Folks, I’m not arguing that it is justifiable to brutalize prisoners. I went out of my way to express that I did not want to see prisoners brutalized. Only that the desire for harm is not abnormal or indicative that there is something wrong with an individual. Please, nobody needs to present an argument to me against brutalizing prisoners because I’m not in favor of it.
Edgy 
I was agreeing with you. Wanting bad things to happen to bad people is normal in my book. I just don’t recommend acting on that emotion. It doesn’t ease the emotions.
…nah. You don’t get a pass on this. Not when you lock up more people per capita than anywhere else in the world. More than El Salvador. Twice as many as Iran. Three times as many as Colombia. Four times as many as Australia.
Some stories.
The US is unique in that it has set up a capitalist, racist pipeline to incarceration that most people that live there just don’t really care about. Out of sight. Out of mind. A system where “74% of people in American jails have not been convicted of a crime.”
Why is it so bad there?
Its because you’ve been indoctrinated by political rhetoric, by the privliged, by “Law and Order.” You don’t get to point fingers at other countries and say “you are tame by comparison.” Not when your system and society is so fundumentally broken there really is no hope of ever getting it fixed.
This is a marathon post and I very well may have made some formatting errors, so my apologies in advance if I did.
Being protected from extrajudicial violence, to include rape and murder, is not “cushier”. It’s the responsibiiltiy of the prison to ensure the safety of its charges.
I do have a plan. Step 1: do not openly advocate for rape and/or murder in prison. Step 2: work on improving prisons so that the prison is not a hell hole or a crime academy.
Again. It is not special treatment. It is protecting the prison’s charges from a real and credible threat.
Right. And how do you expect that to work when the prisoner is dead?
The beginning of your bullet point here made sense, but the rest…what? There is no if. Prison violence is a real problem. There are those who are working to reform prisons. And, yes, I am part of that work.
Yet again: it’s not a privilege to be protected from a real and credible threat.
Just out of curiosity, how many times must you be told something before you realize it was said? Protection is not a cushier sentence.
See above. My plan is to not openly advocate for rape, murder, or any other “extrajudicial punishment”, and for the prison to protect its charges from a real and credible threat.
No. I am suggesting that those who openly advocate for “extrajudicial punishment” to actually think about what they are advocating.
What gotcha? Once again: my plan is to follow the law, and that includes the prison protecting its charges from a real and credible threat. It does not include openly advocating for prison violence.
Exactly right. I would add that not only is what they are advocating shortsighted, but also immoral.
No. If one is going to openly advocate for something to be part of the punishment for a crime, then one should flesh out the whole thing.
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It’s not a non-sequitur. Openly advocate for something to happen, then someone makes that happen–to the delight of the ones so advocating–means that the agent who dispensed “justice” should receive some reward. That’s just, isn’t it? As another poster alluded to upthread: it’s not just for that agent to also be punished for dispensing the hoped for punishment.
Of course I’m not calling for an actual plan to reward or otherwise justify vigilantism, especially if that vigilantism includes rape and/or murder. It’s as you said: a rhetorical tool to get people to think about what they are openly advocating.
Well, besides to you and me, it seems to have been fairly clear to a number of posters in this thread.
I’ve been quite clear that I believe nobody deserves to be raped, killed, or violated in any way while in prison. I’ve also, IMHO, been quite clear that we need to fix the prisons so that the prisons are providing the protection it should to all its charges. While waiting for that to happen, though, it is not conducive to that ideal to chuck someone into a situation where there is a real and credible–and immediate–threat to them of violence against them.
Exactly.
Right.
But would you really be facing the same level of threat as a pedophile or former LEO? If you were, then, yes, the prison should provide the same level of protection as an immediate solution to the problem. The long-term solution, of course, is to ensure the safety of all the prison’s charges. That would require more staffing, more training, more tax money, etc. So long as the general public is adverse to that happening, then the prisons need to work with immediate solutions.
I don’t see the wardens as wanting to side with the former LEO. The warden should be acting on their dual obligations: to the prisoners for their safety and to the state so that failure to provide protection does not result in a massive fiscal hit to the taxpayer when the prisoner or prisoner’s survivors (in the case of murder) sues and wins. I also add that the warden should also be working to make the prisoner a place of rehabilitation.
Of course it’s natural to have that immediage feeling. The issue here is those who are openly advocating for such violence and doubling down on that advocation.
As you said, it’s likely most people who do not actually mean those things. But there are those who really do and advocate openly for them to happen.
You should also note that it seems Dahmer was not killed because of his crimes. The prisoner who killed him also attacked another prisoner at the same time and that prisoner died from his injuries. The murderer said that “God told him to kill”. The prison administration was derelict in their duty, having left these men unsupervised.
I never really thought of them as vigilantes. I’ll have to give that one some thought.
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Here is Merriam-Webster’s definition of vigilante:
a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate)
broadly: a self-appointed doer of justice
ISTM that the broad sense is exactly what those criminals attacking the Capitol were.
Advocating for someone to be “put in gen pop” becasue of what one believes about gen pop’s violence is advocating for that person to be raped, murdered, or otherwise assaulted, regardless of any hand-waving away when called on one’s advocating of such course of action.
You can call me a liar in The BBQ Pit, just as I can call you a jackass.
It’s also a system where the resulting statistics from that racist system serve to bolster further racism against minority populations.
Quoted for truth. Whenever anyone says they just really, strongly feel something I want to roll my eyes, be it love, God, or justice. Powerful emotions are meant to override rational decisions. It may have been a feature once, but in the modern world, it’s a bug.
I didn’t mean to imply that you were incorrect. It’s just I hadn’t considered the January 6th riots from that point of view, and your comment has prompted me to think about it in another perspective. And really, isn’t getting people to consider things from a different perspective the entire point of The BBQ Pit?
Cool. I like your take on that.
Now here, I have to disagree. While I do NOT believe in extra punishment torture, rape, etc in prison, the idea that people do not “deserve” TO be in prison, is asinine. Many of these people are not there simply for the sake of punishment. Some of our laws yes, should be reformed. But a lot of these people also earned their incarceration.
Murder, rape, child abuse, etc – if you do any of that, you deserve to go to prison, and in many cases, you do not deserve to get out of prison. I’m not talking about middle ages style, but I don’t exactly feel sorry for some child molestor, or serial killer, living out their days behind bars.
It’s also better for the rest of US, because it keeps us safe.
I think you are setting up a bit of a strawman there, or at least slightly misreading what I wrote.
As I said, society reserves the right to lock up dangerous people. I have no problem with this, even for indefinite periods. In fact I have no problem with the death penalty in principle (though there are serious practical problems); if a person were truly unreformable and an ongoing danger even to other inmates, killing them might simply be the best option.
Does this constitute “deserving” to go to prison? In my view, no–it is simply the practical truth that we have no means of dealing with dangerous people other than incarceration. And our means of discouraging crimes in the first place is extremely limited (although we could do a lot better with mental health treatment, social support, etc.). If we had some reliable means of dealing with these problems other than prison, it would be immoral to send people there.
And of course none of this should have anything to do with how you feel. You’re allowed to feel that people get their just deserts. Frankly, I feel the same most of the time I hear about bad things happening to terrible people. But this is not a part of how I think the justice system should work.
First of all, I specified other first world countries. I guess I just like America more than you, because I expect us to be better than Russia, China, and countries in South America. I don’t know what Japan is doing on that list, but if they’re as bad as Russia when it comes to prisons, then they should also improve. Of course, they incarcerate 36/100k, where we incarcerate 698/100k, so the scale of our problem is worse.
In other news …
I’m not going to try to summarize it. I have a nice dinner ahead of me and don’t want to jeopardize my appetite.
USA! USA!
And more from the land of the free.
And up Canada way,,
Two men have been arrested and charged over the targeted killing of Ripudaman Singh Malik in Canada.
Malik, the 75-year-old Canadian Sikh man who was acquitted in the 1985 Air India bombings, was shot dead on July 14 while inside his vehicle in Surrey, British Columbia.
Canadian police have arrested and charged Tanner Fox, 21, and Jose Lopez, 23, with the first-degree murder of Malik, the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) said in a news release on Wednesday.
I include this here because those two vigilantes were “already known to police” and have been convicted before of crimes of violence.
I just saw this article this morning and thought of this thread.
Opinion: Sexual assault should never be part of a prison term
or decades, prison rape and other forms of sexual abuse were an unseemly subject of humor on television screens, in living rooms and in comedy clubs across America.
Hearings I chaired two decades ago of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission helped show me and my colleagues on the panel the degree to which prison rape, far from being a laughing matter, is a serious and sometimes even tragic problem. People who have been the victims of sexual assault while incarcerated, however, deserve not derision, but our support.
It’s an opinion article; however, it has rather important information in it. One thing that I was not aware of was the unanimous vote:
In a remarkable show of solidarity, every member of Congress — Democrat and Republican — voted for the legislation. Today, 20 years after its passage, against the backdrop of an increasingly divided Congress and society, PREA reminds us of values that can and should unite us.
The PREA is the Prison Rape Elimiation Act of 2003.
Damn misspellings! “The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.”
And in today’s news:
Texas prisoner accused of killing 22 older women is slain by cellmate while serving life sentence
DALLAS (AP) — A Texas prisoner accused of killing 22 older women over two years, preying on them so he could steal jewelry and other valuables, was slain Tuesday by his cellmate while serving a life sentence, prison officials said.
Billy Chemirmir, 50, who was convicted last year in the slayings of two women, was found dead in his cell at a prison in rural East Texas, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson Hannah Haney said. He was killed by his cellmate who was also serving a prison sentence for murder, according to Haney.
Did you catch that last bit? He was killed by his cellmate who was also serving a prison sentence for murder, according to Haney.
From the same link, here is some information on inmate murders:
Earlier this month, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said it was implementing lockdown measures in response to “a rise in dangerous contraband and drug-related inmate homicides.” At the time of that Sept. 6 announcement, the department said there had been 16 inmate-on-inmate homicides so far this year. In 2021, there were nine such killings; in 2022, there were seven.
Department spokesperson Amanda Hernandez said that as comprehensive searches were completed, units have been resuming normal operations. She said that as of Tuesday, the lockdown had been lifted at 75 units. The Coffield Unit, where Chemirmir was imprisoned, was among 25 units still under lockdown.
So, was it “justice” for the killings of the elderly or was it related to contraband drugs? And, of course, the usual suspect commentary, congratulating one convicted murder for killing another convicted murderer, is in the comments section of this article.
Why not both?
Well, first off it’s not justice for anyone. Second, nobody knows why the surviving murderer murdered the murdered murderer.