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JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

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Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#71

Post by bombcar »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #66
mortallywounded wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Should prisoners be allowed hot water when they shower or is that too much comfort?

If you get sent to prison prison, super solitary, one of the things that can happen is that control of the toilet in your cell gets delegated to "the bubble" to prevent you from flushing the toilet continuously (which they probably won't care about) or intentionally flooding the cell (which they will).

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#72

Post by birdofhermes »

ndriscoll wrote: post #55
birdofhermes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dist…

If you need to read the last sentence of OP with “. . . at the time of the framing,” added to the end, then I’m fine with that.

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#73

Post by aeturnum »

ethbr1 wrote: post #60
aeturnum wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I totally agree that it's important (to all of us) that prisoners be able to maintain their most intimate connections.

> I do think there should very much be tiering of prisons. There are some irredeemably fucked up individuals, who have burned through multiple chances

I both know what you mean and think it's important to consider the current unacceptable state of prisons (which isn't exactly new) when thinking about people using up "multiple" chances. I don't have easy answers at all but part of this is how easy it is to write people off based on an incomplete understanding of their situation.

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#74

Post by currymj »

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…

I think, frankly, the whole philosophical discussion about the purpose of the criminal justice system is a pointless abstraction and waste of time, because the US jail & prison system is a complete failure and as it currently exists, cannot achieve any just goal, whichever one you prefer.

Even if you believe 100% that the criminal justice system should be punitive, and the conditions should be unpleasant, the system still has to protect the physical safety of inmates from violence/harm that's outside the scope of the official punishment.

But it's manifestly unable to do that -- there's constant violence in jails and prisons, and medical care is often incompetent or denied even when badly needed.

Many other cases like this for whatever purported goal is supposed to be achieved. There's no way to rationalize the way the US system currently works, it just kind of shambles on.

I'm not a prison abolitionist in a philosophical sense either, I think there should be a state and that sometimes a state may have to incarcerate people. But as unreasonable and unrealistic as the prison abolitionist movement can be, their emotional orientation towards the US criminal justice system actually seems closer to reality.

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#75

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

aaroninsf wrote: post #56
ttymck wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 objec…

> This country in its current formulation appears incapable of ever escaping the gravity of feverish Christian moralizing

On the contrary, it sounds like Christian morality would be helpful here; the Bible is pretty pointed about loving everyone (including enemies), forgiveness, and, y'know, specifically helping prisoners[0].

[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2025%3A...

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#76

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ethbr1 wrote: post #60
aeturnum wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

How much is profit versus heightened cost, e.g. monitoring?

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#77

Post by bowsamic »

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.

What? Of course they should be comfortable

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#78

Post by superkuh »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #40
superkuh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe. I've never seen mention of STC but I am searching now. That said, when I try to access modern articles through sci-hub they aren't even there, there's no ipfs URI to download to start. http://standard-template-construct.org/ just errors out with 422 unprocessable content. I assume the ipfs proxies are blocking it or the like. So... do I have to run a local IPFS client to access STC? I guess I'll tr…

This is the one I use but yeah you need to run a local IPFS client to access the content normally. https://libstc.cc/

Wow. You've made my month if not my year. Finally I can read articles again! Thank you.

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#79

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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.

> In the US, I believe the overwhelming preference of the public (the "obvious layman view") is that prison should be punitive

"There are five main underlying justifications of criminal punishment considered briefly here: retribution; incapacitation; deterrence; rehabilitation and reparation" [1].

Deterrence and retribution are the punitive elements. To my knowledge, no model that excludes any one element works.

> Other cultures seem to find success with more rehabilitation-focused approaches

The problem is we're in the middle. Not as harsh as Middle Eastern and Asian models. (Counterfactual: Latin America.) Not as rehabilitative as the Nordic models. (Counterfactual: Europe.) We're good at incapacitating criminals.

[1] https://www.unodc.org/e4j/en/crime-prevention-criminal-justi...

Re: JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons

#80

Post by JumpCrisscross »

shagie wrote: post #38
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"

In many cases, the government is prohibited from providing certain things to people convicted of crimes at tax payer expense. This then means that the government has to go to third parties and contract with them to provide those goods and charge the people using them. For example, an ankle monitor - the state can't provide it and give it to the person for supervision and so the third parties who make them have a capt…

> government is prohibited from providing certain things to people convicted of crimes at tax payer expense

By choice. Nothing in our Constitution bans this.

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