On July 11 2013 13:01 DeepElemBlues wrote: Solitary confinement isn't torture though so repeated admonitions that no matter what people do it isn't okay to torture them are non-sequitirs.
Torture the infliction of physical, mental, or emotional pain for the purpose of punishment or coercion.
Sure sounds like inflicting great mental and emotional pain for the purpose of punishment or coercion. Punishment for whatever they did, coercion to make them never want to do it again.
Solitary is kind of a weird issue. Sometimes they are pulled from population for being a threat to themselves or others or because they are going to be ganked. Yes, it's used as a punishment, but there are cases where it's needed for the safety of an individual or the population at large. Having no contact with anything for months on end drives a person mad though. I'm sure there are ways to mitigate this, but imagine someone who is exceptionally delusional, violent and reactive. How do you handle that person? You can't put them in regular population, they are a threat to guards and inmates alike. You can't put them in with anyone else (in this example) because they are bat shit crazy and flip out in whatever way they can. So what do you do??
I do think that there needs to be alternative punishments to solitary; however, what can you take away from someone who basically has nothing? There needs to be a punishment heavy enough that someone doesn't want to do it...and many of the people who end up there time and again have life sentences and don't care if another 10 years is added on because they won't get out regardless. How can you deter someone in this situation from crafting a shank and going to town on a guard?
I'm just glad I'm not the one who has to make these decisions.
On July 11 2013 10:48 GhostOwl wrote: They will eventually eat. Let them perform their hunger strike. There is a reason why they are in prison in the first place. Once they have commited the crimes that landed them in prison, their basic rights were taken away. They don't deserve the same rights as normal citizens.
There's a huge group of philosophers studying ethics and morality that are basically saying that we all live with a big belief and assumption that A) we all have Free Will, and B) we all have Ultimate Moral Responsibility. What they're arguing is that that long held belief, while necessary to function, is actual a big fallacy. We've totally stopped taking into account the idea of nurturance, not only by parents, but by reality and society as a whole.
In any case, I think your statement assumes that, and I have to disagree myself, not only because of what I've laid out, but also because I believe that every person, no matter the crime, deserves some rights and a shred of basic humanity, even if it's just to try to understand them.
Positions like yours (with all due respect) wants to just write off whole swaths of people, separate them from us, as if we could do that. I understand that position and where it might come from, but fundamentallly, I think it's wrong.
I couldn't agree more with this post. We are to a large extent a product of our environment and genetics. The idea that good people can be easily separated from bad people is very questionable, especially in prisons where ethnic minorities, poor people, and mentally ill people are over represented.
Well, I do think we have to address abberant and delinquent behavior. I think they need to be separated from society while they're dangerous. But what you said about minorities and those on the low part of the economic scale being in prison seems systemic to me and circular.
Not to mention the fact that minorities are often targeted unjustly by the police. Just the other day, I was in a part of Brooklyn that I used to live in and they were stopping every black person and checking their ID, which is profiling. More than 80% of pot arrests for small amounts (which is decriminilized by the way on the state level) are latino or black. There are corruption allegations against at least two precincts for trying to boost numbers illegally by doing illegal arrests.
So not everyone in jail deserves to be there. But I don't know what the answer is. Just because we don't have overarching ultimate responsibility, it doesn't mean that we don't have responsibility or choices, small 'r' and 'c'. Our choices though are limited by a bevy of influences throughout our lifetime that we just can't control: our place in time, space, famillies, countries, etc.
It's all dialogues with philosophers, biologists, neurologists, and lots more. It kind of solidified a lot of my own moral and ethical values and ideas...well, more opened them up (I hope). The Philip Zimbardo interview is worth it alone for the entire book. Great read.
I think prisons have a role in society, I'm not arguing they're worthless. Let me quote myself from this thread:
I thought the point of prison was to provide disincentives for crime, rehabilitate people so they can be brought back into society, and/or prevent people from committing further crimes, not subject people to inhumane conditions that worsen their mental state.
On July 11 2013 11:20 a176 wrote: You give them food and a place to sleep. What more do they deserve exactly?
You don't give them anything, you take away stuff, namely their freedom. Robbing human beings of their freedom is an extremely severe sanction and needs to be done with caution. Not by adding torture on top of it.
Jail is torture. It would be horrific to jail anyone ever if there weren't a pressing need.
Seems the internet should mitigate jail's problem with isolating people from society. You can let inmates connect outside without worrying that they'll go out committing violence or what have you.
In a nation that has the highest incarceration rate in the recorded history of mankind it's astounding to read just how ignorant some people are around here about the reality of the situation. Despite the fact that many people seem to write off all offenders as sub-human dirt bags who deserve the worst treatment we can muster (that aspect of American pound-me-in-the-ass culture is a whole other topic), one wonders if the increasingly barbaric and cruel abuse of inmates is really the best course of action for the nation.
But hey, most of us here on TL are white, so we don't have that much to worry about (yet). So let's all go be responsible contributors to society, unlike all those rats who are locked up, and do something constructive with our time... like investing!
Prisons are among the most egregious examples of the insidiousness of the corporate takeover of the American government.
It's sad how 90% of your post is right but it's 100% wrong because you're just being an asshole about it.
You don't need to call people assholes to express your disagreement. A lot of your points can be made without you resorting to telling people they are naive or their positions are ridiculous.
As a norwegian, the way US practice their prison system is so foreign to me that it is almost as real as a fiction movie.
I mean, you go to jail to rehabillitate, not just because society wants revenge. If not, you end up with a lot of money wasted on prison and a lot of crimes when they get out.
I agree with the solitary confinement part, but the ones protesting for better prison conditions?... Come on, you've got to be kidding. I mean the article didn't really elaborate on specifics, but I just imagine a bunch of self-entitled criminals demanding to get their 360 upgraded to an x-box one. (Yes, there are some prisons that actually have gaming systems for the inmates.) You're in prison for a reason, and you don't deserve to be treated like royalty. You get your 4 meals, and the basic necessities, and that should be it.
There needs to be solitary confinement, or at least an alternative that acts as a deterrent for crime within prisons. People don't commit crimes in society because it's against the law, and breaking it causes you to go to jail and lose a large amount of your rights and freedoms. But when you're already in jail, what's to stop you from just doing whatever you like? Giving someone a longer sentence just causes more money to be taken away from health and education services and given to a prison system that already eats through millions.
Rehabilitation should definitely be the focus of any prison system, but without some sort of deterrence there's no real motivation for people to do so. Bettering prison conditions only factors more into this. If people's lives are at risk then of course things should be changed, but things like hats during cold weather are a luxury, not a necessity.
I hope nobody disagrees that solitary confinement is degrading, cruel torture.
It's not. Saying it is is ridiculous.
lol, you don't know shit...
Plus, prisoners get thrown into solitaries for NOTHING. For example: they throw a prisoner into a solitary to free a bed for another transitioning prisoner for a few days, because there's no space to put them anywhere else.
I hope nobody disagrees that solitary confinement is degrading, cruel torture.
It's not. Saying it is is ridiculous.
lol, you don't know shit...
Plus, prisoners get thrown into solitaries for NOTHING. For example: they throw a prisoner into a solitary to free a bed for another transitioning prisoner for a few days, because there's no space to put them anywhere else.
There are people that deserve to be in jail for the rest of their lives but no one deserves solitary. I don't think people appreciate how essential it is for humans to have any form of contact or stimulus from the outside world to simply survive.
Interlocking trend #1: in a world increasingly moving away from crude old-fashioned discipline, prison is a disciplinarian institution – and should be seen as old-fashioned, too
Interlocking trend #2: in a world growing to acknowledge the importance of social ties, prison is an isolating institution – and so should seem out of place
Interlocking trend #3: in a society becoming increasingly aware of mental health challenges, prison is a hub of mental health challenges and so should be scrutinised
Interlocking trend #4: in a society (at times) concerned with equality, prison highlights the discrimination faced by Maori in New Zealand – and so should be rethought
Interlocking trend #5: in a world concerned with evidence-based and effective policy interventions, prison is an ineffective intervention – and so should be largely abandoned
#1: prison is not crude or old-fashioned, this point is an argument by semantics. Call prison disciplinarian (duh) and say that disciplinarianism is crude and old-fashioned and maybe if you do it enough people will believe you. Disciplinarianism, crude and old-fashioned? More like the lack of disciplinarianism has caused crude outcomes in society. "Old-fashioned" a pejorative? Please.
Well we as a society are tending to move away from corporal punishment as a whole. Think of discipline in schools now vs 100 years ago and other related trends in society. While this alone isn't enough to say that we should abandon the prison system in it's current inception, it is a sign that it's increasingly inconsistent with the values we hold in other areas of society. That's an important sign that perhaps it's time for change.
#2: That's the point of prison. Isolating people who commit crimes from the civilian population until is time to let them out again. I see zero problem with prison isolating the social ties of prisoners. These arguments seem to be fuzzy touchy-feely if we are just nicer to people they will improve their behavior. This is dubious at best when dealing with recidivists. I doubt the author has had much contact with people whose main occupation is committing crimes.
But by isolating them you reinforce the 'us vs them' mentality that happens in prisons. Them having this idea that society doesn't want them and that they will never fit into society doesn't do us any good at reforming prisoners. That just increases the likelihood that they re-offend when they come out. I apologise for the NZ example here, but I imagine the situation is far more dire in the US. But here's a quote from a forum held by ex-inmates on their experience in prison:
We have a place where might is right and there is an us-versus-them culture. “It’s kind of like a war in there,” said one of the three panellists, “you have to become someone else, you have to wear a mask of toughness.”
Our prison system caters to the lowest common dominator – the few percent that the panellists agreed do actually need to be in jail – while the vast majority of those serving sentences in prison are poorly served. Our inmates get fit, learn heaps of criminal skills, build great criminal networks, and are, overall, taught more anti-social behaviours while being pushed even further away from society.
“Good things don’t grow in nasty places” we were told. Our current prison system, far from discouraging and stopping criminality, helps start and enhance criminal careers.
#3: Prisons becoming a dumping zone for the mentally ill has been a major public policy mistake and should be scrutinized and the practice reversed. The mentally ill who commit crimes should be in mental institutions.
The question in this case is can anyone really be sane of mind and willfully kill people? I would argue that the cast majority of prisoners have some kind of mental health issue, not necessarily an illness but some kind of issue. By placing these people in prison you just exacerbate those kinds of problems.
#4: Racial minorities are disproportionately represented in prison populations in white-majority countries for a simple reason: they commit a disproportionately large amount of crimes. "Rethinking" prisons will not cause this situation to change so why prisons should be the focus of it is a mystery. It is simplistic and anti-reality thinking to say that the prison population should be a mirror of the demographics of society. I doubt if whites were overrepresented in prison populations that many people would have a problem with it at all. If you want "equality" (what?) in prison population, deal with the issues of why minorities commit a disproportionate amount of crimes. Living in an environment where many or most of the people have been to jail is one of those reasons, but economic and internal culture factors are much more important.
I agree with most of what you have said here. The root causes of these issues do need to be dealt with. But I would argue that the fact that there is an existing high proportion of minorities in prison in fact is a self-repeating negative cycle which influences their community and increases the likelihood of people in their community from entering the prison system. This is all tied up in the likelihood of reoffending which leads me to...
#5: This makes zero sense. More criminals in prison for longer periods of time = lower crime rate. That isn't an opinion, it's a fact.
The evidence shows that prison as an institution focused more on rehabilitation rather than punishment is what is effective. The author has made the mistake of conflating prison with vindictive treatment.
Reducing the prison population would allow for more division of inmates, so hardcore career criminals do not mix with first-time offenders or those who have a chance to turn their lives around. It would also allow for treatment of prisoners to be improved so there is less chance of an anti-social mindset developing among inmates, a prime cause for returning to crime when released.
Prison is a necessary part of society, but the point of it should not be to debase prisoners by treating them like animals and expecting them to act like animals, which of course causes them to act like animals. Every time I see a snippet of a show like Beyond Scared Straight or one of those "Life Inside" style documentaries, I'm amazed at the way the guards allow and/or actually encourage prisoners to act and the way the guards treat the prisoners themselves. Nothing seems more likely to me to encourage recidivism upon release than the practice of indiscriminately mixing prisoners together, treating them with hostility and contempt, and allowing them to form gangs and generally act like it's Lord of the Flies as long as (too much) violence isn't used.
But sorry, if people commit crimes, I want them locked away until it's time to let them out. Saying prisons need to be done away with is naive to the point of folly.
The evidence (your emphasis) supports the claim that rehabilitative sentencing decreases the rate of re-offending and lowers the overall crime rate, when compared against a traditional retribution focus prison. Just so we're clear, I'm not arguing that 'prison' isn't necessary in society -- rather that prison in it's current inception is bad for society and that a rehabilitative focused model would be far more efficient at treating the causes of crime leading to lower crime rates. You want evidence, sure.
Point being. Rehabilitation works. Once society gets over it's need to punish people and realises that a greater common good is achieved by focusing on rehabilitative sentencing then we'll be living in a much better world.
On July 11 2013 11:20 a176 wrote: You give them food and a place to sleep. What more do they deserve exactly?
Rehabilitation. If all the correction system does is lock people in a box until they go mad then there is no justice, just revenge.
whats wrong with revenge? If someone killed my friend I wouldn't wanna "rehab" him, I'd want to make his life very shitty
But.. that's something that's avoided through the justice system, for very good reason (exactly what you just posted.) Having a personal connection to the judgments to be made in court makes you invalid. Just like lying under oath, and then saying what really happened: once you show that decisions being made are anything but observations on facts gathered, and rather become based on history or any other noun that I can't think of right now that might sway your opinions, nobody cares. Nobody is really allowed to care.
Anyway, my point is that revenge is a personal thing to have with someone else, and is natural, but it is acknowledged that if you've been hurt by someone, you're not exactly going to be an impartial person regarding what's best for him/her on trial, or for society all-around, for that matter.
Good documentary, its pretty bad how it is in there sometimes, but at the same time they "usually" did something bad.
I feel bad for the people that get fucked by the system, like the LoL kid who made a threat and is now being beat up in jail and had to be moved around 4 jails so far for his safety.
Westside!! I can not believe how many people are defending career criminals here on this forum.You guys do realize that MOST of the people in the California penitenciary system are members of some criminal orgnization such as The bloods,Crips,Arian Brotherhood,Mexiacan Mafia,MS13, 18th street gangmSurenos,Skinheads,Noestra Familia,Latin Kings,Vice Lords,Drug Cartels etc.These are people who either commited dozens of murders and would slice you for a bag of Marijuana.It is litterally impossible to survive in a west coast penitenciarry without being gang affiliated.Thise people ar e not in there for fun.In fact judges in Cali give very light jail sentences for the sole reason of overpopulation of the penitenciarry system.MOST of the poeple in there are cold blooded murders who would kill you and your family for 100$.
And btw regarding solitary confinment i saw many people here lying that you can get to solitary for nothing.Wrong.You go to solitary for things such as contraband,assaulting an officer,assaulting other inmates etc.In other words they ar ein solitary to protect other inmates and guards from being murdered.If you guys want more background of what happens in Cali prisons check out Lockdownraw or the natgeographic documentaries on youtube.
here are some eloquent ones for you:
These people are in solitary cuase they are a threat to the other inmates.You would not want to be in prison for tax evasion and be in a cell with a member of theArian Bortherhood who would kill you for not being th eright skin color.
@plexa your arguments work well with small time criminals.Here we are talking about life long gangbangers who kill and die for their gang,The ones that escape the gang do that due to their own will and after spending decade sin jail.DO not try and confuse a low time criminal with a killer from ms13.
On July 12 2013 00:32 theking1 wrote: Westside!! I can not believe how many people are defending career criminals here on this forum.You guys do realize that MOST of the people in the California penitenciary system are members of some criminal orgnization such as The bloods,Crips,Arian Brotherhood,Mexiacan Mafia,MS13, 18th street gangmSurenos,Skinheads,Noestra Familia,Latin Kings,Vice Lords,Drug Cartels etc.These are people who either commited dozens of murders and would slice you for a bag of Marijuana.It is litterally impossible to survive in a west coast penitenciarry without being gang affiliated.Thise people ar e not in there for fun.In fact judges in Cali give very light jail sentences for the sole reason of overpopulation of the penitenciarry system.MOST of the poeple in there are cold blooded murders who would kill you and your family for 100$.
And btw regarding solitary confinment i saw many people here lying that you can get to solitary for nothing.Wrong.You go to solitary for things such as contraband,assaulting an officer,assaulting other inmates etc.In other words they ar ein solitary to protect other inmates and guards from being murdered.If you guys want more background of what happens in Cali prisons check out Lockdownraw or the natgeographic documentaries on youtube.
These people are in solitary cuase they are a threat to the other inmates.You would not want to be in prison for tax evasion and be in a cell with a member of theArian Bortherhood who would kill you for not being th eright skin color.
@plexa your arguments work well with small time criminals.Here we are talking about life long gangbangers who kill and die for their gang,The ones that escape the gang do that due to their own will and after spending decade sin jail.DO not try and confuse a low time criminal with a killer from ms13.
No, we don't because we don't consider a saturday night drama series to be indicative of prison life.
On July 11 2013 11:20 a176 wrote: You give them food and a place to sleep. What more do they deserve exactly?
Rehabilitation. If all the correction system does is lock people in a box until they go mad then there is no justice, just revenge.
whats wrong with revenge? If someone killed my friend I wouldn't wanna "rehab" him, I'd want to make his life very shitty
so given the option between reforming a murderer into a productive member of society, or letting him be a ward of the state, forever living off your taxes, you would choose the latter.
I can tell you have given a great deal of thought to this matter.
On July 12 2013 00:32 theking1 wrote: Westside!! I can not believe how many people are defending career criminals here on this forum.You guys do realize that MOST of the people in the California penitenciary system are members of some criminal orgnization such as The bloods,Crips,Arian Brotherhood,Mexiacan Mafia,MS13, 18th street gangmSurenos,Skinheads,Noestra Familia,Latin Kings,Vice Lords,Drug Cartels etc.These are people who either commited dozens of murders and would slice you for a bag of Marijuana.It is litterally impossible to survive in a west coast penitenciarry without being gang affiliated.Thise people ar e not in there for fun.In fact judges in Cali give very light jail sentences for the sole reason of overpopulation of the penitenciarry system.MOST of the poeple in there are cold blooded murders who would kill you and your family for 100$.
And btw regarding solitary confinment i saw many people here lying that you can get to solitary for nothing.Wrong.You go to solitary for things such as contraband,assaulting an officer,assaulting other inmates etc.In other words they ar ein solitary to protect other inmates and guards from being murdered.If you guys want more background of what happens in Cali prisons check out Lockdownraw or the natgeographic documentaries on youtube.
These people are in solitary cuase they are a threat to the other inmates.You would not want to be in prison for tax evasion and be in a cell with a member of theArian Bortherhood who would kill you for not being th eright skin color.
@plexa your arguments work well with small time criminals.Here we are talking about life long gangbangers who kill and die for their gang,The ones that escape the gang do that due to their own will and after spending decade sin jail.DO not try and confuse a low time criminal with a killer from ms13.
No, we don't because we don't consider a saturday night drama series to be indicative of prison life.
its a documentary based on FACTS and all rpeorts say the same thing.
EPT
