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School or Prison

schoolprison.com

461–470 of 497 posts

Re: School or Prison

#461
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even look at school as not being a prison. It's one of the only places I've had the displeasure to be denied basic rights such as going to use a toilet.

Also one of the only places with a nontrivial amount of people who would lie about needing to go to the bathroom, many times per day, just to be disruptive and/or to get out of class. aka "this is why we can't have nice things", juvenile edition :)

Streets are one of the only places that all bank robbers go after a robbery, just to get out of the bank.

This is why we can't have streets... ?!?

Jokes aside, you just provided a very good example of the prison mindset:

Instead of trying to understand the "problem" of students going too often to the bathroom, the default choice is to make the behavior prohibited.

Re: School or Prison

#462

As someone who's been to prison and school, lots of comments here sound pretty tone deaf. Prison in the USA is really bad. Yes school is authoritarian, but most popular entertainment on prisons downplays how bad it really gets. Watch some interviews of people who have actually been to prison. Murder and rape is common (I saw it happen), you will get your possessions stolen under the threat of murder/rape, you'll prob…

> solitary confinement

If the environment is so violent, why wouldn’t you want solitary confinement? (Is there a downside?)

Re: School or Prison

#463

Before I go off topic, very cool and interesting app. I was surprised by the number of times I got it wrong. Now then... There's a lot of people crapping on schools and teachers in this thread, and as a former teacher and spouse of a teacher I'd like to point out a few things: Schools and teachers provide a vital service. Not only do they educate our children, they babysit our children, and the pandemic has shown us…

Mandatory babysitting for everyone for more than 12 years is not nice. The whole thing needs to get unbundled.

Re: School or Prison

#464

Just the idea of a school is worse than a prison: - it’s mandatory - closed confinement - not allowed to do what you want in that closed area - you’re being told what to do for at least 8-14 years - you’re being told when to pee - during the years there is no choice in what you want to learn And at the end of your school/studies you’re asked to be creative and responsible

While we're being hyperbolic and unhelpful, guess what? If you leave kids to their own devices they will play video games and watch Til Tok all day. Good luck with that.

That might be a better life for them. It’s not like schools actually teach useful skills.

Re: School or Prison

#465
post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we're being hyperbolic and unhelpful, guess what? If you leave kids to their own devices they will play video games and watch Til Tok all day. Good luck with that.

That might be a better life for them. It’s not like schools actually teach useful skills.

Yikes. Someone had a bad experience I guess.

Re: School or Prison

#466
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tall, rectangular buildings maximize volume to surface area, I imagine that you mean that tall buildings maximize ground area, and that most property is rectangular. The way to maximize volume to surface area is to build spheres, or cubes if you're forced to remain rectilinear, but tall buildings optimize for ground area.

Surface area in this case refers to surface area of the earth, while volume refers to volume of the structures placed on the earth. OP is entirely correct, and no one misunderstood the point OP was making. You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect. Someone else commented…

> You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect.

Dial it back.

When I hear "most volume per surface area" I think of dome architecture, and anyone with even a slight interest in geometry or architecture would probably think similarly.

I wasn't being rude, I was helping explain their point because the words they used didn't match the ideas they meant to convey.

Re: School or Prison

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In behavioral science it is well documented that punishment is an ineffective driver for behavioral modification. In fact, for punishment to work at all it has to be consistent and immediate. Prison is neither. So our best theory of behavioral modification states that prisons is not a deterrent for crime, nor is there any evidence for it in the records. All the while prisons are an inhumane and terrible way to treat…

Car thieves don't steal cars while in prison. Bank robbers don't rob banks while in prison. Some crime may continue within the walls of the prison, but the world outside is protected. If a person would commit crimes for 40 years, keeping that person in prison for 20 years is a 50% crime reduction.

There are other ways to confine people then prisons. E.g. you can place people under house arrest, curfew, etc.

Also your logic if flawed. Confining people after the deed seem logically a really poor and inefficient way to reduce crime. While one criminal is confined, there will always be another. So your 50% crime reduction is closer to 0%.

Re: School or Prison

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because we as people tend to speak from our experiences, and I do agree that school is more authoritarian than it should be. I'm not sure what else you can do :( it's a really big systemic issue. I think we just need more awareness, first? Social life in prison involves having "friends" who can any day decide to try and rob or fight you (both happened to me with my closest "friend"). Nobody has real frie…

> I'm not sure what else you can do :( it's a really big systemic issue. I think we just need more awareness, first? As someone who has gone through the legal system in the US and was illegally detained for activism and then later accused of false charges (with no evidence) and illegally arrested: I don't think awareness alone will do anything. Everyone knows the Police are corrupt and the city will do little to noth…

I want to chime in here and reiterate your words. Being arrested sucks, and the police in general sucks. Out of say the 10 most violent acts to happen to me personally, the police is responsible for like 7, and did not help in the other 3. When I see a police me go to reaction is to be afraid and try to minimize the risk of interaction. How is it that we allow an organization to walk freely that terrorizes many (most?) people they encounter?

I was arrested in San Francisco back in 2011, it was the most violent act to ever happen to me by far. It was my first time in the city and I was at a protest. Usually it is really easy to avoid arrest in a protest, however that night the police did not give us a choice, rounded us all up and arrested the lot of us. I had my life with me in two bags, apparently you are only allowed to be arrested with one bag, the police suggested that I needed to abandon one (in civil terms this is called theft).

They put us in a petty wagon and drove us around for probably an hour, we couldn’t see out, so for all I know we were being driven out of the city (after being released I found out that we were driven 15min walking distance away from the protest site). I was really scared I wouldn’t be able to get back to the city during this.

We were all detained under a freeway pass in two cages, segregated by the gender the police assigned to us. While detained nobody was allowed water or toilet brakes at first, and then only one person at a time. I never got to go to the toiled during the whole ordeal.

They charged me with a misdemeanor called Illegal lodging (whatever that is). They assigned a court date 3 months into the future. As someone that didn’t live in the state (and even the country) it felt like they were setting me up to do an impossible task. However they dropped the charges before the court date (without telling me though).

Now I in the process of immigrating to the USA, and whenever they ask me if I have ever been arrested/detained, I have to answer “yes”, even though—as far as the justice system is concerned—I have committed no crime, and then I have to explain to them that, yes, I was arrested for a misdemeanor, and then provide documents from the courts that the charges were dropped. A lawyer once told me that many people fall for this and provide the arrest records in an attempt to disclose but fail to show the court records, and are denied as a result.

And when I think about all this, what sucks even more, is that my experience was pretty mild. Hundreds of people have far worse violence inflicted on them by the police then I did a decade ago.

My question is is always: “Why are they doing this, what is the point?” and the only logical answer I can think of is that they really love treating people like shit. The only logical explanation for their behavior is that they are facists. They hate people other then them self. The police really has to be abolished.

Re: School or Prison

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall there was a study a few years back that claimed real recidivism rates were actually much lower than commonly stated due to a selection bias effect. Here are the slides: https://www.bgcheckinfo.org/sites/default/files/public/5thMt...

That PDF you gave makes such an excellent argument that I thought it would be helpful to quote the best part: "When criminologists examine prison populations, they see a concentration of repeat offenders , most of whom will recidivate. Low-risk offenders enter and exit prison once, so in any survey of a prison stock, low-risk offenders are underrepresented as a proportion of the offender population. An analogy is hel…

Interesting.

But the slides still find evidence of recidivism using a less biased offender-based analysis. Moreover they find that the people are still more likely to return to prison the longer they have stayed in prison. The numbers are lower, but are definitely there. Ancestor’s claim about prisons creating criminals still stands.

Then there is the issue of low level drug offenders returning to prison for violent crimes in the next round. It would be interesting to see the numbers on that.

Re: School or Prison

#470
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was indeed what I was referring to. Rather than interpreting your first paragraph as a pardon of Foucault, I consider it a condemnation of the group entire. If your (or their, the french intellectual elite's/literati's) philosophy is so morally vacuous that it fails to recognize the sexual exploitation of children and young teenagers as reprehensible, then it is worth less than nothing. It is an evil. Consent is…

> Power structures and actual power matters too Talking about power structures while criticizing Foucault is pretty rich.

Why? Does F have a monopoly on speaking of power structures?
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