Having seen the horrific rikers beating video. [1] I don't understand why in this day and age, prisons are NOT under 100% CCTV monitoring. Is this just out of sight, out of mind approach? As we debate body-worn cameras to prevent police brutality, ensuring prison and jails are kept under constant surveillance might help reduce recidivism.
It's also tragic that there is direct equivalence to the charter/public school debate. A lot of the arguments for/against charters schools can be simply applied by swapping school for prison. And just like test-scores/teaching-philosophy, you have a superior scandinavian approach.
I agree. I know someone who was arrested for being drunk in public (very, very drunk and belligerent). Once at the jail I guess she continued being belligerent.
At this point she was restrained on a gurney, surrounded by no less than 4 guards. She said something rude and as a result was tazed not once but 3 times.
After I bailed her out we went to the sherrifs office and requested an investigation. After a few days they claimed to not be able to find any video of this happening. They conceded that there are multiple areas where the cameras can't see.
I also found out that the guards at the jail are not sheriff deputies, but employed by a private corporation. But they wear the same uniform as the deputies, sans badge.
The criminal justice system in this country is disgusting. Truly disgusting. If I'm ever fortunate enough to be financially secure (long term) I plan to dedicate my time to induce change in this area of our society.
One interest effect this had on me was respect for local law enforcement. I used to have some level of respect for them and what I had observed as professionalism. That's all out the window now, and I have 0 respect for them. Instead of being polite and reasonable I am now combative and uncooperative in any encounter. They can taser me all they want, Ill just use it as a public campaign against them.
> Instead of being polite and reasonable I am now combative and uncooperative in any encounter.
Just remember: they can get away with anything. It's their word against yours, and they will always win. If you are lucky enough to have any evidence against them, it will just get lost eventually (your case in point).
> They can taser me all they want, Ill just use it as a public campaign against them.
No one in a position to do anything about it will listen. You'll just be adding insult to your injury.
When encountering law enforcement, it's best just to "yes sir"/"no sir" them, and hope you don't come out of it with a charge, or worse. Every question they ask you is an attempt to get you to incriminate yourself. They are not there to help you. It's in your best interest to do everything you can to end the encounter as soon as possible.
Wise advice. I never insult them or anything like that. I don't use sir or ma'am. I love asking if I'm being detained. I never carry ID on me (not in a must identify state). I love denying to answer questions.
I agree that they are never here to help. I don't answer questions as a matter of course.
Another guard trick if you are drunk & being hostile is to claim you 'struck an officer'. Since you are blacked out drunk you have no memory of the altercation and now face a felony charge.
Don't you think you could better promote change by working for the system rather than being a dissident outside the system? Everytime I see threads that talk about "bad apples" I find it strange that I never see comments that encourage getting "good apples" to apply.
I've thought about it. I've even contended in debates that if society restored respect for civil service the situation would likely improve.
Anecdotally I've known multiple people pretty well before they became cops. They were all good people and believed everyone had rights. Then, the gang mentality set in. Now is "us" versus "them". It got to the point where I no longer associate with them.
I ran into an old work acquaintance a while back and he was wearing a new prison guard uniform. I blurted out, "Oh no! You've gone over to the dark side!"
Authority figures are regularly given a sort of indoctrination on induction. It's us vs them, they're criminal scum, etc etc. You can't have a civil conversation with a cop, even an off-duty one, about how criminals might be driven to criminal acts by things beyond their control and how they're still people. They simply choose that lifestyle and therefore are unequivocally The Bad Guys. It's in the entire culture, one person isn't going to change it. I do generally dislike cops, and I know there are still some good ones - but they're holdouts, and even they usually only hold out so far or so long before they fold to the cultural expectation for them to be overbearing bullies and thugs. Good people don't become good cops, good people lose themselves becoming cops.
What the guards did was wrong, but don't you think your belligerent drunk friend needs to share even a tiny bit of the blame? People act like civilians should be able to do or say literally anything and fully expect law enforcement to be perfectly rational and fair and gentle with them.
I 100% believe that "civilians should be able to do or say literally anything and fully expect law enforcement to be perfectly rational and fair and gentle with them."
You can expect law enforcement to be 'perfectly rational and fair', but expecting them to always be gentle is unrealistic. When people are being violent, it sometimes requires physical force to restrain them, and oftentimes that physical force can't be gentle.
In addition, being 'perfectly rational' does not always mean doing the correct thing every time, with the benefit of hindsight. You can be rational, but in real life we have imperfect information. Innocent people are sometimes hurt because of this imperfect information, even if everyone behaves rationally. It sucks, but is unavoidable.
The idea that cops respond with reasonable force in a rational manner is a fantasy. They are not some innocent victims of misunderstanding, they regularly fight back with as much force as they are allowed to employ, and if noone's watching a whole lot more. It's part of their dichotomous mentality. There is tons of evidence for the idea that cops regularly appoint themselves judge, jury and occasionally even executioner. Having the right information means nothing if your entire mindset is bent around the idea that you're there to mete out punishment to the deserving and all you're doing is waiting for someone to stick out their neck to be made an example of.
Again, I am not trying to argue whether too much force is used too often or not. I am simply stating that, even if we lived in a world where reasonable force was used every time by police, we would STILL have cases of citizens being harmed by the use of force by police. Since we know this, we can't use the fact that someone was injured by police to be our yardstick for determining if a police officer did the right thing or not.
None of us was there. If she was belligerent drunk, how could she reliably remember everything that happened ? More likely story is she refused orders to calm down, assaulted CO's and got tazed before being restrained. That would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
None of us was there, as you said. I do not take it as "more likely" that the victim earned three tazings. I also don't believe that effective policework would ever require tazing a drunk person three times.
And as has been said elsewhere, she was restrained all throughout.
Both law enforcement and correctional officers are trained in similar facilities with similar skills emphasized, and both physical and verbal techniques are part of that.
Emphasis is key. Grappling, weaponry, and mediation are each taught, but it's individuals that decide on application.
If we could put them in soundproof safe rooms after they've been detained so they do not disturb others (and monitor them so they don't hurt themselves), sure. Probably will increase the fines and taxes tremendously to do that.
The thing is that they have less expectations than civilians in many cases. If someone was restrained and I tazed them three times I would be arrested immediately.
She does. Which is why we didn't push an investigation too hard or go to the newspaper because of this potential reaction from the public.
I don't agree with her and I do not believe she is to blame. The system worked on her and she has subordinated to the system.
My opinion is that it is not OK to blame the victim. She was assaulted. That is illegal. She posed no physical threat to the guards. She was strapped down and out numbered 4:1.
Would you blame a woman for being held down and gang raped because she dressed provocatively and said hello to these men? Of course not.
How do you know her version of the story is the correct one? Are you sure she was really strapped down and tasered while restrained? We know she was drunk and belligerent, her recall might be imperfect.
I am not saying that police and prison guards don't abuse prisoners, but people in custody aren't always right either.
- she was seen leaving the scene strapped to a gurney en route to jail
- the taser marks were visible for weeks in 3 separate areas of her body
- she was psychologically damaged. Literally broken for weeks emotionally. It still manifests in strange ways over a year later.
- we ran into another girl she was in jail with at court during pre trial. She was really concerned for my friends emotional well being after "what happened in there".
> I don't agree with her and I do not believe she is to blame.
I didn't say she is fully to blame, but you can't deny she was an instigator by being belligerent and/or drunk. Or rather, her actions were a catalyst to what happened to her.
You can fully expect law enforcement officials to be emotionless machines, but the reality is that they are human as well and sometimes make incorrect choices based on circumstantial triggers.
> You can fully expect law enforcement officials to be emotionless machines, but the reality is that they are human as well and sometimes make incorrect choices based on circumstantial triggers.
The bad thing isn't that cops are human, it's that their status insulates them from responsibility when they screw up in all but the most high-profile cases.
I do not deny that she was an instigator. In fact, I nearly explicitly mentioned it by using the word belligerent.
I contend that it's irrelevant.
If some guy on the street is calling me ugly, fat, or stupid and I walk to him and clock him in the jaw, it's still assault and I would still be charged. The same should apply to jail guards.
>If some guy on the street is calling me ugly, fat, or stupid and I walk to him and clock him in the jaw, it's still assault and I would still be charged. The same should apply to jail guards.
I agree that if a jail guard just walked up to somebody who spoke ill of them on the street and punched them, they should be charged.
But I don't think that things should be simplified that much in the correctional environment because there is a big difference. If inmates were loudly talking down to guards and acting belligerent, that would present a disruption to the orderly running of the institution. It would also set a standard for other inmates to act in that manner. Does that mean I'm saying corrections personnel should feel free to beat inmates at any opportunity? No. But the jail and prison environment has more complex factors at play when inmates act up than just somebody is making fun of me.
I will never agree that beating helpless and restrained detainees is an acceptable response to any scenario in a correctional facility.
There are things like taking away TV privileges or being demoted to janitorial duty that can be an effective deterrent to many behavioral issues in a facility.
I say many (as opposed to most) because our jails/prisons are regularly used to house the mentally ill these days which creates another layer of complexity. We should fix that problem and remove that layer first and foremost.
You are of course accepting completely that a belligerent drunk woman had sufficient unbiased recall to fairly assess the ordering and significance of events. If you're a belligerent drunk, its usually because you believe everyone is being belligerent with you, regardless of whether they are or are not. If drunk people had good powers of decision making and memory, we'd allow them to drive.
oy vey. When you give law enforcement a gun and taser, you expect them to use it appropriately. Your question begs the question that their action was reasonable in light of the "rude" behaviour.
There is no situation where it's okay for LE to shoot or tase someone because of non-threatening words.
I am not saying that at all, in fact having grown up in a country with predominantly private school system, it always amazes me how the land of capitalism ended up with essentially socialist system for education.
When I read this in Snow Crash, I thought Neal Stephenson was being deliberately absurd. But here we are. Want to go to The Hoosegow LLC and not The Clink, Incorporated? That'll be an extra $50 a night.
I didn't even bat an eye. This was probably because this is completely sensible and logical in a libertarian/anarchist society. The concept is expanded in other works of dystopic fiction.
You pay for the best jail you can afford. If you are found innocent, your accuser/prosecutor has to reimburse your costs. If you are found guilty, you have to pay restitution to your victims (or their still-living representatives), and the justice service provider handling your case will take whatever measures may be appropriate to protect their subscribers from you after your release. If you can't immediately make restitution, there may be a supervised work program around that will help you finance your jail boarding and court judgments. Or maybe the judge will work out a deal to reduce your weregeld bill, perhaps in exchange for something like submitting to a specific torture, or having a warning tattooed across your forehead.
If you're a really hard case, you just get named outlaw, and someone kills you for the bounty.
For most people, instead of paying taxes to a county, you would pay a subscription fee to a company that provides all-in-one security, dispute resolution, arbitration, rehabilitation, and property and casualty insurance. You might pay $99/month to a reseller agent of Brinks Allstate, and your neighbor might pay $119/month directly to Alfa Pinkertons through their website. If your kid's bike gets stolen, the cop-adjuster comes by to take your report, helps you file your claim, and determines whether it would be cost effective to investigate and prosecute. If they do, and it turns out your neighbor's cousin was operating a bike theft ring out of their garage, the Alfa Pinkertons arrest him, put him in their jail, and provide him with defense counsel. Brinks Allstate and Alfa Pinkerton have a pre-existing extradition agreement in place, engage Wopner-Brown-Scheindlin as their arbitration subcontractor, who in turn sub-subcontracts some jurors from YourPeers. (You might also need to have a separate justice provider through your workplace.)
After the neighbor is found guilty, he has to pay back the cost of reimbursing the bike owners. Perhaps a few of them are willing to buy their stolen bikes back with [a portion of] their insurance money. Until his checks clear, he stays in the Alfa Pinkerton jail's sweatshop, working off that debt at $X/hour. After he's out, he goes right back to being that creepy guy living above your neighbor's garage, and his credit score goes back up with that "RESTITUTION PAID IN FULL" line on his report.
As bad as this all sounds, our actual, real-life criminal control system is in some ways worse.
That's a lot of people that have to work together when they don't have to and have no incentive to in order for this to be even somewhat effective.
Part of me wants to be a libertarian/anarchist, but the way their ideas resemble freshman physics explanations that ignore friction and wind resistance really turns me off.
The incentive for everyone is in not getting murdered, pillaged, or otherwise brutalized by roving bands of outlaw raiders, like in Mad Max or Fallout. Also, the whole thing runs on pure, unadulterated money-grubbing.
A libertarian world really is a nightmare for the people who believe that the government world does not essentially do exactly the same thing, but with better PR, and maybe different price points. The government version of freshman physics assumes a spherical cow. The libertarian version assumes a spherical pig. The Internet argues about the flavor of the milk.
The truth is that no one will admit there may be warts on their favorite goblin baby until they are growing one right on the end of their pointy little green nose. I have already spent an awful lot of time on the Internet arguing both for and against libertarian ideas. The only good thing that can really be said about the adherents of alternate political views is that at least they recognize that change is only possible if you try something different. You can't really ever predict the outcome of a system when you divorce its ideal workings from the real people who will eventually be running it.
I feel like there would be emergent effects that would make this far worse in reality than the way you described it. Do I think it's better than our current system. Probably. Do I think we can come up with a much better system? Yes!
Sure. As long as you're playing with hypotheticals, you can imagine any outcome you want. And you can poke holes in other people's scenarios all day. That's why it is generally pointless to rely entirely on thought experiments and never study any real-world behavior.
I pay $349/mo to Uncle Enzo's Thing, who kidnaps the CEO of Blackwater, cuts off his ear, and douses him in gasoline. My neighbor is a lifetime OG in the local Compton Crips franchise, and the worldwide org takes out 80% of the board of Triple Canopy with simultaneous drive-by shootings. Sachs-Chase-Salomon-ExxonMobil-GE-AT&T-Shinra drops a nuke on all of us. The Lysistrata Society shorts contraceptive stocks. Hydra-TransUnion-NewsCorp merges with SPECTRE-Facebook-Experian and changes the combined corporate motto to "Evil: It Makes Good Money." Real estate prices for secret volcano lairs rise steeply. The King of Tonga sends two war canoes up the Potomac and decisively conquers a barbecue stand in Northern Virginia, forcing it to put pineapple on its pork sandwiches. Cats and dogs, living together--mass hysteria! Chaos!
They say an armed society is a polite society. Mutually assured destruction is a whole lot scarier when you have competitors waiting in the wings to snatch up your dissatisfied customers that want to switch providers because jaw-jaw costs them much less than war-war.
As mentioned in a cousin post, the assumptions embedded in the hypothetical scenarios make the imagined outcomes useless, just like that novice physics student neglecting wind resistance.
There's many ways in which a dystopian automated system of surveillance and justice would be preferable, but society tends to love organizing its own systems of award and punishment.
I was distraught reading that whole thing until the last sentence. You're right- in many ways it is better than our current system. And that's really scary.
I don't see this as especially outrageous. The part that bothers me is that it isn't available to poorer criminals. But I don't agree with the ex-gang fellow who said getting your ass beat is part of the punishment. That seems unfair to weaker criminals in the same way this scheme is unfair to poor ones. I think the state has an obligation to keep inmates physically safe. If physical violence is something we want as an official part of the punishment let's just bring back corporal punishment.
Also can't help but notice the problem with making this more widely available. The violence in regular jail is a consequence of being locked up with violent people. If you move them to these easier jails they would bring the violence with them
I think exposing rich people to the same conditions as poor people in jail is extremely important.
Monetary wealth translates to social power more often than not.
If rich people experience the same jail as poor, they will push in society to improve it. If you let the rich opt-out they'll never see it and won't be motivated to induce change.
I have spent a couple nights in jail. I know what it's like, and it's not acceptable for anyone to be exposed to this. Change is needed whether you're rich, poor, black, white or purple.
I don't think that will work the way you think that will work --rich people in Jail have less power than a gang member in the pen. Law and order people really don't care who's who when it comes to punishment --there are cases where jailers are corrupted, but it does not matter to them whether it's rich white collar dirty money or blue collar dirty money.
No. The article seems mostly intended to generate outrage that bad criminals might get out of the ass-beating experience of real jail and have access to flat screen TVs
Every argument in favor of letting people with money have a nicer prison experience than those without is an argument in favor of fixing prison problems for every inmate, instead.
As a side benefit, you avoid seeing rich people swinging from lampposts instead of serving time.
> Every argument in favor of letting people with money have a nicer prison experience than those without is an argument in favor of fixing prison problems for every inmate, instead.
Uhm, could it be that you have a typo in your posts, like a missing not?
Because i have a hard time finding logic in the argument as written.
This is despicable, but the conditions at the average prison are despicable too. Just watch almost any cop show to see how the expectation of prison rape has become normalised in American society.
Short-term incarceration (less than two years, and that's not an arbitrary figure) leads to much different conditions than long-term incarceration. There's different effects on humans and different changes in valuated needs.
Rape tends to be the province of those expecting little to no change in their long-term experience. A little different from murder in incarceration, in that the victim has opportunity for reprisal.
Hollywood has normalized it with their shows. I spent over 10 years in various state and federal prisons and never once was an inmate raped while I was in those facilities. I was present during 3 riots, but rapes, not.
Morbid thought: I'm surprised there isn't a cottage industry around buying life insurance policies on prison inmates. I bet you could use statistical methods and/or machine learning to profitably predict inmates most likely to die early, given the prison location, staff, the inmate's crime, and other factors.
Not only morbid but I'd argue morally wrong as well, as this would be betting on peoples lives. It's just as awful as the coliseum just without you being exposed to the blood.
Some European prisons are way better than the best America's pay fof jail schemes.
America's jails are places where people got to get abused rather than get rehabilitated, so what is the big deal about some people paying for a better environment?
> so what is the big deal about some people paying for a better environment?
Because it incentives the private prison to make the situation even worse for those who fail to pay. Effectively the worse they make the "free" the more money they make.
To use an analogy, it is like Amazon Prime, when Amazon Prime first started free shipping was at $25 minimum order. Last year free shipping was at $49. Why? To incentivise Prime memberships. Only competition from Walmart forced them to bring it back down to $35.
So back to prisons... If this became popular, we'd see more prisons who offer zero privacy as the "free" option (e.g. shared bunk beds) all as a means to "incentivise" (blackmail) prisoners into paying for a semi-private or private room.
Plus when you take into account the safety aspect, the whole thing becomes immoral. You're literally forcing prisoners to pay so they can sleep safely at night, otherwise they might get shanked while they sleep (or not get any sleep due to fear). US prisons are already much less safe than most European, Canadian, or AUS/NZ prisons.
>America's jails are places where people got to get abused rather than get rehabilitated, so what is the big deal about some people paying for a better environment?
Because the general ideal for justice is punishment to be based on guilt, not ability to pay for a lessening of guilt.
And allowing some to pay for not going there may be seen as furthering the problem, by making influental people less likely to suffer the same consequences and inspire prisons to treat "second class" inmates worse to increase the motivation to buy an upgrade to "first class"
Admittedly I didn't put a lot of time into making my point but there was a point: it's disingenuous to portray offenders as hapless victims of cruel cruel prison, when the real victims they f'd over, don't get to choose or buy better treatment.
There are still two problems with putting it this way: name-calling and a logic error. We can edit out the name-calling as follows:
it's misleading to portray offenders as victims of prison, when their own victims don't get to choose or buy better treatment
Now the statement is probably fine to post to HN in the sense that it meets the basic standard for civility and substantiveness.
As a reader, though, I'd go further. I would read the meat of the claim this way: "it's misleading to portray offenders as victims, when they victimized others". This is a logic error because the categories are not mutually exclusive. It's possible for victimizers to also be victims, typically by somebody else. Indeed, that dynamic is so common that a cliché ("the cycle of violence") exists to name it.
But we don't have to agree on that bit to have a thoughtful conversation about it. If you'd posted the rewritten statement ("it's misleading...") and someone replied like I did here ("the categories..."), the thread would be fine.
Ha! Ironically enough, the namecalling part you're pointing out now, is the result of my loosening-up on my own self-editorial controls, because I knew this part of the thread wouldn't end up seeing much daylight, and I started treating it as a one-on-one correspondence! (And I was still rushing a bit.)
What I'm getting at is more that making offenders into victims is precisely the intent of the whole system. It's not that the categories are supposed to be mutually exclusive, it's that we are trying to make them as close as possible to 100% mutually overlapping. (If they were 100% mutually exclusive that would mean one class of people was victimizing another class and getting away with it.)
Now... is it cruel to do this? Probably. It might be nothing more than vengeance. Does it lead to recidivism ("cycle of violence")? Yup. But it exists for the benefit of the victims. (Does it actually benefit the victims? Not necessarily. It doesn't bring back their murdered relatives for example. But at least they have a sense that they live in a just world where someone's looking out for them.)
So in other words it is intentionally cruel. Which is why, if anyone is worried about the cruelty of the system, there are ways of staying out of its jaws, mostly involving not being a jerk to your fellow man in the first place. (Does this guarantee you won't be wrongly convicted or even stop-and-frisked? No.)
Anyway you're doing your editorial job and I don't particularly mind being detached from the thread -- actually I'm sort of enjoying this part now. But there are basic parts of who I am that don't fit in with Hacker News, too.
Despite the article's inane attempts to link this to sex crimes, I see nothing wrong with this. Housing and feeding prisoners is a huge drain on society; a prisoner who alleviates that drain absolutely deserves a more humane experience. That's not to say that everyone else doesn't deserve a more humane experience, but we simply can't afford it. No one is suggesting we close down shelters and start housing the homeless in five star hotels, and no one seems to be too bothered by that. On the whole I'd rather money be spent first on that than upgrading prisons.
EDIT: As to the idea that this somehow reduces the effective punishment: while that might be true for the ultra-rich for whom $10k is irrelevant (but since when do they go to prison anyways?), for everyone else, having to fund your own incarceration [directly, in addition to funding everyone else's via taxation,] seems to offset that.
Incentives matter. If you allow prisons to charge for improved prisoner experience, you make the default prison experience the BATNA for negotiating how much money you give the folks running the prison.
Like, if you pay ransoms when terrorists take Americans hostage, you're funding kidnap-Americans-and-ransom-them businesses. If you pay prisons for more humane treatment, you're funding imprison-people-and-threaten-them-with-inhumane-conditions businesses.
We can. By simply releasing basically every prisoner. Literally less than 1% are truly such threats to society as to require the kind of sequestration that only prison can provide.
Given that current jail conditions are dismal as best, I see no reason for private companies to not offer for-pay incarceration services that solve these problems. This is no different than private companies offering delivery services because USPS sucks, or private transportation companies existing because bus infra simply isn't good enough. If a judge considers these options prison-like enough, then I see no reason they cannot exist.
Does it suck because not everyone can afford it? Sure
Does that mean we should just screw everyone equally simply to claim we're fair? IMHO no. Not unless you also want to close down UPS, FedEx, and Greyhound. And not unless you are willing to come out and openly say that YOU consider rape, abuse, and neglect to be an official part of our rehabilitation strategy (because that is all that county and federal prisons excel at)
You are getting confused between consumer goods/services (part of a capitalist market and being sold for profit without regard to social good), and the justice provisions of a functioning society (part of the public good, not for profit, can't be sold, and not subject to market forces or imbalancing tendencies... or at least life was better when it was like that and people knew the difference).
It's also tragic that there is direct equivalence to the charter/public school debate. A lot of the arguments for/against charters schools can be simply applied by swapping school for prison. And just like test-scores/teaching-philosophy, you have a superior scandinavian approach.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000002996576/foota...