61–70 of 265 posts
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How would you deal with an inmate that murders or rapes another inmate?
Protecting inmates from a troublesome inmate can be accomplished without putting that inmate in a small, windowless room with no distractions by themselves for 24 hours a day.
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the challenge is that literally nobody is incentivized to make changes to this system. the situation is really bad for politicians. A politican voting to reform a clearly broken prison system faces tons of risks to their career. Even one wrong vote for improving the prison system will get you labeled as "soft on crime," a dangerous liability for Democrats and nearly a death sentence for Republicans. Every change you…
> A politican voting to reform a clearly broken prison system faces tons of risks to their career. Can you say more about this? It sounds like you think that's normal in your community, to think that way. That's not how I hear the people around me talking about prison. I think most of us would support a candidate who talked about rehabilitation. I worry that by trotting out this old meme as if it were an permanent fi…
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You're absolutely right. Looking for a solution here, the central problem with the US prison system seems to be the incentive structure. Private prisons are paid based on how many inmates they have. Prisons are therefore incentivized to keep people as long as possible, and ensure that if a convict is ever released, that person commits another crime quickly and winds up back in prison. Instead, what if the state paid…
I think you're being a little naive here. If you could wave a magic wand and make it so private prisons got a one-time fee for accepting convicts then I don't think they would invest more in preventing recidivism. What would likely happen is that private prisons would spend even less on each inmate, doing the accounting to determine how much they have to cut from what they already spend to account for the amount of t…
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Best. Response. Ever. /s
It seemed appropriate, given the inanity of the parent comment. The United States: a human-rights-abusing farce of a country that is such a hellhole that over a million people from other countries legally immigrate to it every year, half that number are estimated to illegally immigrate to it annually, and the country's judicial system takes a stance to prevent its President from stemming the tide of inbound visitors…
The kind of country I would like to think many of us would rebel against, if we found ourselves living there.
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Fewer than 10% of prisoners are held in private prisons, so how are private prisons the 'central problem' with the US prison system?
You misunderstood my point. Both government-run and privately owned prisons are paid (or funded) based on how many inmates they have in custody. I'm suggesting that private prisons could be solution to the problem if we change their incentive structure.
Yes, it would be interesting to see if market forces could be used to improve outcomes. It does seem that we politically prefer punishment to rehabilitation though, and the incentives are aligned accordingly...
If being imprisoned and enslaved isn't cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. The constitution doesn't prohibit shit with its useless words in this case.
I always found the faith in the revered interpretations of some constitutional document written centuries ago, and the respect for the "Founding Fathers" not as historical figures, but as some kind of guiding lights for today, totally bizarro. Even the name "Founding Fathers" and the way it's thrown around seems quite bizarre for a democracy. It's the people, and the will of the people, that should be respected, not…
His book, "On Constitutional Disobedience", is now available. I read it, but the piece captures the main idea.
People are products of their environments just like animals. A mistreated animal is also bad behaved and violent.
This is the worst of racism. The next time a white HNer tells PoC to just turn the other cheek toward racist words, point them to this. Racist attitudes are what enable horrific crimes against blacks, such as these.