
Sixteen, Alone, 23 Hours a Day, in a Six-by-Eight-Foot Box - sgpl
https://medium.com/editors-picks/26ab1e09632d
======
ludicast
I am a lifelong liberal but I did work for a year as a correction officer on
Riker's Island (a decade ago, at ARDC which is the jail discussed). The "box"
was referred to by everyone as the "bing".

This isn't an AMA, but I will say that many like much of law enforcement,
there is a discretionary aspect. That is, though inmates can be thrown in the
bing for minor offences, almost all were there because of an accumulation of
violent activities. In other words, they really were "bad guys" (once again a
lot could have changed in a decade).

I would say a bigger problem were the "schools" that the inmates went to in
the jail - they were among the most violent places on earth. The teachers
obviously could not control the classes and there weren't enough COs to help
enough either.

But for the most part things things self-leveled. Inmates had an assigned
classification which tended to bunch them together. Kids who honestly were
good kids, would usually wind up in a camp-like environments called the
"sprungs". And bad kids would wind up with other bad kids, and wind up doing
bad things.

Another thing about that jail, was it was about 50% adolescents and 50%
adults. The adults were usually sentenced but waiting for a bed available in a
state facility.

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adamwong246
Ok, here's a solution: Private prisons are corporations. To ensure that they
act in good faith towards the goal of a better society, instead of motivated
by sheer profit, let us make a laws that compensate private prisons, not by
the number of bodies they house, but instead on the recidivism rates. We
should not be paying these entities to house humans indefinitely. Instead,
motivate them to rehabilitate and return these people to society.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
The only (well not the _only_ ) problem with that is then they would have an
incentive to just get people out as quickly as possible to get paid. We would
have to set up some sort of standards for what it meant to be "rehabilitated"
and that would be pretty difficult.

~~~
adamwong246
If the person re-commits a crime, then the prison must re-pay the government
back. Perhaps we can do away with mandatory sentencing as well! Let the prison
decide when a person has paid their debt to society.

~~~
rblatz
Then you are going to get a lot of "accidental" prison deaths. Because the
prisons won't house an inmate that they don't think they can make money off
of.

~~~
adamwong246
Prisons could choose which inmates they take in. That is, prisons wouldn't be
forced to house inmates who they don't believe have rehabilitation potential.

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jobu
_" Only the U.S., Somalia and South Sudan have declined to ratify the United
Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits juvenile
solitary confinement as a matter of international law."_

Nice.

~~~
xenophanes
Did you bother checking what else it says and what the U.S.'s stated reason
for not signing is? Or do you prefer to post ignorant sarcastic criticism?

~~~
Mithaldu
For cultural context, i live in germany.

Are you american and really think this is a sane path of action: "The
Convention is unlikely to be ratified in the near future because it forbids
both the death penalty and life imprisonment for children [...] threatening
national control over domestic policy"

To be honest, to me this sounds exactly like immigrants to germany claiming a
right to honor slayings because it's part of their culture.

If that's not the statement you tried to make, please clarify what exactly you
think is the US' stated reason for not signing it.

~~~
refurb
_Since 2005 Supreme Court decisions found juvenile executions unconstitutional
as "cruel and unusual punishment"[50][51][52] and that mandatory sentences of
life without the possibility of parole are unconstitutional for juvenile
offenders._

So the US already can't execute or imprison children. So that's not the reason
for not signing it.

~~~
betterunix
Note that the US can still given juvenile offenders life sentences, it just
cannot be a _mandatory_ punishment for a crime.

------
sp332
_“You’re giving all of these young people to us, and we have to determine
what’s wrong with them,” he says. “You can’t do it. It’s impossible.”

...Of the teenagers in solitary, almost three-quarters had diagnosed mental
health problems.

“We don’t have the experience to deal with a person with psychological
problems,” Seabrook says. “We’re not doing enough because they shouldn’t be
brought to us.”_

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
I wonder how much this has to do with the involuntary commitment legal
developments of the 1970s.

~~~
skyebook
Or the process of releasing those in need of treatment during the 80's. Its
amazing how we're capable of so much as a society but can't get it together to
help those most in need.

(Interesting piece from the time on how it came about that the mental
hospitals started being emptied:
[http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-
men...](http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-mental-
patients-began.html))

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
Well as I understand it there has been a pendulum swinging problem. Some
people were getting locked up in the loony bin merely for being eccentric.
Obviously we've gone too far in the other direction and psychotics are roaming
the streets homeless.

------
adamwong246
Jeez, how much longer until we can codify into law that solitary confinement
is cruel and unusual?

~~~
JonFish85
Disclaimer: partially just playing devil's advocate here.

There are circumstances where you need to keep someone in solitary, whether
it's for their own safety or for the safety of others. You can't well put a
hated prisoner in with the general population without expecting that they'll
be murdered. On the other hand, you have prisoners who have made a living out
of murdering prison guards.

What do you do with Thomas Silverstein[1]? Terry Nichols? Members of the
mafia? Caught spies? They'd likely either kill or be killed. I don't really
see a better option than isolating them. These aren't people who are there to
be rehabilitated.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein)

~~~
adamwong246
Fair enough. But this article is about children being encaged en masse by a
bloated bureaucracy, not a judicious selection of individuals that must be
protected for their, or our own, safety.

~~~
vacri
No, it's not about 'children'. It's about 16-year-olds. Teenagers. The actions
in the article are not applied to people below 16. Absolutely no-one calls
16-year-olds 'children' unless they're trying to load their language to make a
political argument.

The one exception is parents comparing offspring, where 'children' applies to
your offspring regardless of age - ask an 80-year-old about his children, and
he'll talk about 60-year-old people.

This doesn't mean the actions aren't inhumane or don't need evaluation or
correction, but please avoid the inflammatory language.

~~~
betterunix
If they are not children, why do we give them no say in the laws they are
incarcerated for violating?

~~~
vacri
I was unaware that the general public's working definition of "children" was
"unable to vote". I guess that means that the severely mentally disabled,
felons, and visiting foreigners are all children?

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swombat
On a slight tangent, that was an amazingly well-written article, with very
professional illustrations, photos, good research, no typos I could see, etc.

How come this is on Medium rather than on, say, the NY Times?

~~~
listic
Who runs this Medium site? Does it use its own engine? My Wappalyzer only
recognizes Typekit.

I've heard of this site only recently and I would like to use a design like
that for my writing prompt site.

~~~
swombat
Medium was founded by Evan Williams (who also founded Twitter and
Blogger.com):
[https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48](https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48)

~~~
listic
Oh, so I guess its' design might be not exactly up for grabs?

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daedalus_j
Not to diminish the content of the article in any way, but I couldn't help but
be amused when I read the headline and thought "Oh god, stuck on a two
dimensional plane, how horrible!"

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inDigiNeous
Jeez, junior programmers should get better work conditions. Oh ..

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happyscrappy
Surely there can be some middle ground between giving people who murder 70+
people their preferred gaming system and putting troublemakers in solitary.

~~~
vacri
If you want a middle ground, you can start by not arguing from outliers. Out
of the several million people imprisoned in the US, how many of them in total
"murdered 70+ people"? How many of them murdered even 10?

Why base your argument for moderation around such an extreme outlier?

~~~
fuzzix
> "How many of them murdered even 10?"

Even that is extreme. How many committed acts of violence at all? How many are
"three strikes" or prohibition victims?

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altero
I find it hilarious that those people are old enough to be locked into box,
but can not legally drink or have a sex.

