Controversial TSA Nudie X-Ray Machines Sent To Prisons 108
An anonymous reader writes "The controversial TSA backscatter X-ray machines are being sent to prisons. According to Federal times, 'The controversial airport screening machines that angered privacy advocates and members of Congress for its revealing images are finding new homes in state and local prisons across the country, according to the Transportation Security Administration.' 154 backscatter X-rays have already ended up in Iowa, Louisiana, and Virginia prisons. TSA is working to find homes for the remaining machines. Per the article: '"TSA and the vendor are working with other government agencies interested in receiving the units for their security mission needs and for use in a different environment," TSA spokesman Ross Feinstein said.'"
Miss world competition? (Score:4, Funny)
If the USA hosts it, then it is good to be 100% sure that one of the contestants is not a terrorist.
No, no, send the pervs! (Score:2)
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Don't worry, plenty of them already have employment as prison guards...
Re:No, no, send the pervs! (Score:4, Interesting)
What happened to the good ole days when these contraptions were vetted on prisoner populations before being approved for widespread public use?
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They were. Now that the TSA trials are complete, they can be used on the general population.
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Admission of Guilt (Score:5, Insightful)
They were treating us like prisoners.
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At least prisoners get complimentary meals and don't have to pay for carry-ons.
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At least prisoners get complimentary meals and don't have to pay for carry-ons.
And none of those pesky "op-outs"
Re:Admission of Guilt (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true at all. If a prisoner sues the prison believing the machines to be unsafe, the prisoner is more likely to get a fair hearing and the prison unlikely to to get away with glossing over health and safety issues related to the machines....whereas the TSA had the carte blanche in the name of Fatherland Security!
Re:Admission of Guilt (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. Because being a prisoner guarantees one's rights, access to legal counsel, timely medical care, and protection from being violently abused...
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well now, I never actually said any of that....I said more likely to get a fair hearing and the prison would be less likely to get away with falling back on "national security" bullshit. The rest is obviously not true.
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Yes, that meant a pat-down. But, a pat-down has less long-term health effects than radiation.
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I can't deny this; it is exactly what I understood. However, can you really say that the situation presents a fair opportunity for a person to make an informed decision? I mean, you likely know that the TSA lied about certifications on the machines, (so much that it prompted NIST to release a statement that they do not even do the kind of safety certification the TSA was claiming to have gotten). You may be aware of the John's Hopkins study claiming these devices are not even safe to be around.
However, as a
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....whereas the TSA had the carte blanche in the name of Fatherland Security!
and yet you could always opt out. Don't be a sheep.
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They were treating us like prisoners.
Were?
When you go to prison (Score:5, Insightful)
You should only lose one right: Freedom.
Not
- security of your personal well being
- privacy
- respect to the human
- torture (psychological or physical)
- physical punishment.
The punishment is withdrawing freedom, not becoming a sub-human. Once you leave prison, you should be considered a typical citizen again -- you served your sentence, so it must not carry on forever.
That said, punishment is known to not be efficient, and not a deterrent for others (as most crimes are not driven by thinking long about the consequences). So modern prisons focus on re-constituting the citizen to full capacity. Because it works better than punishing.
Re:When you go to prison (Score:4, Insightful)
It is utterly hilarious that you would mock systems of retributive justice in (apparent) favor of ones of clinical rehabilitation-- considering just how Orwellian it is to turn the justice system into a clinical one.
Has no one read 1984? Is no one concerned with just how ominous things like a justice system focused on "reconstituting" (or, perhaps, "reeducating?) would be?
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The question is interesting tho - clockwork orange showed an example of such treatment too. Any meaningful behavioral therapy will make differences such that you may worry. I guess you have to trust somebody. Not everybody that is trying explicitly to change you is a criminal or worse - an evil asshole from some agency protecting us from something.
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Also, punishment works pretty well to prevent criminals from committing crimes while in jail (sure, not 100%, as others pointed out before). That's not about being hard on crime; it's about applying the most benef
Re:When you go to prison (Score:4, Interesting)
. So modern prisons focus on re-constituting the citizen to full capacity. Because it works better than punishing.
Always relevant in these discussions [angelfire.com]:
According to the Humanitarian theory, to punish a man because he deserves it, and as much as he deserves, is mere revenge, and, therefore, barbarous and immoral. It is maintained that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter others by example or to mend the criminal. When this theory is combined, as frequently happens, with the belief that all crime is more or less pathological, the idea of mending tails off into that of healing or curing and punishment becomes therapeutic. Thus it appears at first sight that we have passed from the harsh and self-righteous notion of giving the wicked their deserts to the charitable and enlightened one of tending the psychologically sick.......
My contention is that this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being.
The reason is this. The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust. I do not here contend that the question ‘Is it deserved?’ is the only one we can reasonably ask about a punishment. We may very properly ask whether it is likely to deter others and to reform the criminal. But neither of these two last questions is a question about justice. There is no sense in talking about a ‘just deterrent’ or a ‘just cure’. We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.
Making all criminals subject to a clinical internment: Im sure that couldnt possibly go wrong. Insane asylums of the early 1900s? Unit 731? Josef Mengele? Pre-emptive organ harvesting? Nah, Im sure your idea would work out fine.
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Removal doesn't, by itself imply punishment, at least not punishment appropriate to a particular crime. We could remove criminals from society permanently by hanging them all, even the ones who merely wrote bad checks. We could make all sentences life without possibility of parole, or punish with massive but brief periods of torture where the criminal was not kept from society for more than a few days or so, or various methods that would have no real connection between what crime was committed and the sever
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Im arguing that turning criminals into medical patients is a terrible idea that would result in pretty nightmarish systems, whether they looked like 1984 or like Clockwork orange, yes.
At the end of the day I dont see how its appropriate for the state to attempt to "fix" individuals, rather than simply meting out punishment when people violate society's rules. I also dont see how you can avoid a massive moral hazard with the state determining what modes of thought are "normative"; we would end up with a sin
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Rather than forcing rehabilitation on prisoners, what about giving them a choice to participate in rehabilitation programs?
I would be less opposed to it, except that A) im pretty certain it would end up mandatory (slippery slopes are real), and B) it seems to undermine a system based on justice if someone can choose to get out of justice.
Im all for providing resources during incarceration to allow people to get their act together, but I dont think its healthy to ever lose sight of the fact that their incarceration is, first and foremost, punitive.
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I don't see how punishment is immoral: if as the first paragraph states it is in proportion to the damage of the crime. Not everything is monitary but say someone steals your wallet with $200 in it. If months later cops catch the criminal would it be unreasonable for them to take $200 from the criminals wallet and give it to you even if it isn't the same $200 they took? With emotional/physical damages it is harder to balance things out of course but neither of the alternative reasons are acceptable to me fo
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The "fundamental issues leading to imprisonment" are that a free-willed individual broke society's rules.
There are factors that can cause people to go down a bad path, and we should work to address them-- but lets not ever make the mistake of shifting responsibility away from the person who made the choices.
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That's what you say. For some people though, prison is partially a substitute for other purposes of natural justice. There is no universally accepted set of requirements that everyone agrees on. Among them, there is 1) prevention of further crimes by removing the criminal from society, 2) offering solace/revenge to the victims, 3) rehabilitating and educating the criminal, etc.
Unfortunately, no two persons agree on what amount of weight sho
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What about the right of the general public to take pleasure and satisfaction in the petty humiliation and dehumanization of incarcerated persons? The cruelty dollar is a huge dollar, not to mention the cruelty vote.
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Indeed. You have people stabbing each other with sharpened toothbrushes... some proper form or search is necessary and metal-detection is not enough.
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We all lost our freedom a long time ago. I think you mean mobility.
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one has to look at the purpose of 'punishment'
Depends on your jurisdiction. Where I live (New Hampshire), our Constitution specifies reform as the purpose of prison, not punishment.
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When looked in the light of "does it stop/prevent crime", the US prison system makes zero sense.
However, when you look it in the light of "how do we hold people in prison for as long as possible, and ensure they return", it makes perfect sense. The goal of the system is to put people in prison as long as possible.
Look at the stock value of companies in that arena. Not Apple, hockey-stick type of growth, but close enough.
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The American public thinks prison is for punishment, not for rehabilitation, and nobody will stand on the side of prisoners and defend them.
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It really depends on the crime. Here in the US, an arrest for public intoxication (not a conviction... an arrest) is good enough to get one blacklisted from a lot of jobs (this is a filter mainly, as I've worked with HR departments who say that "you can buy your way out of a conviction, but if a cop decides that they should fill out paperwork on you, you are guilty."
Couple that with a felony being dangerously easy to get. Recently in my neck of the woods, a drunk peeing on a well netted 26 charges of lewd
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The general right to privacy is one of the many freedoms withdrawn as a result of criminal conviction. As it should be. As should any freedom which makes it harder for the guards to maintain their own safety or prevent other prisoners from harming you. You're only innocent until *proven* guilty.
The point of prison is to remove those who would harm others from the rest of society and put them somewhere they can't harm the innocent. Punishment doesn't work. Rehabilitation doesn't work. The recidivism rates ba
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Re:When you go to prison (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure how correctional correctional facilities are. I think some people will stop doing crime when they get out because they've had a theoretical punishment turn into an actual one they've experienced. A 20 yr old might think: "oh I won't get caught I'm too smart" and even if I do jails have become so easy now that big deal I'll be bored for a few years. But after having actually experienced it, and having things they didn't even think about happening (like loosing family members while in, or having their kids grow up without them etc) they don't want to go through it again. It isn't necessarily that they've been "corrected" from their bad behaviour just their relative weighting of the alternatives have been adjusted: it is no longer worth the time to do the crime.
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... But after having actually experienced it, and having things they didn't even think about happening (like loosing family members while in, or having their kids grow up without them etc) they don't want to go through it again.....
But that's not the case with sociopaths or people w/o friends and family. If a criminal on their own in the world gets out of the slammer, what's keeping them from going back in?
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Nothing. There will always be broken people where no deterrence matters they just get their rocks off doing whatever crime it is they like. Hopefully the combination of probation/monitoring when they are out and long sentences limits the damage they can do. There is something to be said for old forms of punishment here: if we took a hand for each time you got caught doing armed robbery say you probably wouldn't have much in the way of 3rd time offenders. Could call it cruel and unusual but is it any more cr
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The rate of repeat offenders who have previously spent time in jail would tend to argue against this.
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It depends on the person. Some people live in areas where there are no jobs, period, so in order to make money, criminal activities have to be done to put food on the plate.
Other people just were not raised in an environment other than "they have it, you don't, you take it".
Finally there are the drug addicted types who just have no higher functioning other than to grab something for their next high.
Yes, there are the hardened criminals. Those and the habitually violent ones are the ones that need to be se
Re:When you go to prison (Score:5, Interesting)
Decriminalisation of drugs would also go some way toward slightly less insane levels of incarceration? Having 5% of the population the US account for 25% of the world's prisoners. That is just batshit unhinged.
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For a fraction of the cost of the SWAT teams and weaponry, we could give every single American citizen minimum wage, even if they do nothing at all but watch Springer re-runs. That is about $22,000 a year.
This doesn't sound true. American citizens are about 300 million people. Giving them all $22k per year means about 6.6 trillion dollars. Let's me generous and say the "fraction" you allude to is 1/2, then we need 13.2 trillion dollars spent on swat. From what I've read, the total US police expenditure is closer to $100 billion, which is orders of magnitude less.
You *may* be able to "top up" the very poorest US citizens with that kind of budget (though I'm skeptical), and maybe we decide that children do
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And yet crime tends to be performed by young men. If the majority of criminals were and will remain sub-human and hence continue to commit crimes, that would not be true. Clearly, a good many young men that commit crimes avoid doing so later in life.
Health Concerns (Score:4, Interesting)
Weren't these machines banned in Europe over health concerns from radiation exposure? I know that these are prisoners but shouldn't the health effects of such a machine be studied prior to deploying stuff like this out into the world? http://science.howstuffworks.c... [howstuffworks.com]
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I know that these are prisoners but shouldn't the health effects of such a machine be studied prior to deploying stuff like this out into the world?
What mystifies me is that they (sorta) admitted that the old machines may have been bad for one's health (at least I hear TSA agent say "these are new, safer machines"). However, not a single person had been fined or imprisoned for allowing UNTESTED machines to be used against millions of people.
Re:Health Concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because everything is forgiven if you shout TERRORISM loud enough.
Also, most politicians won't even consider going against the TSA on this because they are too afraid of being called "soft on terrorism" during their next election campaign. Fear isn't just for keeping the populace in line - it keeps the politicians in line also.
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cuz it's really hard to prove health problems are caused by radiation, particularly when you have medical studies which come to opposing conclusions. The uncertainty allows the establishment to continue using the machines until more definitive evidence is produced that the scanner manufacturers and government can't controvert.
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You need context for that.
Sure, it's safer without an x-ray cathode. That's some high-voltage stuff.
Re:Health Concerns (Score:4, Interesting)
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The solution will probably be something as pedestrian as special goggles that the prisoners are given the option to wear, something that looks like those small swim goggles bu
It's not just privacy (Score:1)
It's the radiation. I'm surprised that correctional employee unions haven't objected to these installations, or, at least, demanded that the scanner operators get to wear dosimeters to detect radiation exposure.
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So, where is the problem ? (Score:2)
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Because they weren't already getting worse than that doing routine searches/bangups?
better then strip search (Score:2)
also jails use them on inmates well.
hmmm (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Despite your overstatement in places, you have spoken truth. This is because of basic psychology, where becoming a prisoner pushes you from one of us to being one of them.
We draw distinctions in organizing people, so that we know who to care about. Five people from your state die, or one from your city, and it is a tragedy. Five people an ocean away is barely news.
The quotes from rich people explaining poverty are examples of the same effect, they just don't understand. Same with poor people discussing rich
Poorly worded headline (Score:2)
Controversial TSA X-Ray Machines To Be Used In Prisons
Would have been much more informative.
Re:Moved from the 'open' prison to closed prisons. (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean I can't live with Scarlett Johansson? Darn the luck!
There are no violent ex-cons or gang members in my neighborhood or at my place of work...
No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.
Let me repeat that, so it sinks in...
No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.
There are only so many resources on this planet. We are all in competition for those resources. Communities, cities, nations, alliances, are all there for the purpose of attempting to ensure the best access to resources. Different cultures throughout history have been better at it than others, and I'm certain that the current balance will eventually change. Within those spheres of cooperation exists a degree of competition though, as cooperation doesn't automatically mean succor. If parents want their children to succeed then they need to set their children up on a path to help make them succeed. That generally requires having a certain degree of stability of their own to start with, and then generally requires the parents to make some sacrifices of their own to commit the time and resources to the children that they might otherwise want to spend on themselves.
My very strong opinion is that if you can't afford to have children, then don't have children. 'Afford' includes the willingness to commit that time, effort, and money required to do right by them. There are so many ways of avoiding having children while still enjoying a full life that it's stupid to have kids when one isn't prepared to go all-in.
Land isn't your birthright. Your birthright, whether born in Beverly Hills or in Khartoum, is to struggle to get or to keep what you need to live. That's it. The universe owes you nothing.
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There are no violent ex-cons or gang members in my neighborhood or at my place of work...
I was going to ask you how you know; it reminded me this story from Trenches comic [trenchescomic.com]
I can't imagine anything going wrong here (Score:3)
Besides the privacy and safety concerns of these things, I was under the impression that a major flaw is that it's a bit too easy to sneak things through them.
Is it really a smart idea to move these things from a place where security is theatre to a place where the targets actually *are* sneaking weapons through security and using those to actually kill other people?
Meanwhile, they've been replaced (Score:2)
Meanwhile, in airports they've been replaced by new machines that achieve exactly the same ends using slightly different technology.
But the traveling public has gotten used to it, and complaints have died down, so the new terahertz wave nudie scanners are the new normal.
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Meanwhile, in airports they've been replaced by new machines that achieve exactly the same ends using slightly different technology.
But the traveling public has gotten used to it, and complaints have died down, so the new terahertz wave nudie scanners are the new normal.
Maybe in your neck of the woods, but I've done a bit of traveling over the past several months, and my experience is that the TSA agents have a pitch ready and part of that pitch is "This is not backscatter. No danger to you. No nudie pics can be stored. Please don't ask to be pat down. Please!", which I continued to ignore and tell the man "I don't trust your bosses to tell the truth anymore. Grope away".
That, or they're using the plain old metal detectors, pre 9/11.
So I don't think tetraherz scanners ar
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They've largely replaced the X-Ray backscatter machines with millimeter wave scanners [wikipedia.org], and they are very much still in use in the US. You can see where and how they're in use at TSA Status [tsastatus.net].
I'm glad they've gotten rid of the potentially harmful ones (although I gather the risk is very low); but my primary complaints have always been the gross violation of privacy, ineffectiveness, and government fraud and waste related to the program.
State Hospital Workers (Score:2)
Few people are more hated in Red States than public employees just trying to e
ACLU will fix this little infringement (Score:1)