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The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

themarshallproject.org

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Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#121

Post by theptip »

omegaham wrote: post #98
gnaritas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a simple solution to that, set people free. We don't need to build more prisons, we already imprison more of our population than any other country in the world, we have too many prisons and too many people in them. We need to imprison less people. Release all inmates who committed victim-less crimes, if more room is needed, release all inmates who committed non violent crimes-there are better ways to deal wit…

According to this site[1], felons incarcerated for drugs comprise 16% of the total prison population. 64.8% are incarcerated for violent offenses and property crimes, both of which have victims. The most interesting part, to me, is the "public-order" criminals. When my girlfriend worked corrections, she noted that at the state level, the vast majority of prisoners were in for violent crimes - rape, robbery, murder, a…

> they are morally degenerate for exploiting human weakness for profit.

Are you proposing that selling alcohol should be punishable by imprisonment?

> this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale.

I think that you're engaging in hyperbole. A liquor store or bar is not unambiguously evil. Most _users_ of the drug alcohol are not _abusers_ -- they consume at least somewhat responsibly, are not addicted, do not impose a burden on society, and get a net positive amount of utility from their use of the drug.

You can s/alcohol/pretty much any other drug/ in the previous paragraph, though it's certainly the case that some drugs have lower total utility across society than others.

Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#122

Post by wolfgke »

> "If you can come up with a better way to do this, understanding the fact that we are 162 percent of capacity without double celling, I'm willing to listen to you"

Introduce less and shorter prison punishments into the laws so that there are simply less inmates?

Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#123

Post by Natsu »

bitwize wrote: post #78
Natsu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are two murderers who decided to kill each other. There are good reasons to leave people like that in actual solitary, so that they're unable to hurt others, but killing each other was never a human response. Nor, given their history, can I glibly conclude that prison made them that way, when all evidence is that the causal arrow points in the opposite direction. I may be somewhat biased. My mother was murdered…

So let's leave the cold-blooded killers in prison and put the inmates there on nonviolent drug offenses under house arrest or something.

I'd leave some caveats in there: people who drive under the influence and similar types who have caused serious injury or death should be considered 'violent' here, as well as those who may have merely threatened violence (car jackers, muggers) without actually causing injury.

But yes, ordinary non-violent offenses are not a good fit for prison, in general.

Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#124

Post by jessaustin »

atemerev wrote: post #113
jessaustin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA is a historically-colonized nation with a large diverse population. "Comparable" would be Mexico, Brazil, or Nigeria. Comparing USA to Netherlands is a joke.

OK then. In Nigeria, incarceration rate per 100,000 people is 30. In Mexico, 196. In Brazil, 193. In the US, 737.

I don't disagree with you, but my comment addressed 'ljf's question about violence, directly above it. This myth that USA should exactly resemble a tiny homogeneous European nation has been encouraged by the prison-LEO-judicial-industrial complex in order to argue for ever more draconian punishments: "We're not like Holland yet, so let's lock up 100,000 more minorities!"

Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#125

Post by trhway »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #107
trhway wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder why "animal" surfaced here at all. Animals kill for food or self-defense, it isn't a voluntary act, it is what they have to do. Killing for other reasons, voluntary killings, murders - it is all almost exclusively human trait. In particular, animals don't do murders, it is human invention.

Cats kill for fun.

>Cats kill for fun.

urban legend (the same type of BS like cats decimating bird population in Golden Gate park when it is mostly people who gather the eggs, and sometimes rats who proliferate when cats population is actively controlled).

Instead of eating prey himself, a cat may bring prey back into the den/house for the rest of the pack/pride (which in case of a house cat may be the humans living with the cat instead of other cats like it would be in wild). Just observe a pack of feral or wild cats. Obviously such behavior has nothing to do with "fun". And the killings here about prey. There is nothing about killing other cats. Btw, know any animal who developed cannibalism?

That is one of the main problem with attempts to address violence in human society - the typical starting point is thinking about it as a lost control over "animalistic urges" and having such a 110% wrong starting point it just goes nowhere. Like in AAA, the very first step is to recognize the truth - the violence has been natural driver and result of the development of our brain (chimps for example also demonstrate some types of "human" violence) - and from here we could finally start to move onto the next steps.

Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#126

Post by trhway »

EliRivers wrote: post #85
trhway wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder why "animal" surfaced here at all. Animals kill for food or self-defense, it isn't a voluntary act, it is what they have to do. Killing for other reasons, voluntary killings, murders - it is all almost exclusively human trait. In particular, animals don't do murders, it is human invention.

Some animals kill far more than they need to for food. They kill one, and instead of eating it or leaving with it, kill many more and then just leave the fresh kills behind. That's not for food, and it's not for self-defence.

and just naming such an animal would advance this debate a great length ...

Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#127

Post by burfog »

tyingq wrote: post #101
brownbat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, prison populations are actually really complicated. There's a good piece at The Marshall Project discussing this, with an interesting interactive that illustrates how difficult it would be to dramatically reduce the prison population by only focusing on nonviolent drug offenders: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the... The drug war was a massive overreach. It's not 100% of the overcrowde…

A fair amount of the overcrowding is also driven by sentence length. Things like "three strikes" and "enhanced charges" drive sentence lengths in the US that don't match up with any other civilized nation.

The court system is also badly clogged. The "three strikes" laws reduce the problem by limiting how many times a person can go to trial.

Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#128

Post by tyingq »

burfog wrote: post #127
tyingq wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair amount of the overcrowding is also driven by sentence length. Things like "three strikes" and "enhanced charges" drive sentence lengths in the US that don't match up with any other civilized nation.

The court system is also badly clogged. The "three strikes" laws reduce the problem by limiting how many times a person can go to trial.

You don't think 3 strikes would increase the number of jury trials vs plea deals?

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/23/us/3-strikes-law-in-califo...

Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#129

Post by gozur88 »

clort wrote: post #118
gozur88 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oh, so solitary is bad now. We'll fix it. Put two people in a 10x4 cell. See, not solitary anymore, and we doubled the capacity too. Bonuses for everyone I doubt that. The people running the system don't decide how many inmates they get or how many beds they have. They put people where they have to put them. And they have to deal with this kind of fallout. They're doubling up because they don't have room to do anyth…

> They're doubling up because they don't have room to do anything else then they shouldn't admit them. You know, I've been all over the world and in many third world countries as many people who can get on the bus, just get on the bus. The driver allows it because he gets a dollar for everybody who gets on. In my rich western nation, there is a number posted high up near the ceiling. This number is the number the bus…

>then they shouldn't admit them.

They don't have any choice. Judges send them people in prison vans, and then it's their problem.

Re: The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate

#130

Post by atemerev »

jessaustin wrote: post #124
atemerev wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK then. In Nigeria, incarceration rate per 100,000 people is 30. In Mexico, 196. In Brazil, 193. In the US, 737.

I don't disagree with you, but my comment addressed 'ljf's question about violence, directly above it. This myth that USA should exactly resemble a tiny homogeneous European nation has been encouraged by the prison-LEO-judicial-industrial complex in order to argue for ever more draconian punishments: "We're not like Holland yet, so let's lock up 100,000 more minorities!"

Netherlands are not that homogeneous. In Amsterdam, there are 25-30% of residents who are not Dutch. In Geneva, where I live — more than 50% non-Swiss residents.
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