I've heard some bleak prison stories over the years. One guy I met was an avid reader (and I guess you could say a bit of a hacker). This was in the 80s, so things have changed. Once he would get into a book, the guards would come in and confiscate it. He would try to find a way to piece together the story before the guards would take the book (3 hours to a couple of days from getting it). That went on for 3 months, he said. Imagine spending every waking hour thinking up, trying and evaluating methods for the fastest way to consume a book.

Another guy I met once who is still in prison said that he spent 6 months in solitary. He spent his entire time strengthening his fingers so he could climb brick walls with just his fingertips. An odd thing to do but when you have nothing but your body in a cell you can only spend time getting fit or wasting away.

Most prisons have outreach programs. You can go and teach someone to read (or program). It is a very interesting experience and you may even get someone interested in a topic enough to save them from the system (or themselves).

Poorly, I imagine. Hackers like to think of themselves as loners who don't need anybody, but they still interact with many people day in and day out via the internet.

I sometimes think about the games that I'd play, the structures I'd create, exercises. I'd suck at it. I do wonder about it though, not irregularly.

My guess is by going insane. Once your perception of the state of reality lets you do the things you want to do you'll likely stop noticing the padded walls.

I've spent 3-6 months in places where I didn't see another person, but I always had the option of leaving, and I had the Internet, which makes it entirely different from prison. I've done 2-3 weeks with no Internet and no other people who spoke English (and who I didn't really interact with beyond them bringing me food/water), and it wasn't too bad -- I read books and

I'm confident I could do a month alone in a reasonable room with just books and paper and enjoy it (the only cost being the forgone opportunity to do other stuff, but it would be overall enjoyable) -- catching up on a lot of fiction, history/biography, and tech reading. 6-12 months with a computer, preloaded with development tools and books, but no live Internet access, would be fine too. I really don't understand the people who think a 3-5 year mars mission with only a few other people would be that psychologically difficult.

But prison wardens don't let inmates read whatever they want. Do you think you could survive reading only what the warden would let you read (and doing only what they permit you to)?

I don't know about you but I think I'd struggle to survive more than a day or two.

Baseline of being in prison at all would be pretty bad. Even if I just had Left Behind books, that might be preferable to being in the general population.

(I'm 99.9% certain you could get a bible, if nothing else -- while I'm an atheist, it would be interesting reading, if only to understand cultural references, and is quite long. Law books would be great, and there are legal arguments ensuring access to those, too.)

Some reading materials should obviously be censored (e.g. information about lock picking, practical drug recipes and violent pornography).

But not even the US prison system should want to limit prisoner's intellectual development! To help prisoners grow will make a subset of them productive members of society instead of parasites. Win-win.

Edit: I'm a European, but not dogmatic. My native Sweden should imho use harsher sentencing in some areas. But this was just ridiculously contra productive.

Under humane incarceration, by programming on their computer and communicating over the internet. There's absolutely no reason these should be denied by default.

Unfortunately, as the article demonstrates, our prisons are anything but humane.

I don't understand why we should make prison suck less.

You do realize that if you make prison overly "humane", it eliminates prison as a form of deterrence.

Yet, there are many examples of making prisons more humane having a positive impact on recidivism.

And conversely, there is plenty of evidence that severity of punishment does not have a significant impact on crime rates.

The simple "heavier punishment -> less crime" appeals only to simplistic logic, but in general is not observed in reality, either in the US or abroad.

The odd thing about many people in the "deterrence" crowd is that so many don't seem to actually be concerned about lowering crime rates, and are concerned moreso with exacting their pound of flesh for the injustice committed by criminals.

Much better immediate punishments could be devised if the goal was deterrence, but society has phased those out. The modern philosophical justification of prison is physical separation from society and environment to prevent repeat offenses.

Making prison "suck less" might even give inmates a shot at a life after they are released. But given that you see prison "suckage" as a feature (especially given the generally accepted ideas of what goes on in prison), I can only conclude that you've ruled out any possibility of yourself ever ending up there, and thus don't really care.

Do you have evidence that deterrence works?

On Alcatraz Audio tour they interview an inmate who said he would tear a button off his clothes and try to find it.