I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/28/29-years-solitary-confinement-robert-king/print

by Tomte • 9 years ago

399 249 9 years ago

mnm12• 9 years ago

If being imprisoned and enslaved isn't cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. The constitution doesn't prohibit shit with its useless words in this case.

ryanlol• 9 years ago

Cruel, but not unusual.

coldtea8• 9 years ago

I always found the faith in the revered interpretations of some constitutional document written centuries ago, and the respect for the "Founding Fathers" not as historical figures, but as some kind of guiding lights for today, totally bizarro.

Even the name "Founding Fathers" and the way it's thrown around seems quite bizarre for a democracy. It's the people, and the will of the people, that should be respected, not what some long gone luminaries said.

koenigdavidmj• 9 years ago

The will of the people on 2001-09-12 would be to get rid of jury trials and allow arbitrary searches and seizures. People are emotional and dumb, and sometimes it is helpful to build an intentional slowness into the process. If it's truly the will of the people, you should have no problem getting 2/3 of Congress to agree on it, followed by 3/4 of state legislatures.

Banthum• 9 years ago

The reason we normalize everyone believing a corpus of core texts is not because we think those core texts are smarter than anything else that could be written or will be written.

It's because to organize a huge number of people, one must create commonalities among them. Any society must have core beliefs, myths, touchstones, and practices, to keep it unified and keep people cooperating and trusting each other.

The founding fathers, their writings and ideals, form the civil religion that makes a rich black Texan Catholic have some reason to trust a poor white Washingtonian atheist. Even though they may be different in so many ways, they at least have this one thing in common, which separates them together from the wider world of Others.

To cooperate properly, humans need this kind of tribal identity correspondence, and an Other to separate themselves from. It's in-built tribal psychology.

Even if those texts prescribe practices are sometimes sub-optimal in outcome, without them the whole society falls apart pretty quickly due to infighting and unsolvable differences in values and identities.

So the value in the texts is not just policy wisdom - it is simply that they are the thing everyone believes in.

This is what's happening now, in fact - a fetish for destroying normative beliefs means people more and more have nothing in common. People just didn't understand the purpose those beliefs had in the first place. They threw them away and now here we are.

(None of this is to say that the content of the texts is totally irrelevant - a society organized around the writings of the founding fathers is obviously going to be different than a society organized around the writings of Confucius, or the texts of Islam. It just means the content isn't the only reason we hold onto these texts).

DennisP3• 9 years ago

The Constitution isn't just a historical document, it's the law. It's certainly open to change by the will of the people, and it defines a process for doing so, which has been used seventeen times.

It's not the only law we interpret this way, considering the intent of the people who created it; courts do the same with laws passed by Congress.

rayiner• 9 years ago

The Constitution plays an outsized role in the U.S. because our voting populace is quite a bit more conservative than our intellectual elite. Our veneration for the Constitution is why, e.g. bans on interracial marriage were eliminated in 1967 with a Supreme Court case instead of in the 1990s when public support for interracial marriage crossed the 50% line. It's why abortion isn't illegal in roughly one third of the states. It's why schools were desegregated by Supreme Court fiat a decade before the Civil Rights Act was passed.

It's a writ small version of the situation that you see with, e.g. Bangladesh. The voting populace there is very conservative, and despite the constitution creating a secular republic, voters have Islamized the country since then. A few years ago, there was a touchy situation where there was concern an interim military caretaker government would not hand back power to the civilian government once elections were conducted. People like my parents (who immigrated to the U.S. from there) who think secular democracy is really important, kind of supported an undemocratic military intervention that might have the effect of protecting it.

cr0sh• 9 years ago

...the respect for the "Founding Fathers" not as historical figures, but as some kind of guiding lights for today, totally bizarro.

My respect for these men is more about their arguably humanistic, Enlightenment-oriented thoughts, knowledge, and goals, which they set down with the seeming best of intents in the hope of crafting a land and a government better than any the world had seen up until then.

Was their dream perfect, or implemented perfectly? No, perhaps not - they were men of their age, and human - with all the faults and foibles that entails. However, even given these limitations, one can't deny that they did a remarkable job.

Personally, I feel that they did a better job than virtually any of our current politicians here in the US could (or would) do today. Hell, the fact that they argued and were at odds over many of the things in our Constitution, yet had the wisdom and humbleness to discuss, argue, compromise, and concede as adults to craft this document, puts them far ahead of most of our representatives today, IMHO.

It's the people, and the will of the people, that should be respected, not what some long gone luminaries said.

These "long gone luminaries" would be appalled at our current situation. They expected that the populace would be educated - not to a base level, but to an "Enlightenment level" - each of us capable of rational discussion, discourse, and understanding of virtually all topics of our day. Where we were limited, we would have the temerity to defer to another with better understanding, in the hope of becoming more educated ourselves. We would not rely upon some mystical being who may not even be there (most of them were Deists), but instead rely upon ourselves and the guidance of history to correct our problems as best as we could. We would embrace and not eschew Science and its understandings, because in that knowledge we could find answers.

Instead, today, the majority of the populace is an apathetic mass on virtually everything; the remainder is mostly divided, angry, and poorly educated. Beyond that is a very small percentage of the people - still divided - making the decisions for the majority; the scary thing is, that even among this small percentage of the population, there is still a great amount who are uneducated, superstitious and bigoted (or worse - educated, machiavellian, and bigoted), and they seeming loathe - if not outright irrationally hate - societal and scientific progress.

This country will fall apart unless we get our act together. I just don't see this happening in a way that ultimately matters - whereby the uneducated and/or apathetic portions of our society understand the importance of bettering their minds and engaging (even if it is just having an informed opinion based on facts) in the governmental sphere of their lives, so that the discussions that need to happen do happen, and the divisions are made smaller.

Should the will of the people be respected? Certainly - when it is just and fair. Right now, for a lot of people, it seems like the will is "eye-for-an-eye" and "mob mentality" (and apparently, they are ok with decades long solitary confinement for people who are innocent, just because they look different or think differently). Such ideas, attitudes and wills I cannot respect.

scott_s• 9 years ago

A law professor who made thinking about the Constitution the focus of his career has similar thoughts: "Let's Give Up on the Constitution", http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/lets-give-up-on-th...

His book, "On Constitutional Disobedience", is now available. I read it, but the piece captures the main idea.

anigbrowl11• 9 years ago

It's been a very useful ideological tool for people who understand how to wield power and are in a position to do so.

I personally think the Republic is far overdue for a refounding, and strongly suspect that the founders of the existing one would have heartily agreed ;-)

mallaidh4• 9 years ago

Slavery was specifically written into the 13th amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

robschia• 9 years ago

I don't even know how to start. The US present themselves as paragons of freedom, and then they blatantly violate every kind of basic human right.

coldtea8• 9 years ago

They also point fingers and lip service democracy globally, while having their bases all around the globe, meddling with sovereign countries abroad, helping topple legitimate governments, and funding / being cozy with all kinds of scum, from Suharto and the Shah, to Pinochet and the saudis (not to mention arming and befriending half of today's militant islamists, including the celebrated in the 80s Taliban).

But that was always their deal: the power plus the hypocrisy and the holier than thou attitude that one affords from being top dog with no one to answer to.

(Of course talking about those in power - the normal people are great, just uninformed about most of those things. Then again, if you live in a huge country with no borders with anybody apart from Canada and Mexico, and with no domestic impact in your life of anything that happens outside (except oil prices), why would anybody care about geography and world affairs?).

aaron-lebo5• 9 years ago

But that wasn't always the deal. The US up until 1900 was not the top dog.

Yeah, the US has a lot of flaws that need to be reformed, but that doesn't make it any different than any more country in history, it makes it exactly like them.

It's not an American problem, it's a human problem. When we understand that and stop pointing we'll all be better off.

rhino3694• 9 years ago

The Taliban isn't really the Mujaheddin that America funded in the 80's. After the Taliban took over most of Afghanistan, many former Mujaheddin joined the government, but it's leaders were distinctly not Mujaheddin.

In fact, the CIA contacts from the 80's were reactivated after 9/11 because, for the most part, they were in charge of the Northern Alliance forces that were battling the taliban in the civil war.

dev360• 9 years ago

I encountered this argument all the time when I came back to Sweden after living in the US for 15 years.

Would you rather have Putin or China run the show?

srean• 9 years ago

Oh that is branding. I am sure you know enough history to take that cheerleading seriously. Then there is united states the noble protectors of the notion of the free market.

Brand making and propaganda comes and goes. Everyone of influence does what is most convenient and beneficial for them to do and leave the rest to the ad agencies. Every empire brands itself as a golden empire. Its nothing new.

scottLobster• 9 years ago

How to start? Go back a couple of centuries. Americans reconciling the American mythology with the actions of the American people/government is one of our unspoken national pastimes going back at least to Manifest Destiny in the 19th century.

But on that note I think "every kind of basic human right" is a bit extreme. We have arguably the strongest free speech protections in the world, people are free to move around as they see fit, we're a pretty great place to start a business as we're a massive single market that speaks the same language with relatively lax regulations and low corruption, our higher education is second to none, and most recently we just allowed gay marriage.

Granted some things need a serious overhaul, but while we get a lot wrong we also get a lot right.

And frankly you'll be hard-pressed to find a government that doesn't try to abuse its people when it's convenient. That just a function of power-hungry people typically being assholes. The difference is the US is the world superpower and we wave the flag a lot, not to mention we're just a massive, diverse country. So our hypocrisy is orders of magnitude greater just by virtue of scale, and then on top of that we're held to a higher standard by everybody else.

If you took the government of, say Norway (or some other government that you feel best respects human rights), gave them the size and diversity of the US, and then scaled them up to World Superpower status and gave them some cultural tweaks to actually be able to maintain that status, I think you'd see just as much hypocrisy.

jMyles• 9 years ago

The prison system in general, and solitary confinement (and other forms of emotional torture) in particular is a good enough reason in my opinion to dismantle the state and start over.

And it's only one of about 4-5 good reasons right now.

Let's do it.

emodendroket2• 9 years ago

...And replace it with what?

zer0tonin2• 9 years ago

Self-managed communes.

anigbrowl11• 9 years ago

Fully automated luxury gay space communism.

jernfrost6• 9 years ago

How about reform? Revolutions have never worked. They just lead to more violence.

I think the problem is that there are too many problems in the US and people focus on too many issues rather than focusing on the underlying issues.

Little can happen until the election system is changed. Hence one needs to vote in politicians who will change it. To make that happen more young people and minorities need to vote. That means whatever you think of prison systems, or anything else, getting more people to vote is number one priority.

What people don't get is that, by merely voting you can make a change even if the choices are shit. If politicians knew lots of young and minorities tended to vote, then the politicians would start attempting to take advantage of that and push issues these groups care about.

TylerE• 9 years ago

Revolutions have never worked

I suspect the French would disagree.

Also, we haven't exactly been paying tea tax to Britain for the last 230-odd years either, for that matter.

anigbrowl11• 9 years ago

I think you'll find that most Americans think one particular revolution worked really well. So do most people who live in countries that gained independence from colonialism, and the French have practically made it a way of life (that's a joke, OK).

Reform and incrementalism are great when there's a broad institutional consensus, but when institutions are widely considered to be corrupt then a rewrite may be better than a refactor. The downsides of revolution are obvious: chaos, violence, unpredictability. But if one honestly accounts for the institutionalized versions in which those conditions are systemically imposed upon unwilling participants, the inevitable conclusion is that social upheaval and a reboot are a price that is sometimes worth paying.

Insofar as enough people feel they have nothing to lose, the economic incentives make it inevitable.

mythrwy2• 9 years ago

There's a bug, throw the old code base all away and start over.

Wait, now we have tons of bugs and it doesn't work at all! How long is it going to take to get working again?

arcticbull3• 9 years ago

Honestly, I find the US prison system absolutely horrifying in all respects. As satisfying as it may be for victims to feel the person that did something to them is 'gone' they will eventually be let out, and when they do I want them to be ready to integrate with society.

Recidivism rates in the US show it is objectively not working, with state prisons leaving inmates to re-offend 76% of the time. [1] In Norway, much derided for their lavish prisons, it's 20%. [2]

Throwing people away and treating them like animals is an abject failure, compounded by the mandatory fill rates in private prison contracts. [3] It's time to revisit the whole system, top down, and make it less about punishment and more about making sure it doesn't happen again. And it should be done with data.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-zoukis/report-docu...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-...

[3] https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/31/report-find...

hellcow3• 9 years ago

You're absolutely right. Looking for a solution here, the central problem with the US prison system seems to be the incentive structure.

Private prisons are paid based on how many inmates they have. Prisons are therefore incentivized to keep people as long as possible, and ensure that if a convict is ever released, that person commits another crime quickly and winds up back in prison.

Instead, what if the state paid prisons a one-time fee for accepting convicts (the amount would vary depending on the type of crime committed), and then penalized the prisons heavily for any recidivism after release?

Prisons would be incentivized to rehabilitate and free the prisoner as quickly as possible (since every additional day in prison costs them money) while minimizing the chance of that prisoner committing another crime when released. You'd see prisons offer education opportunities, vocational training, valuable job programs, relocation to other areas, ongoing therapy, and living conditions befitting a human being to reduce recidivism.

bmmayer12• 9 years ago

Fewer than 10% of prisoners are held in private prisons, so how are private prisons the 'central problem' with the US prison system?

refurb2• 9 years ago

Private prisons are a minuscule percentage of all incarcerated Americans.

lostlogin2• 9 years ago

Instead, what if the state paid prisons a one-time fee for accepting convicts

I might to too cynical but I'm guessing that more prisoners would mysteriously die.

cuckcuckspruce2• 9 years ago

I think you're being a little naive here. If you could wave a magic wand and make it so private prisons got a one-time fee for accepting convicts then I don't think they would invest more in preventing recidivism.

What would likely happen is that private prisons would spend even less on each inmate, doing the accounting to determine how much they have to cut from what they already spend to account for the amount of their fees if a prisoner reoffends. The already ridiculous cost of the prison phone system would skyrocket. Fees assessed to visitors would be increased or added. The cost of items in the commissary would go up. The private prisons would bump fees associated with being released from prison. Private prisons would also take on more forced labor contracts to cover the difference and pay the inmates even less for their time.

Further, you'll see a spike in prosecutions for in-prison crimes, causing a convict to be convicted on a new charge and more money being sent to the private prison to cover the sentencing on the new charge. So you're going to make the indefinite detention problem even worse - before, inmates got to leave. Now they may never get to leave.

In short, this is likely only a viable solution if you can force private prison owners to act morally.

pnathan2• 9 years ago

Private prisons have serious issues, but public ones have issues as well; often they are underfunded, which allowed the private company world to get involved to offer a service for cheaper costs.

I would suggest the solution is properly around the question of the willingness of the US taxpayer to adequately fund the government services.

Clubber• 9 years ago

Private prisons and the incentive for profit is a concern. What is more of a concern, and what leads to much more incarceration is the ambition of prosecutors to rack up convictions, and the embarrassment that is caused if someone discovers a conviction overturned. That's inventive to keep people in prison and don't bother asking if maybe you've got the wrong guy (that's the defense's problem). Also, in many municipalities, the public defenders are very lightly funded, to the degree where one defender works 100 cases at at time. It is in no way a fair trial in any resemblance to what the constitution envisioned.

That's the corruption, that's the stink in the system.

pillowkusis2• 9 years ago

the challenge is that literally nobody is incentivized to make changes to this system.

the situation is really bad for politicians. A politican voting to reform a clearly broken prison system faces tons of risks to their career.

Even one wrong vote for improving the prison system will get you labeled as "soft on crime," a dangerous liability for Democrats and nearly a death sentence for Republicans.

Every change you make will inevitably produce a litany of stories about criminal X who was given "too little" punishment. The media will pick these highly emotional narratives up and the blame will be laid at your feet.

You can gain great political capital by making prisions more harsh (who doesn't like seeing a guilty man get punished?) but expose yourself to a ton of downside risk for trying to go the other way.

Nothing about this situation changes until societal perspectives change or politicians don't have to face downside risk for trying reform.

narrator2• 9 years ago

The politicians know that the media can take one criminal act and magnify it to the most important incident of the decade.

The most prominent example of this was the Polly Klaas murder in California in the early 90s. This one criminal act was magnified to the level of a major terrorist attack and kicked off three strikes and a major prison building and imprisonment boom that lasted two decades. It also led to a wave of "stranger danger" paranoia that ended the era when kids could go outside all by themselves and maybe even ride their bikes around the neighborhood.

Frankly, I blame the media for the whole prison thing. They don't look at statistics and instead blow everything totally out of proportion and make everybody paranoid. Usually there is a paper of record like the NYT or LA times that throws the pitch with some hugely blown out of proportion story and then it gets repeated by the rest of the media and then the politicians hit the pitched story with some ridiculously overreaching and draconian laws. For example there was a recent "Bitcoin kills children" story about kids dying from drugs they bought on the Internet with Bitcoin and voila there's an anti-bitcoin bill pulled out of the desk drawer and put on the agenda by the end of the week.

erikpukinskis4• 9 years ago

A politican voting to reform a clearly broken prison system faces tons of risks to their career.

Can you say more about this? It sounds like you think that's normal in your community, to think that way. That's not how I hear the people around me talking about prison. I think most of us would support a candidate who talked about rehabilitation.

I worry that by trotting out this old meme as if it were an permanent fixture of our political system that you are actually strengthening it.

FnuGk• 9 years ago

What is wrong with being "soft on crime"?

being though on crime clearly does not work

jonnathanson• 9 years ago

This is why we have the Fourth Estate. Politicians won't vote to reform our prison system until that system's flaws and abuses and inefficiencies are made into a big public issue. We need more reporters and more columnists publishing more stories about this topic.

This is a civil rights issue, and it should be written about as such.

weirdkid• 9 years ago

Willie Horton was used in this way to have an incredible negative impact on the Dukakis campaign in 1998. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton

merpnderp2• 9 years ago

Oklahoma just passed a ballet referendum to scale back punishments for drug related and petty crimes. The state legislature has basically overruled a clear majority of the vote at the behest of the public unions who are deeply invested in maintaining the jobs of their members and damn the cost in ruined lives.

BigJono• 9 years ago

The solution is to push through the correct solution by playing the exact same game. Politicians interested in reform are for the most part far too quiet. Every time there is a violent crime committed by an ex-convict they need to use that politically to absolutely slam the criminal justice system until something is done. "Tough on the crime system" is just as good as "Tough on crime" if you're loud and obnoxious enough whenever a camera is put in your face.

spiderfarmer• 9 years ago

Add that to the long list of things that needed an overhaul in the US. Education, healthcare, minimum wage, the war on drugs, gun control. All things with that contribute to the enormous prison population in the US that are in dire need of an overhaul. But it will probably never happen because of widespread corruption and anti-intellectualism.

RubenSandwich2• 9 years ago

You should add hubris to your list of 'why it won't happen'. America is very proud and very rarely in my life have I seen a proud person admit to wrong, much less change their behavior.

fencepost• 9 years ago

Recidivism rates in the US show it is objectively not working, with state prisons leaving inmates to re-offend 76% of the time.

The problem is that you're assuming that low recidivism rates are an actual goal of the US system as it stands. Look at actions, outcomes and actual effects of policies, not at the claims written by PR departments.

It's like voter ID laws in many states - the claim is that they're to prevent fraudulent voting, but they're very poor at addressing the kinds of voting fraud that actually occur. Further, if there's such a big problem with in person voting fraud does that mean that elections staff and prosecutors are completely incompetent since they're apparently unable to find and prosecute enough cases to be even a statistical ripple?

skookumchuck• 9 years ago

Punishment of criminals does nothing to help the victims. The justice system should be about:

1. restitution (where possible)

2. removal of criminals from society so they cannot continue to harm others

3. re-integration of such people back into society when they are no longer a threat

CrowCrowCrow• 9 years ago

As a counter to your opening point - it certainly helped me. It made me feel safer and I had a sense of justice. Not saying it's the same for everyone or that it's necessarily a good thing but the punishment of the person committing the act helped me to move on.

jernfrost6• 9 years ago

I am Norwegian, so I thought I'd add a few points, which I think greatly influence the difference.

1) Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge. In Norway it is a 3 year college education, where you learn about mental illness, why people become criminals, how to rehabilitate people etc. The prison guard job in Norway, is by American standards more like a social worker. Guards spend a lot of time doing activities with inmates. They are not simply there hit misbehaving inmates.

2) The criminal justice system is largely under professional control. We don't elect sheriffs, judges etc like in the US. So there is less opportunity for populist "though on crime" politics to win through. Policies are mainly driven by professionals in the field.

3) Norwegian culture isn't as hung up on good and evil as American culture. I guess that is partly because religion has little importance in Norway. Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. The world "evil" almost never surface in any discussion. It isn't just the justice system, but Norwegians themselves aren't very interested in revenge. E.g. I've never heard a single survivor from the Utøya massacre express a desire for revenge.

I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality.

Toenex• 9 years ago

The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil.

What an interesting point.

vivekd• 9 years ago

Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil.

What? Why do people say stuff like this? The Norse myths were from a millennium ago, no one has believed in them for almost a thousand years. Maybe Norway is largely atheistic now but for the majority of its recent history it was a Lutheran nation and before that the nation had a Catholic tradition dating back to 900 A.D.

Even today Christianity is Norway`s biggest religion, enjoys regular church attendance of a quarter of its population, and has half of the population declaring they believe in a Christian, not Norse, conception of God.

Clearly Christianity has some influence on Norwegian thinking.

planteen• 9 years ago

Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that.

It's interesting you say that. My only exposure to sagas was from reading Beowulf in school, which is a canonical example for the theme of "good vs. evil".

callmeed• 9 years ago

Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge

First off, this varies by state. Second, a few weeks might be an exaggeration for most states. In California at least the academy is 12 weeks long and that comes after application screening, written & physical exams, background/psych checks, and interviews.

wolfhumble• 9 years ago

I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality.

Or maybe it really sprung out of the Christian influence that came after the Viking culture, with teachings like: "Love your enemies" [Matthew 5:44 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A44&...]?

timwaagh• 9 years ago

yet the norwegian prison system also has its problems. especially with regards to its 'hotel prisons' being antisocial and isolating compared to other kinds of prisons. this article is on solitary confinement. norwegians have something to learn here as well.

rhino3694• 9 years ago

Recidivism rates in the US show it is objectively not working, with state prisons leaving inmates to re-offend 76% of the time. [1] In Norway, much derided for their lavish prisons, it's 20%. [2]

You can spin this and say that American criminals need to be locked up because they just cause more crime in general.

Some see that 76% figure and conclude prison makes them worse.

Others see it and think, well these are the bad apples, keep them locked up.

arcticbull3• 9 years ago

I'll give you this is a correlation-causation situation. That said, I see little reason to believe that intrinsic to being American is that 1% of the population should be in prison and of them 75% will have another go at it, when both these numbers dwarf the rest of the developed world.

TallGuyShort• 9 years ago

> As satisfying as it may be for victims

There are other reasons to reform the prison system too, but we as a people really need to work on this one. I know a few people who have been wronged in a big way. One of them (perhaps the most wronged - lost a child to a repeat DUI offender) publicly forgave the offender and didn't even show up to see him be sentenced. They're the only ones that seem to have been able to move on in any meaningful way. The others talk about nothing but what happened to them and were seriously depressed for a long time, even when they were long past the direct consequences of what happened. We all need to be willing to let things go a little more - for everyone's good.

Florin_Andrei• 9 years ago

mandatory fill rates in private prison contracts

One day people will look back at this and go "they did WHAT?"

The age of savagery.

rrobukef• 9 years ago

That day has come and gone. What will we do about it?

BlackjackCF• 9 years ago

Something's rotten when you have for-profit prisons: https://www.aclu.org/banking-bondage-private-prisons-and-mas....

merpnderp2• 9 years ago

It isn't the for profit prisons doing things like rolling back Oklahoma's ballet referendum to ease up on crime or keeping California from even considering it. It's public unions lobbying to keep their jobs.

DavidFlint• 9 years ago

Prisons (especially private ones) should be getting a huge incentive for prisoners that do not come back like 3-5 years delayed grant or something.

This might have resolved a lot of issues with the current system.

nthcolumn• 9 years ago

Where is this North Korea? This isn't about crime. He was a political prisoner.

ciconia• 9 years ago

It's time to revisit the whole system, top down, and make it less about punishment and more about making sure it doesn't happen again. And it should be done with data.

I think the current system is actually less about punishment and more about oppression of certain social classes, namely non-whites and lower-class whites. It is a means of controlling social undesirables.

goodcanadian• 9 years ago

Maybe I looked crazy walking back and forth like some trapped animal . . .

If you see an animal pacing back and forth in a cage, it is generally considered neurotic behaviour and a sign that the cage/enclosure is too small. My point being that it probably did make him slightly crazy and that solitary confinement is psychological torture.

vorotato• 9 years ago

It doesn't make you slightly crazy, people hallucinate in there and they don't come back out the same.

hammock• 9 years ago

Maybe beside the point, but captivity is not the same as solitary and that is an important distinction.

gallerdude2• 9 years ago

Maybe I shouldn't post this online, but this is one of my biggest fears. Just, being trapped somewhere, alone with your thoughts, with nothing to do.

After reading The Jaunt by Stephen King, I was on edge for a day or two afterwards.

WWKong• 9 years ago

I fear my mind the most in a situation where it has got nothing to do.

adrice7272• 9 years ago

I think a lot of people feel this way, but under the right circumstances (i.e. a meditation retreat) and with enough practice, you'll have access to states of deeply profound peace beyond anything you imagined possible.

md224• 9 years ago

The Jaunt by Stephen King

God, that story. Such a simple plot, and yet the existential terror of what it describes is beyond comprehension.

jakebasile• 9 years ago

You are not alone. Just reading the title turned my stomach. The thought of spending that long alone makes me think of ways I could kill myself without any tools just to be free of the torture.

yourapostasy• 9 years ago

After reading The Jaunt by Stephen King, I was on edge for a day or two afterwards.

The story has been optioned [1], will be interesting if it does come out as a feature film.

What would be really interesting is if it is used as a platform for different storytelling angles. Instead of coming out insane, someone comes out, Anathem-1,000-Apert-avout-like, with incanting-like powers from meditating for so long. The Buddhists would get a kick out of that; imagine being able to meditate without physical need for far longer than the 10,000 year increments so popular in Buddhist stories. Then put in savage plot twists: the venerated Buddhist sage is sent through and comes out blubbering insane, but an affable Cajun-drawling redneck scientist goes through and comes out with telekinetic and world tracking powers.

[1] http://io9.gizmodo.com/stephen-kings-teleportation-tale-the-...

detritus• 9 years ago

Ooh, I'll have to read this - thanks for the pointer.

When I was a much younger human I took quite a lot of drugs like mushrooms and MDMA. Toward the end of one such session I found myself in my kitchen, staring into the dark space behind the window and was struck with a realisation of what Hell would be, should it exist. Not spewing fields of lava and endless pains of torture, rather unending consciousness with no inputs or outputs. I imagined black (although that would technically be an input - I am unable to imagine literally nothing!) but just as easily, an infinite field of white would be as horrifically terrifying.

mallaidh4• 9 years ago

A note: Herman Wallace was released on October 1, 2013 because of advanced liver cancer. The state reindicted him on October 3, but he died the next day a free man. Albert Woodfox was released in February 2016. The Angola 3 were held in solitary confinement for more than 100 years combined, with Woodfox's 43 years of solitary being the longest of any American prisoner.

coldtea8• 9 years ago

Anything beyond a few weeks or a month in solitary confinement should be illegal and punishable by law the same as torture.

And with no loopholes for joining many smaller stays to a long big stay.

mallaidh4• 9 years ago

Even a week is too long, the effects on the brain can be measured by EEG within a few days, specifically a state of stupor and delirium. The psychological effects are dangerous and permanent.

komali2• 9 years ago

Solitary confinement is not an effective method of societal reintegration. I'm not sure why it's implemented at all.

giarc• 9 years ago

43 years. I wonder if he has been asked whether he would prefer death.

opo• 9 years ago

For some more background, Frontline did an episode on solitary confinement:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/solitary-nation/

And if you think solitary confinement is a nightmare, how about putting 2 people in a solitary confinement cell?

"Imagine living in a cell that's smaller than a parking space — with a homicidal roommate."

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/03/24/the-deadly-con...

MrZongle24• 9 years ago

I know, right? Worst. Country. Ever. /s

grasshopperpurp3• 9 years ago

Best. Response. Ever. /s

MrZongle24• 9 years ago

It seemed appropriate, given the inanity of the parent comment.

The United States: a human-rights-abusing farce of a country that is such a hellhole that over a million people from other countries legally immigrate to it every year, half that number are estimated to illegally immigrate to it annually, and the country's judicial system takes a stance to prevent its President from stemming the tide of inbound visitors and prospective residents.

It must be a horrible place.

erikpukinskis4• 9 years ago

That's a straw man argument. No one claimed it was the worst country ever.

MrZongle24• 9 years ago

A country that would, and I quote, "...blatantly violate every kind of basic human right" doesn't sound particularly nice, does it?

Every kind of basic human right? I guess we're tied with North Korea, then? If that's the United States, who's worse?

sctb• 9 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14562278 and marked it off-topic.

BowBun• 9 years ago

The prison system is a crazy, privatized torture system designed to keep the poor incarcerated to increase profits for all the contract work related to running the prison system.

Rikers is a great example of a clearly flawed jail system, with inmates getting stuck for years without trial and sometimes killing themselves after losing hope.

Having recently gone through the judicial system as a white male, I can't image being a black man going through the same thing. I was able to buy my freedom, buy excuses, buy a lawyer to get me out of everything. When an oppressed people who already starts out behind falls into the same trap, there's little left for them to do.

Interesting read: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/nyregion/rikers-island-pr...

mod• 9 years ago

You said you can't imagine being a black man going through the judicial system, and then pointed at your wealth as the source of your "win," rather than your race.

heyoni• 9 years ago

Race and wealth are typically intertwined in the form of varying levels of opportunity.

Hydraulix989• 9 years ago

I interpreted the word "buy" more in the sense of social capital.

anigbrowl11• 9 years ago

Sentences are grouped together in paragraphs because of their contextual relationship. Evaluating them as independent statements is a scope error.

nether• 9 years ago

This is the worst of racism. The next time a white HNer tells PoC to just turn the other cheek toward racist words, point them to this. Racist attitudes are what enable horrific crimes against blacks, such as these.

randyrand• 9 years ago

Anyone can be put into solitary confinement.

grasshopperpurp3• 9 years ago

Anyone COULD be lynched in the 1950s. See your problem?

Prisons systems and welfare programs exist the way they do in the US mostly because of racism. If we were a country that all looked similar, we wouldn't be able to see our fellow humans treated this way. But, when it's someone that doesn't look like me? Sure, they look dangerous. Lock them up. Or, sure, they look lazy. Don't give them 'free stuff.'

jernfrost6• 9 years ago

But that is exactly what is needed, more enlightenment with real stories like this. People aren't going to realize racism is a real problem if you just scream racist to them. I am white and used to think anti-racists were a bunch of idiots. Only by seeing the prevalence of racism in social media did I start realizing racism was a bigger problem than I had imagined. Reading "Gang leader for a day", was a major eye opener. I think I partly got into that because of the TV series the Wire and the book Freakonomics, which covered the economics and social structure of drug gangs.

But this requires some curiosity and interest in learning which biggest and racists might not have. And frankly it is hard to change people's mind when you are calling them names. People tend not to listen to people they don't like.

We also have to accept that racism goes both ways, it is just that white racism has much more severe consequences for black than the other way around. But I believe it helps maintain white racism to some degree.

I am not American, so I can comment on this as an outsider, and I can very clearly see that many American blacks have a big issue with whites. It is hard to win over whites if they only have bad experiences with blacks and also see no point in educating themselves on the issue.

I am not passing out blame. I am just saying, everybody can contribute to making racism a thing of the past. The ones who have to do the most are whites.

metasean2• 9 years ago

I grew up with a sociologist as a mother, which means I grew up being taught a lot these systemic bias indicators. Having tried to explain the systemic nature of racism was certainly much more of a challenge before social media!

I'd also highly recommend everyone take an Implicit Bias test or two - https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html Your results might surprise you.

okreallywtf• 9 years ago

This is why the of the alt-right and mens-rights and conservative christians fucking terrify me. Somehow, while making slow steady progress a seemingly large swath of people have gotten the idea that things are exactly backwards. As far as they are concerned, whites, males and Christians are under attack and are now lashing out at minorities, women, and non-Christians as if they are "turning the tide" rather than continuing centuries old conflicts.

Every time I read someone talk about a SJW (social justice warrior) somewhere I cringe thinking about what my country will be like in 10 years if not sooner. People seriously think SJWs and political correctness are our actual problems as if things are fine otherwise.

There are a lot of good people here but there are a lot of people with no empathy and little knowledge and then about 200 million people who just do not care as long as the power and internet stay on and they are left alone.

anigbrowl11• 9 years ago

gmail me

InfiniteBeing• 9 years ago

What do you consider to be mens-rights?

whiddershins• 9 years ago

Is it reasonable to entertain the hypothesis that perhaps the focus on addressing word choice and speech patterns drains energy from combatting real abuses from the legal system?

Wouldn't most minorities prefer to live in a world where people often say insensitive or prejudiced things, but the legal system does not enact violence against them based on their minority status?

Have we conclusively proved that altering speech patterns and day to day expressions of opinion changes the likelihood of state violence against a particular group?

I intuitively feel that a tremendous amount of consciousness raising has happened during my lifetime, but the vicious prison sentences haven't changed much. The massive inequity in legal outcomes continues to be a topic of discussion in the press, and I know people who work for The Innocence Project who feel things are better, but not nearly better enough.

I am concerned that we might be engaged in placebo-like or symptom treating behavior, while the underlying disease goes unaddressed.

bobsgame• 9 years ago

Someone who made millions from Bitcoin or some nonsense please give this guy a million dollars. There needs to be some secret fund for people like this. It's obviously not a fair reparation but it's something.

jernfrost6• 9 years ago

I really shouldn't be reading stuff like this. It makes me so angry. It is odd that so many conservative Americans think racism isn't a thing. Blacks are dismissed as violent thugs, who are the fault of their own problems. But who had acted peaceful and well adjusted if they were subject to as much oppression, prejudice and brutality as the blacks of the US?

People are products of their environments just like animals. A mistreated animal is also bad behaved and violent.

adekok2• 9 years ago

Blacks are dismissed as violent thugs, who are the fault of their own problems.

Black men are dismissed... as are most men, TBH.

The incidence of incarceration goes: black men, white men, black women, white women.

Also, rich tends to beat poor, even considering race. e.g. O.J. Simpson.

https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_g...

Men tend to get 63% larger sentences than women. And that difference is larger than the difference between races.

kerbalspacepro• 9 years ago

Do men commit more crimes than women?

iagooar• 9 years ago

To some extent, solitary confinement is way, way worse than death sentence. It is burying people alive. It's a miracle a person can survive for so long and walk out of it in one piece. I imagine the psychological scars must be pretty profound...

pmoriarty2• 9 years ago

29 years in solitary confinement? What did this guy do, infringe copyright?

thrownawaybylaw• 9 years ago

I did 45 days in solitary within the context of a longer bid. It was hell. Given the effects it has had on my mind and life, I cannot imagine what 29 years will do. It changes the way you behave so subtly, it's even interesting to me now. My friends think it's hilarious how casually I talk to myself. I live a pretty isolated life; I feel more comfortable that way.

Where I was, there was no outside fenced area for the hour mandated rec time. It was a 6'Lx3'Wx6'H fenced dog cage. At least there was a large open window to the outside to look at from the other side of the room.

You're also mandated an occasional hour at the "Law Library", which was really just a single computer with LexisNexis and Microsoft Office in an otherwise empty 4'x6' room. That VB class I had taken really came in handy.

I learned to make some reasonable dice out of toilet paper. Too. Much. Yahtzee.

In the case of the man in the article, his case was overturned. Hopefully, he won't have a criminal record. Getting a job today with a criminal record is incredibly difficult. That's the biggest reason why recidivism is high [x]. It's great that there's a push to "ban the box" (that is, to not ask about criminal history in job applications), but it hasn't made it to all the states. Furthermore, many companies blanketly don't hire felons[x] regardless of the context of the crimes and/or rehabilitation of the individual. Background checks aren't a fair process in their review. Good-bye any real life.

[x] I'm sure somebody is going to argue that the bigger deal is a lack of quality mental health or addiction services provided to inmates and the dearth of such programs prior to conviction, and they'd be right too.

eevilspock• 9 years ago

My sadness is we all read this, feel sad, and move on with our comfortable lives.

That we are powerless is bullshit.

dandare• 9 years ago

I don't think my American friends understand how the civilized world looks at US.

cholik• 9 years ago

I spent 29 years in solitaire

oriettaxx• 9 years ago

and there is even worst: here exceptional testimony of Madagascar's thirty years imprisonment in a recent very book (french only, unfortunately) I suggest

http://www.plon.fr/ouvrage/la-sentinelle-de-fer/978225924354...

I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

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