Recidivism is the goal and not something we try to avoid. So sick of the way this country treats people.
Honestly, this seems cheaper than being on the outside world these days. Guess they didn't adjust for inflation yet. (Don't mind me making 1 phone call a month with my $100/month cell phone plan.)
Also, where are you spending more than $25 for a hamburger? I'm sure you can find some high end restaurants charing that, but even in places like airports, you're not spending that much.
It irritates me that the same people who step over a homeless bum on their way to Starbucks whine about the poor criminals.
Maybe someone should worry about providing hamburgers to the victims of the prisoners’ crimes.
Funny, that. Due to attitudes like yours, it's very hard for people with a criminal record to find gainful legal employment. Many end up living on the street as a direct result.
It's not like it's hard to get into prison.
People do not go to jail without deserving it. So how bad was your friend's record, Lancelot?
California is the most desirable place in the world to live.
History obviously shows differently, read a damn book, wow.
I called the police to get my daughter to a hospital. Long story short, I gave all the details, and am now a convicted felon. I published the whole story online if you want to dig. My story isn't special, either, and people who believe the law defines morality have been very fortunate to lead such a sheltered life.
Even if you use lighter measures for most crimes, focus on rehab, and get rid of cells, prison's still prison. How are you going to lock up nobody?
Other countries seem to manage with a vanishingly smaller percentage of prisoners and without the dehumanization the US routinely employs. So yes, maybe try ending it; it’s not clear the other extreme is any worse and it’s certainly cheaper. One of those “just build permanent houses” moments.
It's no more useless than the post it's responding to.
> it’s not clear the other extreme is any worse
What a bad way to plan things.
I think few people would argue that those classes of law breakers are allowed off the hook.
From my perspective in the UK, we seem to have this obsession with trying to invent everything ourselves instead of looking (primarily at the continent, but also elsewhere) at what other countries have tried and trying to apply what works while being appropriate to our context here. You see it with healthcare, justice (people say that we should copy Scandinavia, but there's never any more analysis), education (we seem to believe our system is the only one there ever has been or ever could be), and so many other places.
And there seems to be this fallacy that because somebody offers excellent critique of a system their solutions are automatically at that level of excellence. You can see it in this thread: We all agree that prisons, particularly in the US, have a lot of problems - and solutions are presented without any regard for if they're actually any good.
Thank you for the book recommendation. I've added it to my reading list - I doubt I'll agree with it, but it seems to be an interesting perspective.
The US - which is the topic of this thread - has a larger incarcerated population than anywhere else by absolutes and percentages; by a rather high number. Other countries seem to do just fine and spend a lot less in the process. So - similar to ending cash bail and various decriminalizing efforts - it’s not clear that prison abolition would actually be net negative to “public safety”.
What I'm saying is that when we change things we need to have some careful analysis and precise implementation to ensure things are actually improving for the better, and that preferably of the possible alternatives we aren't just choosing a better one, we're choosing the best one. The status quo being awful (and I agree - the US prison system seems pretty awful) does not automatically make all proposed solutions a good (or the best) idea.
We didn’t land on the current extreme via well-reasoned debate and there’s a permanent human cost to allowing it to continue. Waiting for the best solution is a luxury and it’s easy for the average commenter here - statistically not affected - to do exactly that.
> I'm not supporting the status quo.
I believe that you do not intend to, but arguments against change inherently support the current state of things, and it’s quite hard to parse out intent and effect at 4am, so apologies there.
I'm aware that opposing radical solutions is in a way conserving the existing solution - and I'm using "solution" generally, I'm not implying that they're any good. I don't want to conserve the current system (though I'm in the UK, so it's less immediately relevant), but I don't want to rashly change it if it means not considering the consequences of those changes.
I've got my own perspective here - I was attacked at school and kicked in the head. A year and a half later, I've had a lot of recovery but it's still completely changed my life.
From my perspective, it was entirely preventable if schools were more willing to expel violent individuals (they had attacked my friend just days before). It may have been deterred if our justice system was less lenient towards under-18s (I was offered "restorative justice" - "talking it through" rings a bit hollow when you've spent the last 4 months off school, barely awake). There is no scenario where talking to him would have been beneficial to me, regardless of how controlled the surroundings were.
That's why this is the one political subject that I consistently talk about when it comes up on HN: It's one where there are a lot of strong emotions both ways, and I see a lot of sentiment that ignores the real human cost of allowing (particularly violent) criminals to continue their actions. There are a lot of strong emotions about radical solutions like abolishing prisons (and hampering schools ability to expell), and there are a lot of strong emotions dehumanising criminals (and treating expulsion as the solution to any problem). People are quick to recognise the harm that one of those positions causes, but rarely see that they're both harmful when done in excess.
So I also feel that it's easy for the average commenter to talk about how "conservative approaches just mean excess harm". From my perspective, overly rash, poorly-thought-out and poorly-implemented approaches also cause excess harm. I'd much prefer this tug-of-war about moving the overton window through extreme policies was put aside so that we can talk about more realistic solutions. And they don't need to be invented in isolation: The world is filled with alternative systems to learn from.
Ultimately putting forward suggestions like "simply abolish prison" is just going to make people dismiss you entirely, not become sympathetic to your cause.
As for why I'm speaking from a UK perspective on a US-centric thread: We tend to import your culture due to a shared language and a lot of shared culture, so in the long run what the US thinks, says, and does is very relevant to me.
1. Guarantee safety for the imprisoned. No more fear of physical / sexual violence. The way people joke about "don't drop the soap" is maddening.
2. No forced labor, no unpaid / barely paid labor. All work must be paid at least prevailing market rates
3. Free of cost essentials - food, clothing, air conditioned shelter, no roommates
4. No price gouging - anything not considered essentials must not cost more than market rate, allow multiple third party vendors in case of disagreement
This is the bare minimum. If we can't meet these, we absolutely must abolish prisons.
Why? Someone needs to pay the cost to imprison people and it's unfair to not make the guilty party at least partially responsible for that cost
If we cannot afford it, we don't have any business running a prison.
On a more selfish note, I don't want (let's call it like it is) slave labor to dilute the value of my labor.
One can just get 'radicalized' merely by observing what going on around, like Ted Kaczynski. Version 1.0 of humans collectively don't meet the bar of standards for a civilized society, if a civilized society did exist then it's by fluke of a confluence of factors and fleeting one at that.
I scheduled a bond hearing with the hope the judge would lower my bond so I could be released and be able to call her, but sadly she died two days before the bond hearing. The State found out, so as soon as we went into the hearing the prosecutor said "Judge, I don't even know why we are here, his mother is dead already. This issue is moot."
We even tried to get the jail to let me make a video call to my mother (that was her dying wish), and the British government intervened to try and persuade them, but they refused, even though they had all the equipment and let you make video calls to your kids if you played chess with them.
Incarceration, for the most part, is just fucking stupidity. As Piper Kerman's lawyer tells her, "Jail is chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people."
I would have expected it to go the other way. Like an offer to be transferred to/from the UK in custody so you can be visited by your mother, because the US government trusts the UK government to return you.
Otherwise this story will just repeat forever.
Assuming the parent poster's guilt is fair, but god help you if the system ever gets turned against you.
"show me the man and I'll show you the crime"
I was in federal prison for years. One week from release, I got an email about a friend in poor health. I had to pay by the minute to access that email account at a prison kiosk, by the way. One minute of email access cost roughly the same as what I was paid for a hour's labor at my prison job as a GED instructor.
I called my friend as soon as I could get access to a phone. I had 5 minutes left of my monthly minutes budget because I'd spent nearly all of my 200 minute monthly allowance release planning with family. As we had only a few moments on the phone, they demanded I come see them the moment I was released. They had something very important they wanted to talk about.
I spent the next few days appealing to every prison official for extra phone minutes to speak with my dying friend. Several of them had phones on their desks as we spoke, and could have just picked up the phone and given me a few minutes right then and there. They all had the authority and ability to assist, and they all refused. From case manager, church chaplin to assistant warden. One said because the other person isn't direct family, they don't count as important enough to grant me an extra phone call. They took three days to consider my request before denying it. Another accused me of lying to manipulate them into giving me extra phone minutes because I'd "wasted" what I was given and they thought we all got way too many minutes anyway.
A few other prisoners offered to let me use their phone accounts to make calls, but if I had done that and been detected by prison staff who randomly monitored phone calls, I risked a disciplinary proceeding that could result in going to solitary confinement instead of going home, and throwing my release arrangements into disarray.
My friend died the day before I went home. I still don't know what they wanted to tell me.