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For a semester, I taught in a state prison for a prisoner educational program. Every time I went in, I was struck by how punitively petty so many of the rules a

For a semester, I taught in a state prison for a prisoner educational program. Every time I went in, I was struck by how punitively petty so many of the rules and corrections officers were. The environment is carefully crafted to suck out all joy and hope from the inmates. Azkaban with its dementor guards is a pretty good illustration of an American prison. Guards are as likely to confiscate gaming materials (and punish inmates) for breaking the rules as they are to do the same because they stubbed their toe or someone looked at them funny. Thankfully we do have some more progressive correctional programs making a little headway like the one I taught for, but nothing about this article surprised me. edit: I accidentally a word.

EggsOnToast 9y ago
I'm just giving anecdata here so I'm curious to see if you agree with me. Having known two people that went to prison, my opinion on the system is that I think people usually go to prison for the legally correct reason. That being said, a lot of people I meet seem to associate going to prison with deserving to live in a hellhole. No one considers the social exclusion itself a hellhole as evidenced by the ubiquitousness of rape jokes about prison. The reason I mentioned that the point about the prisoners deserving it from a legal perspective is because I think this is the point where most people lose sympathy for the prisoner population, it's the moment when they just sort've assume that anything that comes after being found guilty is just more of a reason not to commit a crime in the first place which is a horrific outlook in my opinion.
- pmarreck 9y ago
  > I think people usually go to prison for the legally correct reason Or not, if most of the incriminating information was eyewitness testimony, the #1 cause of wrongful convictions: https://www.innocenceproject.org/ https://www.innocenceproject.org/ MY opinion of the US criminal justice system is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation is almost definitely not being followed, with the bias far into the false-positive conviction camp. Come to think of it, why is the criminal justice system not "tested"? In other words, set up a mock situation where you know in advance who is innocent and who is not (because it's a setup), and run a mock trial by all the rules using actual jurors, and compare the outcome of the trial to the actual innocence or guilt of the actor?
  - EggsOnToast 9y ago
    I agree. That being said, the reason I tried to choose my words carefully is that, in this instance, I think your point mainly functions as a distraction. I agree that things like witness testimony are sub-par as numerous studies have shown, but that's also an issue wholly separate from the point I was trying to make and I felt like mentioning it would be more of a distraction than a boon with regard to highlighting that there is a difference between being guilty and deserving to be imprisoned and purposely making life needlessly hellish for the inmates.
  - tachyoff 9y ago
    > Come to think of it, why is the criminal justice system not "tested"? I can think of a few. 1. That costs time and money. Even if it would help, I see it being very difficult to justify, essentially, "secret shoppers" for the court system. I think it also kind of underestimates how much time, money, and effort goes into trials. It's not like a quick batch of unit tests. It involves lawyers, judges, jury selection (if it's a jury trial), etc. And juries themselves are made up of people who have to take time off work, miss important events, etc. You can't just (somehow while avoiding detection) fake a trial, and then go "surprise, this was just a test!" At the very least it would just piss a lot of people off. That's not to say that there's no way to make sure our legal system is functioning properly, it's just I don't think mock trials are the right approach. Currently, I believe, the rest of the court system is relied upon to police itself, with the help of the legislative branch. Different levels of courts, ostensibly, keep each other in check (e.g. if you disagree with a lower court ruling, you can appeal to a higher court, which then makes a decision, and if you don't like that, you can appeal to the Supreme Court, etc.) Congress also has the power to do things like create federal judgeships, so presumably they have other powers to regulate and manage the federal judiciary (state judiciaries are, I imagine, left to the individual states to oversee.) 2. Cynically, there are certain vested interests that want the legal system to function the way it does (e.g. people who own private prisons and people who profit off of minor drug offenders being put away for life). There's also good old fashioned racism and classism, helping keep the overwhelmingly poor, black prison population stuck where they are. 3. I don't think it would actually tell you much; there are too many variables: different lawyers, different judges, different jurors, different facts, etc. Even if you ran the same trial with the exact same people and circumstances, but on a different day or something, you could get wildly different results. The court system is not deterministic, not by a long shot. The court system also doesn't deal in absolutes like that. It's not "is this person definitely guilty of a crime?", it's "are we sure, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this person committed a crime (based on all of the evidence)?" Because it's impossible to know the entire truth. Sometimes it's impossible to know much of anything at all, at least with certainty. Did OJ commit those murders? We'll never /know/ know in the sense that when I flip a coin I can see that it lands on heads, or in the sense that I know the earth is a spheroid (i.e. it's something that happened in the past and we're trying to determine exactly the series of events given limited information).
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  Being deprived of your freedom is punishment enough. That should be easy to accept for any libertarian and even many conservatives (the ones with libertarian tendencies). Anything beyond that is just adding insult to injury and only serves to reflect badly on the correctional system itself. For instance, I don't understand under what logic prisoners absolutely need to have their stuff chucked out on a regular basis. It serves to do what, besides further humiliate people who are already driven into the ground? You fuck up once and then your whole life goes in the shitter? What sense does that make? Whom does it benefit?
  - jopsen 9y ago
    It benefits nobody, that is what makes it evil. Isn't the question why voters are so cruel? Why do American Christians only make headlines when they preach hatred against the LBQT community?
    - e12e 9y ago
      > It benefits nobody, that is what makes it evil. I heard you like to manufacture jeans and number plates. How about I pay you to house some workers you hardly have to pay to do the work?
    - buttershakes 9y ago
      It benefits the people in power. It benefits corporations who need cheap exploitable labor, or directly profit from the operation of the prison industry. It forces people into low paying menial jobs that keep large companies profitable. It serves a political purpose by scapegoating and marginalizing minorities. It fills the pockets of politicians who help to expand the system and cater to the military-industrial complex that perversely feeds on inequality. I don't think there is a system of oppression or economic control in existence that doesn't benefit somebody, directly or indirectly.
- blacksmith_tb 9y ago
  Yes, I would say that for many people, breaking laws carries a moral charge. Therefore prisoners are necessarily bad people, and deserve bad things (of course, people rarely extend this judgement to their own law-breaking, like speeding, jay-walking, etc.) And all of this when you could ask them where laws come from, if they can be changed or repealed and they'd agree they are just provisional. I think this attitude is mostly a developmental stage that has to be moved beyond - we are taught from an early age to follow rules, and only in adulthood do we potentially understand that sometimes it's better not to, or even morally necessary not to.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  People seem to be incredibly judgemental and lacking in compassion for people in different circumstances. There are a lot of people out there who haven't been exposed to drugs who believe that people who take drugs actually deserve to die. Recently in New Zealand several people ended up in hospital after taking dodgy "MDMA", the sheer number of comments on Facebook about how they had it coming, or they deserved it, or how they shouldn't have been admitted into hospital were disgusting. Regardless of whether they did was right or wrong, these are still human beings, they still have friends and families. Just the other day I walked past a dead heroin addict being wheeled into an ambulance. They had it coming to them, but I didn't feel like they deserved it. Nobody deserves to die on a street corner from an overdose. It's the same thing with prison. Out of sight, out of mind. If people have never met someone who has gone to prison, then to them it's an abstract concept. They can't imagine the pain or suffering. I've met a couple of people who've served time for drug related charges. Neither of them wanted to commit the crimes they did, but they hit rock bottom. When you're addicted to methamphetamine, you don't exactly think clearly or logically. But people don't see this. They see the world through the lens of their own reality and their own circumstances. It's the same thing that causes wealthy people to say that poor people just need to get better jobs. They have no concept of the world that these people live in.
  - Thrwr11 9y ago
    Addicts are people and deserve help, sure. Most of the hate towards them comes from their bad behavior and how that affects other people. Deathwishes are just one way to cope with the inability to actually do anything about, say, noisy or violent drug addicts or criminals who don't care about other people.
    - meschi 9y ago
      I haven't seen one "noisy violent drug addict" in my life. I am not saying they don't exist, but the vast majority of drug users or even addicts are not discernible as such. Anyway, that is my European perspective.
      - 9y ago
- Thrwr11 9y ago
  The plural of anecdote is anecdotes. Anecdatum does not exist.
- __s 9y ago
  If we afren't looking to rehabilitate then we should focus on reducing the cost of capital punishment & begin executing inmates
  - geocar 9y ago
    The reason we don't execute inmates isn't because Americans want rehabilitation, but because they recognise that the Law isn't infallible, and sometimes Innocent people go to jail, and to that end, you can't really have take-backs for an execution. But you're right about cost reduction. I think it costs somewhere around $40k per year to incarcerate an inmate, so how about we just pay them? We can literally put them in a flatshare, feed them and water them, and it'll still be cheaper than putting them in jail.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I mean, the very idea that prison rape jokes are widespread is illustrative of a certain barbarism in our collective thinking.
sergiotapia 9y ago
They're in jail - not a vacation.
- mark_edward 9y ago
  Do you think petty cruelty towards prisoners makes society safer and reduces recidivism?
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I think for many people (not sure about the OP in particular) that's beside the point, because the goal is pure punishment rather than rehabilitation.
- SeanBoocock 9y ago
  Sure and restricting prisoners' freedom is distinction enough such that no one would confuse the two. If prison is meant to have a correctional role, to rehabilitate people and prepare them to reenter society successfully, it needs to be more than a building to house people organized around capricious rules that infantilize the population.
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  And? People realize they are in prison by the sheer lack of freedom of self. Does that somehow mean that we need to punish them for years and years after their sentence? Do we need to give folks psychological disorders or make them suffer physically as well? Who would you rather have as your neighbor: A person in a human prison that has had the help they need, including a push towards becoming a good neighbor - or someone that has been mistreated, tortured, and/or made to be a slave (prison labor) for what could be years, and then punished so severely when they get out that they have trouble meeting their parole duties without resorting to illegal activities? I don't know about you, but I'd rather live next to the first. Most prisoners are future neighbors. Most are someone's family member. Wouldn't it be prudent to do what we can to make the person an upstanding member of society?
  - 9y ago
rb666 9y ago
This is really a thing in the USA and other 2nd-world countries. In most European countries this is very different.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Nordic countries maybe, French, British, German not to mention former Commie block countries prisons aren't what you think...
  - baud147258 9y ago
    French prisons have currently a big problem of a number of inmates way above the stated capacity, radicalisation issues and a lack of financing. The problem were grave enough that the guards did a long strike last year, blocking the access to the prisons.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  The term "second-world" refers to former Communist states. It's not a ranking system.
  - rb666 9y ago
    Oh haha, TIL. My bad.

EggsOnToast 9y ago

I'm just giving anecdata here so I'm curious to see if you agree with me. Having known two people that went to prison, my opinion on the system is that I think people usually go to prison for the legally correct reason. That being said, a lot of people I meet seem to associate going to prison with deserving to live in a hellhole. No one considers the social exclusion itself a hellhole as evidenced by the ubiquitousness of rape jokes about prison. The reason I mentioned that the point about the prisoners deserving it from a legal perspective is because I think this is the point where most people lose sympathy for the prisoner population, it's the moment when they just sort've assume that anything that comes after being found guilty is just more of a reason not to commit a crime in the first place which is a horrific outlook in my opinion.

pmarreck 9y ago
> I think people usually go to prison for the legally correct reason Or not, if most of the incriminating information was eyewitness testimony, the #1 cause of wrongful convictions: https://www.innocenceproject.org/ https://www.innocenceproject.org/ MY opinion of the US criminal justice system is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation is almost definitely not being followed, with the bias far into the false-positive conviction camp. Come to think of it, why is the criminal justice system not "tested"? In other words, set up a mock situation where you know in advance who is innocent and who is not (because it's a setup), and run a mock trial by all the rules using actual jurors, and compare the outcome of the trial to the actual innocence or guilt of the actor?
- EggsOnToast 9y ago
  I agree. That being said, the reason I tried to choose my words carefully is that, in this instance, I think your point mainly functions as a distraction. I agree that things like witness testimony are sub-par as numerous studies have shown, but that's also an issue wholly separate from the point I was trying to make and I felt like mentioning it would be more of a distraction than a boon with regard to highlighting that there is a difference between being guilty and deserving to be imprisoned and purposely making life needlessly hellish for the inmates.
- tachyoff 9y ago
  > Come to think of it, why is the criminal justice system not "tested"? I can think of a few. 1. That costs time and money. Even if it would help, I see it being very difficult to justify, essentially, "secret shoppers" for the court system. I think it also kind of underestimates how much time, money, and effort goes into trials. It's not like a quick batch of unit tests. It involves lawyers, judges, jury selection (if it's a jury trial), etc. And juries themselves are made up of people who have to take time off work, miss important events, etc. You can't just (somehow while avoiding detection) fake a trial, and then go "surprise, this was just a test!" At the very least it would just piss a lot of people off. That's not to say that there's no way to make sure our legal system is functioning properly, it's just I don't think mock trials are the right approach. Currently, I believe, the rest of the court system is relied upon to police itself, with the help of the legislative branch. Different levels of courts, ostensibly, keep each other in check (e.g. if you disagree with a lower court ruling, you can appeal to a higher court, which then makes a decision, and if you don't like that, you can appeal to the Supreme Court, etc.) Congress also has the power to do things like create federal judgeships, so presumably they have other powers to regulate and manage the federal judiciary (state judiciaries are, I imagine, left to the individual states to oversee.) 2. Cynically, there are certain vested interests that want the legal system to function the way it does (e.g. people who own private prisons and people who profit off of minor drug offenders being put away for life). There's also good old fashioned racism and classism, helping keep the overwhelmingly poor, black prison population stuck where they are. 3. I don't think it would actually tell you much; there are too many variables: different lawyers, different judges, different jurors, different facts, etc. Even if you ran the same trial with the exact same people and circumstances, but on a different day or something, you could get wildly different results. The court system is not deterministic, not by a long shot. The court system also doesn't deal in absolutes like that. It's not "is this person definitely guilty of a crime?", it's "are we sure, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this person committed a crime (based on all of the evidence)?" Because it's impossible to know the entire truth. Sometimes it's impossible to know much of anything at all, at least with certainty. Did OJ commit those murders? We'll never /know/ know in the sense that when I flip a coin I can see that it lands on heads, or in the sense that I know the earth is a spheroid (i.e. it's something that happened in the past and we're trying to determine exactly the series of events given limited information).
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
Being deprived of your freedom is punishment enough. That should be easy to accept for any libertarian and even many conservatives (the ones with libertarian tendencies). Anything beyond that is just adding insult to injury and only serves to reflect badly on the correctional system itself. For instance, I don't understand under what logic prisoners absolutely need to have their stuff chucked out on a regular basis. It serves to do what, besides further humiliate people who are already driven into the ground? You fuck up once and then your whole life goes in the shitter? What sense does that make? Whom does it benefit?
- jopsen 9y ago
  It benefits nobody, that is what makes it evil. Isn't the question why voters are so cruel? Why do American Christians only make headlines when they preach hatred against the LBQT community?
  - e12e 9y ago
    > It benefits nobody, that is what makes it evil. I heard you like to manufacture jeans and number plates. How about I pay you to house some workers you hardly have to pay to do the work?
  - buttershakes 9y ago
    It benefits the people in power. It benefits corporations who need cheap exploitable labor, or directly profit from the operation of the prison industry. It forces people into low paying menial jobs that keep large companies profitable. It serves a political purpose by scapegoating and marginalizing minorities. It fills the pockets of politicians who help to expand the system and cater to the military-industrial complex that perversely feeds on inequality. I don't think there is a system of oppression or economic control in existence that doesn't benefit somebody, directly or indirectly.
blacksmith_tb 9y ago
Yes, I would say that for many people, breaking laws carries a moral charge. Therefore prisoners are necessarily bad people, and deserve bad things (of course, people rarely extend this judgement to their own law-breaking, like speeding, jay-walking, etc.) And all of this when you could ask them where laws come from, if they can be changed or repealed and they'd agree they are just provisional. I think this attitude is mostly a developmental stage that has to be moved beyond - we are taught from an early age to follow rules, and only in adulthood do we potentially understand that sometimes it's better not to, or even morally necessary not to.
toomanybeersies 9y ago
People seem to be incredibly judgemental and lacking in compassion for people in different circumstances. There are a lot of people out there who haven't been exposed to drugs who believe that people who take drugs actually deserve to die. Recently in New Zealand several people ended up in hospital after taking dodgy "MDMA", the sheer number of comments on Facebook about how they had it coming, or they deserved it, or how they shouldn't have been admitted into hospital were disgusting. Regardless of whether they did was right or wrong, these are still human beings, they still have friends and families. Just the other day I walked past a dead heroin addict being wheeled into an ambulance. They had it coming to them, but I didn't feel like they deserved it. Nobody deserves to die on a street corner from an overdose. It's the same thing with prison. Out of sight, out of mind. If people have never met someone who has gone to prison, then to them it's an abstract concept. They can't imagine the pain or suffering. I've met a couple of people who've served time for drug related charges. Neither of them wanted to commit the crimes they did, but they hit rock bottom. When you're addicted to methamphetamine, you don't exactly think clearly or logically. But people don't see this. They see the world through the lens of their own reality and their own circumstances. It's the same thing that causes wealthy people to say that poor people just need to get better jobs. They have no concept of the world that these people live in.
- Thrwr11 9y ago
  Addicts are people and deserve help, sure. Most of the hate towards them comes from their bad behavior and how that affects other people. Deathwishes are just one way to cope with the inability to actually do anything about, say, noisy or violent drug addicts or criminals who don't care about other people.
  - meschi 9y ago
    I haven't seen one "noisy violent drug addict" in my life. I am not saying they don't exist, but the vast majority of drug users or even addicts are not discernible as such. Anyway, that is my European perspective.
    - 9y ago
Thrwr11 9y ago
The plural of anecdote is anecdotes. Anecdatum does not exist.
__s 9y ago
If we afren't looking to rehabilitate then we should focus on reducing the cost of capital punishment & begin executing inmates
- geocar 9y ago
  The reason we don't execute inmates isn't because Americans want rehabilitation, but because they recognise that the Law isn't infallible, and sometimes Innocent people go to jail, and to that end, you can't really have take-backs for an execution. But you're right about cost reduction. I think it costs somewhere around $40k per year to incarcerate an inmate, so how about we just pay them? We can literally put them in a flatshare, feed them and water them, and it'll still be cheaper than putting them in jail.
emodendroket 9y ago
I mean, the very idea that prison rape jokes are widespread is illustrative of a certain barbarism in our collective thinking.

sergiotapia 9y ago

They're in jail - not a vacation.

mark_edward 9y ago
Do you think petty cruelty towards prisoners makes society safer and reduces recidivism?
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I think for many people (not sure about the OP in particular) that's beside the point, because the goal is pure punishment rather than rehabilitation.
SeanBoocock 9y ago
Sure and restricting prisoners' freedom is distinction enough such that no one would confuse the two. If prison is meant to have a correctional role, to rehabilitate people and prepare them to reenter society successfully, it needs to be more than a building to house people organized around capricious rules that infantilize the population.
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
And? People realize they are in prison by the sheer lack of freedom of self. Does that somehow mean that we need to punish them for years and years after their sentence? Do we need to give folks psychological disorders or make them suffer physically as well? Who would you rather have as your neighbor: A person in a human prison that has had the help they need, including a push towards becoming a good neighbor - or someone that has been mistreated, tortured, and/or made to be a slave (prison labor) for what could be years, and then punished so severely when they get out that they have trouble meeting their parole duties without resorting to illegal activities? I don't know about you, but I'd rather live next to the first. Most prisoners are future neighbors. Most are someone's family member. Wouldn't it be prudent to do what we can to make the person an upstanding member of society?
- 9y ago

rb666 9y ago

This is really a thing in the USA and other 2nd-world countries. In most European countries this is very different.

dogma1138 9y ago
Nordic countries maybe, French, British, German not to mention former Commie block countries prisons aren't what you think...
- baud147258 9y ago
  French prisons have currently a big problem of a number of inmates way above the stated capacity, radicalisation issues and a lack of financing. The problem were grave enough that the guards did a long strike last year, blocking the access to the prisons.
emodendroket 9y ago
The term "second-world" refers to former Communist states. It's not a ranking system.
- rb666 9y ago
  Oh haha, TIL. My bad.