[aeturnum]

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 prison-industrial complex wherever you can.

[1] https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/prison...

[parhamn]

> 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"

[aeturnum]

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, after all, be a thing one is allowed to "move past" in a meaningful way.

I think "reasonable"[1] access to communication & informational resources is a sensible bedrock upon which to guarantee that people who've done wrong and completed their proper punishment can spend their time and energy preparing to lead a more productive life after they are free.

[1] What this word means always causes a fight but at least we're talking about it.

[ethbr1]

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.

[aeturnum]

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.

[ethbr1]

Any system is fallible. Is the person in prison because the courts worked or they didn't? Is the inmate in solitary because prison monitoring worked or it didn't?

So human sortings will never be 100% fair and correct.

But there's also a vast range to how people conduct themselves in the world and their moral codes.

I think it at least behooves us to consider that the greatest threat to rehabilitation of some inmates might be... other inmates.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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?

[ethbr1]

We'd know, except the two biggest companies GTL and Securus, that together make up about 70% of the market, are both owned by private equity and have no requirement to disclose.

It is known that a high percentage of fees are paid back to the prison the calls originate from [0], and that offering to return a higher percentage is one way these companies win exclusive contracts with prisons.

So color me suspicious that a profit source for prisons is being run at the most efficient and lowest possible cost to inmates...

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmate_telephone_system#Serv...

[ttymck]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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...

[aaroninsf]

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.

[nonrandomstring]

> feverish Christian moralizing

I realise that Christianity in the USA _means_ (to the average American) something almost unrecognisable to me as an Englishman. But if we're talking about punitive prison systems don't you think that's a little harsh considering a central tenet is the forgiveness of sins.

[a2800276]

Central tenant!? Eye for an eye! Don't mess with Texas. Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt just for looking back at the homos.

[magnoliakobus]

That tenet is unfortunately lost on many people in America who are often the most vocal about their faith.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> 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...

[ethbr1]

Honestly, approaching problems empirically and routing around moralizing is one of my great hopes for AI.

If it's a black box, nobody can fan outrage that it's not doing {insert moral but maladaptive thing}.

[vincnetas]

people do not need a valid or logical reason to be outraged ;)

[ethbr1]

They don't, but it takes a lot of chutzpah to be angry at dice!

[shagie]

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 captive customer base - both the state and the individual.

When looking at items inside prisons, there are special requirements for them. They need to be transparent so that contraband can't be hidden in them. There are a number of other requirements for it too. It must run on batteries that can be purchased. This creases a very small market which in turn results in higher individual prices.

It is a complex topic that from one side or the other can appear to be clear cut - but the boundary between those sides is incidentally complex that results in a market that has prices much beyond what would be considered to be reasonable ... but the alternative is even more expensive or restrictive.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-one-of-the-l...

[alwaysrunning]

> It must run on batteries that can be purchased This is not true, there are electrical outlets in cells and common areas. In cells, it is a requirement for CPAP machines and in common areas there are electrical devices like TV's.

The main complaint and cost for prisoners as I understand it is the high cost of calling family members. Where most people might not even remember pay phones, if you do at their peak it was $0.35 to make a call, versus $6-24 for 15 minutes in prison [2].

When you factor in that most prisoners, that can even find a job in prison, make around $0.10/hr and most of their friends and family members are struggling on the outside bc they are just poor or at least one of the bread winners is now making $0.10/hr, that $15/call is very expensive. And even those that run the prison systems will tell you the number one thing to keeping a prisoner calm is regular communication with their family and friends [1]. It also costs $0.35 to send an email, while the two companies that run the telecoms for the prisons in the US raked in $1.4B [3]

Sorry my rant wasn't aimed at you, just wanted to clarify the part about batteries.

[1] https://www.vera.org/news/prisons-and-jails-keep-making-it-h...

[2] https://ellabakercenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Who-P...

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/high-cost-prison-communicati...

[JumpCrisscross]

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

By choice. Nothing in our Constitution bans this.

[nonrandomstring]

> It must run on batteries

Are you allowed batteries in your cell if you're in your cell for battery? (sorry for the potential to polarise the discussion)

[nonrandomstring]

Ah, you humour police are just being negative

[bsder]

What is the purpose of "prison"?

Sure, you need to keep someone who murders people away from the general population. That purpose of prison is restriction.

However, you have way more people in "prison" for things like drug possession. The purpose of prison in that case should be rehabilitation. You can help people kick their drug problem as well as gain education that they likely missed for various reasons. "Restricting" these people's access to resources is counterproductive.

The problem is that people in the US have forgotten that the purpose of incarceration should be about "paying your debt to society" and that afterward you should be reintegrated.

It's also an issue that people in the US seem to believe that prison has a deterrent effect. By and large, it does not (white collar crime being the exception--but we never hear about increasing the penalties for executives). People who are committing crime are not going to be deterred by small adjustments to prison sentences. They know that going to prison is a risk and are doing it anyway.

[DinaCoder99]

The whole american court system has a pretty twisted conception of justice—it's all based around punishment and "deterrence" despite all evidence that this is a super inefficient way to discourage crime.

[birdofhermes]

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.

[ndriscoll]

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.

[birdofhermes]

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.

[ndriscoll]

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.

[birdofhermes]

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.

[skulk]

Even without thinking too hard about purpose prisons actually serve in society, it's self-evident to me that prisoners and their families should not be thought of as piggybanks from which value should be extracted. This creates a perverse incentive to keep more people in prison, which is exactly the opposite of what we (as a society) ostensibly want.

[CptFribble]

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 people from doing crime. This is the same logic that leads to supporting the death penalty (deterrence).

Others want more of a Nordic model, where prisoners are given essentially a basic but relatively-well-appointed studio apartment, good food, activities, etc - but also with a lot of mandatory therapy and "social rehab" classes and stuff like that, in order to reform prisoners back to model citizens.

Really what it comes down to is what we believe is the source of crime. Are criminals regular people who made a bad choice (and thus the source of the decision can be found and rectified)? Or are they a different kind of person more likely to do crimes (and thus must be locked away from society without bothering to try and "rehab" them)?

Like anything it is an incredibly complex and nuanced problem. But personally I think we should all agree that if the State is going to maintain the power to lock people up, we shouldn't allow doing so to become a profit center.

[nonrandomstring]

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...

[vertis]

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)

[slt2021]

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

[mindslight]

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.

[slt2021]

so 112,000 people died from fentanyl overdose, and it is affecting both poor, mid and high income people.

What will be court sentence for someone who stabbed 112,000 people? this is plain genocide, that US progressive liberals somehow allow to happen as "harm reduction" - while in fact it is harm increasing by spreading out everywhere

[mindslight]

I haven't heard any news regarding this incident where one person surreptitiously poisoned 112,000 people with fentanyl, which is what's implied by the responsibility in your narrative. Got a link?

Or if you're trying to imply that every person remotely related to the drug market is jointly and severely responsible for every person who dies using fentanyl, that is so far from the American conception of individual freedom and personal responsibility I don't know that there is common ground to be had.

Also as far as I can tell, very few people are setting out to deliberately do fentanyl itself. So that would point to the problem being the complete lack of otherwise standard product regulation, which also stems from prohibition.

[skulk]

Your maligned "US progressive liberals" were handed an impossible problem: millions of people addicted to 100% LEGAL prescription opioids (doctors ignored warnings and received kickbacks from the Sacklers[1]) and a lack of funds to cover those expenses due to decreased economic opportunities[2], thereby creating a huge market for fentanyl and other cheap opioids.

Maybe don't be so quick to assume you know where the harm is coming from and how it is spreading.

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/opioid-manufacturer-purdue-ph...

[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/men-wom...

[kurikuri]

What are you going on about with your first and second sentences?

Do you believe that people with different cultures/races cannot agree on a system of fair laws?

[slt2021]

Singapore is diverse country of many cultures and they clearly figured out.

Problem is US - smart people dont go into politics, smart people self-select into high paying industries like tech or high frequency trading, and the local city/state politicians are mostly liberal arts types, who are not familiar with STEM or are plain ideologues with their own agenda.

what is lacking in the US is political will to solve problem and too many decentralized decision makers who are not on the same page.

District attorney may be prosecuting criminal, but then judge just lets him loose back on the streets - like what happens to hondos in San Fransicko

[currymj]

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.

[vincnetas]

depends what is your idea of prison. is this a way to punish a person or to rehabilitate him. if it is to punish then then this looks like vicious cycle.

[mortallywounded]

> "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.

[aeturnum]

I understand your questions about tablets in particular. That's kind of my bad - I should have provided a little more context. There's a move in US prisons to take away access to paper books and just give all prisoners tablets (which can be centrally administered)[1]. The high cost for accessing these devices is concerning in the context of traditional mediums of information being taken away.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90249550/can-screen-time-replace...

[qingcharles]

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.

[ThrowawayTestr]

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

[bombcar]

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).

[bowsamic]

What? Of course they should be comfortable

[NickC25]

>There is a whole industry in "providing" services to prisoners at lower quality and higher cost.

And not that, they're publicly traded corporations who have to meet Wall Street's profit expectations. Sickening, if you think about it.

[jstarfish]

Swartz didn't die in vain; this stinks of grift.

Why prisoners, in particular? As you say, they don't exactly have easy access to online resources to begin with.

They might as well offer free pap smears to incarcerated men. They won't take advantage of the offer, but you sure look philanthropic as you pocket the grant money that funds this initiative. In a few years you can shut it down, citing lack of use.