Comment by glenjamin
3 years ago
I once attended an internal presentation while working for the UK's Ministry of Justice.
A large number of contraband mobile phones had been confiscated, and a team performed some data analysis to see what they'd been used for.
The overwhelming conclusion was that the phones had been primarily used to keen in touch with family.
There's also a whole bunch of research that showed that maintaining ties with the outside world while incarcerated led to reduced rates of reoffending (and the inverse was also true - isolation led to increased rates).
Allowing free phone calls in and out of prisons makes a lot of sense both socially and economically.
I would guess that there are many cases where it reduces the burden on the prisoner's family - a burden that should never be a purpose of incarceration, and which may lead to follow-on social dysfunction.
> reduced rates of reoffending
Sounds like something bad for business when you run for-profit prisons.
A lot of what makes sense socially and economically doesn't happen (esp. in the US) when the alternative is a very profitable business, often an oligopoly. E.g. free prison phone calls hurt the >$1B "inmate telephone business."
Prisons themselves can be a profitable business, which (if you own a for-profit prison) provides strong incentive for reducing rehabilitation and increasing recidivism.
Incarcerations should be harsh and life-ending. Look at North Korea, they have way less crime than even Tokyo. In comparions to Chicago look like a mess mafia gangland. When you reward the prisoners with a lot of benefits, you simply tell everyone crime pays. The focus should be on expediting justice and ensuring correct justice to be dispense. Prisoners that committed crimes should be left for them to be in miserable states to discourage them to do crime. Reoffending one can be liquidated. I really dont want my tax going to feed this kind of inhumans.
But the purpose of the prison system isn't to improve society and economics.
For a well-functioning prison system it is.
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Even if you're into the pure punishment angle, prolonged isolation is a factory for mental instability. And you're releasing most of these people back into society at some point.
This is an absolutely bizarre take. Even if you’re all for the pure punitive aspect of it, why would you not want to improve society and the economics? Are you Kim Jong Un or something? I’m genuinely confused how any reasonable argument can be made here, regardless on your stance towards the prisoners themselves.
If you're a retributivist, you believe the point of prison is to punish the guilty. Therefore you will be uncomfortable with the idea of prison as a means to "improve society or economics".
Kant:
> [Punishment] can never be inflicted merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society. It must always be inflicted upon him only because he has committed a crime. For a human being can never be treated merely as a means to the purposes of another or be put among the objects of rights to things
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The US is really big on making sure criminals never stop paying for their crimes.
Improving society in a way that helps anyone who hasn’t earned it is contrary to the goals way too many voters.
They didn’t say they support the status quo.
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I'm hoping the comment you're replying to was sardonic.
Ah, you're thinking of the American prison system. We were talking more about a prison system that is functional and beneficial.
Easy mistake to make, I know.
That’s precisely what it’s for.
Make take a reflecting break.
While it may improve the outcome for prisoners wouldn't it be abused by criminals at a large scale? In my country at least phones are smuggled by criminals to continue running their enterprises from behind the bars.
This is the same type of logic used by police to justify civil forfeiture of cash in the USA. Drug dealers carry a lot of cash because they can't use banks, so anybody carrying a lot of cash must be a drug dealer and the cash must be illegal proceeds from drug dealing.
Not only has this logic severely damaged public trust in police, but it's been incrementally extended to seize money and property from many innocent and/or uninvolved people.
I'm not saying it will never happen, but we should not be punishing everyone for the misdeeds of the few. We should not be attributing anything to criminal activity that has not yet been proven to be criminal activity.
Prison should be about aggregate improvement of society while minimizing dehumanization. Sure, a drug kingpin might keep running their empire from within prison. But we might buy safer prisons and improved reintegration with this cost.
Most inmates probably don't have a criminal enterprise they can run.
Those are the odd cases, yes, maybe you should be able to make exceptions.
But the vast majority of inmates are not kingpins.
According to whatever study the parent comment cites, most of them are used to contact family. Seems the solution to allow free calls from monitored prison phones is a good compromise.
Seems great to allow it through monitored devices for free, you might gather more evidence this way and convict others.
That is do everything possible to prevent smuggled non monitored devices so that the only communication is through sanctioned monitored devices.
Obviously the right to privacy (4th amendment) is lost in prison among other rights so there shouldn't be any issue with the surveillance.
> Seems great to allow it through monitored devices for free, you might gather more evidence this way and convict others.
The conviction already happened. Continuing to gathering evidence (for any purpose other than exoneration in cases of suspected wrongful convictions) - and without new warrants - violates the spirit of double jeopardy (Fifth Amendment).
> Obviously the right to privacy (4th amendment) is lost in prison among other rights so there shouldn't be any issue with the surveillance.
When you say "Obviously" do you mean what things are like, or do you mean what things should be like? If you mean the latter only, then I would agree with you. (Although, I'm not sure whether the US constitution implicitly supports a right to privacy.) The chilling effect means that both the convict and the loved one on the other end can't freely express themselves in a private conversation with each other. If your family member gets prison for life then should you lose your First Amendment rights whenever you want to talk with the convicted family member? By default, criminals shouldn't have zero speech rights and zero privacy either. Whether someone is dangerous or has done immoral things is on its own not enough reason to take away constitutional rights. One possible reading of the 13th Amendment allows slavery and involuntary servitude "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" [1], but the same doesn't apply to other rights.
In the context of prison, freedom of expression and privacy are about as important to me as voting, and I'm not a fan of felony disenfranchisement [1]. In my opinion, US citizens in prison shouldn't lose their voting rights for any period of time, especially considering that vote by mail exists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
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There is no logic that a good thing should be free. In fact it should likely cost prisoners something if it is good for them. Just like breakfast is good for you but it is not free.
“If it’s good for you, it shouldn’t be free” is a very strange hill to die on, even if we weren’t even specifically talking about attempting to rehabilitate criminals.
Can you find a “shouldn’t“ part in my response?
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At the same time, there's no logic that says that a good thing should cost money. A walk in the woods is good for you, should we charge for that?
Also in your particular example, if you walking in a woods that is private or requires hiring people to maintain, you will likely need to pay it. You don’t need to pay it if you walk in the wilderness, but even that you still indirectly paying it via tax if there are any work needs to be done to keep the wilderness looks good to you.
The lack of basic logic training in the responses are hilarious, and some of them can’t even notice there is a damn “likely” there.
The fact that A does not imply B, and A often implies not B does not mean that you cannot find an example that show both A and B. But it is sufficient to weaken the argument to support B using A.
This is silly. Non-prisoners are paying out the nose for prisoners' "free" stuff already, and worrying about some pennies on top of that is petty.
Offering prisoners free phone access is very likely to save non-prisoners shittons of money, so we should do it.
This is totally stupid and illogical. The fact that you already paid some money for the other people doesn’t necessarily give you any reason why you should pay more for another expense, big or small.
Again, none of you guys seems to care about the reason and just want the conclusion.
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Breakfast is literally free for prisoners
I know you just threw that in, but there is considerable evidence that breakfast is not good for you (unless perhaps you're out working in the fields), and the modern concept that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was invented by ad agencies.
On the topic of meal timing, I recommend anything by Salk Institute researcher Dr. Satchin Panda.
What about clean air
You do pay for that through tax. And yes it costs money to maintain clean air, at least in urban settings.
In the libertarian ideal, a clean ecosystem should be monetized to incentivize the production of value by those who think they need a clean ecosystem. In theory, we would all be richer for it.
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