Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons • Hacker News Board

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#231

Post by eropple » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 5:42 AM UTC

Domenic_S wrote: post #150

honzzz wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT: I remember being in the USA after those 9/11 terrorist attacks an they aired those "proud to be an American" commercials all the time... like they assume it's a good thing to be proud that you are a national of a certain nation. And maybe it is a good thing - I don't know. It just seemed strange to me. And all those American flags in front of regular family homes... do you still have those? You don't see that in…

If it weren't for some sense of pride, things would never be fixed. Think about your technology work -- you do a good job because you take some pride in it. American patriotism is the most public, but every country's citizens take some measure of pride in their country. We're the most public about everything (the home of myspace/facebook/twitter/instagram/the internet generally) so it makes sense to me that we're rea…

> If it weren't for some sense of pride, things would never be fixed.

I tend to think that those with the most outward expressions of that pride don't want things fixed.

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#232

Post by Apocryphon » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 6:12 AM UTC

mynameishere wrote: post #198

vacri wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, however, compare to other anglo-centric melting-pot countries, and the US experience is still vastly worse. And no matter which way you carve it, with the rest of the western world having an incarceration rate between 70 and 150/100k, the US is clearly out of order with a rate of 750. In any case, your handwaving away of "we have bad social problems" is missing the point. Norway tries to fix them, using reha…

compare to other anglo-centric melting-pot countries There are no comparable countries. The US is the absolute worst in the West. But just you watch. The UK and Sweden and Norway are importing diversity at an alarming rate. Eventually, their prisons will turn hard, but not through policy. Policy follows reality. California's excessive solitary confinement policies strongly belie its left-leaning government. Get a ste…

How are Canada, the U.K., Australia, or New Zealand not comparable? Have you never heard of the Anglosphere?

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#233

Post by rdl » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 7:18 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #208

igravious wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with one other guy so not solitary > Lots of space, and the Internet, though and not (physically or mentally) confinement either --- The only way in which you are an outlier is that you have an inflated sense of your own awesomeness.

rdl may just be unusual in this sense. As for 3min/day, even solitary prisoners have that minimal contact - bare interaction with guards when let out for exercise, or when the meals come.

Yeah, it's not sensory deprivation, which seems reliably able to drive people crazy in hours to a day. It's just a really crappy form of prison (combined with some additional psychological trauma of being solitary). If you're there voluntarily, even if without the ability to easily leave, it's nowhere near as bad.

I imagine political prisoners do comparatively well in solitary, too, or the extremely religious, etc. I know from the other side, religiosity and belief in one's cause are the main ways to successfully resist torture or other psychological hardship.

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#234

Post by Uchikoma » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 7:40 AM UTC

Interesting how many people here are hand waving to explain this with immigrants, blacks etc. when from the outside everyone else sees it as the brutal "eye for an eye" policy that runs US thinking, society and foreign relations.

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#235

Post by ljf » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 8:02 AM UTC

danbmil99 wrote: post #227

sophacles wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the thought of prison doesn't in fact stop people from breaking the rules. The prison population is in fact growing. Similarly many places have prisons that are very unlike the US prisons, and yet they have lower crime rates. So the evidence against the core of your argument is pretty strong. At some point, when the punishment for minor offenses is extreme, the difference between minor offenses and major of…

> Obviously the thought of prison doesn't in fact stop people from breaking the rules Speak for yourself. Articles like this one sure as fuck make me think twice about doing anything even remotely likely to get me into prison. Punishment as deterrence is a legitimate policy within reason. That said, torturing someone with forced isolation until they are completely insane, especially if they are ever getting out, seem…

My two points would be that in the UK people as sent to Prison AS punishment, in the USA it seems they are sent there FOR punishment.

Also it's not the punishment that stops most people committing crimes, but the fear of getting caught. No matter how bad prison is, if we let people see such lawlessness in their communities that they feel they commit crime with impunity, then some will.

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#236

Post by lmm » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 9:20 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #226

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can reasonably distinguish between having laws and having a criminal justice system as currently implemented. For example, you can have laws without having police officers or prosecutors or prisons. This is effectively what the civil court system does. That does leave the question of what to do with those who commit the most serious crimes like rape and murder, but those are a small minority of the crimes…

you can have laws without having police officers or prosecutors or prisons How do you enforce laws without enforcers?

The law can be enforced by nonprofessionals. It's inefficient but possible.

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#237

Post by nion » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 11:12 AM UTC

saraid216 wrote: post #222

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence that immigration or diversity is the cause of social strife? The U.S. prison population is hugely disproportionately African American. The U.S. has not had a large influx of immigrants from Africa in more than a century (for the obvious reason). Our prisoners are by and large not immigrants, or the children of immigrants, or the grandchildren of immigrants. They're the homegrown domestic Amer…

I've actually been waiting for the Stockholm riots to settle down a little before I analyzed them, but the results I'm expecting is a disproportionate amount of immigrant participants.

You don't need to wait. As someone living in Stockholm I can tell you that there is not a shadow of a doubt that the riots have a majority of immigrant participants.

The reason is that these riots are highly localized to poor areas where the population is almost exclusively immigrant, being clumped together by Swedish immigration policies. (Map: http://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/394110718607097857/1024/10...) While international media might have given you an image of a Stockholm of fire, most Stockholmers have not seen a trace of the riots.

With large amounts of youth failing basic school, being unemployed, and lacking parents and role models who have jobs and have integrated into the Swedish society. Riots are almost bound to happen.

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#238

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 12:27 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #230

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the problem with your conclusion. 2010 median income: White: $54,620 Hispanic: $37,759 Black: $32,068 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104552.html You have to account for poverty before you jump to racism.

What about when the socioeconomic game is rigged against you and has been for most of the last 400 years of American history? I mean, yeah, poverty is without question a factor--but stopping there feels disingenuous to me. Why are they poor? is then a relevant question, and I think that "because of the racism of old white men" is not the worst explanation I've heard.

OK, but then that's a different issue. It isn't racism in the criminal justice system, and it isn't the criminal justice system's failure. It's the failure of the rest of society.

And even if it is racism originally, it's plausible that it's "because of the racism of dead white men." Two centuries ago they kidnapped millions of Africans and brought them here as slaves. Then they were freed without anyone offering to return them to their original communities in Africa or providing them any resources here to raise successful children. The legacy of that is not going away any time soon even if racism today were totally eradicated, because even in a society with greater upward mobility than we have now, poor parents will always be more likely to have poor children than rich parents.

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#239

Post by EliRivers » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 1:07 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #172

EliRivers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence appears to indicate that it's far less effective as a disincentive than people hope. For prison to work as a disincentive, people need to be capable of making sensible decisions about what to do NOW in order to create a better distant future. They often aren't. Criminals are often people who do very badly at this. They don't want to be in prison twenty years from now, but it's not going to affect how the…

How can you know how many people don't commit crimes because they fear prison? Yes the people who currently are in prison are the ones who didn't think they would get caught, but there are people who are not in prison because they did consider that. Yes there are cheaper and more effective disincentives, but you're right it is a cultural thing. Our culture considers those barbaric (but not prison somehow.)

"How can you know how many people don't commit crimes because they fear prison?"

It's very difficult. We can look at the fact that the US imprisons more of its population than any other nation, and if prison is a working deterrent, this would mean that the United States is a phenomenally lawless and criminal society barely held in check by the fear of the USA's notoriously harsh judicial system. Is the USA a phenomenally lawless and criminal society?

There are studies that try to evaluate the deterrence effect of prison. Some conclude yes, some no, but the weight of evidence appears to indicates that on the whole, it's a pretty ineffective deterrent. You can google as well as I can so I won't list a bunch of google hits.

"Our culture considers those barbaric (but not prison somehow.)"

Now that is interesting. I meant a detention system that actually works; that actually is applied with the intention of turning criminals into good citizens and making a better society. I assume that you don't consider that "barbaric", so I'm guessing you thought I meant something like state-sanctioned torture or other such physical abuse, or cutting off people's hands, or public executions in the town square, and all that sort of thing. So our cultural gap is so big that the first thing you thought of to deal with detention as an ineffective deterrent wasn't an effective detention system, but harsher punishments, whereas I thought of stopping trying to use it as a deterrent and do something useful with it.

Re: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

#240

Post by scotty79 » Sat, Jun 01, 2013, 2:21 PM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #84

rdl wrote: post #71

I think I'd rather spend 3 years in solitary (given adequate books, ability to write, etc.) than in general prison population. I accept that I'm probably an outlier, though.

You think that, until you've spent a few months, perhaps only a week, in solitary confinement.

I've spent few weeks without talking to anyone. I had to go out shopping every two weeks or so but I live in country where even 'hello' at the checkout is optional.

I kinda forgot a bit how to talk but apart from that it was pure bliss. I had lots of games and books though.