I assumed he was saying that adding video chat and books is better than current solitary confinement isolation, and I thought, “yeah, of course. Seems odd someone would feel the need to point that out, but alrighty!”

But…I guess he probably means we should replace every prison experience with forced isolation with books and Skype, and it will be a compassionate net-positive.

Aren’t hunter gatherer societies still pretty social? I sure do wish I had a divide by zero iq so I could comprehend whatever evopsych principle this follows.

The Warren Court gave criminal defendants a lot more formal rights, but it seems to me that in many ways we had a more enlightened policy towards criminals in the 1950s than we do today.

we also had much, much less crime to begin with in the 1950s. there was a real shift in criminal subcultures in the 70s and 80s as prisons started filling up as a result of the crime wave and war on drugs.

i read a book about this recently (dl) that i thought was totally fascinating. the gist of it is, as the prisons exploded, the guards lost their ability to govern, along with the older norm-based informal power structures among prisoners. prison culture prior to the 1970s was oriented around small groups and a general seniority hierarchy, where bad behavior might be punished by shunning or a beating by the people you sat with. there was an influx in young prisoners that flouted the old rules, and the chaos resulted in the rise of what we’re familiar with – race-based gangs that extracted compliance through extreme violence. eventually they figured out that by controlling what happened when petty criminals inevitably arrived in county, they could exert power on the outside by threatening inexorable violence. with the unprecedented availability of illegal drugs, the new power structures became economically self-sustaining as well, with a business model that seems impossibly difficult to quash.

how do you undo all of this? the present situation is the result of an arms race – the criminal justice system became harsher, so the worst of the criminal underclass became more sophisticated and extreme, more willing to spend their entire lives in prison orchestrating business and politics. if you legalize drugs, they’ll monopolize whatever other illegal activity generates money, or at the least extract rents in prisons. good luck “focusing on rehabilitation” for the class of hardcore gangbangers whose identities are centered on sociopathic dominance, who are already embedded in networks of the like-minded. it’s like trying to end a war by saying time out – well okay, but the other army is still over there holding their guns.

I…

How do you think people declare the cease of hostilities?

I’d rather spend 20 years in a closet than 10 years trying to navigate petty asshole politics with the threat of being raped or stabbed if I don’t do it properly.

Most people would probably agree, since the main “threat” of prison leveled at people outside is that you’ll be dealing with the Hell of other inmates.