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Comment by cool_dude85 | Hacker News Reader

Quick question for you. You observed this behavior as a volunteer teacher for weekly classes directly, along with enough context to understand what the codes were used for and how prolific the usage was?

Or you were told at least some of the details in your post by prison administration? the same jolly group of fellows responsible for producing, implementing, and administering the type of policies being criticized in this article?

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Having been in jails I've never seen anything of this sort. Although I did set up a coded email system using the commissary food ordering computer which got me labeled as a hacker and eventually banned from using the PCs for school. [I was teaching C# using the compiler hidden away in the Windows folder]

That is a great hack actually! But which compiler is that?

Anywhere that has .Net Framework installed usually has the compiler on hand.

See for instance: https://people.cs.ksu.edu/~schmidt/200s08/findCsharp.html

Yeah, quite honestly the gangs can just, you know, talk. Writing in books sounds exactly like the kind of thing that someone would make up, inspired in movies or something.

I dont know why, but this made me laugh. I mean its horrible, the idea of restricting reading in prison based on such an obvious lie.

The elaborate scenario that you would have to construct such that a message encoded into a book was the only way for a prisoner to pass some nefarious message...

Also the same jolly fellows that have to deal with the aftermath of the hits.

Not more-so than the prisoners, themselves, and by a large margin.

You have such a strong prior that prison administrators are arbitrarily cruel that you just automatically dismiss any reasonable explanations for seemingly arbitrary policies by assuming they are lies and rationalizations?

>You have such a strong prior that prison administrators are arbitrarily cruel

Yes. Don't you?

Must be from one of those nicer places where that's not the case.

I'll leave it up to the reader to dismiss any claims made in that post. But you must admit there's a big difference between "I volunteered at a prison, and this is what I personally saw happening often" and "I volunteered at a prison, and this is what the warden told me when I asked." The first one is at least direct evidence.

Having spent time in some of the nicest prisons in the world, I’d much rather sit down to have dinner with the violent criminals living in those institutions than the prison staff.

Even in Scandinavia, maybe 20% of the prison staff weren’t downright awful people. The rest? Bullying prisoners was their daily entertainment, nothing but cruelty.

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