11 ms·

In having served almost 10 years in prison for drugs. I can say that medium and maximum security prisons are often a breeding ground for killers, and dangerous

by nknwn 10y ago

In having served almost 10 years in prison for drugs. I can say that medium and maximum security prisons are often a breeding ground for killers, and dangerous people. Young kids who have done something incredibly stupid usually end up in these places. They are then immediately put in a situation to fuck or fight. This behavior will often escalate to extreme violence or to be broken psychologically, then owned by other inmates, bought and sold like property. Can that kind of behavior be unlearned? I doubt it... I would argue that at best, people can only learn to do something better, but always lurking in the background. This is only one of many of the bizarre insanities of prison life. I personally don't disagree with the idea of punishment or prison. I would however say that prisons are extremely dysfunctional.

throwawaycanada 10y ago
As an outsider I always just assumed those who ran prisons and designed them wanted them to be set up that way.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  On the other hand I always assumed it's due to short-term thinking and incentives misalignment. Incarceration is a quick way to quarantine criminals and fill the need for justice of the offended. A person who ends up in prison (especially the high-security one) is likely to be away for many, many years - at which point what happens when they're released is someone else's problem. Humans are good at dealing with distant consequences in the abstract, but extremely poor at it in practice. So prisons are what they are by default. Of course there are other issues at play too. For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education. Or another example - you can't really make prisoners do useful work for the society (as opposed to just rotting in their cells), because it disrupts the market economy and becomes a powerful force for administrators to threaten their local communities ("do X, or else I unleash my 300+ strong force of unpaid workers and drive you out of market"). The more I think about prisons, the more I see it's a very convoluted issue, and there isn't any obvious, simple solution.
  - njs12345 10y ago
    > For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education. If this turns out to be a serious problem then perhaps your society has other issues it should be dealing with? 'Nice' prisons certainly seem to work pretty well in Norway: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-pr...
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > If this turns out to be a serious problem then perhaps your society has other issues it should be dealing with? Of course! Which makes the whole thing even more difficult, because now instead of dealing with issues in isolation, you have to untangle the complex web of interdependencies.
    - devonkim 10y ago
      A number of years ago around 2006 I read a story of a man in his 60s that went into a bank, handed a teller a note to not be scared, put some cash in a bag, and that he won't hurt her. She complied, and he sat on the floor and waited for police to arrive. He wanted to go to prison and was committing a felony because he couldn't find a job, social security wasn't enough, he couldn't qualify for disability, he couldn't afford healthcare, and he had run out of options for housing now that the bank had foreclosed on his house. Something is wrong when people are finding the idea of an institution meant to punish people a better life than living in our "free" society that people keep insisting is the best country in the history of the world.
    - kriro 10y ago
      The "easiest" fix to this issue would be fixing education. If it's generally easy/inexpensive to get a good education for every citizen (e.g. via a taxation based social contract) that particular incentive goes away. Different societies have different positions on this. I'm generally very much in the "less government please" camp but for certain areas where there's a potential for multiplier effects or where more equality of opportunity is very likely to have a positive effect on society as a whole (education, health, justice, possibly defense etc.) I don't mind tax-based measures to provide more equality.
kashkhan 10y ago
prison is inhuman punishment. it doesn't stop or correct crime. and in return causes huge social problems.
- nknwn 10y ago
  You are right. Because these same people, are released in 5-10-20 years and are then someone's neighbor. Rarely any job skills to speak of. Often very little in the way of education or resources to improve. So the end result 80-90% of the time is to resort to the familiar crowd and routine.
  - Senji 10y ago
    We need to bring Exile back. That and death sentances federally.
    - nknwn 10y ago
      It is largely the poor and uneducated people who go to prison.
      - bluedino 10y ago
        They don't just "go to prison", that demographic commits crimes that send them to prison.
        danharaj 10y ago
        And the other demographics commit crimes that don't end up with the justice system^ sending them to prison. They're often the same crime. ^ Crimes don't do anything, of course. It's the people in charge who decide who goes to prison.
        pmiller2 10y ago
        And can't pay for lawyers to get them off.
    - 10y ago
chappi42 10y ago
I'm sorry. What can (non-american) outsiders do to help fix/improve this situation (in American prisons)?
- ars 10y ago
  You probably can't do anything about the actual prison experience, but you can help the individuals both before, during and after. There are organizations that try to keep people out of prison by giving them activities or trade training. And there are organizations that try to help people find jobs after leaving prison. You could find some you like and help them financially. Another positive influence is the religious community, so you can help those as well. People with strong religious ties tend to have a much easier time joining their community after prison. There are also some religious communities that try to reach people in prison, and you could help them.
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  I think (as non-american) that the best you can do is to try to convince your American friends (you may have to acquire them first) that the idea of the prison is not a punishment but isolation of the danger and reconditioning to the return back into the society. My understanding is that the last one can not happen in open prisons but only in solitary confinement where a single prisoner does not have any contact with other prisoners but still has constant concealing by professionals and does have other conditions to maintain its decency.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Nuke us.
coenhyde 10y ago
I call prison "criminal university". It's just fucking stupid. We get a whole bunch of violent / profession criminals together so they can learn from each other and build their networks. Then brand them as criminals so they can't get a job when they come out, thus ensuring they reoffend. Oh and we incarcerate for non violent crimes, so entry level criminals have the opportunity to learn from the best and progress their career.
- drdeadringer 10y ago
  Is this similar to "go to the hospital to get sick"?
  - xapata 10y ago
    Not quite. Society is still conflicted over whether prison is for punishment or rehabilitation. In the US, I think it trends mostly punishment with lip service to rehabilitation.
  - whybroke 10y ago
    If you run the hospital poorly enough, that's exactly what happens.
    - gizmo686 10y ago
      "Poorly" seems a bit harsh. From a conceptual standpoint, hospitals are, in some sense, a terrible idea: why would you want to concentrate contagious individuals (let along concentrate them in proximity to people with unrelated sicknesses). The only reason we have hospitals is the only way we can afford to provide medical care to the population. According to the CDC, "On any given day, about one in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection. " http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/surveillance/index.html http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/surveillance/index.html
- ythn 10y ago
  I don't see how you can have a humane prison not be a criminal university. I mean, in the old days, they would just throw you in cell and leave you there for years. Your meals would come in through a slot in the door and you would poop and pee in a pot. No face-to-face interaction with other prisoners. No shared cells. No recreational time in open areas where you can form cliques. The only communication that happened between prisoners was via tapping or other coded acoustics. Allowing prisoners to interact face to face in open and closed environments is going to introduce these extra complexities of prisoners "poisoning" other prisoners.
Red_Tarsius 10y ago
Thanks for your comment. It seems that there are many unreported rapes in American prisons. When you read the real stories and how wardens don't care or enable such system, your faith in human nature is over. You realize how fucked up bureocrats are. If Americans – liberals and conservatives – truly cared about human rights they would have started a riot about such issues years ago. They set up a mass whining for the new president of US in less than 24 hours, people clearly don't care about the inhuman treatment of prisoners. Read the testimony of activist Stephen Donaldson. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-20/news/ls-60064_1_prison http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-20/news/ls-60064_1_priso...
- saulrh 10y ago
  Same with cars, global climate change, and pollution. People only know how to respond to events.
  - cpkpad 10y ago
    You're confusing corruption for incompetence.
- danharaj 10y ago
  It's true. You have to look far outside of the system to find people who take prison abolition seriously. Anarchists, mostly.
  - matwood 10y ago
    Step 1 is do not look to abolish prison. When you start with such an extreme position no one is going to listen.
    - danharaj 10y ago
      Considering that prisons in their current form overflowing with brutality and cruelty are an acceptable mainstream position, I'd rather not care about being extreme. If one believes that prisons as a structure inevitably lead to arbitrarily bad abuse of power, then one is for the abolition of prison.
NumberCruncher 10y ago
>>Young kids who have done something incredibly stupid >>They are then immediately put in a situation to fuck or fight. IMHO this aspect of prison life is common knowledge. I wonder how incredibly stupid one has to be to risk getting jailed. And looking at the numbers that is not a marginal phenomenon.
- rincebrain 10y ago
  A great many things can cause you to be party to something incredibly stupid - something mildly stupid escalating, doing something without full understanding of the consequences... Even if you do grasp the risk at hand, other pressures can drive you to make stupid choices. Regardless of how you got there, though, it should not be a given that you're going to come out of it worse than you went in.
  - NumberCruncher 10y ago
    >> something mildly stupid escalating, doing something without full understanding of the consequences... I still do not get how someone can not understand the consequences. Have they never seen any movie? Really? Never talk to former inmates?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      And yet this is a fact, because otherwise hardly anyone would be in prison. It seems you're confused about this. A hint: lot of the "incredibly stupid" things are being done in the heat of the moment. Other times, people don't really imagine something bad could happen to them. Then, sometimes people think they have no other choice - maybe they're "in too deep", or maybe it's the only way they can think of supporting their family, etc. Sometimes people just take a huge risk for potential huge gains (think of it as criminal world equivalent of starting a startup). Humans are not perfect reasoning machines with infinite computation speed.
      - bluedino 10y ago
        The vast majority of prison inmates have a long history of offenses and didn't just do one stupid thing.
chongli 10y ago
I've never been to prison but when I read this article I feel despondent. Here are people asking for some really tiny, minor things. The whole argument is predicated on the idea that prison is about rehabilitation. It's not. Prison is about destroying people. Punishing them for having the audacity to exist after revealing the fact that their identity does not fit the dominant narrative. I am fundamentally opposed to prison in all but the most extreme cases. I also happen to believe a bunch of other things that would also see me branded as a radical by society, but I digress. Prison is fundamentally destructive as an institution. It is slavery by another name and it must be dismantled, though I don't know how we begin the process.
- zanny 10y ago
  > though I don't know how we begin the process. Its political, and at least in the US, it traces its roots back to corruption and how unrepresentative the US government is of its citizens. If you want to fix almost all societal problems, you first need a system of government that fears and respects its people. I don't care which permutation of state you pick, but if you want a government to care what you say, it has to care about its people. Most countries have that problem. Its less overbearing because most European states have better implementations of near the same parliamentary system, but even those governments are often too centralized and too easily corrupted, and that breeds an unrepresentative state. Making a government that acts in the will of its people is absolutely step one to fixing the problems it causes. Then you just need to persuade the people and thus the representatives to change it.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    There is no reason to believe that harsh prison systems are representative of the will of the people. In the 1990s, three strikes laws in California were enacted by public referendum. The margin was 3-1. 75% of people voted to put people in prison for life for three felonies--and they didn't even have to be violent felonies. And it was one of the most liberal states in the country!
    - mbreese 10y ago
sdenton4 10y ago
As Bryan Stevenson says, a person is more than the worst mistake they've made. The inhumanity of American prisons is reprehensible, and limits the potential of our most vulnerable populations. Imagine if Obama has been imprisoned for smoking a joint in his really years. Is that moment of indiscretion worth voiding a whole life? For those interested in keeping up with our contributing to the effort to fix the US prison system, please check out the Ella Baker center, http://ellabakercenter.org http://ellabakercenter.org. Started by Van Jones twenty years ago, they've been on the forefront of resisting unnecessary prison expansions, reducing the rate at which juveniles are put in prison, and more.
dorfsmay 10y ago
Has temporary imprisonment ever been shown to have a positive impact?
tn13 10y ago
I really don't have words for this. The problem is we the people. We treat anyone in prison or with a government label of felon, sex offender etc. as less than human being. I can't blame the prison university.
wuschel 10y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I would be interested to read more about it. People like who have not been counting their years migh have some imagination, but imagination does not replace experience. Perhaps you should make a write up of your time and observations.

by nknwn 10y ago

throwawaycanada 10y ago

As an outsider I always just assumed those who ran prisons and designed them wanted them to be set up that way.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
On the other hand I always assumed it's due to short-term thinking and incentives misalignment. Incarceration is a quick way to quarantine criminals and fill the need for justice of the offended. A person who ends up in prison (especially the high-security one) is likely to be away for many, many years - at which point what happens when they're released is someone else's problem. Humans are good at dealing with distant consequences in the abstract, but extremely poor at it in practice. So prisons are what they are by default. Of course there are other issues at play too. For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education. Or another example - you can't really make prisoners do useful work for the society (as opposed to just rotting in their cells), because it disrupts the market economy and becomes a powerful force for administrators to threaten their local communities ("do X, or else I unleash my 300+ strong force of unpaid workers and drive you out of market"). The more I think about prisons, the more I see it's a very convoluted issue, and there isn't any obvious, simple solution.
- njs12345 10y ago
  > For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education. If this turns out to be a serious problem then perhaps your society has other issues it should be dealing with? 'Nice' prisons certainly seem to work pretty well in Norway: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-pr...
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > If this turns out to be a serious problem then perhaps your society has other issues it should be dealing with? Of course! Which makes the whole thing even more difficult, because now instead of dealing with issues in isolation, you have to untangle the complex web of interdependencies.
  - devonkim 10y ago
    A number of years ago around 2006 I read a story of a man in his 60s that went into a bank, handed a teller a note to not be scared, put some cash in a bag, and that he won't hurt her. She complied, and he sat on the floor and waited for police to arrive. He wanted to go to prison and was committing a felony because he couldn't find a job, social security wasn't enough, he couldn't qualify for disability, he couldn't afford healthcare, and he had run out of options for housing now that the bank had foreclosed on his house. Something is wrong when people are finding the idea of an institution meant to punish people a better life than living in our "free" society that people keep insisting is the best country in the history of the world.
  - kriro 10y ago
    The "easiest" fix to this issue would be fixing education. If it's generally easy/inexpensive to get a good education for every citizen (e.g. via a taxation based social contract) that particular incentive goes away. Different societies have different positions on this. I'm generally very much in the "less government please" camp but for certain areas where there's a potential for multiplier effects or where more equality of opportunity is very likely to have a positive effect on society as a whole (education, health, justice, possibly defense etc.) I don't mind tax-based measures to provide more equality.

kashkhan 10y ago

prison is inhuman punishment. it doesn't stop or correct crime. and in return causes huge social problems.

nknwn 10y ago
You are right. Because these same people, are released in 5-10-20 years and are then someone's neighbor. Rarely any job skills to speak of. Often very little in the way of education or resources to improve. So the end result 80-90% of the time is to resort to the familiar crowd and routine.
- Senji 10y ago
  We need to bring Exile back. That and death sentances federally.
  - nknwn 10y ago
    It is largely the poor and uneducated people who go to prison.
    - bluedino 10y ago
      They don't just "go to prison", that demographic commits crimes that send them to prison.
      - danharaj 10y ago
        And the other demographics commit crimes that don't end up with the justice system^ sending them to prison. They're often the same crime. ^ Crimes don't do anything, of course. It's the people in charge who decide who goes to prison.
      - pmiller2 10y ago
        And can't pay for lawyers to get them off.
  - 10y ago

chappi42 10y ago

I'm sorry. What can (non-american) outsiders do to help fix/improve this situation (in American prisons)?

ars 10y ago
You probably can't do anything about the actual prison experience, but you can help the individuals both before, during and after. There are organizations that try to keep people out of prison by giving them activities or trade training. And there are organizations that try to help people find jobs after leaving prison. You could find some you like and help them financially. Another positive influence is the religious community, so you can help those as well. People with strong religious ties tend to have a much easier time joining their community after prison. There are also some religious communities that try to reach people in prison, and you could help them.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
I think (as non-american) that the best you can do is to try to convince your American friends (you may have to acquire them first) that the idea of the prison is not a punishment but isolation of the danger and reconditioning to the return back into the society. My understanding is that the last one can not happen in open prisons but only in solitary confinement where a single prisoner does not have any contact with other prisoners but still has constant concealing by professionals and does have other conditions to maintain its decency.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
Nuke us.

coenhyde 10y ago

I call prison "criminal university". It's just fucking stupid. We get a whole bunch of violent / profession criminals together so they can learn from each other and build their networks. Then brand them as criminals so they can't get a job when they come out, thus ensuring they reoffend. Oh and we incarcerate for non violent crimes, so entry level criminals have the opportunity to learn from the best and progress their career.

drdeadringer 10y ago
Is this similar to "go to the hospital to get sick"?
- xapata 10y ago
  Not quite. Society is still conflicted over whether prison is for punishment or rehabilitation. In the US, I think it trends mostly punishment with lip service to rehabilitation.
- whybroke 10y ago
  If you run the hospital poorly enough, that's exactly what happens.
  - gizmo686 10y ago
    "Poorly" seems a bit harsh. From a conceptual standpoint, hospitals are, in some sense, a terrible idea: why would you want to concentrate contagious individuals (let along concentrate them in proximity to people with unrelated sicknesses). The only reason we have hospitals is the only way we can afford to provide medical care to the population. According to the CDC, "On any given day, about one in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection. " http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/surveillance/index.html http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/surveillance/index.html
ythn 10y ago
I don't see how you can have a humane prison not be a criminal university. I mean, in the old days, they would just throw you in cell and leave you there for years. Your meals would come in through a slot in the door and you would poop and pee in a pot. No face-to-face interaction with other prisoners. No shared cells. No recreational time in open areas where you can form cliques. The only communication that happened between prisoners was via tapping or other coded acoustics. Allowing prisoners to interact face to face in open and closed environments is going to introduce these extra complexities of prisoners "poisoning" other prisoners.

Red_Tarsius 10y ago

Thanks for your comment. It seems that there are many unreported rapes in American prisons. When you read the real stories and how wardens don't care or enable such system, your faith in human nature is over. You realize how fucked up bureocrats are. If Americans – liberals and conservatives – truly cared about human rights they would have started a riot about such issues years ago. They set up a mass whining for the new president of US in less than 24 hours, people clearly don't care about the inhuman treatment of prisoners. Read the testimony of activist Stephen Donaldson. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-20/news/ls-60064_1_prison http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-20/news/ls-60064_1_priso...

saulrh 10y ago
Same with cars, global climate change, and pollution. People only know how to respond to events.
- cpkpad 10y ago
  You're confusing corruption for incompetence.
danharaj 10y ago
It's true. You have to look far outside of the system to find people who take prison abolition seriously. Anarchists, mostly.
- matwood 10y ago
  Step 1 is do not look to abolish prison. When you start with such an extreme position no one is going to listen.
  - danharaj 10y ago
    Considering that prisons in their current form overflowing with brutality and cruelty are an acceptable mainstream position, I'd rather not care about being extreme. If one believes that prisons as a structure inevitably lead to arbitrarily bad abuse of power, then one is for the abolition of prison.

NumberCruncher 10y ago

>>Young kids who have done something incredibly stupid >>They are then immediately put in a situation to fuck or fight. IMHO this aspect of prison life is common knowledge. I wonder how incredibly stupid one has to be to risk getting jailed. And looking at the numbers that is not a marginal phenomenon.

rincebrain 10y ago
A great many things can cause you to be party to something incredibly stupid - something mildly stupid escalating, doing something without full understanding of the consequences... Even if you do grasp the risk at hand, other pressures can drive you to make stupid choices. Regardless of how you got there, though, it should not be a given that you're going to come out of it worse than you went in.
- NumberCruncher 10y ago
  >> something mildly stupid escalating, doing something without full understanding of the consequences... I still do not get how someone can not understand the consequences. Have they never seen any movie? Really? Never talk to former inmates?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    And yet this is a fact, because otherwise hardly anyone would be in prison. It seems you're confused about this. A hint: lot of the "incredibly stupid" things are being done in the heat of the moment. Other times, people don't really imagine something bad could happen to them. Then, sometimes people think they have no other choice - maybe they're "in too deep", or maybe it's the only way they can think of supporting their family, etc. Sometimes people just take a huge risk for potential huge gains (think of it as criminal world equivalent of starting a startup). Humans are not perfect reasoning machines with infinite computation speed.
    - bluedino 10y ago
      The vast majority of prison inmates have a long history of offenses and didn't just do one stupid thing.

chongli 10y ago

I've never been to prison but when I read this article I feel despondent. Here are people asking for some really tiny, minor things. The whole argument is predicated on the idea that prison is about rehabilitation. It's not. Prison is about destroying people. Punishing them for having the audacity to exist after revealing the fact that their identity does not fit the dominant narrative. I am fundamentally opposed to prison in all but the most extreme cases. I also happen to believe a bunch of other things that would also see me branded as a radical by society, but I digress. Prison is fundamentally destructive as an institution. It is slavery by another name and it must be dismantled, though I don't know how we begin the process.

zanny 10y ago
> though I don't know how we begin the process. Its political, and at least in the US, it traces its roots back to corruption and how unrepresentative the US government is of its citizens. If you want to fix almost all societal problems, you first need a system of government that fears and respects its people. I don't care which permutation of state you pick, but if you want a government to care what you say, it has to care about its people. Most countries have that problem. Its less overbearing because most European states have better implementations of near the same parliamentary system, but even those governments are often too centralized and too easily corrupted, and that breeds an unrepresentative state. Making a government that acts in the will of its people is absolutely step one to fixing the problems it causes. Then you just need to persuade the people and thus the representatives to change it.
- rayiner 10y ago
  There is no reason to believe that harsh prison systems are representative of the will of the people. In the 1990s, three strikes laws in California were enacted by public referendum. The margin was 3-1. 75% of people voted to put people in prison for life for three felonies--and they didn't even have to be violent felonies. And it was one of the most liberal states in the country!
  - mbreese 10y ago

sdenton4 10y ago

As Bryan Stevenson says, a person is more than the worst mistake they've made. The inhumanity of American prisons is reprehensible, and limits the potential of our most vulnerable populations. Imagine if Obama has been imprisoned for smoking a joint in his really years. Is that moment of indiscretion worth voiding a whole life? For those interested in keeping up with our contributing to the effort to fix the US prison system, please check out the Ella Baker center, http://ellabakercenter.org http://ellabakercenter.org. Started by Van Jones twenty years ago, they've been on the forefront of resisting unnecessary prison expansions, reducing the rate at which juveniles are put in prison, and more.

dorfsmay 10y ago

Has temporary imprisonment ever been shown to have a positive impact?

tn13 10y ago

I really don't have words for this. The problem is we the people. We treat anyone in prison or with a government label of felon, sex offender etc. as less than human being. I can't blame the prison university.

wuschel 10y ago

Thanks for sharing this. I would be interested to read more about it. People like who have not been counting their years migh have some imagination, but imagination does not replace experience. Perhaps you should make a write up of your time and observations.