How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband • Hacker News Board

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#101

Post by dfee » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:09 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #92

dfee wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot relate to any of this, but the clergyman’s approach / perspective definitely seems bizarre. Gaming has much to offer, as does the social scene at a bar. Where I’ve been these two aren’t at odds. I wonder why they have been in your experiences - maybe it’s the military scene (referencing where you said mess hall).

My ex was a soldier. These guys were soldiers stationed in a foreign country. In the US, soldiers are mostly not locals and spouses have a hard time getting a job because everyone knows you will move again in two or three years. But they want your money. At our first duty station, the landlords were raising rent every three months until a General threatened to build enough on base housing to kill the local rental mar…

That context makes sense.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#102

Post by tachyoff » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:10 PM UTC

kolpa wrote: post #99

tachyoff wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Come to think of it, why is the criminal justice system not "tested"? I can think of a few. 1. That costs time and money. Even if it would help, I see it being very difficult to justify, essentially, "secret shoppers" for the court system. I think it also kind of underestimates how much time, money, and effort goes into trials. It's not like a quick batch of unit tests. It involves lawyers, judges, jury selection (…

#1 is not important. Everything costs money, including appeals and cleanups when long-term corruption is uncovered. Adding 1% or 0.1% for integrity testing is trivially justifiable. #2 and #3 are saying the same thing: The powers that be know the system is broken, and don't want to fix it, and therefore want to suppress evidence that shows the brokenness.

#1 is absolutely important. You can't just take valuable time and money from people to do "testing" that, in my opinion, wouldn't tell you anything anyway. It's insulting to all of the professionals involved, especially when they have a backlog of /real/ cases to get to.

But let's entertain the idea and say that you get the trial to happen, and your innocent person was found guilty, or vice versa. What do you do with this information? It doesn't help you because you know the outcome already, but in real trials, you don't know, a priori, exactly what happened (unless you were a witness to something, but even then). So a court messed up. What do you do? Real cases don't operate on some outside observer knowing, in advance, what's going to happen. It's why trials are, at best, a good faith attempt at figuring out what happened and dispensing justice appropriately. Everyone just tries, to the best of their ability (ostensibly; I'm ignoring things like biases and such), to piece together the truth, and render an appropriate judgement.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#103

Post by kolpa » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:11 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #77

dfee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think this is a representative sample or a bizarre situational experience?

There was a widespread moral panic over D&D back in the 1980s. A lot of Christians sincerely believed that D&D was a recruitment tool for satanism. Well into the 1990s, many evangelical groups were producing materials warning that D&D inevitably leads to witchcraft, murder and suicide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATUpSPj0x-c https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...

Beware. "sincerely" is generally a term used to give irrational religious beliefs undeserved weight over (s-called) "mere" rational choices.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#104

Post by knodi123 » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:11 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #69

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitol punishment is however a complete solution to recidivism for violent crime, undeniably.

Challenge accepted: I'll deny it. It's only a "complete" solution if you actually have the right person.

Challenge defeated:

The term recidivism means "the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend."

Thus it only applies to the already convicted. If they weren't caught and convicted, and they reoffend, it's not recidivism.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#105

Post by kolpa » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

tuxxy wrote: post #94

Unbeliever69 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U.S. jails/prisons are designed specifically to make the inmate's life as miserable as they are allowed to by law. Trust me, if jails/prisons could ban books or commissary, they would. What you describe is what the Swedish prison system is all about. https://mic.com/articles/109138/sweden-has-done-for-its-pris... . This is a system designed to make people not only pay for their crimes but to help them rehabilitate an…

>if jails/prisons could ban books... They sorta have. If you want to send a book to an inmate, it must be paperback, must be brand new, and shipped from the retailer. The books cannot have "controversial" material. I've heard of some tech books getting rejected because of "hacking". I know all of this because I have participated in my local Anarchist Black Cross events which is a prison abolition group. Often times,…

The US prison system is largely a loophole to recreate slavery without violating the letter of the 13th Amendment. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/gilmoreprisonslavery...

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#106

Post by kolpa » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:16 PM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #82

scarmig wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether prisons are effective for deterrence is an empirical question. As it turns out, they're not particularly effective. The people who go and hold up a convenience store aren't doing it because of a reasoned cost-benefit analysis based on risk of capture, differential value of prison vs freedom, and future discount rates. They're doing it because they don't do those things. That leaves three real reasons: 1) Refo…

And yet, power blackouts, police strikes and natural disasters usually lead to outbreaks of looting and vandalism. At least some proportion of the population are deterred by the possibility of being caught and punished.

The main question isn't "Is the prospect of jail a deterrent", but "Is the prospect of 10 yrs in jail more of a deterrent than the prospect of 1 year in jail". The USA has absurdly long sentences for crimes.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#107

Post by paulie_a » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:17 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #10

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #3

Disappointing to hear that some prisons are cracking down on D&D, like the Idaho State Correctional Instutition whose rules are quoted ITA. It seems like a productive outlet to me. Locking someone up for a few years with nothing interesting to do sounds like a good way to make someone come out the other end worse than they were before.

> Locking someone up for a few years with nothing interesting to do sounds like a good way to make someone come out the other end worse than they were before. Given the (growing) number of private, for-profit prisons - that would be seen as a feature, not a bug. Because if they leave worse off, they'll likely be returning - thus generating a steady income stream courtesy of taxpayers. Cynical, yes - but likely true.

Do you have any info on the growing aspect of private prisons.

The last time I looked they were statistically insignificant. Even then I don't agree with the concept but if my hazy memory is correct it was close to 5 percent

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#108

Post by paulie_a » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:23 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #37

aerotwelve wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ready to take the hit for asking a very stupid question: why are dice considered contraband? Wouldn't it make more sense to allow inmates access to dice and real spinners? They're human beings with brains. Wouldn't correction officers prefer that they spent their time playing games instead of thinking of ways to escape or "cause trouble"?

I was in both two large corporations and the Army all of which sometimes are disturbingly similar to prison. The way the world works is someone does something stupid or incomprehensible where the most minor detail includes topic X. The report of the foolishness goes up the infinite hierarchy of micromanagers to someone who wants to make a statement to his superior of his great leadership skills by permanently "solvin…

And cynically this is how a bill becomes a law forever

I can't find the relevant video clip, but it's from a school house rock parody

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#109

Post by blacksmith_tb » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:33 PM UTC

EggsOnToast wrote: post #70

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #53

For a semester, I taught in a state prison for a prisoner educational program. Every time I went in, I was struck by how punitively petty so many of the rules and corrections officers were. The environment is carefully crafted to suck out all joy and hope from the inmates. Azkaban with its dementor guards is a pretty good illustration of an American prison. Guards are as likely to confiscate gaming materials (and pun…

I'm just giving anecdata here so I'm curious to see if you agree with me. Having known two people that went to prison, my opinion on the system is that I think people usually go to prison for the legally correct reason. That being said, a lot of people I meet seem to associate going to prison with deserving to live in a hellhole. No one considers the social exclusion itself a hellhole as evidenced by the ubiquitousne…

Yes, I would say that for many people, breaking laws carries a moral charge. Therefore prisoners are necessarily bad people, and deserve bad things (of course, people rarely extend this judgement to their own law-breaking, like speeding, jay-walking, etc.) And all of this when you could ask them where laws come from, if they can be changed or repealed and they'd agree they are just provisional. I think this attitude is mostly a developmental stage that has to be moved beyond - we are taught from an early age to follow rules, and only in adulthood do we potentially understand that sometimes it's better not to, or even morally necessary not to.

Re: How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

#110

Post by kibwen » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 11:47 PM UTC

dumbfounder wrote: post #73

Or they could simulate dice by each person picking a number, adding them all up, and then modding by 6 (+1). Could lead to interesting results methinks...

This would be a variant of Odds and Evens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odds_and_evens ), though Odds and Evens is kept honest by the fact that it's an adversarial game, so there's no point in players colluding to fix the outcome. To obviate any concerns of player collusion you'd need to ensure that the GM is one of the people picking the numbers, and once you've gone this far you actually only need two people to pick the numbers (the GM and one player), which will be just as random as having all players pick the numbers (setting aside the human tendency to pick "random" numbers non-randomly, which is hopefully mitigated by the adversarial nature of the choice). You'd also need some way for the adversaries to prove that they chose their numbers before the other number was revealed, which, as in Odds and Evens, you can do with your fingers (don't fret about the d20, you can count to 20 on your fingers with enough imagination).