Like the guy who was boiled to death with hot water for funsies:
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/florida-wont-charge-priso...
Or where rat poison is regularly fed:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/22-rikers-island-prisoners-sic...
Not only should the guards be up on charges, so should everyone else in the chain of command. 180F from a shower? That's insane, it shouldn't even be possible.
OTOH, giving proper (i.e. often involuntary) treatment for violent mental illnesses would for sure improve the situation.
> “Nobody can condone someone being thrown into a hot shower and killed,” Rundle said. “We read the same thing everyone else did, but it wasn't until we really investigated that we learned that is not what happened.”
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/katherine-fernandez-rundl...
Even ignoring for the moment the deferment of local news outlets to government officials' press releases, instead of actual journalism, the story simply doesn't line up.
Plus when your only defense is "you haven't proven it beyond a reasonable doubt (because of all of the attempts to make it impossible to recover evidence)", even though that holds up in the court of law, it is not very convincing to any layperson who knows how crime happens.
Bluntly put, this article and subsequent defense are textbook bootlicking.
Willing to have an honest conversation if you don't derail it with self-aggrandizing, pre-emptive character assassination based on incredibly tenuous associations.
Right wingers love to rail against cancel culture but have yet to fully recognize that they have employed the tactic forever with exactly the deflectionary style as above.
Ready to talk when you are but I won't hold my breath. If you decide to engage please bring something other than a parrot trained on police press releases.
The guards are just the product of a system/culture.
A portion of the people you work with want to kill you or each other given the chance. Over time this leads you to dehumanize and hate them. Over time, this view gets generalized to most of the people in your care.
Political prisoners tend to be treated as badly as others, if not worst.
There are plenty of people who go into these jobs with the intention of being decent. The existing systems and culture suck that right out of them.
I knew an old bureaucrat. He got to make decisions that would or wouldn't financially screw families over. He said the worst part of his job was seeing all the younger employees in the cafeteria knowing they were being crushed by the system and turned into people like him and his other senior coworkers.
Most prisons exist in places that are economically depressed with few if any other jobs. In some cases, the entire existence of a town revolves around the prison. Quitting is hardly an option when it’s the only real option for putting food on your table and a shelter over your head.
Thus the ethical argument. They'd rather keep doing what they're doing than pick the stress and uncertainty of moving.
Collectively and individually, the United States must “be better”, though.
Indeed. I think the same for everyone. Poverty is not an excuse for brutality.
The unjust and cruel legal system and the behavior of people involved is all a product of society.
It's not just a couple of "bad apples".
And saying this does not give anybody a pass.
Downvotes from creating a plausibly deniable strawman and then tearing it down are less than the upvotes from doing a good job tearing down the strawman. This kind of crap discourse is incentivized in a "if lawsuits are cheaper than recall we don't do a recall" sort of way.
HN (and other social media) is rife with this behavior/feedback loop.