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If there were an Amazon Prison option, I wonder how many people would choose it. Need to serve time? Skip the cell and stay home with a robust suite of real-tim
by ewzimm 4y ago
If there were an Amazon Prison option, I wonder how many people would choose it. Need to serve time? Skip the cell and stay home with a robust suite of real-time behavior analytics to ensure compliance. Conversations are processed locally and scanned for restricted subjects with advanced AI. A special Amazon Prison store offers a full suite of approved products with automatic payments, accessible with Alexa, and customized meal plans are optimized by biometrics. Need money? Work is available on Mechanical Turk at reduced rates for store credit only. Now available for undocumented immigrants awaiting processing!
- sokoloff 4y agoIf I had the choice to serve a sentence in real prison or Amazon Prison, I’m 100% on Team Jassy.
- yamtaddle 4y agoAlmost anything would be worth it to avoid prolonged contact with other prisoners and prison guards.
- tomcam 4y agoI have been incarcerated, and that is a yes from me as well
- slt2021 4y agoThen prison as a punishment will stop becoming a punishment and will reduce incentive to abide by laws
- yamtaddle 4y agoYou think... the threat of abuse and assault by inmates and guards is something we should keep around on purpose?
- slt2021 4y agoyes because there are always will be some criminals in population, and you want to keep the system bad so that others' wont ever think of committing crime, especially juveniles and first time offenders
- MichaelCollins 4y agoIf the government doesn't provide some measure of retributive justice, people will seek it themselves, and that is much worse for society.
- heavyset_go 4y agoThere are a lot of people that think like this, you won't be able to convince them that prisoners should be treated with dignity. I've found that they are receptive of evidence when it comes to efficacy, recidivism, cost, etc. If you care about those things, our prison system makes no sense, it only makes sense if cruelty and maintaining a steady supply of forced labor are the only things they care about.
- BoorishBears 4y agoIf how terrible prison is what backs your incentive to abide by laws, I'm worried. Criminals generally don't expect to be caught, the quality of prison doesn't matter much if you're not planning on going there.
- slt2021 4y agothere is always risk/reward calculation. if you replace prison time with home arrest, then you remove downside to being caught. Especially for second/Nth time offenders.
- BoorishBears 4y agoIf you're good with risk/reward you generally don't do crime (at least, not the kind that doesn't already leave you in the kind of minimum security-style prison being proposed here). In 2015 the average robbery netted less than $2,000 while the average sentence length was almost 10 years. Risking 10 years of your life for $2,000 isn't something that people who understand risk/reward will do, how bad things are while you spend those 10 years is basically a rounding error compared to just how terrible of an idea it already is.
- smegger001 4y agoif the cost to imprison someone is far larger than damages done maybe it would be cheaper for the tax payer to just make the victim whole and give the criminal a lesser sentence.
- 4y ago
- heavyset_go 4y agoPrisons are sexual assault factories, yet that didn't stop the 3 million people who are currently incarcerated here.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agowell why stop there, lets bring back brutal medieval torture, I am sure if people are threatened with being drawn and quartered that will bring the crime rate right down. Russia has torture in prisons and 99% conviction rate, how cone their crime rate is high? Finland's prisons look like 3 star hotels, how come their crime rate is low?
- DocTomoe 4y agoBecause degrading prison as a deterrent works so well, as evidenced in the low crime numbers of the US, as compared to rampant crime in Europe, where prison is much more human-rights-compliant.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 4y agoThat’s just called being a SDE in AWS.
- radicaldreamer 4y agoWhy would you not choose this over what prison is currently like? This is like asking whether people would prefer home confinement to being in a prison cell
- pwinnski 4y agoYou're halfway there. Now consider: why are people paying to put themselves in a light-security prison?
- MerelyMortal 4y agoBecause they don't recognize it will become a prison, or even if they do, they rationize it by saying it's not currently a prison.
- nostrademons 4y agoInterestingly the state has an incentive to take this approach too: it's much cheaper. If you can monitor & enforce confinement without actually building any prisons, you don't need to budget for prisons, you don't need to operate prisons (or contract out to them), and you can avoid the political blowback of the prison/industrial complex. The limiting case for this is the Matrix or Metaverse, where everybody voluntarily confines themselves to their home and interacts with each other only according to the rules of the governing software. No possibility for crime because there are no unmediated interactions, and the state has total control.
- radicaldreamer 4y agoThe state, unfortunately, does not have a great incentive to reduce costs; especially since a lot of prisons are run by for-profit entities.
- staticautomatic 4y ago…that are paid by the state.
- systemvoltage 4y agoWe like to pick on Amazon disproportionately I think. At least in my situation, Apple and Google know far more about me in the most terrifying ways than Amazon. Apple has access* to my entire Phone and over 12 years of phone backups on iCloud. My most intimate conversations, photos, medical and biometric data, etc. Amazon has access to purchase history, not much more since I don't use Alexa. * I understand its all encrypted but we're wearing tin foils at the moment.
- dpflan 4y agoMaybe "Amazon Prism" (a "Prime" members' version of "prison") has a catchier ring to it...
- whyenot 4y agoI would have gone with Amazon Prime Time
- Smoosh 4y agoAmazon Prime and Punishment? (Sorry Mr Dostoevsky).
- belfalas 4y agoAmazon Panopticon would be my submission. If you're going to go evil, lean in all the way.
- emptyparadise 4y agoCalling it Prism would be especially funny in a disdainful way, given a certain NSA program.
- devteambravo 4y agoCompared to a typical US prison, that sounds like a sweet deal. Y'all, we made Black Mirror
- glitchc 4y agoYou need to define home here. I sense an implicit assumption that this is a single family home with more than one bedroom. What is home for an undocumented migrant?
- goodpoint 4y agoIt's already happening. Surveillance using modern technology e.g. GPS ankle bracelets, voice recognition, facial recognition is being widely deployed. For decades surveillance has becoming cheaper and therefore more pervasive and more socially accepted. We are building platforms that can enable turn-key dictatorship. Something that will be extremely difficult to overturn.
- noduerme 4y agoThat basically describes my pandemic year.
- fhcjcgcych 4y agoHow would this be meaningfully different than house arrest? Not that it's a terrible idea but we already have exactly this except that the reason you would use Amazon is simply becsuse you had to as there's no other services with similar reliability. House arrest would probably be better for the government too since the 'prisoner' is paying personal rates rather than whatever Amazon might charge the government for the "service". The only advantage to prison is that it gurantees lodging during the forced homestead which is significant because, contrary to the rosy image painted by portrayals of these people as victims of the system, most of these people are screwups who arent going to have the rent money to keep living where they reside if you bar them from leaving home. The practical implementation would be likely be to just issue section 8 style rent vouchers and contract with gig services and ghost kitchens to ensure you're not liable for starving people to death. After all, Amazon already does the things you've described for the most part anyway. It would probably be much cheaper than real jail. The main other expense that comes to mind is the utility bills and an insurance plan for when the 'prisoners' inevitably vandalize the home you've obligated into keeping them.
- belfalas 4y agoYou jest, but most likely someone at Amazon will read this and think to themselves: "you know...the for-profit private prison industry is ripe for disruption. This could be a good lead." Also, what you describe has been done before in history. In the 19th century in the US there were "Pullman Towns" - everything from A to Z owned by the Pullman company. "Get baptized in a Pullman church, go to a Pullman school, work for Pullman all your life, and get buried in a Pullman graveyard." was an activist slogan at the time. (I learned this from history class at university, paraphrasing from memory). More on Pullman Towns here: https://www.pullman-museum.org/theTown/ https://www.pullman-museum.org/theTown/
- oliveshell 4y agoFor the curious: besides the Pullman towns, there were many other “company towns” [1] in the United States, owned by various companies [2]. Some of the most exploitive ones were owned by mining firms, as immortalized in the famous protest song “Sixteen Tons”, with its refrain “I owe my soul to the company store”. [3] (This song may be familiar to South Park viewers.) [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_towns_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_towns_in_the_U... [3] http://www.protestsonglyrics.net/Labor_Union_Songs/Sixteen-Tons.phtml http://www.protestsonglyrics.net/Labor_Union_Songs/Sixteen-T... [4] https://youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc https://youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc
- belfalas 4y agoThank you for pointing that out - yes, Pullman is one of the most famous examples but the issue was rampant during the Industrial Revolution. In a sense we are now re-living that past, call it the "Digital Industrial Revolution."
- CamperBob2 4y agoYou jest, but most likely someone at Amazon will read this and think to themselves: "you know...the for-profit private prison industry is ripe for disruption. This could be a good lead." "Good business is where you find it." - Dick Jones, Omni Consumer Products
- coldtea 4y ago>Need to serve time? Skip the cell and stay home with a robust suite of real-time behavior analytics to ensure compliance. How would that differ from regular life?
- knewter 4y agoPeople don't appreciate that CBDCs will become the Amazon Prison you describe.
- hnews_account_1 4y agoAside from the dystopian undertone, if I was a betting man, I’d wager they’ll immediately spawn entire industries that disable these surveillance devices for a cost. At the cyberpunk end of dystopian, if I was selling the surveillance tech, I’d also dip into the counter industry and provide some low severity exploits for and play both sides. I wonder if Neal Stephenson has written something of this sort. In Snow Crash, prisons were a per franchise affair iirc.
- nonch0n 4y agoI'd much rather go to the Hoosegow than the Clink
- aqme28 4y agoThis is one of the major plot points for the film Sorry To Bother You.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago"Conversatations are processd locally and scanned for restricted subjects with advanced AI." That includes any conversations with lawyers.