Comment by angelgonzales | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angelgonzales | Hacker News Reader

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I understand your point - prisons want to exploit prisoners and their families for profit by brokering imports into their facilities. I also think that many people who have bleeding hearts for these criminals and their families haven’t been direct victims of crimes themselves. Often these criminals are terrible people who act horrifically and with malice but act so sorry for themselves when they’re caught and on trial. Their families usually only care for the criminal they’re related to and never to the victims no matter that the criminal did. I don’t see families of criminals giving money to the victim of the criminal, do you? Sometimes the families and cultural influence are factors that attribute to a criminal’s motivation to commit a crime. Trust me, I’ve been there! Finding the balance of incentives not to commit crime is difficult because crimes are often committed by violent people who do not respond strongly to logical or legal reasoning but respond somewhat to force and fear. The key, I think, is providing people with resources and care far before they’re at the age where they usually commit crimes. There’s also something to consider about the western and eastern views of individualism. An eastern view might consider this prisoner as a component of their family or their community.

So you want to use the excuse of drug smuggling to punish criminals above their judges ordered constitutionally legal sentence? Got it. Thanks for elaborating on your reasoning and why you don't believe 'all men are created equal' and have constitutional rights (with criminals, what we are discussing here is a protected right to 'familial association' if you want to look it up in case law and Supreme Court precedent). We don't have constitutional rights because they are easy, but because that is what the United States of America has said since it's founding is the right thing to do and the core of what it is as a country.

I’m not sure your argument is valid, I’m not sure of the point you’re trying to make as it relates to the point I was trying to make. That being said, a government isn’t infringing on the rights of citizens when the government incidentally creates a situation where the citizen’s ability to exercise their rights is limited. I as a free person have the right to protest, that doesn’t mean the government is obligated to pay for my posters or advertisements, nor are they obligated to protect me, that doesn’t mean they’re infringing on my right to assemble and protest. I’m also not sure that reading books or news is a constitutional right, although writing and reporting is a constitutional right. A government not providing a means for prisoners to purchase or read books does not mean they’re actively infringing on any rights, it’s purely incidental if the prisoner has no access to literature because the government has no obligation to provide literature to prisoners. There is the question of cruel and unusual punishment, but if we go by historical precedent which is important to consider then not providing literature to prisoners is not a cruel punishment.

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