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A comment on The American prison system’s war on reading. Parent comment

Re:The American prison system’s war on reading by runarberg on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @07:33PM (#29399258)
Even this is a lousy excuse. Banning/raising prices of books for everyone just because authorities failed to do their work is regressive and simply lazy. A better approach is to simply detect when these ciphered messages occur and react appropriately.

Note that only allowing certain vendors is no fail safe either. A criminal can set work with a store which sells through amazon making sure that the “correct” copy gets sent to the prisoner, the postage can be forged to look like an approved vendor, a prison guard can be bribed etc.

If there is a will to send a ciphered message to a prisoner, then there are means. Making life miserable for everyone else is not how you prevent this.

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Re:The American prison system’s war on reading by coldacid on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @08:02PM (#29399439)
Not to mention that none of this is grounds for banning particular authors or genres. This stinks to high heaven of political repression.
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Re:The American prison system’s war on reading by spoonjim on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @07:39PM (#29399300)
Some prisons do do this where the inmates suspected of being active gang members are just put in the SHU arbitrarily.
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Re:The American prison system’s war on reading by runarberg on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @01:26AM (#29401261)
SHU = Special Housing Unit? Is that another way to say isolation? If so, then please please please don’t do that. Isolation is a form of torture (as defined and declared by the UN[1]) and should never be done except for really rare cases.

If you can’t limit a persons gang activity while they are confined in a prison without resorting to torture, then there is some serious incompetence going on.

1: https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/10/392012-solitary-confine...

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Re:The American prison system’s war on reading by spoonjim on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @02:12AM (#29401482)
Well as Clarence Ray Allen showed, sometimes the only way to stop someone from killing people is to kill them.
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Re:The American prison system’s war on reading by sobkas on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @06:48PM (#29410656)
> Well as Clarence Ray Allen showed, sometimes the only way to stop someone from killing people is to kill them.

If killing is such a great solution, lets just kill everyone capable of committing a crime. It will definitely lower it.

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Re:The American prison system’s war on reading by spoonjim on Thursday December 02, 2021 @02:52PM (#29421528)
I mean, your side has won. California doesn’t execute anymore. In the marketplace of ideas, “Clarence Ray Allen should be left alive” is victorious.
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Re:The American prison system’s war on reading by runarberg on Thursday December 02, 2021 @06:05PM (#29424138)
I don’t follow.

Clarence Ray Allen was executed in 2006 at the age of 76 by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison in California. Prisoner execution is still legal 27 states (plus federal and military) including in California. Currently there are 697 prisoners awaiting execution in California[1]. So far this year 5 people have been sentence to death in California, which is up from 3 in 2020[2]. Since Clarence Rey Allen was executed, Californian courts have sentence around 170 prisoners to receive the same fate. The only thing preventing California from executing its prisoners is a handful of powerful individuals (particularly Gavin Newsom) that just so happens to be against this practice. If California were to get a new governor and a judge or two with a laxer moral stance surely state executions would continue.

No our side has far from “won”. We have come close. In 2012 and 2016 popular ballot measures came really close to abolishing the death penalty in California. 7 states (including my home state of Washington) have made state executions illegal in the past decade alone. I think it is only a matter of time before California does the right thing here and abolishes this barbaric practice for good. Sentencing people to death—though infinitely more humane then following through and actually executing people—is still a cruel practice, and California should absolutely stop doing that.

1: https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/capital-punishment/condemned-inmate-...

2: https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/capital-punishment/condemned-inmate-...

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Re:The American prison system’s war on reading by pm90 on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @07:49PM (#29399351)
When it comes to prisons, the people employed at them are clearly not the best from society. I’m not sure if we can really expect more from them. In particular asking them to do more work vs just banning books… it’s an easy decision for them.
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