Just out of college I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I took a job at a prison near Phoenix AZ. It was outdoors, the cells had no AC. In a 10 hour shift in 115 (46c) degree weather I would go through 1.5 gallons (5.6 liters) of water. Every single day at least one inmate would pass out from the heat. At least they got heat for the winter.
Thankfully I left all that behind a long time ago. Though I just checked and they still don’t have AC.
There is a fairly famous quote: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Was this "tent city"? I recall "tent city" was a Joe Arpaio creation that was ultimately closed down in 2017 after he lost reelection as sheriff. My closest experience with "tent city" was when a relative got busted for DUI and ended up spending a weekend there. Was quite the deterrent, as it should be, and his drunk driving was dramatically curtailed. Ultimately that's good for society.
No I worked at a state run prison. All I know about the private ones is 1. The staff get paid less, and 2. They mostly only get “good” inmates. That was over a decade ago so idk if the 2nd part is still true.
Not really. The precolonial southwest was fairly densely populated, with some areas exceeding their modern density. Population density grew sparser for various reasons after the mid-14th century until Spanish colonialism created some dramatic demographic changes. The southwest remained a pretty lawless place on the frontiers of empires where armed conflict was commonplace for the next few hundred years, until after the turn of the 20th century. Would you want to move into a civil war even if it had AC?
AC was coincidentally invented as all of this was clearing up, but it wouldn't become ubiquitous until decades later after the major cities had been established with large populations. And even then, I'd blame cheap accessibility of long distance transportation more than AC for the modern state.
What parts of the pre-14th-century american southwest corresponding to modern Arizona were more densely populated than they are today? I'm a bit skeptical of that claim, given how much more human density is possible under conditions of technological modernity compared to anytime prior to the 14th century.
Bits of Mesa that are now extremely low density suburban development were at one point large Hohokam pueblos. It's not an entirely fair comparison because it's essentially comparing high density midrise apartments to some of the least dense suburban sprawl in the US, but it's not wrong.
At a more regional level, the area around Cortez, CO is less densely populated than it was simply because virtually no one lives there now. Kayenta, much of the Navajo nation, the upper Gila region, etc are similar.
I don't believe that 14th century Indian population counts have any reliability. Estimates of pre-Columbian populations in the US area vary from 10 million to 100 million.
Yeah, it's understood that it's meant as translated though for a translation to be attributed to him there has to be a line in Russian with the same meaning, right? And, as far as I know, such a line doesn't exist in Записки из Мертвого дома, which is trivial to prove with a simple text search for words starting with "цивилиз", which would have caught any form of "civilization". It's really curious why people who never read Dostoyevsky make up quotes for him with phrases that nobody with a good command of the Russian language could have written.
> It's really curious why people who never read Dostoyevsky make up quotes for him with phrases that nobody with a good command of the Russian language could have written.
It's a solid quip, almost serviceable as a Reader's Digest Condensed Book one page summary of Dostoyevsky prison book save for being too good (in English at least) for that sad US affront to literature.
People make up quotes for all manner of reasons, imperfect memory, a need to summarise, it's a joy to tumble both rocks and words to knock off some rough edges and brighten up a gem. Attribution to "elsewhere" is also common enough -- it can upsell your own work by attribution to a great name, it can deflect criticism if you've only polished a turd.
As curious questions go though, why not attribute it to a translation of Solzhenitsyn or Henri Charrière, (it's in the spirit of Oscar Wilde or Stephan Fry perhaps, but their works are already in English and a little too familiar for the bogoquote treatment (maybe)).
People make up random quotes and attribute to random famous people but, at least, they follow the famous person's character. For example, I never doubted "The coldest winter I've ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" was by Mark Twain. He lived in San Francisco and it looks in line with his other jokes. I only found out because someone complained about a cold summer in Slack and I wanted to reply with a link to the quote so I asked an AI to source it.
With any Dostoyevsky quote I see in English, I immediately ask an AI to check because none looks like anything any 19th century Russian writer could have possible written, least so Dostoyevsky. Also, I've never ran into a real Dostoyevsky quote in English even as tortured one as Beauty will save the world (which is probably the most often used one in Russian even though it's a fragment of a sentence with an opposite meaning).
A great many people that read Russian novelists simply don't read Russian.
Translators can and do create translations that aren't faithful to the original in at least one or two significant ways. It's a challenge somewhat like Flattening the Earth - there's always some compromise on angles or areas.
As a result, there are many English readers who see Dostoyevsky through a clouded lens; they imagine him to have traits more unique to some translation than to his core.
I have not read English translations but they cannot possibly be so bad that they inverted the meaning, can they? I.e. the actual quotes from the "House of the Dead" go like these: "A man is a creature that can get used to anything and I think it's the best definition", "There are people like tigers, yearning to lick some blood", "Almost every modern man has latent qualities of a torturer", "The most elevated and the most characteristic quality of our people is the sense of justice and the thirst of thereof" etc.
It's very similar to the Stanford Prison Experiment and has nothing about "degree of civilization", which is a common concept in Anglo culture but very alien to Russians, who never figured that you can just subjugate and exterminate peoples with free conscience if you proclaim them to be "uncivilized".
To recap; the quote, as given here upthread on HN, was "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons", and I described it as "an attributed quote, translated, from discussions on and around his semi-autobiographical novel about time spent in prison."
So not an actual quote of his, but one sprung from the minds of people who imagined him to have said that or meant that.
There's an article that claims to have sourced the origin of that attributed quote (or bogus-quote) to 1964, the Canadian playwright and ex-inmate John Herbert [1]&[2] which I imagine you'd enjoy reading as the article author, Ilya Vinitsky, argues that Dostoyevsky would have been _aware_ of the Western notions of "civilisation" and prisons while not being _aligned_ with them.
A strong case is made for Herbert having started that attribution to Dostoyevsky, and for inspiring the spread of the quote as Herbert and his work were latched onto by prison reformers of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The articles trace far more than I can (I'm not in the least bit fluent in Russian), and the specific blame likely falls to a non Russian prison inmate reading as widely as possible in prison, jumbling multiple sources, taking "literary licence" and not having access to a lot of background on Dostoyevsky.
While I agree, it can’t happen. The Puritanical strain runs too deep, to say nothing of Barbary Slave culture which absolutely continues to persist in the South despite slavery being outlawed.
Punishment is among the most American things that exist — and this is part of the reason I won’t mourn the passing of the US.
Norway actually used to have prisons modelled built on the so-called Philadelphia model [1] with strict isolation. Unsurprisingly it didn't work very well.
It was also one of the prisons that eventually helped drive public opinion away from US-style prisons as punishment because of how extreme it was (recognised also in a 1/3 reduction in sentences if you served there...). It was closed in 1970, around the time when the Nordic movements towards criminal custody reform started really gaining traction.
Norway learned the hard way that the American method doesn't work, and the current reoffending rate is the result of half a century of moving the other direction.
I wish to have the confidence of an American opinion on anything that's different than the US. Studies show that resocialization works and has worked for decades without a sign of "learning it the hard way" in sight
It should be the understanding of a society that no human being is just 'bad'. A human being became 'bad' by a definiton of a society due to circumstances like upbringing, environment etc. and a society which failed you.
Prison is the removal of you from society due to impatibility of current values and should help you become 'better'.
Be happy that you had good/avg parents, the mental strength to help yourself, money, luck, body strength, whatever it was which allowed you to comment on HN instead of being in a prison.
If all it took to ensure a good outcome was to create good circumstances, we'd have fixed society in the prehistoic era. People would have figured it out and asked the good parents to raise all the kids one generation, and problem solved.
Instead what you see is parents with five successful kids, and one that keeps ending up in prison, and no one can really explain how it went wrong.
We have indigeous people and historic effidence, that kids with mental health issues were kept hidden from the rest of a village, sometimes in cages and on chains.
We know very well that the education system around the planet cateres to the masses not to the ones with disabilityes, ADHD etc.
Human beings are complex, any education system is not and its not reflecting the diversity of humans.
In japan for example, kids have to cleanup there own class rooms, wonderful concept, any other real country which adopted that?
Equal parents doesn't need to mean equal circumstances. Times and culture change, parents age, family circumstances change over time, their environment outside the home is different, different friends, different experiences, etc. There's a myriad of factors that can lead to very different circumstances for siblings.
If you talk to people working with foster kids about why some kids succeed despite everything stacked against them, they'll tell you some kids are different.
It's possible you're correct and there's some circumstance controlling things we can't see or don't understand, but that's not a testable idea.
One can't even say that good circumstances are always better than bad circumstances. Bad circumstances can teach a lot about humility, perseverance, empathy, compassion, etc. Good circumstances can lead to grown, spoiled children, people with a child's concept of how the world works, people with no consideration towards others because they didn't need to be part of a community, etc.
Environment plays a huge role, but it's somewhat unpredictable what lessons are taken. One could also say that it's not unanimously clear what makes a good environment; it's likely not simply about having resources and lacking conflict. Likely an amount of scarcity and conflict are needed.
All this isn't to say that kids are all born the same, but I don't consider such differences to generally matter as much as the effect the environment can have.
For a site populated by people that deal with complex technical systems on a daily basis, the idea that systems also exist and shape our outcomes in every day life seems to frequently be a foreign concept.
That sounds like you were shaped by your upbringing. And honor itself is subjective and shaped by the social context it exists in. I don't believe killing to maintain honor is moral and there are millions of people out there who do because of the context they exist in. Likewise, I do not think it is honorable to make prisoners suffer (such as from excessive heat) when it's something in your control while others do because they were raised to believe that once you have wronged, your own worth as a human is diminished.
As humans, we have the capacity to hold multiple concepts like honor and contextual awareness at the same time when adjudicating a crime. Someone who stole to feed their family when they were in a dire situation should not be given the same sentence as someone who stole for personal gain. Our ability to acknowledge complex situations and deal with them also separates us from animals.
No they don't. They have a range of free will. And free will alone doesn't help you if you are unable to understand what you actually want.
Short term goals vs. long term goals requires long horizion thinking. Critical thinking is necessary to break through cultural heritage. I grew up a christian, took me until 14 to denounce this garbage.
Not sure I am following your point. You commented that people have choices, good and bad. I presented you with a story where a good boy was watering his mother's yard and he was thrown in prison (28 yrs) for a murder he did not commit. I guess the only choice to be made was the corrupt police employees?
I think you and I will go around and around in circles on this. I wish you well.
Is your entire line of thinking about crime and punishment not entirely dependent upon laws and punishments, as they exist right now, being perfectly just?
Because otherwise, “they knew the law and chose to break it, therefore they get what’s coming to them” is a bit Javert from Les Mis.
> "People have free will. Bad people know what right and wrong is, and they chose wrong."[0]
Broader Context:
In response to a commentary on how 'good and bad' can be complicated:
> "It's always someone else's fault."[1]
Broader-broader Context:
Prison is punishment, etc.
So, a reasonable chain of thought here and paraphrase of what you've said is:
"people know right from wrong" -> we're in the context of crime and punishment, so this is operating as a substitute for "they know what's legal and illegal". If it's not, it doesn't belong here, because at this point we should all know that legality != morality.
"and they chose wrong" -> therefore they chose the consequences - they chose punishment. The colloquial way of saying that is "they get what's coming to them".
So, while those weren't your words, was that your implicit statement? And if not, what is the implicit statement?
I ask because the people in those cells are real, and 23 of them died of heat.
> People have free will. Bad people know what right and wrong is, and they chose wrong.
The context being that the "bad" person is such simply because they chose to break the law. Even if it doesn't match your thoughts, surely you can see how one might read your comments as both claiming that laws are not morals, and also that those who break the law made the "wrong" (moral) choice (put another way: laws are morals).
Breaking the law is not strictly a moral failure. It can be, but they have an "orthogonal" relationship. To that point:
> I did not say there was no injustice happening. Nor did I say that all laws are just.
Choosing to follow an unjust law is a moral failure. That moral failure is baked into the word "unjust". This blanket statement that the choice to commit a crime is a choice to be "bad" is not self-evident (or it's laughably tautological) and, regardless, is contradicted by the assertion that not all laws are "just".
Of course, one can assume you have more nuanced thoughts than that; the point of my coment is that you've not communicated that nuance here, so you appear to be contradicting yourself: saying both that laws are morals and that they are not morals.
Please do define free will, and try to do so in a way that a) gives people actual agency (define that while you're at it, and b) compatible with the available evidence of how the universe works.
No, I don't know it. In fact, I don't think there's any kind of evidence to suggest "free choice" is even possible for any kind of definition of "free choice" that doesn't make a mockery of the idea it is "free".
I'm still waiting for a definition that could even suggest otherwise. I know I won't get one, because nobody I have this discussion with is ever capable of coming up with one.
If you can't even define the terms, why do you imagine I should "know" it to be true?
Saying you have no free will absolves you of any responsibility for your actions. Call it the "Lindsay Clancy" defense. Human society cannot function with such notions.
The "Lindsay Clancy defense", AKA not guilty by reason of insanity, has roots going back thousands of years, and was used as early as 1844 in the US in the murder trial of Abner Rogers, Jr. In 1982, John Hinckley, Jr. used it after shooting at the president. Others have used it even after the post-Hinckley reforms. Yet society hasn't crumbled.
Saying "He had no free will" doesn't mean "The state has no right to confine him away from people he might hurt."
Well, letting the humanist rehabilitation part aside, there is that social aspect of a sanctioning instance to prisons. Expectations of sanctions do drive human behavior.
I'm not against the idea of the society taking control over the life of one of its own (lets be fair, our planet is small, we are too interconnected) we can't just put people somewere else.
But cruelty shouldn't be part of this. Help and rehabiliation
Meanwhile in this thread, everyone is getting worked up about how evil Texas Christians supposedly are, as though a red flag was waved in front of a bull.
Put your ideas into action in this thread instead of getting self-righteous about people who (a) may or may not even exist, (b) mostly aren't reading this thread even if they do exist.
Society as a whole is not wholly responsible. Some people are taught and some are just bad - bad brains, bad choices, bad intents. I've never had to teach a toddler what to do when another child takes their toy. Somethings are just innate. Some can be helped and should be, others cannot. Taking away an individual's responsibility removes dignity and gets in the way of healing. We don't have to give into the fallacy of choosing one or the other - both society and the individual can be responsible for their actions.
But yes, we have been devaluing human life and dignity, or if you prefer the Image of God, across all of society. The conditions of these prisons should not exist even if this is purely punitive, which I do not believe it should be. Victims deserve justice, but criminals deserve the right to pay the price and come out "clean". We should want to make society whole, to bring them back into the fold as full members, but too often we don't want to pay the cost.
Society or our villages before a planet full of 8 billion people were responsible.
Everyone of us was born to a mother and father. And yo utell me if someone isn't born 'right' we should do what? Kill them? I think Hitler tried that. Not really sure were you are going with this.
Do you really believe our society is really trying to help people? We are sitting in front of our television, watch reality tv and do other shit. We have more than enough capacity to help others. We just don't. This doesn't make it fair in any sense for every human being we brought into existens.
Given that the American prison system is performing as badly as it is, even if you ignore any concern for the prisoners, the US system is immoral even purely on the basis of the harm it does to society through the high reoffending rates.
The U.S. prison system isn't immoral due to it not being one of the best in the world, but is immoral due to the way that it treats people as less than human.
So far when I research the alleged problems with the US prison system, I learn they are also generally present in other prison systems.
There seems to be a general trend of "US inverse exceptionalism", i.e. arguing that the US is a uniquely bad country on the basis of very weak evidence. People complain a lot about systems in the US, but if you look at international comparisons, the US doesn't usually look too bad. Here in this thread people are up in arms because... 1/3 of Texas prisons have A/C, and the remainder have non-AC heat control measures. I doubt this is substantially different from non-US prisons.
> So far when I research the alleged problems with the US prison system, I learn they are also generally present in other prison systems.
The difference is probably the degree of abuse and cruelty.
Also, the U.S. seems to claim to be a civilised society, so it would make sense to compare its facilities (including prisons) with those in other "civilised" societies. When you do that kind of comparison, you may be shocked to discover that U.S. prisons are amongst the worst.
Being incarcerated and having very little control over every aspect of your life IS punishment. The violence, sexual violence and extreme conditions are not necessary.
May we teach our children the only thing that truly matters is how we regard the dignity of people.
I find most successful Americans I meet are so self-obsessed they are left with an incredibly low capacity for empathy for those in lower classes than them. Wild how they think they are so different than Nazis.
I don't understand why Texas voters support such inhumane conditions. All these "Christians" who support this kind of cruel punishment need to have a "come to Jesus" moment, literally.
It's because Texas is the OG of human suffering. Texas gave up territory than end slavery: This is why Oklahoma looks so weird (the "panhandle"). After the so-called Missouri compromise, in order to remain a slave-state, Texas gave up that piece of land. Also, Texas declared independence not once, but twice, to remain a slave state. First, from Mexico: "Many Anglo-American settlers were from the southern United States and brought enslaved workers, using legal loopholes like indentured servitude to bypass Mexican restrictions against slavery. They feared Mexico would abolish the practice entirely". And then, famously, of course, fighting to remain independent during the Civil War.
Your point is valid, but it is worth noting that the panhandle territory was a notoriously inhospitable place to try and exist (for European settlers at least, who called it "no mans land"), so it wasn't like Texas was giving up a gem, none of the surrounding states wanted it.
Texas ceded said land to another state, what they viewed as another nation, such that they could keep the practice of human ownership alive and well. The quality of the land is immaterial to this statement, let alone noteworthy
I disagree, I think it adds context that the political climate of the time was more complicated and involved than the original point. It was a place where you couldn't farm and were under constant attack, during that time.
That's why I added the context about European settlers, it was the States that were drawing the lines and they labeled it "no man's land", look into the history of Beaver County.
There is so much nuance with this. On the one hand, Texas has hot enough days where it is inhumane/dangerous to not have A/C. But also plenty of days that are hot, but bearable. There are plenty of citizens not in prison that live without AC and make due with fans. HVAC systems are ridiculusly expensive. $1.5 billion is about $10K a person. Too bad they can't just give each prisoner a window unit for $200 a piece.
> $1.5 billion is about $10K a person. Too bad they can't just give each prisoner a window unit for $200 a piece.
The former almost certainly includes other installation part, utility, and labor costs. Even if you could give everyone a $200 window unit, you'd need to deliver, install, upgrade utilities, maintain them, etc.
Fans have no cooling effect once the ambient temperature exceeds human body temperature, so "making do with fans" is literally making do with nothing.
Those citizens "making do" generally have freedom of movement, free access to cool water, air-conditioned businesses or vehicles, and are not locked down in a concrete facility.
Please take 5 seconds to fact check yourself with a very quick query against your information source of choice.
Over ~95 degrees, a fan blowing on a human acts as a convection oven, increasing body temperature while dehydrating the body.
This is greatly exacerbated in extreme heat.
CDC guidance is to avoid using a fan in extreme heat conditions unless it is combined with a cooling source and careful hydration. Once again, not exactly an option in a Texas prison.
You don't get to decide who is and isn't a "true" Christian when all it takes is to believe in Jesus' death and resurrection, which even the Prosperity Gospel Christians and Christian Nationalists do.
God does. Judging by their actions and the hate they show towards their neighbors, I get to draw the conclusion they’re not following Jesus Christ’s teachings or the Bible.
Just because these people don't worship or believe the same things as your sect of christianity does not stop them from believing in the teachings of Christ. They just don't agree with you while holding positions of power.
Prosperity gospel is a real thing too, also the fastest sect of christianity growing in the world.
Just because people don't follow the teachings of Christ doesn't mean they don't believe in the teachings of Christ? Hey, what did Jesus have to say about hypocrites?
> Prosperity gospel is a real thing too, also the fastest sect of christianity growing in the world.
Which goes to show you the state of Christianity today. Pretty sad.
Yup! I was raised evangelical and the pastors would brush away this passage as not being translated accurately where they would twist it to justify why you needed to give more money to the church because in the next life you'd be rewarded with riches.
>I don't understand why Texas voters support such inhumane conditions.
I'm in Texas. I'm a little confused as to why you think I should care. For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison... and for those correctly convicted, I'm not especially worried about making them more comfortable.
The entire point of punishment is the cruelty. It doesn't really work without it... it's unclear if you're quibbling over the amount of cruelty, or if you think that there exists some sort of cruelty-free punishment that the rest of us just haven't heard of.
And here I was thinking that prisons should be about keeping people who can't operate in society without damaging society away from society. I mean, even better would be to find a way to help them operate in society, but apparently we're not even all at the baseline.
1. Even correct convictions can later be found to be wrong. Death is irreversible and financially restituting someone's death can never benefit one wrongfully killed.
2. Unless death is the sentence, a sentence should not result in death. If you don't closely control and monitor when the state can do something, it increases the risk of misuse of that power by the state.
3. If cruelty and punishment really worked, crime would decrease over time, not increase.
4. The AC can be set to 75. That's not luxury but won't kill anyone with heatstroke.
> For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison
What a remarkable thing to write. Even knowing that some innocent people are there, you want them to suffer the risk of death and severe harm from heat.
>What a remarkable thing to write. Even knowing that some innocent people are there,
I don't want them in prison at all. You, you're apparently satisfied (somehow?) that they get air conditioning. And you think I'm the psychopath. Something's seriously wrong with you. Leftism, not even once.
I think there's a basic floor for how we should treat other people, regardless of the circumstances. Things like access to food and water, shelter, etc.
I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it, but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.
>I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it,
This is an absurd claim. How does punishment work without cruelty? Remember, that I allow for people to disagree on the quantity of cruelty (supposing that can be quantified)... so you're proposing cruelty-free punishment. This misses the entire point of what punishment is. Perhaps your reading comprehension is faulty, and you confuse the word with "rehabilitation". I see that alot.
>but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.
Hah! I hadn't even read that sentence yet when I wrote the above! Damn I'm good. Rehabilitation is science fiction. No one has even ever proposed a theory on how or why it's supposed to happen, let alone engineered a method to induce it to occur. On reddit, these conversations are often hilarious, but maybe here on Hackernews it will be glorious. Why do you think you need to do to cause a violent criminal to rehabilitate? If the method is performed diligently, what percentage of violent criminals rehabilitate, and what sort of timeline are we talking? Why do the failures (and let's be honest, there are failures in every manufacturing process) fail? Can these be sorted out beforehand?
But at the end of the day, there is still a big problem. Justice is what society promises to the victims so that they will refrain from revenge; the state must carry out the revenge for them. It does so for several reasons: to discourage eternal feuds, to ensure that the correct culprit is targeted, and to avoid normally nonviolent people from growing accustomed to violence. To satisfy their monkey need for vengeance in the most civilized manner possible. If you fail to satisfy it, then these people are obligated to do it themselves. Rehabilitation alone can't substitute, even if it were possible. For the lesser criminals, incarceration suffices. For those more depraved, we don't want them rehabilitated. It serves no need at all.
My mother spanked me when I misbehaved. She caused real pain as punishment.
It was never cruel.
Punishment and cruelty are not equivalent.
Please note, I am not in favor of spanking children, and never spanked mine.
Now as to your final point, that justice is the state taking revenge on behalf of the victims. I replied to you above that I see the validity of this, and for the same reasons you give (discourage eternal feuds). And for those same reasons Justice is restraint. At most equivalent harm, no more than an eye for an eye.
I think it was your anger that made you say these ethics we both share are bullshit rules designed to hurt your family.
Now in the current case, for that point to stand, we need to ensure that the prisoners have in fact harmed identifiable others. Google tells me "Roughly 40% of inmates in Texas prisons are incarcerated for non-violent offenses". Thus 40% of the time, there is no cause for vengeance.
And where prison is vengeance, if it is just, it needs to be restrained. Not cruel. Not unusual. Just as punishment is not cruelty, justice is not cruelty.
For other readers, as I mentioned above, while I see a valid ethical stance behind NoMoreNicksLeft's anger and hurt, I do not share it. I seek mercy, and as for Justice, "Justice is mine sayeth the Lord"-- in other words, I leave it to God. I find it sick that the US, the "land of the free" has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Look, I've had bad interactions with bonafide unredeemable unrehabilitable psychopaths, and I'd like to see such people locked up for life. But I do not wish them cruelty beyond the innate cruelty of life behind bars.
Then that's what they should have written. Leaving it ambiguous gives us the opportunity to take someone who says cruelty is the point at their word, though. They want people to suffer, they are a sadist.
That's a pretty messed up morality. I don't even know where to start on this one.
How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
Its also messed up ethics.
The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta. And from the first time this ever came up it came up as the government saying justice should be balanced. "eye for an eye" == "Punishment fits the crime"
>How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
I'm an atheist. There is no god nor gods. But if I had to have a god, I don't think I'd choose one of the abrahamic ones. There are many to choose from who aren't big on mercy.
>Its also messed up ethics.
I don't accept your ethical framework. It's a system of bullshit rules made up by people who care for me not even a little to put me and my family at a disadvantage against a civilization that doesn't even want to go on living.
>The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta.
Then you're doing it wrong. It can only prevent vendetta if the victims feel as if they receive justice... if those who do wrong are punished. If you remove the punishment/cruelty from the equation, they will simply do that part themselves. Unless you're hoping to emasculate and disarm them so thoroughly that they have no hope of doing so... but I guess that was the ethics stuff you were talking about above.
Ok, so as an athiest, could you do what is right, love mercy, and walk humbly with your beliefs?
Your comment on which god you might choose suggest you are not a fan of mercy. Have you ever made a mistake and wished for mercy for yourself? Have you ever received forgiveness that maybe you didn't think was deserved, if even only from you family?
I can agree with you that justice calls for punishment in response to a harm, and thus harming the person who caused the first harm. And if one considers any intentional harm to another as cruelty, then yes, "the purpose of punishment is cruelty". However, justice also limits the cruelty. The earliest example is "an eye for an eye"-- because the prior system was "a death for an eye" or "I burn your village for an eye", and Hammurabi saw that this lead to endless blood feuds. Vendetta, i.e. you hurt me so now I cause you and your family as much pain as I possibly can, that is not justice.
In fact, I was taking your side in this argument. Many others talk about prison as rehabilitation and keeping society safe, totally dropping the psychological need of the victim for some sense of vengeance. And while I agree with those others, and prefer to leave the vengeance to God rather than to the prison system, I took your side and legitimized the victims need for vengeance.
I am sorry that you have such anger that you saw this as bullshit rules from someone who doesn't care for you and wants to disadvantage you.
>Ok, so as an athiest, could you do what is right, love mercy, and walk humbly with your beliefs?
What has caused you to conclude that any of those things are right? Mercy, benefit of doubt, leniency... these are for the remorseful. We live in a society that doesn't even seem to know that word.
>However, justice also limits the cruelty.
Within reason. Haven't seen much evidence that we currently need to limit it. This isn't 1700s England where anyone is getting the noose for stealing loaves of bread.
Show me some excessive punishment, I might agree with you. "They have to live with the summer heat like everyone had to do so, convicts and the innocent alive, until 70 years ago" just isn't excessive.
Rehabilitation has never really been the point of the US prison or even correctional system at all.
The fact you can serve your time, earnestly work on rehabilitating yourself, jump through all the hoops, etc. but still be under the economic death sentence more or less summarizes how people feel about it.
It’s basically NIMBY applied to the justice system. Everyone loves to pretend they want rehabilitation but also wants someone else to do it. This shows up in hiring, apartment leasing, social benefits, etc.
>Everyone loves to pretend they want rehabilitation but also wants someone else to do it.
People on the left love to pretend this, perhaps. Those of us on the right make no such pretense. It's about punishment, sequestration, and deterrence in that order. Rehabilitation doesn't even enter our minds.
Why do you pretend? It wouldn't surprise anyone if you were to just be honest and that you don't care about rehabilitation either, it's rather that you don't want a justice system at all. We all know that already. There's no reason to hide it.
Why do you continue to pay taxes for private for-profit prisons?
If you don't see value in the U.S. Constitution and providing human beings a chance at reformation, you should advocate for killing falsely convicted criminals before they enter prision and die of inhumane conditions. Wouldn't that be more efficient for your worldview?
I'd love to see a "murder any criminal" bill named for you. I think you would too, so go for it!
>Why do you continue to pay taxes for private for-profit prisons?
Taxes weren't optional last I checked.
>If you don't see value in the U.S. Constitution
Which part of the Constitution is it that guarantees air conditioning? Did I miss an amendment?
>and providing human beings a chance at reformation
Everyone has not only the choice at reformation, if they choose poorly there's always another opportunity to do so later that day. To do so the next morning. If they have to be bribed for that with air conditioning or anything else, they're as far from it as any human can possibly be.
You have a right to advocate for how your taxes are used. Advocate for killing white-collar criminals before they reach prision, and then closing unused prisions, if saving taxpayer money is the only thing that matters to you. Maybe you'll find enough supporters for your cause to make capital punishment a mandatory alternative to prision for all convicted white-collar felons, like future offenders along the lines of Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald J. Trump.
For those in prision today, they can't be rehabilitated if they're dead due to heat stroke caused by cruel and unreasonable 115 degree heat.
As someone in Texas, who also donates large sums of money every year to the Innocence Project, I kind of understand their position even though I think they have written it poorly. I want anyone wrongfully convicted freed and compensated, and I want our justice system to be better at ascertaining guilt rather than using plea deals improperly to imprison people wrongly. I also want our prisons to be places where we take every reasonable action to preserve the lives of the prisoners, including for sure having air-conditioning.
But I also fully understand the point of prison is /punishment/, which is why it's such a severe injustice when someone is punished when they have not committed the crime. Prison is not supposed to be pleasant and comfortable, and we should take every action to preserver prisoner's lives specifically in order to ensure that they can serve their complete sentences, upon the assumption of fair adjudication. Without clear, just, punishment within society, we will revert to vigilantism and chaos.
The core ethical/moral complexity here to me is not about treatment of prisoners, its about how people become prisoners in the first place in the state of Texas. In Texas we have a long history of racist practices in policing, in the courts, and the use of coercive plea deal structures that have resulted in many people being wrongfully convicted. As long as that situation stands, it would be clearer to argue that nobody should be imprisoned at all, but that's also not a reasonable argument. As long people are being imprisoned, we should ensure they are rightfully convicted and understand that prison is a punishment, and that we should preserve prisoner's lives and health so that they can experience whatever just punishment has been meted out by society for the harm they have caused through their choices and actions.
At the same time prison shouldn't be deadly. 85F versus 110F is the difference between uncomfortable and death.
>Without clear, just, punishment within society, we will revert to vigilantism and chaos.
The problem is this doesn't really seem to have any relation to the punishment. In the US we love to think that beating someone to a pulp has a strong effect on their future actions that lead to the beating but redactivism rates do not show any strong correlations here at all. Things like education, living conditions, and wealth are far more correlated.
> At the same time prison shouldn't be deadly. 85F versus 110F is the difference between uncomfortable and death.
Fully agreed. There absolutely should be air conditioning in prisons in Texas. We need to preserve prisoners lives and health using all reasonable means so that they can receive their just punishment via their sentence.
Of note, however, there are /schools/ in Texas that lack working air conditioning due to mismanagement and underfunding, which I find a far more egregious and wrong circumstance.
> The problem is this doesn't really seem to have any relation to the punishment. In the US we love to think that beating someone to a pulp has a strong effect on their future actions that lead to the beating but redactivism rates do not show any strong correlations here at all. Things like education, living conditions, and wealth are far more correlated.
Agreed, punishment does not help with recidivism rates. You're making a rehabilitation argument. That argument might even be reasonable. That is not why prison in the US exists or how they are operated. They are a form of punishment, that is their purpose in our society.
> But I also fully understand the point of prison is /punishment/... Prison is not supposed to be pleasant and comfortable...
I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you present your view, and also see it's validity-- that one purpose of prison is for the government to take a measured and limited 'revenge' for the victims of harm. Where the alternative is blood feuds.
Thus prison should not be comfortable, for those rightfully convicted of crimes involving harm TO OTHERS.
But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.
> But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.
Fully agreed, which is why I make the point that air conditioning isn't a question, of course a prison in Texas should have air conditioning. The 8th Amendment makes this pretty clear, that cruel and unusual punishments are disallowed, as they should be. The punishment is and should be the prison sentence itself.
The imprisonment and lack of freedom is the punishment. The prison itself doesn't need to be actively unpleasant - the whole point is you cannot leave.
I'm more curious personally about the legal side here. Setting aside the actual object level issue (I personally support A/C for prisons), it seems to open up a lot of interesting questions to me:
* was it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C before the invention of A/C (obviously not)
* was it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C before A/C became widespread and affordable for regular people? (probably not)
* what is the main reason why this wasn't an issue 50 years ago and is now? Climate change? People being on average more sensitive to heat than they used to be? Better legal recognition of prisoner suffering? Broadening of 8th amendment protections in the court system? Changing public morals, i.e. "evolving standards of decency"? Ubiquity of A/C in ordinary Texans' day to day life? The random chance of this particular case getting sent to this particular judge?
* Is it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C now, when not all non-imprisoned Texans have A/C (and if so, does that imply that A/C is being codified here as basic human right, and is that really constitutionally tenable? How is it possible for a judge to order that something is a constitutional right for prisoners, but an optional private luxury for non prisoners?)
* Is A/C the only option, or might other, cheaper cooling methods be allowed, if the core of the complaint is reducing preventable heat-related injuries and deaths? Hypothetically (not a real proposal obviously), if instead the prison put hotel-style ice machines in every cell, would this solve the issue or is the judge's decision very specifically about A/C?
Just out of college I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I took a job at a prison near Phoenix AZ. It was outdoors, the cells had no AC. In a 10 hour shift in 115 (46c) degree weather I would go through 1.5 gallons (5.6 liters) of water. Every single day at least one inmate would pass out from the heat. At least they got heat for the winter.
Thankfully I left all that behind a long time ago. Though I just checked and they still don’t have AC.
There is a fairly famous quote: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Was this "tent city"? I recall "tent city" was a Joe Arpaio creation that was ultimately closed down in 2017 after he lost reelection as sheriff. My closest experience with "tent city" was when a relative got busted for DUI and ended up spending a weekend there. Was quite the deterrent, as it should be, and his drunk driving was dramatically curtailed. Ultimately that's good for society.
Was it a privately owned prison? How much freedom do private prisons have to turn opaque for inspectors?
No I worked at a state run prison. All I know about the private ones is 1. The staff get paid less, and 2. They mostly only get “good” inmates. That was over a decade ago so idk if the 2nd part is still true.
Arizona was thinly populated before A/C.
Not really. The precolonial southwest was fairly densely populated, with some areas exceeding their modern density. Population density grew sparser for various reasons after the mid-14th century until Spanish colonialism created some dramatic demographic changes. The southwest remained a pretty lawless place on the frontiers of empires where armed conflict was commonplace for the next few hundred years, until after the turn of the 20th century. Would you want to move into a civil war even if it had AC?
AC was coincidentally invented as all of this was clearing up, but it wouldn't become ubiquitous until decades later after the major cities had been established with large populations. And even then, I'd blame cheap accessibility of long distance transportation more than AC for the modern state.
What parts of the pre-14th-century american southwest corresponding to modern Arizona were more densely populated than they are today? I'm a bit skeptical of that claim, given how much more human density is possible under conditions of technological modernity compared to anytime prior to the 14th century.
Bits of Mesa that are now extremely low density suburban development were at one point large Hohokam pueblos. It's not an entirely fair comparison because it's essentially comparing high density midrise apartments to some of the least dense suburban sprawl in the US, but it's not wrong.
At a more regional level, the area around Cortez, CO is less densely populated than it was simply because virtually no one lives there now. Kayenta, much of the Navajo nation, the upper Gila region, etc are similar.
I don't believe that 14th century Indian population counts have any reliability. Estimates of pre-Columbian populations in the US area vary from 10 million to 100 million.
You can scarcely throw a stone in Phoenix without hitting an old pueblo. I don't see why continent-wide demographics have any relevance.
This feels like a non sequitur?
I think the point they’re making is that it’s unliveable in Arizona without AC.
That's right. A/C changed everything.
This feels like an unnecessary observation, even it were true.
Honestly, Arizona is unlivable unless you are an AC repairman.
Where did Dostoyevsky write that?
He rarely wrote in English (if at all?) - so, never.
It is an attributed quote, translated, from discussions on and around his semi-autobiographical novel about time spent in prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Dead_(novel)
Yeah, it's understood that it's meant as translated though for a translation to be attributed to him there has to be a line in Russian with the same meaning, right? And, as far as I know, such a line doesn't exist in Записки из Мертвого дома, which is trivial to prove with a simple text search for words starting with "цивилиз", which would have caught any form of "civilization". It's really curious why people who never read Dostoyevsky make up quotes for him with phrases that nobody with a good command of the Russian language could have written.
> it's understood that it's meant as translated
I find it best to never underestimate how pedantic strangers on programming related forums can be, so good we've got that out of the way.
I imagine you'd enjoy Martin Porter's four Principles for Quotations and his two pieces on sourcing the Edmund Burke BogoQuote:
* https://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote.html
* https://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote2.html
( and possibly even Porter's paleoCompSci work on stemming: https://tartarus.org/martin/PorterStemmer/ )
> It's really curious why people who never read Dostoyevsky make up quotes for him with phrases that nobody with a good command of the Russian language could have written.
It's a solid quip, almost serviceable as a Reader's Digest Condensed Book one page summary of Dostoyevsky prison book save for being too good (in English at least) for that sad US affront to literature.
People make up quotes for all manner of reasons, imperfect memory, a need to summarise, it's a joy to tumble both rocks and words to knock off some rough edges and brighten up a gem. Attribution to "elsewhere" is also common enough -- it can upsell your own work by attribution to a great name, it can deflect criticism if you've only polished a turd.
As curious questions go though, why not attribute it to a translation of Solzhenitsyn or Henri Charrière, (it's in the spirit of Oscar Wilde or Stephan Fry perhaps, but their works are already in English and a little too familiar for the bogoquote treatment (maybe)).
People make up random quotes and attribute to random famous people but, at least, they follow the famous person's character. For example, I never doubted "The coldest winter I've ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" was by Mark Twain. He lived in San Francisco and it looks in line with his other jokes. I only found out because someone complained about a cold summer in Slack and I wanted to reply with a link to the quote so I asked an AI to source it.
With any Dostoyevsky quote I see in English, I immediately ask an AI to check because none looks like anything any 19th century Russian writer could have possible written, least so Dostoyevsky. Also, I've never ran into a real Dostoyevsky quote in English even as tortured one as Beauty will save the world (which is probably the most often used one in Russian even though it's a fragment of a sentence with an opposite meaning).
A great many people that read Russian novelists simply don't read Russian.
Translators can and do create translations that aren't faithful to the original in at least one or two significant ways. It's a challenge somewhat like Flattening the Earth - there's always some compromise on angles or areas.
As a result, there are many English readers who see Dostoyevsky through a clouded lens; they imagine him to have traits more unique to some translation than to his core.
* https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo363285...
I have not read English translations but they cannot possibly be so bad that they inverted the meaning, can they? I.e. the actual quotes from the "House of the Dead" go like these: "A man is a creature that can get used to anything and I think it's the best definition", "There are people like tigers, yearning to lick some blood", "Almost every modern man has latent qualities of a torturer", "The most elevated and the most characteristic quality of our people is the sense of justice and the thirst of thereof" etc.
It's very similar to the Stanford Prison Experiment and has nothing about "degree of civilization", which is a common concept in Anglo culture but very alien to Russians, who never figured that you can just subjugate and exterminate peoples with free conscience if you proclaim them to be "uncivilized".
To recap; the quote, as given here upthread on HN, was "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons", and I described it as "an attributed quote, translated, from discussions on and around his semi-autobiographical novel about time spent in prison."
So not an actual quote of his, but one sprung from the minds of people who imagined him to have said that or meant that.
There's an article that claims to have sourced the origin of that attributed quote (or bogus-quote) to 1964, the Canadian playwright and ex-inmate John Herbert [1]&[2] which I imagine you'd enjoy reading as the article author, Ilya Vinitsky, argues that Dostoyevsky would have been _aware_ of the Western notions of "civilisation" and prisons while not being _aligned_ with them.
A strong case is made for Herbert having started that attribution to Dostoyevsky, and for inspiring the spread of the quote as Herbert and his work were latched onto by prison reformers of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
[1] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dostoyevsky-misprisioned...
[2] https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/beyond-reasonable-do...
The articles trace far more than I can (I'm not in the least bit fluent in Russian), and the specific blame likely falls to a non Russian prison inmate reading as widely as possible in prison, jumbling multiple sources, taking "literary licence" and not having access to a lot of background on Dostoyevsky.
Apparently he didn't and he wouldn't.
It's just been credited to him.
The US needs to get over this whole ‘punishment’ view of prison. It either a social-safety quarantine, or a rehabilitation
While I agree, it can’t happen. The Puritanical strain runs too deep, to say nothing of Barbary Slave culture which absolutely continues to persist in the South despite slavery being outlawed.
Punishment is among the most American things that exist — and this is part of the reason I won’t mourn the passing of the US.
It's punishment. Any society that thinks otherwise is going to have to relearn the hard way.
No. It's resocialization. > Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%. The U.S. has one of the highest: 76.6% https://harvardpolitics.com/recidivism-american-progress/
And as you probably know, prisons in those two countries are not alike.
Norway actually used to have prisons modelled built on the so-called Philadelphia model [1] with strict isolation. Unsurprisingly it didn't work very well.
It was also one of the prisons that eventually helped drive public opinion away from US-style prisons as punishment because of how extreme it was (recognised also in a 1/3 reduction in sentences if you served there...). It was closed in 1970, around the time when the Nordic movements towards criminal custody reform started really gaining traction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botsfengselet but the Norwegian page is far more extensive: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botsfengselet
Norway is certainly going to learn this the hard way.
Norway learned the hard way that the American method doesn't work, and the current reoffending rate is the result of half a century of moving the other direction.
I wish to have the confidence of an American opinion on anything that's different than the US. Studies show that resocialization works and has worked for decades without a sign of "learning it the hard way" in sight
No it shouldn't.
It should be the understanding of a society that no human being is just 'bad'. A human being became 'bad' by a definiton of a society due to circumstances like upbringing, environment etc. and a society which failed you.
Prison is the removal of you from society due to impatibility of current values and should help you become 'better'.
Be happy that you had good/avg parents, the mental strength to help yourself, money, luck, body strength, whatever it was which allowed you to comment on HN instead of being in a prison.
If all it took to ensure a good outcome was to create good circumstances, we'd have fixed society in the prehistoic era. People would have figured it out and asked the good parents to raise all the kids one generation, and problem solved.
Instead what you see is parents with five successful kids, and one that keeps ending up in prison, and no one can really explain how it went wrong.
And you mean that?
We have indigeous people and historic effidence, that kids with mental health issues were kept hidden from the rest of a village, sometimes in cages and on chains.
We know very well that the education system around the planet cateres to the masses not to the ones with disabilityes, ADHD etc.
Human beings are complex, any education system is not and its not reflecting the diversity of humans.
In japan for example, kids have to cleanup there own class rooms, wonderful concept, any other real country which adopted that?
Equal parents doesn't need to mean equal circumstances. Times and culture change, parents age, family circumstances change over time, their environment outside the home is different, different friends, different experiences, etc. There's a myriad of factors that can lead to very different circumstances for siblings.
If you talk to people working with foster kids about why some kids succeed despite everything stacked against them, they'll tell you some kids are different.
It's possible you're correct and there's some circumstance controlling things we can't see or don't understand, but that's not a testable idea.
One can't even say that good circumstances are always better than bad circumstances. Bad circumstances can teach a lot about humility, perseverance, empathy, compassion, etc. Good circumstances can lead to grown, spoiled children, people with a child's concept of how the world works, people with no consideration towards others because they didn't need to be part of a community, etc.
Environment plays a huge role, but it's somewhat unpredictable what lessons are taken. One could also say that it's not unanimously clear what makes a good environment; it's likely not simply about having resources and lacking conflict. Likely an amount of scarcity and conflict are needed.
All this isn't to say that kids are all born the same, but I don't consider such differences to generally matter as much as the effect the environment can have.
> due to circumstances like upbringing, environment etc. and a society which failed you.
It's always someone else's fault.
For a site populated by people that deal with complex technical systems on a daily basis, the idea that systems also exist and shape our outcomes in every day life seems to frequently be a foreign concept.
My dad told me that the difference between men and animals is honor. And being honorable is something each of us can choose to be, or not to be.
Blaming society for one's own actions is dishonorable. You get to choose, and you are responsible for your choice.
That sounds like you were shaped by your upbringing. And honor itself is subjective and shaped by the social context it exists in. I don't believe killing to maintain honor is moral and there are millions of people out there who do because of the context they exist in. Likewise, I do not think it is honorable to make prisoners suffer (such as from excessive heat) when it's something in your control while others do because they were raised to believe that once you have wronged, your own worth as a human is diminished.
As humans, we have the capacity to hold multiple concepts like honor and contextual awareness at the same time when adjudicating a crime. Someone who stole to feed their family when they were in a dire situation should not be given the same sentence as someone who stole for personal gain. Our ability to acknowledge complex situations and deal with them also separates us from animals.
> Someone who stole to feed their family when they were in a dire situation
It's still wrong. Having a need does not entitle one to steal. Honor is not something you apply only when it doesn't cost you.
What is more dishonorable than letting other people starve, while you have a surplus of food?
It cannot be dishonorable to care for your loved ones. If circumstances leave few other options, stealing is an honorable act.
leaving a bad or unequal society in place is similarly dishonourable. That is still a choice you make
Yet here you are, blaming your dad for your personal shortcomings in worldview.
I have many shortcomings. All of them are my fault.
Trump doesn't have honor and is right now the most powerful person on the planet due to his access to the United States of Americas Military.
Society is not that easy and just because your father said something, doesn't make it true.
Honor is a concept and for sure a great character trait but if you don't get teached a concept like honor, you don't follow it.
Its a brain, a brain which gets teached how to act and behave.
Some learn how to think critical, some don't. Some are intelligent, some are empathic, some don't understand the world very well.
Don't simplify this by a snarky and ignorant comment.
I'm not even against moving people out of our society, its fucked up enough that this is necessayr, but i'm against cruelty and i'm for helping.
> Don't simplify this by a snarky and ignorant comment.
It is simple. People have free will. Bad people know what right and wrong is, and they chose wrong.
No they don't. They have a range of free will. And free will alone doesn't help you if you are unable to understand what you actually want.
Short term goals vs. long term goals requires long horizion thinking. Critical thinking is necessary to break through cultural heritage. I grew up a christian, took me until 14 to denounce this garbage.
Wow! what a dodge! Try reading: The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row
That case is irrelevant to the point. I never said law and justice were perfect. Nothing human is perfect.
Not sure I am following your point. You commented that people have choices, good and bad. I presented you with a story where a good boy was watering his mother's yard and he was thrown in prison (28 yrs) for a murder he did not commit. I guess the only choice to be made was the corrupt police employees? I think you and I will go around and around in circles on this. I wish you well.
Oh honey… tell that to Alan Turing, or millions or gay people, or the literal millions of people who smoked pot and are stuck in prison forever.
And that’s ignoring all the laws people break on the regular.
I did not say there was no injustice happening.
Nor did I say that all laws are just.
I'm not your honey, either.
Is your entire line of thinking about crime and punishment not entirely dependent upon laws and punishments, as they exist right now, being perfectly just?
Because otherwise, “they knew the law and chose to break it, therefore they get what’s coming to them” is a bit Javert from Les Mis.
I was pretty clear.
> “they knew the law and chose to break it, therefore they get what’s coming to them”
Please don't make up quotes and attribute them to me. That's called the strawman fallacy.
I'll quote you clearly.
> "People have free will. Bad people know what right and wrong is, and they chose wrong."[0]
Broader Context: In response to a commentary on how 'good and bad' can be complicated:
> "It's always someone else's fault."[1]
Broader-broader Context: Prison is punishment, etc.
So, a reasonable chain of thought here and paraphrase of what you've said is: "people know right from wrong" -> we're in the context of crime and punishment, so this is operating as a substitute for "they know what's legal and illegal". If it's not, it doesn't belong here, because at this point we should all know that legality != morality.
"and they chose wrong" -> therefore they chose the consequences - they chose punishment. The colloquial way of saying that is "they get what's coming to them".
So, while those weren't your words, was that your implicit statement? And if not, what is the implicit statement?
I ask because the people in those cells are real, and 23 of them died of heat.
> at this point we should all know that legality != morality
Recall that I wrote this to you:
"I did not say there was no injustice happening. Nor did I say that all laws are just."
Recall also that you wrote this here:
> People have free will. Bad people know what right and wrong is, and they chose wrong.
The context being that the "bad" person is such simply because they chose to break the law. Even if it doesn't match your thoughts, surely you can see how one might read your comments as both claiming that laws are not morals, and also that those who break the law made the "wrong" (moral) choice (put another way: laws are morals).
Breaking the law is not strictly a moral failure. It can be, but they have an "orthogonal" relationship. To that point:
> I did not say there was no injustice happening. Nor did I say that all laws are just.
Choosing to follow an unjust law is a moral failure. That moral failure is baked into the word "unjust". This blanket statement that the choice to commit a crime is a choice to be "bad" is not self-evident (or it's laughably tautological) and, regardless, is contradicted by the assertion that not all laws are "just".
Of course, one can assume you have more nuanced thoughts than that; the point of my coment is that you've not communicated that nuance here, so you appear to be contradicting yourself: saying both that laws are morals and that they are not morals.
I am not making any claim about the law. You have confused that with what honor is.
Please do define free will, and try to do so in a way that a) gives people actual agency (define that while you're at it, and b) compatible with the available evidence of how the universe works.
You chose to write that post.
So on other words you don't have an answer.
Everything you write is your free choice. And you know it.
No, I don't know it. In fact, I don't think there's any kind of evidence to suggest "free choice" is even possible for any kind of definition of "free choice" that doesn't make a mockery of the idea it is "free".
I'm still waiting for a definition that could even suggest otherwise. I know I won't get one, because nobody I have this discussion with is ever capable of coming up with one.
If you can't even define the terms, why do you imagine I should "know" it to be true?
Saying you have no free will absolves you of any responsibility for your actions. Call it the "Lindsay Clancy" defense. Human society cannot function with such notions.
The "Lindsay Clancy defense", AKA not guilty by reason of insanity, has roots going back thousands of years, and was used as early as 1844 in the US in the murder trial of Abner Rogers, Jr. In 1982, John Hinckley, Jr. used it after shooting at the president. Others have used it even after the post-Hinckley reforms. Yet society hasn't crumbled.
Saying "He had no free will" doesn't mean "The state has no right to confine him away from people he might hurt."
Well, letting the humanist rehabilitation part aside, there is that social aspect of a sanctioning instance to prisons. Expectations of sanctions do drive human behavior.
I'm not against the idea of the society taking control over the life of one of its own (lets be fair, our planet is small, we are too interconnected) we can't just put people somewere else.
But cruelty shouldn't be part of this. Help and rehabiliation
>no human being is just 'bad'
Meanwhile in this thread, everyone is getting worked up about how evil Texas Christians supposedly are, as though a red flag was waved in front of a bull.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
They aren't ontologically evil, they aren't "just bad." They choose to be evil.
I could say the same about prisoners.
And?
My comment is independent form the others.
Put your ideas into action in this thread instead of getting self-righteous about people who (a) may or may not even exist, (b) mostly aren't reading this thread even if they do exist.
You assume, you don't know what I do besides writing a comment like this.
Stop trying to assume things, if you don't want to take part in this discussion, don't.
But stop playing a game of fallacy
I don't need a degree in sociology to want the dude who broke into my car removed from society.
If he finds the experience improving, so much the better, but it is not my primary concern.
Yeah feel free to continue thinking that simple and be ignorant.
Its easier eh?
But lets be clear, you will be on the reciving side or have been already anyway.
Or if never, you speak from a point of privilige...
You hear that? You're ignorant and privileged for not wanting your car broken into.
Society as a whole is not wholly responsible. Some people are taught and some are just bad - bad brains, bad choices, bad intents. I've never had to teach a toddler what to do when another child takes their toy. Somethings are just innate. Some can be helped and should be, others cannot. Taking away an individual's responsibility removes dignity and gets in the way of healing. We don't have to give into the fallacy of choosing one or the other - both society and the individual can be responsible for their actions.
But yes, we have been devaluing human life and dignity, or if you prefer the Image of God, across all of society. The conditions of these prisons should not exist even if this is purely punitive, which I do not believe it should be. Victims deserve justice, but criminals deserve the right to pay the price and come out "clean". We should want to make society whole, to bring them back into the fold as full members, but too often we don't want to pay the cost.
Society or our villages before a planet full of 8 billion people were responsible.
Everyone of us was born to a mother and father. And yo utell me if someone isn't born 'right' we should do what? Kill them? I think Hitler tried that. Not really sure were you are going with this.
Do you really believe our society is really trying to help people? We are sitting in front of our television, watch reality tv and do other shit. We have more than enough capacity to help others. We just don't. This doesn't make it fair in any sense for every human being we brought into existens.
I don't get your point with the toddler.
> I've never had to teach a toddler what to do when another child takes their toy. Somethings are just innate.
It is safe to guess you dont have much experience with toddlers or kids. Yes some needs to be taught what to do in that situation.
Also, you are using language of dignity and rights in pretty manipulative and dishonest way.
Given that the American prison system is performing as badly as it is, even if you ignore any concern for the prisoners, the US system is immoral even purely on the basis of the harm it does to society through the high reoffending rates.
Based on a quick Google, recividism rates don't seem notably high in the US.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivis...
I also think recidivism is too confounded by the prison population to tell us a lot about the quality of the prison itself.
Compare to places that actually care about reform, like Norway.
"Your prison system isn't one of the best in the world, therefore it is immoral"
The U.S. prison system isn't immoral due to it not being one of the best in the world, but is immoral due to the way that it treats people as less than human.
So far when I research the alleged problems with the US prison system, I learn they are also generally present in other prison systems.
There seems to be a general trend of "US inverse exceptionalism", i.e. arguing that the US is a uniquely bad country on the basis of very weak evidence. People complain a lot about systems in the US, but if you look at international comparisons, the US doesn't usually look too bad. Here in this thread people are up in arms because... 1/3 of Texas prisons have A/C, and the remainder have non-AC heat control measures. I doubt this is substantially different from non-US prisons.
> So far when I research the alleged problems with the US prison system, I learn they are also generally present in other prison systems.
The difference is probably the degree of abuse and cruelty.
Also, the U.S. seems to claim to be a civilised society, so it would make sense to compare its facilities (including prisons) with those in other "civilised" societies. When you do that kind of comparison, you may be shocked to discover that U.S. prisons are amongst the worst.
Prisoners are in prison as punishment. Not for punishment.
That is a concept that eludes many.
No, it's social safety quarantine. If you just want to punish someone, there are much cheaper and more effective ways (e.g. caning)
Being incarcerated and having very little control over every aspect of your life IS punishment. The violence, sexual violence and extreme conditions are not necessary.
It’s "punishment" if you are broke or not well connected. But otherwise it’s rehab (ie, Ghislaine Maxwell transferred to min security)
Prison is punitive by design.
If it was better than the conditions they endured on the outside people would enticed to commit crimes.
That is something that presently happens. So instead, let's improve the conditions of both the outside world and prisons.
I'm sorry friend, those aren't the current set of incentives.
Director Lumpkin should be criminally responsible for these conditions and deaths he has been indifferent to.
Such an appropriate-sounding name he has.
The only truly endless resource is man's inhumanity to his fellow man.
I know. There seem to be an infinite supply of criminals doing crime.
May we teach our children the only thing that truly matters is how we regard the dignity of people.
I find most successful Americans I meet are so self-obsessed they are left with an incredibly low capacity for empathy for those in lower classes than them. Wild how they think they are so different than Nazis.
I don't understand why Texas voters support such inhumane conditions. All these "Christians" who support this kind of cruel punishment need to have a "come to Jesus" moment, literally.
It's because Texas is the OG of human suffering. Texas gave up territory than end slavery: This is why Oklahoma looks so weird (the "panhandle"). After the so-called Missouri compromise, in order to remain a slave-state, Texas gave up that piece of land. Also, Texas declared independence not once, but twice, to remain a slave state. First, from Mexico: "Many Anglo-American settlers were from the southern United States and brought enslaved workers, using legal loopholes like indentured servitude to bypass Mexican restrictions against slavery. They feared Mexico would abolish the practice entirely". And then, famously, of course, fighting to remain independent during the Civil War.
Your point is valid, but it is worth noting that the panhandle territory was a notoriously inhospitable place to try and exist (for European settlers at least, who called it "no mans land"), so it wasn't like Texas was giving up a gem, none of the surrounding states wanted it.
Texas ceded said land to another state, what they viewed as another nation, such that they could keep the practice of human ownership alive and well. The quality of the land is immaterial to this statement, let alone noteworthy
I disagree, I think it adds context that the political climate of the time was more complicated and involved than the original point. It was a place where you couldn't farm and were under constant attack, during that time.
Isn’t that part of the llano estacado? The Comanche lived there just fine.
That's why I added the context about European settlers, it was the States that were drawing the lines and they labeled it "no man's land", look into the history of Beaver County.
There is so much nuance with this. On the one hand, Texas has hot enough days where it is inhumane/dangerous to not have A/C. But also plenty of days that are hot, but bearable. There are plenty of citizens not in prison that live without AC and make due with fans. HVAC systems are ridiculusly expensive. $1.5 billion is about $10K a person. Too bad they can't just give each prisoner a window unit for $200 a piece.
How much do you think it costs, in total, per prisoner today, per year?
Yeah. A one-shot investment of 10k$ per prisoner to avoid more manslaughter cases is peanuts, really.
People outside of prison have freedom of movement to avoid overheating and access to a variety of enviroments and cold drinks and personal fans.
Some times people walk into supermarkets just to cool down.
> $1.5 billion is about $10K a person. Too bad they can't just give each prisoner a window unit for $200 a piece.
The former almost certainly includes other installation part, utility, and labor costs. Even if you could give everyone a $200 window unit, you'd need to deliver, install, upgrade utilities, maintain them, etc.
Fans have no cooling effect once the ambient temperature exceeds human body temperature, so "making do with fans" is literally making do with nothing.
Those citizens "making do" generally have freedom of movement, free access to cool water, air-conditioned businesses or vehicles, and are not locked down in a concrete facility.
There is a absolutely no nuance to this.
> Fans have no cooling effect once the ambient temperature exceeds human body temperature
Sweat is a wet-bulb cooling process which always cools below ambient for any humidity less than 100%.
Please take 5 seconds to fact check yourself with a very quick query against your information source of choice.
Over ~95 degrees, a fan blowing on a human acts as a convection oven, increasing body temperature while dehydrating the body.
This is greatly exacerbated in extreme heat.
CDC guidance is to avoid using a fan in extreme heat conditions unless it is combined with a cooling source and careful hydration. Once again, not exactly an option in a Texas prison.
> cools below ambient
ambient and body temperature arent coupled items there
have you never used a convection oven?
Apparently he doesn't know what the humidity is like in Texas either.
These are Nationalist Christians (Nat-C’s), not actual followers of Jesus.
"They are hurting the right people". This is 100% their mentality.
You don't get to decide who is and isn't a "true" Christian when all it takes is to believe in Jesus' death and resurrection, which even the Prosperity Gospel Christians and Christian Nationalists do.
God does. Judging by their actions and the hate they show towards their neighbors, I get to draw the conclusion they’re not following Jesus Christ’s teachings or the Bible.
They choose to be evil.
But largely supported by people that would call themselves actual Christians FYI, and not even right wing extremist either.
You know what Jesus said about hypocrites. How they self-identify is unimportant if they harm their neighbor at every opportunity they get.
Just because these people don't worship or believe the same things as your sect of christianity does not stop them from believing in the teachings of Christ. They just don't agree with you while holding positions of power.
Prosperity gospel is a real thing too, also the fastest sect of christianity growing in the world.
Just because people don't follow the teachings of Christ doesn't mean they don't believe in the teachings of Christ? Hey, what did Jesus have to say about hypocrites?
> Prosperity gospel is a real thing too, also the fastest sect of christianity growing in the world.
Which goes to show you the state of Christianity today. Pretty sad.
Ah, another sect that selectively chooses which lessons of Christ to follow or ignore to fit their own agenda.
"If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle
Yup! I was raised evangelical and the pastors would brush away this passage as not being translated accurately where they would twist it to justify why you needed to give more money to the church because in the next life you'd be rewarded with riches.
It's a sick belief system.
>I don't understand why Texas voters support such inhumane conditions.
I'm in Texas. I'm a little confused as to why you think I should care. For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison... and for those correctly convicted, I'm not especially worried about making them more comfortable.
The entire point of punishment is the cruelty. It doesn't really work without it... it's unclear if you're quibbling over the amount of cruelty, or if you think that there exists some sort of cruelty-free punishment that the rest of us just haven't heard of.
The US Constitution has a whole bit about forbidding cruel and unusual punishments.
And here I was thinking that prisons should be about keeping people who can't operate in society without damaging society away from society. I mean, even better would be to find a way to help them operate in society, but apparently we're not even all at the baseline.
1. Even correct convictions can later be found to be wrong. Death is irreversible and financially restituting someone's death can never benefit one wrongfully killed.
2. Unless death is the sentence, a sentence should not result in death. If you don't closely control and monitor when the state can do something, it increases the risk of misuse of that power by the state.
3. If cruelty and punishment really worked, crime would decrease over time, not increase.
4. The AC can be set to 75. That's not luxury but won't kill anyone with heatstroke.
> For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison
What a remarkable thing to write. Even knowing that some innocent people are there, you want them to suffer the risk of death and severe harm from heat.
HN is lousy with psychopaths.
>What a remarkable thing to write. Even knowing that some innocent people are there,
I don't want them in prison at all. You, you're apparently satisfied (somehow?) that they get air conditioning. And you think I'm the psychopath. Something's seriously wrong with you. Leftism, not even once.
Comes down to your level of empathy I guess.
I think there's a basic floor for how we should treat other people, regardless of the circumstances. Things like access to food and water, shelter, etc.
I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it, but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.
>I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it,
This is an absurd claim. How does punishment work without cruelty? Remember, that I allow for people to disagree on the quantity of cruelty (supposing that can be quantified)... so you're proposing cruelty-free punishment. This misses the entire point of what punishment is. Perhaps your reading comprehension is faulty, and you confuse the word with "rehabilitation". I see that alot.
>but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.
Hah! I hadn't even read that sentence yet when I wrote the above! Damn I'm good. Rehabilitation is science fiction. No one has even ever proposed a theory on how or why it's supposed to happen, let alone engineered a method to induce it to occur. On reddit, these conversations are often hilarious, but maybe here on Hackernews it will be glorious. Why do you think you need to do to cause a violent criminal to rehabilitate? If the method is performed diligently, what percentage of violent criminals rehabilitate, and what sort of timeline are we talking? Why do the failures (and let's be honest, there are failures in every manufacturing process) fail? Can these be sorted out beforehand?
But at the end of the day, there is still a big problem. Justice is what society promises to the victims so that they will refrain from revenge; the state must carry out the revenge for them. It does so for several reasons: to discourage eternal feuds, to ensure that the correct culprit is targeted, and to avoid normally nonviolent people from growing accustomed to violence. To satisfy their monkey need for vengeance in the most civilized manner possible. If you fail to satisfy it, then these people are obligated to do it themselves. Rehabilitation alone can't substitute, even if it were possible. For the lesser criminals, incarceration suffices. For those more depraved, we don't want them rehabilitated. It serves no need at all.
> How does punishment work without cruelty?
My mother spanked me when I misbehaved. She caused real pain as punishment.
It was never cruel.
Punishment and cruelty are not equivalent.
Please note, I am not in favor of spanking children, and never spanked mine.
Now as to your final point, that justice is the state taking revenge on behalf of the victims. I replied to you above that I see the validity of this, and for the same reasons you give (discourage eternal feuds). And for those same reasons Justice is restraint. At most equivalent harm, no more than an eye for an eye.
I think it was your anger that made you say these ethics we both share are bullshit rules designed to hurt your family.
Now in the current case, for that point to stand, we need to ensure that the prisoners have in fact harmed identifiable others. Google tells me "Roughly 40% of inmates in Texas prisons are incarcerated for non-violent offenses". Thus 40% of the time, there is no cause for vengeance.
And where prison is vengeance, if it is just, it needs to be restrained. Not cruel. Not unusual. Just as punishment is not cruelty, justice is not cruelty.
For other readers, as I mentioned above, while I see a valid ethical stance behind NoMoreNicksLeft's anger and hurt, I do not share it. I seek mercy, and as for Justice, "Justice is mine sayeth the Lord"-- in other words, I leave it to God. I find it sick that the US, the "land of the free" has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Look, I've had bad interactions with bonafide unredeemable unrehabilitable psychopaths, and I'd like to see such people locked up for life. But I do not wish them cruelty beyond the innate cruelty of life behind bars.
> For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison
???
The user just posted
"Run from me, I will hurt you and I will enjoy it"
Which is insanely ironic, that's the exact same kind of person he'd throw in jail.
I think he meant they should be freed.
Then that's what they should have written. Leaving it ambiguous gives us the opportunity to take someone who says cruelty is the point at their word, though. They want people to suffer, they are a sadist.
That charitable interpretation still doesn't save it, unless they have a magical plan to identify and free all the wrongfully convicted/plea-dealt.
The one time I observed an ex-con post here, someone quickly doxxed him, the mob declared him evil, and quickly flagged all his posts and comments.
They don't want cruelty, just their livelihoods taken away.
> The entire point of punishment is the cruelty
That's a pretty messed up morality. I don't even know where to start on this one.
How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
Its also messed up ethics.
The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta. And from the first time this ever came up it came up as the government saying justice should be balanced. "eye for an eye" == "Punishment fits the crime"
>How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
I'm an atheist. There is no god nor gods. But if I had to have a god, I don't think I'd choose one of the abrahamic ones. There are many to choose from who aren't big on mercy.
>Its also messed up ethics.
I don't accept your ethical framework. It's a system of bullshit rules made up by people who care for me not even a little to put me and my family at a disadvantage against a civilization that doesn't even want to go on living.
>The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta.
Then you're doing it wrong. It can only prevent vendetta if the victims feel as if they receive justice... if those who do wrong are punished. If you remove the punishment/cruelty from the equation, they will simply do that part themselves. Unless you're hoping to emasculate and disarm them so thoroughly that they have no hope of doing so... but I guess that was the ethics stuff you were talking about above.
Ok, so as an athiest, could you do what is right, love mercy, and walk humbly with your beliefs?
Your comment on which god you might choose suggest you are not a fan of mercy. Have you ever made a mistake and wished for mercy for yourself? Have you ever received forgiveness that maybe you didn't think was deserved, if even only from you family?
I can agree with you that justice calls for punishment in response to a harm, and thus harming the person who caused the first harm. And if one considers any intentional harm to another as cruelty, then yes, "the purpose of punishment is cruelty". However, justice also limits the cruelty. The earliest example is "an eye for an eye"-- because the prior system was "a death for an eye" or "I burn your village for an eye", and Hammurabi saw that this lead to endless blood feuds. Vendetta, i.e. you hurt me so now I cause you and your family as much pain as I possibly can, that is not justice.
In fact, I was taking your side in this argument. Many others talk about prison as rehabilitation and keeping society safe, totally dropping the psychological need of the victim for some sense of vengeance. And while I agree with those others, and prefer to leave the vengeance to God rather than to the prison system, I took your side and legitimized the victims need for vengeance.
I am sorry that you have such anger that you saw this as bullshit rules from someone who doesn't care for you and wants to disadvantage you.
>Ok, so as an athiest, could you do what is right, love mercy, and walk humbly with your beliefs?
What has caused you to conclude that any of those things are right? Mercy, benefit of doubt, leniency... these are for the remorseful. We live in a society that doesn't even seem to know that word.
>However, justice also limits the cruelty.
Within reason. Haven't seen much evidence that we currently need to limit it. This isn't 1700s England where anyone is getting the noose for stealing loaves of bread.
Show me some excessive punishment, I might agree with you. "They have to live with the summer heat like everyone had to do so, convicts and the innocent alive, until 70 years ago" just isn't excessive.
You say this until it hits you.
But hey, you don't seem to be very empathic about your luck in life.
You could have been just the person in prison.
Btw. some religions believe in rebirth, you might become a prisoner.
Some believe in an infinite rebirth of universities, which will lead you to be in a prision in another reallity.
Even on a logically viewpoint it would be better for your 'other lives' to not be cruel to other human beings.
> The entire point of punishment is the cruelty
Jesus fucking Christ
Loss of freedom is the punishment, not being cooked to death in prison.
Yikes
Might as well make every criminal offense a capital punishment, if rehabilitation isn’t the point anymore.
Why even waste your money on for-profit prisons if you want the prisoners to die?
This guy doesn't want them to die, he wants them to suffer.
I read it as he wants them to die of heat stroke, because their lives are unimportant and not cherished by God.
Rehabilitation has never really been the point of the US prison or even correctional system at all.
The fact you can serve your time, earnestly work on rehabilitating yourself, jump through all the hoops, etc. but still be under the economic death sentence more or less summarizes how people feel about it.
It’s basically NIMBY applied to the justice system. Everyone loves to pretend they want rehabilitation but also wants someone else to do it. This shows up in hiring, apartment leasing, social benefits, etc.
>Everyone loves to pretend they want rehabilitation but also wants someone else to do it.
People on the left love to pretend this, perhaps. Those of us on the right make no such pretense. It's about punishment, sequestration, and deterrence in that order. Rehabilitation doesn't even enter our minds.
Why do you pretend? It wouldn't surprise anyone if you were to just be honest and that you don't care about rehabilitation either, it's rather that you don't want a justice system at all. We all know that already. There's no reason to hide it.
Why do you continue to pay taxes for private for-profit prisons?
If you don't see value in the U.S. Constitution and providing human beings a chance at reformation, you should advocate for killing falsely convicted criminals before they enter prision and die of inhumane conditions. Wouldn't that be more efficient for your worldview?
I'd love to see a "murder any criminal" bill named for you. I think you would too, so go for it!
>Why do you continue to pay taxes for private for-profit prisons?
Taxes weren't optional last I checked.
>If you don't see value in the U.S. Constitution
Which part of the Constitution is it that guarantees air conditioning? Did I miss an amendment?
>and providing human beings a chance at reformation
Everyone has not only the choice at reformation, if they choose poorly there's always another opportunity to do so later that day. To do so the next morning. If they have to be bribed for that with air conditioning or anything else, they're as far from it as any human can possibly be.
You have a right to advocate for how your taxes are used. Advocate for killing white-collar criminals before they reach prision, and then closing unused prisions, if saving taxpayer money is the only thing that matters to you. Maybe you'll find enough supporters for your cause to make capital punishment a mandatory alternative to prision for all convicted white-collar felons, like future offenders along the lines of Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald J. Trump.
For those in prision today, they can't be rehabilitated if they're dead due to heat stroke caused by cruel and unreasonable 115 degree heat.
Read up, buttercup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United...
All fun and games until is you in the prison.
Maybe start here https://innocenceproject.org/ before you let everyone around here see how much of a sociopath you are.
As someone in Texas, who also donates large sums of money every year to the Innocence Project, I kind of understand their position even though I think they have written it poorly. I want anyone wrongfully convicted freed and compensated, and I want our justice system to be better at ascertaining guilt rather than using plea deals improperly to imprison people wrongly. I also want our prisons to be places where we take every reasonable action to preserve the lives of the prisoners, including for sure having air-conditioning.
But I also fully understand the point of prison is /punishment/, which is why it's such a severe injustice when someone is punished when they have not committed the crime. Prison is not supposed to be pleasant and comfortable, and we should take every action to preserver prisoner's lives specifically in order to ensure that they can serve their complete sentences, upon the assumption of fair adjudication. Without clear, just, punishment within society, we will revert to vigilantism and chaos.
The core ethical/moral complexity here to me is not about treatment of prisoners, its about how people become prisoners in the first place in the state of Texas. In Texas we have a long history of racist practices in policing, in the courts, and the use of coercive plea deal structures that have resulted in many people being wrongfully convicted. As long as that situation stands, it would be clearer to argue that nobody should be imprisoned at all, but that's also not a reasonable argument. As long people are being imprisoned, we should ensure they are rightfully convicted and understand that prison is a punishment, and that we should preserve prisoner's lives and health so that they can experience whatever just punishment has been meted out by society for the harm they have caused through their choices and actions.
At the same time prison shouldn't be deadly. 85F versus 110F is the difference between uncomfortable and death.
>Without clear, just, punishment within society, we will revert to vigilantism and chaos.
The problem is this doesn't really seem to have any relation to the punishment. In the US we love to think that beating someone to a pulp has a strong effect on their future actions that lead to the beating but redactivism rates do not show any strong correlations here at all. Things like education, living conditions, and wealth are far more correlated.
> At the same time prison shouldn't be deadly. 85F versus 110F is the difference between uncomfortable and death.
Fully agreed. There absolutely should be air conditioning in prisons in Texas. We need to preserve prisoners lives and health using all reasonable means so that they can receive their just punishment via their sentence.
Of note, however, there are /schools/ in Texas that lack working air conditioning due to mismanagement and underfunding, which I find a far more egregious and wrong circumstance.
> The problem is this doesn't really seem to have any relation to the punishment. In the US we love to think that beating someone to a pulp has a strong effect on their future actions that lead to the beating but redactivism rates do not show any strong correlations here at all. Things like education, living conditions, and wealth are far more correlated.
Agreed, punishment does not help with recidivism rates. You're making a rehabilitation argument. That argument might even be reasonable. That is not why prison in the US exists or how they are operated. They are a form of punishment, that is their purpose in our society.
> But I also fully understand the point of prison is /punishment/... Prison is not supposed to be pleasant and comfortable...
I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you present your view, and also see it's validity-- that one purpose of prison is for the government to take a measured and limited 'revenge' for the victims of harm. Where the alternative is blood feuds.
Thus prison should not be comfortable, for those rightfully convicted of crimes involving harm TO OTHERS.
But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.
> But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.
Fully agreed, which is why I make the point that air conditioning isn't a question, of course a prison in Texas should have air conditioning. The 8th Amendment makes this pretty clear, that cruel and unusual punishments are disallowed, as they should be. The punishment is and should be the prison sentence itself.
the point iant punishment though, its slavery and slave labour.
the laws are written to make sure certain people are easy to press into forced labour
The point of imprisonment is cruelty? Many would disagree. I can think of a few other reasons for it...
The imprisonment and lack of freedom is the punishment. The prison itself doesn't need to be actively unpleasant - the whole point is you cannot leave.
The year is 2030. You are reading a breathless article on HN about how horrible Texas is for air conditioning their prisons but not their school.
Way down at the bottom is a dead comment: "Texan here, schools are managed locally, prisons are managed at the state level"
I'm more curious personally about the legal side here. Setting aside the actual object level issue (I personally support A/C for prisons), it seems to open up a lot of interesting questions to me:
* was it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C before the invention of A/C (obviously not)
* was it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C before A/C became widespread and affordable for regular people? (probably not)
* what is the main reason why this wasn't an issue 50 years ago and is now? Climate change? People being on average more sensitive to heat than they used to be? Better legal recognition of prisoner suffering? Broadening of 8th amendment protections in the court system? Changing public morals, i.e. "evolving standards of decency"? Ubiquity of A/C in ordinary Texans' day to day life? The random chance of this particular case getting sent to this particular judge?
* Is it cruel and unusual punishment for Texas prisons to not have A/C now, when not all non-imprisoned Texans have A/C (and if so, does that imply that A/C is being codified here as basic human right, and is that really constitutionally tenable? How is it possible for a judge to order that something is a constitutional right for prisoners, but an optional private luxury for non prisoners?)
* Is A/C the only option, or might other, cheaper cooling methods be allowed, if the core of the complaint is reducing preventable heat-related injuries and deaths? Hypothetically (not a real proposal obviously), if instead the prison put hotel-style ice machines in every cell, would this solve the issue or is the judge's decision very specifically about A/C?