Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
Even more significant is the widespread societal belief that prison experience should be brutal punishment and torture, with no concern for justice, fairness, or humaneness. Prison rape is a punch-line, it's not even on the radar as a political issue.
The public acknowledges, accepts, and approves of prison experiences as not merely pragmatic methods of keeping some folks separate from public society, and especially not as rehabilitory, but as retributive, vengeful, and arbitrary. These are the basest and most despicable sentiments when it comes to issues of criminal justice, but they rule the day in the 21st century as much as they ever did in the middle ages or even in the stone age.
This is easily one of the most significant issues of our time, as significant and important as the Cold War in the 20th century or the struggle over the abolition of slavery in the 19th.
This is not an actual prevailing attitude in the US.
I won't even say that nobody thinks that way, I just want proof that this is the prevailing mindset.
It is undeniably normative.
People laugh at prison rape because those guys are bad so rape is okay.
As very few prisoners actually vote, this horrid blight on France's human rights track record isn't going to change in a hurry.
Prison is not a rehabilitation center. If it were just a means of keeping folks separate from society, I know plenty of unmotivated individuals that would love to sit around with a bunch of other lazy-asses and be fed 3 meals a day. For free. Don't you?
Prison has to be scary. It has to strike one as the number one place that you do not want to go. It's the other ultimate consequence, along side of death. I can't imagine this world if it wasn't.
That's me being polite. If I was less polite, I would say how much I hate your ignorant, lazy self-righteousness and how this despicable and inhuman attitude is a major factor in how our system destroys people with little to no scientific justification.
Prison experiences in the US are pretty horrific in the norm, and yet there are more people in prison than ever (as a percentage of the population), and many of them are there due to fairly minor or victimless crimes. There is some sort of dissonance there, and I think it comes down to the fact that fear is not the sole or even necessarily the primary motivator for behavior on the boundary of the law.
Also, there are countries where prison is not scary, where the criminal justice system raises rehabilitation above other concerns, and such places (such as Canada and the scandinavian countries) are not the lawless hellholes your theory of human behavior would have them be.
> A very Hobbesian view of society, I see.
Not at all. The central argument in Hobbes' Leviathan is that most people are basically decent and reasonable, but that we need a strong, consistent rule of law in which to relax our guard and build personal, civic and business relationships with each other in a positive sum game where everyone benefits.
It is the fear of violence and death in the absence of the rule of law that leads to the Hobbesian trap: a tragic situation in which someone who doesn't want trouble ends up pre-emptively raiding someone else who also doesn't want trouble, simply because they have no way to trust one other.
We also have a growing incarceration rate (U.S), which shows that prison does a pretty poor job of making people "scared absolutely shitless of prison so much that they play exactly by the rules" and don't forget, sometimes the rules are pretty ridiculous.
Also "...individuals that would love to sit around with a bunch of other lazy-asses and be fed 3 meals a day. For free." is already the reality of the situation in many cases.
It's not a choice between the scariest most brutal situation you can imagine or no prison at all. There are other options to make a better system. And in general, a society shouldn't have to be scared into "playing by the rules".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat... Also read prison privatization.
It's not always about money, at least not here in Austria. I'm glad we have a baseline level of wealth. Do we always need more? Trying to be better, faster, stronger? When do we stop? Does it make sense in the end? Is it even really guaranteed to be the most productive strategy?
Isn't the fact that I can walk through the most "sketchy" Vienna neighborhoods in the middle of the night worth quite a bit? Again I'm not talking about money here.
Prison is not a deterrent. If it was, you would see prison population decline over time. Instead, it has grown quite significantly and in a racist way (black men are massively overrepresented and sent to prison).
When people don't even think consequences will ever apply to them, how can the consequence act as a deterrent?
Or from another point of view what makes prison less scary than the outside world? Everyone knows prison is unpleasant yet that doesn't appear to stop the increasing numbers each year.
> Our prison system does a pretty good job at driving this perception home.
If this was a performance review they should be fired.
No it doesn't. The problem with chest-thumping-ego-driven-bullshit like this is that it is very fact-adverse and causes more problems than it solves. Your type of prison is nothing more than a gang training camp.
Start here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=rehabilitation+vs+punishment...
And don't stop until about page 200ish.
TLDR version: "the punishment is being locked up; we do not add to the suffering."
Google translate is decent at times, funny at other times (the vulture entering the scene is a translation of the prison director's surname), and woefully incorrect at others ("e.g. The IBT'ers still put their helmets on and not ask first what's going on" should be "don't put their helmets on but ask first what's going on"), but I think the message comes across.
Two things to add:
1) the "for life system" (rightfully, IMO) is under scrutiny from the EU because, effectively, nobody ever is pardoned.
2) there are stronger regimes in some prisons.
I'm not the least bit afraid of going to prison here. Still I don't break the law, for reasons better than fear of prison.
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/08/world/prisons-in-japan-are...
At some point, when the punishment for minor offenses is extreme, the difference between minor offenses and major offenses gets very blurry. Extreme example: if stealing carries a punishment that is effectively the same as murder, the only logical thing to do when stealing is murder any potential witnesses. The US isn't quite this bad.
However, when the actual punishment for minor crime includes the concept of a felony record, it becomes much harder to differentiate between minor possession of drugs and say grand theft. They both carry felony record issues. That means the being convicted of either results in prison, exclusion from most of the work force for life, the inability to participate in a lot of "better yourself" programs (and really, people who messed up earlier in life should be encouraged to be in these!) and a host of other life long punishments. I understand this is a bit tangential to your point, but bear with me...
Now, when you look at the way the US justice system actually does things, you get this perception of arbitrariness or even randomness. The threat of prison is there, but there is no intuitive logic to how it works. Carrying some drugs will get you 20 guaranteed years in prison, while murdering someone will get you maybe 5, maybe 100. Raping someone will get you less time than "hacking". Racial discrepancies exist too in how prison is applied, as do wealth issues. There is parole/early release, and differences between judges and prosecutorial discretion further complicating the punishment question.
Whether or not there is good, deep, and sound defensible logic in how this works, the appearance is that there is no way of determining how you'll punished for what you're doing. As such, once the decision has been made to do something relatively harmless, the deterrent effect of prison no longer applies. The rational choice is "punishment, when it happens, could be anything", therefore the game is no about deciding actions based on punishment, it is deciding actions based on getting caught. Any action, no matter how severe, that lessens your chance of getting caught is better than a less severe action which doesn't modify or worsens the chance of conviction.
Basically my point is that when you want to use prisons to deter bad behavior, you better make it obvious that their application is something that can be reasoned about. As it stands, prison can't be included in any reasoning about consequences, except in an overly simplistic binary matter that has no effect at curbing any behavior once it is on the table.
Speak for yourself. Articles like this one sure as fuck make me think twice about doing anything even remotely likely to get me into prison. Punishment as deterrence is a legitimate policy within reason.
That said, torturing someone with forced isolation until they are completely insane, especially if they are ever getting out, seems counterproductive.
[edit: re-read the post I'm replying to and I agree, random irrational punishment is a lousy deterrent. For deterrence to work the system has to be at least nominally fair, and punishment meted out needs to be proportional to the degree of misbehavior. That is clearly not the case with the US justice system, and as the article points out, inside the prison the rules are applied with astonishing caprice and unfairness.]
Also it's not the punishment that stops most people committing crimes, but the fear of getting caught. No matter how bad prison is, if we let people see such lawlessness in their communities that they feel they commit crime with impunity, then some will.
If your theory were accurate, countries like Norway--with its extremely humane prisons (http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00.htm...) would be crime-ridden hellholes.
But Norway's homicide rate is 1/10th that of the United States, and other crime statistics are similarly low: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
So it seems you are, in fact, wrong; and inflicting horrifying suffering indiscriminately on anyone who goes to prison does more harm than good.
No. I know absolutely no people who would choose to be put in prison simply because they would be fed. I cannot imagine a wealthy society (and make no bones about it, our society is wealthy enough that people can be fed) which would permit that.
> It has to strike one as the number one place that you do not want to go. I can't imagine this world if it wasn't.
Try visiting Sweden some day. Or quite a few other places in the world -- almost any country other than the US, which is quite competitive for the world's worst prison system.
That is not the case in other Developed countries.
Have you seen The Green Mile? I think that's the name of the movie, where the lead character contemplating committing a crime just so life would be easier again.
Some people do chose prison; or, enough of their friends are in prison that it's not actually seen as a 'bad thing' for them to be in there. Add to that how we as a society feel about people that have come from prison and are a felon; and sometimes, life may actually be easier for some people on the inside.
Also the character only says that because he's been in prison for most of his life and he's so old when he gets out that he doesn't know how to function outside of prison.
The answer is that not all crimes are created equal, and neither should all punishments. You can go to prison for very mundane stuff.
I really don't understand why supporting the current US prison system is an opinion so dangerous that it must be hidden from sight.
Also, if you would've carefully read his post, you'd have seen that he doesn't advocate rape and torture, but the perception of it. It's a subtle difference, but a significant one.
Nobody's stopping anybody from spreading their opinion, last I checked. I said the downvotes were deserved.
Not only for being factually incorrect, ("Prison has to be scary", which is the whole premise of the post, is handily disproved by looking at some of the Nordic nations' systems), but for perpetuating the kind of culture that allows solitary confinement (i.e. psychological torture) and prison rape to be accepted by otherwise sane and caring people.
The culture of "whatever happens to guys in prison is their own fault" NEEDS to stop.
directly contradicts
> [it] deserves every step closer to invisible that it's getting
from your previous comment.
Also, you know that downvoting something enough hides it from HN. On HN, a downvote doesn't mean "I disagree", because we have comments for that. A downvote means "this comment isn't HN-worthy".
As for the actual discussion topic, I mostly agree with you and I don't understand why you're discussing it with me. I'm defending another's right to disagree with you and me.
> The culture of "whatever happens to guys in prison is their own fault" NEEDS to stop.
I agree, but I'm appalled that you think you can enforce a culture change by hiding the opinions of people that don't want that culture change. You can't shove culture down people's throats.
Actually, it does. pg has said that it is fine to use this way.
I think it's stupid, and you'll see in my profile a screed against the braindead moderation style of HN and why I think it's bad. I don't particularly care anymore though - there is no interest from the admins in changing it, so it's pointless to try.
And then there are the idiots. Here, the downvote is less about disagreement per se, and more about a response to thought that is generally stupid and awful. What it says is that your opinion is so unworthy of consideration that it's simply being removed from circulation.
The comment you're commenting about doesn't use either of these words. He (or she) merely says that "prisons should be scary" and "the current system does a good job of achieving that."
In fact, I would tend to agree with him: Prisons should be scary. If people have no reason to be scared of prisons, what keeps a huge number of people from just giving up on ever doing anything economically productive and instead just shoplift or burglarize whenever they want/need something and don't have enough money for it, because they know that once they're caught they can just take it easy and sit in jail playing video games all day? If that happens, who will grow and prepare all the food to feed these prisoners, and do the work to maintain the jail facilities (and the supply chain which produces the needed materials)?
A society that doesn't have a punishment that people are afraid of seems to me like it would be on a short road directly to a complete collapse of civilization.
The second point is right on the money as well: The current system does do a good job of being scary. I certainly don't want to go to jail, and I've made a habit of noting gray areas in the law where behavior I intuitively think of as "reasonable" is actually illegal, and how you should conduct yourself around law enforcement officials to minimize your chances of going to prison (in the US, you should never help them in any way, never lie to them or physically resist them in any way, refuse consent to all searches, and decline to speak with them unless you have the advice of a lawyer who represents you and will be present during the questioning.)
Neither he nor I say that rape and torture is the only possible way to make prisons scary. For me, being locked up for years without video games is scary enough by itself.
> I applaud you for uttering what is clearly a minority opinion here
Me too! I think HN can be too much of an echo chamber sometimes, especially when it comes to politics. (Whether articles like this one are HN-relevant material is questionable, but I've found the comments here to be much more well-reasoned than most of the political discourse I've seen on the Internet.)
In fact, I personally do my part to help this by occasionally playing devil's advocate -- saying things I don't necessarily believe, which I know will be controversial, risking downvotes solely for the sake of stimulating a good discussion.
People sometimes find it very difficult to agree to disagree, especially about highly controversial subjects like politics. This has a chilling effect even on me: I try very hard to keep this account separate from my real identity, so people whose opinion I care about won't take one of my devil's advocate comments out of context. (For that matter, I tend not to advertise my actual political views to people unless I know them well and think they will either agree with me, or are intellectually mature enough to accept that sometimes people acting in good faith can have different opinions than they do. And I think that I am so constituted that I would act in this way in the current US political environment no matter what my views actually were.)
I also upvote comments I disagree with, if they're sufficiently well-written and thought-provoking, especially if they seem to have been downvoted solely because people disagree with the opinion.
Like slavery in the 18th century, prisons are a necessary evil to punish people who do not deserve rehabilitation, correction or edification. Conditions have to be bad enough so that a large segment of the rock-bottom citizens don't commit crime just to get some hope. Therefore the conditions of prison have to be a few steps less desirable than being homeless, penniless, cloth less, hungry and with no hope of getting out of it.
It's my belief that jails are full of criminals because we don't understand the mental illnesses that brought them there. If we can do whole-brain simulation, emulation, and detection in a client, I think studying the body of brains in jail vs the body of brains outside jail will reveal some remarkable findings. It could be their ethical systems were coaxed into the off position, and we may be able to detect this before a person commits crime. Saying: "You better get your ethical centers back on-line, or we'll have to put you under increased surveillance".
If what you say is true, then why is this not an explicit part of our criminal justice system? Why are there no laws and regulations which spell out the brutalities that prisoners should be exposed to? Why is the process not formalized, institutionalized, documented, and routine?
Why has there been no public campaign to repeal or modify the 8th amendment to the US constitution (banning cruel and unusual punishments)? Or to set new legal precedent in the UK to invalidate the equivalent protections in the English/British constitutions? If it is such a foundationally important part of a well-functioning society then why is it not being talked about and debated above board?
1. Prisons as correctional center far outweighs some homeless guy pick-pocketing so that he doesn't have to die tired, hungry, cold, alone on pavement.
2. A homeless guy not dying on the pavement is a benefit in itself.
> prisons are a necessary evil to punish people who do not deserve rehabilitation, correction or edification.
People go to prison for a variety of reasons. Not paying your parking ticket or possessing 5gm of Marijuana do not qualify as "do not deserve rehabilitation".
> Like slavery in the 18th century, prisons are a necessary evil
Slavery was a necessary evil?
> It's my belief that jails are full of criminals because we don't understand the mental illnesses that brought them there.
1. You can believe whatever you want.
2. Stretch the definition of law and everybody is a criminal.
3. The spectrum of things you can go to jail for is so wide the belief that all criminal brains are wired the same way has a low probability.
4. The belief that "criminals" deserve what they get is how all sorts of draconian laws come into being. When the govt. says it tortured a few alleged terrorists, and you stand on the sidelines and cheer, you don't realize you are being instrumental in your own destruction. Tomorrow it can be you getting water-boarded, and the rest of us "good citizens" will stand on the sidelines and cheer.
The root problem is the xenophobia of old white men.
White: $54,620 Hispanic: $37,759 Black: $32,068
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104552.html
You have to account for poverty before you jump to racism.
I mean, yeah, poverty is without question a factor--but stopping there feels disingenuous to me. Why are they poor? is then a relevant question, and I think that "because of the racism of old white men" is not the worst explanation I've heard.
And even if it is racism originally, it's plausible that it's "because of the racism of dead white men." Two centuries ago they kidnapped millions of Africans and brought them here as slaves. Then they were freed without anyone offering to return them to their original communities in Africa or providing them any resources here to raise successful children. The legacy of that is not going away any time soon even if racism today were totally eradicated, because even in a society with greater upward mobility than we have now, poor parents will always be more likely to have poor children than rich parents.
Also, your example of median incomes by race is a grand example of exactly what I'm talking about; thanks for that.
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
There's a guy currently in solitary confinement serving time for felony hacking. The hack? Executing GETs against a public API. He got a 41-month sentence for that.
By any definition that's just crazy.
Wow. I know it's a matter of philosophical debate whether such people actually exist[0]. But it's a matter of wilful ignorance to pretend that anything but a tiny minority of the US prison population falls under that category.
I think they don't. There's people that would be a really bad idea to ever let back in to society (say, a Breivik) but for a lot better reasons than "does not deserve rehabilitation/edification". Then there's people for whom rehabilitation is pointless because they're so mentally deranged they're not going to get better. Obviously such cases are the minority and very rare.
Also, did you consider to think: If your homeless prefer prison, that might not be because your prisons are too pleasant, but rather how you treat your homeless? Why are they left without "an opportunity to move up in the world from rock-bottom"? It's a ridiculous argument, "we can't treat group X humanely because then group Y who we also don't give a chance will want it too"--what?!
It's those lowest rungs that a society is judged by, you know. Whether the average American has a better life means absolutely zilch as long as you leave your schizophrenics begging and mumbling in the streets, and keep people in solitary the way this article describes.
Nice, I was moved enough to reply, so as a satire it's a good piece.
This person is clearly a troll. Ignore. [Edit: or is this a joke that I didn't get ?]
The blatantly obvious alternative to this is for the government to provide adequate food assistance and homeless shelters such that you can get the free meals and roof without committing a crime first, in which case there would be no incentive to do this whatsoever.
If by "our" you mean "the US" then I'm already of the mind that it's bizarre and barbaric and I doubt I'm alone.
In many ways it strikes me as suffering from problems similar to those in our older (now largely dismantled) system of insane asylums.
Both sought to address a very serious problem, for which we only have flawed solutions to choose from. And while we don't have proven-better alternatives for many of the problems that arise [1], it -- as a whole -- is progressing to a place where the system has been corrupted into a larger problem than the one it's trying to address.
[1] Though when we have for-profit industry lobbying legislators based purely on their profit motive, it's foolish not to say there are proven-better alternatives to many of the problems. To say nothing of the prison-rape culture and our societal response to it.
Oh please. The US has a recidivism rate within 3 years of 67.5%. Norway has a recidivism rate of 20% within 2 years. There are proven-better alternatives, but your society has decided not to implement them.
Some of them, yes. Which is what I said.
In any case, your handwaving away of "we have bad social problems" is missing the point. Norway tries to fix them, using rehabilitation in its prisons as one example. The US tries to ignore them, and uses prisons as punishment. It's a point of philosophy. No-one expects that the US recidivism rate would drop to Norway's levels should the focus shift to a Norway-style penal system, but they do expect it would still drop markedly.
There are no comparable countries. The US is the absolute worst in the West. But just you watch. The UK and Sweden and Norway are importing diversity at an alarming rate. Eventually, their prisons will turn hard, but not through policy. Policy follows reality.
California's excessive solitary confinement policies strongly belie its left-leaning government. Get a steady dose of murder/rape/robbery and that's what happens.
And prisons aren't punishment. Only victims want to punish criminals. Everyone else just wants kept far away from criminals, and if that means putting rotten people in cages, fine. You can see the effect here:
http://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/images/cjsc/recent-s...
(That said, I think solitary confinement should be time-limited. No point in driving people crazy.)
As to social strife, this is a standard book, even though written by a leftist, who tries to make the best of it.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007....
The reality is more simple:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden
Immigrants were five times more likely to commit sex crimes
I absolutely do not believe that number. It is almost certainly more like 10 or 15 times. The Swedish government is a pure head-in-ass creature, and almost certainly bending the statistics.
But I think my answer is yes, if you factor out middle-to-high income rioters, you would still see a disproportionate representation of immigrants to natives.
My theory is fairly simple: it's about incomplete integration. If natives fail to identify immigrants as accepted natives, there will be conflicts that regularly break out into anything from racial profiling to riots (such as the famous LA riots) to civil wars to secessions (such as South Sudan).
I could also be completely crazy in seeing this pattern, though; I'm not an expert in this area by any means.
The reason is that these riots are highly localized to poor areas where the population is almost exclusively immigrant, being clumped together by Swedish immigration policies. (Map: http://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/394110718607097857/1024/10...) While international media might have given you an image of a Stockholm of fire, most Stockholmers have not seen a trace of the riots.
With large amounts of youth failing basic school, being unemployed, and lacking parents and role models who have jobs and have integrated into the Swedish society. Riots are almost bound to happen.
Some of this has to do with African-Americans who have been living in poverty for generations stretching all the way back to slavery -- a situation which doesn't exist in Iceland.
It also has to do with the US economic policies which promote the flight of low-skill jobs overseas. Not everyone has the intellectual ability to be a doctor or a web developer (especially given our dismal education system), and there are only a limited number of low-skill non-relocatable jobs like food service or retail. Things were much better for people with limited education when labor unions had a monopoly on many unskilled jobs and could set monopoly pricing on wages. Now, with tariffs and high shipping costs no longer keeping manufacturers from moving overseas, competition from workers in desperately poor countries is forcing wages downward; when the going rate for a given job falls below the US minimum wage, those jobs simply disappear from the US entirely.
Unfortunately, global corporations who benefit from the situation have too much influence over US politics, opponents of this aspect of the status quo are too disorganized, and the analysis I outlined above is not widely enough accepted for change to happen in the near term.
We're all immigrants if you dig back far enough, but in reality if you were born and raised in a country, you are not an immigrant and within a couple of generations, there are likely to be no real residual effects.
There are exceptions to this rule which are related to inheritance and cabals of cultre but for the most part, immigration seems to be a net gain, it's a lack of social mobility that is causing problems.
Modern Europe immigration policy seem are a bit fucked up, but I imagine you can pretty well correlate education and welfare with crime stats, but beyond that, hardening your ordinary criminal doesn't seem to help anyone.
I agree except that I don't consider our prison and drug policies "normal" or acceptable. And a significant amount of people don't consider them normal. I think, for more in the spirit of that question, it's interesting to consider what 95+% consider normal that in the future 95+% will consider barbaric. Something like that.
I cant imagine a politician saying that he will fund prisons get any votes whatsoever. It would be suicide. And whatever fruits would come from such measure , he would never see, and the population as a whole is likely to ignore.
This is the kind of problem that comes from Democracy, unfortunately. Not prisons, but the inherent inhability to address a real, provable issue that falls flat on public opinion.
I also believe this is an economic policy issue as well. The problem is exacerbated by increasingly unequal living conditions. Its no secret that crime and socio-economic status is highly correlated.
The above statements really make the problem a lot larger, however i believe this wont be fixed until something changes in the above, because convicts are the most politically and economically weak part of society.
I forget where I read it but I believe that there is a correlation between the severity of the punishment and it's peak effect. If it is normal imprisonment then the effect of the punishment plateaus at 18 months (ish) and if it is solitary then the (albeit greater) effect of the punishment plateaus at 30 days, after that it is achieving no extra punishment and you may as well go back in to a rehabilitation mode. I'm not saying that prison sentences should be no longer than 18 months but after this point the focus should be on (eventual) reintegration into society with new skills and education to keep them from reoffending.
For prison to work as a disincentive, people need to be capable of making sensible decisions about what to do NOW in order to create a better distant future. They often aren't. Criminals are often people who do very badly at this. They don't want to be in prison twenty years from now, but it's not going to affect how they live their life now.
If prisons as thought of as primarily a disincentive, it's a very expensive way of getting not much back. I expect it's a cultural thing.
Yes there are cheaper and more effective disincentives, but you're right it is a cultural thing. Our culture considers those barbaric (but not prison somehow.)
It's very difficult. We can look at the fact that the US imprisons more of its population than any other nation, and if prison is a working deterrent, this would mean that the United States is a phenomenally lawless and criminal society barely held in check by the fear of the USA's notoriously harsh judicial system. Is the USA a phenomenally lawless and criminal society?
There are studies that try to evaluate the deterrence effect of prison. Some conclude yes, some no, but the weight of evidence appears to indicates that on the whole, it's a pretty ineffective deterrent. You can google as well as I can so I won't list a bunch of google hits.
"Our culture considers those barbaric (but not prison somehow.)"
Now that is interesting. I meant a detention system that actually works; that actually is applied with the intention of turning criminals into good citizens and making a better society. I assume that you don't consider that "barbaric", so I'm guessing you thought I meant something like state-sanctioned torture or other such physical abuse, or cutting off people's hands, or public executions in the town square, and all that sort of thing. So our cultural gap is so big that the first thing you thought of to deal with detention as an ineffective deterrent wasn't an effective detention system, but harsher punishments, whereas I thought of stopping trying to use it as a deterrent and do something useful with it.
How else would you explain the widespread of tobacco smoking, over-eating, and other behaviors that are extremely dangerous but not immediately punishing?
One of the highest prison populations in the world. If it were a deterrent, people wouldn't commit crimes that get them in prison, would they?
Either its no deterrent, or Americans are the most criminal in the world.
We might have more crime than other first world countries in general, but it's not like prisons are the cause of it. That doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Besides, what are you comparing it to? All other countries use prisons as well, and what would the alternative be anyways?
If you want either to work as a disincentive, you first must make people be in control of whether they enter that next state of hell. This article clearly shows that prisoners aren't; they can just get sent to solitary (for decades!) because the wardens don't like them or find them a nuisance.
IMO, especially in the USA, many people aren't really in control w.r.t. the "do I want to go to prison?" question either. If you happen to be born in a poor neighborhood, you have to be exceptionally strong mentally not to get involved with petty crimes such as marihuana dealing, and if you do, you can get locked up. When you get out, you return to that poor neighborhood, and, having a record, you are certain that you cannot get a job anymore.
I still have sympathy for (most) people that commit crimes, and I think it'd be inhuman not to. That's why we don't have the death penalty for all crimes, regardless how effective a deterrent that would be.
On the other hand, if you know the consequence of committing a crime and decide to commit it anyways, I don't have as much sympathy. You can't say that people have no choice whatsoever. Just because you grew up in a poor neighborhood doesn't make committing crimes ok.
Why?
Why is the self appointed leader of the free world so inhumane?
Waterboarding was always obviously torture. No fair-minded person would ever have said that it wasn't; the suggestion is a joke. Thus the only people who had reason to say otherwise were ideologues, power-wielders, and bootlicking journalists.
Solitary confinement isn't like that, and it has taken time for fair-minded people to see it in this light. The fact that the science on it is so unequivocal is a big part of this coming into (some) people's awareness, as well. That's why I said "now so obviously a form of torture". It wasn't obvious before.
Here's a great article to get your started: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...
Lack of sleep is also deployed in some countries ie. the guards won't let you sleep.
This is a widespread trend especially in law enforcement and justice and it extends beyond prisons.
Consider waterboarding. It's a hugely traumatic experience, and undoubtedly a form of torture, but because it doesn't leave bruises or break bones it is tolerated and accepted.
Consider tasers and pepper spray (OC). Again, they cause pain or muscle spasms, but they don't break bones or cause bleeding or bruising so their use is tolerated at thresholds far below what would be allowed to bring about the use of physical force, even for use in restraining someone. Being pepper sprayed in the face and eyes is every bit as traumatic and physically violent as being slapped or punched, yet pepper spray is frequently used by the police in situations where physical force would be considered police brutality. The same goes for tasers.
If I ever get in prison (which I hope to avoid but nobody can be guaranteed) I hope to be in solitary.
I do know someone who did go to prison and basically was a slim straight haired indian prettyboy teenager in american jail... his approach was from the first day he entered prison he immediately attacked the first person he saw, went to solitary got out immediately attacked the first person he saw, did that for about 3-6 months... eventually he was so nuts he joined a gang, he liked the gang life better than the solitary
I used to think like that when I was younger, "going to prison getting raped?! I'll take solitary." Then someone that was released spoke at our college about what solitary really meant. I'll take my chances with the rapists.
The prison system we have around the world stimulates creating "professional" criminals by placing criminals among themselves. If we to break this cycle, we should get everyone a prison cell without inmates but with a window and books they can read.
I'm not concerned about the prison system. They are the means to the end. What does bother me is the US justice system. They convict more people than any other country on the planet. Prison can't be a deterrent if you have overzealous prosecutors searching for me people to convict.
And for those who don't have an expansive vocabulary, what do you do when you read a word you don't understand in one of these books?
There might be some ethnocentrism here... I might be wrong but it seems to me like you make an assumption about this generation that is only valid in US. I live in Europe and when I think about people I know, there is nothing controversial about it and we don't have to wait for future generations - we consider it barbaric now and as far as I know it's illegal - I mean people can be put to cells alone but they can read books, they have right to go for a walk with other prisoners for an hour and stuff like that - when I talk about solitary confinement I mean conditions described in that article.
I am not trying to be judgemental here - I just think that for some Americans it might be interesting to consider that in some countries things like solitary confinement or death penalty can be looked at the same or similar way that you Americans probably look at punishments like stoning to death or cutting off hands.
Even the UN has only made it torture if it's some <18yrs old.
But that being said, I'm all for ending it. Or ending most imprisonment and moving towards restorative justice.
I mean, let's say you get sent to the SHU, I won't go into why because that's probably impossible without introducing circular logic. Now all your "associates", ie everybody who knows you in prison, can also be sent to the SHU. The only way out quickly is for you to "debrief", accuse some other people so they can be sent to the SHU in your place. But, how many people can you genuinely criminalise who aren't known associates? Judging by the fact they read prisoner's diaries, I'd infer surveillance is quite high, so surely the number of unknown criminal associates is pretty low? If that holds, then who do you "debrief" about? Like the article said, it's a catch-22, or at least should be. Instead the guards have a - according to a judge - legal right to make up stories, attribute them to you, forge your signature and incarcerate others on that basis.
It's so abstract it's bizarre. It just seems so dystopian, if you consider the world inside the prison where you're 'innocent' until you commit crime on the inside, that world would be ridiculed if they weren't criminals. Thrown in on false evidence, and the only way out is to give more false evidence. I don't understand how that ends up happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPZed8af9RI
The facts stated have never been refuted.
Be ashamed. Either Americans are the most criminal in the world, or the US justice system has a real problem.
I mean, worse than Iran? Worse than China? South Africa? Are Americans really that bad?
Perhaps now we know a certain hacker preferred death. I know I would. As a British citizen, I would genuinely rather kill my self than end up in the US justice system. Do not doubt that. And I know my government will not protect me from American "justice" either.
Im sorry, but this makes me very, very angry. If a country cant get justice right and fair, then Im sorry, I believe it has no right being a country, let alone being a country that thinks it has the right to interfere on the world state, and have the sheer arrogance to pontificate on others.
So simple and so horribly true. Criminal justice politics in America is utterly overrun with the crudest and most cynical pandering to simple fear, revulsion and vindictiveness.
He has criticisms about what has happened in Sweden, no doubt. But it's the prospect of going near a US prison that is the non-starter, and the basis of his asylum.
You should be ashamed of your prejudices (obviously I'm not commenting on US justice system here).
Your brainwashed intellect (not sure if its even intellect) has led you to believe that the US is a bastion of freedom when its quite the contrary. Stop watching Fox News for crying out loud.
When those kings were deposed, rather than abolishing the structures those kings had created, they were instead largely preserved and put under "democratic" control.
It could be that this was a mistake: that there's something structurally intrinsic to the instruments of monarchies that can not be eradicated, regardless of who nominally controls them. ACAB.
Fiat-money Central Banks mostly were created under democracies, and seem quite resistant to change. Social-welfare programs. Anything related to lobbying.
I think the razor points to "institutions are highly resistant to change", not anything specific to monarchy vs. democracy.
(Not meaning to put words in anyone's mouth — just offering the thought the way my brain processed it.)
That does leave the question of what to do with those who commit the most serious crimes like rape and murder, but those are a small minority of the crimes currently prosecuted and are generally not the ones that best exemplify the failure of the existing justice system.
How do you enforce laws without enforcers?
In a democratic society with a Kafkaesque prison system, torture of prisoners is not as easily associated with any one person's cruelty. Because most people are optimistic and don't like to believe that several hundred million of their neighbors would silently condone the torture of a whole class of people, it's easy for lazy minds to consider prisoner torture acceptable, necessary, justified, and so on to whatever stronger beliefs these individuals may hold.
I'm not saying that prisoners would fare any better in a non-democratic society, but how people think of prisoner mistreatment would definitely be different.
Hypothetically, we believe in justice and freedom (and other good things and not bad things), or we would not have formed a democracy. Since we freedom-loving, democratic people would naturally act to end all oppression, it follows that if a policy, law or practice does not change then it must not truly oppress people.
And the reason he is in prison in the first place is for changing an integer on the end of a URL.
Do these punishments make sense to anyone?
The prison authorities transparently use isolation in an SHU as punishment for making them look bad or for inconveniencing them. The two inmates mentioned in the article who acted as 'jailhouse lawyers' seem like good examples of this. Anyone in prison who offers any resistance to the power of the authorities is very likely to be treated this way, even if they are merely requesting legally-guaranteed rights or marginally better treatment, because doing so acts as an example to others.
Auernheimer was imprisoned, it seems to me, primarily for unrepentantly embarrassing those in positions of power, and later transferred to the SHU for the same reason.
Can you provide at least one reference to this atrocity?
[I'm guessing you can't]
If your intent is to single out black people, there are many ways you can target them without spelling out "black people". Specific job categories, specific neighborhoods, specific types of crime (which are hugely lopsided racially), etc etc.
The same can be applied to any race. You can effectively create a law that only targets Asian immigrants without once mentioning the words "Asian immigrant".
In the US race and crime are inexorably linked, and highly politicized. Through a combination of factors and people (acting both maliciously and otherwise), blacks are without a doubt targeted.
Here in NYC we have a rather odious policy of stop, question, and frisk, where the police are empowered to stop anyone they deem suspicious or threatening and search them. It turns out that Blacks and Latinos are search disproportionately often, well beyond their proportional contribution to crime rate. There's nothing in the regulation that spells out that dark-skinned people should be searched more, but everyone in charge knows this is the consequence, and everyone in charge intends this to be the consequence.
Racism is complicated. The fact that you don't have a hooded guy on your lawn burning a cross, screaming "lynch him!", doesn't mean it's not in front of you.
When the police presence is higher in black neighborhoods, you are going to see more arrests. When the law is so broad that anyone can be arrested, the effect will be magnified. Eventually you get to the situation we are in today, where in some black communities one in four black men has been to prison. This is not merely a measurement error or some kind of mistake; our approach to law and law enforcement right now is disproportionately affecting black people, especially black men.
Other countries with stable democracies have universal health care, don't incarcerate almost 1% of the population, have never landed people on the moon, don't spend 5% of their GDP on the military, aren't the home of Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, and so on. America has always been (and will probably always be) an edge case.
I seriously doubt that. What goes around comes around.
Actually, they don't.
And that's another way in which America is different than most other nations.
Please do not take this the wrong way. I kind of admire your patriotism... although I think it might prevent you from seeing (and fixing) bad things.
American patriotism is the most public, but every country's citizens take some measure of pride in their country. We're the most public about everything (the home of myspace/facebook/twitter/instagram/the internet generally) so it makes sense to me that we're really public about patriotism.
I tend to think that those with the most outward expressions of that pride don't want things fixed.
Shouldn't or doesn't? Shouldn't, sure. Doesn't ... the evidence doesn't bear this out.
What seems to be problematic to me is that the bad ones seem to be on different abstraction level than the good ones. Other countries might not have Apple, Microsoft, and IBM but they certainly have huge globally successful companies. They never landed on the moon but they have explored space and achieved important things related to science or technology.
Which could negate the idea of being an outlier in bad things is somehow related to being an outlier in good things... if anyone would be making such claim.
Similarly, the argument that "we have high highs, therefore it's reasonable to have low lows" really doesn't do the complexity of human nature any justice, instead treating it as a simple see-saw.
There are some exceptions to this like being able to visit another prisoner for one hour every day or use the kitchen for one hour every few days, etc. (Or if you are really lucky you can get a job inside the prison.)
I'd say being imprisoned is inhumane in every country on this planet. I hope future generations come up with alternatives to this medieval practice.
Given what they'd do if you were found guilty...
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-pris...
See e.g. http://www.internationalpenalandpenitentiaryfoundation.org/S... Germany.pdf. An excerpt from the section on Prison regime(s):
The common core of regime activities is a Monday to Friday work week.
Work hours follow those of the civil service. In addition there is the one hour
of daily exercise in the open air. Prisoners are walked to their work places af‐
ter breakfast, they are returned to their cells for lunch and at the end of their
work hours. Here the uniformity ends. Regulations with respect to night‐
time lockup differ widely. In pretrial prisons, where most prisoners do not
work, prisoners may be locked up for 23 hours a day. Many prisons have
adopted a policy of open cell doors between the end of work and lockup
time. After lockup, leisure‐time activities outside the cell rooms may still be
possible. But this depends on the prisoner’s enrolment in one of the organ‐
ized activities offered by prison staff or (more likely) by some external group
(from Alcoholics Anonymus to political parties, religious groups et cetera).
But all of this may not apply to all prisoners and it definitely does not apply
to all prisons.Finding work in most prisons can also be pretty hard. There are certain jobs that are always in demand (welder, carpenter, etc.) but if you're a simple academic and not a craftsman you can only hope to get one of the lower level jobs like librarian, kitchen help, etc. That paired with prison overpopulation can make getting a job pretty hard.
The problem is that the prison system in Germany is heavily underfunded and that a good portion of the prison buildings are very old (a few date even back to the late 19th century). Germany would need many new prison buildings with humane sanitary standards but you don't get points in the election for spending tax money on the well being of prisoners.
[0] https://twitter.com/CACorrections/status/340220581972692992
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/hangover-part-iii-e...
Lots of space, and the Internet, though.
so not solitary
> Lots of space, and the Internet, though
and not (physically or mentally) confinement either
---
The only way in which you are an outlier is that you have an inflated sense of your own awesomeness.
I imagine political prisoners do comparatively well in solitary, too, or the extremely religious, etc. I know from the other side, religiosity and belief in one's cause are the main ways to successfully resist torture or other psychological hardship.
I kinda forgot a bit how to talk but apart from that it was pure bliss. I had lots of games and books though.
I've done 10-12 days a few times, and routinely do ~5 days.
You need to experience it for yourself before you make such bold claims. It's a very intense experience.
I agree it's intense, but not exclusively bad. And I'm pretty sure I'd prefer it by far to being in prison with contact with inmates and COs.
There are a lot of people who have spent weeks/months solo in pursuits like sailing. It clearly isn't just the isolation of solitary which is a problem; it's probably more to do with 1) the type of people sent there and 2) the lack of control over one's own destiny. People who require "social interaction", put in a new/stressful situation against their will, etc. are a lot more likely to suffer from it than people who aren't particularly social and are solitary voluntarily and in a non-stressful setting.
What's the longest time you've ever gone without seeing or talking to another human where you can't easily do so? i.e. you can just walk outside and see one, or pickup the phone, or chat on internet.
I do remote hiking trips where it would take me 5 days to see another person even if I wanted to.
Remove yourself from the world, completely.
(This also becomes a philosophical/psychological question: is it more holy to resist sin when surrounded by temptation, or when in a pure environment? Is it harder to avoid talking to people if you know you just have to pick up a phone to do so, or when it's a serious production?)
That being said, some people are hardier to the idea of being in solitude, though it does usually take some training to get there. However most people aren't that hardy, especially in the extreme case of solitary confinement.
2. I think that you would be really surprised how cruel the lack of social contact can be. We are wired to be social but it's hard to even imagine spending prolonged time without talking to others etc. because most of us have never experienced it.
Someone who has never experienced hunger could think that they would be OK without food... but I am pretty sure they would change their mind after three days without a bite.
Other people think that inmates are anti-social people. But were they always anti-social? Or just some of the time? And how is anti-social measured? Do extroverts make less anti-social people? And if so, does it matter that many inmates are also extroverts?
Bureaucracy seems to be incredibly painful in the Justice system. Decisions get made. To reverse those decisions it becomes a problem in itself. To err is human? To persist on it is stupid. Or is it just a bureaucratic mare?
This site has a huge amount of information, this is probably also the place to look if you want to help: http://solitarywatch.com/
If you want to know more, a good place to start is this national geographic documentary http://documentarystorm.com/solitary-confinement/
and these two excellent articles https://www.byliner.com/susan-greene/stories/the-gray-box-an... http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...
That is cruel but sadly not unusual punishment.
"Your honor, I do believe I'd be better off dead / So if you can take a man's life for the thoughts that's in his head / Sit back in that chair and think it over, Judge, one more time / And have 'em shave off my hair and put me on that execution line."
http://sfbayview.com/2012/hugo-pinell-is-42-years-in-isolati...
I bring up the point about two different prisoners in that 1. I don't believe all prisoners should be treated alike and 2. Different strokes for different folks. As for baseline humanity, again that is subjective. Pirates viewed marooning with some jug of water and a knife and shot as humane. I don't think that fits today's standards of humane treatment.
The article suggests that because of one man in the system the exception if you will, is getting screwed, we must do more to prevent this from happening. I'd argue that if this was a computer system, one exception isn't something to write home about. Many exceptions depending on how you define it however...
Systemic exceptions are expensive to fix and will cost us all a good amount in practice, so the real question we may ask ourselves is, how much money are we willing to put in taxes to overhaul the system? More specifically how much are each one of us willing to pay? A lump some of a dollar? Sure. A million dollars? Not so sure.
Anyway, it's a mother jones article, it and many like it prey on the notion of self-hate and guilt-ridden introspection that many of the U.S. audience loves to talk about, including me!With so many startups and entrepreneurs here on HN, I bet tons of you have violated laws for taxes, banking, employment, or zoning at one time or another and you probably had no idea.
"But it wasn't until I started posting on Hacker News that I truly realized man's inhumanity to man..."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/prisoners-contac...
But unlike private health care, there's no one even poking it with a stick in the start up world.
Prison is supposed to be a deterrent. My biggest gripe is that I have to pay for it at all. I support banishment or death.
Does this view also not presuppose that all prisoners have exhibited anti-social behavior? I think we can both say that this is not the case. Although, prisons tend to somewhat separate the two populations.
I also suppose that others are more habitually and fundamentally anti-social. These people are not worth the effort of trying to 'save'. The brains have literally been wired for this behavior[over the course of many years]. They must be removed from society.
There are also those somewhere in between natural-born killer and 'busted for pot'. These people are responsible for their own personal choices. If they keep making bad choices of their own volition I have no compassion for them. [I say this from first hand experience dealing with a close relative who is a lifelong fuck-up.]
1. People differ vastly in their innate ability to follow societal rules.
2. The justice system is able to distinguish between people who make simple mistakes, and people who are unable to follow society rules.
3. The above is a big factor in sentencing.
While there is evidence that some aspects of behavior are innate, there is also a huge literature linking the environment a person is raised in, and their tendency towards crime. Furthermore, sentencing is generally extremely inconsistent by any standards, so it is very unlikely that sentencing would fit your criteria for being lenient to the right people. Finally, it's hard to think of sentencing criteria that fit the criteria you propose, and are also objective.
With that said, I have a few specific points.
> Prison is society's recourse for anti-social behavior
Lets speak objectively. Prison is a punishment that is forced upon some people who are found guilty of breaking some law. Many laws exist without thought for "social" behavior.
> Does it have to be a violent and horrible place? No. The residents tend to make it that.
Some residents make it that. Other residents have little to no "social" means of preventing or defending themselves against it.
> I am against pampering in anyway, with my tax dollars, people whom I've had to remove from proper society...for anti-social behavior.
Its funny that you use the word "pampering" when the alternative we are discussing is torture.
Nonetheless, this is the easiest point at which I can find common ground with you. Would you, rather than pay with your tax dollars for "pampering" prisoners, pay for educating prisoners so that our GDP grows? If there were ways to measure that GDP increased because we educated and enabled certain prisoners, would you gripe less?
> Prison is supposed to be a deterrent.
I've always heard that its supposed to be for rehabilitation. But, again, lets speak to the reality rather than the ideal: Prison is obviously not an effective deterrent.
> These people don't require reform. They are typically leaniently sentenced, pay for their mistake and move on.
What evidence do you have that people who don't need reform are typically leniently sentenced?
Banishment or death? Really? You do realize that pretty much any inventor or programmer of note in the US--the folks on whose shoulders all of us stand--are likely guilty of several "anti-social" actions?
Prisons, as implemented, are a bad answer to a stupid question.
You have to give Obama credit though, he is supernaturally charismatic and completely amoral, not to mention the best centrist in US political history.
I think that when he is gone and his powers of charisma and diversion have long dissipated, history will not be kind to him. He never had the courage and compassion to do the right thing.