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]
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.
> 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]
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.
> It is in fact about rehabilitation which is why the criminal justice system and prisons have rehabilitation and education programs.
Just because some US prisons have rehabilitation and education programs does not mean that's the focus of the system as a whole.
What that actually looks like can be observed in many other places, places with much lower recidivism rates, much lower incarceration rates, much higher qualification and training demands for the guards, and most important of all; No profit expectations.
> I was referring to your Reuters article.
And that Reuters article is still about domestic prisons, please read it more carefully.
> 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.
His main demand was unsupervised interviews with prisoners, which is a very legitimate demand if he wants to get even remotely anything useful out of that visit.
Or do you really expect potential torture victims to openly speak out, when they know their torturer is standing right behind them, ready to punish them the moment the UN envoy leaves?
Would you accept such conditions if the country in question here was Russia or China? Then why should anybody accept such conditions from the US? Why even set such conditions in the very first place?
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.
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.