Rotary Jails | Hacker News Reader

Rotary Jails

amusingplanet.com

76 pointsClepsydra40 comments

Tom Scott has made a video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DGXHMOhXAw

I was reminded of the panopticon [1] prison design paradigm. The rotary controls the prisoners physically by only allowing one cell door to be open at once, while the panopticon doesn't necessarily limit how many doors are open at once. The rotary jail doesn't make it easier to watch the prisoners, while the panopticon allows the wardens to convince the wards that they are always watched.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

The inventor called it "a mill for grinding rogues honest"

You could in theory combine the two with the cells arranged in a rotating barrel.

"Why Brown and Haugh went the convoluted route and chose to rotate the cells instead of the circular cage, is a mystery."

Any guesses? It does seem like a dumb idea to rotate the massively larger/heavier cells.

Would the cells and prisoners actually be heavier? If you have a giant cage of iron bars, I imagine the interior structure, which just needs the walls between cells, and the floor, would be lighter actually.

Maybe because they are so much heavier. Prisoners would probably be able to make the door revolve much more easily. The cells, even if it is possible turn them with a hand crank from somewhere, wouldn't be movable from the opening by hand.

Mount the central cage on a heavy millstone such that you still need the hand crank and leverage provided by a gearing system to rotate it.

In Tom Scott's video, posted in another message in this thread, he notes that the inventor partnered with an iron foundry owner. Each set of cells is notated to be 30 tons of steel: more steel vs. would've been needed for a simple circle of bars that rotated.

Seems simpler to know exactly where the entrance is, relative to the entire building. You could build a hallway off it.

This theoretically makes it usable in a smaller space, since you don't need a hallway to run around the entire ring.

Getting a prisoner in or out would be like the Central Bureaucracy cube in Futurama.

Securing one entrance well is easier than moving along with revolving one. It is way simpler to stand still and aim with a gun than walk along shifting door way and aim a gun.

Serving food is simpler since you can just carry a cart with say a soup pot on one entrance and hand in bowls of it while the thing rotates. With moving door you'd have to keep moving the pot or pre-laddle the soup.

Same goes for all other housekeeping tasks. When the prisoners take their linen and clothes to wash they can not have any contact with other prisoners as they don't walk past their cells.

Bringing prisoners in is easier since they will always move along the same exact route no matter what since that is where the door is.

You could also potentially keep the prisoners from knowing who is in the same jail as them if you don't let them see one another. Obviously sound still carries, but some prisoners might not want to talk, so you could also consider it a privacy feature.

It also means you can firmly attach the bars to floor and ceiling making the cells more secure.

These are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are others as well. While I can not think a single good reason why the bars should move.

> While I can not think a single good reason why the bars should move.

It’s cheaper to build?

If one person could rotate the whole thing with a crank, why couldn't the prisoners do the same by holding the bars and pushing on the walls?

Anyway, this reminded me of the mechanical fortress from Myst.

Worm gear maybe, so it couldn't be back driven?

There's a variety of motion mechanisms that can't be backdriven. A worm drive[1] is a common one.

Alternatively, they could simply have a external lock on rotation that's engaged when someone's not actively moving the cells.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worm_drive

I'm curious as to how the plumbing worked in this system. Would seem difficult to pipe water in a manner that can rotate like this.

This sounds inhumane and thus unlikely to happen in modern prison design (which tbh is more of a jobs program these days than actually designing for restitution or rehabilitation)

"The rotary jails had many design problems. For example, in the event of fire, it was not possible to evacuate the inmates fast enough".

I don't really buy the quote. You could mitigate a fire in many ways and on top of that unless it takes you minutes to move from a cell to another evacuating 8 prisoners wouldn't take that much time.

Only real fire related threat I can see is if a prisoner for some reason wants to set himself on fire and succeeds. Putting him out might take too long.

As for the inhumane part. I personally don't see it and I think our prisons are little too nice currently, but I'm from a country that doesn't run for-profit prisons.

Well, you could make it such that in event of a fire, the external cage would drop down low enough to facilitate evacuation into a designated fenced up area.

If this caught your imagination, you'll want to read the short story "Manuscript Found in a Police State" by Brian Aldiss

Also, the “great wheel” in his Helliconia books (which takes this idea to rather extreme levels).

Aldiss also has described the Wheel of Kharnabar in "Helliconia Winter": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helliconia#Helliconia_Winter

It's always interesting to see the weird things that are designed after technology advances but before it is optimized.

Or, alternatively, horrible over-engineering for only a very slight benefit (fewer guards), with huge externalized cost (prisoners feelings about living in such a concoction, fire safety).

The externalized cost doesn't seem so bad if you don't care about prisoners' feelings or if they die in a fire. Unfortunately, I think that mindset is probably more common, especially historically, than many realize.

I got a real flashback to Wolfenstein: The New Order from this :D

Iowa was one of the unethical states using them well into the 1960s. Shameful.

Wanted to block the cookies on this website. After flipping about 20 of the pages off, I’ve noticed that the list contains probably more than a 100 3rd party websites. Nope, bye.

There's some kind of sickening scroll acceleration applied to this page, making it exceedingly frustrating to use with a magic mouse. Not surprised due to level of shit shoveled onto the site, but I have no idea why anybody would want to subject their users to this.

It feels like someone recreated the experience of a slippery ice floor from a platformer game in a webpage. It's amazing that they found something less pleasant to do on a webpage than the mouse-following-sparkles that used to be popular on people's geocities pages.

It works pretty well with JS disabled.

Makes me think that I should go the way of the (perceived) average HN user and tighten up my browsing experience...

A quick look at the code: it appears that theres javascript keeping the top-bar "sticky" instead of good ol' CSS. So every time you scroll some new computation kicks in. The jerkiness may be the massive amount of computation thats taking over your browser. Im by no means an expert on web stuff - so this is just my guess.

Interesting, I've seen another site a few weeks ago that seemed odd when scrolling too. I think they are a great company with a decent product, but this is a turnoff. I was thinking of contacting them but felt a waste of time since probably whoever I contact would go to someone that isn't a web developer and just feel like it'd go nowhere to improve their site. Especially if it only happens on Mac, and they are using another OS as was wondering if the site did it on other platforms or even browsers too.

Also an ad appeared over the "I accept" cookie banner right before I was going to click it.

On my end I saw 40 things blocked which must have included both all ads, that cookie accept garbage, and any other nonsense. Ublock origin + firefox 71. Even scrolling seemed to be pretty normal on the normal page although its even nicer with one click to view in reader mode.

I visited the site at work and it brought vanilla Chrome to its knees. There is just an obscene amount of garbage that loads (and continues to load) on that page. Phew.

It matches with the design of this jail

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