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How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband

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

#231

Post by gorogue »

tachyoff wrote: post #95
eximius wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hire them?

Way easier to pay them like $0.15/hour in prison than the federally-mandated minimum wage. (That number might be hyperbole, but prison wages, if they even exist where you are, are abysmally, illegally low. I believe some of them are indeed sub-dollar.)

20 years ago in Ohio, the average was $18 per month. But you could make (a little) more if you made clothes for the prison industry. And all that was spent on soap, toothpaste, and other necessities that the state didn't provide.

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

#232

Post by oreo81 »

cm2187 wrote: post #193
toomanybeersies wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to be incredibly judgemental and lacking in compassion for people in different circumstances. There are a lot of people out there who haven't been exposed to drugs who believe that people who take drugs actually deserve to die. Recently in New Zealand several people ended up in hospital after taking dodgy "MDMA", the sheer number of comments on Facebook about how they had it coming, or they deserved it, o…

I think the lack of sympathy for addicts doesn't come from the assumption that they can just stop being addicts or have a rational behavior once they became addicts, but from the thinking that they became addicted of their own free will when they started taking hard drugs. It's not like the dangers and consequences of drug addiction aren't widely known. Actually I can only think of a handful of Hollywood movies where…

>it's a free world

Not as free as it should be.

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

#233

Post by oreo81 »

meschi wrote: post #191
Thrwr11 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addicts are people and deserve help, sure. Most of the hate towards them comes from their bad behavior and how that affects other people. Deathwishes are just one way to cope with the inability to actually do anything about, say, noisy or violent drug addicts or criminals who don't care about other people.

I haven't seen one "noisy violent drug addict" in my life. I am not saying they don't exist, but the vast majority of drug users or even addicts are not discernible as such. Anyway, that is my European perspective.

As a european, you must be a huge fan of gypsies.

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

#234

Post by romwell »

dtech wrote: post #178
sathackr wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of convictions arise from plea bargaining. Prosecutors and law enforcement stack charges so that it appears to be a 'good deal' to just accept a plea deal rather than risk trial and spending decades behind bars on the slight chance you will be falsely convicted. IMO this is the single biggest problem with our system. Plea bargaining and prosecutorial discretion makes a mockery of due process. Overlo…

There is not a lot wrong with plea bargaining if an innocent suspect can except a fair trail, it trades a more lenient sentence for criminals for a more efficient, speedier and cheaper system. The problem in the US is that poor innocent suspects have heavily stacked odds in a trail: multiple biases in judges and juries and no good lawyer with enough time for their defense. So an innocent must take the plea bargain be…

So, there's a lot wrong about plea bargaining.

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

#235

Post by romwell »

tropo wrote: post #227
toomanybeersies wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to be incredibly judgemental and lacking in compassion for people in different circumstances. There are a lot of people out there who haven't been exposed to drugs who believe that people who take drugs actually deserve to die. Recently in New Zealand several people ended up in hospital after taking dodgy "MDMA", the sheer number of comments on Facebook about how they had it coming, or they deserved it, o…

Adjusting that to match what I know: If people have never met someone who has LOST A CHILD TO MURDER, then to them it's an abstract concept. They can't imagine the pain or suffering. I've met a couple of people who've LOST THEIR CHILD. That daughter can never be replaced. The father just about bankrupted himself traveling 1500 miles each way to be at the court for every hearing. It's been over a dozen years, largely…

One is not lacking in compassion for the father by also wishing to improve the situation of the murderer.

Compassion is not a zero-sum game.

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

#236

Post by labster »

kamaal wrote: post #186
tachyoff wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way easier to pay them like $0.15/hour in prison than the federally-mandated minimum wage. (That number might be hyperbole, but prison wages, if they even exist where you are, are abysmally, illegally low. I believe some of them are indeed sub-dollar.)

Slavery is protected by law under the 13th Amendment.

Yes, it doesn't apply in prison:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

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

#237

Post by earenndil »

deadmetheny wrote: post #209
edanm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Come to think of it, why is the criminal justice system not "tested"? In other words, set up a mock situation where you know in advance who is innocent and who is not (because it's a setup), and run a mock trial by all the rules using actual jurors, and compare the outcome of the trial to the actual innocence or guilt of the actor? Probably for the same reason most things are or aren't done - some form of status-qu…

>It's possible for eyewitness testimony to be the #1 cause of wrongful convictions, but for there to be only e.g. 3 wrong convictions a year out of 100k trials. Which would probably be pretty "acceptable". "It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer." Three innocent people being punished is a travesty and in no way acceptable.

Let's take this to an extreme. Let's get rid of incarceration and legal consequence entirely. Then you're to never wrongly convict someone, right? All other ways could and likely will end up with false positives.

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

#238

Post by Beltiras »

ufo wrote: post #219
Beltiras wrote: post #188

I'm fascinated by this as a problem. I had an idea how to solve it. Books are not contraband and you can pick two random words from, say the Catcher in the Rye or to name a less controversial book, the Bible and use the first letter of each one to "roll the die". Wrote a small script that tries to balance the odds given the frequency of first letters of words in the English language (odds taken from [1]). Script can…

That is a really interesting idea. But if we pick words by randomly pointing at a page in the book we might need take into account how big the words are in addition to how frequent they are.

Yes, I thought about that. I'm working on extending the program to essentially change the King James Bible into a fair random distribution of any kind. Length of words is something to consider. Position on page might also be at issue but one would need data on the exact printing so that might be overkill.

Being a gamer myself motivated me to actually solve this problem neatly. Make PDFs and get them into distribution.

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

#239

Post by Beltiras »

kibwen wrote: post #225
Beltiras wrote: post #188

I'm fascinated by this as a problem. I had an idea how to solve it. Books are not contraband and you can pick two random words from, say the Catcher in the Rye or to name a less controversial book, the Bible and use the first letter of each one to "roll the die". Wrote a small script that tries to balance the odds given the frequency of first letters of words in the English language (odds taken from [1]). Script can…

Using a Bible is a good idea (and also amusingly ironic), because it would allow you to open to a random page, point at a random word, and use the chapter and verse numbers as your random elements, no script required. The statistical distribution might be a bit curious, though...

Chapter and verse would not be good enough, they are not "random enough".

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

#240

Post by nybble41 »

pessimizer wrote: post #140
politician wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prisons want to ban gambling and currency counters (coins, chips, etc) in order to disrupt the rise of debt-based gang activity. "The house always wins" turns a prison into an organized structure of debtors and owners fairly rapidly, I'd imagine. And you can't fault the far fewer security guards from wanting to avoid a face-off with a unified enemy.

Well, there's no house in non-casino gambling; it's just in the nature of gambling that some people will lose and some people will win, and some people will borrow money to continue to play when they shouldn't. The only mechanism to force repayment of loans without government is violence or monopoly.

The only mechanism to force repayment of loans without government is violence or monopoly.

Nonsense. First, while this is phrased to position government as an alternative to violence, forcing repayment of loans with government involves both violence and a monopoly—a monopoly on "legitimate" violence being the main factor which all governments have in common. Second, government cannot be relied upon to force repayment of loans (e.g. they allow debts to be discharged in bankruptcy). Third, social pressure can effectively force people to repay their loans without resorting to violence. As things stand today, the main factor that keeps people from skipping out on loans is not the threat that the government might get involved, or a more general fear of violence, but rather the impact it would have on their credit score—in other words, the risk of acquiring a reputation as someone who does not repay their debts, and consequently losing access to future credit.

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