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I used to be a volunteer teacher for a 3-hour weekly class in a local prison. One of the things this article misses is that gangs – which are especially active
by ARandomerDude 5y ago
I used to be a volunteer teacher for a 3-hour weekly class in a local prison.
One of the things this article misses is that gangs – which are especially active in prison systems – use books to pass ciphered messages. Highlighting, underlining, dogeared corners, scratched out characters, etc. are used prolifically as encoded messages that would appear to be regular wear to a casual observer. The "tradecraft" these guys employ is amazing (albeit for a horrible purpose). We were allowed to have books shipped directly from publishers or known third-party entities (e.g., Amazon) and there was a request form an instructor could fill to add new approved vendors.
All that to say, I understand the policy, even though it's not ideal for those honestly wanting to read. It's hard for most people to imagine but a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes, and there are real cases of warring gangs orchestrating "hits" on other gang members through innocuous looking content.
- shimonabi 5y agoCould you not solve this by introducting a time delay before the same book can be borrowed again? It's 2021. Why not just allow a simple e-reader?
- saargrin 5y agoi would have never imagined that, but thinking about it,its actually a brilliant tactic
- worik 5y ago> a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes Some of the prisoners are quite bad too
- rkk3 5y agoWe should probably remove their ability to read, write or speak all together, just in case something bad could come from it.
- MattGaiser 5y agoThis is a far better explanation for the decision.
- CyanBird 5y agoIt really isnt, people in prison, or people all together will always find novel ways to communicate, and on this case use books, yet the net benefit of them having access to literature is itself good on a whole other level vs the smaller drawbacks which happen from some of them being cuts, this ofc is without getting into the core fundamental that prison is supposed to be there as both a chance of rehab and as a place to separate them from society temporarily let alone this just being inhumane treatment
- GrifMD 5y agoThat doesn't explain the cost for use of e-books, especially the public domain books under Project Gutenberg, nor does it really explain the banning of book donations from registered non-profits. If the issue you describe is prevalent, then I could see the need for vetting non-profits before donation, but not outright blocking them.
- MarkMarine 5y agoThe article is pretty clear about all this. Companies make money from this, so it’s done. Guards smuggle in most of the contraband, like cell phones, so banning books is like trying to hold back a flood with a bucket. Taken to its logical conclusion, private companies are making money hand over fist with private prisons, from the amount taxpayers pay to house inmates, and from modern day slave labor of prison “jobs” making products. Why not ensure you’ve got a recidivist population of that labor by taking away any avenue for someone to escape the cycle. Truly evil.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoDon't forget all the corrections officers jobs and the money that flows into the system. It's not just private industry. The .gov is very much in on the racket.
- xyzzyz 5y ago> Taken to its logical conclusion, private companies are making money hand over fist with private prisons, from the amount taxpayers pay to house inmates, and from modern day slave labor of prison “jobs” making products. Given that private prisons cost less than state run ones, do you think taxpayers would prefer to pay more for prisons just so that companies running private prison don’t make a profit? Do you apply this logic also to construction projects? I.e. would you prefer to pay, say, twice as much for a bridge to be build by government construction agency, so long as no private construction company makes a profit building it?
- emodendroket 5y agoI'd say, even if you are correct that it's cheaper on a per-prisoner, something I find hard to believe, the incentives to imprison more people are so perverse that I would anticipate the price would catch up, and that's before we even consider the moral ramifications of imprisoning people to satisfy a quota set by a profit-seeking entity.
- anonymouse008 5y ago[edit] just to round out context, this story was told while putting locked down chrome books (better than just books I guess) and secure networking in the prison so that inmates can learn trade skills and even coding (at zero cost for use to the inmates as well). Please don’t mistake any of the below for lack of respect and care A nearby prison had inmates routinely high, a huge black eye on the warden and staff. For the life of them they couldn't figure out how anyone was smuggling narcotics until one day they caught an inmate smoking a page of the Holy Bible. So the inmates were getting printed religious materials soaked in heroin (thank you generous spirit) and then ripping them out to enjoy. This prison went the somewhat charitable route to scan all letters, books and documents, but it does go to show that stories / headlines that appear absurd on the surface are usually just as absurd underneath.
- Bud 5y agoGuess what: inmates are going to get high regardless of whether idiotic book bans are put in place or not. That being the case, it's clearly better to allow the books than not.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoYou make an interesting point. > "(As an aside, learn to spell "heroin".)" Just my 2 cents, but I think that phrasing may come across as harsh. Keeping things civil is a big part of keeping HN's discussions interesting.
- Avshalom 5y agoWhen discussing horrifying moral stains on a country maybe 'keeping [it] interesting' isn't a real high priority for some people.
- Bud 5y agoYou're right, it was too harsh and I have deleted it. I guess I just get a little upset about drug-policy moralizing from people who, well, can't spell the name of the drug in question. But I still should have been more civil
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- littlestymaar 5y agoI did the same kind of thing in France, and most inmate found a way to smuggle a cell phone. If it's also the case in the US (which I'd be surprised if not) that'd mean that a rule against steganography in book is mostly here for legacy reasons.
- runarberg 5y agoEven this is a lousy excuse. Banning/raising prices of books for everyone just because authorities failed to do their work is regressive and simply lazy. A better approach is to simply detect when these ciphered messages occur and react appropriately. Note that only allowing certain vendors is no fail safe either. A criminal can set work with a store which sells through amazon making sure that the “correct” copy gets sent to the prisoner, the postage can be forged to look like an approved vendor, a prison guard can be bribed etc. If there is a will to send a ciphered message to a prisoner, then there are means. Making life miserable for everyone else is not how you prevent this.
- spoonjim 5y agoSome prisons do do this where the inmates suspected of being active gang members are just put in the SHU arbitrarily.
- runarberg 5y agoSHU = Special Housing Unit? Is that another way to say isolation? If so, then please please please don’t do that. Isolation is a form of torture (as defined and declared by the UN[1]) and should never be done except for really rare cases. If you can’t limit a persons gang activity while they are confined in a prison without resorting to torture, then there is some serious incompetence going on. 1: https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/10/392012-solitary-confinement-should-be-banned-most-cases-un-expert-says https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/10/392012-solitary-confine...
- spoonjim 5y agoWell as Clarence Ray Allen showed, sometimes the only way to stop someone from killing people is to kill them.
- sobkas 5y ago> Well as Clarence Ray Allen showed, sometimes the only way to stop someone from killing people is to kill them. If killing is such a great solution, lets just kill everyone capable of committing a crime. It will definitely lower it.
- joe5150 5y agoit sounds plausible, but I couldn't find any good evidence of this being widespread. I also can't see how this justifies subject- or genre-based bans on new books.
- wesleywt 5y agoSo what. Gangs will pass messages no matter what you do. That looks like a prison administration problem and not a problem with the books.
- kbenson 5y ago> So what. The answer to the problem of "incarcerated individuals are using a resource provided to them to facilitate the murder of other individuals" should never be "so what".
- magicalist 5y agoI mean, "so what" seems ok until it's more than a thing a random hn commenter heard from someone when they volunteered at a prison that one time.
- kbenson 5y agoSo what doesn't call in to question the veracity of the statement, it implies that the situation described doesn't matter. To me it sounds like "Well, the problem is hard, so we should just accept that some people may die and live with it" as opposed to "we don't know how common that is" or "the alternative is worse and here's why". My objection is to what I see as a cavalier attitude towards the injuries and deaths of those we've incarcerated, which I think we have a clear duty to try to alleviate. We are legally required to not torture and or injure them, and I don't think turning a blind eye towards what happens in the environment we force them to be in diminishes our responsibility with respect to that.
- joshuamorton 5y agoI think you're taking a particularly uncharitable reading of GPs "so what". I read it precisely as asking the other person to make the value tradeoff argument.
- kbenson 5y ago
- annoyingnoob 5y ago> a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes And then we treat them like animals and take everything from them with no chance to improve themselves. Our prison system is broken and not based on outcomes but simply on incarceration. What if people needed to show an improvement in themselves instead? https://www.skyetravels.com/finnish-prison/ https://www.skyetravels.com/finnish-prison/
- Shared404 5y agoI would love to see something like BYU-I's Pathway program made widely available to prisoners. That's probably a pipe dream in US society though.
- okwubodu 5y agoWhy are we so eager to treat people according to the worst of them? It’s always “some may misuse it: take it from all of them.” It’s an insane way to treat human beings. I don’t know how someone can call this justice with a straight face.
- rhizome 5y ago"A little bad is all bad," is an instance of hypodescent, the same morality that gave us the one-drop rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
- whatshisface 5y agoPrison operators are held accountable for crimes committed in their prisons, but they aren't rewarded for teaching prisoners.
- lookalike74 5y agoPrison operators turning a blind eye to guards openly selling contraband and cellphone access to prisoners is not only criminal but rampant. A federal prison in the southeastern U.S. recently transferred 90% of their inmates to other facilities and banned staff due to the incredible corruption there. And sorry, but teaching prisoners starts with the prisons funding teachers, not 'rewards.'
- jerry1979 5y agoWas that Atlanta?
- beebeepka 5y agoWe all know it's just a pretext
- ravi-delia 5y agoI'm deeply sympathetic to this viewpoint, and definitely oppose book bans and restrictions. That being said, I think you're misinterpreting OP's perspective. They aren't (at least not deliberately) proposing these restrictions out as some punishment for immorality, they're specifically concerned about safety. If significant numbers of people die that wouldn't die if books were restricted, that's at least an argument for a ban. Again, I'm not saying at anything near enough people die due to book-organized hits to swing the scales. That seems...unlikely, to say the least. I'd just argue that there's a difference between keeping all the kids in at recess and hits being called.
- chipgap98 5y agoDoes banning used books actually stop any of the communication between gang members? Do we have any idea how often books are used to incite violence versus how often they are just read? What percentage of prison violence comes from book encoding versus other means? These seem questions you would have to answer before coming to the conclusion that banning books is the right answer here. "a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes" seems to imply that we can justify mistreatment of millions of Americans. If there are problems with prison violence we should address those rather than just limiting access to books.
- Eelongate 5y ago> Does banning used books actually stop any of the communication between gang members? Definitely not, it's impossible to stop unless maybe you go full supermax and utterly isolate every prisoner from every other. And even then, they might still tap out messages to each other through the walls. You'd need very thick walls to prevent that I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code#History
- ohyeshedid 5y ago> Does banning used books actually stop any of the communication between gang members? No, there are unlimited ways to fly a kite.
- ineedasername 5y agoI don't think books are where we should be putting up the fight to stop covert communication when prisoners can pass messages in so many different ways. Not with the positive impacts that education in prison can have compared to covert communication that's barely impacted at all by such a ban.
- authed 5y agoOh my gosh... that is a crazy argument. Reminds me of Bush & Obama that allowed spying on everyone because of a terrorist attack (not sure, but Trump also probably signed an extension of the "PATRIOT" act, and Biden is next.)
- opo 5y ago>...(not sure, but Trump also probably signed an extension of the "PATRIOT" act, and Biden is next.) No Trump did not extend it: >...After President Donald Trump threatened to veto the bill, the House of Representatives issued an indefinite postponement of the vote to pass the Senate version of the bill; as of December 2020, the Patriot Act remains expired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act We will have to see what Biden does.
- authed 5y ago> as of December 2020, the Patriot Act remains expired That's great to hear.
- bccdee 5y agoAny form of communication is a medium for coded messages. Steganography through e-mail, code words exchanged during visitors' hours. I think it's silly to hold up books as a dangerous avenue for secret communication when there are already so many other ways of communicating with someone in prison. The only way to prevent secret messages from getting inside prisons would be to cut off all communication with the outside world, and that would be totally inhumane even if it were possible.
- cool_dude85 5y agoQuick question for you. You observed this behavior as a volunteer teacher for weekly classes directly, along with enough context to understand what the codes were used for and how prolific the usage was? Or you were told at least some of the details in your post by prison administration? the same jolly group of fellows responsible for producing, implementing, and administering the type of policies being criticized in this article?
- kingcharles 5y agoHaving been in jails I've never seen anything of this sort. Although I did set up a coded email system using the commissary food ordering computer which got me labeled as a hacker and eventually banned from using the PCs for school. [I was teaching C# using the compiler hidden away in the Windows folder]
- antman 5y agoThat is a great hack actually! But which compiler is that?
- kingcharles 5y agoAnywhere that has .Net Framework installed usually has the compiler on hand. See for instance: https://people.cs.ksu.edu/~schmidt/200s08/findCsharp.html https://people.cs.ksu.edu/~schmidt/200s08/findCsharp.html
- trothamel 5y agoAlso the same jolly fellows that have to deal with the aftermath of the hits.
- rexpop 5y agoNot more-so than the prisoners, themselves, and by a large margin.
- deleted 5y ago
- joe_the_user 5y agoCitations? I haven't taught in prisons but I know several people who have and I haven't heard such a claim. Just as much, I don't see how teaching an 3-hour weekly class would give you inside information about activities this. I mean, even if an inmate said this was happening, I'm not sure how believable they'd be.
- kingcharles 5y agoI've never seen communications in books like poster says, but I've seen dozens of other ways. (I was just released from jail)
- dathinab 5y agoDoes it really matter? As far as I can tell cipher messages are passed around successfully all the time in more or less all US prisons.
- jquery 5y agoWas this what you witnessed or what the BS explanation for the flagrantly racist anti-literacy policies were? Thanks for your volunteering, but seriously, did you even spend more than a few minutes thinking about how ridiculous that reasoning is? Could be used to ban anything. Taking away books from prisoners isn't the solution to gang violence. Absurd. This is just more crappy punitive American "justice", no different than the lack of AC in 75% of Texas prisons meant to torture inmates in the summer.
- RickJWagner 5y agoI can validate your statement that prison has some 'seriously bad dudes'. I used to live in a city with a federal penitentiary, I made friends with several people that worked there. One friend worded it this way: There are a some people that are just there due to circumstances, or bad choices, or whatever. Then there are some people there that will hurt you or anyone else just for the fun of it. You definitely want to avoid the mean ones, because there is no rhyme or reason to why they want to hurt you.
- ryanlol 5y agoHe was describing the people working in the prison, right? That sounds like a pretty good description of prison guards.
- RickJWagner 5y agoUm, no. Have you ever been around prison guards, rec specialists, medical providers? Some of the best people you'll ever meet. They're working to help others.
- ryanlol 5y agoYes, I have been to prison. In Scandinavia, where the prisons are supposed to be the best in the world. > prison guards, rec specialists, medical providers? Some of the best people you'll ever meet Some of them, yeah. There’s always a few people who came to work in prisons to make the world a better place. Most of them? It’s just a job they could get, not a particularly cozy one at that. Arendt shocked the world by writing about the banality of evil, the nazis weren’t monsters. Instead, they were just boring bureaucrats. Most of them were perfectly nice, ordinary people just following orders. The prison guards obviously aren’t nazis, but even the nazis seemed like perfectly normal people until you paid very careful attention.
- Andrex 5y agoKindles?
- Brian_K_White 5y agoWhat stops them from using codes in any other form of communication? This rationale fails the most basic sniff test.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y agoThis reeks of "b..b..but think of the children" levels of discussion. >.... It's hard for most people to imagine but a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes, We've heard this before.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 5y agoI am sure that's the case and I'm sure a no-books policy makes administration easier. But at the end of the day, a "summary execution" policy would be even easier to administer and we all rightly recoil from that one.
- farrarstan 5y agowhere’d you go loser?
- SilasX 5y agoWait, what? Am I reading that right? You're saying there's a community of "naturals" at steganography, and the prison system can't somehow leverage that to find them legitimate work that keeps them from being reliant on a life of crime and perpetually trying to outsmart the legal system for nefarious ends? And before anyone says it: yes, I know, prison labor, at least as currently done in the US, is abusive. But surely there's a middle ground that allows such tradecraft experts to earn fair wages while they build up useful skills, and which incentivizes them to go white hat?
- zestyping 5y agoI see the concern, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with where the books come from. It's no justification for prohibiting books from all but a few approved vendors, prohibiting used books, prohibiting e-books, or eviscerating prison libraries. There may be other arguments for these other prohibitions. But the coded-message argument is completely without merit.
- maceurt 5y agoThey can pass info regardless. The guards are the way that most prisoners circumvent rules. Regardless, the biggest security risk is created by overpopulation and inadequate resources/ old buildings. And certain rights are more important than the increased risk of illegal activity or violence.
- sysOpOpPERAND 5y agothey could broadcast the books to different cells by embedded audio