Writing Is My Main Freedom. One Day My Work Disappeared (2021)
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/01/28/i-m-having-a-c...
His last post is from July 2022. I wonder if he is still alive.
In for second degree murder.
Yes, this is mentioned in TFA.
To be clear, I think medical treatment without humiliation is warranted even for murderers.
> To be clear, I think medical treatment without humiliation is warranted even for murderers.
I agree.
Questions going through my mind: Is it known what are the software and hardware capabilities of these JPay / kiosks? If I have an app that’s already in the App Store and Google Play, how can I make it more compatible / reliable for this environment?
I'm curious about this. I can't think of anything I've seen in movies that suggests they have access to the net in general. Sure, I've seen stuff about prison libraries, whose services I generally presumed to be free, but never much more than that.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90794291/e2808be2808bwhat-a-penn...
Most apps aren't able to use storage, but those of us on the outside can create logins and change some account settings. iHeartRadio and PlutoTV are probably the best ones prisoners get access to; can't get save things locally but the websites will remember activity.
Welcome to every modern tech product.
I didn't realize that prisoners were allowed tablets. Evidently there is a business that will give prisoners tablets at no charge, but then basically charge them to use those tablets. This seems like something a non-profit could do a lot better job of.
To answer your question though, yes entrenched interests and lack of competition. When you are sole provider, no matter how broke people's families are they are going to dig deep. Some states also allow a "kickback" system where the department gets a % of the fees collected by the providers. Fortunately some states have made this illegal and more are starting to now that we've shown how corrupt and gross the incumbent situation is, but there's still a way to go. I will also say that I've been impressed with a lot of people in the departments. Many of them don't like the current system either and they think it's wrong, so they've been really helpful/willing to work with us.
Related past thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042558
Profit extraction is one reason, and a large one. However, an equally large one is cruelty: these systems are designed to make prisoners suffer, and public accountability runs counter to that goal.
Plea deals become implied threats. Take this cheaper deal or we'll throw this massive set of stuff at you. Remember Aaron Swartz?
You wipe that out by wiping out plea deals.
Then perhaps we are arresting far too many people for things that don't matter?
If you remove low-level drug offenders from the system, suddenly there is a LOT more capacity.
Or, mentioning my earlier example, why the hell was a federal prosecutor gung ho to go after Aaron Swartz? Apparently there wasn't anything more important to be spending time on. That doesn't look like a very overloaded court system to me.
If the general public had to actually PAY for the justice system, perhaps they'd suddenly discover that they want it a lot smaller.
It seems like there might be room for improving conditions in ways that will help prevent them from being back in prison later. Education and working in a way that develops skills are two ways that come to mind.
Even if you can prove a non-profit, non-funded program reduces recidivism, if it also happens to make prisoners’ lives marginally better in the process, that’s an immediate no.
I mean, most of the people involved in the prison system have decided to work in a place where the users aren’t there willingly or able to change service providers, so I guess they would trend toward minimal competence, right? The more they can leverage software written by anybody else, the better, I guess.
I've seen a lot of talk recently about crime and calls for various people to be imprisoned; everyone from carjackers to right-wing vigilantes. In the midst of these conversations, please remember: prisons exist to torture prisoners.
Excerpts from another recent Marshall project article:
> An officer who broke his baton hitting a prisoner 35 times, even after the man was handcuffed, was not fired. Neither were the guards who beat a prisoner at Attica Correctional Facility so badly that he needed 13 staples to close gashes in his scalp. Nor were the officers who battered a man with mental illness, injuring him from face to groin. The man hanged himself the next day.
> Magalios, who was incarcerated at Fishkill Correctional Facility, was kicked and punched by a guard after hugging and kissing his wife hello during a visit. Court records show that another officer held Magalios down while a third watched. All three officers still work at Fishkill.
> The Marshall Project identified more than 160 excessive-force lawsuits that the state lost or settled, paying $18.5 million in damages. The corrections department’s records show that officials attempted to discipline an officer in just 20 of those cases. They fired six guards.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/05/19/new-york-priso...
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If your child made the choice to steal someone's car, you would be upset with them. But would you want them to be subjected to decades of unchecked abuse and inhumane treatment?
Wrong. The intentions of the ruling class are not to oppress others but merely to protect their own interests, which is a far more difficult matter to confront.
The fundamental basis of capitalism, being the state's violent protection of the right to accumulate capital, defines the predominant motives of oppression. Members of the ruling class have little choice but to expand their personal power and control, lest they lose it all. This tendency alone results in the private prison industrial complex and erodes citizen rights.
So what you're saying is that the system is working as intended?
The article talks about Jim Crow juries, unconstitutional jury rulings where the defendant gets convicted even when the jury is split. These were created to try and stifle the voice of black jurors, and they did, right up until just a couple years ago. Sheriffs like Joe Arpaio stay in office by marketing themselves to voters as being as cruel to prisoners as possible; it's just another facet of the enduring Southern Strategy. The system is working as intended.
I don't think the prison industry or upper class are cruel for cruelty's sake. The American Conservatism is simply convenient to them. I'd go as far as to say that even voters who appear to embrace being cruel to prisoners aren't deliberately trying to be cruel, but are by and large the disenfranchised poor people with zero upward mobility, whose miserable existence is made slightly more bearable by having a class with even fewer privileges than them.
You're exactly right. But oppression is a useful tool to protect one's interest. Demoralizing people and showing them that you have them by the balls is an effective tactic. "Oh, you want to come at me? Have you seen our prison system? It's not worth it, not in a thousand years"
I don’t know all the details but it has always seemed a bit messed up that someone can hurt or kill you and your societies main concern would be how to rehabilitate that person.
Yes, private prisons are corrupt profit centers, and this is what voters have chosen. When the other options are pay more taxes to incarcerate criminals, or let them run free, how could things be any other way? They are voters, not saints.
As for "The Marshall Project", another non-profit funded by the same batches of plutocratic blood-money as all the other non-profits. Why are office people so gullible as to think that plutocrats who would wreck an entire economy, or poison a whole town for a quick buck are suddenly public benefactors after passing their ill-gotten gains through a 501(c)(3)?
PS) for the downvoters: Vote as you will, but after you vote, please ask yourself: Did you go to a "rough" school? Have you lived in a "rough" neighborhood for more than a year? I am glad to accept your judgment from experience, but if you are judging from propaganda, it is time for you to stop and reflect.
Do you have a source for this - that the way the prison system is handled in the US now is the cheapest way?
(Not that I wrote anywhere that it even was the cheapest way, but that voters would pay more taxes. If you think about it for a moment, you will see that these two statements aren't identical.)
I just remember from my readings of the county register, the prisons put these services up for competitive bid. The amount paid by the department of corrections was usually minuscule, if not zero, since the prisoners paid for these services directly out of their own earnings.
And if you dig into the article itself, he mentions the JPay tablet:
> Inmates can purchase the $69.99 tablet from a kiosk in their facility or someone can purchase it for them. To communicate with inmates, people can access JPay's web platform or get the free JPay app on iPhone or Android. To email or send video-messages, inmates and people on the outside need to purchase 40 cent stamps each time.[0]
[0] https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/23/technology/jpay-prison-tabl...
Public prisons have switched to this model because a) US prisoners are rough on things, and if you try keep them fully-stocked without a cost mechanism, the correctional system will go bankrupt. b) in the long-run, it's cheaper to pull-in an outside contractor who is making a profit off of the prisoner and/or his relatives than to hire full-time public employees, who are very difficult to fire, and tend to have defined-benefit pensions instead of defined-contribution ones (like most of the private sector). That is to say, the public employee may end up being 20%-30% cheaper than the contractor while the work is being performed, but the public employee also comes with the open-ended obligation of his pension (i.e. defined benefit) however many years into the future, while the contractor doesn't (defined contribution).
Short answer would be that JPay can pull a tremendous amount of money out of each prisoner's hide for a service that the government could have provided less expensively, and still be a net savings to the taxpayer, since the taxpayer isn't the one footing the bill. While if the government did provide the service, the taxpayer could be exposed to an obligation later on. The prisoner's wages are outside of the equation, since we have to pay those either way.
I don't have a dog in this race. I'm just a guy who used to work for a county government and read the budgets and the contracts.
Why would voters pay more taxes?
Most non-profits are funded by government grants or by donations from normal people, not ex-finance bros.
Moreover, a non-profit financed entirely by a single wealthy donor is not a 501(c)(3), by definition. It is a 501(c)(4) private foundation, and there are very strict rules governing the finances of a 501(c)(4) entity. (The Marshall Project is a 501(c)(3), while it was initially funded by an ex-finance bro the majority of its funding since then comes from other donors.)
Yes. The usual suspects.
Annie E. Casey Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Maverick Capital Foundation, Neil Barsky, Open Society Foundations, Propel, Rockefeller Family Fund, Timothy and Michele Barakett, the Tow Foundation and Trinity Wall Street [0]
And you will need to source your "2-3x more", since even sites arguing against private prisons are stating a far more modest difference:
According to the study, it costs a private prison about $45,000 a year to house a prisoner, compared to the general cost of about $50,000 annually per inmate in a public prison, resulting in roughly $5,000 in savings per year.
A 2011 study estimated a prisoner’s value of freedom for 90 days at about $1,100 — already taking a large chunk out of the advertised taxpayer and city savings from private prisons.
Moreover, there are other additional costs that are difficult to quantify.
Mukherjee listed some of them, as “the cost of injustice to society (if private prison inmates systematically serve more time), the inmate’s individual value of freedom, and impacts of the additional incarceration on future employment.”[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marshall_Project#Organizat...
[1] https://thecrimereport.org/2020/08/21/private-prisons-drive-...
While private prisons are cheaper on a per-day basis, they hold prisoners behind bars longer than public prisons (an average of 90 days) due to increased use of behavioral infraction citations, which negates most of the savings. The link also notes that other costs, like the lawsuit settlements, negate any remaining theoretical savings that exist from using private prisons. WSU researchers noted that this this increased incarceration period alone cost Washington state taxpayers an additional $10.6 million/year over what it would have cost to house those prisoners in public facilities. (https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2020/09/15/privatized-pri...)
And indeed, an audit by Georgia noted that private prisons cost at least 10% more than public prisons on a per-day basis for each prisoner incarcerated (https://apnews.com/article/af7177d9cce540ab9f2d873b99437154), and that a substantial portion of the behavioral infractions issued to justify extended incarceration terms were unsupported by evidence.
Yes. The usual suspects.
Today I learned that an engineer, the family of the UPS founder, the Ford family, and one of the pioneers of the American metallurgy industry are the "usual suspects" in destroying the economy. Leaving aside the fact that the Ford company revolutionized industrial manufacturing, introduced the concept of "fair wages," and was one of the first companies to embrace the shortened (i.e., 5-day) work week that you enjoy today. Or that Langolier pioneered the American metallurgy industry and played a vital role in its existence. Or that UPS was one of the pioneers of the telegraph and parcel delivery, and played an instrumental role in making non-local commercial sales a viable market. Or that Heising is an EECS that owns 6 patents in integrated circuits. Or that MacArthur was an insurance and real estate tycoon who built most of Palm Beach and conducted his business from one of the shops (out of hundreds) that formed in the cities he built.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_State_Department_of...
> the "usual suspects" in destroying the economy
Where did I accuse anyone of "destroying the economy"? (Oh, I kinda did in my first post. And in the case of George "Open Society Foundation" Soros and Thailand, and probably some of these other hedgies, that is also the case.) But for the most part, these people have done wonders for the economy, and if by "the economy" we mean the sort of people who work at and buy into hedge funds, doubly so!
Ordinary people and the environment, however, are another story.
Of course they don't cost 2-3x more than an entire state prison system. Even the Southern states that love private prisons couldn't afford that.
The one I originally cited, which was arguing against private prisons, conceded that private prisons were nominally $5,000/yr cheaper than public prisons, but taking the 90-extra-days (on average) spent at private facilities into account incurs a "value of freedom" cost, which they have estimated at $1,000 per sentence. The paper they were paraphrasing[0] from claims, "delayed release erodes half of the cost savings offered by private contracting". In other words, the other half of the cost savings are still intact.
Or there's this Brookings paper[1], which is a little more in your favor:
> Private prisons cost the state an average of $46.50 per prisoner per day in 2012, while the state’s comparable public facilities ranged from $35.11 to $40.47.
Taking the smallest state figure, the private prison is 32% higher; the largest state figure, and the private prison is 15% higher, neither of which are 2-3x more.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2523238
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/es_2016...
They also chafe at the idea that prisons should be allowed to inhibit their inhabitants’ freedom in anyway. As if prison should actually be a really nice free hotel that we send people who commit murder and rape.
I totally get that someone can sound eloquent in written form, especially if a professional editor spends some time cleaning up the grammar, etc. but that doesn’t change the fact that this particular person ended someone else’s life in cold blood and is now whining about not being able to send his daughter poems in stanza form. The other guy can’t send anything to his daughter at all because he’s dead. Maybe you should recognize you deserve to be punished.
As he's convicted of 2nd degree murder, this is precisely what he did not do.
Michigan's statutes indicate that first degree murder includes any willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing. [1] Whereas second degree murder includes all "other kinds" of murder which do not fall under the specifically enumerated conduct rising to the level of first degree murder. [2]
While the second degree murder statute does not expressly describe what circumstances would precipitate those "other kinds" of murder, the statute outlining the scoring system for crimes involving "intent to kill" suggests that second degree murder would be committed where the offender had unpremeditated intent to kill or created a very high risk of death knowing that death was the probable result. [3]
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[1] http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(cdcjvuv1er3twxx1crhz3tb3))/...
[2] http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(cdcjvuv1er3twxx1crhz3tb3))/...
[3] http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(cdcjvuv1er3twxx1crhz3tb3))/...
I don't like scumbags who commit those crimes any more than you do, but honestly, if we just want to be as f'd up as possible to them, then it starts to get pretty close to the "just do capital punishment" argument. If on the other hand we'd like them to reform themselves so we don't just have to keep them locked up forever or kill them, various forms of psychological torture run counter to those goals so we actually should care that they're not being subjected to cruelty.
If you look at prison as a whole, I don't think the needle is anywhere close to "so pleasant that people don't even want to stay out of it" so no, I don't think it's necessary to make every aspect of it worse just to spite them. It won't bring the victims back. And just having them locked up at all is sufficient to keep the rest of society safe.
Don’t generalize that no one wants no prisons. Our prisons should not operate like Abu Ghraib. Why are drugs, weapons, sexual assault and violence occurring in what is supposedly secure facilities? Why are prisons allowing/encouraging tribalism along racial/ethnic lines? Why is rape and sexual slavery permitted?
Our tax dollars fund all of this.
Other industrialized nations have better training for law enforcement and much better prison systems, which don’t operate like hellholes.
They don’t promote a private prison industry which lobbies for longer sentences so that their firms get to bill the state and enrich their owners.
If it's possible to do so and sufficiently discourage crime up front, still reduce recidivism, and keep society from harm, then yes, absolutely.
Being the real world and lacking such a perfect solution doesn't mean that can't still be the direction we aim in.
The goal is maximizing net benefit to society.
There's absolutely some amount of benefit to the satisfaction the punitive approach can have for those harmed, there's definitely benefit to getting people to choose to not commit crimes due to consequences (but with diminishing returns), and there's absolutely benefit to keeping actively dangerous individuals separate from society. However, when we make prisons so bad that people come out as dangerous or more dangerous than they went in, has society actually benefitted on the balance?
Are we, collectively, better off because one murderer was made utterly miserable for 15 years who is just as likely to murder again than we are if that same murderer was made moderately inconvenienced for 10 years, but is less likely to murder again?
the problem here is that many attempts to discourage crime upfront come with a reduction of personal freedom and privacy. eg. surveillance.