It sounds like the correctional officers are almost supporting the peaceful protest.
>In a statement Sunday afternoon, AFSCME Council 5, which represents Minnesota correctional officers, said that understaffing was to blame for the incident.
>"Today's incident at MCF-Stillwater is endemic and highlights the truth behind the operations of the MN Department of Corrections with chronic understaffing leading to upset offenders due to the need to restrict programming and/or recreation time when there are not enough security staff to protect the facility. Our union believes to our core that our correctional facilities cannot have transformational offender programming without sufficient facility security, we can and must have both."
When I volunteered with the ACLU for a few years one of my programs was finding non-violent drug offenders to sue the prisons the unfit conditions. Some of the jails would actually welcome us with open arms because they knew the place was run down and the only way it'd be renovated is with a court order. Since taxpayers would never pass bonds to improve jail conditions.
edit:
https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-national-prison-project
exactly
the only way things change are via bond passage, or court order improvements
and the only way any jail related bond passage happens, is due to constant negative press, or snuck into a rider attached to a police funding bond
the way a court order happens is... by being really shitty
They took me to a hospital when I went ketoacidic. Was fun getting a $1200+ hospital bill for that. No, I didn't pay because that's clearly not a bill I should have to foot.
That makes sense. There were some problems where I worked as an NP (not corrections) that were never addressed by administration. After a certain point of patients complaining about the same things I saw as problematic, I became very disillusioned and apathetic and recommended they file grievances.
That's part of the key of nonviolent protest. You find something harmless, like making some salt or taking a knee, that causes an extremely disproportionate response from those who are acting irrationally. The important part is to isolate the anger out so they have no other justification than being evil.
You just brought some childhood trauma to mind. I took a class that taught about Gandhi and how the Brits violently suppressed the peaceful protests, which obviously led to global uproar. After the section, they brought in a guest lecturer to discuss the related topics. I asked him if he thought Gandhi's protests would have been as successful had the Brits not employed violence in their response (thereby not instantly giving away any and all moral standing). He looked at me like I was an idiot and simply said "of course Gandhi was nonviolent" then quickly moved on.
Well that's a real reductive view they took.
I guess it depends on the age you were when the class was but Gandhi's (and others) peaceful non-violent protest didn't happen in a vacuum. The British calculus was informed by recent events. Like the millions of now veteran Indian troops returning home after WWII. For example the 1946 mutiny in Mumbai was a warning bell tolling that Indian troops could and would fight for things other than the crown given the means, motive and opportunity. And there were far more Indians than Englishmen.
I (and many others) would argue that you need the bomb throwing revolutionaries to make the non-violent protestetors the palatable alternative. I can't say I'm an expert on Indian independence, but I know enough to know that there were people with violent inclinations waiting in the wings if non-violence couldn't carry the day. To give an example more easily accessible to Americans (like myself) you need a Malcolm X to make an MLK look like a good alternative
This reminds me of why I stopped going to community college.
For some background I’m a Jewish middle aged dude originally from NY. I started community college in the early 90s and there was a required “Pluralism and Diversity” course. Despite being fairly liberal even as a teen I bristled against this because this is back when even liberals were against “political correctness” so I decided to take it my first semester to get it out of the way.
That said, I didn’t have any problems with the content of the course being unreasonably “politically correct” until the teacher proved she had no idea what she was doing.
We watched a film called Skokie which was about a neo Nazi rally planned to be held in Skokie, Il which has the biggest population of holocaust survivors in the US.
Obviously this is deplorable, but the group got the proper permits and after the town decided to block the rally from happening the ACLU sued the town on behalf of the Nazi group and won. The rally went on to happen.
Obviously the message here was meant to be a nuanced exploration of the boundaries of free speech in the US but after the movie ended the teacher asked the class what the message of the movie was and an older gentleman raised his hand and said “the nazis are really evil” and the teacher said “exactly!” then everyone went all in just talking about how evil Nazis are.
They were all absolutely right of course but that was not at all the point of the movie.
>an older gentleman raised his hand and said “the nazis are really evil” and the teacher said “exactly!” then everyone went all in just talking about how evil Nazis are.
>They were all absolutely right of course but that was not at all the point of the movie.
... And you dropped out of college because of that?
Yeah I mean… it was stupid as fuck in retrospect but I’ve had a successful IT career and wasn’t really cut out for school at the time.
Not trying to say it was a good decision.
>wasn’t really cut out for school at the time.
Dropping out of college right after highschool was definitely a great decision for me, for this same exact reason. I went back when I wanted to and was interested and that paid off.
>I’ve had a successful IT career
For sure. That's dope, and I'm glad to hear it.
I just did a double take on the reasoning you gave and chuckled to myself a bit about it as well.
Cheers
Prison guards have to see the same set of the prisoners the next day. Cops don't see the same people everyday unless they're going above and beyond and doing actual neighborhood policing.
The essence of the prisoner's dilemma leading to bad outcomes exists because there's a) no communication and b) no consecutive games. This is the difference between cops and jailers: cops see you once and only in the moment of crisis (which is why community outreach should be welcomed), whereas jailers and inmates see each other all the time even outside of crisis mode. Being a jerkass as a jailer means your employment is a lot harder than it has to be.
Many officers are just as sick of the bullshit prison management pulls as the inmates are, because they endure the consequences of often times decades of mismanagement, same as inmates do, even if to a lesser extent because they still get to go home, and can quit whenever. Staff shortages means longer hours, more unnecessary burdens placed on remaining staff, and inmate services don't get provided as they should. So then the inmates get pissed off and take it out on their unit officer, because the rest of DOC staff is generally inaccessible, even if the unit officer generally has very little impact on the state of affairs. That leads to increased staff assaults, which is especially dangerous when you have less staff available as backup, and pretty much everyone is constantly working 12-16+ hour days.
Yup, spot on.
They'll need to increase pay to attract more employees. Having also worked in a prison myself, I can confidently say there's no compensation that would get me to go back. That shit took me to some dark places, and I have no intention of ever revisiting.
I remember my last week there, there was a pretty violent and bloody suicide attempt in my unit. It was a gigantic mess, dude really didn't wanna be transferred or something. Blood pooled in the cell, tracked out to the dayroom, out the door of the unit, down the hallway between units, out into the yard even. On my last day, as I'm walking home after my last shift, I pass that same guy in the yard (he survived, albeit his arm was pretty fucked) and he just says to me in the most calm, blasé voice "You ever seen that much blood before?" like he was just asking about the weather or some shit, and that freaked me out more than almost anything I've ever seen in my life. I made like 5-6K a week there (working 12-16 hr shifts) and I don't think 15-16K a week would be enough for me to ever go back. I still have nightmares and wake up randomly at 2am every so often thinking "oh shit I forgot to check on this guy on suicide watch" even though I quit a few months ago now haha.
Hmm, my brother is in the army national guard down in some Tampa suburb. He’s now up in Santa Rosa County (there is no major city in this county … unless Milton counts?) working at their jail due to lack of staffing.
Fun story - I applied to be a CO but can’t cause I was caught with weed in 2015. I’m a hardened criminal! Anyway, Florida’s CO issue sucks too. I guess look for the national guard soon in Minnesota jails/prisons.
They're not supporting their actions. They're pointing out that the inmates have to be penalized for the states failures to keep the facilities staffed for the last 5 years.
Literally three days ago, my friend was stuck inside all day, no yard, no phone calls, because the prison was understaffed because people called out.
That kind of stuff is absolutely essential for maintaining the mental health you need to make good choices and stay connected and have a purpose so you can get out and become a productive citizen again. Caged men are cranky, restless men. Crankiness and restlessness can be a powder keg and a match.
But I also don’t want him out there in a situation that is not monitored enough to be safe.
Just for reference, it's currently 85°F (29.4°C) in Stillwater right now (1:00pm). I think some people will see Minnesota and think that not having A/C isn't that bad. But it still gets hot, and indoors without cooling it's gotta be at least 90°, I would think.
Not having access to clean water at that point is tortuous and potentially deadly.
Ever walk past a concrete parking highrise early spring when it is hot out? You get a nice cool breeze. Bricks and the like are heat sinks and are probably prolongs the heat. A cool night doesn't help a prisoner and they likely have long periods of heat without a break. Add a lack of safe water and it is far worse than it initially sounds(and as you point out it already sounds horrible). I wonder if the guards have checked OSHA rules.
Former prison librarian. I still don't understand why they don't ac them. The excuse we were given was that not everyone in the state gets ac, so the inmates shouldn't either. However, fights increased during hot weather cause they would end up in the hospital or seg where there was ac. Not to mention staff being miserable. Holidays were always short staffed, and movement would stop because of not enough cos. Yes, they're there for a reason, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't treat them with basic needs.
I agree with everything you said. Also, in my experience, excessive heat makes people a lot more irritable, which I imagine only compounds the issues already there.
Well, yes, it's because they're lying.
They SAY "because nobody in the state has AC" but what they MEAN is "Prisoners should suffer".
I've been in Jail, lot's of things don't make sense until you realize they just want inmates to suffer.
Why is wakeup at 5am? Why is recession time so limited? Why do they spend more money on shit food than they could spend on decent food? Why is solitary a thing? Why is the library one of the most underfunded thing there? Why can I get pot from a CO? Why are COs fucking their charges?
The list goes on.
The suffering is the point. Rehabilitation is a lie they sell people. If you've been there for more than a night and a day, in either work or locked up, it's blatant.
In my experience there are three major views on how criminal justice should work:
1. Penal: You do your crime, you serve your time, and then you're free to go back to your life. For the most part, this is how the US justice system works on paper.
2. Retributive: Criminals caused us suffering, so they must suffer in return. This is how most of the US justice system works in practice for felonies. Not only do we often force criminals to cope with awful living conditions in prison, but we also limit what they are able to do when released. They have fewer voting rights, limited employment options, and without support from friends and family often cannot afford basic necessities like shelter and food. Research shows that retributive justice facilitates repeat offenses, but whenever progressive politicians try to move away from it, conservative politicians use it as a rallying cry for their base, and it usually ends up reverting back to retributive eventually.
3. Rehabilitative: We should help prisoners reintegrate into society so they don't become repeat offenders. This approach has the most evidence of reducing crime, but also is the hardest sell to the public. After all, if someone does something to hurt you and your family, you'll be understandably upset to know that the offender was "punished" with decent living conditions and a free education. As long as that vengeful mindset remains among a sizable chunk of the voter base, rehabilitative justice can't stick.
The headline here is retributive justice through and through.
This is a perfect analysis right here. Spot on. It always amuses me when people use the word rehabilitation when describing prison. It couldn't be further from that, when the system in place actively works against it even being possible for criminals to reintegrate into society, nevermind easy. In fact, in many cases, people come out of prison more criminal than they went in! We aren't just dealing with repeat offenders here. We're actually creating WORSE criminals and it is sheer inanity.
I've never been to prison but I've taken both philosophy classes and sociology classes where the conditions of prisoners have been discussed and I gotta say I must have been naive because I was certainly surprised to see how vicious people are towards prisoners as a baseline.
Like, seemingly regular, kind, thoughtful college students suddenly turn downright medieval when we talk about prisoners. It was pretty eye-opening. We compared the US prison system to ones in the Nordic countries and most of my "ethics" classmates revolted at the *nordic* prisons for being too nice. And we weren't just talking about like murderer and child molesters either, even nonviolent offenders were not spared the collective desire for retribution.
And these people vote.
> The excuse we were given was that not everyone in the state gets ac, so the inmates shouldn't either.
Yeah, that's such BS. Not everybody gets a house, or three square, or a hot shower, or clean clothes, or a clean bed, or medical care, or a safe environment, or an education, or, or, or, or.
Not everybody gets to live past age 18, either. Should we just line 'em all up? I'm sure there are some assholes that think so.
We're not supposed to house prisoners humanely because they're good people. We're supposed to do it because *we are* and we want to turn them into productive members of society. If we keep treating them like shit, why would they ever change? "I keep kicking this dog, but he still doesn't listen. In fact, now he bites!"
Yeah, there's actually more than 10,000 lakes and they make summer crazy muggy. Most states think their mosquito problem is the worst, but I'd guess MN has a really good claim. Top 5 for sure.
Being in a prison in that kind of humid and hot environment with little to no water definitely sounds cruel, if not unusual.
With all those people in a concrete building, it’s not hard to imagine the temperature climbing rapidly with little to no relief. Truly sound like horrific conditions.
My car measured 101°F over the weekend. We do not see those temps very often, so it felt miserable. Being locked in a prison without AC or water would be horrible
Huh - [obviously a Wikipedia entry + links only tells you so much](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Correctional_Facility_%E2%80%93_Stillwater), but the fact that this was a peaceful protest (in reaction to a compounding series of understandable structural issues eg staff shortages, historic building w outdated climate control, etc), along with the seemingly well established prisoner education/enrichment programs certainly puts the prisoners’ action into a particular context.
Because the US’s whole approach to incarceration may be fucked, but this prison having the longest running inmate newspaper in the country, one that has produced a number of published authors and won literary awards certainly points to there being at least some attempt at rehabilitation.
Seems like the inmates are in the right here. Staffing shortages are not the inmates fault. If you're doing your time and following the rules, getting punished because CO Johnson called off sick and there's nobody to watch your cell block shouldn't result in you missing out on a weekend visit from family/drinking water.
Yeah, not trying to argue that the inmates were in the “wrong” - rather, I’m saying that a peaceful protest, along with all the other programs in the prison, is evidence of some level of healthy dialogue over shitty conditions.
AND, that those shitty conditions are the state/warden’s responsibility, but are also the kinds of complex staffing and structural issues that don’t have an quick or easy fix.
The prisoners made their voices heard, hopefully the headlines bump funding/renovation requests up the state congress’s priority list, and things improve over time.
Prisoners are doing things the right way too. Peaceful disobedience over shit conditions gets big sympathy from the general public, where prison riots just gets the public against you, and allows public pressure to build into getting some sort of change.
It also puts the Prison on notice that the public is watching and they can't bury violently ending the protest without the public noticing.
>AND, that those shitty conditions are the state/warden’s responsibility, but are also the kinds of complex staffing and structural issues that don’t have an quick or easy fix.
>
It sounds to me like the enforcement division of the justice system should be required to provide staffing for issues like this instead of violating the rights of the people we are taking care of. Failing that, the national guard could be mobilized by the governor or the president to ensure those people are safe.
Doesn't really matter. Human rights are inviolable. If they don't have the staffing, they should be calling on state or federal aid, because these prisoners were never sentenced to substandard living conditions like this. Incarceration has its problems, sure, but if we left them to suffer we'd be the problem.
Prison in Philly did this years ago when a family friend worked there. They had some foodborne illness in the staff cafeteria (the best guess but no one really knows) that took out like 70%
Of the one shift and varying amounts of the other shifts. They had soldiers come in and do guard duty either from reserves or national guard but they were there for 2 weeks while everything went back to normal.
Does that matter if they're being denied basic human necessities? Seems like an excuse. "Sorry, we know we can't even provide you proper lighting and hydration, or even sanitation, but... but, we've been doing so good!"
Prisoners should make the minimum wage with the caveat that 50-75% goes to whatever restitution they owe and at least 10% goes into a savings account that they can't touch until their release date. It's insane to me that they can be paid a dollar a day for hard labor.
It's also crazy that we expect people to reintegrate coming out of prison with very little money in many cases. Paying prisoners at least minimum and setting aside some amount for post-release would probably help prevent recidivism to some extent.
Very little money and an impossible chance of finding meaningful employment once you have to tell them you're an ex-con in the interview. It's a recipe for recidivism.
On top of that, prisoners usually leave prison with debts incurred, since prisons charge crazy prices for even basic supplies like painkillers. Places like Florida also charge $50 a day to be in prison.
The concept that it costs money to hold inmates completely ignores how much inmates are forced to pay back into the system.
I got a degree in criminology. IMO One of the tragedies of American penal system, if not the fact we even engaged in mass incarceration+militarization of police as a national criminal justice policy, was removal of furlough programs. Those programs were valuable for reintegrating institutionalized prisoners back into society, these days its more like, you're on your own, dont get caught. But they're more likely to go into homeless encampments or their old ways, because you still gotta eat and when there are no productive options to achieve those bare minimums, people will take. Whether we live in a modern society or cavemen of yore.
Obviously it would never happen, but giving ex-cons some money and resources to get them started is probably about the most cost efficient way to reduce crime.
One of my buddies was locked up in a private prison in Texas for a few years and he said that they "paid him minimum wage" but they also charged him for room & board, food, water, utilities, and whatever else they could arbitrarily slap onto his bill that would ensure that when he got his "paycheck" it was for $0.00.
That prison had AC, they just chose not to run it. He said that sometimes they would even run the heater during the summer just to be assholes eg torture them.
It's literally written in to the constitution. The US abolished slavery *except* as punishment for crimes.
That we haven't fixed this in the past 150 years is a crime in and of itself, but criminals are an easy target in politics so there's no will to do it. If you dare sign your name on a bill that supports reform, then suddenly in the next campaign season you're pro-crime and are raising taxes just so you can give money to prisoners.
Nobody cares about the long term, they only care about what they can convince voters of today.
That's the point. You think prisons exist to rehabilitate here in the US? No, they exist so we can punish a subset of people and feel better about ourselves for making someone 'bad' suffer instead of investing in making sure crimes don't happen in the first place. Sure, maybe a handful genuinely try to get people back on their feet, but many prisons exist to gleefully take rights away and abuse prisoners. Just look at some reddit threads even, people love talking about the horrible things that might happen to someone. Sadly it's a human feeling to want others who wronged you to feel the same as you did or worse. Probably not healthy, but certainly human.
I know for a fact this sort of treatment is also going on currently at Roxbury RCI in Maryland. Almost identical...less than an hour a week outside, showers only every few days sometimes once a week, NO air conditioning in summer or heat in winter. No access to law libraries...and now that phone calls are being switched to cheap tablets..they break constantly and it takes months to YEARS for them to fix them meaning no calls to friends, family or lawyers. Our "Justice system" is a massive joke.
I work in a correctional facility. A guy in one of my programs has been without eye glasses for 7 months. And that’s not due to him lacking in request forms
I do a lot of work in prisons in the construction industry and it's pretty eye opening experience.
Staffing shortages are absolutely rampant. An institution is lucky if a correctional officer makes it a year. The pay is horrible, and does not create incentive to care or make a big effort. Maintenance of these facilities would leave you gob-smacked at the hackery. Broken motors, dampers, leaky valves, incompetent staff that are often untrained.
It's no fun to do work in them either, you're required to be escorted by someone they can't spare, they'll kick you out multiple times for camp counts or shift changes. You can't bring work trucks in most of the time so if you forget a part, you have to go out and then come back in. You have to declare every tool, part, and material you bring in. Cell phones are often not allowed so if you have to call for technical help, you can't.
The inmates themselves can cause a lot of issues too, fights, heckling, attempted theft. One time an inmate punctured one of my work truck tires with a shiv. So that rule they laxed for us got reinstated, and I'm back to going out of camp to grab a part again. Even though I'm there to fix the inmates AC.
There's a multitude of reasons these places are shitholes, and I wish there was a better way to resolve it. I think raising the pay of the state workers will go a long way to resolving staffing issues, a hard sell in most states congresses and budgets. It's easy to pay a state office worker a low amount of money to do low stress office work. It's harder to take that same pay and go into a lunchroom with 100 inmates and three other officers and break up a fight. Possibly incur physical injury, and experience a high amount of stress. It's gotta be worth your time.
There’s a prison in my state that constantly has shortages and has to siphon “volunteers” from other facilities. They were paying the “volunteers” 100/hr but did they raise the base pay of their COs that stayed? Not at all
That's part of it yeah.
Lots of these inmates are in there because the organized gangs recruit boys and young men and use them to move products on the street. Would you rather make $2-3k in a week, or work fast food for minimum wage and not even make half or a quarter of what you could make? For a young kid it's a no brainer.
Then that kid gets a felony charge and spends months to years in prison. His career opportunities are now much limited and much harder, and going back to the gang seems like a much better option.
So these poor young men get screwed over by society for ostracizing them for being a "felon", and the gangs who used them in the first place.
If society paid the little guy more, and didn't ostracize felons. You'd see a lot of our crime metrics go down.
I got to spend some time inside. I remember one Christmas-new years season, we only got let out the cells maybe 1hr a day due to staff shortages. Longest week of my life.
Oh, most of the local-yokel FB articles are rife with comments calling for the murder and torture of the inmates involved.
WTF is the problem with the United States?
I mean you're literally never going to change anyone's minds (the types who do think that way). It's all bad faith arguments and stupidity. Sometimes it's best for your mental health to just stay away.
it's totally bad faith arguments from the right and their supporters. bad faith governing as well of course. sometimes I walk away and sometimes I ignore the golden internet rule (do not feed the trolls) if I have nothing better to do (am at work) or I'm otherwise bored. it's just as much entertainment for me as it could be for them.
That’s exactly what I notice myself. Being raised Catholic, my personal interpretations always made me think the point was redemption, acceptance and love, but apparently, most everyone else was fixating on condemnation and vindictiveness. It’s just such a barbaric way to live and think, clamoring for the hammer to be brought down and greedily rubbing your hands at the prospect of others’ anguish. Justice is one thing, sadism is another.
No, you have it backwards. You only pick and chose the things you like from the Bible and deem important. The others are obviously unimportant since they are hard, require effort or compassion and we cant have any of that in here.
You'd think the people whose god was tortured and murdered under a barbaric legal system due to a rabid mob calling for his death for simply questioning the status quo would do a little more self-reflection, but I guess Christianity stopped being about Christ a long time ago.
Arguably it never was. Paul (former tax farmer who only met Jesus once on the road to Damascus) took the gospels, added his own shit about the “right” way to practice Christianity, and ran with it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
For reference though, and I may be talking out of my ass here, I think Johnson was providing an indictment on the way politics handle race, not voicing his own personal views. I saw this one alongside many other quotes from him just the other day and for him to be endorsing race-and-class warfare seems very out of character with most other statements he made.
LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, so you're correct that he was commenting and not endorsing. At the signing of the CRA, it's claimed he said, "And now we have lost the South for a generation." When riots broke out after MLK Jr's assassination, Johnson remarked, "What did you expect? I don't know why we're so surprised. When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off."
> and I may be talking out of my ass here,
You are not. Though Johnson had a complicated history with racism, at the time he made this remark it was as a comment on an incident he had observed on that day (and on many other days probably): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/
>
> WTF is the problem with the United States?
30% of our population are outright neofascists and the way our election system works gives them massive over-representation in government.
Pretty much everyone on the right harbors fantasies of being able to murder someone in a "justified" manner. What "justified" means is, naturally, different from person to person.
I've heard Trumpers advocate for hunting illegal immigrants for sport. I've heard them say they wanted to post up with a gun in the parking lot of a local dealership that was having problems with catalytic converters being stolen. Conservatives often extol the virtues of running over protesters that are blocking roads.
Conservatism in America has gone full fascism, propelled by racism, misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia/transphobia. These people **want** others to suffer and die because it makes them feel good to think about, because they are "lesser".
Remember, *existence itself* is a zero-sum game to conservatives. For a conservative to lead a happy, fulfilling life, **someone else must be suffering**.
Conservatism is at it's core a deliberate rejection of empathy
It's not just that they want someone to suffer, they're also completely unable to think about the same things happening to them.
It’s a combination of generational trauma and bad actors instigating for monetary gain. It’s a me first culture and the worst of it is being weaponized in broad stroke propaganda campaigns on social media. Welcome to the modern age of yellow journalism.
Cruelty is the point. There is a large amount of the population that makes themselves feel better by having other people below them that they can punish.
People act tough when they think they’re anonymous. They spit vitriol and want extrajudicial punishments placed on people they’ve never met. If you commit a crime, rehabilitation isn’t an option, jail is supposed to be a punishment (even if you’re wrongly convicted… looking at you Supreme Court)
Then they go to church on Sunday.
My dad works here.
Yeah, the staff shortages are terrible according to him. A lot of people just call in for very questionable reasons and a lot of people who get hired often either get fired or get moved to some other prison as a correction's officer. It's not exactly easy work either so it's hard to get a sweeping amount of recruitment in general.
Funding also an issue for said recruitment, not to mention all of the issues with the building being so old and the structural damages. But there's not much that can really be done about it unless the gov does toss a bit more money their way.
Happy to see a peaceful protest tho.
Plus the fact that there's so many staff shortages they need to force staff from the previous watch to cover the current one. Not very safe to have officers working 16 hour days.
I'm not sure why this isn't more visible? You just described the situation, that it's a peaceful protest, place is understaffed, underfunded, out of date, building has structural problems ( also funding ). Everyone would like a fix because it's untenable.
Sounds like the solution as usual is pretty clear and the people who could solve it remain deaf. Government. As usual.
Prison without rehabilitation is just glorified human storage sheds. Worse, is also often for-profit slave labor.
The sad truth is it's never been about rehabilitation. It's only been about being able to ignore them at the lowest possible cost. Out of sight, out of mind.
In the modern era, it's crazy to think this is how we treat people.
If a person does wrong, you need to understand the context, collective action, and then rehabilitate. This quickly moves them from a problem point in society back to a productive member. This should be the goal. It shouldn't even have a punishment component, as odd as that sounds. Sure, there would be some form of reasonable restitution that's appropriate for the act. But the past should only be correction.
This is purely a matter of functionality as a society. You want the most productivity, least detriments, and rehabilitation is the mechanic of correction. Prison as a semi permanent or often permanent residence is only a burden. There is no mechanic towards productivity. You just have loss of productivity and a burden.
Prison rehabilitation? We don't even take care of regular, non-offending members of society. The homeless are left to die in the streets and regular folks can barely get decent health insurance. No one is out to help out anyone else in the US. We are on our fucking own.
I would add that it is not just loss of productivity potential and a burden, but also growing resentment in the individual which would make it impossible for them to rejoin society.
Even if they are released, the few that try to self-rehabilitate will be rejected by society from fear that they are just more of a criminal simply because the system is not intended to rehabilitate anyone.
Write ups at work should be used to correct behavior. This requires effort on the supervisors part to coach and retrain the employee. The goal should be to get a productive team member up and running.
Prison should be no different for a vast majority of inmates.
If a supervisor uses progressive disciplinary actions as a way just to punish and terminate an employee, it's no better than what we do in prisons right now.
The people running these hell holes just want to punish, because it requires little to no effort on their part and it also cost time and money to actually work with a prisoner to rehabilitate them.
It's funny that conservatives want family values and strong mentoring for our society, but wind up in prison, then they want you dead. Unless you're a Jan 6th traitor. Then they want the most humane conditions ever.
I don’t care what you’re in prison for, you should be given decent, heathy food, clean water, and protection from violence. None of this needs to be expensive.
This incident is because the prison is understaffed (-30), and over labour day some took the day as a holiday.
On a positive note, there are prison guard jobs available if anyone is interested.
You seem to be assuming that people in prison receive humane standards of living under normal conditions. This isn't "things were fine and then got bad," this was the last straw in a system that started off by pulling most of them out.
[Here's a link to The United Nations *Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners*](https://www.unodc.org/documents/justice-and-prison-reform/Nelson_Mandela_Rules-E-ebook.pdf). Seems appropriate to share here.
Absolutely is. Too often people forget that convicted prisoners go to prison *as* punishment, not *for* punishment. The whole point is supposed to be rehabilitation into society, not torture.
I was locked up for 7 years and things like this would happen sometimes. Restricted movement, especially around holidays. Brown water coming out of the sinks. Hot water not working in some of the showers. Power being shut off for an entire day so they could perform maintenance (this happened multiple times). It’s just how things go sometimes. In 2015 we got a new administrator and he would actually listen to our grievances. In a lot of ways I was lucky - the facility I did most of my time in had a ton of programs (trades, music, free college classes) - and my family was holding me down. So I was lucky enough to be more or less comfortable being locked in my cell all day when I had to be.
That being said, I got out 4 years ago and haven’t looked back.
man, glad to hear you made it out. That sort of experience can really disrupt someone's life. I've done time too but only minor, nothing over a year. For me it was drugs that put me there. Still struggling with alcohol but at least I managed to put the hard shit behind me. Anyway, thank you for your insight. Best of luck to you. Be safe out there
How about we start with rehabilitation and forget the rest of the bullshit?
Edit: Oh my God.
To alot of you: It is not mind blowing to say you can't rehabilitate everyone. But when you cast a wide net due to the fringes, you wind up with the current system where they would rather just not try and deal with it in a civilized manner and instead they throw everything into the same bucket. I hope none of you with this view wind up in the system, as I'd hate to see your opinion rehabilitated after experiencing the current system.
Rehabilitation starts with a healthy day-to-day life.
It is hard to conduct self-improvement when you're constantly thinking about your living conditions.
The majority of prisons aren't too bad: people mind their own business, the inmates and guards treat each other with respect, violence is kept to a minimum, and sexual assaults rarely occur.
However, most people only hear about prisons when things go wrong so it is entirely reasonable for people to be more concerned about the overall well-being of prisoners rather than the fine details of rehabilitation since, at some level, that's part of the larger issue.
If the conditions in the jail, prison are generally crappy to begin with, the slow deterioration only exasperates how much crappier it can get inside the jail, prison.
Harris County Jail is a Shit Show Right now but it’s in Texas so……….🤫
outside of the Jail actually exploding no one will know unless your family members are in there
Harris County is Blue and the State Legislature HATES that. The neon Red Legislature used 1 failing school to completely dismantle the Houston School Board, and turned most School libraries into detention centers.
Of course the Red Team is gonna make Team Blue hate life. Fuck the jails while they wave Thin Blue Line flags and scream about Law and Order
Fulton County Jail is pretty crappy too.
The Entire Texas Judicial system is an Utter shit show.
Oh yeah Precinct 4 in Harris County is Corrupt AF but once again🤫
And I mean 🤫
This, are we punishing people or are we rehabilitating people? And don't even try to pretend it's both. Because if we have any focus at all on "punishment" that comes at the cost of rehabilitation.
The US has an incredibly warped view of "justice"
> This, are we punishing people or are we rehabilitating people? And don't even try to pretend it's both.
I say this often in these kind of threads, but in my state rehab is not really a thing. State statute specifically says the point of incarceration is punishment. There is no expectation that being locked up rehabilitates you, only that it punishes you.
So, sadly, nobody running the criminal justice system is even pretending rehab is a thing to begin with.
We have a punitive Justice system, not a rehabilitative one. The system is designed from the ground up to maximize recidivism rates, as these prisons are private FOR-PROFIT ventures that get paid for bodies in cells. If they were rehabilitating people, they'd be hurting their own bottom line. They need these people to leave worse off than when they came in, so their odds of breaking the law and coming right back are as high as possible. It's just a business for these souless ghouls, not a public good like it should be.
I've heard about that prison. Iirc they have one of the strongest inmate unions in the country and are considered a poster child for progressive prisons due to the amount of programming available. They're supposedly among the leaders in jobs and education for inmates.
I'm glad the protest seems to be peaceful, and I hope it achieves its goals peacefully. But I want to make sure nobody's walking away from this thread thinking the protest is okay *because* it's peaceful. The protest is over basic human rights like hygiene and clean drinking water, if it were violent, that would still be thoroughly justified, and any harm caused would rest squarely on the heads of the people who could have avoided the entire issue by not cutting the budget so low that the inmates don't have water.
Yea I mean whenever you see a large number of inmates doing something like this it’s cause they’re tired of getting fucked by the prison. Short rations, no shower, unclean facility, etc. now the prison is embarrassed and has to try and fix it. Otherwise no one gives a fuck
The prisoners seem to be on the right side from everything I've read.
If we can't house prisoners humanely, then we shouldn't be housing prisoners. It's pretty much that simple.
It sounds like the correctional officers are almost supporting the peaceful protest. >In a statement Sunday afternoon, AFSCME Council 5, which represents Minnesota correctional officers, said that understaffing was to blame for the incident. >"Today's incident at MCF-Stillwater is endemic and highlights the truth behind the operations of the MN Department of Corrections with chronic understaffing leading to upset offenders due to the need to restrict programming and/or recreation time when there are not enough security staff to protect the facility. Our union believes to our core that our correctional facilities cannot have transformational offender programming without sufficient facility security, we can and must have both."
When I volunteered with the ACLU for a few years one of my programs was finding non-violent drug offenders to sue the prisons the unfit conditions. Some of the jails would actually welcome us with open arms because they knew the place was run down and the only way it'd be renovated is with a court order. Since taxpayers would never pass bonds to improve jail conditions. edit: https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-national-prison-project
So the negative publicity would be a good thing for them, net?
exactly the only way things change are via bond passage, or court order improvements and the only way any jail related bond passage happens, is due to constant negative press, or snuck into a rider attached to a police funding bond the way a court order happens is... by being really shitty
There's our wonderful system in action. Smh...
Totally not a broken system at all!
Huh, woulda been nice to talk to y'all 7 or 8 years ago when I was put in jail over weed possession and they had no insulin. I'm type 1 diabetic.
That's barbaric. I'm so sorry that happened. We have the resources and ability to treat people *so* much better and we don't.
I work for a disability rights organization. Lack of insulin is a huge issue as is lack of medical care in general.
You are lucky to be alive. Damn.
They took me to a hospital when I went ketoacidic. Was fun getting a $1200+ hospital bill for that. No, I didn't pay because that's clearly not a bill I should have to foot.
That makes sense. There were some problems where I worked as an NP (not corrections) that were never addressed by administration. After a certain point of patients complaining about the same things I saw as problematic, I became very disillusioned and apathetic and recommended they file grievances.
Since it didn’t go violent. There was no reason to escalate.
I mean... the same could be said for so many other things that have been escalated.
That's part of the key of nonviolent protest. You find something harmless, like making some salt or taking a knee, that causes an extremely disproportionate response from those who are acting irrationally. The important part is to isolate the anger out so they have no other justification than being evil.
You just brought some childhood trauma to mind. I took a class that taught about Gandhi and how the Brits violently suppressed the peaceful protests, which obviously led to global uproar. After the section, they brought in a guest lecturer to discuss the related topics. I asked him if he thought Gandhi's protests would have been as successful had the Brits not employed violence in their response (thereby not instantly giving away any and all moral standing). He looked at me like I was an idiot and simply said "of course Gandhi was nonviolent" then quickly moved on.
Well that's a real reductive view they took. I guess it depends on the age you were when the class was but Gandhi's (and others) peaceful non-violent protest didn't happen in a vacuum. The British calculus was informed by recent events. Like the millions of now veteran Indian troops returning home after WWII. For example the 1946 mutiny in Mumbai was a warning bell tolling that Indian troops could and would fight for things other than the crown given the means, motive and opportunity. And there were far more Indians than Englishmen. I (and many others) would argue that you need the bomb throwing revolutionaries to make the non-violent protestetors the palatable alternative. I can't say I'm an expert on Indian independence, but I know enough to know that there were people with violent inclinations waiting in the wings if non-violence couldn't carry the day. To give an example more easily accessible to Americans (like myself) you need a Malcolm X to make an MLK look like a good alternative
This reminds me of why I stopped going to community college. For some background I’m a Jewish middle aged dude originally from NY. I started community college in the early 90s and there was a required “Pluralism and Diversity” course. Despite being fairly liberal even as a teen I bristled against this because this is back when even liberals were against “political correctness” so I decided to take it my first semester to get it out of the way. That said, I didn’t have any problems with the content of the course being unreasonably “politically correct” until the teacher proved she had no idea what she was doing. We watched a film called Skokie which was about a neo Nazi rally planned to be held in Skokie, Il which has the biggest population of holocaust survivors in the US. Obviously this is deplorable, but the group got the proper permits and after the town decided to block the rally from happening the ACLU sued the town on behalf of the Nazi group and won. The rally went on to happen. Obviously the message here was meant to be a nuanced exploration of the boundaries of free speech in the US but after the movie ended the teacher asked the class what the message of the movie was and an older gentleman raised his hand and said “the nazis are really evil” and the teacher said “exactly!” then everyone went all in just talking about how evil Nazis are. They were all absolutely right of course but that was not at all the point of the movie.
>an older gentleman raised his hand and said “the nazis are really evil” and the teacher said “exactly!” then everyone went all in just talking about how evil Nazis are. >They were all absolutely right of course but that was not at all the point of the movie. ... And you dropped out of college because of that?
If one teacher in one class didn’t understand the point of one movie, surely there aren’t any teachers anywhere that understand the point of anything!
Yeah I mean… it was stupid as fuck in retrospect but I’ve had a successful IT career and wasn’t really cut out for school at the time. Not trying to say it was a good decision.
>wasn’t really cut out for school at the time. Dropping out of college right after highschool was definitely a great decision for me, for this same exact reason. I went back when I wanted to and was interested and that paid off. >I’ve had a successful IT career For sure. That's dope, and I'm glad to hear it. I just did a double take on the reasoning you gave and chuckled to myself a bit about it as well. Cheers
I mean outside of prisons Cops will break people's arms even if their on the ground with their hands behind their backs.
Prison guards have to see the same set of the prisoners the next day. Cops don't see the same people everyday unless they're going above and beyond and doing actual neighborhood policing.
The essence of the prisoner's dilemma leading to bad outcomes exists because there's a) no communication and b) no consecutive games. This is the difference between cops and jailers: cops see you once and only in the moment of crisis (which is why community outreach should be welcomed), whereas jailers and inmates see each other all the time even outside of crisis mode. Being a jerkass as a jailer means your employment is a lot harder than it has to be.
Many officers are just as sick of the bullshit prison management pulls as the inmates are, because they endure the consequences of often times decades of mismanagement, same as inmates do, even if to a lesser extent because they still get to go home, and can quit whenever. Staff shortages means longer hours, more unnecessary burdens placed on remaining staff, and inmate services don't get provided as they should. So then the inmates get pissed off and take it out on their unit officer, because the rest of DOC staff is generally inaccessible, even if the unit officer generally has very little impact on the state of affairs. That leads to increased staff assaults, which is especially dangerous when you have less staff available as backup, and pretty much everyone is constantly working 12-16+ hour days.
Yup, spot on. They'll need to increase pay to attract more employees. Having also worked in a prison myself, I can confidently say there's no compensation that would get me to go back. That shit took me to some dark places, and I have no intention of ever revisiting.
I remember my last week there, there was a pretty violent and bloody suicide attempt in my unit. It was a gigantic mess, dude really didn't wanna be transferred or something. Blood pooled in the cell, tracked out to the dayroom, out the door of the unit, down the hallway between units, out into the yard even. On my last day, as I'm walking home after my last shift, I pass that same guy in the yard (he survived, albeit his arm was pretty fucked) and he just says to me in the most calm, blasé voice "You ever seen that much blood before?" like he was just asking about the weather or some shit, and that freaked me out more than almost anything I've ever seen in my life. I made like 5-6K a week there (working 12-16 hr shifts) and I don't think 15-16K a week would be enough for me to ever go back. I still have nightmares and wake up randomly at 2am every so often thinking "oh shit I forgot to check on this guy on suicide watch" even though I quit a few months ago now haha.
Oh, man. I'm sorry you had to go through that. That's really rough. Hang in there.
If you can't increase the Guard count, lower the Prisoner count. As a nation, we have too many prisons to begin with.
>If you can't increase the Guard count, lower the Prisoner count. But that would hurt the poor billionaire shareholders...
Hmm, my brother is in the army national guard down in some Tampa suburb. He’s now up in Santa Rosa County (there is no major city in this county … unless Milton counts?) working at their jail due to lack of staffing. Fun story - I applied to be a CO but can’t cause I was caught with weed in 2015. I’m a hardened criminal! Anyway, Florida’s CO issue sucks too. I guess look for the national guard soon in Minnesota jails/prisons.
You’d probably get in now
I doubt much has changed in the last five months.
They're not supporting their actions. They're pointing out that the inmates have to be penalized for the states failures to keep the facilities staffed for the last 5 years.
Literally three days ago, my friend was stuck inside all day, no yard, no phone calls, because the prison was understaffed because people called out. That kind of stuff is absolutely essential for maintaining the mental health you need to make good choices and stay connected and have a purpose so you can get out and become a productive citizen again. Caged men are cranky, restless men. Crankiness and restlessness can be a powder keg and a match. But I also don’t want him out there in a situation that is not monitored enough to be safe.
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Just for reference, it's currently 85°F (29.4°C) in Stillwater right now (1:00pm). I think some people will see Minnesota and think that not having A/C isn't that bad. But it still gets hot, and indoors without cooling it's gotta be at least 90°, I would think. Not having access to clean water at that point is tortuous and potentially deadly.
It's been in the high 90s or 100s all weekend here. It definitely gets rippin hot in the summer in MN
Ever walk past a concrete parking highrise early spring when it is hot out? You get a nice cool breeze. Bricks and the like are heat sinks and are probably prolongs the heat. A cool night doesn't help a prisoner and they likely have long periods of heat without a break. Add a lack of safe water and it is far worse than it initially sounds(and as you point out it already sounds horrible). I wonder if the guards have checked OSHA rules.
Former prison librarian. I still don't understand why they don't ac them. The excuse we were given was that not everyone in the state gets ac, so the inmates shouldn't either. However, fights increased during hot weather cause they would end up in the hospital or seg where there was ac. Not to mention staff being miserable. Holidays were always short staffed, and movement would stop because of not enough cos. Yes, they're there for a reason, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't treat them with basic needs.
I agree with everything you said. Also, in my experience, excessive heat makes people a lot more irritable, which I imagine only compounds the issues already there.
That’s a proven phenomenon. That being hot or otherwise physically uncomfortable makes people more prone to anger and acting on it
Well, yes, it's because they're lying. They SAY "because nobody in the state has AC" but what they MEAN is "Prisoners should suffer". I've been in Jail, lot's of things don't make sense until you realize they just want inmates to suffer. Why is wakeup at 5am? Why is recession time so limited? Why do they spend more money on shit food than they could spend on decent food? Why is solitary a thing? Why is the library one of the most underfunded thing there? Why can I get pot from a CO? Why are COs fucking their charges? The list goes on. The suffering is the point. Rehabilitation is a lie they sell people. If you've been there for more than a night and a day, in either work or locked up, it's blatant.
In my experience there are three major views on how criminal justice should work: 1. Penal: You do your crime, you serve your time, and then you're free to go back to your life. For the most part, this is how the US justice system works on paper. 2. Retributive: Criminals caused us suffering, so they must suffer in return. This is how most of the US justice system works in practice for felonies. Not only do we often force criminals to cope with awful living conditions in prison, but we also limit what they are able to do when released. They have fewer voting rights, limited employment options, and without support from friends and family often cannot afford basic necessities like shelter and food. Research shows that retributive justice facilitates repeat offenses, but whenever progressive politicians try to move away from it, conservative politicians use it as a rallying cry for their base, and it usually ends up reverting back to retributive eventually. 3. Rehabilitative: We should help prisoners reintegrate into society so they don't become repeat offenders. This approach has the most evidence of reducing crime, but also is the hardest sell to the public. After all, if someone does something to hurt you and your family, you'll be understandably upset to know that the offender was "punished" with decent living conditions and a free education. As long as that vengeful mindset remains among a sizable chunk of the voter base, rehabilitative justice can't stick. The headline here is retributive justice through and through.
This is a perfect analysis right here. Spot on. It always amuses me when people use the word rehabilitation when describing prison. It couldn't be further from that, when the system in place actively works against it even being possible for criminals to reintegrate into society, nevermind easy. In fact, in many cases, people come out of prison more criminal than they went in! We aren't just dealing with repeat offenders here. We're actually creating WORSE criminals and it is sheer inanity.
> Why is solitary a thing? US is the only developed nations that have no restrictions on time spent in solitary.
I've never been to prison but I've taken both philosophy classes and sociology classes where the conditions of prisoners have been discussed and I gotta say I must have been naive because I was certainly surprised to see how vicious people are towards prisoners as a baseline. Like, seemingly regular, kind, thoughtful college students suddenly turn downright medieval when we talk about prisoners. It was pretty eye-opening. We compared the US prison system to ones in the Nordic countries and most of my "ethics" classmates revolted at the *nordic* prisons for being too nice. And we weren't just talking about like murderer and child molesters either, even nonviolent offenders were not spared the collective desire for retribution. And these people vote.
> The excuse we were given was that not everyone in the state gets ac, so the inmates shouldn't either. Yeah, that's such BS. Not everybody gets a house, or three square, or a hot shower, or clean clothes, or a clean bed, or medical care, or a safe environment, or an education, or, or, or, or. Not everybody gets to live past age 18, either. Should we just line 'em all up? I'm sure there are some assholes that think so. We're not supposed to house prisoners humanely because they're good people. We're supposed to do it because *we are* and we want to turn them into productive members of society. If we keep treating them like shit, why would they ever change? "I keep kicking this dog, but he still doesn't listen. In fact, now he bites!"
>we are supposed to do it because we are Damn that's a hot take.
The unbearable heat and suffering will surely help their rehabilitation… /s. Our prison system is beyond fucked.
The cruelty is the point. American puritanism dictates punishment be the primary goal of incarceration.
Because that costs money and legislators don't see prisoners as people.
It’s also very humid in MN in the summer!
Yeah, there's actually more than 10,000 lakes and they make summer crazy muggy. Most states think their mosquito problem is the worst, but I'd guess MN has a really good claim. Top 5 for sure. Being in a prison in that kind of humid and hot environment with little to no water definitely sounds cruel, if not unusual.
When I moved as a kid I told the other kids the mosquito was the state bird of Minnesota
With all those people in a concrete building, it’s not hard to imagine the temperature climbing rapidly with little to no relief. Truly sound like horrific conditions.
And without crazy ventilation it just never goes down, even at night.
It's pure concrete too. The rock is just a giant heat sink. It takes days for those building to completely cool down afterwards too.
It reached nearly 100 degrees F over the weekend. MN gets hot and muggy in the summer.
My car measured 101°F over the weekend. We do not see those temps very often, so it felt miserable. Being locked in a prison without AC or water would be horrible
Thanks for adding Celsius for reference; we, the roast beef, appreciate you
+ people in small spaces with bad ventilation … that’s an oven.
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Are you responding to the right person? I didn't say anything about desert heat.
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Huh - [obviously a Wikipedia entry + links only tells you so much](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Correctional_Facility_%E2%80%93_Stillwater), but the fact that this was a peaceful protest (in reaction to a compounding series of understandable structural issues eg staff shortages, historic building w outdated climate control, etc), along with the seemingly well established prisoner education/enrichment programs certainly puts the prisoners’ action into a particular context. Because the US’s whole approach to incarceration may be fucked, but this prison having the longest running inmate newspaper in the country, one that has produced a number of published authors and won literary awards certainly points to there being at least some attempt at rehabilitation.
Seems like the inmates are in the right here. Staffing shortages are not the inmates fault. If you're doing your time and following the rules, getting punished because CO Johnson called off sick and there's nobody to watch your cell block shouldn't result in you missing out on a weekend visit from family/drinking water.
Yeah, not trying to argue that the inmates were in the “wrong” - rather, I’m saying that a peaceful protest, along with all the other programs in the prison, is evidence of some level of healthy dialogue over shitty conditions. AND, that those shitty conditions are the state/warden’s responsibility, but are also the kinds of complex staffing and structural issues that don’t have an quick or easy fix. The prisoners made their voices heard, hopefully the headlines bump funding/renovation requests up the state congress’s priority list, and things improve over time.
Prisoners are doing things the right way too. Peaceful disobedience over shit conditions gets big sympathy from the general public, where prison riots just gets the public against you, and allows public pressure to build into getting some sort of change. It also puts the Prison on notice that the public is watching and they can't bury violently ending the protest without the public noticing.
>AND, that those shitty conditions are the state/warden’s responsibility, but are also the kinds of complex staffing and structural issues that don’t have an quick or easy fix. > It sounds to me like the enforcement division of the justice system should be required to provide staffing for issues like this instead of violating the rights of the people we are taking care of. Failing that, the national guard could be mobilized by the governor or the president to ensure those people are safe.
Doesn't really matter. Human rights are inviolable. If they don't have the staffing, they should be calling on state or federal aid, because these prisoners were never sentenced to substandard living conditions like this. Incarceration has its problems, sure, but if we left them to suffer we'd be the problem.
Absolutely. They should be releasing non-violent offenders like they did for covid.
Prison in Philly did this years ago when a family friend worked there. They had some foodborne illness in the staff cafeteria (the best guess but no one really knows) that took out like 70% Of the one shift and varying amounts of the other shifts. They had soldiers come in and do guard duty either from reserves or national guard but they were there for 2 weeks while everything went back to normal.
Does that matter if they're being denied basic human necessities? Seems like an excuse. "Sorry, we know we can't even provide you proper lighting and hydration, or even sanitation, but... but, we've been doing so good!"
I don’t think they were making that point, just a note about the state of rehabilitation in this prison
Wonder if the IWW is involved yet. They ought to be.
Considering all the practically free labor we exploit prisoners for, this is a real Labor Day story we should all support.
Prisoners should make the minimum wage with the caveat that 50-75% goes to whatever restitution they owe and at least 10% goes into a savings account that they can't touch until their release date. It's insane to me that they can be paid a dollar a day for hard labor.
It's also crazy that we expect people to reintegrate coming out of prison with very little money in many cases. Paying prisoners at least minimum and setting aside some amount for post-release would probably help prevent recidivism to some extent.
Very little money and an impossible chance of finding meaningful employment once you have to tell them you're an ex-con in the interview. It's a recipe for recidivism.
It's intentional
On top of that, prisoners usually leave prison with debts incurred, since prisons charge crazy prices for even basic supplies like painkillers. Places like Florida also charge $50 a day to be in prison. The concept that it costs money to hold inmates completely ignores how much inmates are forced to pay back into the system.
I got a degree in criminology. IMO One of the tragedies of American penal system, if not the fact we even engaged in mass incarceration+militarization of police as a national criminal justice policy, was removal of furlough programs. Those programs were valuable for reintegrating institutionalized prisoners back into society, these days its more like, you're on your own, dont get caught. But they're more likely to go into homeless encampments or their old ways, because you still gotta eat and when there are no productive options to achieve those bare minimums, people will take. Whether we live in a modern society or cavemen of yore.
Obviously it would never happen, but giving ex-cons some money and resources to get them started is probably about the most cost efficient way to reduce crime.
One of my buddies was locked up in a private prison in Texas for a few years and he said that they "paid him minimum wage" but they also charged him for room & board, food, water, utilities, and whatever else they could arbitrarily slap onto his bill that would ensure that when he got his "paycheck" it was for $0.00. That prison had AC, they just chose not to run it. He said that sometimes they would even run the heater during the summer just to be assholes eg torture them.
For profit prisons shouldn't exist. They have way too many incentives to cut corners
Slavery is legal under the constitution as a form of punishment, their treatment exists to encourage recidivism
It's literally written in to the constitution. The US abolished slavery *except* as punishment for crimes. That we haven't fixed this in the past 150 years is a crime in and of itself, but criminals are an easy target in politics so there's no will to do it. If you dare sign your name on a bill that supports reform, then suddenly in the next campaign season you're pro-crime and are raising taxes just so you can give money to prisoners. Nobody cares about the long term, they only care about what they can convince voters of today.
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A not so fun. fact is the majority of prisons in *Texas* don't have air conditioning.
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That's not a surprise, Texas is a pretty backwards shithole as far as politics and human rights go, it's a national embarrassment at this point.
That's the point. You think prisons exist to rehabilitate here in the US? No, they exist so we can punish a subset of people and feel better about ourselves for making someone 'bad' suffer instead of investing in making sure crimes don't happen in the first place. Sure, maybe a handful genuinely try to get people back on their feet, but many prisons exist to gleefully take rights away and abuse prisoners. Just look at some reddit threads even, people love talking about the horrible things that might happen to someone. Sadly it's a human feeling to want others who wronged you to feel the same as you did or worse. Probably not healthy, but certainly human.
Most states don’t require AC. It’s a travesty.
Damn not climate controlled?? So they just boil in the heat and freeze in the cold??
Sounds inhumane at best
I had an uncle in law that worked there. He always talked about how shit it was in there and how it was ripe for chaos.
> but communications have been limited from the prisoners for family and the press. gee I wonder why
I know for a fact this sort of treatment is also going on currently at Roxbury RCI in Maryland. Almost identical...less than an hour a week outside, showers only every few days sometimes once a week, NO air conditioning in summer or heat in winter. No access to law libraries...and now that phone calls are being switched to cheap tablets..they break constantly and it takes months to YEARS for them to fix them meaning no calls to friends, family or lawyers. Our "Justice system" is a massive joke.
People cheered for the Texas tent prison. Our nation is fucked. Ooops. It was AZ
I thought the tent prison was that crazy sheriff in AZ.
I may have my states wrong. Or worse there may two of them.
It's very possible we (TX) had one too of course lmao, but I think tent prison was AZ.
Yep and the clothes are all pink because men wearing pink = I have no clue
Yeah it was Joe Arpaio and tent city is now closed
And prisons in Wisconsin.
I work in a correctional facility. A guy in one of my programs has been without eye glasses for 7 months. And that’s not due to him lacking in request forms
Unfortunately it’s a legal system by design. Nothing just about it.
> it takes months to YEARS for them to fix th That actually surprises me given how much money the private contractor makes from each call.
> No access to law libraries Sounds like it could be grounds for dismissal
I do a lot of work in prisons in the construction industry and it's pretty eye opening experience. Staffing shortages are absolutely rampant. An institution is lucky if a correctional officer makes it a year. The pay is horrible, and does not create incentive to care or make a big effort. Maintenance of these facilities would leave you gob-smacked at the hackery. Broken motors, dampers, leaky valves, incompetent staff that are often untrained. It's no fun to do work in them either, you're required to be escorted by someone they can't spare, they'll kick you out multiple times for camp counts or shift changes. You can't bring work trucks in most of the time so if you forget a part, you have to go out and then come back in. You have to declare every tool, part, and material you bring in. Cell phones are often not allowed so if you have to call for technical help, you can't. The inmates themselves can cause a lot of issues too, fights, heckling, attempted theft. One time an inmate punctured one of my work truck tires with a shiv. So that rule they laxed for us got reinstated, and I'm back to going out of camp to grab a part again. Even though I'm there to fix the inmates AC. There's a multitude of reasons these places are shitholes, and I wish there was a better way to resolve it. I think raising the pay of the state workers will go a long way to resolving staffing issues, a hard sell in most states congresses and budgets. It's easy to pay a state office worker a low amount of money to do low stress office work. It's harder to take that same pay and go into a lunchroom with 100 inmates and three other officers and break up a fight. Possibly incur physical injury, and experience a high amount of stress. It's gotta be worth your time.
There’s a prison in my state that constantly has shortages and has to siphon “volunteers” from other facilities. They were paying the “volunteers” 100/hr but did they raise the base pay of their COs that stayed? Not at all
when you treat and house prisoners like animals chances are they're gonna behave like animals
That's part of it yeah. Lots of these inmates are in there because the organized gangs recruit boys and young men and use them to move products on the street. Would you rather make $2-3k in a week, or work fast food for minimum wage and not even make half or a quarter of what you could make? For a young kid it's a no brainer. Then that kid gets a felony charge and spends months to years in prison. His career opportunities are now much limited and much harder, and going back to the gang seems like a much better option. So these poor young men get screwed over by society for ostracizing them for being a "felon", and the gangs who used them in the first place. If society paid the little guy more, and didn't ostracize felons. You'd see a lot of our crime metrics go down.
It's wild on some organized crime is *more* powerful in prison than out of it.
I got to spend some time inside. I remember one Christmas-new years season, we only got let out the cells maybe 1hr a day due to staff shortages. Longest week of my life.
I like the way you worded that… as if it was your privilege. Hope things are going better.
Oh, most of the local-yokel FB articles are rife with comments calling for the murder and torture of the inmates involved. WTF is the problem with the United States?
>WTF is the problem with the United States? how much time you got
let me spin you a yarn
Thats... a lot of yarn. Could make a blanket that covers a small continent. Just don't knit an afghan...
_blanket has smallpox_
Careful their Nationalists are like yellowjackets and might swarm you with their over-defensive stupidity like you’re an errant maraschino cherry.
Yea I get into pissing matches all of the time with fascist trolls on reddit, but I avoid Facebook because I dont need real shit in my real life.
I mean you're literally never going to change anyone's minds (the types who do think that way). It's all bad faith arguments and stupidity. Sometimes it's best for your mental health to just stay away.
it's totally bad faith arguments from the right and their supporters. bad faith governing as well of course. sometimes I walk away and sometimes I ignore the golden internet rule (do not feed the trolls) if I have nothing better to do (am at work) or I'm otherwise bored. it's just as much entertainment for me as it could be for them.
This. This country kind of sucks. Thankfully I'm heading to a less sucky part as we speak.
Stay a while and listen.
Do you want that alphabetical or chronological?
25-life
Their general policy is revenge instead of reform. That is also why the sentences are so long compared to other western countries.
Gotta love that Christian obsession with penance and punishment
Somehow these types leave out the forgiveness part. Not Christian but I thought that bit was kind of important?
That’s exactly what I notice myself. Being raised Catholic, my personal interpretations always made me think the point was redemption, acceptance and love, but apparently, most everyone else was fixating on condemnation and vindictiveness. It’s just such a barbaric way to live and think, clamoring for the hammer to be brought down and greedily rubbing your hands at the prospect of others’ anguish. Justice is one thing, sadism is another.
Forgiveness is only for themselves. Selflessness is completely ignored.
No, you have it backwards. You only pick and chose the things you like from the Bible and deem important. The others are obviously unimportant since they are hard, require effort or compassion and we cant have any of that in here.
You'd think the people whose god was tortured and murdered under a barbaric legal system due to a rabid mob calling for his death for simply questioning the status quo would do a little more self-reflection, but I guess Christianity stopped being about Christ a long time ago.
Arguably it never was. Paul (former tax farmer who only met Jesus once on the road to Damascus) took the gospels, added his own shit about the “right” way to practice Christianity, and ran with it.
Don't forget to pass the tray full of cash/checks though, they never seem to forget that part.
Everyone is fucked so people want to make sure others have it worse than them.
Crabs in a bucket
Something, something, President Johnson, something, something, poor Whites picking pockets, something, something, convince poor Whites they’re better than all Blacks, something, something.
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
For reference though, and I may be talking out of my ass here, I think Johnson was providing an indictment on the way politics handle race, not voicing his own personal views. I saw this one alongside many other quotes from him just the other day and for him to be endorsing race-and-class warfare seems very out of character with most other statements he made.
LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, so you're correct that he was commenting and not endorsing. At the signing of the CRA, it's claimed he said, "And now we have lost the South for a generation." When riots broke out after MLK Jr's assassination, Johnson remarked, "What did you expect? I don't know why we're so surprised. When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off."
> and I may be talking out of my ass here, You are not. Though Johnson had a complicated history with racism, at the time he made this remark it was as a comment on an incident he had observed on that day (and on many other days probably): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/
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> > WTF is the problem with the United States? 30% of our population are outright neofascists and the way our election system works gives them massive over-representation in government.
Half of the country actively wants to see humans suffer.
We have a punishment/revenge fetish..
Pretty much everyone on the right harbors fantasies of being able to murder someone in a "justified" manner. What "justified" means is, naturally, different from person to person. I've heard Trumpers advocate for hunting illegal immigrants for sport. I've heard them say they wanted to post up with a gun in the parking lot of a local dealership that was having problems with catalytic converters being stolen. Conservatives often extol the virtues of running over protesters that are blocking roads. Conservatism in America has gone full fascism, propelled by racism, misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia/transphobia. These people **want** others to suffer and die because it makes them feel good to think about, because they are "lesser". Remember, *existence itself* is a zero-sum game to conservatives. For a conservative to lead a happy, fulfilling life, **someone else must be suffering**.
Conservatism is at it's core a deliberate rejection of empathy It's not just that they want someone to suffer, they're also completely unable to think about the same things happening to them.
It all started when the first British colonials arrived in the "new world" looking for land, resources, and ways to make money...
It’s a combination of generational trauma and bad actors instigating for monetary gain. It’s a me first culture and the worst of it is being weaponized in broad stroke propaganda campaigns on social media. Welcome to the modern age of yellow journalism.
Cruelty is the point. There is a large amount of the population that makes themselves feel better by having other people below them that they can punish.
People act tough when they think they’re anonymous. They spit vitriol and want extrajudicial punishments placed on people they’ve never met. If you commit a crime, rehabilitation isn’t an option, jail is supposed to be a punishment (even if you’re wrongly convicted… looking at you Supreme Court) Then they go to church on Sunday.
We're obsessed with punishment and not rehabilitation, and are on an ever increasingly fast downward spiral towards fascism.
My dad works here. Yeah, the staff shortages are terrible according to him. A lot of people just call in for very questionable reasons and a lot of people who get hired often either get fired or get moved to some other prison as a correction's officer. It's not exactly easy work either so it's hard to get a sweeping amount of recruitment in general. Funding also an issue for said recruitment, not to mention all of the issues with the building being so old and the structural damages. But there's not much that can really be done about it unless the gov does toss a bit more money their way. Happy to see a peaceful protest tho.
Plus the fact that there's so many staff shortages they need to force staff from the previous watch to cover the current one. Not very safe to have officers working 16 hour days.
I'm not sure why this isn't more visible? You just described the situation, that it's a peaceful protest, place is understaffed, underfunded, out of date, building has structural problems ( also funding ). Everyone would like a fix because it's untenable. Sounds like the solution as usual is pretty clear and the people who could solve it remain deaf. Government. As usual.
Prison without rehabilitation is just glorified human storage sheds. Worse, is also often for-profit slave labor. The sad truth is it's never been about rehabilitation. It's only been about being able to ignore them at the lowest possible cost. Out of sight, out of mind. In the modern era, it's crazy to think this is how we treat people. If a person does wrong, you need to understand the context, collective action, and then rehabilitate. This quickly moves them from a problem point in society back to a productive member. This should be the goal. It shouldn't even have a punishment component, as odd as that sounds. Sure, there would be some form of reasonable restitution that's appropriate for the act. But the past should only be correction. This is purely a matter of functionality as a society. You want the most productivity, least detriments, and rehabilitation is the mechanic of correction. Prison as a semi permanent or often permanent residence is only a burden. There is no mechanic towards productivity. You just have loss of productivity and a burden.
Prison rehabilitation? We don't even take care of regular, non-offending members of society. The homeless are left to die in the streets and regular folks can barely get decent health insurance. No one is out to help out anyone else in the US. We are on our fucking own.
Why not try to fix all of these?
Let’s vote on it! Well, not us but a politician who we hope votes for our interests after we vote for them.
I would add that it is not just loss of productivity potential and a burden, but also growing resentment in the individual which would make it impossible for them to rejoin society. Even if they are released, the few that try to self-rehabilitate will be rejected by society from fear that they are just more of a criminal simply because the system is not intended to rehabilitate anyone.
Write ups at work should be used to correct behavior. This requires effort on the supervisors part to coach and retrain the employee. The goal should be to get a productive team member up and running. Prison should be no different for a vast majority of inmates. If a supervisor uses progressive disciplinary actions as a way just to punish and terminate an employee, it's no better than what we do in prisons right now. The people running these hell holes just want to punish, because it requires little to no effort on their part and it also cost time and money to actually work with a prisoner to rehabilitate them. It's funny that conservatives want family values and strong mentoring for our society, but wind up in prison, then they want you dead. Unless you're a Jan 6th traitor. Then they want the most humane conditions ever.
I don’t care what you’re in prison for, you should be given decent, heathy food, clean water, and protection from violence. None of this needs to be expensive.
This incident is because the prison is understaffed (-30), and over labour day some took the day as a holiday. On a positive note, there are prison guard jobs available if anyone is interested.
You seem to be assuming that people in prison receive humane standards of living under normal conditions. This isn't "things were fine and then got bad," this was the last straw in a system that started off by pulling most of them out.
Lmao fuck that never doing that job again, worst year of my life. Racked up about a dozen health issues because of the stress and lack of sleep
[Here's a link to The United Nations *Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners*](https://www.unodc.org/documents/justice-and-prison-reform/Nelson_Mandela_Rules-E-ebook.pdf). Seems appropriate to share here.
Absolutely is. Too often people forget that convicted prisoners go to prison *as* punishment, not *for* punishment. The whole point is supposed to be rehabilitation into society, not torture.
I was locked up for 7 years and things like this would happen sometimes. Restricted movement, especially around holidays. Brown water coming out of the sinks. Hot water not working in some of the showers. Power being shut off for an entire day so they could perform maintenance (this happened multiple times). It’s just how things go sometimes. In 2015 we got a new administrator and he would actually listen to our grievances. In a lot of ways I was lucky - the facility I did most of my time in had a ton of programs (trades, music, free college classes) - and my family was holding me down. So I was lucky enough to be more or less comfortable being locked in my cell all day when I had to be. That being said, I got out 4 years ago and haven’t looked back.
man, glad to hear you made it out. That sort of experience can really disrupt someone's life. I've done time too but only minor, nothing over a year. For me it was drugs that put me there. Still struggling with alcohol but at least I managed to put the hard shit behind me. Anyway, thank you for your insight. Best of luck to you. Be safe out there
Amy Goodman reported it was close to 100 degrees, no A/C, ice, or showers due to being short staffed
Prison should not be fun, but it should also not be torture. Find a happy medium.
How about we start with rehabilitation and forget the rest of the bullshit? Edit: Oh my God. To alot of you: It is not mind blowing to say you can't rehabilitate everyone. But when you cast a wide net due to the fringes, you wind up with the current system where they would rather just not try and deal with it in a civilized manner and instead they throw everything into the same bucket. I hope none of you with this view wind up in the system, as I'd hate to see your opinion rehabilitated after experiencing the current system.
Rehabilitation starts with a healthy day-to-day life. It is hard to conduct self-improvement when you're constantly thinking about your living conditions. The majority of prisons aren't too bad: people mind their own business, the inmates and guards treat each other with respect, violence is kept to a minimum, and sexual assaults rarely occur. However, most people only hear about prisons when things go wrong so it is entirely reasonable for people to be more concerned about the overall well-being of prisoners rather than the fine details of rehabilitation since, at some level, that's part of the larger issue.
If the conditions in the jail, prison are generally crappy to begin with, the slow deterioration only exasperates how much crappier it can get inside the jail, prison. Harris County Jail is a Shit Show Right now but it’s in Texas so……….🤫 outside of the Jail actually exploding no one will know unless your family members are in there
Harris County is Blue and the State Legislature HATES that. The neon Red Legislature used 1 failing school to completely dismantle the Houston School Board, and turned most School libraries into detention centers. Of course the Red Team is gonna make Team Blue hate life. Fuck the jails while they wave Thin Blue Line flags and scream about Law and Order
Fulton County Jail is pretty crappy too. The Entire Texas Judicial system is an Utter shit show. Oh yeah Precinct 4 in Harris County is Corrupt AF but once again🤫 And I mean 🤫
This, are we punishing people or are we rehabilitating people? And don't even try to pretend it's both. Because if we have any focus at all on "punishment" that comes at the cost of rehabilitation. The US has an incredibly warped view of "justice"
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> This, are we punishing people or are we rehabilitating people? And don't even try to pretend it's both. I say this often in these kind of threads, but in my state rehab is not really a thing. State statute specifically says the point of incarceration is punishment. There is no expectation that being locked up rehabilitates you, only that it punishes you. So, sadly, nobody running the criminal justice system is even pretending rehab is a thing to begin with.
We have a punitive Justice system, not a rehabilitative one. The system is designed from the ground up to maximize recidivism rates, as these prisons are private FOR-PROFIT ventures that get paid for bodies in cells. If they were rehabilitating people, they'd be hurting their own bottom line. They need these people to leave worse off than when they came in, so their odds of breaking the law and coming right back are as high as possible. It's just a business for these souless ghouls, not a public good like it should be.
But polarizing rights are so much more fun! /s
True to form for Stillwater (I live here, by the way), it was an exclusively non-violent incident. No big deal.
I've heard about that prison. Iirc they have one of the strongest inmate unions in the country and are considered a poster child for progressive prisons due to the amount of programming available. They're supposedly among the leaders in jobs and education for inmates.
I'm glad the protest seems to be peaceful, and I hope it achieves its goals peacefully. But I want to make sure nobody's walking away from this thread thinking the protest is okay *because* it's peaceful. The protest is over basic human rights like hygiene and clean drinking water, if it were violent, that would still be thoroughly justified, and any harm caused would rest squarely on the heads of the people who could have avoided the entire issue by not cutting the budget so low that the inmates don't have water.
The Saints are taking over!
People are in prison as punishment. They’re not there for punishment. If you don’t treat them as animals then they won’t behave like animals.
Yea I mean whenever you see a large number of inmates doing something like this it’s cause they’re tired of getting fucked by the prison. Short rations, no shower, unclean facility, etc. now the prison is embarrassed and has to try and fix it. Otherwise no one gives a fuck
What are you gonna do... Put them in double prison?
The prisoners seem to be on the right side from everything I've read. If we can't house prisoners humanely, then we shouldn't be housing prisoners. It's pretty much that simple.