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Comment by ARandomerDude | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

they could broadcast the books to different cells by embedded audio

Kindles?

> 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 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.

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.

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