The state of the US prison system.

[sonicneedslovetoo]

I have no idea how many of you know about this, but I was researching about Chelsea Manning having heard some vague stuff through my email when I came across this article:
http://solitarywatch.com/facts/faq/
For those of you who don't feel like reading that its about solitary confinement so I'll take out a few of the more depressing extracts.

1.Children as young as 7(the lowest age I could find where they can be charged as adults) are held in solitary confinement.
2.A teenager was sent to solitary confinement at age 15, he stayed in solitary until he was 33.(information in the faq is slightly out of date)
3.LGBT or the mentally ill are held in solitary confinement.
4.People in solitary confinement do not receive mental health care, the teenager mentioned above repeatedly tried to commit suicide and I'm told they superglued his wrists and put him back in his cell.
5.Until 2014 there was NO legislation regarding pregnant women in solitary(people in solitary are refused anything but the most basic medical care)

There are other things in there, but they are frankly even worse to the point where I am unsure if I can post them on this forum(in particular parts of the "people with mental illness")

This made me very depressed when I found out Chelsea up there could be put in solitary for an indefinite period of time simply for having an empty tube of toothpaste in her cell and I wanted to share it with you guys. Btw don't look up anything about Florida prisons they are unimaginably terrible. In particular you should not look up "Darren Rainey"

 

[MeatMachine]

I've always been of the opinion that the United States' prison system as a whole is absolutely disgusting and is structured to do way more harm than good. In America, the main concern I hear about is that so many non-violent people are imprisoned for stupid bullshit and thrown into a den of cannibalistic wolves to "correct" their "antisocial" behavior. Anyone who manages to come out of the experience with a shred of humanity are dumped back into an alternate reality where they are stigmatized, probably have no help or resources, and are still expected to carry the entire burden on simply making it work anyway.

From what I've heard, every country in the world has some appalling approach to criminal justice, with the possible exception of a Scandinavian country or two. Prisons that are overcrowded, poorly maintained, or rely on torturous practices for ease of control is the norm. Unfortunately, prison reform is the last thing on the list of anyone's priorities, assuming they are one of the minority of people who actually give a shit in the first place.

I'm not advocating that non-violent offenders should be excused or even treated lightly, but the term "correctional facility" is so painfully oxymoronic that I don't even feel comfortable thinking about what life in prison must be like.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The state of the US prison system is rather appalling, yes, though this is well known. Explanations range from "for profit" to "don't care" to "abusing prisoners is good for society".

Also, you've only touched on the official stuff, not the abuse and exploitation.

 

[Lufia Erim]

I don't know ANYTHING about prisons or how they work outside of unrealistic TV prison shows.

But in my head, i think being alone is better than the risk of being beaten killed or raped by other inmates.

 

[spartandude]

But in my head, i think being alone is better than the risk of being beaten killed or raped by other inmates.

Well being in solitary confinement is essentially being kept in a small room with a bed, a toilet and a sink with no one else around. And atleast once a day (although it should be twice a day) a guard slips a small tray of food through a slit in the door and everynow and then some toilet paper.

You can't talk to anyone and there is nothing to do. It is more or less torture to be kept in there for any more than a week really.

 

[stroopwafel]

I've always been of the opinion that the United States' prison system as a whole is absolutely disgusting and is structured to do way more harm than good.

Absolutely. With California's ridiculous ''3 strikes'' law you can get thrown into Pelican Bay amongst the rapists and murderers over the most trivial shit. For life(!) I'm all for putting away deliberate killers and violent career criminals for good, but so many 'crimes' are committed out of ignorance, stupidity, poverty or impulse. Sure, there should be a sanction for bad behavior but when most 'criminals' locked away in correctional facilities are either ethnic minorities or other economically disenfranchised people there is no denying a high degree of class justice is at play here as well.

Not just that, but the sentences themselves and the conditions inmates have to deal with are absolutely brutal as well. People locked in cells for 23 hours a day, people getting raped and murdered, solitary confinement to the point people are losing their sense of self.

I once read somewhere that you can determine how civilized a society is by the way it treats its prisoners, and I think there is definitely some truth to that. Prisoners can't vote so they aren't politically interesting. They don't have the sympathy from the media or society in general b/c they made a mistake and/or did something bad. Nobody gives a shit about them, so they are left to the mercy of a justice system that seems content mopping up the underclass in a self-sustained economy of prison centers and aggregate industries outsourced to the private sector.

For the prisoners that aren't bad people, it's sad really.

 

[MeatMachine]

But in my head, i think being alone is better than the risk of being beaten killed or raped by other inmates.

I thought this too, until I watched a few documentaries on solitary confinement; somehow, solitary confinement actually manages to be a lower circle of hell than standard confinement. While it may initially seem like a more comfortable and less dangerous environment than shared areas, most people barely last 2 days in solitary confinement before they start being driven totally mad.

It should be mentioned, by the way, that most solitary confinement areas don't mean that you are totally isolated from other inmates. In most cases, the other prisoners in nearby solitary cells do everything in their power to create as much civil unrest for the guards and other prisoners as possible, screaming non-stop, flooding their toilets, flinging shit under their doors, barricading their windows, and attempting suicide - all of this, on top of the mental decay that sets in over time with the psychological siege that comes from being trapped in a tiny, consistent room with 0 stimulation, many people end up begging to be released back in common areas before they inevitably go insane themselves and replicate the same behavior the others do. To make matters worse, any time a person in solitary confinement behaves unfavorably (harming themselves, disobeying rules, behaving destructively), they are punished with more time in solitary, creating and endless cycle of hopeless beat-downs that perpetuates their agonizing death by mental attrition.

Standard confinement usually leads to cruel experiences - solitary confinement is intrinsically cruel if implemented for more than 24 hours or so.

 

[chuckman1]

My dad is a crazy guy always in jail. A big problem is people that belong in a mental institution are sent to jail instead. Basically our prisons are worse than most western nations with slave pay for labor. Reform is needed but nobody cares about criminals or mentally ill.

 

[Cowabungaa]

From what I've seen in documentaries and raw data, it completely flies against what we actually know about human behavior, correcting criminal behavior, what actually works, logic and basic human decency.

That makes it brutish, uncivilized and completely anti-moral. Thanks to things like that I'm so revolted by the idea that the US is supposed to be the 'leader of the free world'.

 

[Saltyk]

I've found that the biggest differences between the guards and the prisoners is that one gets to go home after eight hours. Every single person I have met or heard of that worked in a prison are almost all ass holes (with maybe one exception). Seriously. One guy defended the rape conviction of Genarlow Wilson because oral sex was "illegal" according to a 1995 law.

Fun Fact: The guy who wrote the law said it was never intended to be used to convict a teenager for having oral sex with another teenager.

That being said, I feel solitary confinement should at least be a tool that can be used for violent and dangerous offenders. It's better to keep a person who may harm others away from the general population. The form that takes may need to change, but I'd rather keep the serial killers away from the less violent criminals. For example, I know a coworker who had a family member that killed a cellmate because he wanted the guy's Reese's cups (yes, really). Someone like that probably should have never been in a cell with anyone else.

 

[Kopikatsu]

You think that would at least cause people to hesitate when committing crimes, but no.

If the criminals accept that a prison sentence is their fate when they break the law, and they break the law anyway, do they really deserve anything less?

 

[rcs619]

The primary issue with the US prison system (and the justice system in general for that matter) is the dehumanization of people who break the law. You see it from the police doing the arrests with how they mistreat, ignore and beat people. You see it from judges and prosecutors with how they go for the harshest possible sentences, regardless of context just so that they can boast about conviction rates when they inevitably run for election of some kind. And you see it in the prisons themselves, locking people away and treating them like animals, often sticking minor non-violent offenders in the same cells as hardened criminals and killers.

Then there's the rape, which is so well-known that it's become a common 'joke' about US prisons. Don't drop the soap, hurr hurr. Rape is funny in this context because he's a criminal and probably deserved it.

Don't get me wrong, there should be an element of punishment to being in prison. You're there because (in a lot of cases) you either hurt someone or were doing something that *could* have potentially hurt someone. But the primary focus of the entire justice system should be rehabilitation. It should be trying to make sure that our re-incarceration rate is as low as humanly possible, and it just isn't. Minor criminals and first-time offenders should not be thrown in with killers and prison gangs. Are there some people that are career criminals (or outright monsters in human form) and cannot be helped no matter what? Of course there are, but the vast majority of criminals aren't monsters. Most of them are people who made boneheaded, idiotic decisions or got caught up in events that spiraled out of control.

Then there's the sex offender registry, which is just a joke nowadays with how broadly it is misused. But that's a whole other topic.

 

[sonicneedslovetoo]

You think that would at least cause people to hesitate when committing crimes, but no.

If the criminals accept that a prison sentence is their fate when they break the law, and they break the law anyway, do they really deserve anything less?

Well you see solitary confinement isn't just for violent insane raving madmen, anybody who can be determined to be mentally ill to children can be put in there. They also don't have different rules for people who are put in solitary for their own protection, and people who are put in solitary because they're dangerous. Its not just people who have been convicted of crimes either, a 16 year old in Alaska was kept in solitary for 17 months while he was waiting for sentencing. Heck even pregnant women can be put into solitary and denied medical care.
The guy I mentioned in the original post was given a three month extension on his stay in solitary confinement for yelling at a guard for not accepting his grievance form. I'm told he tried to commit suicide during his time in solitary and all they did was superglue his wrists shut again and put him back in the cell. I strongly feel that the line between disciplining people and torturing them has been crossed, and its entirely likely these people will not recover.

There are also problems with "gang reporting" as well, prisoners are incentivized for reporting people as members of a gang and they can throw you in solitary confinement for that. I'm told that these reports are largely taken on their word.

 

[Erttheking]

You think that would at least cause people to hesitate when committing crimes, but no.

If the criminals accept that a prison sentence is their fate when they break the law, and they break the law anyway, do they really deserve anything less?

Yeah, the problem is that so many people have pretty much been deluded into the fact that only truly terrible people go to prison because of how horrible the conditions are there.

So when someone breaks the law and California, and it's their third strike, they're gonna be surprised when their minor crime lands them in maximum security.

Oh, and most of the people in max are there for stupid shit like drug possession, because of stupidly puritan laws.

In short, people are thrown in max for the most stupid of fucking arbitrary reasons. Not surprising considering that this is a country where police officers can get in trouble for not giving out enough tickets. Yup, if everyone is following the law, the police get punished. What kind of ass fucking backward logic was put into this country's legal system?

 

[chocolate pickles]

You think that would at least cause people to hesitate when committing crimes, but no.

If the criminals accept that a prison sentence is their fate when they break the law, and they break the law anyway, do they really deserve anything less?

Yeah, the problem is that so many people have pretty much been deluded into the fact that only truly terrible people go to prison because of how horrible the conditions are there.

So when someone breaks the law and California, and it's their third strike, they're gonna be surprised when their minor crime lands them in maximum security.

Oh, and most of the people in max are there for stupid shit like drug possession, because of stupidly puritan laws.

In short, people are thrown in max for the most stupid of fucking arbitrary reasons.

If someone has broke the law 3 times, then do they really deserve nice treatment? I would rather see them in maximum security shitting themselves in the hope that maybe they will stop breaking the law, because obviously more lenient treatment hasn't worked.

OT: You guys seem to have the exact opposite problem from the UK: We have to treat every scumbag like a golden child. The police themselves are treated more like criminals because of shit birds like the Daily Mail trying to hype up cases of 'police brutality' and all the softies in the political system insisting we need to treat everyone 'equally', not matter if they have never broken a law in their life or been a gang member for 10 years.

 

[Bat Vader]

You think that would at least cause people to hesitate when committing crimes, but no.

If the criminals accept that a prison sentence is their fate when they break the law, and they break the law anyway, do they really deserve anything less?

Yeah, the problem is that so many people have pretty much been deluded into the fact that only truly terrible people go to prison because of how horrible the conditions are there.

So when someone breaks the law and California, and it's their third strike, they're gonna be surprised when their minor crime lands them in maximum security.

Oh, and most of the people in max are there for stupid shit like drug possession, because of stupidly puritan laws.

In short, people are thrown in max for the most stupid of fucking arbitrary reasons. Not surprising considering that this is a country where police officers can get in trouble for not giving out enough tickets. Yup, if everyone is following the law, the police get punished. What kind of ass fucking backward logic was put into this country's legal system?

To be fair though I feel like it would be really hard to break any law more than once or at all. If someone has three different strikes for breaking the law I feel it's either because it was deliberate, they didn't care, or they didn't know. I feel the first two are the most common. The law is the law. Props to the people that are trying to get drug laws and other stupid laws changed or taken away but before they are taken away those laws must still be obeyed.

 

[Erttheking]

You think that would at least cause people to hesitate when committing crimes, but no.

If the criminals accept that a prison sentence is their fate when they break the law, and they break the law anyway, do they really deserve anything less?

Yeah, the problem is that so many people have pretty much been deluded into the fact that only truly terrible people go to prison because of how horrible the conditions are there.

So when someone breaks the law and California, and it's their third strike, they're gonna be surprised when their minor crime lands them in maximum security.

Oh, and most of the people in max are there for stupid shit like drug possession, because of stupidly puritan laws.

In short, people are thrown in max for the most stupid of fucking arbitrary reasons.

If someone has broke the law 3 times, then do they really deserve nice treatment? I would rather see them in maximum security shitting themselves in the hope that maybe they will stop breaking the law, because obviously more lenient treatment hasn't worked.

OT: You guys seem to have the exact opposite problem from the UK: We have to treat every scumbag like a golden child. The police themselves are treated more like criminals because of shit birds like the Daily Mail trying to hype up cases of 'police brutality' and all the softies in the political system insisting we need to treat everyone 'equally', not matter if they have never broken a law in their life or been a gang member for 10 years.

Considering that things like possessing drugs and stealing a slice of pizza have counted towards the strikes, no. Any system where you can be put away for 25 years because you committed petty theft is broken. And that's before you take into account the horrible conditions of the American prison system, where being murdered by gangs and being abused by gangs and guards are both a thing, and that's without getting into rape. I don't like the idea that someone can get raped for stealing a slice of pizza. And the problem with your argument. You assume that when someone goes to jail for twenty years and then gets out, they're not going to commit crime again. Except people can refuse to hire them after that on the basis of them being felons and there's a good chance they won't know how to function on the outside due to having no marketable skills and technology having advanced 20 years. You know what they do? Break the law again because it's the only option they have. The system is broken. It doesn't fucking work. It's a short term solution made by people who don't care about the future and just want a place to stuff all of the "undesirables" In Norway, they built what they proudly call the most humane system in the world, with cells that look like college dorm rooms. And for every criminal that gets released from prison and commits a crime again in Norway, three do it in America.

I wish the police in my country were treated like criminals. They sure as fuck act like them spending their favorite pastime of "shooting people and then lying about it because when you report police killing people, it goes to the police". Oh yeah, another reason I don't trust the prison system in this country. Corrupt cops.

I'd love to have your problems with the prison system instead of mine. I'd prefer to live in a country where police are under heavy observation and scrutiny instead of living in a country where large amounts of people will always defend the police when they decided to shoot another black kid.

 

[Erttheking]

You think that would at least cause people to hesitate when committing crimes, but no.

If the criminals accept that a prison sentence is their fate when they break the law, and they break the law anyway, do they really deserve anything less?

Yeah, the problem is that so many people have pretty much been deluded into the fact that only truly terrible people go to prison because of how horrible the conditions are there.

So when someone breaks the law and California, and it's their third strike, they're gonna be surprised when their minor crime lands them in maximum security.

Oh, and most of the people in max are there for stupid shit like drug possession, because of stupidly puritan laws.

In short, people are thrown in max for the most stupid of fucking arbitrary reasons. Not surprising considering that this is a country where police officers can get in trouble for not giving out enough tickets. Yup, if everyone is following the law, the police get punished. What kind of ass fucking backward logic was put into this country's legal system?

To be fair though I feel like it would be really hard to break any law more than once or at all. If someone has three different strikes for breaking the law I feel it's either because it was deliberate, they didn't care, or they didn't know. I feel the first two are the most common. The law is the law. Props to the people that are trying to get drug laws and other stupid laws changed or taken away but before they are taken away those laws must still be obeyed.

Like I said before, I did a little looking around, and I found out that stealing a freaking slice of pizza can count towards the three strike laws in California. Because apparently "Felony petty theft" is a thing. And let's be honest. Human beings are STUPID animals. We drink, we do things without thinking things through, we let our emotions get the better of us, and sometimes we do something wrong without realizing that it was wrong. Did you know that public urination was a crime? I heard a story about a guy who didn't and got in trouble with the police for it. People can get their LIVES ruined over the most mundane and stupid of shit. Punish people that break the law, sure, but I'm tried of the legal system wielding a battle axe in situations that call for scalpel.

(Oh, except for rich people, they can't go to jail even when they accidentally kill people because it would hurt their feelings.)

 

[Kopikatsu]

So when someone breaks the law and California, and it's their third strike, they're gonna be surprised when their minor crime lands them in maximum security.

Oh, and most of the people in max are there for stupid shit like drug possession, because of stupidly puritan laws.

Yeah. You know how you fix that? Stop committing fucking crimes. 'Oh, the crimes they committed aren't that bad!' No. Don't commit crimes in the first place. The end.

 

[Mr_Spanky]

So when someone breaks the law and California, and it's their third strike, they're gonna be surprised when their minor crime lands them in maximum security.

Oh, and most of the people in max are there for stupid shit like drug possession, because of stupidly puritan laws.

Yeah. You know how you fix that? Stop committing fucking crimes. 'Oh, the crimes they committed aren't that bad!' No. Don't commit crimes in the first place. The end.

So i guess the idea that the justice system should have a proportional response to the crime committed is something you disagree with?

Hence 3 counts of petty theft is equal to raping someone or beating them half to death?