I'm not sure who the genius was that thought up "23 hours a day in a small cramped windowless cell, with 1 hour for TV or a shower (according to my friend, his brother can either watch TV for one hour, or watch for a half hour and then take a shower as well), that should rehabilitate these people and get them ready to be productive citizens when they're due for release into society."
Prison needs to be about rehabilitation, not confinement. That means social contact, decent meals, exercise, job training programs, in the prison jobs (cook, librarian, etc), and educational opportunities.
Solitary for confinement for a day or two as "punishment" for transgressions is perhaps acceptable, but to let people languish in 23 hour in/ 1 hour out situations for weeks, months, and years is absolutely inhumane.
When we build our nation up (I'm American) from the bottom up, that's when we become stronger as a society. It's time for the richest nation in the world to stop letting people fall through the cracks and provide access to the opportunities and programs that produce so many of the entreprenuers, scientists, doctors, and inventors we so revere.
Otherwise, fuck it, we may as well just kill 'em when they get there, no?
when are you running for president because I haven't heard one candidate speak as intelligently about any issue as you have so clearly spoken about this one.
Ha, thanks. I'm only 25, so I've got about 10 years to put together a platform before I'm even eligible.
Obviously, as some of the other posters have pointed out, there a few issues regarding my statements when it comes to habitual reoffenders who threaten the rest of the prison populace. I'd need to do some more research on the subject (look at other prison systems, look at occurrence rates, etc) to figure out a proper response to that.
This is how I see it now though: when you learn to scuba dive, first they tell you the basics on dry land, then they get you into a pool with the proper supervision and equipment, then you go into the ocean.
When it comes to rehabilitating prisoners so that they're able to interact with the ocean (society), we're not even giving them the on land basics much less the pool (which could be civilian roles inside the prison environment).
Rewarding good behavior has been studied and shown to be far more effective than punishing bad behavior. So that's the route I propose.
Of course, in a society where we don't provide a lot of people (generally the people who could use it the most) the in land basics, much less the pool, before they end up in prison, I'm not sure what we expect.
I've been considering writing a book called "A Path Forward: A vision for a Prosperous America" which would include a lot of my views. Hopefully that will be coming out in the next few years. If you ever see it, you'll know it was me. My views are primarily based on a rational perspective, evidence based learning, and a very healthy dose of compassion.
I've never understood how people could dismiss so easily a person with decades of experiences they've never had. Of course you can learn from them. Why aren't we?
I'm totally with you in spirit. Solitary should not be used for long-term punishment for offenses in prison, or as punishment for what happened on the outside.
But what do you do about an inmate who terrorizes his cellmates, his peers on the yard, his peers in the cafeteria, etc. You've tried solitary for a day, for a week, etc.
If you leave this inmate in with general, he's taking away their rights to learn and rehabilitate. If you put him in with a bunkmate... well, that seems like punishment to the bunkmate. You end up creating a new ad-seg unit that looks just like the old one, but with a new name.
I'm not meaning to say that solitary is used correctly in the US right now. Not at all. But it may be an inevitable result for a very small group of prisoners who would otherwise take away the others' right to rehabilitate.
The object is for the prison guards to have a way control dangerous or non-compliant prisoners. The prison staff do not have a stake in what happens outside of the prison.
It seems like many or most Americans believe that the proper mandate of justice system should only include punishment because:
1) rehabilitation is immoral because it would tend to reward and promote wrong doing
2) prisoners are morally inferior and therefore rehabilitation will be ineffective
3) moral and orderly persons needn't fear the justice system because they won't break the law and therefore
4) arguments for reform must be rooted in concern for the welfare of morally inferior persons, because reform can have no other utility
I have heard these things from many people I know, and apparently most of us voted for the system we have. Also, I think we really enjoy punishing people, even if it's abstract, it's very satisfying to imagine dominating and tormenting people we don't like, and along with appeals to fear, this is an excellent way to appeal politically to citizens in order to forward one's interests.
I really can't imagine that we will stop doing this as long as only a minority of people are concerned about being imprisoned themselves.
No, of course not. I said that was the purpose intended by the guards. It costs them little to use solitary confinement liberally, so they do. If someone is inconvenient or troublesome, or just pisses them off, away they go.
I also think that it's well evidenced that solitary makes people go completely insane, and that the guard doesn't care very much what happens to them if they ever get out of prison.
EDIT: What I'm trying to say here is that I think what we're doing is harmful, but there seems to be little incentive for empowered parties to change it.
Dangerous prisoners can be physically isolated from others with bars, but they can be left to talk to others through the bars rather than cutting them off socially.
Some other perspectives on "rehabilitation": it's easy to associate that word with treatments like Anders Breivik's, which to many (most?) Americans seems insane and they feel he should just be shot. A variant of 2 is that "rehabilitation" in a prison setting makes no sense not because of moral failings but because the methods just make it more likely the prisoner is institutionalized instead. This is the case with many mentally ill people who are stable, on medication, etc., but in efforts beyond that to "rehabilitate" by e.g. giving them housing near the facilities or part-time (less than 10 hours a week) work (with 30% of all income they take unless you can move out) they end up locking them in with dependence. Another variant of 2, people for the most part are either "habilitated" already or not before prison and after prison. Many types of crimes that result in prison sentences aren't really indicative of a person in need of "rehabilitation", just a person that made a mistake (like submitting too much to vices like greed). The time in prison acts as a deterrent to help bolster weak wills, but if those who end up there anyway change at all it will only be from forced introspection as their normal life falls away for a while. They don't need much prison time or "rehabilitation", just incentive not to do what they did again. And on the other side, there's the feeling that people like Breivik could never be "rehabilitated" and in fact weren't "habilitated" to begin with. Better to shoot those people, or, failing that, at least make their lifetime in prison unenjoyable.
I think you can get people to agree to other mandates of the justice system beyond pure punishment as deterrent if your other mandate is more specific, detailed, and limited than "rehabilitation". For instance, lowering remission rates, or keeping employment rates pre and post prison similar...
A blurb I recall: Upwards of 90% of people on death row have such severe head injuries that you can find evidence of it with an x-ray if there are no medical records.
For some people, "rehabilitation" that does not involve serious medical intervention not currently possible is just not going to solve the problem. No amount of disincentives or will power or whatever is going to help someone behave better if they are literally brain damaged.
I agree that we need a better system, one that does better at either rehabilitation or deterrence through punishment, as our current system is bad at both.
However, we can't let these types of offenses continue. Altercations in prison indicate a type of extreme stupidity and/or violence, given that the offender is committing a crime while in the punishment stage for another crime. Drunken driving kills ~10k a year (http://www.cdc.gov/MotorVehicleSafety/Impaired_Driving/impai...) and gang violence kills about the same in Mexico (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10681249). The numbers for drug overdoses (often indirectly caused by said Mexican gangs) are far higher. Do you really want to let literally tens of thousands of people in the United States and Mexico lose their lives every year because we were too soft on the offenders?
> Altercations in prison indicate a type of extreme stupidity and/or violence
Your list is incomplete. Altercations also occur when people are stressed. Push most people enough, strip away humanity and agency, and they will lash out.
> because we were too soft on the offenders
Being too hard on prisoners has its own downsides. As this essay demonstrates.
The question is, had we treated Adam Morales, Angel Coronado, and the others more softly, would they still have gone on to the commit crimes that lead them back to prison?
> we can't let these types of offenses continue
There doesn't seem to be much in the way of evidence that the US style of being hard on prisoners has your desired goal of reducing the number of deaths due to drunk driving, as the case of Silvestre Segovia demonstrates.
Therefore, it doesn't seem the hard/soft classification is really relevant.
Estimates for ME casualties are between 500,000 and 2 million plus, not including refugees, the injured, nor the complete economic gutting for those who remain experience.
What should be done about that? Gonna let the US government get away with genocide?
Prison, like most other institutions in America, is about power and control. It has nothing to do with morality, efficiency, nor opinion, those are manufactured lies and opinions to keep the status quo.
You sound like another blood thirsty progressive calling for the wanton destruction of millions.
Want to stop Mexican cartels, support drug legalization. Prohibition doesn't work, it has never worked, drug use declines in countries, like Portugal, which decriminalize drug use. Calling out for the powerful to continue their spree of murder and to continue to gorge upon the lives of young black men is utterly disgusting and farcical especially when you sight the drug war as what we must fear. No fear the ones who imprison millions and kill millions more.
When we build our nation up (I'm American) from the bottom up, that's when we become stronger as a society.
If we cared about this, we would be more supportive of parents, children, family. By the time you have a situation where we throw them in a dark hole and forget about them, things have gone very, very wrong and there are no easy answers. The guy profiled in the article is between a rock and a hard place because he would need to repudiate the Mexican Mafia to get out of solitary, something not likely to be good for his health.
That doesn't mean I am okay with what is going on. But sometimes there just aren't nice/easy ways to handle something.
Solitary confinement as it exists in the US today is cruel and unusual punishment by any reasonable measure.
The core problem here is that the criminal justice system is not about true justice, and it damned sure isn't about rehabilitation. It's about retribution. And that, frankly, is a barbaric notion of "justice" that our country should have left in the distant past. It's going to take a long long time to fix this problem.
It also relies on things like eyewitness testimony which has proven quite unreliable. All in all it is a very dated system that is in serious need of an upgrade.
It doesn't really matter that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, seeing as the vast majority of people will believe a witness' testimony over contradicting evidence.
Look up Dario Gabbai and what he says the color of cyanide-poisoned bodies was (blue), then look up the real color cyanide-poisoned bodies turn into (red).
You may not have meant it this way, but it is always alarming when people dismiss the whole of the American justice system as "dated," as if that were a bug rather than a feature.
On the whole, the American system -- with its ancient safeguards inherited from the English common law -- does an excellent job at deterring and ferreting out serious crime while protecting the innocent. The American criminal law assumes our innocence; tells us the accusations against us; can only search our bodies, homes, and things with good reason, as decided by an impartial judge; compels our accusers to face us in open court; prevents juries from hearing unfairly inflammatory evidence; and generally allows most of us to live our private lives unmolested.
That's a good foundation.
On the other hand, the American criminal law also imprisons more human beings than any other law on the planet by an absurd margin, turns poor black areas into humiliated angry police states, turns marginal offenders into hardened criminals with sociopathic prisons, accepts prison rape as a mere cost of doing business, drives people insane with solitary confinement, and, as you point out, unfairly convicts people on unreliable evidence.
But we can deal with these problems piecemeal while preserving the good.
I don't think anyone can rationally argue that solitary confinement is not cruel and unusual. The Supreme Court should be ashamed for having opportunities to right such an injustice and failing. And all for what? An "outstanding management tool." Fucking disgusting.
32 comments
[ 2294 ms ] story [ 1348 ms ] threadPrison needs to be about rehabilitation, not confinement. That means social contact, decent meals, exercise, job training programs, in the prison jobs (cook, librarian, etc), and educational opportunities.
Solitary for confinement for a day or two as "punishment" for transgressions is perhaps acceptable, but to let people languish in 23 hour in/ 1 hour out situations for weeks, months, and years is absolutely inhumane.
When we build our nation up (I'm American) from the bottom up, that's when we become stronger as a society. It's time for the richest nation in the world to stop letting people fall through the cracks and provide access to the opportunities and programs that produce so many of the entreprenuers, scientists, doctors, and inventors we so revere.
Otherwise, fuck it, we may as well just kill 'em when they get there, no?
Obviously, as some of the other posters have pointed out, there a few issues regarding my statements when it comes to habitual reoffenders who threaten the rest of the prison populace. I'd need to do some more research on the subject (look at other prison systems, look at occurrence rates, etc) to figure out a proper response to that.
This is how I see it now though: when you learn to scuba dive, first they tell you the basics on dry land, then they get you into a pool with the proper supervision and equipment, then you go into the ocean.
When it comes to rehabilitating prisoners so that they're able to interact with the ocean (society), we're not even giving them the on land basics much less the pool (which could be civilian roles inside the prison environment).
Rewarding good behavior has been studied and shown to be far more effective than punishing bad behavior. So that's the route I propose.
Of course, in a society where we don't provide a lot of people (generally the people who could use it the most) the in land basics, much less the pool, before they end up in prison, I'm not sure what we expect.
I've been considering writing a book called "A Path Forward: A vision for a Prosperous America" which would include a lot of my views. Hopefully that will be coming out in the next few years. If you ever see it, you'll know it was me. My views are primarily based on a rational perspective, evidence based learning, and a very healthy dose of compassion.
I've never understood how people could dismiss so easily a person with decades of experiences they've never had. Of course you can learn from them. Why aren't we?
Cheers mate.
But what do you do about an inmate who terrorizes his cellmates, his peers on the yard, his peers in the cafeteria, etc. You've tried solitary for a day, for a week, etc.
If you leave this inmate in with general, he's taking away their rights to learn and rehabilitate. If you put him in with a bunkmate... well, that seems like punishment to the bunkmate. You end up creating a new ad-seg unit that looks just like the old one, but with a new name.
I'm not meaning to say that solitary is used correctly in the US right now. Not at all. But it may be an inevitable result for a very small group of prisoners who would otherwise take away the others' right to rehabilitate.
(Edit: replaced stray ? with .)
For a lot of people, even if there are some benefits, they aren't going to make up for the lack of social contact.
It seems like many or most Americans believe that the proper mandate of justice system should only include punishment because:
1) rehabilitation is immoral because it would tend to reward and promote wrong doing
2) prisoners are morally inferior and therefore rehabilitation will be ineffective
3) moral and orderly persons needn't fear the justice system because they won't break the law and therefore
4) arguments for reform must be rooted in concern for the welfare of morally inferior persons, because reform can have no other utility
I have heard these things from many people I know, and apparently most of us voted for the system we have. Also, I think we really enjoy punishing people, even if it's abstract, it's very satisfying to imagine dominating and tormenting people we don't like, and along with appeals to fear, this is an excellent way to appeal politically to citizens in order to forward one's interests.
I really can't imagine that we will stop doing this as long as only a minority of people are concerned about being imprisoned themselves.
Do you really believe that only those types of prisoners end up in solitary confinement?
I also think that it's well evidenced that solitary makes people go completely insane, and that the guard doesn't care very much what happens to them if they ever get out of prison.
EDIT: What I'm trying to say here is that I think what we're doing is harmful, but there seems to be little incentive for empowered parties to change it.
Belief in a Just World creates an unjust one.
I think you can get people to agree to other mandates of the justice system beyond pure punishment as deterrent if your other mandate is more specific, detailed, and limited than "rehabilitation". For instance, lowering remission rates, or keeping employment rates pre and post prison similar...
For some people, "rehabilitation" that does not involve serious medical intervention not currently possible is just not going to solve the problem. No amount of disincentives or will power or whatever is going to help someone behave better if they are literally brain damaged.
However, we can't let these types of offenses continue. Altercations in prison indicate a type of extreme stupidity and/or violence, given that the offender is committing a crime while in the punishment stage for another crime. Drunken driving kills ~10k a year (http://www.cdc.gov/MotorVehicleSafety/Impaired_Driving/impai...) and gang violence kills about the same in Mexico (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10681249). The numbers for drug overdoses (often indirectly caused by said Mexican gangs) are far higher. Do you really want to let literally tens of thousands of people in the United States and Mexico lose their lives every year because we were too soft on the offenders?
Your list is incomplete. Altercations also occur when people are stressed. Push most people enough, strip away humanity and agency, and they will lash out.
> because we were too soft on the offenders
Being too hard on prisoners has its own downsides. As this essay demonstrates.
The question is, had we treated Adam Morales, Angel Coronado, and the others more softly, would they still have gone on to the commit crimes that lead them back to prison?
> we can't let these types of offenses continue
There doesn't seem to be much in the way of evidence that the US style of being hard on prisoners has your desired goal of reducing the number of deaths due to drunk driving, as the case of Silvestre Segovia demonstrates.
Therefore, it doesn't seem the hard/soft classification is really relevant.
Estimates for ME casualties are between 500,000 and 2 million plus, not including refugees, the injured, nor the complete economic gutting for those who remain experience.
What should be done about that? Gonna let the US government get away with genocide?
Prison, like most other institutions in America, is about power and control. It has nothing to do with morality, efficiency, nor opinion, those are manufactured lies and opinions to keep the status quo.
You sound like another blood thirsty progressive calling for the wanton destruction of millions.
Want to stop Mexican cartels, support drug legalization. Prohibition doesn't work, it has never worked, drug use declines in countries, like Portugal, which decriminalize drug use. Calling out for the powerful to continue their spree of murder and to continue to gorge upon the lives of young black men is utterly disgusting and farcical especially when you sight the drug war as what we must fear. No fear the ones who imprison millions and kill millions more.
Get a heart.
If we cared about this, we would be more supportive of parents, children, family. By the time you have a situation where we throw them in a dark hole and forget about them, things have gone very, very wrong and there are no easy answers. The guy profiled in the article is between a rock and a hard place because he would need to repudiate the Mexican Mafia to get out of solitary, something not likely to be good for his health.
That doesn't mean I am okay with what is going on. But sometimes there just aren't nice/easy ways to handle something.
The core problem here is that the criminal justice system is not about true justice, and it damned sure isn't about rehabilitation. It's about retribution. And that, frankly, is a barbaric notion of "justice" that our country should have left in the distant past. It's going to take a long long time to fix this problem.
Look up Dario Gabbai and what he says the color of cyanide-poisoned bodies was (blue), then look up the real color cyanide-poisoned bodies turn into (red).
On the whole, the American system -- with its ancient safeguards inherited from the English common law -- does an excellent job at deterring and ferreting out serious crime while protecting the innocent. The American criminal law assumes our innocence; tells us the accusations against us; can only search our bodies, homes, and things with good reason, as decided by an impartial judge; compels our accusers to face us in open court; prevents juries from hearing unfairly inflammatory evidence; and generally allows most of us to live our private lives unmolested.
That's a good foundation.
On the other hand, the American criminal law also imprisons more human beings than any other law on the planet by an absurd margin, turns poor black areas into humiliated angry police states, turns marginal offenders into hardened criminals with sociopathic prisons, accepts prison rape as a mere cost of doing business, drives people insane with solitary confinement, and, as you point out, unfairly convicts people on unreliable evidence.
But we can deal with these problems piecemeal while preserving the good.
Are we sure we are talking about the same justice system?