Nevertheless, I see those proposals as a rhetorical tool to push people making those suggestions to follow the thought paths, not as an actual call to put a proposal on the table.
Thought that was pretty clear, but obviously YMMV.
The effects on staff are often overlooked when this is talked about. Having prisoners subject each other to violence and rape takes a toll on staff also. Who they hell wants to deal with that every day?
I was just reading about this, the 300 is total exonerated. Still some death row prisoners tho.
Of more than 300 people exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, more than 25% were convicted of murder. Eighteen were sentenced to die; others were charged with capital murder but narrowly escaped the death penalty, and still others would likely have been charged with capital crimes if the death penalty had been in place at the time of their trials. We have also worked on cases of people who were executed before DNA testing could be conducted to confirm guilt or prove innocence, and we are aware of several non-DNA cases where evidence of innocence surfaced after people were executed.
My son works in a prison. He actually enjoys the physical aspects of training for the job.
I’ve stopped asking “anything interesting happen at work lately” because he answers with stuff beyond anything I imagine. Hearing what he witnesses daily (and has come to consider normal), it’s hard to believe that anyone leaves prison normal.
I’m not surprised. I wonder how high their burnout rate is? In the long run, I think it would be better to burn out than become numb to the violence.
Out of the group he initially trained with, several dropped out during training, a few lasted less than a week, and one is in prison doing a couple of years.
He has been lucky and has been promoted twice. He spends more time at a desk now, but still joins in when his guys do cell extractions and shakedowns.
Good for him, sounds like he’s doing it right.
I shouldn’t have relied on memory. Thanks for clarifying the numbers.
I agree with Chronos here. People should be in the general population by default, unless there’s some specific threat, I guess. I would certainly be thrown into that group, and I’m sure it would be terrible for me. I have no gang I could cozy up to, I’m not physically imposing, not street-wise.
If things are so awful in the general population, fix that. My understanding is that other countries don’t have such awful prison experiences. Why is it so bad here? It’s because we think of criminals as animals, lesser beings.
If “good guys”, like cops, end up having a hard time in the general population, then it might encourage folks to fix the problem in general.
Otherwise, it seems to me that we’re saying that “regular” criminals deserve to be raped and killed in prison, but ex-cops should get special treatment.
Are folks saying cops should separated because they’re good guys? My reading is that they’re separated because they are targets for revenge and are more vulnerable, like pedophiles. They aren’t being rewarded for being cops but knowing how they could be targeted puts a burden of care on the state to mitigate that added vulnerability.
Do agree that a system solution is needed, but until then, immediate solutions have to be in place.
I’m saying that, as a wimpy suburban guy who is not some kind of white supremacist, I would also be in some deep shit if I were in prison. If pedophiles and cops get some special protection, shouldn’t I also get that protection?
But, maybe if cops and other people who the warden might want to side with (not pedophiles) are going to get abused, maybe the warden or the state or whoever will do something about the terrible prison conditions in this country, especially when compared to other first world countries.
I get that and I don¡t disagree- I was responding specially to you calling cops “good guys” as the rationale. Yes, everyone should be better protected, no doubt. But we already have a couple subpopulations that absolutely are more vulnerable so we can’t pretend we don’t know that just because we don’t have a full solution yet.
I don’t buy the premise that the warden or whoever will be so moved to see cops harmed that they’ll jump into action. Protective custody, from what I’ve been told, is worse than being in the general population. Those cops are already having it worse, and they don’t seem to care. I also don’t believe that the wardens identify with the crooked cops, and think they’re good guys.
If “good guys”, like cops, end up having a hard time in the general population, then it might encourage folks to fix the problem in general.
Probably nothing. I think it’s fairly normal for human beings to want bad things to happen to bad people. They deserve it, right? It’s justice, right? If you had a crowbar and found yourself locked in the same room as the man who murdered your child, would you at least consider caving his skull in? I think most of us would. So those people who express those desires, I’m not sure there’s actually anything wrong with them. It seems rather natural to me.
Please note that I’m not in favor of brutalizing prisoners. And I suspect most people who say “Throw him in gen-pop” couldn’t actually stomach watching the brutalization or even hearing about it in detail. But then I didn’t exactly shed any tears when Jeffrey Dahmer was beaten to death by his fellow inmates while incarcerated.
I never really thought of them as vigilantes. I’ll have to give that one some thought.
Consideration for staff was one of the things that turned me against the death penalty.
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be fairly normal and have something wrong with you, if it’s fairly normal to have something wrong with you.
In the book Gangster Redemption he describes several levels of prison security, including medium-security facilities, which already have “a lot of violence” (and violent felons), as well as maximum-security facilities. As for one maximum-security facility he described, “For inmates found to be a snitch, a child molester, or someone not accepted in the minds of the inmates, the likelihood of a stabbing, a severe beating, or even murder was inevitable.” He was none of the above, plus he had some sort of Mafia and gang protection, but he still had to fight for his life using a shiv or knife smuggled up his ass, on more than one occasion. As for “the hole” (solitary confinement), people would go crazy and commit suicide in there.
Perhaps I didn’t communicate effectively. I don’t believe expressing a desire for bad things to happen to bad people is abnormal or indicative that something is wrong with them.
Then the thought paths he’s proposing are stupid and incoherent. Read it for yourself:
- What sort of logical rigor demands that the prisoner-murderer has to be compensated? That’s just a strawman contrived by Monty. He suggested that a certain position requires an idiotic conclusion that it doesn’t require at all, except to serve the needs of his grandstanding.
- Nobody hoped for a murder! Look, this is in the text that Monty himself quoted:
What do we call it when Monty claims someone wants a murder, but Monty himself has quoted that person saying the exact opposite? I’m not sure if we’re allowed to say it in the pit, but it’s so dishonest that it seems willful to me.
It is if the person lacks the self-awareness to realize that they aren’t healthy, mature thoughts. It’s one thing to express them abstractly, or to relay how a person feels about something. It’s another to genuinely wish harm on another without any hint of conscious override.
Watch an episode of “To Catch a Smuggler” and that will give you an idea about how some other country’s prisons are, especially in South America. Or Russia, Japan, China.
U.S jails are tame, compared to those.
At times I’ve been aware of just what some of my patients did to end up in prison. I’ve found myself shaking with rage and envisioning severe corporal punishment being inflicted on them. However, that emotional reaction is no basis for justice nor humane principles or ethical action. So I vent my rage appropriately (meditation, relaxation, bitching to a trusted friend/colleague), and then act appropriately.
Essentially, my feelings of anger/rage/revenge are not wrong. But acting inappropriately on them would be. Sadly too many people believe that the intensity of their feelings about something directly correlates with the TRUTH about that something.
PS: I’d also advise folks to not accept as gospel fact books written by former inmates/staff, nor TV/Movie portrayals of life in prison, nor other mass media presentations on the topic. Some are pretty accurate, but they’re the minority, IMHO.
Basically jails and prisons in the US, both state and federal, are not pleasant places. Some are much better than you might think, while some are much worse.