7 ms·

Anecdotally, my brother in law was in US prison (federal) and we would send him books all the time and he would read them and trade them around for other books.

Anecdotally, my brother in law was in US prison (federal) and we would send him books all the time and he would read them and trade them around for other books. It's hard to contextualize how much nothing they have to do in prison. Reading is literally one of the only things you could be guaranteed to be able to do on a day to day basis regardless of lock down status.

rqtwteye 4y ago
I have seen videos where they trained dogs or had adopted rescue cats. I think a lot of prisoners would do way better if they got a chance to feel like a productive member of society. Them being firefighters in California wildfires comes to mind too.
- capableweb 4y ago
  There is generally two types of prisons in the world, one is "Punish"/"Keep rest of the world safe" prisons, and the other is "Rehabilitation" prisons. The latter tries to make people be able to re-integrate after finishing the sentence, while the first doesn't care as long as they are imprisoned and kept away from the rest of "normal folks". Convincing people that rehabilitation is possible is a huge job, and I don't see that happening in the US anytime soon.
  - diveandfight 4y ago
    Rather than types, maybe those qualities are more like ends on a spectrum?
    - rqtwteye 4y ago
      It's a very US thing to present issues as one side or the other, "Left or Right", "Capitalist or Socialist" with nothing between. In reality almost everything is on a (multi-dimensional) spectrum with a lot of nuance. This binary thinking is reinforced by TV and social media and is tearing the country apart.
    - strken 4y ago
      Maybe even axes on a graph, where prisons strive to be on the Pareto front at different points.
  - quacked 4y ago
    "Rehabilitation" is in many cases a misnomer. There's a difference between Rehabilitating someone who developed a problem and Habilitating someone who was never taught to think with a moral compass. People in the US could be convinced to get behind major prison reform if the reformers weren't so insistent on representing every felon as Jean Valjean.
    - at_a_remove 4y ago
      I was watching an interesting video of a young woman who had just gotten a DUI. She didn't understand why it was a "thing" because she hadn't hit anyone. She managed to argue herself into two months in the county jail because she didn't understand and did not want to understand. She also tried, briefly, to make a case that she was too attractive for prison. Upon questioning, it was fairly clear that she would go on to reoffend. I saw another video of five teens who liked throwing heavy rocks over a busy overpass. They had done this more than once. Of course, they ended up killing someone, after which text messages were exchanged with much LOL and LFMOA and HAHAHA. Apparently, they had pre-planned some kind of defense where everyone would agree that the eldest of the bunch was the only one throwing the rocks, as well. The four youngest got a year of probation. The eldest got three and a quarter years in prison. He's out and the rest are long clear of their probation. I am unsure what could be done to rehabilitate these individuals rather than merely coercing lip service from them.
      - throwway120385 4y ago
        I am equally unsure. But I believe we have a responsibility to try to help the weakest members of our society become better people, and if that means locking them up for a while and trying to teach them a moral compass that's what we should try even if it's doomed to failure. It can't be any worse than what we're currently doing.
        AlbertCory 4y ago
        Psychopathic individuals mainly use therapy as post-graduate training in how to simulate human emotion. Just ask some shrinks. They don't learn a moral compass; they learn how to pretend they have one. Of course, not all inmates are psychopathic, but 15-25% manifest those traits, according to https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy.
  - wefarrell 4y ago
    Rehabilitation requires education and social services and once you start providing those resources to prisoners people question the logic of giving prisoners something for free that everyone else has to pay for. Why should a prisoner get access to college classes while a law abiding citizen has to pay tens of thousands of dollars? Of course it winds up saving the state money by decreasing recidivism, but it raises inconvenient questions.
    - Ar-Curunir 4y ago
      The correct answer, of course, is that everyone should have access to basic educational and social services. This is unpopular with many in the US.
      - kevviiinn 4y ago
        It's a great way for capital owners to keep workers fighting amongst themselves
  - 1270018080 4y ago
    A solid 30% of the country doesn't even want people to have healthcare. There are fundamental issues that make the populace irredeemable ideologically. Of course if you could reprogram that 30% we'd be okay, but, like you said, good luck with that.
  - Fezzik 4y ago
    In law this is often couched as ‘retribution’ vs ‘rehabilitation’. I’ve been out of law school for over a decade, but about ten years ago pretty much all the evidence was the retributive prisons/legal systems were awful (created more recidivists, were more expensive, had more conflict between staff and inmates, etc…).
  - saithound 4y ago
    As one of the people in the camp that firmly rejects rehabilitation: if you think that it's hard to convince me that rehabilitation is possible, I have bad news for you. Most of us don't care if it's possible or not: to get us on board, you'd have to convince us that rehabilitation is _just_, which is a much harder task. I think a good argument could change my mind, but it has to be a moral argument, not an economic one. "We rehabilitated your rapist and integrated them into our society" is considered by many to be an affront to the victims, and the very opposite of justice. If you were to convince me that it was 100% possible, and the rehabilitated criminals become productive members of our society, that would make me support it less, not more.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jon-wood 4y ago
      What if we reframe this from the extreme of a rapist, where I agree in many cases retribution needs to be an element of the sentence. How about someone who’s been sentenced for stealing, which they did in order to feed their kids? They dropped out of high school, and have never held down a steady job. Do you genuinely believe it’s better to further smack them down with a criminal justice system that will prevent them getting a job in the future, rather than having them leave prison qualified to do something productive?
      - saithound 4y ago
        > How about someone who’s been sentenced for stealing, which they did in order to feed their kids? Current valid defenses against a charge of larceny include amking an honest mistake, being mentally incapacitated, and having the intention to restore. If you believe that "immediate physical need even without an intention to restore" should be a valid defense against this criminal charge as well, I'm with you. I don't think we disagree on that. The law does, but it's much easier to convince people that certain specific acts should not be considered criminal than to convince them of the justness of rehabilitating actual criminals. So, as far as I can tell, such examples have no bearing on the question of rehabilitation at all: why would we need to rehabilitate somebody who's not guilty in the first place?! If somebody is guilty of a crime, however, how could eventually letting a perpetrator return to society, get a job and do something productive _not_ be a further unjust act against the victim? Almost everybody agrees that the state helping perpetrators of a crime to get revenge on their victims would be twisted and heinous. I'm sure you agree too. But living well is the best revenge, and that's exactly what rehabilitation is: preparing an incarcerated offender to live well (function as a law-abiding member of the society) after their release, and by that further torment their victims.
- jeffwask 4y ago
  He had a job running the commissary but even that only filled so much time. He would have loved anything that allowed him to learn a skill he could have used on release.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- LambdaComplex 4y ago
  > Them being firefighters in California wildfires comes to mind too Those are the ones that aren't allowed to work as firefighters once they're out of prison due to their criminal records, right?
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    Correct. It's not rehabilitation or job training, it's legal slave labor to do one of the most dangerous jobs we have, as explicitly allowed for by the 13th Amendment of the Constitution. The United States still has legal slavery, just with extra steps.
    - hkt 4y ago
      > just with extra steps I thought the whole thing here was that for inmates, there weren't any extra steps? I'll confess to not knowing much about this though (I'm not American)
      - hirsin 4y ago
        The extra steps are the ones between them being a free person and an inmate.
        anonporridge 4y ago
        Like making loitering a crime and then using police and prosecutor discretion to selectively enforce said crime only against poor minorities. And like magic! You can re-enslave the people who were 'freed'.
    - pb7 4y ago
      Except no one is forcing them, they choose to do it because it gives them purpose.
      - DangitBobby 4y ago
        Yes, I've heard that these positions are highly sought after and gives the _volunteers_ a sense of purpose, but it gives some people living comfortably outside of prison icky feelings about consent. I have no doubt prisoners would have some choice words for people in this comment section who would choose to take the option away from them.
ALittleLight 4y ago
We (society) should get them access to Khan Academy plus a ChatGPT style interface for interactive tutoring. Imagine giving each prisoner a tablet, possibly wrapped in the kids edition foam so they couldn't hit each other with it, and letting them work through basic education in every field they're interested in. I expect people who worked on it would come out of a substantial sentence better educated than most.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  That would be nice, but first you have to get around the nightmarish world of for-profit corporations that control all prisoner access to information and communication in the US. The system is designed to bleed every penny possible from prisoners and their families, not to rehabilitate them.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    I think for profit prisons are a small fraction of the carceral system. Most prisons are government run. Even in the case of private prisons what we need is to align incentives. We shouldn't be mainly paying per inmate, but rather give the private prison X% of the inmate's taxes after release and nothing if the inmate offends again. The idea is, we don't want to incentivize prisons to just hold people - that actually incentivizes the prisons to promote recidivism. We do want the prisons to impart job and life skills that will make the prisoner a productive and law abiding member of society after release.
    - kritr 4y ago
      Looks like around 8.4% of prisons were private in the US in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison
      - melagonster 4y ago
        let 90% people can learn something there is a good Idea.
asdfman123 4y ago
> Reading is literally one of the only things you could be guaranteed to be able to do on a day to day basis regardless of lock down status. Why did you bring my early 2000s suburban upbringing into this?

rqtwteye 4y ago

I have seen videos where they trained dogs or had adopted rescue cats. I think a lot of prisoners would do way better if they got a chance to feel like a productive member of society. Them being firefighters in California wildfires comes to mind too.

capableweb 4y ago
There is generally two types of prisons in the world, one is "Punish"/"Keep rest of the world safe" prisons, and the other is "Rehabilitation" prisons. The latter tries to make people be able to re-integrate after finishing the sentence, while the first doesn't care as long as they are imprisoned and kept away from the rest of "normal folks". Convincing people that rehabilitation is possible is a huge job, and I don't see that happening in the US anytime soon.
- diveandfight 4y ago
  Rather than types, maybe those qualities are more like ends on a spectrum?
  - rqtwteye 4y ago
    It's a very US thing to present issues as one side or the other, "Left or Right", "Capitalist or Socialist" with nothing between. In reality almost everything is on a (multi-dimensional) spectrum with a lot of nuance. This binary thinking is reinforced by TV and social media and is tearing the country apart.
  - strken 4y ago
    Maybe even axes on a graph, where prisons strive to be on the Pareto front at different points.
- quacked 4y ago
  "Rehabilitation" is in many cases a misnomer. There's a difference between Rehabilitating someone who developed a problem and Habilitating someone who was never taught to think with a moral compass. People in the US could be convinced to get behind major prison reform if the reformers weren't so insistent on representing every felon as Jean Valjean.
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    I was watching an interesting video of a young woman who had just gotten a DUI. She didn't understand why it was a "thing" because she hadn't hit anyone. She managed to argue herself into two months in the county jail because she didn't understand and did not want to understand. She also tried, briefly, to make a case that she was too attractive for prison. Upon questioning, it was fairly clear that she would go on to reoffend. I saw another video of five teens who liked throwing heavy rocks over a busy overpass. They had done this more than once. Of course, they ended up killing someone, after which text messages were exchanged with much LOL and LFMOA and HAHAHA. Apparently, they had pre-planned some kind of defense where everyone would agree that the eldest of the bunch was the only one throwing the rocks, as well. The four youngest got a year of probation. The eldest got three and a quarter years in prison. He's out and the rest are long clear of their probation. I am unsure what could be done to rehabilitate these individuals rather than merely coercing lip service from them.
    - throwway120385 4y ago
      I am equally unsure. But I believe we have a responsibility to try to help the weakest members of our society become better people, and if that means locking them up for a while and trying to teach them a moral compass that's what we should try even if it's doomed to failure. It can't be any worse than what we're currently doing.
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        Psychopathic individuals mainly use therapy as post-graduate training in how to simulate human emotion. Just ask some shrinks. They don't learn a moral compass; they learn how to pretend they have one. Of course, not all inmates are psychopathic, but 15-25% manifest those traits, according to https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy.
- wefarrell 4y ago
  Rehabilitation requires education and social services and once you start providing those resources to prisoners people question the logic of giving prisoners something for free that everyone else has to pay for. Why should a prisoner get access to college classes while a law abiding citizen has to pay tens of thousands of dollars? Of course it winds up saving the state money by decreasing recidivism, but it raises inconvenient questions.
  - Ar-Curunir 4y ago
    The correct answer, of course, is that everyone should have access to basic educational and social services. This is unpopular with many in the US.
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      It's a great way for capital owners to keep workers fighting amongst themselves
- 1270018080 4y ago
  A solid 30% of the country doesn't even want people to have healthcare. There are fundamental issues that make the populace irredeemable ideologically. Of course if you could reprogram that 30% we'd be okay, but, like you said, good luck with that.
- Fezzik 4y ago
  In law this is often couched as ‘retribution’ vs ‘rehabilitation’. I’ve been out of law school for over a decade, but about ten years ago pretty much all the evidence was the retributive prisons/legal systems were awful (created more recidivists, were more expensive, had more conflict between staff and inmates, etc…).
- saithound 4y ago
  As one of the people in the camp that firmly rejects rehabilitation: if you think that it's hard to convince me that rehabilitation is possible, I have bad news for you. Most of us don't care if it's possible or not: to get us on board, you'd have to convince us that rehabilitation is _just_, which is a much harder task. I think a good argument could change my mind, but it has to be a moral argument, not an economic one. "We rehabilitated your rapist and integrated them into our society" is considered by many to be an affront to the victims, and the very opposite of justice. If you were to convince me that it was 100% possible, and the rehabilitated criminals become productive members of our society, that would make me support it less, not more.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jon-wood 4y ago
    What if we reframe this from the extreme of a rapist, where I agree in many cases retribution needs to be an element of the sentence. How about someone who’s been sentenced for stealing, which they did in order to feed their kids? They dropped out of high school, and have never held down a steady job. Do you genuinely believe it’s better to further smack them down with a criminal justice system that will prevent them getting a job in the future, rather than having them leave prison qualified to do something productive?
    - saithound 4y ago
      > How about someone who’s been sentenced for stealing, which they did in order to feed their kids? Current valid defenses against a charge of larceny include amking an honest mistake, being mentally incapacitated, and having the intention to restore. If you believe that "immediate physical need even without an intention to restore" should be a valid defense against this criminal charge as well, I'm with you. I don't think we disagree on that. The law does, but it's much easier to convince people that certain specific acts should not be considered criminal than to convince them of the justness of rehabilitating actual criminals. So, as far as I can tell, such examples have no bearing on the question of rehabilitation at all: why would we need to rehabilitate somebody who's not guilty in the first place?! If somebody is guilty of a crime, however, how could eventually letting a perpetrator return to society, get a job and do something productive _not_ be a further unjust act against the victim? Almost everybody agrees that the state helping perpetrators of a crime to get revenge on their victims would be twisted and heinous. I'm sure you agree too. But living well is the best revenge, and that's exactly what rehabilitation is: preparing an incarcerated offender to live well (function as a law-abiding member of the society) after their release, and by that further torment their victims.
jeffwask 4y ago
He had a job running the commissary but even that only filled so much time. He would have loved anything that allowed him to learn a skill he could have used on release.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
LambdaComplex 4y ago
> Them being firefighters in California wildfires comes to mind too Those are the ones that aren't allowed to work as firefighters once they're out of prison due to their criminal records, right?
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Correct. It's not rehabilitation or job training, it's legal slave labor to do one of the most dangerous jobs we have, as explicitly allowed for by the 13th Amendment of the Constitution. The United States still has legal slavery, just with extra steps.
  - hkt 4y ago
    > just with extra steps I thought the whole thing here was that for inmates, there weren't any extra steps? I'll confess to not knowing much about this though (I'm not American)
    - hirsin 4y ago
      The extra steps are the ones between them being a free person and an inmate.
      - anonporridge 4y ago
        Like making loitering a crime and then using police and prosecutor discretion to selectively enforce said crime only against poor minorities. And like magic! You can re-enslave the people who were 'freed'.
  - pb7 4y ago
    Except no one is forcing them, they choose to do it because it gives them purpose.
    - DangitBobby 4y ago
      Yes, I've heard that these positions are highly sought after and gives the _volunteers_ a sense of purpose, but it gives some people living comfortably outside of prison icky feelings about consent. I have no doubt prisoners would have some choice words for people in this comment section who would choose to take the option away from them.

ALittleLight 4y ago

We (society) should get them access to Khan Academy plus a ChatGPT style interface for interactive tutoring. Imagine giving each prisoner a tablet, possibly wrapped in the kids edition foam so they couldn't hit each other with it, and letting them work through basic education in every field they're interested in. I expect people who worked on it would come out of a substantial sentence better educated than most.

egypturnash 4y ago
That would be nice, but first you have to get around the nightmarish world of for-profit corporations that control all prisoner access to information and communication in the US. The system is designed to bleed every penny possible from prisoners and their families, not to rehabilitate them.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I think for profit prisons are a small fraction of the carceral system. Most prisons are government run. Even in the case of private prisons what we need is to align incentives. We shouldn't be mainly paying per inmate, but rather give the private prison X% of the inmate's taxes after release and nothing if the inmate offends again. The idea is, we don't want to incentivize prisons to just hold people - that actually incentivizes the prisons to promote recidivism. We do want the prisons to impart job and life skills that will make the prisoner a productive and law abiding member of society after release.
  - kritr 4y ago
    Looks like around 8.4% of prisons were private in the US in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison
    - melagonster 4y ago
      let 90% people can learn something there is a good Idea.

asdfman123 4y ago

> Reading is literally one of the only things you could be guaranteed to be able to do on a day to day basis regardless of lock down status. Why did you bring my early 2000s suburban upbringing into this?