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nessin, are you trying to make a general argument that environmental conditions have no effect on human behavior, or are you more specifically arguing that criminals constitute a special class of humans who are inherently doomed to violate societal norms and whose behavior cannot be modified by changing their environment for better or for worse?
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May 26, 2011 22:43
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nessin posted:No, I'm saying that someone who has already broken the law isn't going to decide to stop breaking the law in the future just because they were treated differently in prison. Of course people are influenced by their environment, and "criminal" is no more a classification of the human race than hillbilly, but (in general, obviously false positives do happen) I'm saying that someone who has made a decision isn't going to suddenly decide that decision was wrong in the face of how they're treated in prison. So how do you explain the many prisoners who work their programs and are eventually released to become ordinary law-abiding citizens, or the criminals who suffer in prison and become more dangerous and violent as a result? Both outcomes occur routinely, although the prison environment in America today is so negative that the second seems more likely. Take Clyde Barrow of "Bonnie and Clyde" fame as a negative example. Barrow was a mere petty thief when he was sent to Eastham Prison Farm, where he was repeatedly raped by an older inmate whom he probably murdered in revenge (though it couldn't be proven at the time). He wasn't a killer when he went in, but after his release he was certainly not shy about shooting people. He eventually killed 12, who might have lived full lives if the guards had been more hands-on about preventing rapes. As to a positive example, what about Jimmy Boyle? He was a Glasgow-based gangster serving a life sentence for murder (served 15), but while in prison he participated in an art program that unlocked an unexplored creative side. He became a sculptor and writer, and at the time of his release in 1982 was apparently fully rehabilitated and he has been in society for 29 years without re-offending. Is he only pretending to be reformed to avoid serving another stretch in prison?
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May 27, 2011 02:32
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nessin posted:B) I'm seriously done. Absolutely last post, I promise, cross my heart and all that. I had a nice post with more detail about Jimmy Boyle and Clyde Barrow by way of explaining how your reasoning was incoherent, but I guess there's no point since aside from you the thread is basically in consensus and you've promised to leave. All I'll say is that you have an inaccurate view of criminal behavior, and a really reductive understanding of how the prison environment is constituted. The real problem is not just the effect that the prison environment has on an individual man--the problem is the kind of society that is created by packing thousands of men into that environment and leaving them to interact with each other under the slimmest kind of supervision.
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May 27, 2011 04:58
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Down Right Fierce posted:Isn't that literally anywhere in this country? Like, I live in hell and can still name 3 parks and 2 schools within walking distance. A few years back Miami got some attention because the only place in Dade County where sex offenders could live was in a homeless sex-offender colony under a bridge. Seriously. To me the most amazing thing about that story is that the authorities treat this as a reasonable solution to the problem, to the extent of depositing the offenders there after their release. No politician wants to vote against one of these laws because his next opponent will run ads accusing him of being a friend to child molesters, so basically any law restricting their rights can be passed, in spite of how counter-productive it is. As the CNN article notes, extensive restrictions will just cause most sex offenders to go underground and the system will lose track of them altogether. Another fun one from Florida: 95 sex offenders living in one St. Petersburg trailer park, because the manager there was one of the few people who would rent to sex offenders.
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Jun 1, 2011 00:12
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The kind of agricultural work usually done by migrants (e.g. fruit picking) is generally arduous and very poorly compensated, which is why the labor has to imported from Central America in the first place. Americans do not want to pick peaches all day in the hot sun for $7.25 an hour (possibly less, depending on various exemptions), and they double do not want to relocate from Atlanta to rural central-south Georgia and live in primitive housing conditions for the privilege. With the migrants being chased out of the state, Georgia growers will have to offer competitive wages and consequently raise prices to cover their increased overhead, unless an alternate labor force can be located. I wouldn't be surprised if GA passed a law that said any unemployed parolee or probationer has to seek work (to "cover his fees") or else be violated back to prison, and then the only work supplied is agricultural labor.
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Jun 15, 2011 21:08
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Main Paineframe posted:The main problem, actually, is that it's a purely short-term program. It's incredibly difficult work which pays the workers bare sustenance wages, doesn't provide any benefits, and lasts for about a season. They go out and work for a couple months, making barely enough to meet their rents, Rents? The rural communities that employ seasonal farmworkers don't have surplus housing for them to rent, because the units would stand empty for half the year. The workers are typically provided substandard and heavily overcrowded housing by their employer, sometimes paying him rent, sometimes not. To cut through the BS, Georgia is basically talking about forcing young men (probably disproportionately black) from urban areas like Atlanta to squat eight to a room in shacks in Klan Country, working 12-14 hours six days a week at $9/hr., with no overtime since farmworkers are exempt from overtime pay. I'm repeating myself, but there's a reason that the agricultural sector needs to continuously import impoverished and desperate Central Americans, and that's because by virtually every measure they're the worst jobs available. Low pay, long hours, no overtime, no stability, substandard housing, poor working conditions, etc. The UFW has some documents. quote:and then the job ends and they're just as poor and unemployed as they were before this program started. If this was extended to hook ex-cons up with a greater variety of jobs, including some better ones, then I could really see this being a Good Thing - kind of a job board for convicts, which connects ex-prisoners with employers willing to hire them. It doesn't fix the core problem of employers discriminating against convicts, but it's better than the status quo. What you're talking about would be a program designed to benefit the parolees and probationers, as opposed to the proposed Georgia plan, or to prison work programs already in place around the country, which are designed to exploit a captive work force for the benefit of their employers. Vocational training for prisoners and employment services for parolees are good ideas, and they would probably save more money than they cost (since it costs so much to imprison people, almost anything that reduces recidivism is likely to save money). Unfortunately those programs are usually the first thing eliminated in a budget crunch. Also: "I can't get a job and the state department of corrections is finding good jobs for evil criminal felons?"
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Jun 18, 2011 20:01
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nm posted:What is better for society: It's probably considered lame to namedrop Foucault, but Discipline and Punish is about this principle. Corporal punishment can't effectively control crime because it's over quickly and the public is as likely to sympathize with the criminal as with the people who are lawfully punishing him. Criminal behavior is part of society, because criminals take their lashes and go back to work immediately after. Incarceration places the criminal into the category of "delinquent" distinct from the rest of the citizen population, so that crime is segregated from the population. There are some ways in which Foucault's idea is overly simplistic (e.g. racial underclasses and their underground economies) but I think as a generalized concept it hits the mark.
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Jun 19, 2011 20:27
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KingEup posted:So is this dude going to end up in prison? It depends on a lot of factors. If you're just incredulous that claiming paper is LSD counts as drug trafficking, his actions could easily qualify as those crimes under state law. The fact that he was charged indicates that is the case. That doesn't mean he'll be convicted of them, though. It may be an attempt to intimidate him with harsh charges to force a plea to a lesser offense, in which case whether he serves time or not will depend on his previous criminal record. If he opted to have his day in court, I don't doubt that the DA could get a conviction out of a Utah jury. The main problem with selling people burn bags is that they tend to return later and murder you. Granted, this is probably less likely with LSD than with other drugs, but he's still creating a public safety risk.
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Jun 21, 2011 18:23
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nm posted:What good exactly does this do over a 15 to life where if he grows the gently caress up and can be a honest citizen he gets out and if not he stays in? Does anybody benefit materially from a sentence like that? Is this a case where the prosecutor might ask the judge to give that many years, because the DA wants to use it for a campaign ad? Or were they punishing him for refusing to cooperate? Or just giving him a ridiculous sentence out of pure racist hatefulness? It just seems kind of curious to single out this kid and calculate things so he gets a life sentence behind a few armed robberies. Maybe they threatened all of them with the full 160 years to get them to flip, and his partners gave it up, but he refused so they had to follow through so nobody would think they were making empty threats.
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Jul 4, 2012 22:50
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Private Eye posted:"I just want to commend you on your prison regime, which I actually think is what the British public, if they could sit down and design their own regime, I think this is what they'd design. I genuinely do". Actually he's probably right, because trying to organize a justice system by appealing to the horse sense of the general public is stupid and results in a race to the bottom pursuing ever more severe punishments. The effort to appeal to voters by being tough on crime is a big part of why the American system is so totally hosed up. I think three strikes laws, which people were just discussing, are the best example of something that's good politics but ridiculously bad policy. I mean, think about it from different angles. Would the British public mandate life sentences or maybe castration for paedophiles, if they were allowed to design their own regime? Maybe. Let's study that possibility. Give the people what they want.
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Jul 17, 2012 02:05
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Cold and Ugly posted:Dude, that poo poo is so poorly edited that it's almost stream of consciousness, and it's just allegation after allegation after allegation. If that were legitimate news it would be at least five separate articles. If you had actually paid the most basic attention to the article he was quoting, such as by clicking through the link to review the original, you would have found out that it was the Huffington Post licensing an Associated Press article. If you're not familiar with the AP, they're a wire service supported by subscriptions from various newspaper publishing entities around the United States. They do legwork on national affairs stories so that regional papers around the country can reprint them. Papers pool resources in the AP so it can cover national issues for them, absolving them of the need to maintain their own satellite desks, reporters, and stringers all over the country/world. Mid-range papers like, say, the Des Moines Register, Dallas Morning News, or whoever, rely heavily on the AP, to the extent that if you grabbed the "nation" section of any given American daily probably about half the articles are going to be from the AP. But I'm belaboring the point. The practical effect of all this is that AP articles are specifically designed to be simple, tautly written, unbiased, and easy to follow, so that any paper can just plug the story into today's edition with minimal editing. No fuss, no muss. If you're having trouble following bog-standard AP style, it honestly says more about you than it does about the article. quote:How can you expect me to defend my department against such unsubstantiated tripe? The article is very well substantiated, as the allegations all come from a report issued by the independent inspector general of California prisons. You're going to need to find some way to attack the credibility of Robert Barton and his office. At any rate, my guess would be that he didn't expect you to defend your department against what was stated in the article. And you didn't.
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Aug 28, 2013 04:21
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dethkon posted:You guys have any thoughts on this? There was a fairly infamous incident that went before the Supreme Court of Canada, USA v Cobb, where American prosecutors were trying to get Canadians extradited to stand trial in the USA for mail fraud. One of the prosecutors went on Canadian TV and admitted to threatening Canadian citizens with prison rape if they didn't agree to immediate extradition. As in, waive your rights and come to the USA immediately, because if you make us actually go through the process of legally extraditing you, we're going to convict you and send you to a terrible prison where you'll be raped. The SCC determined that you have a right to contest extradition, because duh, and that making insane and extravagant threats was an abuse of process, so the guys weren't extradited. There have also been some cases, I'm mostly thinking of Ireland here because they've done it several times, where other countries have refused to extradite to the USA on the simple basis that the US prison system is so cruel and inhumane that it would violate their own constitutions to give people up to be imprisoned in it.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:03
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