8 ms·
Prison isn’t set up for today’s tech so we have to do legal work the old way
- aspenmayer 1y agoPrison is like a SCIF you can never leave.
- mikeodds 1y agoEqually awkward places to have your phone not on silent
- aspenmayer 1y agoCould’a swear I turn the ringer off Was wrong, first burner nick(ed) Had’a ‘nother one; unsure on vibrate tho So now my cellie’s shitting bricks
- red-iron-pine 1y agojust as many doors to get buzzed in through slightly less cavity searches
- buckle8017 1y agoSounds like your lawyer messed up not sending paper copies. Good thing he saved the $10.
- bdangubic 1y agoPaper copies?????! What is this, 1999 :-) Many (many, many…) Courts have been fully paperless for years
- buckle8017 1y agook but the jail is not and he would have gotten the paper copies right away
- School-Cotton 1y agoSure, but what stops the lawyer from printing out the PDFs?
- awesome_dude 1y agoHave you SEEN the price of ink????
- btown 1y agoDon't worry! If ink's too expensive to buy outright, have no fear - you can buy a subscription to Instant Ink and pay... (checks notes) even more! But you'll never need to worry about buying ink again! https://www.hp.com/us-en/printers/instant-ink.html#section=explore-plans https://www.hp.com/us-en/printers/instant-ink.html#section=e...
- Havoc 1y agoWhy can’t they just change the rules? At some point surely everyone involved can see it’s just silly
- buckle8017 1y agobecause they don't trust inmates with computers and they also don't trust their lawyers
- decimalenough 1y agoWhy would they? Put yourself in a prison bureaucrat's shoes. There is no upside to changing the rules, easier legal work or whatever for the inmates doesn't affect them (hell, it might even cause more work). But if they do change the rules and something bad happens (like, shock horror, somebody smuggling in a picture of a naked lady), it's their ass on the line for approving it.
- moron4hire 1y agoThe downside for them is more like: prisoners get released earlier, so they don't make their quarterly earnings targets, so that's why their asses are on the line.
- zx8080 1y agoSeems pretty serious and probably very real KPI. We live in a capitalist society, after all. Why does the parent get downvoted?
- potato3732842 1y agoBecause the majority of prisons are not private and all the perverse "muh headcount, muh resources, muh silo" incentives that you see in government are more applicable.
- moron4hire 1y ago
- quietthrow 1y agoAren’t prisons a business run by corporations? And I could be wrong but I recall reading somewhere a while ago that 1 or 2 companies run most of the prisons in USA. As such they probably have no need / incentives driven by market forces to modernize. It’s not exactly a market to begin with in the first place I would say.
- cmeacham98 1y agoNew Jersey State Prison is, as the name implies, a state-run prison.
- ronsor 1y agoMost people are not in private prisons (< 10% [0]), even if there shouldn't be any at all. Of course, there are still many "contractors" and "vendors" (phone service providers, food vendors, etc.) in public prisons which grift everyone. [0] https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in-the-united-states/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...
- monkeyelite 1y agoPublic is when the government holds the wallet and pays vendors. Private is when they give a wallet to someone else to pay the vendors.
- poslathian 1y agoAfter becoming familiar with the reality of the cost inflation of (in my case local government real estate) development projects vs private I chalked it up to graft, incentives, and mismanagement. Actually your comment is probably more correct - adds a whole step to move the wallet. Misaligned incentives and mismanagement are probably more equal across public/private than we like to believe
- monkeyelite 1y agoI'm being a little bit facetious. When the government actually owns/operates the labor or equipment they can do a lot more. In the prison example state COs are certainly better than rent-a-cops. It's just unfortunate that's how most administrators work. The traditional debate about public vs private usually focuses on different tradeoffs and incentives of the public - but if they are just paying market vendors it's greatly diminished.
- alchemyzach 1y agoIf prison is going to claim to be rehabilitative then access to word processors, and even some websites (jstor, wikipedia, etc), is a bare minimum requirement imo. Revoke it for bad behavior, sure, but it should otherwise be available several hours per day. And to all the vindictive sociopath losers out there who want prisons to just inflict max pain all the time - do you not realize improving prison quality of life directly benefits you and could even save your life? Brutalizing a man with harsh conditions, treating him like a wild animal for months/years on end, and then releasing him is just going to make him 5x more angry and dangerous upon release and less likely to assimilate, but now here he comes walking down the same street as you and your loved ones
- bongodongobob 1y agoOh this is easy. > Brutalizing a man with harsh conditions, treating him like a wild animal for months/years on end, and then releasing him is just going to make him 5x more angry and dangerous upon release and less likely to assimilate, but now here he comes walking down the same street as you and your loved ones "Maybe he should have made better choices" they say, as they smugly reference an eye for an eye in their text sent from God.
- programjames 1y agoI think more realistically, they'll argue if the prison didn't succeed in rehabilitating them, they obviously just need a longer sentence.
- virtue3 1y agoOtherwise they just learn how to be better criminals from other inmates. Life is really tough on the outside for a lot of prisoners. I’m extremely in favor of helping them lead successful and productive lives on the outside that don’t need to rely on crime.
- mulmen 1y ago> Revoke it for bad behavior, sure Why is this an acceptable form of punishment?
- mayo369 1y agoWait a moment, they can't use computer? I remember read some news about prison people become a programmer or something like that...
- ddtaylor 1y agoFederal versus state(s). The Federal system is more-or-less standardized and many have access to many things either on campus or remotely. The State system is a hodge-podge of nonsense and most States are ran like trash for money reasons.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoExpanding on this: each state is often run by a mix of public and for-profit institutions and services by crooked corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, and so there are often incentives like campaign $upport for politicians to find ways to imprison as many people as possible. In Texas, the facilities are like 19th century penal colonies.
- astura 1y agoSo each prison or prison system has its own rules. But I can imagine a prison allowing people to learn computer skills while also having very limited access to computers. They could have a computer lab that has locked down computers and no Internet access and is accessed with supervision for use only for classes and class assignments.
- pm90 1y agoEveryone should want prisons to be better; it isn’t that hard to imagine of some unfortunate circumstances that can lead to you or someone you know ending up there; its in everyone’s best interest to keep it effective, efficient and as painless as possible to make it through the system.
- sharts 1y agoNot just prison but the mental health system. Heck even the health system. A large proportion of people in prison are there because of mental issues and there was nowhere else to put them since nobody can navigate that mess and there is little to no funding for it. Particularly since (public) mental health institutionalization was deemed to infringe on “freedom” (and also not profitable) the only options today are prison or running around the streets until inevitably they do something that warrants imprisonment. There are some things that markets can invigorate through innovation. But public health and safety certainly isn’t one of those things.
- rossant 1y agoYes, and it's a fallacy to imagine you'll never end up there if you don't ever do anything wrong. The proportion of totally innocent people in prison is all but negligible. Hard to believe but true.
- pfannkuchen 1y agoWhile true that some people do end up in that situation, I think the probability of the average hner ending up in that situation is basically zero. The people who are overrepresented in being harassed by police tend to be underrepresented in technology circles.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoIt's no accident. Maximum cruelty, difficulty, and petty punitiveness are the point because America happily throws away people and doesn't have any concept of reform or reintegration.
- hn_throw_250822 1y ago[dead]
- kelseydh 1y agoI never understood why prisoners shouldn't at least have read-only access to the internet. This is going to become a bigger issue as more and more people think and understand the world through Google searches and LLMs. One reason people who post bail end up with vastly better outcomes in court is because they can prepare for their cases so much better than those stuck in jail waiting for trial.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoHow does one setup a read-only access to the internet?
- pcthrowaway 1y agoOne doesn't "setup a read-only access to the internet". But for information access, I imagine something like Kiwix[1] or El Paquete Seminal (without the piracy of course)[2] would be useful to a lot of people Another option would be to mitm all web requests from a custom web-browser (install a root cert on all devices) and drop all POST, PUT, and DELETE requests. Prohibit the browser from storing cookies or localStorage, and perhaps maintain an allow-list of sites which can be accessed. This is obviously not foolproof, but it'd certainly make real-world "request smuggling" much more difficult. Of course, a better question is if there's really even value to providing read-only internet access in the first place? I understand that for some inmates there might be concerns of them contributing to illicit operations in the outside world, but the rationale I usually hear for why inmates are prevented from computer/internet access has more to do with the "dangerous" information they might access (how to commit crimes in the future, avoid getting caught, etc). And I think both of these arguments are worth our skepticism. [1]: https://kiwix.org/en/ https://kiwix.org/en/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
- dkiebd 1y agoIt’s Semanal, not Seminal. Seminal amusingly translates to “related to semen”. Even more amusing when Paquete can also mean “crotch”.
- disishtupid 1y agoUpgrading systems now a days always means adding more access from more people.