I generally like being alone in my room. My desk, tv, and bed are within 10 feet of each other. And I have never really put anything on my walls. Just white walls, desk, bed, and tv. I have been in a basement for the last 18 months and I have been upstairs for about 5 minutes today. I have a bathroom and fridge and microwave down here.
But I have a feeding tube. That is how I ended up down here. We thought it would be the safest place to be while I was going through chemo. For six months while my immune system was garbage I just stayed down here and would only go up to get groceries or go to chemo/radiation. So I always joked that I think I could deal with solitary. I prefer being alone.
All that changed about a month ago.
The balloon on my PEG tube (DDG it) had deflated. And one night I went to change the gauze and while I pulled the gauze out it just started pouring out blood. In a matter of seconds my boxers had blood all over them. I was terrified. This much blood on the outside, how much blood is going into my stomach? Am I going to bleed to death? On the ride to the ER I was feeling faint..
I am getting to the solitary part.
But I saw a nurse right after checking in. And she determined I wasn't bleeding to death. I was going to have a bit of a wait to see a doctor. 4 hours to be exact. But they wanted me out of the ER waiting room due to being on pembro and there had just been a case of C-19 8 hours away.
So I was being walked to a room and she said they were low on places to put me. I was going to be in a "mental health" room. But they got a bed in there for me. White walls, a bed, no problem..
Huge problem!
It is so hard to describe. It was basically a cinder block box and a massive metal door. Everything tucked away so you couldn't kill yourself. And it was so loud since the air had to be pumped in. And I had a bed they wheeled in for me. And the door was open so I could go to the bathroom when I wanted. If that door was closed and I couldn't get out I would have lost my shit. And I nearly lost it anyway. Something about that room was just unlike anything you can imagine. It was like being buried alive.
I would imagine solitary is about a million times worse. I would classify it as torture.
And my feeding tube had slipped between my stomach and the "outside skin" tearing up everything making it bleed. Just shoved it back in and loaded up the balloon with more saline and went home. And then had the tube replaced the next day during normal hours.
It's absolutely cruel and unusual punishment. The American Constitution forbids this. I've only spent three days straight in a county solitary cell for a silly threat to a judge. In that scenario, it was a glass walled cell in the high security block. Every surface is cement, and your only clothes are a Velcro tunic/blanket. Surveillance is continuous. There, the non-compliant were beaten and strapped to a wheelchair for days and not their bed. They also open your cell to let a violent offender "clean your cell for you" on a regular basis. It was awful in a way entirely unto itself in my memory. I can't even begin to imagine the conditions and lengths of time in this article.
> I can't even begin to imagine the conditions and lengths of time in this article.
How about 27 years and counting? [1] That Guardian article was written in 2003 and he's still in there. I can't help thinking there is more that could have been done for him.
You were in solitary confinement but had another offender come in there daily to clean the cell while you were there? I was under the impression that solitary confinement didn’t allow interaction with others.
Why no comments discussing the root cause has the writer reported it: men who should be receiving non-voluntary mental treatment being forced into the prison system due to non-existence of mental facilities.
Historically said mental facilities (mental asylums) were themselves inhuman and barbaric. The out cry against them lead to their closure. Yet if that just drove the prison system to new levels of inhuman and barbarism then that itself a regression.
Do other countries have more successful mental services? I know Japan did not close down their asylums during the same era America did. Are those facilities acceptable?
I live in Japan and I can't tell you about the asylums. What I can tell you is that mental health is a huge stigma, there are plenty of people you'll see in the street or in shops/cafes etc who appear in need of mental help, and there are violent attacks every so often that you probably wouldn't hear about abroad but are again, obviously the work of people who are mentally disturbed.
As I say, I don't know anything about the asylums here but the idea that they could be any good seems incredibly unlikely to me, based on my general experience (and what I've heard from other foreigners here).
It's bigger than Ronny Raygun. The first problem was JFK died before the community-based treatment centers could be funded and realized. Subsequent presidents scaled them back because they didn't understand or couldn't relate to their need. And so, Cook County (encompassing Chicago) jail run one of the largest mental healthcare systems because state, local and federal government has failed to do so.
The ol' finger-pointing, can hacky sack-routine rather than helping the people who can't adequately grasp reality or hold jobs are left to live in tents in the weeds of highway embankments or under bridges. TBH, this seems like something some social-work lawyers should take on to push federally through the courts or with legislation. Worrying about initial sticker-price shouldn't be the focus because of the numerous ancillary costs that are far more expensive than doing the right thing (which is why Cook County jail does what it does).
Your describing 19th century practices. It’s not as if time has been standing still. These days (europe) mental health services are institutions. Often a group of buildings, ranging from very open assisted living to closed for the truly insane.
While there are instances of abuse on rare occasion, it seems to be miles of from the barbarism of the 19th century.
So there is a whole spectrum of classification these days so only who are truly harmful get locked up when necessary.
Unfortunately the US (no doubt others too) prison is the business of punishment. If you are poor you will get a harsher punishment. If nobody is looking you will get a harsher cheaper punishment. Working at a prison requires a certain mindset. Empathy is soon weeded out. What's left is brutality. That's the deal society has made, to hide away the hard problem of solving crime at root cause.
Its not just prison, it's the entire perception of crime and punishment in the US.
Its why convicts cannot vote in elections even when they get released.
Its why they still have the death penalty. And why victims families can watch them being executed. Its eye for an eye, punishment and not forgiveness and rehabilitation. Its much deeper than the quality of life behind bars.
The system is also exceptionally biased (certainly so for a democratic country where ostensibly people are free, equal, and corruption is low) against the lower income layers of the society and based on race, while the top layer of income/influence gets a wildly, ridiculously different experience. [0][1][more]
The US doesn't seem to have a justice and penal system, they have a modern slavery system.
Felons not being able to vote is not universal. It is up to each state to determine whether to allow felons to vote. In recent years restoration of voting rights to felons has been on the rise.
It's obviously torture. If you've ever spent one night in a holding cell/mental health hospital situation you know it's absolutely 100% inhumane. It's only nazis who've never been in that situation who think like "oh well we have to do something with people like that you know". We have to help them, not lock them in a fucking box. It's a heinous crime committed every single day by the state and complicit officials. Should be abolished today.
Eva Zeisel is an important American designer. She also happened to be my next door neighbor. Over dinner, she recounted her 12-months in solitary confinement in Siberia, for having protested against Stalin's regime. She has written a bit about this experience.
She was 97 when I knew of her and even though she was ageing, her faculties were sharp (Extra Pepperoni is the only way to have a Slice, she said).
I asked her what lessons from the Solitary confinement stayed with her. She said "The value of knowing that there was no yesterday and probably there will be no tomorrow. And somehow I need to resist the urge to use, the intentionally left behind blunt knife to cut my veins. And the value of dressing warm".
I cannot even imagine what it must have been. She was some human.
You can measure the health of a society in how they treat the weak and helpless (helpless in this case in regards to prisoners who are at the whim of the prison).
In this regard, America is profoundly sick and defective.
It is of course true, instead of rehabilitating, they are breeding criminals in prison. It's an abomination.
That is really besides the point, because this article is about the third world, or should I say medieval prison system in the USA. That system is a crime against humanity in far too many ways. It is just one of the things many Europeans just don't get why you think it's acceptible. The prison system in the USA is a major cause of crime, not a solution. No civilized country has jailed up anywhere near the percentage of the population as the USA
Agreed. Yet another entrenched, old way of doing things that has been completely debunked using both evidence and common sense among the educated but will require monumental political will to change.
> It is just one of the things many Europeans just don't get why you think it's acceptable.
I definitely agree with your comment. But for the sake of the discussion, I would like to point out that Europe also has prison problems, but at a way lower scale:
- France and Norway prisons have very high suicide rate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6066090/. Though no country is even close with the USA. Citations from the article: "We excluded the USA in one analysis (for incarceration rates) because it was an outlier, with an incarceration rate of more than eight times higher than the majority of other countries." and "Rates of prison suicide compared with rates of incarceration - Data are for men and women combined. USA was not included in this analysis because it is an outlier (appendix p 17)."
Neither is good - what exactly are you trying to raise for discussion here though?
The fact that there are issues in European prisons doesn't change the situation in US ones. You also also say no other country is close - which is just an indirect way of affirming the parent post (that Europeans find the American system hard to understand). They're hardly going to agree and understand with the American prison system if their own is equally as bad?
You're creating a dichotomy that doesn't exist. American prisons are terrible. European prisons also have issues. Both are true and are worth being discussed at large.
The discussion was about one of this those systems. Deflecting attention to criticism of other systems during that discussion is not constructive, and comes across as apologetics.
You're right, they're not a dichotomy - so why bring them up?
Animal rights aren't dichotomous to the problem of the American prison establishment either. They're also irrelevant to the discussion except as a diversionary tactic too
You seem to be reading something in my comment that isn't there. I'm not diverting anything. I explicitly stated that I'm in agreement with tda's comment. tda mentioned the European point of view. As a person from and living in a European country I find it important (or at minimum: interesting) to be aware of our own issues in the domain being discussed.
That's definitely not irrelevant to whatever discussion you feel the need to enforce, if people from the US want to improve fight against their prison system by promoting the European models, they should be aware of its shortcoming. In any case that's worth discussing.
Anyway, I'm not that interested in justifying my previous comments, I don't see why I should have to. So I will stop here. Have a good time for the rest of the day.
1. If you go to prison, innocent or otherwise, you're not getting hired afterward. This leads to desperation, desperation leads to...
2. In prison, you become socially reliant on criminals to simply get by. This results in cultural transference. Someone getting in trouble for shoplifting learns about the joys of [insert more lucrative criminal activity here]. Combine this with point 1 and you get repeat offenders who become 'hardened' criminals. Basically, they get better at crime, because crime involves skills just like everything else in life.
3. Poor prison conditions result in psychological trauma. This, in turn, leads to anti-social behavior.
In short, we pay a lot of money to create better criminals who are highly motivated to commit more crimes.
Recidivism is very high when people get PTSD, no mental health support or any support whatsoever when they are let free after a decade or two. In civilised countries the prison systems main objective is preparing someone for the life after prison. In other countries revenge is the top priority
People go in for minor crimes, get mixed up with gangs with hardened criminals and learn the trade. Once outside they have no opportunities so they become a hardened criminal. The system just sucks.
What does the qualifier "someone like him" mean in this context? Is getting killed by anyone not terrible?
I don't see how getting killed by a former honor-roll student who left an abusive household two years before he was legally allowed to drive, had already been shot, and was left on the streets paranoid, mentally-ill and traumatized before he was even past the age of majority, is any worse than getting killed by just about anyone.
What do you mean “he doesn’t take responsibility”? He’s not saying that he shouldn’t have been to prison, he’s sharing an experience being tortured by the state while purging his prison sentence.
> What do you mean “he doesn’t take responsibility”?
It's probably an issue of poorly chosen words, but compare
> fourteen months later I shot a man and unfortunately caused his death.
with
> fourteen months later, I shot and killed a man.
The way that it's currently written sounds like an accident: "I, a victim of PTSD, shot a man and, in a bizarre twist of events, he died from it". The passive voice there paints a disconnection between the cause and the effect.
Of course, judging a man's life from two sentences is nonsense. It just so happens that those two sentences are very unfortunate. But that's on the editor.
I don't quite see it that way - it reads to me as a very careful choice of words explaining that he shot the person intentionally, but did not intend for him to die. As I understand, this would be the difference between voluntary manslaughter and murder.
At the same time, people are the product of our environment, so ignoring that context would also be foolish. Of course, it's easier to blame a child and sentence him to two decades of prison instead of actually fixing the urban hellholes they grew up in, so we end up with years of solitary confinement and these kind of comments on HN :-/
it's not written in the passive voice though? in that sentence "shot" and "caused" are both active verbs with "I" as the subject. it's a bit more detached than saying "I shot and killed a man", but I don't think it shows a lack of remorse or responsibility. if anything, it emphasizes the regret at the irreversible outcome.
Even if that's completely true, it doesn't detract from the points made in the article. Violating human rights doesn't become acceptable just because someone is a bad person, and the American prison system doesn't become justifiable just because there are bad people there - because they're still people.
Pretty much no one (under normal circumstances) wants to be killed or die. I'm not sure why you even mentioned it?
However, if you'd take those hellish elements away & ensure silence, I think long solitary confinement might work if you teach people how to meditate. That's just not being done enough in prisons right now. See "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkxSyv5R1sg
EDIT: I know this is probably a controversial opinion to non-meditators, but if you're going to downvote, at least provide an argument for why you don't agree.
>I know this is probably a controversial opinion to non-meditators, but if you're going to downvote, at least provide an argument for why you don't agree.
I'm guessing it's the pretense that you can simply teach anyone to meditate whether or not they want to learn. Also, it suggests a system where a form of torture is potentially justified because you shift responsibility to the person being tortured. "They took the class on meditation and signed on the line that they understand how to endure solitary, so their suffering is their own fault!"
> I'm guessing it's the pretense that you can simply teach anyone to meditate whether or not they want to learn
Meditation techniques aren't hard to learn, they're comparable to any form of exercise. The hard bit is in doing them sincerely, just like any form of exercise.
Can you teach someone press-ups? Then you can teach them meditation. You just can't make them do it, or effectively.
As to signing up for solitary for an extended period, I wish I could, but only if it was humane (e.g. no violence, feces flung at me etc), which I'm willing to bet (and the article seems to back up my suspicion) prison solitary isn't.
What you're describing is forcing people to meditate.
The way I understand what you describe:
"We will torture you, you can either have it better by doing this meditation thing _we teach you_ or you can suffer"
The issue here is the torture itself, not the fact that the torture is difficult to deal with.
AFAIK, that's how the US got in this mess to begin with: because people thought that solitary confinement would lead to reflection, prayer, and self-improvement. Suffice to say, this approach has not been very successful.
I think that arguing for meditation to make your stay in jail tolerable is similar to throwing people into the sea and arguing they should learn how to swim - it's focusing on the wrong part of the problem. Extended isolation is torture. Arguing in favor of "making the torture less awful" (the "when life gives you lemons" approach) diverts resources from the actual problem, namely, let's stop torturing people.
Obviously, because they indeed torture them by making the conditions so horrible, as described in the article. Nor do they provide guidance in how to actually cope with isolation and put this time into good use to train the mind.
> Extended isolation is torture.
That's entirely subjective and dependent on the conditions.
> That's entirely subjective and dependent on the conditions.
In good faith, we can assume we're talking about the context of this article. Let's step beyond the literal and discuss the entire conversation. If we do this, yes it is torture. Even if we don't consider the entire conversation, just within the cultural context of the article we can assume that it would be for most people. Continuing to focus on changing the victims instead of the perpetrators is the wrong initial avenue of approach.
By all means, campaign for teaching people your preferred form of meditation. Just do it in a context where everyone is already free.
Here‘s an argument: The US is supposedly the land of the free, where everyone is allowed to live life according to their beliefs. It would be against this principle to force this re-education program you‘re proposing on someone.
A way simpler argument would be that it‘s unrealistic to expect this level of discipline for a stretch of time like this from people who couldn‘t even stop themselves from killing someone.
However, if you‘ve ever read „Papillon“, I think the methods he describes as using in dealing with his sentences seem to me to be pretty close to meditation.
Well, ideally you'd give them a choice between following an intensive meditation training (for instance, I don't think it can be only thing that's needed for rehabilitation) and just classic imprisonment. If you force it on them, it can have the opposite effect.
Then you should also have monks as supervisors in those solitary confinement cells.
You can't make actual change to an individual. You can give them an opportunity of course, but not change them. Some will harden their person and some will just break, you want neither.
Show them humanity, love and give those treatment that need it. Focus on the positive parts and lift those up. Solitary confinement can only be of good if it's chosen, much like any personality change.
Admit that it's not the prison that is a problem, it's that youth problems is not properly dealth with. (as pointed out in the article)
I don't see any focus on this in neither local or global politics. It's odd that it's still given today that we could possibly bully each other to a better behavior.
When will we learn? Punishment does not lead to improvement.
Quoting from a blog post I wrote [1] which included a note on this documentary and why I think it made an overly positive case for Vipassana and its effects on prisoners in Tihar Jail:
> There is a popular documentary on YouTube called “Doing Time, Doing Vipassana” on the introduction of Vipassana into Tihar Jail (probably the most populated prison in the world with a current population of 17130 prisoners), and how Vipassana improved several measures of psychological well-being among the inmates that undertook it — things like anxiety, depression, sense of alienation from mainstream society, etc. This has become such a success story for Goenka Vipassana that Kiran Bedi — Inspector General of Delhi Prisons at the time — is invited to speak at major public events organised by the Goenka Vipassana organisation. Having become a Vipassana enthusiast herself, she praises it freely in TV interviews and even the odd TED talk.
> But to me this is yet another example of bad science in which meditation seems to get a free pass. Introducing Vipassana was not the only improvement Bedi made to Tihar; she arranged vocational training for prisoners, introduced Yoga classes, organised sports events and celebrations for religious festivals, established petition boxes and went on daily inspections, interacting with prisoners and listening to their problems. Just like patients who feel better after homeopathic treatment, what may have mattered more to prisoners was that Bedi was actually trying to help them; they knew this and therefore already expected things to improve in their lives. Also, there seems to have been no control group in the Vipassana Tihar research. Prisoners who volunteered to learn Vipassana were segregated from the rest and may have been treated better overall. There should have been a control group that was also segregated and in all respects treated the same as the Vipassana group except for the Vipassana part.
I wonder what the physiological effects on the body are from years of no sunlight, no physical exertion, and constant stress? Must have atrophied like crazy.
It's another time someone mentions the Plato's Cave. The reason this allegory often makes deep impression is that Plato was initiated, not just a philosopher, and thus actually knew what he was talking about and that allegory is a carefully worded model of reality, as accurate as it could be told at that time.
Our justice system is right, at most, 96% of the time. I'm not comfortable knowing anyone is tortured, even if you believe it is 'justified.' Knowing some prisoners are innocent makes it even more obvious that humane treatment is the only reasonable course of action.
I have a question for you. What do you think will happen when these guys are released? Most of them will have problems for the rest of their lives. They will probably be more dangerous to society.
Even if you for some reason accept the cruel punishment, you should also consider that they may move in as your neighbour when they are released. Don't you think that the mental state may cause more problems than if they were treated humanely?
76% of US prisoners are re-arrested within five years, which is higher than many other countries. Think of how many victims could be saved if the prisons were more focused on rehabilitation than punishment?
Two wrongs don't make a right. It certainly satisfies some primal urge to see a criminal get punished, but we also need to distinguish between young individuals in difficult circumstances making bad choices from how we decide to run our societal systems—there needs to be a higher bar for the latter. Leaving humanitarian issues aside for a moment: do privatized prisons w/ a punishment mentality actually reduce crime?
Statically speaking there is a change You(in general - maybe you don't drive) could kill a person tomorrow with your car, something weird on the streets could distract your eyes for a second.
Would it be fair to be tortured? The punishment needs to be proportional with the crime but you probably don't want to transform good people that made a mistake into bad/destroyed people so when then sentence is over instead of releasing that good person you release a new criminal you created and trained in your prison.
But you still taken a live and hurt a family emotionally and financially. I interpreted the comment I replied that since your torture is less then the getting killed is justified. I mean me getting killed is the same if it was premeditated or not, if it was an honest accident or a stupidity/ignorance etc.
Completely disagree. If you die, it's hard on those you leave behind, but for you it's either oblivion, the afterlife, or reincarnation. Perhaps that sounds flippant to you, but I've been in multiple traumatic life and death situations as well as several medical ones that were also pretty bad.
While I have a strong will to live (without which I wouldn't be here) the mere fact of dying is not that big of a deal. You're going to die, just as surely as a piece of string has two ends. The notion of life going on indefinitely is not much different from the infantile or drug-induced difficulty in distinguishing between oneself and one's environment. Indeed, being conscious of this fact is the easiest way to appreciate the social-temporal context within which you exist and to some extent see your life from the outside, rather than just down the barrel of your personal future.
His future was taken from him as well. You are now two futures shorter.
It's horrible when someone dies, but it's not obvious that the person responsible should endure any punishment. Where does your reasoning end? How far should it stretch? For how long after his punishment should he get judged? How are you to judge that four years of torment is minor, have you done it yourself?
Boiling his 19 years in prison down to this comment is appaling. Where's your humanity?
I think this alludes to an important difference about US vs. other countries. The US has no social safety net, or a very thin one. A harsher criminal justice system makes sense when the consequences are so much greater for the victims of crimes. A family that loses its breadwinner can be on the street in no time.
Imposing longer prison sentences won't help support the victims family. If anything it's taking tax dollars away from the welfare system and channelling those funds to the prison system.
When a person goes to prison they may also be leaving a family who are now unable to meet their needs. Harsher penalties might mean that person is unable to provide for their family for longer.
But I have a feeding tube. That is how I ended up down here. We thought it would be the safest place to be while I was going through chemo. For six months while my immune system was garbage I just stayed down here and would only go up to get groceries or go to chemo/radiation. So I always joked that I think I could deal with solitary. I prefer being alone.
All that changed about a month ago.
The balloon on my PEG tube (DDG it) had deflated. And one night I went to change the gauze and while I pulled the gauze out it just started pouring out blood. In a matter of seconds my boxers had blood all over them. I was terrified. This much blood on the outside, how much blood is going into my stomach? Am I going to bleed to death? On the ride to the ER I was feeling faint..
I am getting to the solitary part.
But I saw a nurse right after checking in. And she determined I wasn't bleeding to death. I was going to have a bit of a wait to see a doctor. 4 hours to be exact. But they wanted me out of the ER waiting room due to being on pembro and there had just been a case of C-19 8 hours away.
So I was being walked to a room and she said they were low on places to put me. I was going to be in a "mental health" room. But they got a bed in there for me. White walls, a bed, no problem..
Huge problem!
It is so hard to describe. It was basically a cinder block box and a massive metal door. Everything tucked away so you couldn't kill yourself. And it was so loud since the air had to be pumped in. And I had a bed they wheeled in for me. And the door was open so I could go to the bathroom when I wanted. If that door was closed and I couldn't get out I would have lost my shit. And I nearly lost it anyway. Something about that room was just unlike anything you can imagine. It was like being buried alive.
I would imagine solitary is about a million times worse. I would classify it as torture.
And my feeding tube had slipped between my stomach and the "outside skin" tearing up everything making it bleed. Just shoved it back in and loaded up the balloon with more saline and went home. And then had the tube replaced the next day during normal hours.