Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

about.jstor.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 105 posts

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#51

Post by birdofhermes »

ndriscoll wrote: post #45
birdofhermes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 5th, 8th and 13th Amendments and their various interpretations in court opinions: this is a good place to start learning about prisoner rights. Some argue that prisoners do not enjoy access to any constitutional rights, or perhaps only a few of them. But if this were true, surely the Constitution would have explicitly established them as a specific underclass, as it did for slaves.

The constitution does actually explicitly establish convicts as a specific underclass; in fact it literally specifically allows them and only them to be slaves. The 13th amendment reads: > Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The 13th Amendment belongs to a different document than the Constitution proper and was ratified about eighty years later. From the standpoint of the dominant school of constitutional interpretation, the distinction matters.

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#52

Post by vertis »

CptFribble wrote: post #41
parhamn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This goes against any notion of just punishment. Do you have a good explanation for this? I haven't though about prisoner rights much. The obvious layman view of this is "the whole prison thing is about restricting access to resources"

It's a hard discussion, because the real issue is whether we as a society want prison to be about punishment or rehabilitation. Like many things, Americans generally seem to be split on the topic: Some want prison to be a hard punishing experience and are fine with low quality of life and forced labor, because they believe that this sort of punishment will make criminals regret doing crime, and discourage future peop…

It's probably some combination of both. There is a subset that can be reformed and made bad decisions, and there is a subset that are beyond help and just need to be kept from further damaging society.

(fwiw: I'm very much in the rehabilitation camp)

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#53

Post by slt2021 »

CptFribble wrote: post #41
parhamn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This goes against any notion of just punishment. Do you have a good explanation for this? I haven't though about prisoner rights much. The obvious layman view of this is "the whole prison thing is about restricting access to resources"

It's a hard discussion, because the real issue is whether we as a society want prison to be about punishment or rehabilitation. Like many things, Americans generally seem to be split on the topic: Some want prison to be a hard punishing experience and are fine with low quality of life and forced labor, because they believe that this sort of punishment will make criminals regret doing crime, and discourage future peop…

Nordic model works in Nordic countries because there are Nordic people with a singular race and culture and it works for them.

One could argue that deterrence should be a major factor just because of demographics of US prison system. For example look at Singapore/Indonesia/Philippines and how they solved drug trafficking problem.

US for sure could learn a lot from Singapore

Rehabilitation already exists for minor crimes and first-time offenders, but the people who end up in actually prison are wayyy past any rehabilitation, its not their first rodeo

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#54

Post by throawayonthe »

superkuh wrote: post #23
mortallywounded wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To all the 20 year olds, libgen.rs

Library Genesis is great, but it doesn't have much in terms of journal articles. sci-hub did but the attacks on them in Indian courts have made it so they haven't been able to upload new articles since Dec 2020. They only have pre-2020 articles. Anna's archive is basically just a combo of those two sources and some others things. I really, really miss sci-hub and being able to read research papers. Before sci-hub the…

try annas-archive, they mirror and index many options

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#55

Post by ndriscoll »

birdofhermes wrote: post #51
ndriscoll wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constitution does actually explicitly establish convicts as a specific underclass; in fact it literally specifically allows them and only them to be slaves. The 13th amendment reads: > Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The 13th Amendment belongs to a different document than the Constitution proper and was ratified about eighty years later. From the standpoint of the dominant school of constitutional interpretation, the distinction matters.

You're going to have to clarify what you mean on that. I'm not aware of any school of thought that thinks amendments to the constitution are somehow distinct or less valid. The original document provided processes for amending (i.e. modifying) it, and amendments were made under those rules. An "amendment" is literally a modification to a document; that's what the word means.

In fact, to the extent that there's a distinction, it's that amendments take priority over the previous version of the document. Obviously they'd have to; otherwise that would just mean you can't amend the original document.

According to the current version of the US constitution, which is the only one that matters, slavery is legal in exactly that one circumstance.

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#56

Post by aaroninsf »

ttymck wrote: post #39
parhamn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This goes against any notion of just punishment. Do you have a good explanation for this? I haven't though about prisoner rights much. The obvious layman view of this is "the whole prison thing is about restricting access to resources"

I think you've described the "punitive" notion of prison. There is, as I understand it, also a "reformative" notion of prison: removing dangerous people from society and attempting to rehabilitate them. In the US, I believe the overwhelming preference of the public (the "obvious layman view") is that prison should be punitive. Other cultures seem to find success with more rehabilitation-focused approaches.

And,

this success is measureable. Outcomes in terms of overall recidivism, and in total societal cost, just as in the case of universal health care, so great as to make the American disposition appear not just irrational but willfully counterproductive.

This country in its current formulation appears incapable of ever escaping the gravity of feverish Christian moralizing and the correlated vicious contempt for objective truth and measurable outcome.

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#57

Post by qingcharles »

mortallywounded wrote: post #34
aeturnum wrote: post #29

Obviously this brings up the horrible unfairness of Aaron Swartz's treatment, but before you move on I encourage you to further get upset about the entire US prison system. Prisoners are charged high fees for access to basic resources[1]. There is a whole industry in "providing" services to prisoners at lower quality and higher cost. This goes against any notion of just punishment. Consider pushing back against the p…

> "One family member in West Virginia told APBP they paid more than $400 in three weeks for tablet usage." Access to a tablet and messaging outside the prison is hardly a "basic resource" and it's likely an avenue for exploit. Should we treat prisoners like humans? Sure. Should they be comfortable? Not so much.

Access to tablets and messaging is a key resource to decrease recidivism.

Studies have shown that continued contact with family and friends while incarcerated increases the chances of having a support network upon release.

I regularly message about a dozen people in prison on a daily basis and 95% of my communications is help with finding housing, finding jobs, education, and legal information to help fix issues with their criminal case.

I was in for 10 years myself, and I can tell you the last month where I finally had a tablet was the most productive of my time inside. The number of connections I made that helped me when I got out was life-changing.

p.s. these tablets are generally super-cheap Ali Express style junk with literally the worst software you've ever seen. Imagine going on UpWork and saying "I need some messaging software for Android. No bug fixes or support required. Just has to take $$ and occasionally work. Willing to pay US$40 for the app." -- that's probably how the thing got made. Some first time coder followed a YouTube tutorial and then deployed it to a million devices.

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#58

Post by nonrandomstring »

CptFribble wrote: post #41
parhamn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This goes against any notion of just punishment. Do you have a good explanation for this? I haven't though about prisoner rights much. The obvious layman view of this is "the whole prison thing is about restricting access to resources"

It's a hard discussion, because the real issue is whether we as a society want prison to be about punishment or rehabilitation. Like many things, Americans generally seem to be split on the topic: Some want prison to be a hard punishing experience and are fine with low quality of life and forced labor, because they believe that this sort of punishment will make criminals regret doing crime, and discourage future peop…

Let's remember that there are four (arguably more) pillars of a criminal justice system.

The two we are missing here are deterrence and incapacitation [0].

One of the reasons for putting people in jail is so that they won't be able to continue offending, in other words to "protect the public".

Another is to stop people offending in the first place.

A couple of modern problems come to mind. A society that lives in fear of crime and is low on forgiveness wants to lock 'em up forever and throw away the key. There is no concept of time having been served. This also goes against the grain of a "for profit" prison system by disincentivising rehabilitation.

In a society with rampant poverty and poor healthcare the deterrence part breaks down. People would rather get into prison than die of cold and hunger on the streets. In response, prisons must become ever more brutal to stop that.

Therefore a high trust, low poverty society has less incarcerated persons independent of "objective criminality".

[0] https://www.bsslawllc.com/blog/2021/12/the-four-pillars-of-s...

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#59

Post by mindslight »

slt2021 wrote: post #53
CptFribble wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hard discussion, because the real issue is whether we as a society want prison to be about punishment or rehabilitation. Like many things, Americans generally seem to be split on the topic: Some want prison to be a hard punishing experience and are fine with low quality of life and forced labor, because they believe that this sort of punishment will make criminals regret doing crime, and discourage future peop…

Nordic model works in Nordic countries because there are Nordic people with a singular race and culture and it works for them. One could argue that deterrence should be a major factor just because of demographics of US prison system. For example look at Singapore/Indonesia/Philippines and how they solved drug trafficking problem. US for sure could learn a lot from Singapore Rehabilitation already exists for minor cri…

No, doubling down on the already arbitrary and capricious criminalization of consciousness-affecting chemicals, especially with the death penalty, is not something the US should learn from.

I've never been big into hard drugs and I don't even really drink these days, but I still recognize that such laws are an affront to my own personal freedom and a blight on the goal of law and order.

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#60

Post by ethbr1 »

aeturnum wrote: post #46
parhamn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This goes against any notion of just punishment. Do you have a good explanation for this? I haven't though about prisoner rights much. The obvious layman view of this is "the whole prison thing is about restricting access to resources"

Sure - prisoners are people who society has determined should have limits on their freedom and maybe this can be understood as a reasonable limit? Different people would draw lines in different places. For me, it seems essential that we preserve access to intellectual and communicative resources for at least two reasons: the post-prison future for correctly convicted people and the wrongly convicted. Prison must, aft…

Profiting off an inmate's desire to communicate with their family seems egregiously "unreasonable", for starters.

And to your post-prison future point, maladaptive.

Discharging someone at the end of their sentence with (a) family and social connections strained or severed, (b) depleted financial resources, & (c) a barrier to jobs in many states... does not sound like a mix that reduces recidivism.

Instead, reasoning backwards from a complete, well-adjusted person at discharge time, and figuring out what the prison needs to provide to an inmate during their incarceration to end up that person, and then funding it as needed without any prisoners-need-to-pay-for-themselves BS, makes more sense.

That said, I do think there should very much be tiering of prisons. There are some irredeemably fucked up individuals, who have burned through multiple chances, and one of the worst things we could do to people interested in getting their life back on track is mix them in with those people.

Post reply on HN