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I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

theguardian.com

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Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#141

Post by mmirate »

Toenex wrote: post #88
jernfrost wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Norwegian, so I thought I'd add a few points, which I think greatly influence the difference. 1) Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge. In Norway it is a 3 year college education, where you learn about mental illness, why people become criminals, how to rehabilitate people etc. The prison guard job in Norway, is by American standards more like a social worker. Guards spend a lot of…

> The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. What an interesting point.

From a modern viewpoint, I fail to comprehend how Order/Chaos is not merely a special case of Good/Evil.

Biological life/intelligence, and the Earth it inhabits, is Order, an unusual low-entropy arrangement of matter; whereas the ultimate Chaos is the cosmological Heat Death.

Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#142

Post by anigbrowl »

sho wrote: post #108
Toenex wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. What an interesting point.

If you are at all interested in this topic, I cannot recommend this lecture series highly enough. I found it absolutely mind-blowing and a stunning revelation. Just give the first episode a shot. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-O...

Don't sit with your first revelation, though. Jordan Peterson is a great lecturer but he leverages that to promote a particular worldview of his own. There's a reason for the Buddhist saying 'if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.'

Please note that this is a metaphor for continually reworking your own ideas, not an exhortation to kill anyone who displays Buddha nature.

Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#143

Post by anigbrowl »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #41
hellcow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right. Looking for a solution here, the central problem with the US prison system seems to be the incentive structure. Private prisons are paid based on how many inmates they have. Prisons are therefore incentivized to keep people as long as possible, and ensure that if a convict is ever released, that person commits another crime quickly and winds up back in prison. Instead, what if the state paid…

Fewer than 10% of prisoners are held in private prisons, so how are private prisons the 'central problem' with the US prison system?

Are you familiar with the phrase 'thin end of the wedge'? The private prisons are to many people an unacceptable moral ill that treats incarceration as a source of profit, and whose continued existence provides cover for other institutional abuses.

Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#144

Post by xaqfox »

zer0tonin wrote: post #97
emodendroket wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...And replace it with what?

Self-managed communes.

We tried that with 50 independent self-managed communes, but the central commune still usurped or were gifted most of their powers and responsibilities. What would be different this time around?

Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#145

Post by ajmurmann »

rhino369 wrote: post #91
erikpukinskis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A politican voting to reform a clearly broken prison system faces tons of risks to their career. Can you say more about this? It sounds like you think that's normal in your community, to think that way. That's not how I hear the people around me talking about prison. I think most of us would support a candidate who talked about rehabilitation. I worry that by trotting out this old meme as if it were an permanent fi…

Part of the problem is that even thought a lot of people generally agree that we are too harsh on criminals, they don't stick to that viewpoint when the rubber meets the road during situations they care about. People who are liberal on sentencing get angry if short sentences are handed down in rape or financial crime cases.

Your last paragraph made me smile at the idea of having prisons filled with bankers instead of drug dealers. Do your point is certainly valid.

Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#146

Post by tkxxx7 »

mmirate wrote: post #141
Toenex wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. What an interesting point.

From a modern viewpoint, I fail to comprehend how Order/Chaos is not merely a special case of Good/Evil. Biological life/intelligence, and the Earth it inhabits, is Order, an unusual low-entropy arrangement of matter; whereas the ultimate Chaos is the cosmological Heat Death.

A funny consequence is that Order vs. Chaos is almost entirely dependent on the scale you consider.

Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#147

Post by irrational »

rhino369 wrote: post #118
arcticbull wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you this is a correlation-causation situation. That said, I see little reason to believe that intrinsic to being American is that 1% of the population should be in prison and of them 75% will have another go at it, when both these numbers dwarf the rest of the developed world.

America has some features that most developed counties don't, like a racial underclass and larger percentage of lower income families. There is also just something wrong with cultures in North & South America. We have really high murder rates in general. America is sort of unique in that we have very strong rule of law but also have relatively high crime. Also those recidivism rates you cited are apples and oranges.…

Well you see, all the Scandinavian troublemakers got onto boats and went a conquering. Eventually they started settling instead of conquering. So all the pansies stayed at home and bred more pansies and that's why modern Scandinavian countries have few troublemakers. As an example, the area around Manchester England was settled by the Scandinavian troublemakers and many of their descendants immigrated to the Americas (those who didn't became Football hooligans). Therefore the American troublemakers are actually a result of the Scandinavians shipping off all of their troublemakers. So it's all the Scandinavians fault.

Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#148

Post by anigbrowl »

hellcow wrote: post #83
ryandrake wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is cynical at all. Such an incentive structure + the general public's lack of interest in the human rights of prisoners, would guarantee that outcome.

Then could we make a small change to the incentive structure such that this becomes a non-issue? For instance, could the government pay out the fee over 10 or 20 years (perhaps paying it in full on release), and stop future payments if the prisoner dies while in custody?

You'll just end up playing whack-a-mole, only the moles getting whacked will be real people being treated unjustly. This is why I'm a deontologist. The pursuit of maximal utility is a fine thing, but people tend to vastly overestimate their powers of foresight and where that overestimation causes human suffering it's better avoided altogether. We already have comparative examples of systems that seem to work vastly better than our without being so radically different as to be beyond analysis, so I don't see why you're so desperate to preserve the possibility of a profit opportunity here.

Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#149

Post by linuxhansl »

gallerdude wrote: post #58
adrice727 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people feel this way, but under the right circumstances (i.e. a meditation retreat) and with enough practice, you'll have access to states of deeply profound peace beyond anything you imagined possible.

Can you elaborate on this - would love to resolve my fear.

Look into vipassana or insight meditation.

It's something _everybody_ can learn and do, there is nothing mystical or religious or secret about it.

You usually start with samadhi (or concentration), where you simply observe your breath - either as air movement through your nostrils or as movements of the abdomen. In the beginning you can count your breaths 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 1 again. Most people lose track at 4 or 5 and get distracted by thoughts in the beginning. If that happens just start at 1. No blaming, just start again.

You can do this for a very long time without getting bored.

After a while you can stop counting, and naturally drift into the vipassana (insight/wisdom) part. Just observe your breath and start noticing whatever else is going on. Sounds, your thoughts, feelings, fears, joys, etc, etc.

Re: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#150

Post by anigbrowl »

narrator wrote: post #113
Brakenshire wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media are responding to their own incentives, you might as well pass the blame again onto the readers/watchers. It's a structural problem, no one group is to blame. I'd say one major factor is the US seems to be mostly devoid of a shame/duty based culture. People need to be driven to act within generalizable moral codes across the whole society. The idea that if the market supports it and it is within the law the…

The newspaper business has been losing a lot of money lately. They are just turning into toys for people who want to set the national agenda. Their value as propaganda and PR outlets vastly outweighs their value as subscription collecting or advertising venues. Advertisers will overpay for ads to get a good PR story anyway and with the enormous Web of interlocking ownership these days it's pretty easy to hide the con…

Yeah but this isn't a new problem, I remember the whole Polly Klaas thing well, and if you look into history it's abundantly clear that this sort of sensationalism has long been a fixture of media. I was visiting the Museum of Oakland not too long ago and was struck by a letter written in the 19th century from a new arrival observing that 'the canard [a french term for a bullshit news article] is a fixture in American journalism...'

I'm not ascribing all responsibility to the media, though - it's one factor among many. I somewhat agree with the poster above about the US not having the same sort of shame/duty culture that prevails in the EU, and suggest that to some extent this derives from the coincidence of different philosophical and social cultural traditions in the US.

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