Why would prisons ban my book? Absurdities rule the system (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Why would prisons ban my book? Absurdities rule the system (2022)

themarshallproject.org

136 pointsTomte164 comments

There's also the movement towards doing away with paper books altogether and charging prisoners, by the minute, to rent e-books.

https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/prison...

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jan/13/u...

> In December, the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation launched a pay-per-minute ebook policy, which charges inmates five cents (4p) per minute of reading. The fee equates to roughly an hour of prison labour.

"Rehabilitation", indeed.

It is all a giant scam and the general public including me is complicit

I wonder when that monetization model comes to other devices outside. Just imagine how much companies could make if it costed money to use your smartphone, tablet or computer...

I mean, we used to pay per minute to use our cell phone. I think it's proven that it's harder to sell to a (literally) non-captive audience.

Wait, that's over-priced even for the general public. That's around $25 to read an average Harry Potter book -- even nice sets of books 1-7 go for less than $175 new, where you get to keep the bloody book. You can buy the whole ebook series for Kindle outright in the $60-$80 range.

Yes; the point is to extract money from their friends and family on the outside. They've been similarly price-gouging phone calls and basic hygiene/personal care supplies for ages.

Well we couldn't have people ordering or sending books. Those could have drugs in them, and every possible step needs to be taken to make sure no one has drugs.

Prisoners need a locked-down e-book system so that they don't get dangerous content, like maybe certain religious materials. The general public doesn't want to bear the cost of administering that so best to have some corporations bid for the rights for their captive audience. The high cost to the prisoner keeps prisoners safe by limiting exposure to thoughts of those outside prison, which causes disorder. We also must ensure compensation of the e-book administrators for the costly efforts of maintaining hundreds of megabytes of plaintext.

The incarceration system in the US varies wildy by location, and even prisons within the same system. I'm very skeptical that this sort of heavy handed approach is needed anywhere at all, but at the very least it would only be a few places. There are already 3rd party charities that would supply books with a reasonable process to vet the item before it gets into the prison.

My post was satire but I don't think any vetting process can effectively and economically stop fentanyl and LSD from being impregnated in paper books and making it through.

I understand that it's still much easier to cut a deal with a prison guard.

Photocopier

That's illegal. Copyrights and such

Not necessarily. You're allowed to make backups and whatnot in a few scenarios carved out ahead of time that likely wouldn't adversely affect the creator.

But this is not a backup scenario

Now this seems an infinitely better issue to get upset about (and attempt to rectify) than anything mentioned in the original article.

Prisons, being an extension of the government, have no job picking and choosing books over moral outrage.

Prisons, being largely a vehicle through which government acts to express society’s (or at least, the ruling class’s) moral outrage, act perfectly on-brand when picking and choosing books over moral outrage.

The main job of prisons is enhancing public safety. Firstly by holding dangerous people behind bars and secondly by bettering those that can be bettered and preparing them for a successful post-prison life. They might not do a very good job with the second of these tasks (and indeed make some offenders more dangerous), but I don't see why, in the pursuit of it, government should not take a view towards what books would be very likely to do more harm than good. If you don't accept this why not? And if you do, what better criterion than "moral outrage" do you propose? Keeping people you want to re-integrate into society away from what most of society would see as morally outrageous does not strike me as a priori unsound. Maybe violent Neonazis are easier to re-integrate if they don't read Mein Kampf whilst in prison?

Even before covid, some prisons eliminated in-person visits and instituted some proprietary and predatory-priced video calling https://www.npr.org/2016/12/05/504458311/video-calls-replace... and even phone calls are super expensive https://www.npr.org/2022/10/23/1130782415/incarcerated-peopl... I'm sure covid has been used to accelerate the end of in-person visits.

I apologise in advance for a lack of reference (was probably Popehat) but the most bizarre if not scary thing I read about the public’s attitude to prisoners and justice was that if you asked them “Should prisoners be allowed to read books?” or ask them “Should prisoners be required to read books?”. You’ll get very different results. Basically any question asked of the public will broadly favour the one that sounds like a punishment :(

Edit: as per the reply below, it’s entirely possible I misremembered this. I asked Popehat and he said it sounds familiar but he doesn’t recall.

There was a post yesterday about Arizona prisons inducing labour (birth) in inmates against their consent. Plenty of comments saying things like "they're wards of the state so consent isn't needed".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235888

Edit: fixed a typo and clarified that it's labour (i.e., giving birth) and not physical labour.

Without commenting on the morality those comments are correct. In the United States those who are incarcerated can be compelled to labor, per the 13th amendment.

You might even say that's the whole purpose, historically and economically, of prisons in the first place.

Under this view, presumably historical nations that made most of their money from trade, and didn't rely much on local production (the Netherlands, say; or Portugal; or Hong Kong under British rule), would see little-to-no local economic benefit from a marginal slave laborer — and so just wouldn't bother to establish any prisons / penal colonies. And also, likely would find it hard to sell these criminals on to other countries, given their known criminality / disobedient attitude.

Is this accurate? If so, then what did such countries generally do with their criminals? Exile them?

> You might even say that's [ed: forced labor] the whole purpose, historically and economically, of prisons in the first place.

Generally, no, that would not be accurate.

OTOH, prisons were, before fairly recent history, generally of fairly limited use. Forced labir definitely, and as a direct replacement for chattel slavery, is the original reason for mass incarceration practices in the United States (though overtly, directly using it for that purpose has since fallen out of favor.) Different systems have different hiatories of penal practices and have used similarly described institutions for different purposes.

You're reading too quickly and inferred the wrong meaning of "labor" here. The meaning here is "give birth to a child" not "engage in work" so the 13th amendment is completely irrelevant.

Edit: It didn't help that "including" was probably an autocorrect from "inducing"

> Edit: It didn't help that "including" was probably an autocorrect from "inducing"

Damn the awful auto-correct on my phone! Thank you for pointing that out, it certainly made the intended meaning less obvious.

That the 13th amendment doesn’t extend abolition to prisoners doesn’t necessarily mean that no other rule or law could extend abolition to prisoners.

18 usc § 1589, the general statutory forced labor ban in the US, does not exempt penal labor.

"Inducing labor" is a medical procedure.

If you're unconscious or altered mental status a doctor can force you to do a medical procedure to overcome an emergency situation, like say a baby that needs to come out immediately. Whether you are a prisoner or not would be irrelevent.

The doctor made this clear to me when I was unlawfully detained in Arizona while officers lied to the doctor telling them there was drugs in my GI tract. The doctor was chomping at the bit to find some clinical evidence of emergency so he could force me to do what he wanted.

While this is not a 13th Amendment issue, and possibly not an issue under federal statute law banning slavery, servitude, forced labor, and human trafficking (which unlike 13A doesn’t have a penal exemption, so it may apply), it does violate medical consent rights which prisoners generally retain.

>violate medical consent rights which prisoners generally retain.

Do they? I complained to my state board when medical personnel performed "care" on me without my consent while I was detained (not arrested, not in prison/jail, and at the time no warrant/court order -- just 'detained' and dragged to hospital on a hunch by an officer that there might be drugs hidden up my ass). I was told by my state board the nurse/doctor can do what they want without my consent as they are basically acting as a police officer, and that my (extremely thorough, well documented, 100+ page) claim was denied -- not only that it was denied in triage and not even assigned to a detailed investigation. The medical records clearly listed I was alert and oriented and also expressed there was no clinical evidence of emergent situation, so this wasn't some normal civil exception.

Considering the act in the article happened in Arizona and my own interaction with the state board is that it is legal for nurse/doctor to do as they wish without your consent if LEO is involved, it seems to be de facto legal. Not only that I got the bill and even though the "insurance" was listed as "ICE health care services" the debt in full was sold to debt collectors who are chasing me to this day.

> > violate medical consent rights which prisoners generally retain.

> Do they?

Generally, yes, but there are some exceptions, and it is an area that is complicated in the details because it involves multiple federal Constitutional rights and statutes interacting with state laws.

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2019/nov/4/beyond-estel...

> I complained to my state board when medical personnel performed "care" on me without my consent while I was detained (not arrested, not in prison/jail, and at the time no warrant/court order -- just 'detained' and dragged to hospital on a hunch by an officer that there might be drugs hidden up my ass). I was told by my state board the nurse/doctor can do what they want without my consent as they are basically acting as a police officer, and that my (extremely thorough, well documented, 100+ page) claim was denied -- not only that it was denied in triage and not even assigned to a detailed investigation.

Well, yes, this sounds like a cavity search, where the legal issue isn’t medical consent but potentially unreasonable (and thus unlawful) search under the 4th Amendment as incorporated against the states by the 14th Amendment.

The state medical board is the wrong forum for that complaint.

(Note that even for the actual medical consent issues in the above cited source, federal courts have been the forums; state medical boards are more convenient—because when they decide to get involved, they bear the cost of investigation—but are really not generally an effective method of holding state and local law enforcement and correctional authorities, and medical practitioners employed or directed by them, to task.)

I agree that it appears they should, but again recall this happened in Arizona. I personally have spoken with their board. They personally have expressed to me that it isn't even against the regulatory bounds of the license of medical professionals to act without consent. They refuse to even _investigate_ acts that happen under detainment without consent by a patient who was fully alert and oriented without any emergent condition. That is, there is zero effect to the license of anyone doing it as the board refuses to act on it in the state this article is in. The claims simply die in triage -- and this isn't some theoretical but my concrete experience.

>The state medical board is the wrong forum for that complaint.

The complaints I made to medical board was about medical staff at a private hospital acting without consent. I was even sent the bill this wasn't a prison or other state hospital. Why would the board be an inappropriate forum? I understand the board doesn't control actual police officers but they were not the direct subject of the complaint.

>he legal issue isn’t medical

And this is the problem I keep confronting to try and solve this situation. If you argue it was medically improper, suddenly it was a "criminal search and you need to hold accountable the process for the criminal search." If you argue it was an improper search, suddenly it was "medical care and you need to determine if the medical care was improper." This allows both the LEO and medical personnel to weasel out of it by flipping things to the other side, which is part of the reason why it is probably done this way as a slippery "be medical when you argue against the criminal aspect and be criminal search when you argue against the medical aspect." I know the game being played with that card because it gets played a lot.

The 13th amendment doesn't say anything about forcing prisoners to give birth

The context of slavery in the 13th amendment was the recent slavery in America. Could you not basically do what you wanted medically with a slave in the early 19th century? Forcing birth seems to fit within the limits of slavery.

The 13th amendment doesn't expand the right of the state to abuse prisoners.

Expand? No, retain? Yes, unless you've decided slavery isn't abuse.

Actually there were limited restrictions on what could be done to slaves, but that's irrelevant since the 13th ammendment doesn't make prisoners slaves, it merely doesn't make involuntary labor as part of a punishment illegal.

Memory is very fallible, and if you can't remember the source I'd suggest it's quite possible you're not accurately remembering the information as well. Even in cases where someone's memory is entirely accurate, without a source it's hard to see if we're missing relevant context (for instance, if a certain piece of information was gathered decades earlier). A few years back[1] the ACLU claimed that it's polling found broad support for prison reform and reducing the prison population.

When Obama first came into office, Senator Jim Webb (generally considered a moderate) actually had a plan for a commission to study the criminal justice system in the U.S. in an effort to reform it. It received widespread support, with even a number of Republicans co-sponsoring the bill. The leadership didn't seem particularly interested in it, for whatever reason, and nothing came from it.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/91-percent-americans-sup...

Prison reform in particular seems to be one of those things folks educated on the prison system (or even just close to it) are in favor of, but folks who don't interact with it at all believe for whatever reason that it's fine and any attempts to make it better is immediately equivalent to making things "easier" on prisoners which sets up a knee-jerk negative reaction.

The leadership was probably afraid that even a bipartisan effort would be vehemently opposed by a vocal minority as soft on crime, anti-LE, or something else.

I’m glad you posted this as a reminder to everyone to be wary of my supposed fact. I was unsure if I should have even posted it but I’ll spend some time now and have a look for the source.

Edit: wow @popehat deleted all their tweets!

> Edit: wow @popehat deleted all their tweets!

Yeah, he wrote about why here: https://popehat.substack.com/p/goodbye-twitter

He's on Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@Popehat) and coincidentally re-tweeted (or whatever the Mastodon equivalent is) the author of this piece a couple days ago talking about this topic.

Previously 're-tooted', but, disappointingly, no more :( https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

(In practice, people still use the 'toot' terminology a fair bit)

Why would you expect to get the same answer to those two questions? They're completely different, and answering Yes to 1 and No to 2 is self-consistent.

Or do you mean that responders answered No to 1 and Yes to 2?

The implication is "no" to 1 and "yes' to 2, because the first is framed as giving prisoners a privilege and the second is framed as punishing them. Unfortunately the source for this was likely Ken White (@popehat), and he's left Twitter and removed his tweets, so it's not possible to confirm the original wording. I'm pretty sure it was just an offhand remark he made and not something that's actually been studied.

I think on balance you are most likely correct and I added an edit to explain

So, you're addicted, maybe not even because of your own fault (shitty childhood, opioids from a physician?) and your country takes you out of college instead of helping you!? You take someone from a situation that may make their situation better into a stonecold environment that produces unproducitive citicens at best and criminals at worst!? And he didn't even harm anybody else.

What a system.

You have to realize the American legal system is optimized to (1) provide employment for the legal system, (2) provide slave labor for states and corporations, and (3) exploit the families of prisoners for profit.

Perhaps also, (n) assuage the fears of a certain class of voters through populist policies that have less to do with effectiveness than they do with fear and retribution.

That rhetoric furthers economic benefits though. Prisons are mostly located in rural areas, where they provide job centers to otherwise poor people.

The legal system is chiefly concerned with moving people out of urban centers into rural areas, where their incarceration is paid for through state tax revenue, redistributing the money from urban to rural areas.

This is the reason why prison lobbies are the strongest political opponents of drug decriminalization or legalization - reducing prison occupancy reduces profits per prisoner.

I've also heard that the prison population, while sometimes non-voting, goes to the electoral advantage of these rural areas.

That's correct. Prison populations are included in the areas they are located for census purposes, further skewing political power towards rural areas.

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806...

Don't forget enforcing black codes and Jim Crow during reconstruction. A lot of those laws are still on the books. Vagrancy, loitering, anti-camping, anti-panhandling, etc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)#:~....

Those are the historical reasons prisons were necessary, but those all go towards the above goals - providing a source of slave labor.

It has expanded its reach since then though. While the legal has a hard time incarcerating people who haven’t committed crimes (although it still does this, and actively builds up its pipeline for fresh bodies), it’s still able to exploit innocent people for profit. You can see this in prisons strategy of removing and banning in person visits, moving convicts far from their communities, and extorting families with predatory prices to communicate with their loved ones.

Not to forget to be used as tool against political opponents.

Cruelty's a pretty central part of our culture over here.

The issue appeared to be that note cards weren't allowed. Presumably, there would have been no problem if his family copied them onto 8.5 x 11 paper. I don't know why they would ban notecards, but it seems at least possible that the jail had a previous issue where someone used notecards do do something dangerous.

Likely some issue with a notecard being able to be fashioned into a weapon

I'm betting it's because of gambling. Note cards can be used more easily to produce playing cards. Sheets of regular paper become too unique when they are torn to be used for a fair card game. Most of these weird bans are attempts to prevent gambling.

Interesting. Are cards banned from jails and prisons?

I'm not so sure...you can get a pretty regular edge with fold fold fold rip. I think it's more that cardstock type paper can be used to fabricate a pretty rigid thrusting weapon with the correct technique.

That could possibly have worked, if sent as 'letters'. His best chances are to find a lawyer acquaintance who will send the copied note cards on his official stationary so it's correspondence with a lawyer.

The thing I've found most maddening when sending material to inmates is that you cannot, for obvious reasons, send used books. It's totally understandable, but things can become expensive.

Not knowing much about the US prison system, I have to ask: why is obvious that you can't send used books to inmates? Is communication restricted in a way that you can't send them letters, and used books are banned because they could contain hidden messages, or what?

More like hidden drugs or weapons

I would assume the books are inspected before delivering them, to prevent this? Just like any other package delivered to the inmates.

Why ban the books entirely?

It's hard to inspect books.

Books have been used to pass codes since their early creation.

If an inmate is still engaged in criminal operations, passing books back and forth makes it easy to still operate.

Also there is some risk of the book containing contraband. You can x-ray them but that doesn't catch everything, especially not narcotics.

I don't know the full scope of what concealed stuff they're looking for, though I assume drugs are at the top of the list. I meant obvious that you can control the prison ecosystem with less inspection on site.

> And he didn't even harm anybody else

He doesn’t mention what he was convicted of, just that he had heroin addiction problems. The incident leading to his arrest may have included violence, we just don’t know because he did not provide enough info.

She* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keri_Blakinger#Drug_charges

>And he didn't even harm anybody else.

This ignores that he broke the law. Being punished for breaking the law isn't a revolutionary idea.

It isn't revolutionary, but it is incompatible with the concept of human rights and proportionate punishment.

I found out some years ago that certain kinds of tax-related federal student aid is cut off for people who've been convicted of crimes like, say, drug dealing.

What. The fuck? A 19-year-old gets caught selling drugs so we... make it harder for them to get an education that might give them more attractive options than selling drugs? We... make it more likely for them to go deeper into debt, if they do try to get an education, so make certain kinds of alternative income more attractive to them? What possible sense could that make?

I expressed, to the tax accountant who'd told me this, some confusion re: why we'd have a policy that would clearly tend to increase recidivism, hoping he'd be able to explain why this wasn't obviously stupid, and all he came back with was something like "I guess you're some kind of bleeding heart liberal then." Dafuq? I mean, on the one hand, sure, guilty as charged, but what does that have to do with preferring to have less crime happen?

Because it's legislating/regulating morality. That's the American Way©, in my experience.

I'm not trying to be a cool edgelord kind, but really. It has appeared, over the course of my life, that most "unsolvable" political issues really amount to trying to do what's "right" instead of what's "good" for society.

Gun control - knee jerk morality issue. Abortion - same thing. Education reform. Prisons and law enforcement. Drugs. The number just goes on forever.

It's because we don't care to have less crime happen. We care that people are appropriately punished for being bad.

It's very frustrating.

There's a reasonable argument "if funding for 19 year olds' federal student aid is a limited resource, that it might be rationally prioritized, and in doing so, for priority to be given to people without a criminal record".

Each of those three elements: not unlimited, needing priority, and prioritized thusly could be viewed by people as being sensible.

Whether it should be unlimited is a different question from "given it's not unlimited, how should we prioritize it?"

Colleges are basically ground zero for drug sales. Why the hell would the public be in the business of actually funding dealers to set up shop?

I couldn't care less about drugs and think everything up to and including fentanyl should be completely legal and sold at the 7-eleven, but fuck paying the bill for that. Sorry dealers, pay for your own college.

I'm in Australia so...

Australian state and federal governments subsidised fossil fuels to the tune of a staggering $11.6 billion in 2021/22.

Should student drug dealers receive state and federal funding for their education?

Yep.

Drug dealers are providing a public service, taking on a fair amount of risk to deliver a service the community requires.

Nothing makes much sense.

If all we've got is opinions, let's go with mine.

P.S. I didn't down vote your comment, I up voted it because I engaged with it.

> So, you're addicted, maybe not even because of your own fault

Yeah, my heart goes out for all those underprivileged Harvard/Cornell/Rutgers students with loaded parents, who at some point in their ivy league degree and due no fault of their own, suddenly find themselves at a point where they just have to take up drug-dealing.

> And he didn't even harm anybody else.

It's a she. And chances are, if you're dealing heroin, you are probably harming someone.

> After applying to and getting into Rutgers University, she made money to pay for classes by joining a strip club and escort agency, which allowed her to rent an apartment of her own. [1]

Yes, won't someone please get that silver spoon out of her mouth. People who come from a middle-class life can end up in bad situations as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keri_Blakinger#Homelessness,_a...

Would I also be expected to feel sorry for her had she taken up sex work and drug dealing to afford different luxury goods, a Porsche Carrera say? The Porsche's lower price tag and resale value would have arguably made it a more prudent investment than an elite university English degree with private accommodation.

> People who come from a middle-class life can end up in bad situations as well.

There's little indication that any of the bad situations she ended up in had external causes. May then one's sympathy with the self-inflicted hardships of the privileged not at least be conditional on a little readiness to assume some responsibility?

When she writes:

> After almost a decade of struggling with heroin addiction, I’d gotten arrested just a few days before I was supposed to finish my last semester at Cornell.

It sounds like the system conspired to rob poor struggling Keri of her Cornell(TM) degree right before the finish line. The reality is that she was a drug dealer caught with $150'000 worth of heroin in her possession (she brags about it elsewhere). But to her the real story are the minor inconveniences the prison system temporarily put in the way of her completing her degree and one of 50 states banning her inspirational and recently released life-story. She does not disagree with proscribing certain books for prisoners but appears offended that the somewhat arbitrary lists different states have drawn up do not completely match the arbitrary list she personally would have drawn up (and fail to fully reflect her own tastes in the ravings of murderous psychopaths).

My girlfriend volunteered with a program that supplies books to children and teenagers in juvenile prisons. As you might expect, those facilities tended to take a very paternalistic attitude. In general, young adult literature dealing with drugs, crime and gangs was not permitted. In other words, inmates were not allowed to read books reflecting their own life experiences. Often it was single administrator in charge of banning books and that person would operate without any formal policy. It was difficult to appeal individual bans, because that administrator usually also had the power to ban the program from the prison entirely and didn't respond well to people questioning their decisions.

Kansas bans the 3rd edition of O’Rielly’s Python Cookbook for…

“Describes procedures for construction of weapons, ammunition, bombs, incendiary devices”

Interesting.

There is another book with "cookbook" in the title which is banned in a lot of countries and matches that description...

So pythonistas are anarchists now.

always have been, down with type tyranny

Python still forces indents for code structure. The true anarchy language would probably be PHP.

Of course, there's a section on distributing packages and making a stopwatch timer.

My code certainly blows up all the time.

If I were applying to YC again I would be tempted to pitch a private / non-profit prison. I abhor the idea of private prisons but it seems like the only way in our modern society to build a prototype of one that actually treats incarcerated people like human beings.

I understand this desire but charity alone cannot (let alone the profit motive that would seep into any venture-backed effort) cannot solve a systemic problem.

The roots of the modern US prison system go back to slavery economics [1]. The Lousianna State Penitentiary (known as "Angola") is quite literally a cotton-picking plantation.

Poverty and the desire for forced (ie cheap) labor are the driving forces here.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA&t=3s

Agreed. As well as a heavy fascist / anti-human bent toward the torturing of consciousness.

good ol US o A

A non profit prison should in theory be able to out compete for profit prisons because they don’t need to bake profits into their bids. They could then use that surplus to have more humane conditions.

However that argument applies to other industries, but charities haven’t taken over the world because the profit motive is surprisingly effective at motivating both people and organizations.

You are entirely ignoring the revenue generating portion of slave labor in this analysis.

No, if a private prison is paying a prisoner 0 to X$/hour the the charity might only be able to pay that same person 1$/hour more because the surplus for that labor is finite. However, that’s still an improvement.

For-profit prison systems effectively split the profit between the company and the government, by bidding lower than an ethical provider could (even if we assume no backroom deals, which is a dubious assumption to make.)

Splitting the profit between the prisoners and government is arguably more ethical than splitting it with a private company and the government while shafting prisoners.

It’s an interesting ethical question imo. Charities don’t operate third world sweatshops, but because they don’t the conditions are worse in third world sweatshops. So, if a charity wanted to improve worker confirms in the third world should they run a sweatshop?

Sure, in general, but when the profit comes from shafting the prisoners to the point of diminishing returns, I feel there's little room for that argument.

The sweat-shop example seems somewhat quantitatively different, as treating the workers better adds value for a sufficient number of consumers.

Your prison could play the long game...

Have better conditions, and educate the prisoners better, reducing re-conviction rates and getting ex-prisoners back into work.

Then, lobby for the laws to be changed. Get prisons to be paid as a cut of future tax revenues from ex convicts. Let them bid per prisoner as what percentage of future tax revenue they want to house the prisoner.

In such a system, your prison would earn far more revenue and be far more profitable than 'worse' prisons.

Yes, this is basically where my head is at. First, solve the immediate problem of improving conditions wherever possible. Then work on the harder problem of changing the environment that created it.

Nice thought, but it still incentivizes putting people behind bars.

If the scheme works really well, people might actually want to be put behind bars, because then they'll get a free education, given employment, a lifelong mentor, etc. And the 'bars' might look more like university accommodation than a prison.

Obviously legislators would probably want to step in before it gets to that stage.

The problem with that is that it's paid with the loss of freedom (otherwise you have to come up with a separate rehabilitation system for those who are dangerous and solve the same problem all over again).

And the loss of freedom is the main problem of things like debt-fueled servitude, which is considered undesireable in the West.

Historically, most countries go through these cycles where we depend on immigrant workers for lower level work. We definitely profited off of slavery as well as Chinese, Hispanic, and Irish (to name a few) workers to build the USA. The same is true in Asia where they depend on Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, etc. people for work. The same is true in Europe where we depend on north Africans, eastern Europeans, etc.

As these cycles shift and those people become less welcome due to populism, immigration policies, and those people simply staying to work in their home countries, I worry that we'll lean even more heavily into systems like the prison system to provide workers for countries. In the absence of better pay or full automation, I'm not sure exactly who is supposed to fill those roles besides prisoners. It's a terrifying dystopian thought that your main motivator to not break the law in the future is to not be stuck in indentured servitude for the rest of your life.

Not to be snarky, but many European countries have publicly funded and administered prisons that treat inmates much more humanely than US prisons, especially Norway and Finland. The problem is that the US's culture loves punishment, US tax payers like to see cost per inmate be as low as possible, and in a surprising number of rural counties the local prison is a major employer. So I don't think that making private prisons non-profit would change much of any of that, and also it's not "our modern society", it's the US's modern society.

Yes, very much agreed. It's an entirely different mindset.

Norway also has 1/10th the per capita prison population and spends 5x more per inmate.

I wonder if the economic gains of having 10x fewer citizens doing menial prison labour makes up for that cost.

Any prison that you made emphasizing rehabilitation instead of punishment would immediately get picked up by the news media because it's an amazing story for generating clicks. The prison would be presented to readers as the 'country club' that's 'soft on criminals' that 'YOU (underlined and bolded in the obnoxious way they do) are paying for!!!'

The public doesn't want justice - they want an underclass to feel superior to.

Yep. The minute one of the prisoners reoffended, the conservatives would use it to force the politician who supported it out of office and the jail shut down even if the rate of reoffense was infinitely better than for a traditional prison.

That's being optimistic, you'd probably be the target of an underhanded mudslinging campaign that's secretly funded and directed by shareholders of the for-profit system. You know, things like "grass-roots" advocacy groups popping up out of nowhere in opposition, FOX news take downs of your employees and managers, endless trouble with permits and funding while certain politicians get sweet campaign donations on the side.

Anyone that is serious about engineering societal problems out of existence should take up prison reform as one of their highest priorities. People who compulsively break the social contract need to be separated from people who don't, but the present way of doing it is basically just an extended duration of torture where they're placed at the mercy of much worse criminals and corrupt guards, and really prevented from doing anything useful besides forced labor for little or no pay.

The author seems to find it inexplicable that"Mein Kampf" would be allowed if any other book is banned. "Mein Kampf" is a fairly common read for high school and college classes that focus on original source material. Not to say that there aren't weird things that are banned in different places, but "Mein Kampf" doesn't appear to make the argument he is trying to make.

I think the author finds it weird they ban civil-rights-promoting books for being "racially incendiary" but allow Mein Kampf.

It's kinda like banning Titanic for the nude painting scene, but allowing Behind the Green Door. Like, sure, I guess it's kind of a classic, from a certain point of view, but... really? That gets through but Titanic doesn't?

It does, because although there is scholarly interest in Mein Kampf, it’s also anti-Semitic. It would be reasonable for prisons to make the determination that the latter trumps the former.

I wonder why prisons would ban books written by 'black prison abolitionists'

How could a book arguing that prisons are nonsense and criminals should be free possibly be considered inflammatory in a prison where criminals are not free but want to be?

I don't doubt that the American justice system is perverse but this is not the reason. Sure mein Kampf could use a ban but that's all.

I think the problem with prisons (both privately and publicly run) is that they have a monopoly over the lives of the prisoners, and, as we know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I propose that prisoners be allowed to select which rehabilitation provider they are assigned to. The rehabilitation provider must pay fines if the person reoffends after they have been released.

Ebooks came up here, but only extended as far as 2020, so here is a more recent discussion from early 2022. It has 40 views on YT after nine months so I can tell how much y’all care. :lol:

Cost of Reading in Prisons: Book Censorship and E-Reader Tablets In Carceral Institutions

https://pen.org/event/the-cost-of-reading-in-prisons-book-ce...

> While Texas prisoners can read Hitler’s manifesto, the state banned pioneering Black journalist Ida B. Wells’ book “On Lynchings” because its examination of racist vigilante mobs used “racial slurs.” Similarly, Louisiana bans texts by Black prison abolitionists, including George Jackson’s “Blood in My Eye” and Mariame Kaba’s “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us,” for being “racially inflammatory.” But it allows “Mein Kampf,” as well as every single book mentioned in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s round-up of racist literature.

Certainly very bizarre

> Certainly very bizarre

Or just SOP for those familiar with Texas governance.

I wonder who recommends these bans and who carries them out. Guards? The state? Are they only banning books once someone tries to bring them in? That could explain why some of the books you'd expect to see on the list are missing.

The article goes into the inconsistencies of the process, which vary widely from state to state.

Yes, though not in enough detail to determine whether certain books have been omitted from bans because e.g. racism is not a concern or if prisoners have not tried to bring them in.

Only if you don’t know the history of the American legal system - e.g., created to capture runaway slaves, then to provide a legal system to protect slavery.

Allowing convicts to understand the history of the practice would be anathema to its goals.

I don't think it's that bizarre when you think about it, shallow and silly reasoning for sure but it's not that weird nor does it seem to be some racist conspiracy or whatever.

Talking about texas Is it really surprising US prisons are going to ban books written by prison abolitionists? Not sure i'd even chalk it up to that to be honest.

Unless we know how books are added to the banned list not sure there's much to discuss, for example you'd think the malcolm X books would be banned, but they aren't(although there is one nation of islam book banned). If you need to bring the book in it wouldn't be very surprising to me that maybe nobody donated a mein kampf to the prison.

From a quick look[0] it seems like there are 38 books banned for racial things in Texas, and those are the titles:

  BEST OF JOE R. LANSDALE, THE
  BLACK KLANSMAN (BLACKKKLASMAN)
  BLACK MANS BIBLE
  BLACK MESSIAH MURDERS, THE
  BLACK SUN
  BRING THE WAR HOME
  EVERYTHING YOU LOVE WILL BURN
  FROM NIGGAS TO GODS PART ONE
  FROM NIGGAS TO GODS V2 ESCAPING NIGGATIVITY &
  GREEN RIVER RISING
  HEBREWS TO NEGROES 2 V1 WAKE UP BLACK AMERICA
  HUNTER
  I HAD A HAMMER
  INTO THEIR OWN HANDS
  JEWS SELLLING BLACKS
  KU KLUX TERROR
  LEGACY OF VIOLENCE LYNCH MOB AND EXECUTIONS IN
  MAKING OF A SLAVE, THE
  MURDER IN PLAIN ENGLISH
  MY MOTHER THE CHEERLEADER
  NATURE'S ETERNAL RELIGION
  ON LYNCHINGS
  OUTDATED ADVERTISING
  PRISON GUARD'S DAUGHTER, THE
  REGGIN: AMERICA IN A MIRROR
  ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY
  SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL
  SON OF MR. SULEMAN, THE
  TAKE ME TO THE BRIDGE
  UN-CIVIL WAR BLACKS VS NIGGAS
  WATERMELONS, NOOSES & STRAIGHT RAZORS
  WERENIGRO, THE
  WHITE HOODS: CANADA'S KU KLUX KLAN
  WHITE MAN'S BIBLE, THE
  WHITER RACISM
  WILLIE LYNCH LETTER & THE MAKING OF A SLAVE
  WILLIE LYNCH LETTER AND THE MAKING OF A SLAVE
  WOLF WHISTLE

What does become apparent is that most of these that are deemed racial deal with black people as protagonists, and while that is a problem knowing the process how they came to be there is pretty important to if anything be able to fix it. If you're gonna ban for this kind of content all should be banned equally, black sun seems to be a neo-nazi book of some sort so at least there's that.

[0]:https://observablehq.com/@themarshallproject/prison-banned-b...

Somehow I missed a paragraph from the article and yeah, the books seem to be mostly evaluated as they come into the jail.

I think you missed that a large part of that list are anti-semitic books.

Why is there a cover photo of a black man? To make us think that this has to do with the population that is most affected by prisons?

When in reality these are the experiences of an extremely privileged white woman! (rich parents, attended a private school, etc.)

Perhaps to get commenters to show their bias and inattention to detail.

For example: people suggesting the conviction may have been due to a violent crime.

iowa bans arduino for dummies.

What I find absurd is the author takes the stance that banning books is wrong, but not so subtly hints that so called “racist” books should be banned.

I find this contradictory.

IMO the author's point is that banning books is wrong, and even if it isn't, it makes no sense that his book is banned while Mein Kampf isn't.

Or put more charitably, their stance is if you _must_ ban books for the safety of prisoners, racist ones are a good candidate, but having not banned racist books indicates it's not about safety.

I could see that logic.

By my superficial understanding, the main social organization in most prisons is gangs based around racial lines (eg Aryan Brotherhood) so anything that can raise the temperature is a poor idea.

> so called “racist” books

Setting aside questions about the morality of banning books, why is "racist" in scare quotes here? The only two books I saw the author explicitly note as being unbanned were Mein Kampf and the Turner Diaries. Are you suggesting that these works are falsely maligned and not truly racist?

Because the books he labeled racist came from a list like the ADL. (I might be wrong on the org). In recent times these types of popular lists have been used to call all sorts of things racist which were not so.

Like the book, to kill a mockingbird for example being recently banned in many school districts.

If you're talking about the author, she cited SPLC. I'm not familiar with ADL, but I'd be surprised if they're more ill-suited for assembling blacklists of racist reading material than SPLC.

The ADL was originally founded to protect a rapist that tried to get a black man that worked for him accused for the rape he committed in Atlanta but failed. It also advocates for an ethnostate in israel. That completely destroys any credibility it has.

The original article cited the SPLC, not the ADL, so this has literally nothing to do with the topic at hand except that the GP commenter's mind for some reason jumped to the ADL while trying to defend books about murdering Jews and other minorities.

Hardly defending, I’m just no fan of censorship, including the authors book.

What I don’t like is lists of books we accept as bad without reading them ourselves.

It would have taken you two minutes of investigation to realize that these books are nothing like To Kill a Mockingbird. You could have read the SPLC article that the author linked, which lists numerous books explicitly promoting white supremacy, violence against minorities, and ultimately the extermination of anyone who isn't white. Or you could've just looked up the books' summaries and a few choice quotes to see how overtly racist they are.

From Mein Kampf:

> The Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate. For as long as a people remain racially pure and are conscious of the treasure of their blood, they can never be overcome by the Jew. Never in this world can the Jew become master of any people except a bastardized people.

From the Turner Diaries, in an extended passage describing the author's extermination fantasy, much of which is too grotesque to even share:

> There are many thousands of hanging female corpses like that in this city tonight, all wearing identical placards around their necks. They are the White women who were married to or living with Blacks, with Jews, or with other non-White males. There are also a number of men wearing the I-defiled-my-race placard, but the women easily outnumber them seven or eight to one. On the other hand, about ninety per cent of the corpses with the I-betrayed-my-race placards are men, and overall the sexes seem to be roughly balanced.

Please, Turner Diaries is explicitly racist and written by a card carrying white supremacist. And its is a know fact that the text has incited murders. The Oklahoma bomber had pages from the book on his person when he carried out his attack. It's ridiculous to deny that the book communicates a message of racial hatred and violence, when it's clear in the text, claimed by the author, and celebrated by it's fans.

I'm not for banning any books, but if books are banned when they "Advocates/encourages violence, hatred, group disruption, racial animus and not merely describes the same" the Turner Diaries should one of the first to go.

True. Calling Adolf Hitler a racist is only something woke millennials would do. /sarcasm

I hate that the immediate reference against which a book ban should be compared is Mein Kampf. The effect will not be to ease those bans, but to ban Mein Kampf too, and that sets an incredibly low standard to book bans - it's a very dull book.

In my university we were able to read and critique Mein Kampf and trace Hitler's intellectual claims into the broader climate of his era. He's a negligible figure in the history of ideas but a good case study for their power. This is more and more risky to do in higher education, as it prompts lynching by a woke mob. Ironically, the hordes requesting banning Mein Kampf are espousing many of its authors convictions.

I assumed that Mein Kampf was commonly read in high school at schools with a strong great books program. Is that not the case in the US?

Why would anyone choose Mein Kampf for a Great Books program? It’s not a significant intellectual or creative work of literature.

It may be dull, but it’s also anti-Semitic.

“Ironically, the hordes requesting banning Mein Kampf are espousing many of its authors convictions.”

This strikes me as being complete nonsense. Anyway, citation needed.

> It may be dull, but it’s also anti-Semitic.

Yes, so? That's relevant because antisemitism is wrong? Really, in a thread about banning books you bring up wrong ideas?

> This strikes me as being complete nonsense. Anyway, citation needed.

I could give you a citation, but you banned the source material, remember. That's double plus ironic because Hitler's work is absolutely full with vitriolic ramblings about how the Jewish media is spreading wrong ideas poisonous for the soul of the nation. "The bigger the lie, the most likely it is to be belived", he laments, and explicitly calls for the suppression of such speech. He would get to enact those ideas in a few short years.

Antifascist activists who are looking at book bans as a weapon for their fight should probably take a good hard look in the mirror; they might see some disturbing semblance.

> Many prison systems ban reading materials because of their formats: No hardbacks! No pop-ups!

The kinds of people in prison would use them as weapons, to huff the binding glue, or would hollow out the cover and shove drugs in it.

The kinds of people _outside_ of prison would use them as weapons, to huff the binding glue, or would hollow out the cover and shove drugs in it too.

No, you obviously have no idea how having the worst people in society with nothing but time, magnifies the weaponization of literally everything possible.

I say this as a convict. You’d be amazed at the creative ways people will warp things from their intended purpose.

Prison Break has nothing on real life.

So? people inside of prison being extra-creative does not make the people outside of prison less-creative.

People outside don't need such creativity because they have access to superior implements. No need to file the end of a toothbrush into a shiv when you can just use a knife or gun.

“Necessity is the mother of invention”

Honestly, I want to live in your reality where criminals outside of prison rely solely on hard-cover books as weapons and a means of getting high instead of literally all of the things available to the general public that are better at being weapons and a means of getting high.

The source of drugs in prisons is primarily the people who work there [1]:

> Prison staff are often responsible as well: During the pandemic, even though visitation from family and friends was suspended, attorney visits were restricted, and teachers, tutors, and volunteers stayed home, drugs got into many prisons anyway. As The Marshall Project reported, the number of incarcerated people disciplined or charged for drugs actually increased during the pandemic in Texas prisons.

Prisoners highly value books and other reading material. They are generally looked after. Many prisons limit the number of personal items so reading materials are passed to other prisoners (who themselves may not have the funds or outside family to purchase them).

Banning books isn't a safety issue. It's another means of squeezing more profit from the incarcerated.

[1]: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/07/15/inside-the-nat...

FWIW when I worked for a local government doing IT and software dev I had to go into the local prison a couple dozen times to set up some equipment. There were zero metal detectors, searches, etc. for me when I entered, and I could have easily smuggled in just about anything. In fact I had a credit card shaped knife that I made sure to remove from my wallet everytime I went in, but there would have been nothing to stop me otherwise.

There was likely no searches because the prison officials tacitly are involved with the smuggling and need to not search anyone to make it look like a uniform policy rather than an exceptional policy for the smugglers.

Had you actually brought materials to the prisoners, whoever was doing the actual smuggling would have found out through the grapevine and you would have been promptly arrested.

My humble conjecture.

I think most understand some of the physical reasoning.

The absurdity is the discrepancy and random outcome.

Yes, there are legitimate concerns with specifics of the materials in this context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com