JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons(about.jstor.org) |
JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons(about.jstor.org) |
[1] https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/prison...
Do you have a good explanation for this? I haven't though about prisoner rights much. The obvious layman view of this is "the whole prison thing is about restricting access to resources"
I think "reasonable"[1] access to communication & informational resources is a sensible bedrock upon which to guarantee that people who've done wrong and completed their proper punishment can spend their time and energy preparing to lead a more productive life after they are free.
[1] What this word means always causes a fight but at least we're talking about it.
In the US, I believe the overwhelming preference of the public (the "obvious layman view") is that prison should be punitive. Other cultures seem to find success with more rehabilitation-focused approaches.
This then means that the government has to go to third parties and contract with them to provide those goods and charge the people using them.
For example, an ankle monitor - the state can't provide it and give it to the person for supervision and so the third parties who make them have a captive customer base - both the state and the individual.
When looking at items inside prisons, there are special requirements for them. They need to be transparent so that contraband can't be hidden in them. There are a number of other requirements for it too. It must run on batteries that can be purchased. This creases a very small market which in turn results in higher individual prices.
It is a complex topic that from one side or the other can appear to be clear cut - but the boundary between those sides is incidentally complex that results in a market that has prices much beyond what would be considered to be reasonable ... but the alternative is even more expensive or restrictive.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-one-of-the-l...
Sure, you need to keep someone who murders people away from the general population. That purpose of prison is restriction.
However, you have way more people in "prison" for things like drug possession. The purpose of prison in that case should be rehabilitation. You can help people kick their drug problem as well as gain education that they likely missed for various reasons. "Restricting" these people's access to resources is counterproductive.
The problem is that people in the US have forgotten that the purpose of incarceration should be about "paying your debt to society" and that afterward you should be reintegrated.
It's also an issue that people in the US seem to believe that prison has a deterrent effect. By and large, it does not (white collar crime being the exception--but we never hear about increasing the penalties for executives). People who are committing crime are not going to be deterred by small adjustments to prison sentences. They know that going to prison is a risk and are doing it anyway.
Some argue that prisoners do not enjoy access to any constitutional rights, or perhaps only a few of them. But if this were true, surely the Constitution would have explicitly established them as a specific underclass, as it did for slaves.
Some want prison to be a hard punishing experience and are fine with low quality of life and forced labor, because they believe that this sort of punishment will make criminals regret doing crime, and discourage future people from doing crime. This is the same logic that leads to supporting the death penalty (deterrence).
Others want more of a Nordic model, where prisoners are given essentially a basic but relatively-well-appointed studio apartment, good food, activities, etc - but also with a lot of mandatory therapy and "social rehab" classes and stuff like that, in order to reform prisoners back to model citizens.
Really what it comes down to is what we believe is the source of crime. Are criminals regular people who made a bad choice (and thus the source of the decision can be found and rectified)? Or are they a different kind of person more likely to do crimes (and thus must be locked away from society without bothering to try and "rehab" them)?
Like anything it is an incredibly complex and nuanced problem. But personally I think we should all agree that if the State is going to maintain the power to lock people up, we shouldn't allow doing so to become a profit center.
Access to a tablet and messaging outside the prison is hardly a "basic resource" and it's likely an avenue for exploit.
Should we treat prisoners like humans? Sure. Should they be comfortable? Not so much.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90249550/can-screen-time-replace...
Studies have shown that continued contact with family and friends while incarcerated increases the chances of having a support network upon release.
I regularly message about a dozen people in prison on a daily basis and 95% of my communications is help with finding housing, finding jobs, education, and legal information to help fix issues with their criminal case.
I was in for 10 years myself, and I can tell you the last month where I finally had a tablet was the most productive of my time inside. The number of connections I made that helped me when I got out was life-changing.
p.s. these tablets are generally super-cheap Ali Express style junk with literally the worst software you've ever seen. Imagine going on UpWork and saying "I need some messaging software for Android. No bug fixes or support required. Just has to take $$ and occasionally work. Willing to pay US$40 for the app." -- that's probably how the thing got made. Some first time coder followed a YouTube tutorial and then deployed it to a million devices.
And not that, they're publicly traded corporations who have to meet Wall Street's profit expectations. Sickening, if you think about it.
Why prisoners, in particular? As you say, they don't exactly have easy access to online resources to begin with.
They might as well offer free pap smears to incarcerated men. They won't take advantage of the offer, but you sure look philanthropic as you pocket the grant money that funds this initiative. In a few years you can shut it down, citing lack of use.
And jstor being opaque as it is, it is the perfect recipe for zero discoverability.
I understand the struggle here. I was interviewing at that company at one point, and it was difficult to do research on them and the Jstor platform for the reasons you listed.
I think they started doing this during the pandemic.
The personal account allows you to read up to 100 articles online every 30 days. "Online" means you can't download the article as a PDF, for instance. It's cumbersome to have to read stuff online only, but better than nothing.
University accounts are nicer, since you can download articles and read offline. On the other hand, most schools won't carry all the journals that JSTOR holds.
I really, really miss sci-hub and being able to read research papers. Before sci-hub there were a handful of forums for requesting and fulfilling full text papers. But those forums basically died because sci-hub was so easy and useful. And now that sci-hub is dead there's nothing.
It is probably a good idea to first check to see if there are any such libraries in your area that offer such success before turning to prison.
If this is in the realm of "unimaginable goals" for them, then public access to science is infinitesimally unlikely. What a joke of an organization.
The main complaint and cost for prisoners as I understand it is the high cost of calling family members. Where most people might not even remember pay phones, if you do at their peak it was $0.35 to make a call, versus $6-24 for 15 minutes in prison [2].
When you factor in that most prisoners, that can even find a job in prison, make around $0.10/hr and most of their friends and family members are struggling on the outside bc they are just poor or at least one of the bread winners is now making $0.10/hr, that $15/call is very expensive. And even those that run the prison systems will tell you the number one thing to keeping a prisoner calm is regular communication with their family and friends [1]. It also costs $0.35 to send an email, while the two companies that run the telecoms for the prisons in the US raked in $1.4B [3]
Sorry my rant wasn't aimed at you, just wanted to clarify the part about batteries.
[1] https://www.vera.org/news/prisons-and-jails-keep-making-it-h...
[2] https://ellabakercenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Who-P...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/high-cost-prison-communicati...
By choice. Nothing in our Constitution bans this.
Are you allowed batteries in your cell if you're in your cell for battery? (sorry for the potential to polarise the discussion)
And your academic "record" only matters if you plan on getting additional advanced degrees in the future. If you have a degree or two already you lose nothing by having a half-dozen Fs from community college classes a decade later.
Pricing for academic materials is nonsensical, but you can usually find a way to get free or cheap access as an individual learner if you go through libraries.
> 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.
In fact, to the extent that there's a distinction, it's that amendments take priority over the previous version of the document. Obviously they'd have to; otherwise that would just mean you can't amend the original document.
According to the current version of the US constitution, which is the only one that matters, slavery is legal in exactly that one circumstance.
http://standard-template-construct.org/ just errors out with 422 unprocessable content. I assume the ipfs proxies are blocking it or the like. So... do I have to run a local IPFS client to access STC? I guess I'll try.
And to your post-prison future point, maladaptive.
Discharging someone at the end of their sentence with (a) family and social connections strained or severed, (b) depleted financial resources, & (c) a barrier to jobs in many states... does not sound like a mix that reduces recidivism.
Instead, reasoning backwards from a complete, well-adjusted person at discharge time, and figuring out what the prison needs to provide to an inmate during their incarceration to end up that person, and then funding it as needed without any prisoners-need-to-pay-for-themselves BS, makes more sense.
That said, I do think there should very much be tiering of prisons. There are some irredeemably fucked up individuals, who have burned through multiple chances, and one of the worst things we could do to people interested in getting their life back on track is mix them in with those people.
> I do think there should very much be tiering of prisons. There are some irredeemably fucked up individuals, who have burned through multiple chances
I both know what you mean and think it's important to consider the current unacceptable state of prisons (which isn't exactly new) when thinking about people using up "multiple" chances. I don't have easy answers at all but part of this is how easy it is to write people off based on an incomplete understanding of their situation.
So human sortings will never be 100% fair and correct.
But there's also a vast range to how people conduct themselves in the world and their moral codes.
I think it at least behooves us to consider that the greatest threat to rehabilitation of some inmates might be... other inmates.
How much is profit versus heightened cost, e.g. monitoring?
It is known that a high percentage of fees are paid back to the prison the calls originate from [0], and that offering to return a higher percentage is one way these companies win exclusive contracts with prisons.
So color me suspicious that a profit source for prisons is being run at the most efficient and lowest possible cost to inmates...
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmate_telephone_system#Serv...
"There are five main underlying justifications of criminal punishment considered briefly here: retribution; incapacitation; deterrence; rehabilitation and reparation" [1].
Deterrence and retribution are the punitive elements. To my knowledge, no model that excludes any one element works.
> Other cultures seem to find success with more rehabilitation-focused approaches
The problem is we're in the middle. Not as harsh as Middle Eastern and Asian models. (Counterfactual: Latin America.) Not as rehabilitative as the Nordic models. (Counterfactual: Europe.) We're good at incapacitating criminals.
[1] https://www.unodc.org/e4j/en/crime-prevention-criminal-justi...
this success is measureable. Outcomes in terms of overall recidivism, and in total societal cost, just as in the case of universal health care, so great as to make the American disposition appear not just irrational but willfully counterproductive.
This country in its current formulation appears incapable of ever escaping the gravity of feverish Christian moralizing and the correlated vicious contempt for objective truth and measurable outcome.
The two we are missing here are deterrence and incapacitation [0].
One of the reasons for putting people in jail is so that they won't be able to continue offending, in other words to "protect the public".
Another is to stop people offending in the first place.
A couple of modern problems come to mind. A society that lives in fear of crime and is low on forgiveness wants to lock 'em up forever and throw away the key. There is no concept of time having been served. This also goes against the grain of a "for profit" prison system by disincentivising rehabilitation.
In a society with rampant poverty and poor healthcare the deterrence part breaks down. People would rather get into prison than die of cold and hunger on the streets. In response, prisons must become ever more brutal to stop that.
Therefore a high trust, low poverty society has less incarcerated persons independent of "objective criminality".
[0] https://www.bsslawllc.com/blog/2021/12/the-four-pillars-of-s...
(fwiw: I'm very much in the rehabilitation camp)
One could argue that deterrence should be a major factor just because of demographics of US prison system. For example look at Singapore/Indonesia/Philippines and how they solved drug trafficking problem.
US for sure could learn a lot from Singapore
Rehabilitation already exists for minor crimes and first-time offenders, but the people who end up in actually prison are wayyy past any rehabilitation, its not their first rodeo
I realise that Christianity in the USA _means_ (to the average American) something almost unrecognisable to me as an Englishman. But if we're talking about punitive prison systems don't you think that's a little harsh considering a central tenet is the forgiveness of sins.
On the contrary, it sounds like Christian morality would be helpful here; the Bible is pretty pointed about loving everyone (including enemies), forgiveness, and, y'know, specifically helping prisoners[0].
[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2025%3A...
If it's a black box, nobody can fan outrage that it's not doing {insert moral but maladaptive thing}.
I've never been big into hard drugs and I don't even really drink these days, but I still recognize that such laws are an affront to my own personal freedom and a blight on the goal of law and order.
What will be court sentence for someone who stabbed 112,000 people? this is plain genocide, that US progressive liberals somehow allow to happen as "harm reduction" - while in fact it is harm increasing by spreading out everywhere
Do you believe that people with different cultures/races cannot agree on a system of fair laws?
Problem is US - smart people dont go into politics, smart people self-select into high paying industries like tech or high frequency trading, and the local city/state politicians are mostly liberal arts types, who are not familiar with STEM or are plain ideologues with their own agenda.
what is lacking in the US is political will to solve problem and too many decentralized decision makers who are not on the same page.
District attorney may be prosecuting criminal, but then judge just lets him loose back on the streets - like what happens to hondos in San Fransicko
Even if you believe 100% that the criminal justice system should be punitive, and the conditions should be unpleasant, the system still has to protect the physical safety of inmates from violence/harm that's outside the scope of the official punishment.
But it's manifestly unable to do that -- there's constant violence in jails and prisons, and medical care is often incompetent or denied even when badly needed.
Many other cases like this for whatever purported goal is supposed to be achieved. There's no way to rationalize the way the US system currently works, it just kind of shambles on.
I'm not a prison abolitionist in a philosophical sense either, I think there should be a state and that sometimes a state may have to incarcerate people. But as unreasonable and unrealistic as the prison abolitionist movement can be, their emotional orientation towards the US criminal justice system actually seems closer to reality.
Or if you're trying to imply that every person remotely related to the drug market is jointly and severely responsible for every person who dies using fentanyl, that is so far from the American conception of individual freedom and personal responsibility I don't know that there is common ground to be had.
Also as far as I can tell, very few people are setting out to deliberately do fentanyl itself. So that would point to the problem being the complete lack of otherwise standard product regulation, which also stems from prohibition.
Maybe don't be so quick to assume you know where the harm is coming from and how it is spreading.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/opioid-manufacturer-purdue-ph...
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/men-wom...
and get hundreds of millions from state budget for their "nonprofits".
meanwhile Singapore, China, Philippines, Indonesia actually try to solve the problem, that include tackling the traffic and dealers + harsh sentences + they abolish the culture of drug usage