5 ms·

The whole idea of putting a man in a box with other criminals so he can "think about what he did" seems like a complete failure, besides the fact that he's kept

The whole idea of putting a man in a box with other criminals so he can "think about what he did" seems like a complete failure, besides the fact that he's kept away from the public so he can't commit more crimes. It's one thing when someone has life in prison without the possibility of parole, but if a man is eventually going to be let out, what good does it really do to prevent him from being able to function on the outside? Basically nothing, as far as I can tell. He is destined to be destitute and possibly go back to a life of criminality. People don't want money and resources to go towards training "violent murderers who didn't do anything to deserve what they're getting", but then what else do you expect other than that you're deferring the criminality to a later date? The odds are not in your favor that the prisoner be reformed by the time he gets out. Reforming criminals, and I mean actual reformation and not the horseshit we consider reformation today, is a cost society should bear for its own good so that prison actually means something. Why let prisoners out when they are likely destined to go right back to prison?

tiedieconderoga 3y ago
>what good does it really do to prevent him from being able to function on the outside? From whose perspective? Part of the problem is that some powerful groups are incentived to keep people coming back to prison. Private prisons reap profits, politicians get an easy way to drive fear in their constituents, telcos can charge an arm and a leg for phone calls, commissaries clean up by charging exorbitant prices for toothpaste and ramen, etc. Until we start connecting positive outcomes for those groups to positive outcomes for the prisoners, it'll always be an uphill battle. As Upton Sinclair used to say, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- masklinn 3y ago
  Keeping people in prison forever is also a very “law and order” position which plays well with certain groups, and is very easy to sell: you don’t need any sort of nuance, you don’t face empathetic conflicts, etc…
- iamthirsty 3y ago
  Private prisons comprising a much smaller percentage of inmates than people realize.[0] [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Adult_incarceration_statistics_for_the_USA._Timeline.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
  - ROTMetro 3y ago
    Now do private companies providing the phone call service. Now do commissary. Now the computers where you pay per minute to write and read emails. Now do UNICOR (like forced labor for McDonalds Corporation who has UNICOR do the CAD work for their franchise store remodels all the way to CAD work being done on the new World Trade Center).
    - iamthirsty 3y ago
      I've done that research, and companies like JPay have incredible monopolies, and make a good amount of money. But that isn't what people refer to, and not the point I made. The common misconception is that private prisons themselves are the issues. Sure, the ancillaries are terrible, but relatively small by comparison. Sure, the government isn't providing those services, so private companies stepped in and monopolized. Regardless, they are providing a service for money. Not as shocking and horrible as it's made out to be.
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      Turns out that every problem can be solved with one more level of indirection also works for privatization.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
treeman79 3y ago
At some point if people keep attacking harming, and or murdering others. They just need to be put some place they won’t harm others. Too many people rob / mug others and get arrested dozens of times only to be back on the street quickly. A single person can traumatize hundreds.
beardog 3y ago
>besides the fact that he's kept away from the public so he can't commit more crimes. Even this part is a failure. Prisoners can and do commit crimes that victimize other prisoners, guards, and sometimes the outside public.
beambot 3y ago
The problem runs deep. Prison "slavery" is codified in the US Constitution's 13th Amendment: > Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Is it any wonder that "enterprising" organizations take advantage...?
- WindyLakeReturn 3y ago
  While I think there is a definite issue with prisons being used as a source of labor, I also don't see how you can have prison without it being slavery. At the very core, putting someone in a limited area they do not want to be in, forcing them to stay there under threat of violence, and forcing them to behave seems to be a form of slavery. Even if we were to consider a nice prison focused around rehabilitation and not exploitation, there are still things the prisoner is forced to do. They are forced not to leave. They are forced to follow certain rules. They are forced to move between locations at certain times of the day. They may be forced to attend classes or do specific types of labor like cleaning their rooms or common areas. Unlike a job where you might be 'forced' to clean, but you can always quit, quitting is rarely a choice for the prisoner and will result in worse punishment. Even if the prison does not directly profit off the labor of the prisoner, this level of control seems to be a form of slavery. Rarely do I see slavery defined as requiring profit to be made off the slave, though slavery rarely happens where it isn't found to be profitable by the person doing the enslaving (based on the enslaver's own view of what counts as profit). If we were to fully ban slavery even for prisons, then for even nice prisons to continue to exist we would have to define some other non-slavery action which would include having control of where a person lives, how they live, when they sleep, and all the other powers of a prison. In such a case, it would then be possible for a state to allow this non-slavery even for people not convicted of a crime, because it isn't slavery and thus isn't a violation of the 13th amendment. Generally things like kidnapping laws as they currently exist would prevent any private entity from doing this, but exceptions might be carved out. On realistic example would be teen rehabilitation camps which already can border on the legal limits of kidnapping, false imprisonment, and slavery. Some stories from these places already sound like they might be crossing the line, though that might only be allowed as long as they are dealing with minors with parental approval. I could reasonably see a state extending such treatment until the teen is 21 or such.
somenameforme 3y ago
When you walk into some store, why don't you just take whatever you want and walk out? Perhaps you have some virtuous reasons: maybe find stealing ethically wrong, or maybe from a philosophical point of view since if everybody stole at their discretion that society would collapse, or maybe you just don't want to have a reputation as a thief. But what if somebody didn't care about anything at all like that? And try as hard as you might, you simply couldn't convince him of your train of thought. What then? All that's really left is deterrence. In the past (and in the present in many places) if you steal then the first time something like a finger gets cut off, and the next time the hand comes off, and the third time - well don't steal three times. But of course that's barbaric, so we need to do things that aren't barbaric, but what? And so enters the idea of prison. Rehabilitation is of course ideal, but in reality some people simply can't be rehabilitated. So what do you do then? Separation of those who can and cannot be rehabilitated would ostensibly be ideal, but it's interesting to consider that in doing this you'd effectively be going full circle and recreating the asylum type systems of times long since past. It's unclear that this would be desirable even in the best of times, and we're certainly not in the best of times.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  I don’t think people think through the “deterrence” angle very well though. In order to make deterrence effective you need to have people who really stand to lose something, but like I was just listening to C.R.E.A.M last night (funny enough while playing chess) and Method Man raises an interesting point: “life in the world no different from a cell”. For someone facing seriously abject poverty, the potential rewards of crime may outweigh the costs. You can make prison progressively more horrible, but you can also make life outside of prison progressively better with IMO a similar effect. In the US we rarely discuss the anti-crime effects of social welfare policies, but they’re quite real. In a world without the kind of serious poverty we accept all over the US even 5 year prison sentence is a massive loss, because life outside is so much better. In a world where people are living in $10 a day then maybe 5 years in prison isn’t such a huge price if the upside risk appears big enoug
  - charcircuit 3y ago

tiedieconderoga 3y ago

>what good does it really do to prevent him from being able to function on the outside? From whose perspective? Part of the problem is that some powerful groups are incentived to keep people coming back to prison. Private prisons reap profits, politicians get an easy way to drive fear in their constituents, telcos can charge an arm and a leg for phone calls, commissaries clean up by charging exorbitant prices for toothpaste and ramen, etc. Until we start connecting positive outcomes for those groups to positive outcomes for the prisoners, it'll always be an uphill battle. As Upton Sinclair used to say, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

masklinn 3y ago
Keeping people in prison forever is also a very “law and order” position which plays well with certain groups, and is very easy to sell: you don’t need any sort of nuance, you don’t face empathetic conflicts, etc…
iamthirsty 3y ago
Private prisons comprising a much smaller percentage of inmates than people realize.[0] [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Adult_incarceration_statistics_for_the_USA._Timeline.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
- ROTMetro 3y ago
  Now do private companies providing the phone call service. Now do commissary. Now the computers where you pay per minute to write and read emails. Now do UNICOR (like forced labor for McDonalds Corporation who has UNICOR do the CAD work for their franchise store remodels all the way to CAD work being done on the new World Trade Center).
  - iamthirsty 3y ago
    I've done that research, and companies like JPay have incredible monopolies, and make a good amount of money. But that isn't what people refer to, and not the point I made. The common misconception is that private prisons themselves are the issues. Sure, the ancillaries are terrible, but relatively small by comparison. Sure, the government isn't providing those services, so private companies stepped in and monopolized. Regardless, they are providing a service for money. Not as shocking and horrible as it's made out to be.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    Turns out that every problem can be solved with one more level of indirection also works for privatization.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

treeman79 3y ago

At some point if people keep attacking harming, and or murdering others. They just need to be put some place they won’t harm others. Too many people rob / mug others and get arrested dozens of times only to be back on the street quickly. A single person can traumatize hundreds.

beardog 3y ago

>besides the fact that he's kept away from the public so he can't commit more crimes. Even this part is a failure. Prisoners can and do commit crimes that victimize other prisoners, guards, and sometimes the outside public.

beambot 3y ago

The problem runs deep. Prison "slavery" is codified in the US Constitution's 13th Amendment: > Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Is it any wonder that "enterprising" organizations take advantage...?

WindyLakeReturn 3y ago
While I think there is a definite issue with prisons being used as a source of labor, I also don't see how you can have prison without it being slavery. At the very core, putting someone in a limited area they do not want to be in, forcing them to stay there under threat of violence, and forcing them to behave seems to be a form of slavery. Even if we were to consider a nice prison focused around rehabilitation and not exploitation, there are still things the prisoner is forced to do. They are forced not to leave. They are forced to follow certain rules. They are forced to move between locations at certain times of the day. They may be forced to attend classes or do specific types of labor like cleaning their rooms or common areas. Unlike a job where you might be 'forced' to clean, but you can always quit, quitting is rarely a choice for the prisoner and will result in worse punishment. Even if the prison does not directly profit off the labor of the prisoner, this level of control seems to be a form of slavery. Rarely do I see slavery defined as requiring profit to be made off the slave, though slavery rarely happens where it isn't found to be profitable by the person doing the enslaving (based on the enslaver's own view of what counts as profit). If we were to fully ban slavery even for prisons, then for even nice prisons to continue to exist we would have to define some other non-slavery action which would include having control of where a person lives, how they live, when they sleep, and all the other powers of a prison. In such a case, it would then be possible for a state to allow this non-slavery even for people not convicted of a crime, because it isn't slavery and thus isn't a violation of the 13th amendment. Generally things like kidnapping laws as they currently exist would prevent any private entity from doing this, but exceptions might be carved out. On realistic example would be teen rehabilitation camps which already can border on the legal limits of kidnapping, false imprisonment, and slavery. Some stories from these places already sound like they might be crossing the line, though that might only be allowed as long as they are dealing with minors with parental approval. I could reasonably see a state extending such treatment until the teen is 21 or such.

somenameforme 3y ago

When you walk into some store, why don't you just take whatever you want and walk out? Perhaps you have some virtuous reasons: maybe find stealing ethically wrong, or maybe from a philosophical point of view since if everybody stole at their discretion that society would collapse, or maybe you just don't want to have a reputation as a thief. But what if somebody didn't care about anything at all like that? And try as hard as you might, you simply couldn't convince him of your train of thought. What then? All that's really left is deterrence. In the past (and in the present in many places) if you steal then the first time something like a finger gets cut off, and the next time the hand comes off, and the third time - well don't steal three times. But of course that's barbaric, so we need to do things that aren't barbaric, but what? And so enters the idea of prison. Rehabilitation is of course ideal, but in reality some people simply can't be rehabilitated. So what do you do then? Separation of those who can and cannot be rehabilitated would ostensibly be ideal, but it's interesting to consider that in doing this you'd effectively be going full circle and recreating the asylum type systems of times long since past. It's unclear that this would be desirable even in the best of times, and we're certainly not in the best of times.

tech_ken 3y ago
I don’t think people think through the “deterrence” angle very well though. In order to make deterrence effective you need to have people who really stand to lose something, but like I was just listening to C.R.E.A.M last night (funny enough while playing chess) and Method Man raises an interesting point: “life in the world no different from a cell”. For someone facing seriously abject poverty, the potential rewards of crime may outweigh the costs. You can make prison progressively more horrible, but you can also make life outside of prison progressively better with IMO a similar effect. In the US we rarely discuss the anti-crime effects of social welfare policies, but they’re quite real. In a world without the kind of serious poverty we accept all over the US even 5 year prison sentence is a massive loss, because life outside is so much better. In a world where people are living in $10 a day then maybe 5 years in prison isn’t such a huge price if the upside risk appears big enoug
- charcircuit 3y ago