there is always risk/reward calculation. if you replace prison time with home arrest, then you remove downside to being caught. Especially for second/Nth time offenders.
People often think that's the case, because it kind of makes sense. But real world data suggest it doesn't work that way. In fact you are generally just making your problems worse. First and biggest problem is, that it turns small time crooks into hardcore criminals, because that's the only way to survive on the inside. So unless you never plan on releasing anyone out of prison, having bad prisons is not great idea.…
How about willfully admitting yourself into the Amazon prison, to build up prison credits. By so doing, you could commit small crimes with impunity, using your already earned credits to skip punishment. Hmm. The rich already commit large crimes, and skip punishment, using MONEY.
$5000 in AWS credits if you spend a month in Amazon Prime Prison™
Forgot about that GPU cluster you spun up last month and built up an astronomical AWS bill? Don’t worry, you won’t have to sell a kidney, stay at Amazon Workhouse Services until you've cleared your debt!
People said the same thing about recycling. It's fun to go through the motions of faux privacy optimism, but a handful of good-doers don't offset the harm caused by a mob of complacent laymen.
Recycling is a scam. It mostly just gets trashed on the other end. All the time and money spent on it would be better spent elsewhere. It’s just a massive feel good exercise.
> It's just a massive feel good exercise.
At best. At worst, it is a concept pushed by corporate giants to pin responsibility for plastic/trash production on the working class. "It's not our fault for shipping everything in plastic, or using Chinese factories spewing unregulated megatons of smog - it's your fault for not recycling."
I avoid things like Echo, Roomba, and closed ecosystem IOT-type devices for just this reason. And I'd never allow these in my home.
To get around this problem, it would be cool to see something like a DIY merged with quality industrial design where the owner gets end-to-end custody of resulting data. Unfortunately this doesn't lend itself to being a favorable investment for corporate monopolies.
If you're good with risk/reward you generally don't do crime (at least, not the kind that doesn't already leave you in the kind of minimum security-style prison being proposed here). In 2015 the average robbery netted less than $2,000 while the average sentence length was almost 10 years. Risking 10 years of your life for $2,000 isn't something that people who understand risk/reward will do, how bad things are while…
if the cost to imprison someone is far larger than damages done maybe it would be cheaper for the tax payer to just make the victim whole and give the criminal a lesser sentence.
There are a large number of crimes for which money can not make the victim whole.
slightly off topic, but: Growing up in Detroit under the specter of the police unit STRESS—an acronym for “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets” ...am I the only one heartily sick of propagandistic backronyms? The branding of public policy is a disturbing (and long-running) symptom of institutional capture. This example is particularly totalitarian, inflicting a reminder of STRESS on an entire community. Of course,…
Yep. Same with acts military operations. Patriot Act? Operation Iraqi Freedom? It suggests what you are if you oppose their contents.
If there were an Amazon Prison option, I wonder how many people would choose it. Need to serve time? Skip the cell and stay home with a robust suite of real-time behavior analytics to ensure compliance. Conversations are processed locally and scanned for restricted subjects with advanced AI. A special Amazon Prison store offers a full suite of approved products with automatic payments, accessible with Alexa, and cust…
This is one of the major plot points for the film Sorry To Bother You.
"What does it mean when one's life becomes completely legible to tech companies?" Does it mean something different than if one's life becomes completely legible to a government. If yes, then why.
Limited scope. Apple does a few things, Google a few more. Neither can imprison me or bar me from half of society in quite the same way as the government does.
If Apple goes all out on me, it sucks. If the government does, it's deadly.
Almost anything would be worth it to avoid prolonged contact with other prisoners and prison guards.
Then prison as a punishment will stop becoming a punishment and will reduce incentive to abide by laws
Because degrading prison as a deterrent works so well, as evidenced in the low crime numbers of the US, as compared to rampant crime in Europe, where prison is much more human-rights-compliant.
It's still punishment to not be allowed to leave your home. Not as uncomfortable as prison, obviously. But this gets into whether the main goal of prison is to cause physical discomfort as punishment or to protect society. When you look at the routine nature of beatings and rape in prisons, whether or not you are okay with people receiving that as punishment you have to admit that those aren't the punishments prescri…
Prison reform is possible. While I certainly sympathize with the aspect of reform for prison, it seems unpalatable to me to not punish, say, someone who rapes a child or with complete disrespect for the law and other people and breaks into homes or smashes car windows to basically be told to hang out and watch TV and “reform” at home with pamphlets or asinine internet courses from a state-provided computer. Parole, p…
I don't know how we get to fixing the problems that land people in prison in the first place. All I'm saying is pick a logical position and stick with it. If it's reforming people, put them on a farm. If it's punishment, put them in a gulag. To me, reform (lefty) and punishment (righty) are just hot topic culture war footballs. Both sides like to kick them around. The real issue is what is the point of this prison institution? No one seems to know. If there's any logic, it should be to protect society from your murderers and rapists. What happens to them after that can be argued by every liberal and conservative on the planet, but I think it's important to delineate clean goals first.