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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about prison, having fortunately never been there. So I just can't understand how an officer can have any kind of unsupervised and unseen time with inmates. I just assumed everything everywhere in a prison is monitored and recorded.

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Modern prisons are, ironically enough, reverse panopticons. Governments do very little to monitor and protect the people it's placed under bodily control, even going so far as to create vast dark privatized spaces where it can maintain a careful ignorance of all the horrible things that go on in them.

And this is by, at least implicit, intent. Prison in the US fits into a punitive, even retributional model. If you hurt society you get hurt in return. If you do something bad you get punished. Fear and rememberance of punishment is what keeps people in line. In such a model it's undesirable for prison conditions to be mild or tolerable, the more intolerable and brutal the better, because that makes them a more effective punishment.

It's a model that has continued to be used in the American justice system for centuries, but it's not a system based on any scientific principles. Worse, it doesn't actually work. As often as not prison breeds worse criminals rather than keeping people on the straight and narrow.

It works exactly as it's supposed to: as the primary instrument of white supremacy in a war against racial minorities. That's why the Drug War figures so prominently in explaining why we have a higher rate of imprisonment than any other country in the world, and why minorities are so disproportionately targeted in the drug war for petty offenses like using and selling crack (despite it being less pure than coke) or marijuana (itself a term that Anslinger brought to prominence in the 1930's to racialize the drug and the war against it).

In practice it may work out that way, but I don't believe that the majority of actors within the criminal justice system are acting in bad faith or are intentionally advancing a racist agenda. Indeed, many LEOs are racial minorities.

I don't think it's helpful to characterize the actions of officers or DAs as racist per se but rather to point to the racist consequences of drug laws, LEO behavior, and so on. I think the number of people within the system acting in good faith far outweigh the number of bad actors and if we desire change it'll be easier if we can convince such folks into coming to "our side" rather than vilifying them.

LEOs don't make legislation or push for harsh sentences.

Their unions do, however. I'm not anti-union, but do tend to be anti-police union.

The California Correctional Officers union is routinely accused of pushing for harsher punishments as a job guarantee, which of course is a problem in a state with such over-crowding of its prisons like California. I would accuse them of gross moral indecency but it takes a pretty indecent person to become a CO anyways.

Jacobin just came out with a great article about this:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/the-bad-kind-of-unionism/

I have a friend who works on security systems for jails. There are plenty of areas unrecorded. There is cost for one thing - prisons are large places and recording all of it is expensive. There is also the hardware - all cameras etc are a possible source of bits and pieces that could be made into weapons or other contraband.

Hearing the security procedures that goes into taking actual tools into a jail makes your realise how locked down they are - every single item (down to a set of keys) has to be inventoried on the way in, and on the way out. No phones taken in - no exceptions. Bear in mind that staff working on security systems never get in the same space as prisoners - it's not like they're fixing cameras in the cafeteria while the prisoners mill around.

As an aside, he is investigating the use of automated drones for doing perimeter patrols. They are good at flying a set pattern with a camera payload. But there are many kinks to work out.

Keep in who is doing the monitoring, guards who look to be often involved sexual assault. See comment on consent I responded to in this article's thread. The situation of the victim is one of imprisonment, nearly every variable of their life is defined by the (sometimes rapist) guards.

Correctional facility is what they call them, yep.

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