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In Britain, even jails have a class system

theatlantic.com

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Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#91

Post by rwmurrayVT »

gavinray wrote: post #84
rwmurrayVT wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used the brillo pads from the kitchen and a battery. I was very inept at doing it so I just lit it from someone's already lit cigarette. The most we ever did with outlets was making little stingers.

One stupid choice as a reckless 18 year old was enough of an experience for me to decide I was never going back there again. Unfortunately that trespassing was the lowest-class felony so it has made it one hell of a time for me getting a job later in life, with HR policy in most places and the fact it never leaves your record.

Once was enough.

I was very fortunate when I first got home. I went to a fairly good, borderline great, engineering school. I was lucky enough to be picked up back in my same field. Once I can get my security clearance back or even just naval base access it'll be better.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#92

Post by mprev »

m0zg wrote: post #83

The _visibility_ of the class system is one thing that surprised me about the UK. It seems to be a very visibly stratified society. Unlike in the US where everyone likes to pretend they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and assumes there's ample social mobility (which there isn't as much as they think), in the UK most folks seem to know exactly where they belong, and they seem to be more content with their po…

Economic class seems very visible in the Bay Area, to me as a Brit visitor.

Class is as much cultural and, in terms of upper class, hereditary here in the UK. I could never be upper class as I don’t have the right ancestors.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#93

Post by mprev »

lidHanteyk wrote: post #55
emiliobumachar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate. As it is, this flew over my head.

It's to do with British English vs. American English. In the USA, a TV remote control has batteries; in the UK, a telly clicker contains batteries.

My remotes have batteries. The box I bought the batteries in contained them. Now they’re in use, they’re not contained as that’s a temporary state before use.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#94

Post by mytailorisrich »

coldtea wrote: post #86
mytailorisrich wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This misses the elephant in the room: How can they "find" anything in prison? The only answer is corruption of the prison staff. That has to be the root cause. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/rise-in-pris...

People have been able to find stuff in prison since the time of Julius Ceasar, in every country and every time. There's no avoiding that...

> There's no avoiding that...

Of course it's avoidable. But no-one cares enough: As long as it is hard enough to escape then the public does not care too much whether inmates use drugs, rape/fight each other, or what not, especially if stopping that would mean spending more on prisons.

The fallacy (or hypocrisy) is to pass off lack of will as practical impossibility.

The UK and the US are among the richest countries on Earth and they are democracies. There is no escaping that the state of their prisons represents the collective decision of society (us all).

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#96

Post by philwelch »

wpietri wrote: post #41
jsjddbbwj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with hierarchies?

I am having trouble taking this as a sincere question. You've honestly never seen or heard of hierarchical power being misused? I mean, just to pick one enormous historical trend, there's a reason the world has mostly gotten rid of monarchies, and it's not because we thought crowns and scepters were maybe a bit tacky.

> I mean, just to pick one enormous historical trend, there's a reason the world has mostly gotten rid of monarchies, and it's not because we thought crowns and scepters were maybe a bit tacky.

How did that work out for them?

* The abolition of the English monarchy led to the brutal military dictatorship of Cromwell, which ended only with the reestablishment of the monarchy.

* The abolition of the French monarchy led to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, which ended in a cataclysmic continent-wide war and the reestablishment of the Bourbon monarchy.

* The abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies led to Hitler.

* The abolition of the Russian monarchy led to the Soviet Union and the mass murder of tens of millions.

* The abolition of the Chinese imperial monarchy led to a half-century-long civil war between Nationalist, Communist, and warlord factions, leading ultimately to a Communist dictatorship and the mass murder of tens of millions.

Hierarchical power is a human universal, and trying to abolish it without recognizing this fact only leads to its reemergence in even more violent forms within the space of a few years, decades if you're lucky.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#97

Post by riazrizvi »

> Atkins: People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the capitalist dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or born in the wrong place to have all the things that society has told them they should have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it all, not just the wealth but the stuff.

My favorite part. They don’t realize that capitalism itself is regressing to a class-based system. People like Trump, Johnson, Cameron can fake invoices, but the interviewer, just an ordinary member of the public has to play by the rules.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#98

Post by uk_programmer »

ploxolo wrote: post #61
throway1n wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

had he said black or jewish criminals you would have been raging on twitter spewing woke slogans. he was simply singling out an ethnicity, the english criminal did.

Oh must have missed Romanian is an ethnicity and not a nationality.

People in the UK are usually referring to people that come from the country of Romania when they say Romanian. The ethnic meaning I don't think is used much over here.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#99

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jsjddbbwj wrote: post #34
throway1n wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

had he said black or jewish criminals you would have been raging on twitter spewing woke slogans. he was simply singling out an ethnicity, the english criminal did.

I agree with you. If it said "black thugs" everybody would go crazy over it. (I believe both things should be okay to be said)

I suspect you've missed a subtlety about the situation. If there was a black population, and I've referred to them all as "black thugs" then that's racist. If there's a subset of the population who are thugs and black, and I refer to them as black thugs then that's descriptive.

Like, if he said "the a Romanian programmers gather outside at lunch to smoke", that's not racist if that's what the Romanian programmers do, it's simply descriptive.

Sure, sometimes there's an underlying motivation of unnecessary racial discrimination behind why someone points out a fact, but facts aren't racist of themselves.

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