Prisons Moving To All-Video Visitation (mic.com) 277
"A new system called 'video visitation' is replacing in-person jail visits with glitchy, expensive Skype-like video calls," reports Tech.Mic. "It's inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence -- but god, it makes money."
Slashdot reader gurps_npc writes: In-person costs a lot to administer, while you can charge people to 'visit' via video conferencing. (Charge as in overcharge -- just like they charge up to $14 a minute for normal, audio only telephone calls). This is new, and the few studies that have been done show that doing this increases violence in the prison -- and it's believed to also increase recidivism. But the companies making a ton on it like that -- repeat customers and all. Of course, the service is horrible, often being full of static and dropped calls -- and the company doesn't help you fix the problem.
Meanwhile, the EFF reports that last year Facebook disabled 53 U.S prisoner and 74 U.K. prisoner accounts at the request of the government, and is urging people to report takedown requests for inmate social media to OnlineCensorship.org.
Slashdot reader gurps_npc writes: In-person costs a lot to administer, while you can charge people to 'visit' via video conferencing. (Charge as in overcharge -- just like they charge up to $14 a minute for normal, audio only telephone calls). This is new, and the few studies that have been done show that doing this increases violence in the prison -- and it's believed to also increase recidivism. But the companies making a ton on it like that -- repeat customers and all. Of course, the service is horrible, often being full of static and dropped calls -- and the company doesn't help you fix the problem.
Meanwhile, the EFF reports that last year Facebook disabled 53 U.S prisoner and 74 U.K. prisoner accounts at the request of the government, and is urging people to report takedown requests for inmate social media to OnlineCensorship.org.
No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
US prisons are a systematic violation of basic human rights. They are barbaric, full of horrific atrocities, and there is no excuse for them.
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US prisons are a systematic violation of basic human rights. They are barbaric, full of horrific atrocities, and there is no excuse for them.
You also need to add in the stats that while the US has 4.4% of the worlds population it has 22% of the worlds prisoners [wikipedia.org]
Sure you can say that people shouldn't commit crimes. That's easy to say. The hard question to ask is why people are committing crimes at rate much higher than the rest of the world.
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We can also reach that stat by having longer sentences than other countries. A related issue, if it exists. Are there stats on the how many prisoners we are adding compared to other countries?
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the US is at hart a fundamentalist religious nation. These like to condemn and torture anybody that missteps forever, no mercy to be had. (What, say, the core of the Christian faith says about people that do this to others is not pretty.) Hence adding the maximum level of exploitation on top is no surprise. Kind of reminds me of what was going on in Nazi Concentration Camps and USSR Gulags, or today in similar installations in North Korea. The next step will be involuntary medical experiments. Josef Mengele would be so proud.
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"US prisons are a systematic violation of basic human rights. They are barbaric, full of horrific atrocities,"
That's because of the low quality of people we have in them.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is saying prisoners should be let free but this "hard on crime" insanity is actually just hard on criminals, and raises crime rates by turning a guy that made a mistake into a hardened criminal. If you really, truly want safe streets you're going to have to show some compassion.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. "Tough on crime" does not work, or rather it has the opposite of the intended effect. That has been known reliably for a long, long time. Criminals do not expect to be caught, and hence penalties do not figure in their motivation. And then not giving them a good chance to become part of society again after they were caught, just makes the problem much, much worse.
The cave-man reflex of just applying more violence to anything undesirable makes basically every problem worse, but being cave-men, its proponents are not equipped to even grasp simple statistics that say they are doing it wrong. Incidentally, the same effect is at work with the "War on Drugs" that has created huge crime-cartels and a lot of users that suffer entirely preventable damage due to contaminated drugs or that have to do crime due to artificially and massively inflated prices. Or the "War on Terror" that has created a lot of new terrorists by killing inconceivable numbers of innocent bystanders.
Applying violence to a problem is about the most base and most stupid thing you can do. The only thing more stupid is to apply more violence when the approach fails.
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not "settled science":
1) Sentence Enhancements Reduce Crime [nber.org]
2) Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows [theguardian.com]
Here's a simple thought experiment on deterrence. In each of the following scenarios, do we get a) More crime, b) less crime, c) no change?:
1) If we actively rewarded crime?
2) If crime had no state-imposed penalty?
3) If crime had state-imposed minimally inconveniencing penalties?
4) If crime had harsh state-imposed penalties?
You're suggesting deterrence doesn't work because no offender thinks he'll be caught. I don't think that's true. The possibility of capture likely has some place in the offender's risk analysis. Hence many criminals' actions to minimize their possibility of capture.
I admit that deterrence will not deter everyone. But it is safe to say it will deter at least some. And we should take what we can get.
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That's not "settled science":
1) Sentence Enhancements Reduce Crime
2) Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows
White papers by economists at the NBER are not scientific evidence.
White papers aren't peer-reviewed. That allows authors to get away with any bullshit that the reviewers and editors of a peer-reviewed paper would challenge.
Economists aren't scientists. They find association and accept it as causation, as they do with this study. Scientists find associations all the time, but when they do a controlled study, about half the time the association doesn't hold up and there is no causation.
Steven Levitt is espec
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Well, there might not be any evidence to support your "well known" theory. Indeed much research to show the opposite.
But there is plenty of evidence that "Tough on Crime" does work very well ... for the people that make money out of the prison system.
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
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Frankly, I think before the "hard on crime" types talk about addiction issues, they ought to take at least a beginners course on the psychology and neurology of addiction. Or heck, even some basic psychology. This idea that we are completely free agents, that free will is absolute, was debunked decades ago. A lot of our behaviors, even our more cognitively complex ones, happen "under the hood", and to one extent or another our free will is an illusion, decisions like "I need another shot of vodka" or "I nee
prisons are run to hurt society (Score:5, Informative)
A friend of mine was in prison because federal prosecutors don't have any ethics that they have to follow. The prosecutor lied so blatantly that their own expert witness sued them. Still, the jury ate it up because the lies fit their preconceived notions.
Inside prison, everything is run by gangs. Intimidation is constant, violence is common, maiming and murder is not uncommon, and people only survive by becoming a hardened criminal.
They come out much worse - for them and for society.
I have no problem with harsh punishment. I do demand good results, and our current system is not producing them.
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The problem is not that people are sent to prison. The problem is how the prisons are.
Why should gangs even be able to have any power inside prisons? There is no need for that. Make a prison where prisoners have less contact with other prisoners - mostly contact with guards. Get rid of prison rape, gange rule etc.
Prison should still be where you don't want to be. Because of the BOREDOM of years inside. Being locked up and going nowhere. Not "fear of other prisoners"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not every addict is taking heroin. Some start Oxy, or Ativan, or (common drug here) because a doctor prescribed it and they became addicted to it without any intent. Did you know there are certain genes that make drugs like Ativan super addictive? Mutations to liver enzyme pathways CYP450 2D6 and 3A4 combined in the right increase/decrease of those enzymes make the drug between 4 and 10 times as powerful as it is expected to be; meaning a doctor who prescribes the medication in a good faith dosage could be
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Pot does not make you more aggressive. It calms you down and relaxes mind and body.
Perhaps you should try it once before spreading your FUD?
Plenty of 'conscious' decisions are not conscious at all but trained habits. People who pull a gun because you look at their GF do that because they were raised and trained to do that. Absolutely nothing conscious about it.
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"...pot makes one more aggressive for a short time immediately after consuming/smoking."
I call bullshit. After consuming pot in multiple ways with hundreds of other people in all kinds of situations for over 40 years, I've never seen this "effect", period.
I no longer smoke or consume pot, but I repeat: I have never, ever seen anyone become more aggressive after using it, immediately or otherwise.
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False. From March of 2016 [psychologytoday.com]:
New research published on-line in advance of print in the journal Psychological Medicine, concludes that continued use of cannabis causes violent behavior as a direct result of changes in brain function that are caused by smoking weed over many years.
Further on the article states:
What makes this new study more compelling than previous studies is that the researchers followed the same individu
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
So how did this study control for the demographic differences between pot use reporting populations and not?
They didn't? What a surprise. Worthless study. Richer people were much less likely to admit it, especially historically.
You need to double check the definition of 'scientific evidence'. It doesn't mean: 'Things I agree with.'
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I'm predisposed to agree with you, but the study summary says that it controlled for "other putative risk factors for violence", and that they didn't just use self-reports but also criminal records (and yes, I know that criminal records are also biased).
I'm not paying $6 to pass the paywall to get more clarity on their controls though. You could be right but I'm not convinced you are.
You need to double check the definition of 'scientific evidence'. It doesn't mean: 'Things I agree with.'
It honestly sounds like you are calling this evidence unscientific because it isn't in the set of "Things I agree with".
Here
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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concludes that continued use of cannabis causes violent behavior
That explains how all the stoners I know are dangerous, unpredictable, and violent.
Oh no. Wait. That's not right, they're actually all productive and gainfully employed members of society. My mistake.
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How about just looking at the science? Marijuana _is_ linked to psychosis whether you like it or not, studies that properly compensates for the self-medication effect (where people with preexisting mental problems use alcohol, marijuana or other drugs to feel better) still shows that use of the drug can trigger psychosis of different kinds - in some cases permanent. This isn't too strange given what we know of the workings of the brain and the effects of drugs.
Claiming there isn't a problem is the common ex
Cannabis (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that marijuana has never been linked to any deaths, it's that there has never been a lethal marijuana overdose, and estimates of the LD50 are 20,000 to 40,000 times the normal dose [wikipedia.org]. I have no doubt that marijuana in combination with other drugs or other health conditions could be fatal, but [a] the difference between the effective dose and the lethal dose is one of the greatest of all psychoactive substances, and [b] consuming a lethal dose is more than a little impractical. It is completely impossible to consume a lethal dose of marijuana cigarettes. Even taking low estimates for the LD50, it would require smoking more than one cigarette per second for a sustained period of time.
As you no doubt know, the role of cannabis in producing psychosis is debated, and odds are there are genetic factors there as well. I believe it is more fair to say that drug use can produce psychosis in susceptible individuals, without needing to be more specific. Similarly, there are studies on both sides of the violence issue, and using the word "linked" [xkcd.com] is somewhat disingenuous. I believe further study is necessary to be able to firmly establish either position.
Cannabis has been established as one of the safest recreational drugs. One can even make favorable comparisons to caffeine. As one of the >40% of the US who has tried marijuana, I would say you're being alarmist, and I don't think that balances out the "pro-drug propaganda". Telling people to "Fuck off!" is also not indicative of a desire for honest discussion.
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After years of hearing about it, I've just gotten into GoT. If the punishment for snagging single episode is hanging, I'd tremble at the thought of what punishment awaits me...
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I own a portion of a company that makes specialty ropes, you insensitive clod!
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
I would much rather have the convicted criminals under lock and key than roaming the streets.
Nearly all prisoners are eventually released. So a prison system that hardens and desocializes them is probably not a good thing.
Family and community contact is one of the best ways to reduce recidivism. It is very short sighted to put up barriers to visitation.
Early in the primaries, prison reform actually looked like it was going to be an election issue. Hillary, Bernie, and John Kasich all spoke out about the problems. Unfortunately, the issue appears to have faded away.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about nationally but locally the courts are pretty lenient on first time offenders for everything other than murder and rape. Usually it's the ones that just don't get the message and go back two or three times that get the hammer dropped. First offense is almost always probation and often second offenses get very little jail time. I guess they figure if you're not getting the message they have to hit you over the head with it to get your attention. When I see someone that's repeatedly broken the law get shoveled off to a long sentence in a shit hole somewhere it's hard to feel much empathy for them. I've been the victim of theft and I have to say that while I don't agree with cruelty I don't think shutting someone up in a cold hard place is worse than letting them back out to prey on people.
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I don't think shutting someone up in a cold hard place is worse than letting them back out to prey on people.
Most people in prison did not "prey" on anyone. There are locked up for non-violent, and often victimless, crimes, such as drug offences, immigration violations, etc.
In America, some states lock up way more people than others, yet they don't have less crime. There is little evidence that imprisoning lots of people makes you safer.
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Not according to this. Violent felons make up the largest percentage of the prisoners.
http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339
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Not according to this. Violent felons make up the largest percentage of the prisoners.
Your own citation clearly states that violent offenders are a minority of the prison population.
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Your own citation clearly states that violent offenders are a minority of the prison population.
Sure, spin those stats.
What they show is that while violent offenders are a "minority" when you combine all other categories into one , as a category violent offenders are by far the largest category.
As well, 47.7% isn't exactly a small "minority.
2012 Stats
Violent - 47.7%
Property - 17.1%
Drug - 20.5%
Public-Order - 13.8% (what is "public-order"?)
Other - 0.7%
And, when you combine violent offender and property crime, that's a majority, unless you want to tell me that burglary and car theft and such things shou
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Prison is about more than punishment. Or it should be, if you want the people walking out of that prison to reintegrate into society, and not end up back on their pre-prison trajectory.
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when you combine all other categories into one
A balanced view might break try this breakdown first:
47.7% - Violent
52.3% - Non violent
And then, it might try to break down both of the two categories further. Violent, for instance, consists of stuff like murder, assault, violent burglaries, home invasions, sexual assault, domestic violence, violence against minors. Etcetera etcetera. Whereas non-violent might have a different breakdown. But to leave violent offences in a category of their own, and then on that basis, suggest they they are the 'largest' c
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Public-Order - 13.8% (what is "public-order"?)
State : Includes weapons, drunk driving, court offenses, commercialized vice, morals and decency offenses, liquor law violations, and other public-order offenses.
Federal : Includes immigration, weapons, and other public-order offenses.
Just read the linked article.
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"Sure, spin those stats.
What they show is that while violent offenders are a "minority" when you combine all other categories into one , as a category violent offenders are by far the largest category."
You fucking disingenuous asshole. There are only two types of crime, violent and non-violent. It doesn't matter how you try grouping shit up, you witless fool.
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Not according to this. Violent felons make up the largest percentage of the prisoners.
http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339
On 5 out of 7 years in that chart 'violent' felons make up under 50%. Just because they're all lumped into one where the non violent crimes are split up doesn't mean there's more of them. So according to your own information you should have said "Violent felons make up just under half of the prisoners".
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Immigration offences are NOT a victimless crime (Score:2)
The victims of the crime are hard working citizens who earn less than they would because their value in the labour market is undermined.
The victims are the citizens whose house is repossessed because their employer has gone bankrupt because another firm has competed it into bankruptcy because it employed illegal immigrants at below the minimum wage.
And of course the most visible victims are the 'dream children' whose illegal immigrant parents selfishly bought them along when the started their criminality, a
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It can. Heard an interview a while back with a native woman who'd spent 8 years in prison after stabbing someone to death when she was 15.
As she put it, it wasn't that she made bad choices, but rather that she didn't even know there were choices. She'd spent 20 years after getting out of prison helping young fucked up people to understand that there were actually choices and she felt that she'd made a difference in quite a few lives. If she is correct that she helped at least one person stay away from a liv
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But the goal IS to desocialize them. How else do you get repeat offenders and keep the system running? The very LAST thing prisons want is fewer criminals, it cuts into their bottom line.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know if this is the case of not. But I though prisons receive a bonus for people who don't reoffend in a certain time period?
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This is a profit-driven enterprise. Privately run prisons.
They get money per inmate.
Contracts are also written to guarantee a minimum number of inmates, so you pay even if the prison is empty.
It's the most odious scam going.
--
BMO
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, the US prison industry _wants_ repeat customers. There is a lot of money in it. Hence anything even remotely targeted at reintegrating former criminals gets squashed, to extreme overall costs for society.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Anyone can be a "criminal", if the government decides its advantageous to call you one. Pot smoker? Criminal. Sell your buddy a few of your joints? You're a dealer. Live in the same house as someone who sold a joint to someone? You're an accessory. In fact your the most pitiful kind of accessory there is: somebody with nobody valuable to rat on. Guys who sell marijuana by the bale will get less time than you do.
Texas of course has taken this to a new low.
I did a little Google searching and found out that the Travis County Correctional facility is the largest mental health provider in its region. Why? Because as mental health beds are disappearing the county is shifting those people to its prison. And now they're trying to turn mental patients and recreational pot smokers into a profit center.
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If you follow the law and fit in like an ordinary human being
then you will die full of regret
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On average, American's commit three felonies a day. You're probably one of them, even if you don't smoke pot or live with someone who does.
https://www.amazon.ca/Three-Fe... [amazon.ca]
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It's amazing how many yards have opium poppies growing in them, or maybe not when you look at the flower seeds at the store and realize how common this plant is and also how easily it self seeds.
Huge chunks of the population are guilty of (unknowingly) growing narcotics and could be sentenced to quite a few years in prison.
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Personally, sure. I don't smoke pot, and nobody I associate with uses around me.
But avoiding pot as an entire society? Nope. Can't be done. Such a big fraction of the population has decided pot laws are stupid (which I agree with) and that they'll ignore those laws, it's just spitting into the wind. The futility of of our pot policy is probably biggest single corrupting factor our law enforcement.
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Of course it's not a daycare. Are you nuts? Running a daycare is WAY less profitable than running a prison!
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Having worked in a military detention facility and having interviewed and toured at a civilian facility, I've noticed some odd things.
You go to prison *as* punishment and not *for* punishment.
This is entirely backwards in a civilian facility. Prison should be a place where one still has a modicum of respect and self-determination. No, it needn't be insecure to do so. The greatest thing a government should be able to take is your freedom, your dignity (or lack of it) should be your own.
I've mentioned this before but it's this important and has meant that much to me - for all these years.
From the staff side, entering in through the Sally Port, was an old cross-stitched sign on the wall. It was dull and faded, certainly not regulation, but it had been there for as long as anyone could remember. On that sign was a simple, but important, adage. It said, "There, but by the Grace of God, go I."
I suppose that won't mean anything to you and that you'll be unable (unwilling?) to understand it. So, consider it not writ large on your behalf but for the others who might take your post to heart without having the benefit of an alternative view.
I was a chaser/escort - in civilian terms I was a "Transportation Officer." It ties into my oft-quoted determination/conclusion that people are people, pretty much everywhere you go. Lest you read this and think you're still cognizant, I encourage you to recollect the sign. "There, but by the Grace of God, go I."
It should be /as/ punishment and not /for/ punishment.
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What fascinates me is the fact the people often treat prison as something that is set in stone and given to us by the gods instead of realizing that it's a man made invention just like everything else around us. AFAIK the origins of prison was Christians in Europe who thought that if they put criminals into the same kind of solitude that monks exhibit in a monestary which then would make the criminals be able to get "closed to god".
Fast forward some thousand years and prison is the lowest denominator. Mysel
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
You go to prison *as* punishment and not *for* punishment.
This is by far the most insightful comment in this entire thread.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Not many people even understand it. *sighs* Look at all the comments you see in the threads where someone they loathe is probably going to prison. There are people actively expressing their hope that the person be given "prison justice" in the form of rape, beatings, and even death. There are some horrible people out there and no, I'm not actually talking about the people who are incarcerated.
An interesting aside, seeing as I'm already typing, is that just prior to the cessation of the Korean War's military actions if a Marine Escort/Chaser lost their detainee then they were obligated to serve that person's time up until the escaped prisoner had been returned to custody. I believe this part remains true to this day: If you escape, or try to escape, from a custodial sentence in a military facility there is no time added to your sentence nor is it a crime in and of itself. The natural state of a human is to be free of restraint. To try to escape is natural and thus not considered a criminal offense in the UCMJ.
However, I never had anyone attempt to escape or even appear to be considering it. We were trained, more or less, to treat the prisoners with respect. In fact, the prisoner may outrank you and still retain their rank until such time as they are officially dismissed from service. (No, they can not order you to let them go - such would be an unlawful order.) There are some strange protocols that might sound odd to a civilian but it's essential to keep in mind that our wards were trained to kill. There are no firearms inside the secure zone and more of them than there are of you - and they've already been acclimated to CS gas. Even if it weren't the humane thing to do, it would still be *very* wise to treat the prisoners with respect.
I didn't spend much time inside the secure zone. I was not on guard duty, patrol, rover, or anything like that. I'd been trained (we all were) to fill those roles but my specific duty was transport/escort. I took them to court, medical, escorted to funerals, and sometimes flew with them to a detention center that was closer to their home. I drove everything from a bus to what is pretty much just your standard police cruiser.
One of the more memorable episodes was when a civilian court officer tried to disarm me. No, not violently or with force or anything but vocally asserting that I was not authorized to carry a firearm or bring any weapons into the court. We got a call on the radio telling me that it had been resolved and that I was to bring the accused back to the court. I'd simply turned around and taken my prisoner back out to the cruiser and was driving back to base. My job was not just to stop my prisoner from escaping but it was also to prevent them from coming to harm. I was not going to allow my prisoner to be cuffed and shackled (defenseless, pretty much) in a group of angry civilians and not retain my service weapons.
Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, or anything like that. I'm not going to leave my prisoner undefended. There's more to detention than just keeping them detained. There's an obligation to keep them from harm. That and there were a lot of really angry people in the courtroom. My prisoner had beaten the shit out of some well-liked civilian. If you're curious, he was acquitted in the civilian court but was still went through the court martial and was convicted there and ousted from the Marines. It turns out that not only had he not swung first but the civilian was drunk (as was the young Marine) and was insulting him with racist slurs before he hit him. Once he hit him, things got a bit out of hand and much damage was done and that resulted in permanent brain injury to the civilian. I'm not sure what the end result was as I wasn't the one to transport him at the end and I've no idea what happened in the civil trial that followed. He was already bucked out of the service by then.
I dunno, this is already long enough but it's about humane treatment and respect. It's not hard to treat humans like untam
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
I would much rather have the convicted criminals under lock and key than roaming the streets.
They are eventually released, incapable of interacting with lawful society because they've become so removed from normal human social behavior that they have adapted to the violent prison life.
Recidivism costs us real money. These for-profit prisons are stealing our tax dollars because they aren't taking care of the long term interests of society keeping the recidivism rate low.
The Free Market fails again.
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If a policy leads to more violence and higher recidivism, then how precisely is that helping anyone? Reforming a criminal, which is one key issue to prisons (otherwise, why not just have a big dark hole and throw people in it), is undermined by such measures, and while the operator of that prison makes a few bucks more, it ends up costing taxpayers more in the end.
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Well, they are supposed to treat prisoners humanely.
They are supposed to rehabilitate prisoners.
They are not supposed to engage in 'punishment' or otherwise induce unnecessary hardships. (Remember the rehabilitation thing?)
They are not supposed to try to milk money out of a captive audience, that obviously no longer has a paycheck, or their families.
They are not supposed to view prisoners as a profit center.
They are not supposed to take advantage, financial or otherw
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Meme parroter.
Who the hell under 70 reaches for a metphor and comes up with ... Club Med?
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Being nasty to prisoners doesn't actually achieve anything -- it's simply hurting people because you can't or won't control your emotional reactions, much like many of the criminals themselves have done.
You people should just say you want the death penalty for every crime. Or learn to think and solve problems rather than rage and hate.
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That's true. The animators at Club Med... the horrors... I still can't talk about it.
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Then you have nothing to compare USA prisons
Apart from all the other countries in the world, that is.
Humane visitation (Score:5, Insightful)
Contact visits with family and loved ones are a privilege, and give the inmates something to look forward to and stay out of trouble for.
If prisoners wind up with daily lives so poor nothing that can be taken away from them, who's going to want to take care of them?
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OK, let's keep it in perspective - a shop owner treats customers well to generate repeat business.
So, why the expectation that privatized prisons won't do everything they can to generate repeat business? Charging for video "visits" makes money - and if on top of that, it has the side effect of increasing recidivism - who ends up making a profit on it?
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Let's not forget the politicians who take advantage of voters' tendencies towards irrational hysteria to pass draconian laws. This whole "eye for an eye" thing causes more misery, and does absolutely nothing to prevent crime.
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So you think we should execute car thieves or credit card scammers, and they should feel lucky that you're not in charge?
Let's not forget that the kind of prison system you seem to approve of only exacerbates the problem. But hey, fuck science. You want revenge, even if it bites you in the ass in more ways than one.
It's not like they can keep cell phones out. (Score:2)
Why would anybody pay to use this service when they can just pay to use/borrow someones cell and Skype? Even better, use a video chat service that works.
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Just remember to wipe the poo off of the mouthpiece.
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the mouthpiece.
Worst prison nickname ever.
Corporate political influence (Score:2)
We've gotta put some real controls on the power of $ in our government. Please add your name to this effort for a start: http://www.movetoamend.org/ [movetoamend.org]
The cost is not the cost of the call (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot cheaper (Score:2)
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We have a /. user who works in the industry and has for some time. I imagine they will see this thread but they're on my friend's list so I will put this here and they may notice and respond about the financial aspect. If I get a minute, I'll send them a notice off-site and they may opt to share what they know. (They're helping me out with a project that I am working on.)
American voters like punishment (Score:2)
The point my rambling is trying to make
Yeah, this system is evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Our prison system seems to be turning increasingly evil - as in, willfully and casually harming others on a consistent basis well beyond their charter of stopping harm to others, for their own benefit.
They're increasingly subverting our political process, in order to take what should arguably be a time of reformation and a path back to society (and improvement of the general welfare), and using is to transform every human into a maximum income machine, including transforming laws to make the process worse. There's occasional noises towards public good in the letter of the rules of these places, but they're getting increasingly privatized and 'efficient' at gathering money.
I understand the ideal - this is where we throw folks who won't follow the rules, who won't respond to fines, a place where we repay unfairness with unfairness, so that we can remain productive. Which would be a fine ideal too, if it didn't cost taxpayers $60,000-$130,000 a year per person for land,buildings, employees,healthcare, goods, administration, etc.. We're basically paying for a rather large professional army, complete with all the logistics, in order to make a large portion of our population feel bad for the rest of their lives, for the most part.
It's part of why I've never understood the common Christian conception of Hell - a place of eternal pain, complete with the equivalent of angels who spend their existences making people feel bad for something they can no longer do anything about.
If the point of this horrible song and dance was to reduce motivation to break rules - then there should be a television in every public space, if not in every home, to show the suffering of rule breakers, to at least justify the lesson that we should be learning from all this suffering. If all these people were paying the cost, for our benefit, then all our children should see their suffering, so all this suffering wouldn't be a waste of both their lives and the time of all the people spending their lives imprisoning them.
Perhaps we don't because we really are all rule breakers. Most traffic studies I've seen find that the average driver breaks around 4,000 traffic laws every year. Proportionally the same with bike riders and pedestrians. And that's just the easily observable stuff. But we don't really enforce our rules, instead we pay people to selectively enforce them, and prosecute infractions in some of the oddest ways possible. Things like 'discovery processes', armies of paid lawyers, laws changing at the request of lobbyists, special courts, judges owning stakes in other parts of the process, and very strange politics and biases everywhere.
If the point of the whole game is to pay the least amount of resources, in order to keep the maximum number of people cooperative and productive, then I think everyone would judge that we're doing this the wrong way. There's a LOT of nations to compare against, and we're having worse results than almost all of them.
The prisons we have now are doing horrible jobs in all regards, and are actively engaged in a process of making things worse. If we're spending all these resources, the cheapest thing to do is to take this large army, and reconcile it with better, more productive, and cheaper goals. It's never going to be cheap or easy, but almost anything is going to be cheaper and easier than the road we're going down now.
Ryan Fenton
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Perhaps we don't because we really are all rule breakers.
Or at least anybody with any worth to society is. If you follow all the rules, you will not be doing anything else with your life, never even take the risk to think something not approved. A society that limits all rule-breaking too strictly stagnates pretty fast and eventually fails.
Dehumanization Complete (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just another way to isolate inmates and dehumanize them so they have fewer resources and less meaningful, human contact. This is how they strip a person of every last vestige of their humanity.
I understand that for long-distance scenarios this video-visitation could be a good thing, but to prevent people from meeting in person is wrong and abusive.
Welcome to the Prison Industrial Complex, where you're not an inmate, you're a profit-center. Heaven forbid they use Skype, which actually works- no, lets use our proprietary "solution" that's not worth a shit and doesn't actually work. Because if we used Skype we couldn't charge an arm and a leg for our "service".
Some things should not be run for profit, including schools, police services, hospitals, and prisons.
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Why shouldn't prisons be paid by how well they rehabilitate their clients?
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Why shouldn't prisons be paid by how well they rehabilitate their clients?
1) They aren't "clients". They're inmates. A client is someone who pays a professional for a service. An inmate is someone we pay to have incarcerated. They use two different words because those are two different things.
2) The other reason is because prisons aren't for rehabilitating people anymore, no matter what the "Welcome To Prison" brochure says.
Seriously, they don't give a shit about rehabilitating anyone, they just want to warehouse people and keep them off the streets. Anyone that tells you differe
For-profit prison system (Score:5, Insightful)
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This.
Instead of paying the prisons per prisoner, the government should pay less for repeat offenders.
This will give those companies a reason to rehabilitate people.
Better yet, don't try to shoehorn something that is clearly a government concern into the private sector.
Otherwise, why pay for the prisoners at all?
Surely the free market can take care of itself without government handouts?
I used this system recently (Score:5, Informative)
An associate got jailed and I "visited" him twice in Glynn county jail in Georgia.
That was the only quick way I could initiate contact from outside. Other ways include sending postcards by mail... The system uses low-end webcams and offers no privacy to the inmate. They don't use a handset, which means audio gets overheard by other inmates. Camera was aimed too high. I could see other inmates. "Visits" at that facility need to be done at specific times and are limited to 15 minutes. I gave him some vital information and setup schedule for for when I would be available to accept his calls.
By contrast, inmates can make a phone call that gets billed to the person outside seemingly at any time. They can make repeated phone calls and the amount of contact seems to be limited mostly by the wallet of the person outside. They use a phone handset, which offers improved audio quality and privacy with regards to other inmates.
My phone bill from PayTel was allegedly 21 cents per minute, but the actual blended rate once you incorporate all the fees is 36.6 cents.
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By the way, the video call was free as of February 2016.
I actually know a felon (Score:5, Insightful)
So, I know a felon, a guy who incarcerated for felony theft. He was a real treacherous shitbag before he went in, but now, he's quite polite (I'm sure he's still quite treacherous but I have no interest in finding out). No more late night parties, his house (yes, there is money in his family, so he has a house) is lights out relatively early in the evening. I think prison had quite the correct effect on this guy. It seems to have deterred him from future criminality.
Prison should deter people, both those who have committed crimes so they don't want to return, and those who don't with to have a stay in the first place.
This nonsense about 'everyone is a criminal - you're committing crimes right now' - is nonsense. I haven't seen a shred of evidence to support such a thing (which I how I make decisions on the accuracy of claims).
If you have a panic attack whenever you see a cop, that would seem to warrant an examination of your own life. Don't ride dirty. Don't have guns, drugs or drug paraphernalia on you or in your car.
Are there bad cops? Of course. Do they make up more than a tiny minority of cops? No. I haven't seen a lick of evidence to suggest otherwise.
Lionizing criminals, which I remember in the 70s and 80s only leads to a lot of innocent people suffering. Criminals should be held to account for their actions.
Re:I actually know a felon (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a panic attack whenever you see a cop, that would seem to warrant an examination of your own life. Don't ride dirty. Don't have guns, drugs or drug paraphernalia on you or in your car.
I don't have a panic attack when I see a cop, but I *am* acutely aware that the cops are not my friend. I don't really know what constitutes 'riding dirty'. I don't have guns, drugs, or drug paraphernalia in my car. But if a cop has a notion to fuck up my day and my car because I'm driving through his shitty little town and they make their revenues by making bullshit traffic stops and ginning up cause to search my car and stealing any cash I have through civil forfeiture, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I'm completely powerless in that situation, and a lot of the creepy fucks who are attracted to police work get their jollies by taking advantage of that power imbalance. Or maybe they're just corrupt and greedy. Their motivation doesn't matter that much.
There are plenty of examples of this behavior in news reports. There is no reason to believe it can't happen to me. I mean, here's one from just a few days ago, where the only reason the victims had their money (~$50,000) returned is that they were a Christian band who had raised the money for an orphanage, and that kind of thing makes bad headlines. http://dailysignal.com/2016/04... [dailysignal.com]?
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Maybe this is not the prison system's first opportunity to see what happens to inmates who never have (in-person) contact with friends and family outside the prison.
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???? Stories about dystopian developments make the feed all of the time. Poorly-implemented tech services are being proffered at an enormous profit margin to a locked-in customer base. Do I have to add a car analogy and a get-off my lawn joke, and a alien overlords joke?
Poorly-implemented? Two anecdotes about poor video quality. An author with an agenda to push and we get two anecdotes?
Enormous profit margin? Two times numbers ever given. One was $10 for a 20 minute call and the other was $0 for twice weekly calls from the designated call center. Outrageous sums.
Article was light on data and heavily shaded what was presented.
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Can I spend a day with you and note down the crimes you commit during it?
If we make it a week, I'll quite likely find something you could do time for.
Our legal system is so out of whack that it is near impossible not to break the law anymore.
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It was a general comment in relation to the OP who said people shouldn't commit a crime so they wouldn't go to jail.
I realize common sense doesn't sit too well on /. but at least make an effort to try.
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The jails are too full of pot heads. There's no space for robbers, murders, and rapists...
Would this false meme go away?
At the height of the War on Drugs hysteria, combined state and federal prisoners in for drug offenses (all, not just pot) topped out a little over 25%.
http://felonvoting.procon.org/... [procon.org]
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Yes, well, Let's take a slightly more inclusive view [bop.gov], no?
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Yes, well, Let's take a slightly more inclusive view [bop.gov], no?
Inclusive? Those are federal only statistics. A subset of overall prisoners. Not inclusive. Federal crimes. You know, heavily weighted to drug offenses.
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Sorry, took the word "felons" at face value.
So, let's get really all inclusive and call it what it is, Correctional population [bjs.gov], which, at a mere 6.85 mil, is at its "lowest rate since 1996", putting only 2.8% of the adult population through the system... But it doesn't show the breakdown.
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putting only 2.8% of the adult population
Forgive me, but almost three percent seems incredibly high. Three out of every hundred people actually going to jail?
Re: I have an idea (Score:2)
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