Hundreds of South Carolina Inmates Sent to Solitary Confinement Over Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Hundreds of South Carolina Inmates Sent to Solitary Confinement Over Facebook

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Can this possibly be accurate? Does "disciplinary detention" really mean "solitary"? Reporting on South Carolina prison abuses in other circumstances seem to indicate that it's exactly that.

Here's a report the SC Department of Corrections produced. The numbers are right there. Can SC possibly be acknowledging that people spend hundreds of days in solitary confinement for Facebook? Or, really, for virtually any offense at all?

http://www.doc.sc.gov/pubweb/research/SystemOverview/social-...

Good catch. It does not seems like solitary confinement. I found this doc from Nevada:

http://www.doc.nv.gov/sites/doc/files/pdf/ar/AR734.PDF

Not sure I agree. A document from Washington outlines Disciplinary segregation which very much sounds like solitary. Granted disciplinary segregation and disciplinary detention might not be the same.

http://www.washlaw.org/pdf/Guide_to_Segregation_in_Federal_P...

This is Nevada, though; I can't find similar documentation for South Carolina.

It should be absolutely illegal to revoke visitation and communication rights for longer than 2 weeks.

How does the US system expect inmates to reintegrate into society after they have spent years without human contact?

The US system is about punishing people as harshly as possible, not rehabilitating them. It's all about fear. And it's allowed to happen because if you polled the population you'd find that an uncomfortably high number of people view prisoners as less than human. They're viewed as not deserving of any rights so they usually don't have many, if any, people fighting on their behalf which causes them to be swept under the rug and largely ignored.

Also keep in mind that many prisons in the US are run by for-profit corporations. They clearly don't want people to reintegrate. They want people recommitting at as high of a rate as possible.

There's limited political incentive to improve the lives of a non-voting group. Legally, a large amount of prisoners or former convicts can't vote since they're disenfranchised (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disfranchisement#United_States_...).

>Also keep in mind that many prisons in the US are run by for-profit corporations. They clearly don't want people to reintegrate. They want people recommitting at as high of a rate as possible.

This is over blown. It's like 3% of prisoners are in for private prisons. We treat them shit in our government prisons too.

They don't have to be in a private prison to warrant private sector interests. I don't think we can afford to underestimate the economic impact on companies that provide food, security, building services, apparently social network investigation services, etc.. If non violent offenders were suddenly released tomorrow it would have a very negative effect on companies that have based their whole business model on catering to prisons, both public and private. Not to mention the impact on local jobs (e.g. guards, staff, administration) if we were suddenly able to close a significant number of prisons.

I really do believe that there is a political will in this country to not upset the economic status quo that having a large prison population has created, especially at the local and state level.

You are right, but I still don't think that is the major cause of all the mistreatment and high incarceration.

Voters love "tough on crime" politicians. At a local level, being weak on crime is a death sentence.

Until you convince the voters that throwing people in jail is a mistake, you'll get this.

I would have thought that voters would generally be pretty furious about the massive economic cost of running these prisons.

Reports like this should wake people up to the over-obsession with incarceration as a punishment: http://cacs.org/research/winners-and-losers-corrections-and-.... Just need to keep banging the drum, and pushing anecdotes on how the cost to incarcerate is often ridiculous compared to the cost of the crime.

Obviously for violent offenders it's a completely different discussion. There are still very serious structural problems, but you certainly can't win that argument on economics alone.

But if they reintegrate they're less likely to become repeat customers, and who would want that? /s

not the fine upstanding citizens making millions of dollars off these folks, thats for sure.

I would be in favor of Facebook relaxing it's policy regarding password-sharing for inmates, who can't legally access Facebook directly. Like the article says, Facebook could be a great tool for sharing information about social injustice inside prisons.

Prison policy here sounds like a flagrant violation of the first amendment, when you think about what social media actually is. It's just a way for people to send messages to each-other. Punishing an inmate for asking his friend to post on Facebook on his behalf is equivalent to punishing an inmate for asking his friend to send a letter on his behalf.

I can kinda see why the punishment is so harsh for a form of communication that COs can't intercept or witness.

I don't think Facebook should be suspending their pages - but I can understand the punishment.

The punishments do seem extreme, but the why downvotes? Not everyone in jail is a drug addict who was affected by bad circumstances. Really bad people get locked up too.

I only have this one link on hand, but surely it isn't an isolated incident. Communication is monitored for a reason.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05...

Downvotes probably because HackerNews is very anti-censorship, even if it's in a field that's been censored since the beginning (they read the mail inmates send out, but making it punishable to use ways around that is somehow super bad?)

They're clearly either not thinking about the people who are putting out hits by using their contacts through SNS or they are and going the "censorship is bad period." route, which is understandable.

I wouldn't complain, but in this event it's actually hindering decent conversation. shrug It is what it is.

Dude ... you did something that sent you to prison so, by definition, your rights are going to be curtailed.

I do however have a problem with many of the things we send people to prison for ... let's fix that first (and those who therefore don't go to jail won't be in trouble for their social media habits).

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