it would be a large improvement over what you're doing to people now
The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
21–30 of 83 posts
Re: The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens when a rowdy prisoner breaks the VR headset and is suddenly trapped alone in a box for 10 years. What state do you think he’ll be in when he’s let out? Ridiculous idea
Maybe you could give them a replacement edit: and I mean, they could still use voicechat in the meanwhile, you can build that in the wall so it's pretty hard to break
And when they break the replacement? Or they piss off the guards so the replacement somehow takes months to get to them?
It’s cruel.
Re: The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
#23I was just having a conversation elsewhere, and I complained that technocrats want to put everyone in identical boxes and mediate their entire experience of the outside world. I had no idea my figurative expression had ever been proposed seriously.
Re: The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
#24Archive link to the story the author is talking about https://web.archive.org/web/20160304065420/http://maneatingr...
It's not satire? I thought the author was deliberately constructing The Matrix one element at a time.
Re: The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
#25I keep thinking about Dostoevsky's account of late 19th century Russian prison in "The House of the Dead". It's in a remote town, but it's pretty open, civilians walk in and out and do business with inmates. Why are modern prisons so cut off from society in comparison?
The modern prison is not modeled after a town, school, or hospital as a place of community, growth, and rehabilitation. The modern prison is modeled after a dairy farm, where prisoners are livestock to be housed and milked for profit. I’m a big believer in the idea that economic incentives determine behavior, so until we take the profit motive out of the prison system, I believe it will continue to be a place of exploitation. I shudder to think of how much worse it could get with Facebook involved.
Re: The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
#26I mean, I'm with Snow here. I think the response is a bit poor in that "well, we don't know that this is safe, so this proposal is obviously crazy and does no one any good." Maybe we could find out if it's safe? It doesn't seem obvious to me that it's a bad idea.
The idea is obviously bad because it’s ostensibly designed to protect prisoners by reducing the opportunity for prisoner-on-prisoner violence. A noble goal, but what this fails to recognize is a good chunk of prison violence originates from guards, including sexual assault. I fear giving guards free reign to isolated prisoners would have the exact opposite effect of reducing violence in prison.
Re: The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure, we have to “draw the line”, but isn’t that arbitrary? Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators. Personally, I have arbitrarily decided to care more about potential murder victims than convicted murderers, potential rape victims than convicted rapists, property owners than convicted thieves, and so on.
> Perhaps, insofar as it's arbitrary to be more concerned about the well-being of victims than perpetrators. I’d argue that our current system isn’t really interested in the well being of victims either. Or rather, it’s only interested with the victims when the victims express specific opinions. The actual relationship between crime, survivors, retribution, and forgiveness is an extremely complex matter. Consider the…
When you say “our current system”, which country are you referring to?
Re: The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
#28If people were actually worried about inmate mental health we would do away with incarceration. Being held against your will doesn’t exactly do wonders for you - and the consequences don’t end when you’re released. Sure, we have to “draw the line”, but isn’t that arbitrary?
This may be one of my spicier opinions but I think we should have caning for some crimes. Fines and incarceration both have collateral damage, if the person punished is responsible for anyone. Fines are regressive. Incarceration has a host of well known problems. But, unfortunately, a sufficiently dangerous person does need to be physically put away. Being held against your will may well do wonders for people you thr…
It's not particularly spicy, but it has absolutely no evidence to support its effectiveness, either as a deterrent or as rehabiliitation.
In fact plenty of historical evidence suggests it not only doesn't work, it makes reoffending more likely.
There's no space for "Well, obviously..." in prison management. Effects are often not obvious at all.
This is fine if you really want revenge porn, but not so much if you want a saner and less criminal culture.
Re: The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
#29The original blog post is pretty silly for a number of reasons, but I think this reply post is also pretty bad. For instance, the author makes it sounds like cheaper and better prisons would be a bad thing:
> In other words, when Snow focuses on making prison safer and cheaper, he’s working on the wrong problem...If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change. Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans and avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness and structural racism.
He later goes on to dismiss worries about violence in prison, and chalks up the fear to people like Shane imagining the people in prison as being "so other." Prison violence is a very real problem, and it's hard to feel like someone actually cares about the prisoners when they're casually dismissing it like this and acting as if it's misguided to try to make prisons safer. The other issues he talks about are important, but they don't negate the importance of improving prisons. It's like arguing that the worries about the Boeing 737 Max are unimportant because we should be riding high speed trains instead of flying.
Furthermore, there seems to be a severe lack of imagination. For instance, he writes:
> Furthermore, will contact with humans through virtual worlds mitigate the mental problems prisoners face in isolation or exacerbate them? How do we answer any of these questions ethically, given the restrictions we’ve put on experimenting on prisoners in the wake of Nazi abuse of concentration camp prisoners.
He's not wrong that switching prisoners who are used to human interaction into isolation with VR seems like it would end up badly. But a mere two paragraphs before this, he writes about how there are already supermax prisons (among others) where the prisoners are isolated. We wouldn't need to do Nazi-esque experiments to see if VR has potential, we could offer it to prisoners who are already isolated. I can't see how it wouldn't be an improvement for most of those who are already isolated.
Again, I don't disagree that the original article was extremely goofy. But this response doesn't seem to be much better, especially for someone who teaches courses on social change.
Re: The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me (2016)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens when a rowdy prisoner breaks the VR headset and is suddenly trapped alone in a box for 10 years. What state do you think he’ll be in when he’s let out? Ridiculous idea
Maybe you could give them a replacement edit: and I mean, they could still use voicechat in the meanwhile, you can build that in the wall so it's pretty hard to break
>Maybe you could give them a replacement
but isn't this supposed to be happening in America?