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In Britain, even jails have a class system

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Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#171

Post by Nasrudith »

majormajor wrote: post #50
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...

Root cause is a vague term. What's the root cause of people being corruptible, and how do you fix that ?

There are many technically correct answers. The fire triangle shows that a root cause is not a singleton.

1. Them being alive. Obvious fix but not useful or moral. 1a. The less omnicidal but potentially more niche in practice answer is "get humans out of the loop" - that worked quite successfully with automated phone switchboards. 2. Their incentives being misaligned with the nominal goal. The easiest fix there is a "sarcastic AI" goal of making the corruption the explicit legal goal aligning them. 3. Lack of effective oversight - they can only be corrupt if they can get away with it without sufficient negative consequences. Certainty and speed is more important than magnitude and not being enough to be worth doing anyway in spite of punishment. 3a. Enforcement in practice suffers from "turtles all the way down" with who watches the watchers. Transparency and multilateralism can help but well international law is only a series of guidelines because of it being multilateral between powers.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#172

Post by Nasrudith »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #119
gowld wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prison is a terrible environment by its nature and by design. Usually, yes. But not necessarily. A prison could be more like a residential college or a boarding school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison

New Zealand appears to be doing a reasonable job of youth detention, where the facilities are more like high schools than prisons. Wandering through New Zealand's Korowai Manaaki youth detention centre, you can't help but notice the basketball court, veggie patch and classrooms — it feels more like a high school than a prison. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-27/nz-youth-detention-ce...

Sadly it seems that most have gone the opposite direction with making schools more like prisons. Metal detectors, visitors watched with suspision, high ratio of supervised to supervisees resulting in effective partial rule by them. Am I talking about prisons or schools? Yes.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#173

Post by Nasrudith »

ciconia wrote: post #162
riazrizvi wrote: post #97

> 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 cla…

> ... capitalism itself is regressing to a class-based system. Capitalism has always been a class-based system. There's the people who work for wages, and the people who live off rents from their capital.

I don't think there /hasn't/ been a class based system in human prehistory even. Granted then the classes may have been hunter and gatherer. It is fundamentally inevitable as a result of specialization and even within the same the normal curve would effectively do the same.

There are of course differences in the degrees of inequality.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#174

Post by Nasrudith »

wpietri wrote: post #68
verall wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful, you're going to hear some lobster arguments...

Is that what we're calling authoritarians these days?

It is a reference to one of the weirder bits of Jordan Peterson and his infamous self-help cult.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#175

Post by rwmurrayVT »

kyuudou wrote: post #146
rwmurrayVT wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a minimum security facility there are often no fences. I was at Morgantown and you could get anything you wanted for approximately 4x the retail value. It was so fucking hot there guys would have their families buy a "prison" issue fan on Amazon and send it to someone who's family lived in Morgantown. Then they'd run out and bring it back in the middle of the night. Cigarettes were $2 each or $20 for a pack. Dip i…

I've heard stories about people improvising "hooch" by letting apple or orange juice sit around and ferment and using that as a trade item for the other usual stuff. When I got stuck in a similar minimum security facility (no cells, just half-walls between groups of 4 beds so there was lots of socializing going on), people would trade their prescribed Seroquels and other such meds similarly. I also found out about "m…

That was not very popular at Morgantown. You could just buy actual alcohol from the street. It was usually 10 or 20 dollars for a peanut butter jar full of vodka, normally Grey Goose. It sounds "racial", but a lot of things were based on stereotypical vices. We had Newports and Grey Goose. You could request something specific, but then you'd be paying the 4x premium. You could usually get a better deal because they'd be bringing in entire cartons of Newports, etc.

There was one night nurse who didn't watch you take your pills so tightly. Most people who had the prescription didn't share it.

There is a lot of creative food. I don't know if I'd eat the cheesecake on the street, but it is good when you haven't had anything for a while. We'd occasionally get street food inside, but it was like McDonald's breakfast, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, or chicken wings.

There was not a lot of petty criminals at Morgantown. Simple possession rarely lands you in federal prison. The worst of the worst is conspiracy. It doesn't take much for you to be linked to a conspiracy. The mandatory minimums don't make sense for that kind of crime. There's a lot of marijuana + money laundering. I'd say around 15% of people really had no business having anywhere near their actual sentence length.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#176

Post by rwmurrayVT »

ErikAugust wrote: post #131
rwmurrayVT wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a minimum security facility there are often no fences. I was at Morgantown and you could get anything you wanted for approximately 4x the retail value. It was so fucking hot there guys would have their families buy a "prison" issue fan on Amazon and send it to someone who's family lived in Morgantown. Then they'd run out and bring it back in the middle of the night. Cigarettes were $2 each or $20 for a pack. Dip i…

Sounds strange maybe but, does everyone have to participate in black markets? Are there any penalties for just being without vices like you mentioned?

No there's no penalty. You don't have to do anything in a minimum or really a low. You can just mind your own little world. The majority of people don't smoke/drink/drugs/etc. Most people trade//buy food or whatever. That's still "black market" I guess. The people from the kitchen steal food, etc.

At higher levels things start to go more and more by the car system. You only associate with your race and your number. You get an ID number, which in my case is #####-083. The last three digits represent where you are from. 083 is Hampton Roads in Virginia. You ONLY hang out with your race and your area. It can go above just the city into more regional things. You only go outside of your car for business.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#177

Post by claudiawerner »

philwelch wrote: post #96
wpietri wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

And now that monarchy has a lot less power than it did.

>* 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.

And now France is a roughly-democratic republic.

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

Same for Germany.

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

Not so much the same for Russia, but I'd take the Russian Federation or some parts of the USSR over the Tsarist dictatorship.

It's worth a strong mention that many countries which freed themselves of imperial control by the monarchy or republic of another country didn't end up in a disastrous state. The United States, Ireland and India are good examples.

>Hierarchical power is a human universal

Some kind may be, though it shouldn't be confused with monarchy. Hierarchy is not equal to a monarchy, and modern republics show that power can be distributed at least a little better, with success.

>its reemergence in even more violent forms within the space of a few years, decades if you're lucky.

And then the emergence of freedom, apparently - when most monarchy is abolished or minimized to the point of being powerless, we benefit. Arguably, the abolition of monarchy is not sufficient to do away with the unjust power of the state, but it is sufficient to do away with a certain unjustified power of man over another man.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#178

Post by Mirioron »

DanBC wrote: post #169
Mirioron wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious: what do you think about the police in the UK going after people that post mean tweets on Twitter? Does it erode your faith in the police even further?

It doesn't happen much. Almost all those things you hear about are either campaigns of harassment or incitement to violence. Sometimes, rarely, it's the police having a discussion to let someone know what the law is in order to prevent that person committing an offence. And even this discussion with potential offenders is probably going to end after the police mishandling of the Henry Miller case: https://www.judicia…

>Almost all those things you hear about are either campaigns of harassment or incitement to violence.

I rarely hear about those. Almost all of the cases that make international news are about police "checking someone's thinking" or arresting someone for posting lyrics or satire.

>How do you feel about US police arresting six year old children for misbehaviour in class?

Sounds exactly like something I'd expect from the US. Over policing is a problem that have over there. I was asking the parent poster about this specific point, because they were disappointed with how the police use their resources. I was curious how they felt about police resources being used to deal with tweets instead of something else. Personally it would annoy the hell out of me if the police weren't doing their jobs actually doing police work, but somehow still found the resources to police mean tweets. Those priorities seem backwards to me.

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#179

Post by ubnt »

ploxolo wrote: post #60
wpietri wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The opposite of hierarchies is not some blissful state of civilized anarchy, it is chaos, violence and free for all. If you think some leftist state is the solution, sorry for breaking it to you but they are highly hierarchical if not more than state tending toward classic liberalism. Most experiments in this vein have ended badly (millions dying), see communist China (now a hierarchical dictatorship btw), USSR, Cuba…

So, Bolsonaro is "thankfully steering Brazil of peril"?

Re: In Britain, even jails have a class system

#180

Post by ArchReaper »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #161
ArchReaper wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubling down on your ignorance isn't helping.

Perhaps you could enlighten me instead of being arrogant? The state of prisons is avoidable and due to society not caring enough. Is that a false and ignorant claim? Why? I think you should explain because I think that may claim is patently observable and a matter of fact.

Just because something appears obvious to your viewpoint does not make it a fact. That's not how facts work.

> The only answer is corruption of the prison staff.

> Smuggling is impossible unless staff turn a blind eye, or procedures are sufficiently lax

Here's an example: these two statements are false.

Trying to present opinions as facts makes you non-credible, you should avoid doing it.

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