People in prison are not monsters. They're people.
I won't deny that illicit substances flowing into prisons is a problem. But painting all prisoners as smugglers who are incapable of receiving affection, love, or support is absurd.
If someone deprived another of dignity via a crime (say, via sexual assault or murder), why should that person be deserving of any dignity themselves?
How many soap bottles would I have to steal before you think I don't deserve any dignity?
And then there's also not everybody convicted of a crime actually did the crime [1].
[1]: https://innocenceproject.org/national-academy-of-sciences-re....
Many in prison would slit a throat, scam, mug, assault, rape etc without any kind of remorse. These people are not like you and I.
Some of these do some variation of “find Jesus” and try and change. Many do not. Or they take decades to change ways.
At Some point dangerous people need to be locked away.
Fear of punishment is the only thing that keeps a small percentage of the population from doing these things on a regular basis. Think how people act in real life vs being Anonymous online.
There's no reason to assume the majority would committed violence at the first chance they get since they didn't do that while outside of prison.
* Violent crimes often include things such as drug dealing even when no actual violence occured.
There's very little about people who are imprisoned that justify depriving them of being able to communicate with people who aren't imprisoned. For one, how will they communicate if they are being raped, physically abused, or medically neglected by the prison?
At some point, they are human, and if you've ever spent any time even volunteering around the "system" you would begin to understand exactly how wrong, and how utterly heartless this kind of thinking is. How we treat the helpless defines our humanity.
In Georgia during a two year sting 46 people were convicted, all DOC employees, mostly Corrections Officers.
Taking away physical mail from people already deprived of their rights seems extreme, especially when the problem pretty clearly is COs who enable it.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/final-defendants-includin...
https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/court-overturns-guards...
This is a wretched assumption that dehumanizes everyone in prison by implying that they are a part of some lesser subspecies that does not deserve humane treatment.
Man your callousness is jarring.
Is there anything resembling evidence that the current system of incarceration selects the "kinds of people" to whom you refer, rather than arbitrarily from the population, weighted by money and melanin?
The National Crime Victimization Survey?
I mean people always try and say that the FBI crime stats are wrong/falsified/whatever but I rarely if ever see any attempts to debunk the NCVS which corroborates the FBI crime numbers.