it means. You do not do this but instead drop a few related opinion pieces and leave figuring out how they are supposed to relate to the topic at hand to me. Problem is, I don't think these are especially relevant to what we are discussing.

As I wrote before comparing recidivism, and even cost, between private and public prisons is difficult because private prisons tend to house different populations of prisoners and tend to be located in different locales. When scholars to try to control for variables they find mixed results ranging from private prisons decrease recidivism to have no effect to increase recidivism. The balance, from my short investigation, seems to suggest "No effect".

Nothing in what you've linked refutes that or gives me any reason to reconsider. Nothing in what you've linked or what you've written makes the case that private prisons are inherently bad either.

I do not understand what point you are attempting to make. I have shared my opinion on private prisons - that we need to align their incentives with society and prisoners. You have said I shouldn't share my opinion because it disagrees with experts - but you don't link to any such experts and there doesn't seem to be any expert consensus on the topic.

One more contrast between you and I in this thread - when I am offering an opinion based on my own thinking I provide an explicit caveat to that effect. You, on the other hand, misleadingly bolster your pronouncements by suggesting that they are the informed consensus of experts and "people who've thought about this for a long time."

> disinterestedly with facts, statistics, and published analyses

I think this is the core of the disagreement, and why we're talking past each other...

Your argument (let me know if I'm stating it correctly): on the objective metrics of cost, recidivism, and so forth there is no compelling statistical difference between public and private prisons. Therefore there's no grounds to rule out either. Since different incentives can change behavior, better laws could result in private prisons optimizing for these metrics and we'd have better outcomes.

My argument (evidently not clear from previous posts): Prisoners shouldn't be treated cruelly regardless of whether that improves or worsens some objective metric. Example: it isn't morally OK to serve prisoners rotten food, even if that makes them less likely to come back. An academic or government agency who is disinterested in the welfare of prisoners is the least qualified to study how prisons should be run, while those with a track record of promoting human rights and humane treatment for prisoners have the most credibility on how to make things better.

Edit: I'd also add just how catastrophically bad it is that private prisons do lobbying. Their fundamental incentive is the exact opposite of the rest of society: to have the highest number of criminals possible.

No, that's not my argument at all, though I apologize because I can see how you would get there. I spent too much time arguing matters of fact that are incidental. If private prisons were worse on every metric I would take that as evidence of my statement that their incentives are misaligned. I don't think it's well demonstrated that they are worse, but that question is beside my point.

My point is that the incentives of private prisons are misaligned with society. As I wrote earlier, they would view recidivism as repeat customers. I then suggested a concept to realign private prisons with society and prisoners.

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with private prisons. The problem is that they are misaligned, not that they exist - as I see it. To approach the problem a different way - public prisons don't have a good incentive structure either and they produce some pretty poor results. In fact, it is our public criminal justice system that is currently hiring misaligned private prisons in addition to running their own poorly performing prisons.

> I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with private prisons. The problem is that they are misaligned, not that they exist

I have lived through some of these cycles, of trying to adjust incentives so markets can deliver goods/services in a sensible way when the naturally occurring incentives are skewed in all the wrong ways.

In imprisoning people the incentives are all wrong to involve the private sector. The public sector too faces bad incentives. It is a catastrophe AFAICT both in the USA, here in Aotearoa, and in our neighbouring state Australia. These are the cases I know something about.

We can only fix it one bite at a time, and keeping the private sector out of the mix - with their millions in lobbying power, is one such bite. Here we have mostly succeeded. Where the private sector has gotten in the lives of prisoners have gotten worse.

Remember: Every prisoner will be released (here - maybe not there) and they will be your neighbour. How do you want to treat them when you have them in your power? So you think cruel treatment will increase, or decrease, the chances of bad actions when they are living next to you?

Private prisons are terrible but they're a tiny minority. Governments run the vast majority of prisons and also are responsible for outsourcing to private prisons.

I was teaching C# to the detainees in one jail. I only had the compiler that was installed in the Windows folder, but no reference docs. I tried to get a C# book mailed in, but it was refused as it "could be used to hack [my] way out of the jail."

Luckily one of the nuns at the jail took pity on me, ordered it herself from Amazon and smuggled it in, complete with enclosed CD-ROM.

I could only do command-line apps, so I taught them how to write a text adventure :)

"Department Of Corrections" is a little Orwellian, a little Pythonesque. I can imagine a little old lady in a tweed suit going around town and correcting the spelling of shop signs and graffiti with a red marker.

It's rather more unpleasant in real life though. Why not just call it "Department of Prisons" and be over with it? It's like how in Greece we have the "Ministry for Protection of the Citizen", which is responsible for sending riot police to teargas pensioners and club teachers on the heads when they demonstrate. It used to be the "Public Order Ministry" but everyone made the obvious joke about it ("Public disorder"). So we need police and a mininster to supervise them? Call it "Ministry of Police". Why beat around the bush? For the sake of whom?

Pynchonesque?

That works too :)

It's even worse when it is applied to county jails where there are pretrial detainees who are only suspected of crimes and are technically still innocent in the eyes of the law.

https://www.cookcountysheriff.org/departments/cook-county-de...

Forget books - the cost of phone calls from/to inmates cannot be justified in this age and day. I can understand the need to limit calls but the cost is simply exploitive to put it mildly.

FWIW this is how federal prison is as well. All books that don't come from manufacturers or authorized sellers (Amazon, etc.) are returned upon arrival.

> as little as 25 cents an hour for their labor, many can’t afford even that.

Try $0.80 per MONTH which is how much you make in federal prison in the basic jobs.

That is just plain slavery.

Yes. That's a loophole written into the 13th amendment.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States

I think the prison system in the U.S. tells a lot about humanity and how democracy is (not) implemented. First of all, removing someone's access and right to speech and voting, is degenerative to the society. We send people to prison to punish them and punish our future as a society, and not acting rationally and in the original meaning of the Greek word "to punish" (τιμωρώ) which (approximately) meant to help.

What do you teach a prisoner by paying them 25cents or less for honest work...???

The idea, perhaps inadventerily proposed by US constitution, is that citizens have rights with corollary that prisoners and non-citizens don't. It is nauseating how acceptable it is that non-citizens and prisoners are not entitled to pursuits of happiness. It's one thing to punish murderers so harshly and quite another thing to roll up shoplifters into same groups and strip them of virtually all of their rights.

> It's one thing to punish murderers

You know that this murderer can be a wife that killed her abusive husband. Or other similar circumstances. Not all murderers are evil.

books to prisoners does a lot of good work providing free books for prisoners, and they have a comprehensive list of prisoner reading restrictions by state

https://www.bookstoprisoners.net/banned-book-lists/

includes banned titles, banned subject matter, banned formats, lists of accepted books, and so on. it looks like until now Iowa was one of the more permissive states.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition...

I read many examples of why this is acceptable, but they are all based on the concept that lowering the bar is the way, that because there some (many?) bad guys then all must accept what for me are incredible life limitations, it seems being imprisoned is not enough. USA prison system is designed to perpetually preserve it self.

I know the reading experience is different but perhaps they could benefit from using (offline) Kindle?

The article mentions that they have those. The e-readers charge prisoners 5 cents per minute to read most books, including public domain works. The prisoners are paid about $0.25/hr for working, so reading for an hour would take about four hours of labor.

"The paperback version of 1984 is about 330 pages. It will take a person who is able to read 30 pages per hour about 11 hours to read the novel. At the discounted $0.03/minute usage fee, 11 hours of reading a free book will cost a person about $19.80—and this is if you don’t stop to think or re-read."[1]

That's at the temporarily discounted 3 cents/minute rate.

Also, from the same source:

"For one, WVDCR will receive a 5% commission on gross revenue, including fees from video visitation."

Which explains the whole thing. That's 5% of gross revenue...not profits. Ouch.

[1] https://appalachianprisonbookproject.org/2019/11/20/how-much...

The prices are high because they know families will subsidize the costs. Colleges also employ this same tactic.

Yes. Most things in jails and prisons are paid for by the families, not the incarcerated person.

Some smart jurisdictions are wising up to this and banning this profiting from the person's family: https://sftreasurer.org/san-francisco-will-become-first-coun...

> The e-readers charge prisoners 5 cents per minute to read most books, including public domain works.

This alone is so devious on so many levels.

I don't think I could enjoy a book if I had a meter ticking down money for every minute I just stare at a page while thinking.

A kindle itself isn't acceptable. The batteries that it uses along with, well, not being clear cause problems.

https://laughingsquid.com/transparent-devices-used-in-us-pri...

so, why cant they just get access to a library of ebooks which the state has cryptographically signed? Wouldn't that make books universally accessible and also secure the state's fears that there would be contraband/hidden messages?

That's a pretty easy one: the e-book readers would be prohibitively expensive, plus those require charging, plus they require tech support.

I'm pretty sure that's not going to fly in your usual for-profit prison system.

Let's just stick to used books.

looks like that abolition of slavery we keep hearing about was more like a soft phasing out ...

Any time there is an article on HN about prisons, most of the comments are kooky conspiracy theories. The concept that bad people intent on committing crime exist seems to be incomprehensible to many if not most in this audience for some reason.

The article itself is biased and not founded in any rational reasoning. It recognizes the potential for contraband for books coming from random sources then justifies it merely because "most contraband comes from guards anyway" or so it says.

The original source linked to in this article was a better and more objective read: https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2021-04-29/iowa-sta...

I can't see anybody seriously arguing that bad people intent on commiting crime exist; the questions, rather, is "how many people?", "how bad are they really?", "how serious the crime is?", and "is locking them up really the best way to deal with it?".

But even ignoring all that, there are clearly better ways to deal with contraband.

Those questions you ask were already decided in a court of law by an elected or appointed judge and a jury of the subject's peers.

And if there is a better way to deal with contraband then what is it? HN wants to trust the experts on many topics, yet for some reason not on this topic.

> HN wants to trust the experts on many topics, yet for some reason not on this topic.

Where does your expertise in this topic come from?

Where did I claim to be an expert? I'm referring to the actions taken by the experts who oversee the prison system mentioned in the article.

Unqualified people fail upward, qualified people make mistakes, and some people are just crooked.

I wonder if the same folks banning books in prisons are the same folks that sell access licenses for trash pseudo-documentary tv shows in prison? You know the ones, they usually show you inmates using or trading dope or they'll show off some weapons. This is considered entertainment television programming.

I wouldn't be making appeals to others expertise without some skepticism, friend.

They didn't ban books. They banned books from random sources. Established retailers and other approved sources are not banned and there is a process for becoming approved. If you study corrections at all this is a very common policy and I'm surprised they did not have this already.

> If you study corrections at all

Hey friend, some people learn about corrections the hard way, so it's not assumptions and appeals to authority, it's a lived experience.

The approval processes of any vendors come with product restrictions, which function as bans.

Supreme court has upheld that some things can be banned if they are in the interest of maintaining the security of a detention facility. Inmates shouldn't be receiving books on how to make bombs for instance.

More than books on how to make bombs have been banned.[0]

[0] https://www.bookstoprisoners.net/banned-book-lists/

And? My one example is not an exhaustive list, summary, or assessment.

This still does not equate to a ban on books as you have represented.

Not really, because 1) the court of law operates according to, well, the law, which is itself far from perfect - many things that are offenses probably shouldn't be, and many others should probably not mandate prison terms; and 2) none of those people you've mentioned get much if any say on how prisons are actually run.

In any case, when US locks up more of its population in relative terms than any other country in the world, I think the assumption that things are basically broken here should be the default - the onus is on those supporting the status quo to explain why US is special.

The better way to deal with contraband is electronic readers, just to give one obvious example.

> how many people?", "how bad are they really?

Sadly we have to design for the edge cases lest they go completely unhandled/unchecked

Computer programming metaphors being stretched to the point of breaking to justify... banning books in prison.

Personally I think that the "halting problem" of whether to halt sending books to prisoners is better served with informed discussion, and not sad metaphors that attempt to end run around considering the actual issues at play.

When you design for the "edge cases" you end up with a bunch of Supermaxes were people vegitate 23 hours a day in solitary, which is btw commonly considered torture [0]

Maybe the goal shouldn't be to design for "unchecked edge cases to apply maximum punishment" but rather a fundamental change in US prison and incarceration policies [1]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rights-un-usa-torture-idU...

[1] https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I

Corrections theory has evolved a lot since 1950s and it hasn't been about applying punishment for a long time. If someone is locked up 23 hours a day, it is because it was determined through a classification process that they are a danger to the staff and other inmates to be in any less restrictive housing. Modern corrections theory is about putting inmates in the least restrictive housing necessary to keep them.

Some considerations of the many are often that the inmate has a history of assaulting or extorting other inmates if they are housed in a general population dorm.

Source: Corrections in America book

As for your article, it's not proper to lump together prisons such as Guantanamo Bay, which is a military prison, to the typical state and federally run facilities. These are completely different types of prisons with different ways of operation, and inmates are inside for different purposes. Issues at Guantanamo Bay are not representative of issues present at the state run prison mentioned in the HN article.

> Corrections theory has evolved a lot since 1950s and it hasn't been about applying punishment for a long time.

It's apparently also not about rehabilitation, so what is it actually about?

> Source: Corrections in America book

At the danger of sounding a bit too flippant; The US ain't the only country that has written books on "correction". Maybe it's time to expand the horizon a bit and try to look for inspirations and solutions outside of America?

> As for your article, it's not proper to lump together prisons such as Guantanamo Bay

The article is explicitly about the UN envoys visit to US domestic prisons.

His potential visit to Gitmo was another story, there the US offered him to visit but only under such extreme restrictions that he wouldn't have been able to do his job, as the US even denied him unsupervised interviews with inmates [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/11/un-torture-e...

It is in fact about rehabilitation which is why the criminal justice system and prisons have rehabilitation and education programs.

"Corrections in America" is the name of the book and it discusses the history of criminal justice back to the earliest recorded times. As the original article is about a state run prison in America, it seems much more relevant than most of what is being discussed in this topic.

I was referring to your Reuters article. In respect to this guardian article, it says they did permit him but on terms he did not agree with. To expect to roam around freely as you wish within a prison seems like a ridiculous proposition and inherently presents a security risk to the institution.

> It is in fact about rehabilitation which is why the criminal justice system and prisons have rehabilitation and education programs.

Just because some US prisons have rehabilitation and education programs does not mean that's the focus of the system as a whole.

What that actually looks like can be observed in many other places, places with much lower recidivism rates, much lower incarceration rates, much higher qualification and training demands for the guards, and most important of all; No profit expectations.

> I was referring to your Reuters article.

And that Reuters article is still about domestic prisons, please read it more carefully.

> To expect to roam around freely as you wish within a prison seems like a ridiculous proposition and inherently presents a security risk to the institution.

His main demand was unsupervised interviews with prisoners, which is a very legitimate demand if he wants to get even remotely anything useful out of that visit.

Or do you really expect potential torture victims to openly speak out, when they know their torturer is standing right behind them, ready to punish them the moment the UN envoy leaves?

Would you accept such conditions if the country in question here was Russia or China? Then why should anybody accept such conditions from the US? Why even set such conditions in the very first place?

Politicians capitalize on a large percentage of the public seeing incarcerated people, as a whole, as "undeserving of rights". That is the root of the current system. Anecdotally, I have had a large number of people offer that very opinion - "well if they wanted rights they shouldn't have committed a crime", never mind that the situation is far more nuanced than that.

The way things are now, it seems that everybody else is basically thrown under the bus for the sake of those edge cases.

There seems to be this assumption that Americans are thrown into prison willy nilly for every small offense. Yes, it does happen in some egregious cases. A few decades ago, our zero tolerance drug laws were a real contributor here. Today however, for the most part, you have to commit either a major violent crime, or have a serial record of continual offenses to wind up in prison in most jurisdictions.

Why would you believe this? The awful drug laws didn't just go away. The guy who wrote many of them is President now. Vastly more people are in the system for drug offenses today than there were "a few decades ago".

Every arrest for drug sales, possession, or use is an injustice. 95% of cases end in plea bargain rather than a real verdict. We imprison more people, in both percentage and absolute terms, than any nation on earth, in history. The system is set up to maximize incarceration, and that's absolutely what it does.

I keep seeing violent criminals let out to repeatedly victimize my fellow community members. No jail. No prison.

I see people showing up dead who have booking photos (aka in hindsight, should have been imprisoned for their own safety). About once a month so far, but I don’t Google each case; the murders aren’t really news anymore in 2021.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/katu.com/amp/news/local/a-growi...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.koin.com/local/multnomah-co...

I know it’s tough to believe coming from a position of privilege (believe me, I used to hold similar beliefs) but there is actual serious social dysfunction in the world. There is violent crime associated with hard drug use. Meth is actually a big deal.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

We’re seeing a massive spike in homicides so I think for some that is what is shattering the illusion of the post-90s quiet period we’re coming out of.

FWIW, I have personally been attacked by a person who was most likely experiencing meth-induced psychosis. I didn’t want to acknowledge how dangerous people can be.

Edit: and it’s not just the actual attacks being a sole problem. I can’t walk very far without having to dodge someone who is in full-blown psychosis, either screaming obscenities (if you said ‘faggot’ and ‘nigger’ sound like not nice things to say to passers by, I would agree) or violently brandishing construction materials or knives. Sometimes it is just destruction of public property, but that is less common, since they might actually be bothered if they cause too much damage in one place.

Sometimes the cops stop by, but they can’t do anything because being high on meth and making the public uncomfortable is not actually illegal and the jails won’t book anyone for anything less than murder or rape.

I have lived many places in the US and every one of them you will spend in the night in jail if you are caught DUI.

> The system is set up to maximize incarceration, and that's absolutely what it does.

Claims like this don't match observed reality. Practically every story about a violent crime that ends up in an arrest involves a look at the long rap sheet of the offender. Surely, a country that's trying to maximize its prison population would have people like that in prison already. Why are so many people with violent histories released, given that we live in a "mass incarceration" state that wants nothing more than to lock people like that up?

It looks to me like states try pretty hard to keep people out of prison; you have to commit a very serious crime and/or have a long history of arrests before you'll end up spending a significant amount of time in one.

I can easily imagine a state that wanted to "maximize incarceration" and it looks nothing like our status quo.

Reading the piece you linked in a sibling thread, I found this:

One of the big tragedies of mass incarceration in the United States is that while high levels of imprisonment are clearly a political and mechanical response to high levels of crime, they are not a very effective response. The basic reason is that soaring prison headcounts are mostly driven by long prison sentences, but the deterrent effect of prison is much more driven by the odds of getting caught. In other words, an 80% chance of needing to serve a two-year sentence and a 20% chance of needing to serve an eight-year sentence have the same expected value. But the former is much more deterring. And since it deters more effectively, it will lead to fewer crimes being committed and less incarceration. And that’s what we actually need — less crime, not harsher punishment for the minority of criminals who get caught.

Perhaps some "law & order" types believe that every crime should be punished by life in prison, but that isn't what other human societies do and they mostly have less crime than we have. Many of them focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment, leading to vastly lower recidivism. High recidivism is one of the techniques we use to maximize incarceration, and as Yglesias describes at your link astonishingly long sentences are another. The phenomena reinforce each other: a 17yo who spends 12 years in prison for robbery will generally not get a high-paying job at age 29.

Those who watch a great deal of CNN "headline news" and 11 PM local news might reject these observations, but those people are living in a nightmare false reality driven by the well-known "if it bleeds it leads" rule. Stop watching those evil TV shows! USA imprisons 65 out of 10,000 people. No other nation comes close. No other nation has come close in history. (That includes USA in previous eras.) We have vastly higher crime rates than other developed nations because our "justice" system is so extreme. The system is more effective at destroying lives than at preventing crime. If one carefully considers that proposition, it will be apparent that many of those destroyed lives are actually innocent of the "crimes" of which they have been convicted.

Don't "imagine" alternatives. Instead, examine what others do. Also, read that link you posted.

> We have vastly higher crime rates than other developed nations because our "justice" system is so extreme. The system is more effective at destroying lives than at preventing crime. If one carefully considers that proposition, it will be apparent that many of those destroyed lives are actually innocent of the "crimes" of which they have been convicted.

This is actually an extraordinary claim that requires evidence. It can’t be stated as flatly true. But I have no problem acknowledging that our system is particularly cruel. Prisons should be safe, clean, humane, comfortable...but not empty. The reality is that there’s a lot of violence in this country and its causes are complex and inscrutable. “We have a lot of crime because we lock so many people up” is unconvincing.

"The World Prison Brief's data estimates the U.S. incarceration rate at 639 inmates per 100,000 people as of 2018, or 13% higher than the rate of the next-closest country, El Salvador (564 inmates per 100,000 people)"

One note on this: the primary way that the U.S. system differs from the rest of the world is in the average length of sentence. At any given moment we have more people in prison because the people we put in prison stay there longer, not simply because we put more people in prison.

A startling fact: if you released every person in prison on a drug charge the U.S. it would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. This is both because the reality is that the U.S. has a lot of violence and because we tend to issue very long sentences for violent criminals. This is a good thread that covers some of this: https://twitter.com/JohnFPfaff/status/1376971131039666177

The article I pulled that link from is also very good, but it might be only for subscribers (I'm not sure). This is that article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/mass-incarceration

It covers a whole bunch of stuff that's relevant to this thread -- what kind of people are in prison, what kinds of crimes did they commit, what works to deter crime, why do we have such a high incarceration rate, what effect does policing have on crime, are longer sentences a deterrent, and so on -- and I'm tempted to quote it at length, but I think the best thing I can do is just link it and leave it at that.

I tell you one thing - I'd never really associated with any criminals before I went to jail and I was surprised by the personalities of those I met inside.

The title of my autobiography will be "All my friends are murderers". Honestly, nearly all my closest friends in jail were the murderers - for the most part they were the nicest, calmest, most intelligent people locked up. Why is that? I don't know. [I was in a jail where there was no classification - you could steal a candy bar and be celled with a guy facing a mandatory life sentence for multiple homicides]

Could the charities circumvent it by unifying into a large books for prisoners organization and becoming an "approved vendor"?

No, they won't ever become an approved vendor. The people profiting from this have close ties to those who approve vendors. Approving the charities would erode those profits.

The whole US prison system is corrupt to the core. It's one of the (if not the) ugliest stains on the entire country. It's a continuation of slavery by other means.

> It's a continuation of slavery by other means.

This is the part that shocks me. With nearly universal agreement that slavery is bad, how does the approximate equivalent continue?

Well the reality is that we have nearly universal agreement to say that slavery is bad. That's not the same thing.

The way the 13th amendment is written is how: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction". This is why penal labor is explicitly allowed, and why this population is milked for money (re: charging by the minute to read a free book available under public domain).

Yes. There are now more black people legally owned as slaves than there were in the 1800s. It's just that the government owns them all now. The USA didn't abolish slavery it just made it illegal for private corporations to own them. Of course, the private corporations now rent them from the government.

Is it possible/optional that companies could employee these inmates in a non-abusive way? eg; could a company opt to pay them minimum wage or educational benefits?

Yes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/business/economy/labor-ma...

> Nearly every weekday morning for much of last year, Mr. Forseth would board a van at the minimum-security prison outside Madison, Wis., and ride to Stoughton Trailers, where he and more than a dozen other inmates earned $14 an hour wiring taillights and building sidewalls for the company’s line of semitrailers.

> After he was released, Mr. Forseth kept right on working at Stoughton. But instead of riding in the prison van, he drives to work in the 2015 Ford Fusion he bought with the money he saved while incarcerated.

> Work-release programs have often been criticized for exploiting inmates by forcing them to work grueling jobs for pay that is often well below minimum wage. But the Wisconsin program is voluntary, and inmates are paid market wages. State officials say the program gives inmates a chance to build up some savings, learn vocational skills and prepare for life after prison.

I would donate to a charity, if such one existed, that just helped give at least minimum wage (ideally a living wage) for a social good cause.

Any leads on such a thing?

I've long thought about the concept of guaranteed employment, like basically if people charitably said "look, if you cant find a job, I'll give you one doing a social good, like sweeping this street or chopping onions at a local foodbank" ...

The classic ones that I'm familiar with are bakeries.

For example - https://justdane.org/just-bakery/

A recent article from NPR https://www.npr.org/2021/11/23/1056856357/former-inmates-are...

Another bakery from a bit ago - https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/04/15/469942932/th...

One that is more on the farming skills - https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1037594879/this-prison-teache... and another one - https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/wisconsin/2017/08/... and then for youth https://doc.wi.gov/Pages/AboutDOC/JuvenileCorrections/GrowAc... -- though these are more about teaching while incarcerated rather than jobs once they're out.

Even aside from the "do they accept charity or donation" the thing to do is to look at having your place of employment to say... get bagels from Just Bakery or have get pizza from Down North Pizza to continue to support the community and the people working at such jobs.

I'd also check with the state DWD (or equivalent) - Department of Workforce Development. They're often part of the set of departments that work to reduce recidivism and may have suggestions for either "these companies employ ex-convicts" so that you can help by patronizing them along with "these organizations help with reentry" - and that would be an opportunity for donations.

For that example - https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/press/2019/190403_new_hope_frostma... and https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/press/210729-reecc-job-center.htm

The US has a culture of retribution [1] against convicts. This has led to the election of many politicians, prosecutors, and the like who campaign on a "tough on crime" platform [2]. In spite of what the wikipedia article on retributive justice says, I believe schadenfreude is a component of this. People see stories in the news about violent crimes and they often gather outside courtrooms to cheer when harsh sentences are handed down, including the death penalty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio

They're not slaves, they're prisoners with jobs. /s

Basically when it became no longer tenable to deny the fundamental humanity of an enslaved person, we found a way to deprive them of their humanity by criminalizing them. So now we don't have to feel bad for abusing them because they deserve it. It's not slavery, see, it's justice.

Or so the argument goes. It's disgusting.

The jail I was at used Google Street View to determine if the vendor had a shop open to the public at the address they mailed the books from. If they did they would assume all their used books were tainted and would refuse them.

> Now, imagine if the State of Massachusetts had defunded its libraries and banned anyone from sending books behind prison walls—that remarkable evolution might never have occurred, and the world would have lost one of its most important radical voices.

The author seems to have found a second “benefit” to the bans.

Was part of a church group that helped out at prisons. Many of them were illiterate.... Not sure how many of them can read

The "American prison system" is a pretty broad brush that includes county jails (people do end up there for months/years), state run facilities, federal facilities, etc. Pretty sure as a whole, most of the prison population can read.

In other threads I've been flamed for the pedantry of conflating prison vs jail. Smart people avoid thinking about the US prison system and will defend their views rather than admitting it's full of hard problems, for which they have no good answers...while criticizing that everyone else is doing it wrong.

I do agree there are hard problems. But truly free books is easy to solve.

How can you be “not sure how many of them can read” when in the previous sentence you state “many of them were illiterate”?

The worst thing is those who cannot read. In the county jails I was at for many years there was literally _nothing_ to do except read. Imagine being stuck in your cell for 21 hours a day (average in the jails I was in) and can only stare at the walls because you can't read.

Especially worse if you are in a single-man cell and can't even annoy your cellmate all day for a little conversation.

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