[jdjdjrj]

Any time there is an article on HN about prisons, most of the comments are kooky conspiracy theories. The concept that bad people intent on committing crime exist seems to be incomprehensible to many if not most in this audience for some reason.

The article itself is biased and not founded in any rational reasoning. It recognizes the potential for contraband for books coming from random sources then justifies it merely because "most contraband comes from guards anyway" or so it says.

The original source linked to in this article was a better and more objective read: https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2021-04-29/iowa-sta...

[int_19h]

I can't see anybody seriously arguing that bad people intent on commiting crime exist; the questions, rather, is "how many people?", "how bad are they really?", "how serious the crime is?", and "is locking them up really the best way to deal with it?".

But even ignoring all that, there are clearly better ways to deal with contraband.

[kingcharles]

I tell you one thing - I'd never really associated with any criminals before I went to jail and I was surprised by the personalities of those I met inside.

The title of my autobiography will be "All my friends are murderers". Honestly, nearly all my closest friends in jail were the murderers - for the most part they were the nicest, calmest, most intelligent people locked up. Why is that? I don't know. [I was in a jail where there was no classification - you could steal a candy bar and be celled with a guy facing a mandatory life sentence for multiple homicides]

[maerF0x0]

> how many people?", "how bad are they really?

Sadly we have to design for the edge cases lest they go completely unhandled/unchecked

[cool_dude85]

Computer programming metaphors being stretched to the point of breaking to justify... banning books in prison.

Personally I think that the "halting problem" of whether to halt sending books to prisoners is better served with informed discussion, and not sad metaphors that attempt to end run around considering the actual issues at play.

[freeflight]

When you design for the "edge cases" you end up with a bunch of Supermaxes were people vegitate 23 hours a day in solitary, which is btw commonly considered torture [0]

Maybe the goal shouldn't be to design for "unchecked edge cases to apply maximum punishment" but rather a fundamental change in US prison and incarceration policies [1]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rights-un-usa-torture-idU...

[1] https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I

[jdjdjrj]

Corrections theory has evolved a lot since 1950s and it hasn't been about applying punishment for a long time. If someone is locked up 23 hours a day, it is because it was determined through a classification process that they are a danger to the staff and other inmates to be in any less restrictive housing. Modern corrections theory is about putting inmates in the least restrictive housing necessary to keep them.

Some considerations of the many are often that the inmate has a history of assaulting or extorting other inmates if they are housed in a general population dorm.

Source: Corrections in America book

As for your article, it's not proper to lump together prisons such as Guantanamo Bay, which is a military prison, to the typical state and federally run facilities. These are completely different types of prisons with different ways of operation, and inmates are inside for different purposes. Issues at Guantanamo Bay are not representative of issues present at the state run prison mentioned in the HN article.

[freeflight]

> Corrections theory has evolved a lot since 1950s and it hasn't been about applying punishment for a long time.

It's apparently also not about rehabilitation, so what is it actually about?

> Source: Corrections in America book

At the danger of sounding a bit too flippant; The US ain't the only country that has written books on "correction". Maybe it's time to expand the horizon a bit and try to look for inspirations and solutions outside of America?

> As for your article, it's not proper to lump together prisons such as Guantanamo Bay

The article is explicitly about the UN envoys visit to US domestic prisons.

His potential visit to Gitmo was another story, there the US offered him to visit but only under such extreme restrictions that he wouldn't have been able to do his job, as the US even denied him unsupervised interviews with inmates [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/11/un-torture-e...

[jdjdjrj]

It is in fact about rehabilitation which is why the criminal justice system and prisons have rehabilitation and education programs.

"Corrections in America" is the name of the book and it discusses the history of criminal justice back to the earliest recorded times. As the original article is about a state run prison in America, it seems much more relevant than most of what is being discussed in this topic.

I was referring to your Reuters article. In respect to this guardian article, it says they did permit him but on terms he did not agree with. To expect to roam around freely as you wish within a prison seems like a ridiculous proposition and inherently presents a security risk to the institution.

[LocalH]

Politicians capitalize on a large percentage of the public seeing incarcerated people, as a whole, as "undeserving of rights". That is the root of the current system. Anecdotally, I have had a large number of people offer that very opinion - "well if they wanted rights they shouldn't have committed a crime", never mind that the situation is far more nuanced than that.

[int_19h]

The way things are now, it seems that everybody else is basically thrown under the bus for the sake of those edge cases.

[lr4444lr]

There seems to be this assumption that Americans are thrown into prison willy nilly for every small offense. Yes, it does happen in some egregious cases. A few decades ago, our zero tolerance drug laws were a real contributor here. Today however, for the most part, you have to commit either a major violent crime, or have a serial record of continual offenses to wind up in prison in most jurisdictions.

[jessaustin]

Why would you believe this? The awful drug laws didn't just go away. The guy who wrote many of them is President now. Vastly more people are in the system for drug offenses today than there were "a few decades ago".

Every arrest for drug sales, possession, or use is an injustice. 95% of cases end in plea bargain rather than a real verdict. We imprison more people, in both percentage and absolute terms, than any nation on earth, in history. The system is set up to maximize incarceration, and that's absolutely what it does.

[n8cpdx]

I keep seeing violent criminals let out to repeatedly victimize my fellow community members. No jail. No prison.

I see people showing up dead who have booking photos (aka in hindsight, should have been imprisoned for their own safety). About once a month so far, but I don’t Google each case; the murders aren’t really news anymore in 2021.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/katu.com/amp/news/local/a-growi...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.koin.com/local/multnomah-co...

I know it’s tough to believe coming from a position of privilege (believe me, I used to hold similar beliefs) but there is actual serious social dysfunction in the world. There is violent crime associated with hard drug use. Meth is actually a big deal.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

We’re seeing a massive spike in homicides so I think for some that is what is shattering the illusion of the post-90s quiet period we’re coming out of.

FWIW, I have personally been attacked by a person who was most likely experiencing meth-induced psychosis. I didn’t want to acknowledge how dangerous people can be.

Edit: and it’s not just the actual attacks being a sole problem. I can’t walk very far without having to dodge someone who is in full-blown psychosis, either screaming obscenities (if you said ‘faggot’ and ‘nigger’ sound like not nice things to say to passers by, I would agree) or violently brandishing construction materials or knives. Sometimes it is just destruction of public property, but that is less common, since they might actually be bothered if they cause too much damage in one place.

Sometimes the cops stop by, but they can’t do anything because being high on meth and making the public uncomfortable is not actually illegal and the jails won’t book anyone for anything less than murder or rape.

[confidantlake]

I have lived many places in the US and every one of them you will spend in the night in jail if you are caught DUI.

[dionidium]

> The system is set up to maximize incarceration, and that's absolutely what it does.

Claims like this don't match observed reality. Practically every story about a violent crime that ends up in an arrest involves a look at the long rap sheet of the offender. Surely, a country that's trying to maximize its prison population would have people like that in prison already. Why are so many people with violent histories released, given that we live in a "mass incarceration" state that wants nothing more than to lock people like that up?

It looks to me like states try pretty hard to keep people out of prison; you have to commit a very serious crime and/or have a long history of arrests before you'll end up spending a significant amount of time in one.

I can easily imagine a state that wanted to "maximize incarceration" and it looks nothing like our status quo.

[jessaustin]

Reading the piece you linked in a sibling thread, I found this:

One of the big tragedies of mass incarceration in the United States is that while high levels of imprisonment are clearly a political and mechanical response to high levels of crime, they are not a very effective response. The basic reason is that soaring prison headcounts are mostly driven by long prison sentences, but the deterrent effect of prison is much more driven by the odds of getting caught. In other words, an 80% chance of needing to serve a two-year sentence and a 20% chance of needing to serve an eight-year sentence have the same expected value. But the former is much more deterring. And since it deters more effectively, it will lead to fewer crimes being committed and less incarceration. And that’s what we actually need — less crime, not harsher punishment for the minority of criminals who get caught.

Perhaps some "law & order" types believe that every crime should be punished by life in prison, but that isn't what other human societies do and they mostly have less crime than we have. Many of them focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment, leading to vastly lower recidivism. High recidivism is one of the techniques we use to maximize incarceration, and as Yglesias describes at your link astonishingly long sentences are another. The phenomena reinforce each other: a 17yo who spends 12 years in prison for robbery will generally not get a high-paying job at age 29.

Those who watch a great deal of CNN "headline news" and 11 PM local news might reject these observations, but those people are living in a nightmare false reality driven by the well-known "if it bleeds it leads" rule. Stop watching those evil TV shows! USA imprisons 65 out of 10,000 people. No other nation comes close. No other nation has come close in history. (That includes USA in previous eras.) We have vastly higher crime rates than other developed nations because our "justice" system is so extreme. The system is more effective at destroying lives than at preventing crime. If one carefully considers that proposition, it will be apparent that many of those destroyed lives are actually innocent of the "crimes" of which they have been convicted.

Don't "imagine" alternatives. Instead, examine what others do. Also, read that link you posted.

[dionidium]

> We have vastly higher crime rates than other developed nations because our "justice" system is so extreme. The system is more effective at destroying lives than at preventing crime. If one carefully considers that proposition, it will be apparent that many of those destroyed lives are actually innocent of the "crimes" of which they have been convicted.

This is actually an extraordinary claim that requires evidence. It can’t be stated as flatly true. But I have no problem acknowledging that our system is particularly cruel. Prisons should be safe, clean, humane, comfortable...but not empty. The reality is that there’s a lot of violence in this country and its causes are complex and inscrutable. “We have a lot of crime because we lock so many people up” is unconvincing.

[confidantlake]

"The World Prison Brief's data estimates the U.S. incarceration rate at 639 inmates per 100,000 people as of 2018, or 13% higher than the rate of the next-closest country, El Salvador (564 inmates per 100,000 people)"

[dionidium]

One note on this: the primary way that the U.S. system differs from the rest of the world is in the average length of sentence. At any given moment we have more people in prison because the people we put in prison stay there longer, not simply because we put more people in prison.

A startling fact: if you released every person in prison on a drug charge the U.S. it would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. This is both because the reality is that the U.S. has a lot of violence and because we tend to issue very long sentences for violent criminals. This is a good thread that covers some of this: https://twitter.com/JohnFPfaff/status/1376971131039666177

The article I pulled that link from is also very good, but it might be only for subscribers (I'm not sure). This is that article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/mass-incarceration

It covers a whole bunch of stuff that's relevant to this thread -- what kind of people are in prison, what kinds of crimes did they commit, what works to deter crime, why do we have such a high incarceration rate, what effect does policing have on crime, are longer sentences a deterrent, and so on -- and I'm tempted to quote it at length, but I think the best thing I can do is just link it and leave it at that.

[jdjdjrj]

Those questions you ask were already decided in a court of law by an elected or appointed judge and a jury of the subject's peers.

And if there is a better way to deal with contraband then what is it? HN wants to trust the experts on many topics, yet for some reason not on this topic.

[int_19h]

Not really, because 1) the court of law operates according to, well, the law, which is itself far from perfect - many things that are offenses probably shouldn't be, and many others should probably not mandate prison terms; and 2) none of those people you've mentioned get much if any say on how prisons are actually run.

In any case, when US locks up more of its population in relative terms than any other country in the world, I think the assumption that things are basically broken here should be the default - the onus is on those supporting the status quo to explain why US is special.

The better way to deal with contraband is electronic readers, just to give one obvious example.

[ohyeshedid]

> HN wants to trust the experts on many topics, yet for some reason not on this topic.

Where does your expertise in this topic come from?

[jdjdjrj]

Where did I claim to be an expert? I'm referring to the actions taken by the experts who oversee the prison system mentioned in the article.

[ohyeshedid]

Unqualified people fail upward, qualified people make mistakes, and some people are just crooked.

I wonder if the same folks banning books in prisons are the same folks that sell access licenses for trash pseudo-documentary tv shows in prison? You know the ones, they usually show you inmates using or trading dope or they'll show off some weapons. This is considered entertainment television programming.

I wouldn't be making appeals to others expertise without some skepticism, friend.

[jdjdjrj]

They didn't ban books. They banned books from random sources. Established retailers and other approved sources are not banned and there is a process for becoming approved. If you study corrections at all this is a very common policy and I'm surprised they did not have this already.