This is one of those findings that feels so unbelievably obvious. Of _course_ giving prisoners the ability to stay connected with the outside world helps rehabilitate them.
It also really highlights just how cruel for cruelty's sake our modern prison system is. I know there's an almost fetishistic worship of punishment in the US and many other countries with large prison populations as a method of "rehabilitation", but the data shows us that if you actually care about healing people (spoiler: the US does not), it's both not very expensive and extremely positive for society to do it right. It starts with free phone calls, work transition programs, reducing restrictions on jobs held by ex-felons, and other simple changes that cost a hell of a lot less than taking care of the broken souls our prisons churn out.
People always bring up that "90% of US prisons are public so it's not a private prison problem" but those public prisons all contract out things like food and communication and monitoring and anything else that's possible to private companies.
Don't forget the per minute charge to use kiosk computers to send electronic communication with family, or the pay to use phone app for family members to get those same communications.
Or that you have to buy any medications sold in commissary from there and won't be given them at medical (which costs $5 a visit when you don't make $5 a month) like aspirin at the for profit commissary that buys from jacked up 'prison commissary' distributors and has a way shorter than what you buy in the store expiration date. Keep in mind you are not allowed to share 'medication' and that having expired 'medication' in your locker can be a shot (writeup, potential loss of good time, potential to have your security points increased and shipped to a higher security(i.e. less safe) prison).
$5 a visit, when they are making $0.33 and hour...more than two days labor to pay it all for a doctor visit. "One of the biggest differences between the incarceration systems of Norway and the USA is that Norway does not have large, centralized jails. Instead, Norway utilizes a system of small, community-based correctional facilities that focus on rehabilitation and reintegration into society." "Norway's prison system houses approximately three thousand offenders. Norway's prison system is renowned as one of the most effective and humane in the world. Norway does not instate capital punishment or life imprisonment." Seems U.S.A. has cruel and unusual punishment for prison health.
I'm sure most people who are employed make money from their employment but they're also not running a business which has "costs", "revenue" and, hopefully, "profit". They enter a contract with such a business which will treat the individual's salary as a "cost" which lessens the "profit" from the "revenue".
> has profit been redefined by Marxists with some new "it's not profit when we do it" BS definition?
Profit as the excess retained by or on behalf of capital owners is not a definition created by Marxists, using it for other things which are seen as loosely similar to that central goal of the most important property relation in capitalism is a newer, expansive, metaphorical use.
> Profit as the excess retained by or on behalf of capital owners
> capital owners
There it is, the "not when we do it" qualification. Just as I suspected, very predictable. Profit is when you're bringing in more money than you're spending. Whether you are labor or a "capital owner", profit is profit. When an animal gets more calories from their food than they spent to get it, even that is profit.
Here's wiktionary's definitions:
> (accounting, economics) Total income or cash flow minus expenditures. The money or other benefit a non-governmental organization or individual receives in exchange for products and services sold at an advertised price.
If you view a profit on a supply basis, as "the difference between the sold value of a good and the price to produce it", then somebody living paycheck to paycheck is, by definition, not profiting off of their labor. The cost of living, and thus be able to produce labor, is approximately the same as the amount they're being paid.
If you view profit on a demand basis, profit is the difference between what the the seller values the good at and the value the buyer places on the good. In that regard, labor is never sold at a profit for the laborer: companies only purchase labor that they can use to produce more value than they pay for it.
Framed another way, if the value of labor is the price the market is willing to pay for it, then employment is almost always a negative exchange for the worker. The value of someone's labor is the price that employers are willing to pay for it, and the price employers are willing to pay for the labor is greater than the wage the employee receives (because employing somebody is more expensive than just paying them a wage).
All told, unless your definition of "profit" is indistinguishable from "money changes hands", workers don't profit from their labor.
Well yeah if you're treading water living paycheck to paycheck, then you're not making a profit. But anybody in that situation with an opportunity to make more money will jump at it, because the idea is to make more money than you're spending, e.g. to earn a profit.
Well you’re definitely missing the spirit of the comment. Employees do not “profit” off of anything, it’s the other way around. I make a cent, BossMan makes a dollar, etc.
Yes, and if there aren't enough donations and volunteers we just close the prison and release the prisoners because obviously people didn't think it was that important.
I've mentioned it before but Ruth Wilson Gilmore points out that prisons form a system of rural jobs programs. Tying together the 1980s farm crisis and the rise in incarceration
The very literal and real truth is that The U.S.A. from the constitution down is a White supremacist country, and it continues to this day. Prison Labor = Slavery, and the Republicans are monopolizing this to their benefit. Until this is fixed... we remain a racist country. We need to continue to progress towards equality, because if we do not, or children will, and will hate us for it. We fought World War I, the War to and all Wars over Fascism, We fought World War II, to end Fascism, and now... we forget. Its shameful, and it will become embarrassing.
The lifelong ban does seem arbitrarily harsh and engineered for abuse (anybody subject to taxation should retain voting rights); who benefits from this and how? (It's been 20+ years since my last civics class.)
Racism was the historic angle-- but even if you target a black community and make felons of all the men, they would only comprise a minority of voters in a white district, and it just reduces the number of all eligible voters in an all-black district. Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?
Or is it just a way to suppress voting by as much of the Left as possible?
The Right are the ones who define all these laws. The Left are the ones who seem positioned to run afoul of them (pro-drugs, pro-abortion, pro-prostitution, etc.), then lose their ability to influence change.
> Racism was the historic angle-- but even if you target a black community and make felons of all the men, they would only comprise a minority of voters in a white district, and it just reduces the number of all eligible voters in an all-black district.
Reducing the number of voters by eliminating a disfavored class from representation while retaining the political power of apportionment that counts the disebfranchised citizens was the whole point of the 3/5 compromise, and mass criminalization plus felon disenfranchisement is its direct replacement.
Also, you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.
> Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?
That, too, but its largely a federal politics thing.
> Reducing the number of voters by eliminating a disfavored class from representation while retaining the political power of apportionment that counts the disebfranchised citizens was the whole point of the 3/5 compromise
Thanks-- I [think I] see where you're going but still don't get where this ends. You have a district with a minority of people who can't vote. Yet they are counted among the population.
This directly suppresses presidential votes, but what besides the House benefits from an inflated population of non-voters?
> you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.
The thought crossed my mind, but the only example I'm familiar with is Atlanta-- a few blue droplets on a red ocean, yet the state is currently represented by two Democratic senators, and the House is split. There's something weird about this but I'm not a political strategist enough to understand what's going on here. Is this where population matters-- density of the metro area outweighing the rest of the state?
In the 2020 election in Georgia, 49.24% voted for one party and 49.49% voted for the other. The "blue droplets in a red ocean" is very obvious: the ocean has very few people.
> The thought crossed my mind, but the only example I'm familiar with is Atlanta-- a few blue droplets on a red ocean, yet the state is currently represented by two Democratic senators, and the House is split. There's something weird about this but I'm not a political strategist enough to understand what's going on here. Is this where population matters-- density of the metro area outweighing the rest of the state?
Yes, Atlanta metro is about 60% of the population of the state of Georgia.
The Republicans did this for decades, until they could start building prisons in their districts, then they went into hyper-drive, moving as many prisons into Republican districts as they could, and its well documented, and it is completely egregious.
It gets even worse. For purposes of apportionment prisoners are counted in their place of incarceration rather than their domicile. New York lost a congressional seat by 89 people. How many New Yorkers are incarcerated at Fort Dix?
I don't mean the prison(er) labor. Prisons employ not just guards but doctors and nurses and groundskeepers and secretaries, plumbers, electricians, HR, food service companies... Just like colleges or military bases, prisons are a source of jobs for the surrounding area and can be the only thing keeping them even vaguely economically viable.
Making the slave labor illegal wouldn't get rid of most of the economic/political incentive for prisons.
If nobody sells food to prisons, then what will the prisoners eat? Do you propose that prisons be run as farms where prisoners are made to produce their own food? I've heard that prisons in South Korea work that way, but I've also heard that prisons in South Korea are brutal by even American standards, such that the US Military has an agreement with the South Korean government that any US servicemen put into Korean prisons will be fed more than a starvation diet. Apparently conditions in Korean prisons are such that an agreement like that is necessary.
Maybe, prisons buying food isn't the problem with American prisons.
> Apparently conditions in Korean prisons are such that an agreement like that is necessary.
I don't know the current state of them, but you can tour Seodaemun prison (operational 1908-1987; it's now a museum/memorial). They make no attempt to hide the fact that the conditions were historically even worse than you're describing-- basically concentration camps sans gas chambers. Food was watery gruel, toilets were rat-infested holes in the ground, etc.
Visit in the winter when it's 30F out for the full experience; the prisoners weren't given adequate clothing for the cold themselves so even bundled up to the teeth you can appreciate their misery.
Out of curiosity, how many servicemen did the US allow to get into foreign prisons?
I know at least two highly mediatized cases of US servicemen committing murder in Europe[1][2] but were instantly airlifted to the US before they could be arrested by the local police, so they couldn't be trialed and jailed in the EU and instead got to walk free back home.
If the US stepped in for them in Europe, I doubt they won't do the same in Korea.
He was meant to board a plane back to America where he would be thrown out of the military, but he evidently decided to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.
But the prison still gets to set the policy, no? Like how many minutes people can call, and what they can charge?
"Nobody should profit off of prison, period" is very simplistic: the electricity company makes a profit; the store selling bread, sausages, milk, potatoes, and whatnot makes a profit; the supplier selling books makes a profit; AT&T will make a profit from the phone lines regardless, just as they make a profit off phone lines to offices, etc. etc.
The problem isn't private companies: it's the prison officials. How much of that revenue goes back to the prison? A substantial amount I bet. That's why they do it; that a private company is involved isn't all that important. Yes, it's exploitive and counter-productive, but few seem to care as prisons are for evil people who deserve to be assraped on a daily basis anyway, and anything more than bread & water is a luxury.
This fully fits with the general attitude that exists in the US towards criminals. This is a country that puts 9-year olds in full leg and arm shackles for stealing bubble gum[1] (putting a kid like that in court is already dubious), and there are plenty of examples ranging from the existence of the "innocence project" to all the drug tests for employment, etc. etc. What is wrong with you people?
I'm sure it's a multifactorial problem, but I have a hard time seeing direct profit as being the original cause of this issue, as opposed to a parasitic growth that developed on top of it. The core issue has to be the basic voter fear and attitude that so harshly punished any politician of the 80s and 90s who was seen to be "soft on crime." Misdemeanors converted to felonies. Mandatory minimum sentences were introduced. Police got free military surplus gear and became more of a hostile occupying force than part of the community.
There's discord between the discussion in this thread and discussion any time the subject of San Francisco policing comes up. They're too soft and let crime happen. They ignore shoplifters. People are just shitting in the streets. Okay, well what do you want the police to do? It seems the options are you either kill petty shoplifters and homeless people or you send them to prison. But then the same people will complain about exploding prison populations.
Am I lacking in creativity? Because there are three options I can see:
- Create a society where even unskilled, somewhat antisocial people who went through great trauma as children do well enough that they don't turn to crime, and actually treat those who are so mentally ill that they'll be long-term homeless virtually no matter what.
- Allow some amount of non-lethal crime to happen and live with it.
- Put massive amounts of people in prison.
It seems like voters have converged on the third as their preference, not because they're being brainwashed by private prisons and corrupt corrections officer unions, but because the first option is too expensive and the second option would mean they need to see human shit and broken windows when they're walking around the city. At least prisons tend to be in the middle of the desert or swamp where it's out of sight, someone else's problem.
We used to let people do military service as an alternative sentence for minor infractions, but that led to a lot of antisocial behavior in an institution that requires order to function (it stopped after Vietnam). There's a reason why when Russia did the same thing recently, the prisoners were used as first-wave cannon fodder and left the actual fighting to Wagner...criminals tend to lack discipline.
There's room for a middle option between passivity and slavery/prison. Some people need to be wards of somebody, so set up an institution like the military (endless boot camp, or the mining-town setups of old) and use that for alternate sentencing. Last chance: you get training, a mandatory job, shitty housing, and limited freedom (shore leave/weekend passes). It's not ideal, so work the program as long as you need to and GTFO. Fuck it up and next time you will go to prison.
The first option is not actually more expensive than the cost of how we handle it now. E.g. we could just give homeless people housing for less than the cost we already spend on homeless services.
The problem is the "they don't deserve things for free" mindset. It's even here in this thread too, I had to pay for education, why should prisoners get it? This vindictive thinking is all over HN, just a couple days ago a top comment was wondering why we allow them to "infest" cities like they're some sort of disease rather than other people. If you ran on a dog whistled "kill the homeless" platform, you'd get a lot of voter support.
The 1995 film "Heat" refers to them as "gladiator academies". And there's a great Willem Dafoe film called about the US prison system called "Animal Factory".
My personal take is that it's a stress response in the US. Our society and economic system has evolved to put the vast majority of people one or two paychecks away from poverty. When you feel like your life is miserable, and you have no hope of improving it, it feels good to see righteous violence done to someone lesser.
A similar example: educating prisoners reduces recidivism. Feels obvious, right? Education leads to jobs, jobs lead to money, money means less need to do crime. But then you get these "whaddya mean prisoners get free college but I have to pay, prison should be a punishment" takes, and so whenever one of these programs gets too effective and popular, it's liable to get killed. This is actually the first year Pell grants have been available to prisoners since it was banned 30 years ago.
I was at Millhaven, a maximum security institution in Ontario, a few years ago. The prisoners told me that only 10 of them could attend university courses at a time. The librarian confirmed it.
I think another obvious answer would be to make community college classes available to prisoners. In California (and other places) it’s very easy to get community college for free regardless of income level. Doing this more widely and offering people in prison CC classes for free means that this isn’t something “special” only people in prison get. You could even take a page out of Georgia Tech and similar universities’ books and offer prisoners online versions of classes with prerecorded materials + a TA with office hours and that they can email for questions to relatively cheaply deploy classes in prisons without needing to spend a professor’s time and without the security concerns of them entering the prison.
Of the 23 countries listed [1] on this site, all of them have tuition fees which are much lower than the US. A first sight shows Latvia as highest with up to 9900 EUR per academic year. Europe has 44 sovereign states.
You are correct, it's not "all" and "Europe" in general. But the sentiment (and the main difference) vs. US is visible and my point stands: "free" education is possible.
The primary purpose of prisons is to keep criminals out of the streets and physically unable to re-offend. Punishment and/or rehabilitation are at most distant secondary considerations.
A disturbing number of Americans would be very happy if they didn't.
See: "tough on crime" winning elections everywhere, three strikes laws, mandatory minimums, and the surprisingly popular viewpoint even in relatively liberal areas that more crimes should face the death penalty. The last one is particularly eye-opening: when I point out that the death penalty costs the state more due to appeals, the response I frequently get is that the solution there is to make the death penalty easier to apply and block appeals on it. "Execute all drug dealers" and the like.
I spent 10 years in pretrial detention and 99% of the time there was zero to do except look at the walls. The system doesn't want to do anything to help you. You have to make your own re-education inside.
This research won't matter for prisoners in the US.
We (Americans at large) send criminals to prison for punishment, not rehab. It's why we care so little about their treatment while in prison. Why we make rape jokes about prisoners. Why we rarely get angry about prisoners dying in prisons.
And that's when they aren't sources of revenue for private companies.
Yes, I'm to angry about this state of affairs to even begin to think it can be changed.
And on top of that there are literally dozens of other exceptions the courts have come up with over the years. I was forced into slavery by the government in the USA, due to exceptions that allow the government to force unconvicted persons into labor in certain circumstances.
I love how they'te lile unfree labor is consistent with free labor. They just literally don't care what the law is. Just goes to show it's all a bunch of playing pretend.
Edit: To clarify, the court interprets this statute as baring rehabilitation considerations in Federal prison. A Federal Prison sentence has zero intention of being rehabilitative, by statute and Congressional intent:
Title 18 U.S. Code § 3582 - Imposition of a sentence of imprisonment
(a)Factors To Be Considered in Imposing a Term of Imprisonment.—
The court, in determining whether to impose a term of imprisonment, and, if a term of imprisonment is to be imposed, in determining the length of the term, shall consider the factors set forth in section 3553(a) to the extent that they are applicable, recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation.
Odd interpretation, I think. To me it sounds more as if those who wrote the text, meant "Don't keep people in prison for too long, transfer them elsewhere to some place better for rehab as soon as reasonable." But not "rehab is forbidden and prisoners should get bullied by sadists"
What research? I read the article expecting a study, but it never even mentions the word "research" so that was a dud. The title OP is using here isn't the title from the article, which may be why people only reading the headline here might assume that the article delves into some sort of study, but it doesn't.
I have no dog in this fight, but I don't like how this is being treated as something academically sound, rather than an article that is basically a collection of vox pops.
> We (Americans at large) send criminals to prison for punishment, not rehab.
Mostly, we send them to prison so they are out of the streets and aren't committing more crimes. Their fate doesn't matter to us beyond that; out of sight, out of mind.
I am always amazed at the amount of online discussions where masses of people cheer on about prisoners getting raped in prison, as if that is some logical consequence of getting incarcerated and should be the default punishment in addition to the time done.
These people want retribution, not justice. It's scary and I don't want to live with the same people in society who think it's okay to think like this.
It’s all just another circus to keep the masses occupied, this one also acts as a deterrent. Too many people are comfortable with the death penalty, and too many see vigilantes favourably.
> This research won't matter for prisoners in the US.
From the link:
> This year California became the second state in the nation, and the largest to date, to mandate free calls in state prisons.
It's news that directly contradicts you, not research.
I think this is a HN headline auto-edit that impairs understanding, sadly: "California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation" - removing "California's" and changing "are repairing" to "boost" significantly changes what it means.
Prisons are already an idealistic institution, in the interest of being more humane. The alternative before was capital punishment, work camps, or slavery (including in war). That's not to say prisons are ok in their current state, or can't be improvement. I just don't think rehab was historically the primary intent.
Prisons on the scale we have now are a very modern invention. In history the vast majority of crimes were punished with fines (good for the government), expulsion or fairly petty physical punishments.
This is one of the best researched books on the subject, IMO:
> The City reported on Thursday that the New York City Department of Correction will no longer notify the media when a person dies while incarcerated, ending a consistent process that has been in effect for two years. “That was a practice, not a policy,” Frank Dwyer, the department’s new spokesman, told the outlet.
No, we send people to prison to remove them from society so they stop harming others.
These largely aren’t people who were committing minor crimes like selling weed, they are people who have repeatedly proven themselves to be dangerous, violent and antisocial.
If you watch US media it's obviously the latter. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many jokes about "pound you in the ass" prison. Prison sexual assault is often even cited as a positive when talking about criminals like rapists of pedophiles.
The main goal of the prison system is to keep criminals apart from society, preventing them from re-offending as long as they are locked up. The conditions of the imprisonment don't matter at all from this perspective.
We're not interested in rehabilitation in the US. We have parasites here who lobby against the relaxation of drug laws solely because they make money from the prison population. We elect presidents with crackhead sons that are responsible for passing unbelievably draconian drug laws.
Of course allowing phone calls with family keeps connections with family secure, and of course secure connections with family reduces recidivism. This is the biggest non-discovery since a right-wing economist discovered that people who went bankrupt due to medical debt weren't all irresponsible people, and decided to go into politics as a champion of the working class, trading on that "scholarship."
When will people stop discovering the poor and the weak, and stop voting or actively lobbying against them? Prison phone calls have been a government-granted exploitation racket since forever, but somehow they're still legal. Our progressives hire an unofficial credit card lobbyist to be president, and shed crocodile tears for black people who are poorer than they were in 1995.
edit: here's my proposal. Let's not isolate prisoners from society at all. Let's allow reporters in every prison, give them facilities within the building to work, and let them talk to whoever, whenever, and report whatever. Let's take the opportunity that we have gained from nabbing an out of control person to bring them back into society, rather than push them out farther. Let them vote. Let them do remote work to pay off their victims, the state, and to support their families.
Prison should be where we put people in order to protect society, not a torture chamber.
Let’s cut the bullshit. Prisons have nothing to do with rehabilitation and everything to do with punishment and dissuading others. If there was any desire for rehabilitation, prisons would look a lot more like in-patient therapy. Phone calls would never have cost as much as they have, and books and other self-improvement tools would be freely available.
Someone else mentioned this and I don't think it's talked about enough: They're basically there to just warehouse shady people so they can't commit more crimes.
Prisons don't deter crime. They might give the impression of deterrence to honest individuals. However, I think everyone in prison believed they had a scheme, process, or system in order to evade detection; believed what they were doing was on the boundary of the law, but inside it; or they committed a crime of passion.
Sounds like a good argument for longer sentences. If they can't be deterred (and many of them can't) and they can't be resocialized (and many of them can't), why let them out and ruin more lives?
They can't commit more crime (outside of prison) while they are inside prison. We also know that just getting older has a wonderful effect on recidivism.
I think a third category exists which is the largest percentage of people in the system: people in bad situations for whom it isn’t that they thought they’d get away with it nor was it a crime of passion. I.e. it wasn’t that they were bad people conniving nor were they good people temporarily inflamed into being bad people. These are the hopeless people in terrible circumstances (poor, inner city, falling into a gang as the only place they belonged, with no role models - as an example) who did bad things.
In generality they might believe the law will catch up to them. However, they would have chosen to steal bread from this store this time because it would minimize getting caught. But I agree with your point.
There are people in prisons who are wholly innocent as well.
It's not just the costs that get you, but also the arbitrary minutes-per-month limit.
I was in federal prison for years. One week from release, I got an email about a friend in poor health. I had to pay by the minute to access that email account at a prison kiosk, by the way. One minute of email access cost roughly the same as what I was paid for a hour's labor at my prison job as a GED instructor.
I called my friend as soon as I could get access to a phone. I had 5 minutes left of my monthly minutes budget because I'd spent nearly all of my 200 minute monthly allowance release planning with family. As we had only a few moments on the phone, they demanded I come see them the moment I was released. They had something very important they wanted to talk about.
I spent the next few days appealing to every prison official for extra phone minutes to speak with my dying friend. Several of them had phones on their desks as we spoke, and could have just picked up the phone and given me a few minutes right then and there. They all had the authority and ability to assist, and they all refused. From case manager, church chaplin to assistant warden. One said because the other person isn't direct family, they don't count as important enough to grant me an extra phone call. They took three days to consider my request before denying it. Another accused me of lying to manipulate them into giving me extra phone minutes because I'd "wasted" what I was given and they thought we all got way too many minutes anyway.
A few other prisoners offered to let me use their phone accounts to make calls, but if I had done that and been detected by prison staff who randomly monitored phone calls, I risked a disciplinary proceeding that could result in going to solitary confinement instead of going home, and throwing my release arrangements into disarray.
My friend died the day before I went home. I still don't know what they wanted to tell me.
I had a friend in jail for a short period of time. I couldn’t let her languish. So I did those $25 hamburgers and $13 phone calls. Everything about this was repulsive to me. But for someone so gentle I couldn’t not do these things.
Recidivism is the goal and not something we try to avoid. So sick of the way this country treats people.
The only thing you use your cell phone for is making a single phone call? Literally nothing else?
Also, where are you spending more than $25 for a hamburger? I'm sure you can find some high end restaurants charing that, but even in places like airports, you're not spending that much.
> It irritates me that the same people who step over a homeless bum on their way to Starbucks whine about the poor criminals.
Funny, that. Due to attitudes like yours, it's very hard for people with a criminal record to find gainful legal employment. Many end up living on the street as a direct result.
> The $25 hamburger includes free rent, health care, and clothing. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Honestly this just shows me how misinformed you are. Prisoners often pay for their own stay. This is on top of that.
That depends. "Innocent until proven guilty" is the framework of most Western law. This creates more burden on the prosecution (i.e., the police), and creates a law enforcement environment that biases as "guilty until proven innocent".
I called the police to get my daughter to a hospital. Long story short, I gave all the details, and am now a convicted felon. I published the whole story online if you want to dig. My story isn't special, either, and people who believe the law defines morality have been very fortunate to lead such a sheltered life.
Harsh? It’s a useless, knee jerk, response designed to excuse people from thinking about alternatives.
Other countries seem to manage with a vanishingly smaller percentage of prisoners and without the dehumanization the US routinely employs. So yes, maybe try ending it; it’s not clear the other extreme is any worse and it’s certainly cheaper. One of those “just build permanent houses” moments.
You can recognise a system is broken without making things even worse. Critique of the status quo is easy, solutions are hard. There are more solutions than total abolition.
For anyone interested, Humankind by Rutger Bregman goes into this very topic (among others). It is a nice book and recognizes the nuance while suggesting improvements, mainly by looking at other countries and systems.
Support of the status quo is even easier. Did you have a point beyond that?
The US - which is the topic of this thread - has a larger incarcerated population than anywhere else by absolutes and percentages; by a rather high number. Other countries seem to do just fine and spend a lot less in the process. So - similar to ending cash bail and various decriminalizing efforts - it’s not clear that prison abolition would actually be net negative to “public safety”.
What I'm saying is that when we change things we need to have some careful analysis and precise implementation to ensure things are actually improving for the better, and that preferably of the possible alternatives we aren't just choosing a better one, we're choosing the best one. The status quo being awful (and I agree - the US prison system seems pretty awful) does not automatically make all proposed solutions a good (or the best) idea.
I am not opposed to analysis; there is, however, a point where existing system is so irredeemably corrosive that measured and conservative approaches just mean excess harm. It certainly makes all solutions proposed worth considering; it’s hard to imagine a much worse answer to public safety than the US prison.
We didn’t land on the current extreme via well-reasoned debate and there’s a permanent human cost to allowing it to continue. Waiting for the best solution is a luxury and it’s easy for the average commenter here - statistically not affected - to do exactly that.
> I'm not supporting the status quo.
I believe that you do not intend to, but arguments against change inherently support the current state of things, and it’s quite hard to parse out intent and effect at 4am, so apologies there.
My initial argument was quite unclear, that's partially on me. I've edited it - it was an overly emotional response that was unclear about what I actually meant.
I'm aware that opposing radical solutions is in a way conserving the existing solution - and I'm using "solution" generally, I'm not implying that they're any good. I don't want to conserve the current system (though I'm in the UK, so it's less immediately relevant), but I don't want to rashly change it if it means not considering the consequences of those changes.
I've got my own perspective here - I was attacked at school and kicked in the head. A year and a half later, I've had a lot of recovery but it's still completely changed my life.
From my perspective, it was entirely preventable if schools were more willing to expel violent individuals (they had attacked my friend just days before). It may have been deterred if our justice system was less lenient towards under-18s (I was offered "restorative justice" - "talking it through" rings a bit hollow when you've spent the last 4 months off school, barely awake). There is no scenario where talking to him would have been beneficial to me, regardless of how controlled the surroundings were.
That's why this is the one political subject that I consistently talk about when it comes up on HN: It's one where there are a lot of strong emotions both ways, and I see a lot of sentiment that ignores the real human cost of allowing (particularly violent) criminals to continue their actions. There are a lot of strong emotions about radical solutions like abolishing prisons (and hampering schools ability to expell), and there are a lot of strong emotions dehumanising criminals (and treating expulsion as the solution to any problem). People are quick to recognise the harm that one of those positions causes, but rarely see that they're both harmful when done in excess.
So I also feel that it's easy for the average commenter to talk about how "conservative approaches just mean excess harm". From my perspective, overly rash, poorly-thought-out and poorly-implemented approaches also cause excess harm. I'd much prefer this tug-of-war about moving the overton window through extreme policies was put aside so that we can talk about more realistic solutions. And they don't need to be invented in isolation: The world is filled with alternative systems to learn from.
Ultimately putting forward suggestions like "simply abolish prison" is just going to make people dismiss you entirely, not become sympathetic to your cause.
As for why I'm speaking from a UK perspective on a US-centric thread: We tend to import your culture due to a shared language and a lot of shared culture, so in the long run what the US thinks, says, and does is very relevant to me.
I am talking from a US perspective. At a minimum we must:
1. Guarantee safety for the imprisoned. No more fear of physical / sexual violence. The way people joke about "don't drop the soap" is maddening.
2. No forced labor, no unpaid / barely paid labor. All work must be paid at least prevailing market rates
3. Free of cost essentials - food, clothing, air conditioned shelter, no roommates
4. No price gouging - anything not considered essentials must not cost more than market rate, allow multiple third party vendors in case of disagreement
This is the bare minimum.
If we can't meet these, we absolutely must abolish prisons.
How about this - allow infinite phone calls and e-mails home. That's it. No need for a startup, VC finding or anything. Just let people call home. I'd prefer for free, but if you need to keep a small monthly or per minute fee, at least just have it cover the costs.
>If that had happened to me, it probably would have radicalized me.
One can just get 'radicalized' merely by observing what going on around, like Ted Kaczynski. Version 1.0 of humans collectively don't meet the bar of standards for a civilized society, if a civilized society did exist then it's by fluke of a confluence of factors and fleeting one at that.
Exactly. The court assigned a punishment based on the crime. The entire point of separating legislating/policing/judicial is to keep things as objective as possible. The suggestion that someone deserves a punishment they weren't assigned is abhorrent. It's not far off excusing police beatings.
Ugh. I had the same. I was held in pretrial detention for 10 years because I couldn't afford the small amount of bond money. My mother was dying while I was in there and I am in the USA, she was in the UK. The rates at one point were $1.50/min. I would try to call her for 5 minutes per day, that was the absolute most I could afford. It is heartbreaking to have someone dying at the other end of the phone line and you have to hang up on them.
I scheduled a bond hearing with the hope the judge would lower my bond so I could be released and be able to call her, but sadly she died two days before the bond hearing. The State found out, so as soon as we went into the hearing the prosecutor said "Judge, I don't even know why we are here, his mother is dead already. This issue is moot."
We even tried to get the jail to let me make a video call to my mother (that was her dying wish), and the British government intervened to try and persuade them, but they refused, even though they had all the equipment and let you make video calls to your kids if you played chess with them.
Incarceration, for the most part, is just fucking stupidity. As Piper Kerman's lawyer tells her, "Jail is chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people."
At least there seems to be a lot of movement against pretrial detention because of financial reasons like bond. Of course, your passport would be confiscated so you still wouldn't be able to visit her, but at leas you could have spent hours on the phone with her.
Exactly. The State already had my passport as I had to give that up to even get a bond hearing. (Although the British government said they would issue me an emergency passport if I wanted to flee)
I'm amazed they offered you an emergency passport, although I'm guessing this was during your lengthy pre trial detainment.
I would have expected it to go the other way. Like an offer to be transferred to/from the UK in custody so you can be visited by your mother, because the US government trusts the UK government to return you.
Maybe read Humankind by Rutger Bregman? There are either ways than the super harsh, sometimes commercial US prison system. There are also “crimes” that really shouldn’t be crimes.
There is a nonprofit that is trying to address this called Ameelio (https://www.ameelio.org/). They were hiring in the HN Who is Hiring thread. I don't know much about them, but it seems like they have some traction in a few states. Their voice call product says that it offers free voice calling, with all the monitoring/security features built in.
I hope these types of nonprofit tech companies succeed as they are not profit seeking off of the misery of other people.
it sounds like it doesn't satisfy the most critical requirement: allowing sadistic prison employees to torture and extort prisoners in fun and new ways with no oversight
who are they expecting to buy this, Montessori prisons?
The UK's ministry of justice has rolled out phones to quite a few prisons now and they have had an amazing impact, despite the opprobrium of idiot newspaper editors.
It is thought that this cuts recidivism by 40% and allows people to stay in touch with family. The number is good, but it is worth considering one of the less often articulated points about the system: it punishes families, too. Take away a breadwinner, an extra pair of parental hands (however active), and put a father at a distance from their kids, and what do you get? A lonely partner who can't share domestic work. Kids with only one adult to relate to, where that adult now carries responsibilities that were previously shared.
In other words, prisons incarcerate individuals but punish families. Phones in prisons lessen the blow somewhat, and it is little surprise that even this very small line of contact keeps people in touch with people they care about, instead of leaving them adrift and vulnerable to mixing with the wrong sorts on release.
Really, they ought to be abolished. Other forms of punishment and rehabilitation exist. Restorative justice exists. It would be better that we used it.
(I'm gendering the above in the way I am because in the UK, as in many other places, ten men are in prison for every one woman, give or take)
There are probably a lot of prisoners who could safely benefit from alternative treatments. (Safety as judged from the perspective of law-abiding members of society.)
But there is certainly a subset of them who would not be safe to treat outside of prison. And those people should remain in prison, IMO.
Having spent a decade inside, I agree with your overall sentiment. There are some people who are completely unable to control their criminal behavior and probably just aren't safe to be released, but they could certainly be held in more humane conditions as their issues are probably due to the DNA lottery rather than anything they brought on themselves.
But, the vast majority of those I met would be totally capable of living productive (tax-paying) lives if they had the necessary support to get their lives rebooted, employment and shelter found, etc.
Exactly this. Some UK prisons were found to be giving out tents to people who were leaving, which was illegal. You can, I am sure, imagine the results.
I'm just out of prison. The authorities warned me that I cannot sleep on the same bench more than three times in a year or it would be classified as my permanent residence and I would have to provide utility bills to prove I lived there. This also applies for any subway train I was told - you can sleep on the same line three times in one year, but you have to switch between the lines every three days until you have exhausted all the lines. You cannot sleep in a tent in one position for more than three days unless you can provide documented proof of residence. If you sleep in your car note the street address of the nearest building to where you have parked. You can only sleep at that address for three days.
They were deadly serious about this. Obviously you can lie to them about where you have been, but you have to tell them under penalty of perjury, so now you're committing a different felony which carries 5 years in prison.
I am not quite a prison abolitionist but I am troubled by the same point. Punishment inflicted on an offender is transitive in its pain. Even if suffering is righteously deserved it is shared by innocent people with the capacity to love the wretched. Even if one does not wish to grant humanity to a criminal for his sake, it seems necessary for ours.
In Brazil free phone calls would* allow criminals to manage crime from prison, through family.
* would = do; prisoners have easy access to cellphones, etc. Very common are scam calls originating from prisons. Classic real life meme is one criminal calling one person who happened to also be in another prison.
So we have to hire trained, educated employees capable of detecting code speak and monitor every single phone conversation? Why are people so opposed to giving adults a time out with no phones, no calls, no distractions, just a book, rehabilitation classes, and job training. is it really that hard to see adult criminals as children who have misbehaved and need to be taught how to function in society? If parents punish a child, nobody blinks an eye, and even probably praises good parenting. If we punish delinquents and teach them how to operate in our hyper-complex society, it's problematic.
> Why are people so opposed to giving adults a time out with no phones, no calls, no distractions, just a book, rehabilitation classes, and job training.
I don't think anybody is? Where do we find such a magical place?
Coming from LatAm as well, and wanting dangerous criminals punished as much as the next populist politician promises to do, so that we get closer to a less lenient and excessively-tolerant system, I can see where you are coming from and I agree that their set of problems are different than ours.
Especially here in Chile where recent mass immigration waves have pretty much spiked violent crimes in ways that were only common in central america, so it absolutely caught the country unprepared, where petty theft is pretty much given a slap on the wrist so as to avoid prison, even with multiple reincidences.
Even then, this would be a positive development, as calls could be completely monitored from landlines I guess, rather than the smuggled phones that make it to prison through public defenders and drops all the time, so it could actually be better as a way to prompt more frequent inspection and at least here, allowing prisons to jam mobile signal, which is something that's been proposed for years but even guards have protested against, as they rely on radio for internal comms (I'm not sure about the specifics)
This feels like an intuitive conclusion. Of course sequestration from society is bad for mental health and ability to reintegrate into society. Prison phone call fees however are another example of the patronage to vendors. It was never about the interests of society.
Prisons are a money maker for both public and private entities. Everything has a cost including copays for medical and dental. Oregon is the worst when it comes to advocacy for prisoners while they tout how progressive they are. It's a racket and hopefully California is the example that motivates other states to change.
I'm... actually impressed by the comments in this thread. Normally when I look at the comments on a thread with a human aspect, HN can be relied upon to provide a truly horrific pro-corporate, anti-human comment upvoted to the top. But I'm genuinely and pleasantly surprised this time. Good job guys, maybe there's hope for y'all.
The prison lobby is very strong, and there is a massive money making machine ($3billion/yr in the US alone) that keeps the paywall that is access for prisoners, and for families intact.
groups like https://www.ameelio.org/ have been for years trying to make a dent in this, but I think they are only in 3 states currently. I do think it really says something when communicating with those in prison is so hard that the IRS has to use a non-profit to do it.
Like some much in this world, it is a cancerous greed that consumes makes everything worse for everyone.
El Salvador, a country with the highest murder rate per capita in the world, passed emergency measures to enact strict antigang policies under the leadership of the young President Bukele (same guy that legalized bitcoin). Bukele was the first 3rd party candidate to win and break the 2-party duopolicy that ruled el salvador since 1970s
The antigang policies included a strict no-phone-calls while in jail policy. Other policies included jamming cell signal in jail, no visitors, and temporary holding period (without charges) was increased from 2-3 to 10-15 days. All this was allowed under emergency measures voted by congress supermajority, which enabled special police powers for 30 days. The emergency measure has been renewed 10+ times already.
Murders have gone down 92% [1]. There are entire neighborhoods that have recently opened small shops for the first time in decades (it was impossible to open any viable business due to crime).
9 out of 10 salvadoreans is happy and plans to vote to reelect Bukele in the upcoming election [2]. el Salvador congress is updating the constitution now since it does not allow re-election.
The approval rating of ~90% is the highest of the entire western hemisphere.
Doesn't sound like a refutation of the article to me. There's a difference between using communication to keep gang ties strong, and using communication to keep family ties strong. A difference between incarceration of people who belong to organized crime syndicates (where their biological family ties are subsumed by their organized crime syndicate ties) and those who are incarcerated for armed robbery of a liquor store because they need cash to pay for their addiction. It shouldn't be a surprise that different prisoners engaged in crime for different reasons, and therefore require different strategies to rehabilitate.
I’ve been to juvenile prison, loads of these teenagers were out and out proud of their being in. They would happily manipulate and game anything to their advantage, and as a result the guards are forced to be intolerant assholes for the most part. If they aren’t, they’ll be taken for suckers.
So how do you sort of the otherwise good kid who gets into a fight or thought weed wasn’t a big deal from the future career criminals of America?
Honestly? Start by hiring more therapists and social workers for the prison system, so that the ones in the prison system actually have a manageable caseload and truly focus on what individual prisoners need. You'd need to borrow from the "magnet school" model - a specialized school within a wider school - to have a single wing within a larger prison devoted to a specific kind of rehabilitation, transferring in prisoners who need that kind of rehab, then expanding. That requires free space to set that up properly, so, some additional construction / other depopulation measures to get that space available. The people who run those programs need leeway to offer things that may not be available in most prisons and take away privileges that may be taken for granted. It's not such a radical idea - it's basically what separates the different levels of security prison (Camp Fed down the spectrum to supermax), just, in additional ways as well.
I think you missed the point where El Salvador prohibited all visits because it enabled criminality.
I'm not dismissing this outright, but in terms of priorities, giving counseling to criminals to "distinguish" between the hardened criminals and everyone else seems ripe for abuse, and not exactly a top priority when there are things like cop unioins, crowded jail spaces, and unfunded learning/job opportunities for inmates
While punishment may lead to justice it is not required for justice to take place. What is required is accountability, rehabilitation and restitution. The current focus from the public appears to be, instead, retribution. That seems to be insatiable for those who have been transgressed.
None of this requires the use of prisons. Although in the case of offenders likely to commit more violent crimes while justice is sort for previous offenses it, appears, to be our currently best way of management.
Similar to how the aim of schooling is to create citizens who can engage productively in society; the focus of prisons should be on recreating productive citizens.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadIt also really highlights just how cruel for cruelty's sake our modern prison system is. I know there's an almost fetishistic worship of punishment in the US and many other countries with large prison populations as a method of "rehabilitation", but the data shows us that if you actually care about healing people (spoiler: the US does not), it's both not very expensive and extremely positive for society to do it right. It starts with free phone calls, work transition programs, reducing restrictions on jobs held by ex-felons, and other simple changes that cost a hell of a lot less than taking care of the broken souls our prisons churn out.
Nobody should profit off of prison, period.
Or that you have to buy any medications sold in commissary from there and won't be given them at medical (which costs $5 a visit when you don't make $5 a month) like aspirin at the for profit commissary that buys from jacked up 'prison commissary' distributors and has a way shorter than what you buy in the store expiration date. Keep in mind you are not allowed to share 'medication' and that having expired 'medication' in your locker can be a shot (writeup, potential loss of good time, potential to have your security points increased and shipped to a higher security(i.e. less safe) prison).
Profit as the excess retained by or on behalf of capital owners is not a definition created by Marxists, using it for other things which are seen as loosely similar to that central goal of the most important property relation in capitalism is a newer, expansive, metaphorical use.
> capital owners
There it is, the "not when we do it" qualification. Just as I suspected, very predictable. Profit is when you're bringing in more money than you're spending. Whether you are labor or a "capital owner", profit is profit. When an animal gets more calories from their food than they spent to get it, even that is profit.
Here's wiktionary's definitions:
> (accounting, economics) Total income or cash flow minus expenditures. The money or other benefit a non-governmental organization or individual receives in exchange for products and services sold at an advertised price.
There's no "capital owners" qualification in this or any other common definition: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/profit https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/profit
If you view profit on a demand basis, profit is the difference between what the the seller values the good at and the value the buyer places on the good. In that regard, labor is never sold at a profit for the laborer: companies only purchase labor that they can use to produce more value than they pay for it.
Framed another way, if the value of labor is the price the market is willing to pay for it, then employment is almost always a negative exchange for the worker. The value of someone's labor is the price that employers are willing to pay for it, and the price employers are willing to pay for the labor is greater than the wage the employee receives (because employing somebody is more expensive than just paying them a wage).
All told, unless your definition of "profit" is indistinguishable from "money changes hands", workers don't profit from their labor.
I'm like 66% serious.
I like it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_crisis#1980s_crisis
https://archive.org/details/goldengulagpriso00gilm
The prisons also counted all the people in them as residents, for apportionment of votes, money, and so on.
You would have a rural county where 6,000 people, including 1,500 prison guards, actually live. And then 6,000 prisoners.
Which would count as 12,000 people in terms of congressional and state representation. But only half of them are actually allowed to vote.
This is known as prison gerrymandering, although in New York it was made illegal in 2010[0].
However, it's still legal in many other states[1].
[0] https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/NYS_A9710-D.html
[1] https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/models/chart.html
They should be able to vote though
Racism was the historic angle-- but even if you target a black community and make felons of all the men, they would only comprise a minority of voters in a white district, and it just reduces the number of all eligible voters in an all-black district. Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?
Or is it just a way to suppress voting by as much of the Left as possible?
The Right are the ones who define all these laws. The Left are the ones who seem positioned to run afoul of them (pro-drugs, pro-abortion, pro-prostitution, etc.), then lose their ability to influence change.
Reducing the number of voters by eliminating a disfavored class from representation while retaining the political power of apportionment that counts the disebfranchised citizens was the whole point of the 3/5 compromise, and mass criminalization plus felon disenfranchisement is its direct replacement.
Also, you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.
> Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?
That, too, but its largely a federal politics thing.
Thanks-- I [think I] see where you're going but still don't get where this ends. You have a district with a minority of people who can't vote. Yet they are counted among the population.
This directly suppresses presidential votes, but what besides the House benefits from an inflated population of non-voters?
> you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.
The thought crossed my mind, but the only example I'm familiar with is Atlanta-- a few blue droplets on a red ocean, yet the state is currently represented by two Democratic senators, and the House is split. There's something weird about this but I'm not a political strategist enough to understand what's going on here. Is this where population matters-- density of the metro area outweighing the rest of the state?
Presidential voting power (for the same reason as the House; well, really, as a direct consequence of apportionment of the House).
Yes, Atlanta metro is about 60% of the population of the state of Georgia.
This is egregious.
Snark aside, this is how you systematically disenfranchise minorities. See Florida.
Democracy doesn’t mean only the “deserving” get a vote. In theory.
Making the slave labor illegal wouldn't get rid of most of the economic/political incentive for prisons.
Maybe, prisons buying food isn't the problem with American prisons.
I don't know the current state of them, but you can tour Seodaemun prison (operational 1908-1987; it's now a museum/memorial). They make no attempt to hide the fact that the conditions were historically even worse than you're describing-- basically concentration camps sans gas chambers. Food was watery gruel, toilets were rat-infested holes in the ground, etc.
Visit in the winter when it's 30F out for the full experience; the prisoners weren't given adequate clothing for the cold themselves so even bundled up to the teeth you can appreciate their misery.
Out of curiosity, how many servicemen did the US allow to get into foreign prisons?
I know at least two highly mediatized cases of US servicemen committing murder in Europe[1][2] but were instantly airlifted to the US before they could be arrested by the local police, so they couldn't be trialed and jailed in the EU and instead got to walk free back home.
If the US stepped in for them in Europe, I doubt they won't do the same in Korea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teo_Peter#Death
Here is a 2007 article in Stars and Stripes (USDoD newspaper) about the special treatment American service-members receive in South Korean prisons: https://www.stripes.com/news/u-s-servicemembers-treated-diff...
Wait, what?!
He was meant to board a plane back to America where he would be thrown out of the military, but he evidently decided to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I suspect the north will keep him as a bargaining chip to exchange for something later on.
"Nobody should profit off of prison, period" is very simplistic: the electricity company makes a profit; the store selling bread, sausages, milk, potatoes, and whatnot makes a profit; the supplier selling books makes a profit; AT&T will make a profit from the phone lines regardless, just as they make a profit off phone lines to offices, etc. etc.
The problem isn't private companies: it's the prison officials. How much of that revenue goes back to the prison? A substantial amount I bet. That's why they do it; that a private company is involved isn't all that important. Yes, it's exploitive and counter-productive, but few seem to care as prisons are for evil people who deserve to be assraped on a daily basis anyway, and anything more than bread & water is a luxury.
This fully fits with the general attitude that exists in the US towards criminals. This is a country that puts 9-year olds in full leg and arm shackles for stealing bubble gum[1] (putting a kid like that in court is already dubious), and there are plenty of examples ranging from the existence of the "innocence project" to all the drug tests for employment, etc. etc. What is wrong with you people?
[1]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/courts-shackle-...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/
We're happy to send people to public prisons, and they're not that many private ones.
There's discord between the discussion in this thread and discussion any time the subject of San Francisco policing comes up. They're too soft and let crime happen. They ignore shoplifters. People are just shitting in the streets. Okay, well what do you want the police to do? It seems the options are you either kill petty shoplifters and homeless people or you send them to prison. But then the same people will complain about exploding prison populations.
Am I lacking in creativity? Because there are three options I can see:
- Create a society where even unskilled, somewhat antisocial people who went through great trauma as children do well enough that they don't turn to crime, and actually treat those who are so mentally ill that they'll be long-term homeless virtually no matter what.
- Allow some amount of non-lethal crime to happen and live with it.
- Put massive amounts of people in prison.
It seems like voters have converged on the third as their preference, not because they're being brainwashed by private prisons and corrupt corrections officer unions, but because the first option is too expensive and the second option would mean they need to see human shit and broken windows when they're walking around the city. At least prisons tend to be in the middle of the desert or swamp where it's out of sight, someone else's problem.
There's room for a middle option between passivity and slavery/prison. Some people need to be wards of somebody, so set up an institution like the military (endless boot camp, or the mining-town setups of old) and use that for alternate sentencing. Last chance: you get training, a mandatory job, shitty housing, and limited freedom (shore leave/weekend passes). It's not ideal, so work the program as long as you need to and GTFO. Fuck it up and next time you will go to prison.
The problem is the "they don't deserve things for free" mindset. It's even here in this thread too, I had to pay for education, why should prisoners get it? This vindictive thinking is all over HN, just a couple days ago a top comment was wondering why we allow them to "infest" cities like they're some sort of disease rather than other people. If you ran on a dog whistled "kill the homeless" platform, you'd get a lot of voter support.
Of course they shouldn't, and they shouldn't profit off of healthcare, or higher education or a bunch of other things either.
Which one is actually going to get fixed?
None of them, because the goal is making money, and it's working really well.
It's some kind of deep-rooted psychological thing. Permanent pubescent power fantasies.
Is it a plague of bad taste? A conspiracy to make everybody dumber?
Stress is a drug in this way. Affecting our emotions and how we see and think.
They're not even wrong. But isn't the obvious answer to make higher education accessible to everyone, instead of just those with capital?!
When people say that shit (because they do), I respond: yeah, hahah, that's a good point isn't it? :) Why doesn't everyone get free college? :)
It's not like it's not feasible.
Of the 23 countries listed [1] on this site, all of them have tuition fees which are much lower than the US. A first sight shows Latvia as highest with up to 9900 EUR per academic year. Europe has 44 sovereign states.
You are correct, it's not "all" and "Europe" in general. But the sentiment (and the main difference) vs. US is visible and my point stands: "free" education is possible.
[1] https://www.studyineurope.eu/tuition-fees
See: "tough on crime" winning elections everywhere, three strikes laws, mandatory minimums, and the surprisingly popular viewpoint even in relatively liberal areas that more crimes should face the death penalty. The last one is particularly eye-opening: when I point out that the death penalty costs the state more due to appeals, the response I frequently get is that the solution there is to make the death penalty easier to apply and block appeals on it. "Execute all drug dealers" and the like.
Another side of the US, the idea that everything has to be a business, in that case, charging prisoners to make phone calls.
We (Americans at large) send criminals to prison for punishment, not rehab. It's why we care so little about their treatment while in prison. Why we make rape jokes about prisoners. Why we rarely get angry about prisoners dying in prisons.
And that's when they aren't sources of revenue for private companies.
Yes, I'm to angry about this state of affairs to even begin to think it can be changed.
*slaves
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...
So if making a profit is the purpose it is illegal?
Here are a few of the other exceptions:
https://onlabor.org/when-is-forced-labor-consistent-with-the...
Sorry about what happened to you. Terrible.
Title 18 U.S. Code § 3582 - Imposition of a sentence of imprisonment
(a)Factors To Be Considered in Imposing a Term of Imprisonment.— The court, in determining whether to impose a term of imprisonment, and, if a term of imprisonment is to be imposed, in determining the length of the term, shall consider the factors set forth in section 3553(a) to the extent that they are applicable, recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation.
This doesn't suggest anything about urgency to get a hamburger, just to not expect any.
I have no dog in this fight, but I don't like how this is being treated as something academically sound, rather than an article that is basically a collection of vox pops.
Mostly, we send them to prison so they are out of the streets and aren't committing more crimes. Their fate doesn't matter to us beyond that; out of sight, out of mind.
These people want retribution, not justice. It's scary and I don't want to live with the same people in society who think it's okay to think like this.
From the link:
> This year California became the second state in the nation, and the largest to date, to mandate free calls in state prisons.
It's news that directly contradicts you, not research.
I think this is a HN headline auto-edit that impairs understanding, sadly: "California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation" - removing "California's" and changing "are repairing" to "boost" significantly changes what it means.
Prisons are already an idealistic institution, in the interest of being more humane. The alternative before was capital punishment, work camps, or slavery (including in war). That's not to say prisons are ok in their current state, or can't be improvement. I just don't think rehab was historically the primary intent.
This is one of the best researched books on the subject, IMO:
https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-History-Prison-Practice-Punish...
Another reason for this one is that departments in charge of prisons try to keep prison deaths quiet[0] and refuse to perform autopsies for months[1]
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/deaths-at-rikers-cit...
> The City reported on Thursday that the New York City Department of Correction will no longer notify the media when a person dies while incarcerated, ending a consistent process that has been in effect for two years. “That was a practice, not a policy,” Frank Dwyer, the department’s new spokesman, told the outlet.
[1] https://twitter.com/keribla/status/1639033487603933186?
These largely aren’t people who were committing minor crimes like selling weed, they are people who have repeatedly proven themselves to be dangerous, violent and antisocial.
They should look into getting an unlimited minutes plan
Exactly what is the punishment?
Is the punishment loss of liberty for a period of time?
Or is the idea that for a period of time you are subjected to whatever punishments and humiliations and dehumanization the system can hit you with?
Of course allowing phone calls with family keeps connections with family secure, and of course secure connections with family reduces recidivism. This is the biggest non-discovery since a right-wing economist discovered that people who went bankrupt due to medical debt weren't all irresponsible people, and decided to go into politics as a champion of the working class, trading on that "scholarship."
When will people stop discovering the poor and the weak, and stop voting or actively lobbying against them? Prison phone calls have been a government-granted exploitation racket since forever, but somehow they're still legal. Our progressives hire an unofficial credit card lobbyist to be president, and shed crocodile tears for black people who are poorer than they were in 1995.
edit: here's my proposal. Let's not isolate prisoners from society at all. Let's allow reporters in every prison, give them facilities within the building to work, and let them talk to whoever, whenever, and report whatever. Let's take the opportunity that we have gained from nabbing an out of control person to bring them back into society, rather than push them out farther. Let them vote. Let them do remote work to pay off their victims, the state, and to support their families.
Prison should be where we put people in order to protect society, not a torture chamber.
It's just shitty.
There are people in prisons who are wholly innocent as well.
I was in federal prison for years. One week from release, I got an email about a friend in poor health. I had to pay by the minute to access that email account at a prison kiosk, by the way. One minute of email access cost roughly the same as what I was paid for a hour's labor at my prison job as a GED instructor.
I called my friend as soon as I could get access to a phone. I had 5 minutes left of my monthly minutes budget because I'd spent nearly all of my 200 minute monthly allowance release planning with family. As we had only a few moments on the phone, they demanded I come see them the moment I was released. They had something very important they wanted to talk about.
I spent the next few days appealing to every prison official for extra phone minutes to speak with my dying friend. Several of them had phones on their desks as we spoke, and could have just picked up the phone and given me a few minutes right then and there. They all had the authority and ability to assist, and they all refused. From case manager, church chaplin to assistant warden. One said because the other person isn't direct family, they don't count as important enough to grant me an extra phone call. They took three days to consider my request before denying it. Another accused me of lying to manipulate them into giving me extra phone minutes because I'd "wasted" what I was given and they thought we all got way too many minutes anyway.
A few other prisoners offered to let me use their phone accounts to make calls, but if I had done that and been detected by prison staff who randomly monitored phone calls, I risked a disciplinary proceeding that could result in going to solitary confinement instead of going home, and throwing my release arrangements into disarray.
My friend died the day before I went home. I still don't know what they wanted to tell me.
Recidivism is the goal and not something we try to avoid. So sick of the way this country treats people.
Also, where are you spending more than $25 for a hamburger? I'm sure you can find some high end restaurants charing that, but even in places like airports, you're not spending that much.
Funny, that. Due to attitudes like yours, it's very hard for people with a criminal record to find gainful legal employment. Many end up living on the street as a direct result.
It's not like it's hard to get into prison.
People do not go to jail without deserving it. So how bad was your friend's record, Lancelot?
California is the most desirable place in the world to live.
History obviously shows differently, read a damn book, wow.
I called the police to get my daughter to a hospital. Long story short, I gave all the details, and am now a convicted felon. I published the whole story online if you want to dig. My story isn't special, either, and people who believe the law defines morality have been very fortunate to lead such a sheltered life.
Even if you use lighter measures for most crimes, focus on rehab, and get rid of cells, prison's still prison. How are you going to lock up nobody?
Other countries seem to manage with a vanishingly smaller percentage of prisoners and without the dehumanization the US routinely employs. So yes, maybe try ending it; it’s not clear the other extreme is any worse and it’s certainly cheaper. One of those “just build permanent houses” moments.
It's no more useless than the post it's responding to.
> it’s not clear the other extreme is any worse
What a bad way to plan things.
I think few people would argue that those classes of law breakers are allowed off the hook.
The US - which is the topic of this thread - has a larger incarcerated population than anywhere else by absolutes and percentages; by a rather high number. Other countries seem to do just fine and spend a lot less in the process. So - similar to ending cash bail and various decriminalizing efforts - it’s not clear that prison abolition would actually be net negative to “public safety”.
What I'm saying is that when we change things we need to have some careful analysis and precise implementation to ensure things are actually improving for the better, and that preferably of the possible alternatives we aren't just choosing a better one, we're choosing the best one. The status quo being awful (and I agree - the US prison system seems pretty awful) does not automatically make all proposed solutions a good (or the best) idea.
We didn’t land on the current extreme via well-reasoned debate and there’s a permanent human cost to allowing it to continue. Waiting for the best solution is a luxury and it’s easy for the average commenter here - statistically not affected - to do exactly that.
> I'm not supporting the status quo.
I believe that you do not intend to, but arguments against change inherently support the current state of things, and it’s quite hard to parse out intent and effect at 4am, so apologies there.
I'm aware that opposing radical solutions is in a way conserving the existing solution - and I'm using "solution" generally, I'm not implying that they're any good. I don't want to conserve the current system (though I'm in the UK, so it's less immediately relevant), but I don't want to rashly change it if it means not considering the consequences of those changes.
I've got my own perspective here - I was attacked at school and kicked in the head. A year and a half later, I've had a lot of recovery but it's still completely changed my life.
From my perspective, it was entirely preventable if schools were more willing to expel violent individuals (they had attacked my friend just days before). It may have been deterred if our justice system was less lenient towards under-18s (I was offered "restorative justice" - "talking it through" rings a bit hollow when you've spent the last 4 months off school, barely awake). There is no scenario where talking to him would have been beneficial to me, regardless of how controlled the surroundings were.
That's why this is the one political subject that I consistently talk about when it comes up on HN: It's one where there are a lot of strong emotions both ways, and I see a lot of sentiment that ignores the real human cost of allowing (particularly violent) criminals to continue their actions. There are a lot of strong emotions about radical solutions like abolishing prisons (and hampering schools ability to expell), and there are a lot of strong emotions dehumanising criminals (and treating expulsion as the solution to any problem). People are quick to recognise the harm that one of those positions causes, but rarely see that they're both harmful when done in excess.
So I also feel that it's easy for the average commenter to talk about how "conservative approaches just mean excess harm". From my perspective, overly rash, poorly-thought-out and poorly-implemented approaches also cause excess harm. I'd much prefer this tug-of-war about moving the overton window through extreme policies was put aside so that we can talk about more realistic solutions. And they don't need to be invented in isolation: The world is filled with alternative systems to learn from.
Ultimately putting forward suggestions like "simply abolish prison" is just going to make people dismiss you entirely, not become sympathetic to your cause.
As for why I'm speaking from a UK perspective on a US-centric thread: We tend to import your culture due to a shared language and a lot of shared culture, so in the long run what the US thinks, says, and does is very relevant to me.
1. Guarantee safety for the imprisoned. No more fear of physical / sexual violence. The way people joke about "don't drop the soap" is maddening.
2. No forced labor, no unpaid / barely paid labor. All work must be paid at least prevailing market rates
3. Free of cost essentials - food, clothing, air conditioned shelter, no roommates
4. No price gouging - anything not considered essentials must not cost more than market rate, allow multiple third party vendors in case of disagreement
This is the bare minimum. If we can't meet these, we absolutely must abolish prisons.
Why? Someone needs to pay the cost to imprison people and it's unfair to not make the guilty party at least partially responsible for that cost
If we cannot afford it, we don't have any business running a prison.
On a more selfish note, I don't want (let's call it like it is) slave labor to dilute the value of my labor.
One can just get 'radicalized' merely by observing what going on around, like Ted Kaczynski. Version 1.0 of humans collectively don't meet the bar of standards for a civilized society, if a civilized society did exist then it's by fluke of a confluence of factors and fleeting one at that.
I scheduled a bond hearing with the hope the judge would lower my bond so I could be released and be able to call her, but sadly she died two days before the bond hearing. The State found out, so as soon as we went into the hearing the prosecutor said "Judge, I don't even know why we are here, his mother is dead already. This issue is moot."
We even tried to get the jail to let me make a video call to my mother (that was her dying wish), and the British government intervened to try and persuade them, but they refused, even though they had all the equipment and let you make video calls to your kids if you played chess with them.
Incarceration, for the most part, is just fucking stupidity. As Piper Kerman's lawyer tells her, "Jail is chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people."
I would have expected it to go the other way. Like an offer to be transferred to/from the UK in custody so you can be visited by your mother, because the US government trusts the UK government to return you.
Otherwise this story will just repeat forever.
Assuming the parent poster's guilt is fair, but god help you if the system ever gets turned against you.
"show me the man and I'll show you the crime"
I hope these types of nonprofit tech companies succeed as they are not profit seeking off of the misery of other people.
who are they expecting to buy this, Montessori prisons?
It is thought that this cuts recidivism by 40% and allows people to stay in touch with family. The number is good, but it is worth considering one of the less often articulated points about the system: it punishes families, too. Take away a breadwinner, an extra pair of parental hands (however active), and put a father at a distance from their kids, and what do you get? A lonely partner who can't share domestic work. Kids with only one adult to relate to, where that adult now carries responsibilities that were previously shared.
In other words, prisons incarcerate individuals but punish families. Phones in prisons lessen the blow somewhat, and it is little surprise that even this very small line of contact keeps people in touch with people they care about, instead of leaving them adrift and vulnerable to mixing with the wrong sorts on release.
Really, they ought to be abolished. Other forms of punishment and rehabilitation exist. Restorative justice exists. It would be better that we used it.
(I'm gendering the above in the way I am because in the UK, as in many other places, ten men are in prison for every one woman, give or take)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/in-cell-phones-for-more-p...
But there is certainly a subset of them who would not be safe to treat outside of prison. And those people should remain in prison, IMO.
But, the vast majority of those I met would be totally capable of living productive (tax-paying) lives if they had the necessary support to get their lives rebooted, employment and shelter found, etc.
They were deadly serious about this. Obviously you can lie to them about where you have been, but you have to tell them under penalty of perjury, so now you're committing a different felony which carries 5 years in prison.
* would = do; prisoners have easy access to cellphones, etc. Very common are scam calls originating from prisons. Classic real life meme is one criminal calling one person who happened to also be in another prison.
I don't think anybody is? Where do we find such a magical place?
https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/prison...
Especially here in Chile where recent mass immigration waves have pretty much spiked violent crimes in ways that were only common in central america, so it absolutely caught the country unprepared, where petty theft is pretty much given a slap on the wrist so as to avoid prison, even with multiple reincidences.
Even then, this would be a positive development, as calls could be completely monitored from landlines I guess, rather than the smuggled phones that make it to prison through public defenders and drops all the time, so it could actually be better as a way to prompt more frequent inspection and at least here, allowing prisons to jam mobile signal, which is something that's been proposed for years but even guards have protested against, as they rely on radio for internal comms (I'm not sure about the specifics)
groups like https://www.ameelio.org/ have been for years trying to make a dent in this, but I think they are only in 3 states currently. I do think it really says something when communicating with those in prison is so hard that the IRS has to use a non-profit to do it.
Like some much in this world, it is a cancerous greed that consumes makes everything worse for everyone.
El Salvador, a country with the highest murder rate per capita in the world, passed emergency measures to enact strict antigang policies under the leadership of the young President Bukele (same guy that legalized bitcoin). Bukele was the first 3rd party candidate to win and break the 2-party duopolicy that ruled el salvador since 1970s
The antigang policies included a strict no-phone-calls while in jail policy. Other policies included jamming cell signal in jail, no visitors, and temporary holding period (without charges) was increased from 2-3 to 10-15 days. All this was allowed under emergency measures voted by congress supermajority, which enabled special police powers for 30 days. The emergency measure has been renewed 10+ times already.
Murders have gone down 92% [1]. There are entire neighborhoods that have recently opened small shops for the first time in decades (it was impossible to open any viable business due to crime).
9 out of 10 salvadoreans is happy and plans to vote to reelect Bukele in the upcoming election [2]. el Salvador congress is updating the constitution now since it does not allow re-election.
The approval rating of ~90% is the highest of the entire western hemisphere.
[1] wsj. https://archive.vn/azpDU
I’ve been to juvenile prison, loads of these teenagers were out and out proud of their being in. They would happily manipulate and game anything to their advantage, and as a result the guards are forced to be intolerant assholes for the most part. If they aren’t, they’ll be taken for suckers.
So how do you sort of the otherwise good kid who gets into a fight or thought weed wasn’t a big deal from the future career criminals of America?
I'm not dismissing this outright, but in terms of priorities, giving counseling to criminals to "distinguish" between the hardened criminals and everyone else seems ripe for abuse, and not exactly a top priority when there are things like cop unioins, crowded jail spaces, and unfunded learning/job opportunities for inmates
None of this requires the use of prisons. Although in the case of offenders likely to commit more violent crimes while justice is sort for previous offenses it, appears, to be our currently best way of management.
Similar to how the aim of schooling is to create citizens who can engage productively in society; the focus of prisons should be on recreating productive citizens.