
In Britain, even jails have a class system - pepys
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/02/jails-britain-chris-atkins-book/606730/
======
dmix
> Lewis: Tell me about “spice,” which seems to have become the British
> prisoner’s drug of choice.

> Atkins: It was so ubiquitous. You could tell straightaway if someone was on
> it, they’d be zombified, with glazed eyes. They’d just be lying on their bed
> in a vegetative state.

> I think [spice users] are used to smoking strong cannabis. And you can't
> really get away with that, because of the smell. But spice doesn’t smell.
> The sniffer dogs can’t get it.

> It’s the law of unintended consequences. An older screw [prisoner officer]
> said, it used to be that inmates would smoke weed. But then [jails] brought
> in drug testing, and marijuana stays in the system for a month. So they
> stopped doing that, and started to do spice, which makes people vegetative
> and violent.

There's hundreds of laws like this outside of prison. You take one thing away
[with good intention] and then people find a new thing. But the new thing
leaves society worse off (in this case crazy and violent off spice).

I personally believe the whole obsession with prison time for punishment in
the US is a good example of this. The general public gets very vindictive,
then you send them to con-college and they come out a worse criminal. With
difficulty finding a job but plenty of new friends in the criminal world and a
reputation as a tough-guy.

Consequently the whole war on drugs is the perfect example of unintended side-
effects. Creating a hundred-billion dollar black market funding the worst
cartels and street gangs. And hey we have thousands of tough guys coming out
of prison in need of work.

Zoning laws are another good example of something that sounds like a good idea
that ultimately hurts communities more than it helps - resulting in the mass
suburbanization of America and urban ghettos [1]. Now people are moving back
to cities with a serious lack of housing density, food deserts [2], driving to
work becomes mandatory, etc etc. Then there's the War on Terrorism.....

I could go on.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-
Transportation-M...](https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-
Transportation-Metropolitan/dp/1933115157/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert)

~~~
mytailorisrich
This misses the elephant in the room: How can they "find" anything in prison?

The only answer is corruption of the prison staff. That has to be the root
cause.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/rise-in-
pris...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/rise-in-prison-
officers-contraband-smuggling)

~~~
rwmurrayVT
In a minimum security facility there are often no fences. I was at Morgantown
and you could get anything you wanted for approximately 4x the retail value.
It was so fucking hot there guys would have their families buy a "prison"
issue fan on Amazon and send it to someone who's family lived in Morgantown.
Then they'd run out and bring it back in the middle of the night. Cigarettes
were $2 each or $20 for a pack. Dip is like $12 a can for the Kayak brand with
a 99c sticker on it.

There were over 800 of us and around 10 staff on actual security detail at a
time. There were maybe 40 searches a week and they were normally targeted on
the people that they had suspicions about. It happened to me one time and they
guy found my camel crush. Thankfully I had been there less than 3 weeks so he
just assumed someone stashed it there since I moved into an empty bunk. After
that I never had another issue.

Spice is horrible. We'd have people vomiting regularly. They'd get "stuck"
outside when we got called back into the units. It's really gnarly stuff that
I would not willingly ingest. The most popular drug was definitely suboxone.
The drug tests were not working for subs when I was still there. Supposedly
they were just starting to come out with some for it that the BOP used.

Every thing went in a cycle. One guy would run most of the smuggling for the
white people. I'm not going to name names here, but his balance sheet showed
about $75k in profit over a rolling 6 month period. Another ran it for most of
the African Americans. Eventually runners would get caught or the ring leader
would get busted with a cell phone. That gives you an immediate upgrade to the
next highest level facility. Prices would jump until someone was crazy enough
to start it all back up again.

Right before I left the biggest person got caught with a sim card. Prices for
cigarettes went up to nearly $15 each. That was if you were remotely lucky
enough to find one. A guy came back on probation violation and luckily enough
I was his bunk mate. Things went back to regular within a couple of weeks. He
made more in Morgantown than he did on the street...

Subs/meth/vape juices could be applied to paper inside of books or letters.
Anything liquid and dried usually could come in that way, but in a minimum
it's not even worth the hassle.

~~~
kyuudou
I've heard stories about people improvising "hooch" by letting apple or orange
juice sit around and ferment and using that as a trade item for the other
usual stuff. When I got stuck in a similar minimum security facility (no
cells, just half-walls between groups of 4 beds so there was lots of
socializing going on), people would trade their prescribed Seroquels and other
such meds similarly.

I also found out about "making spread" and was amazed at the ingenuity of some
folks and what they could do with ramen, water, some crumbled up cheetos and a
pound cake. And how this was used in the internal economy. Fascinating stuff.

On the negative side, most of the people were in there for petty drug
offenses, e.g. victimless crimes not involving violence which upset me
greatly. Such a shame since most of these guys were obviously above-average IQ
and otherwise nice, sometimes charismatic people. What a waste of tax dollars
and lives.

So many stories just from my short stay there.

~~~
rwmurrayVT
That was not very popular at Morgantown. You could just buy actual alcohol
from the street. It was usually 10 or 20 dollars for a peanut butter jar full
of vodka, normally Grey Goose. It sounds "racial", but a lot of things were
based on stereotypical vices. We had Newports and Grey Goose. You could
request something specific, but then you'd be paying the 4x premium. You could
usually get a better deal because they'd be bringing in entire cartons of
Newports, etc.

There was one night nurse who didn't watch you take your pills so tightly.
Most people who had the prescription didn't share it.

There is a lot of creative food. I don't know if I'd eat the cheesecake on the
street, but it is good when you haven't had anything for a while. We'd
occasionally get street food inside, but it was like McDonald's breakfast,
Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, or chicken wings.

There was not a lot of petty criminals at Morgantown. Simple possession rarely
lands you in federal prison. The worst of the worst is conspiracy. It doesn't
take much for you to be linked to a conspiracy. The mandatory minimums don't
make sense for that kind of crime. There's a lot of marijuana + money
laundering. I'd say around 15% of people really had no business having
anywhere near their actual sentence length.

------
netcan
>> _A December 2017 parliamentary report said up to 90 percent of prisoners
have mental-health problems, and 12 percent turn to self-harm or attempt
suicide multiple times._

How could it be otherwise? Even ignoring the likely correlation between
psychological problems and incarceration... Prison is a terrible environment
by its nature and by design.

Would we be surprised if concentration camp or gulag inhabitants had mental
health issues?

Effectively, psychological injury is part of the punishment.

It's strange to think that prisons are relatively new.

~~~
gowld
> Prison is a terrible environment by its nature and by design.

Usually, yes. But not necessarily.

A prison _could_ be more like a residential college or a boarding school.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
New Zealand appears to be doing a reasonable job of youth detention, where the
facilities are more like high schools than prisons.

 _Wandering through New Zealand 's Korowai Manaaki youth detention centre, you
can't help but notice the basketball court, veggie patch and classrooms — it
feels more like a high school than a prison._

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-27/nz-youth-detention-
ce...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-27/nz-youth-detention-centres-
different-to-australia/11321582)

~~~
Nasrudith
Sadly it seems that most have gone the opposite direction with making schools
more like prisons. Metal detectors, visitors watched with suspision, high
ratio of supervised to supervisees resulting in effective partial rule by
them. Am I talking about prisons or schools? Yes.

------
arethuza
I can strongly recommend _" A Bit of a Stretch"_ \- I read it after reading _"
The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken"_ which is pretty
terrifying.

~~~
netcan
An honest look at criminal justice is actually terrifying, even moreso because
we don't even have a lead on alternatives.

~~~
AQuantized
Decriminalization of non violent drug use and a prison system focused on
rehabilitation would be a start.

~~~
Mirioron
This is politically very difficult to do though. It will be seen as being soft
on crime. A system focused on rehabilitation requires the public to not be as
bloodthirsty as they are in the US. They need to given former felons a chance
after they've carried out their punishment.

------
Grustaf
Thank God for that, it would be absurd and harmful to mix tax evaders and
murderers. And more expensive since the entire prison needs to be safe enough
for its most violent inmate.

------
m0zg
The _visibility_ of the class system is one thing that surprised me about the
UK. It seems to be a very visibly stratified society. Unlike in the US where
everyone likes to pretend they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and
assumes there's ample social mobility (which there isn't as much as they
think), in the UK most folks seem to know exactly where they belong, and they
seem to be more content with their position in the class hierarchy. Or at
least that's the perception from spending a month in London and vicinity. I'm
sure someone will argue vehemently against it.

~~~
alasdair_
"class" means something different in the UK than it does in the US. Wealth is
often a side-effect but there are plenty of aristocrats without money who
would still be considered upper-class.

It's more a combination of social graces and breeding. In the USA, someone
like Donald Trump would be considered upper class but would never be
considered so in the UK.

~~~
m0zg
Probably more "breeding" than "social graces" though, if Prince Andrew is any
indication.

~~~
alasdair_
One can definitely have no money and still have class, or vice versa (as
Andrew demonstrates).

------
microtherion
The "class system" in the title reminded me of a report I read yesterday that
Harvey Weinstein hired a "prison consultant" a while ago to prepare him for a
potential (and now highly likely) imprisonment.

------
masonic
A fictionalized example is in the original (1969) film "The Italian Job".

~~~
walshemj
And also the UK TV series Porridge - which probably never got shown on US
television.

~~~
Zenst
Great TV show/comedy, but for a more realistic insight into prisons of the
time, the film Scum(1979) seems more on the nail.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079871/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079871/)

------
mcguire
Spice, in case anyone isn't familiar:
[https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/synthetic-c...](https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/synthetic-
cannabinoids-k2spice)

------
monkeycantype
YANML so I shall remain anonymous, and we will agree that what is below is a
work of imaginative fiction:

I was presented with the temptation to commit the same crime that sent this
guy to jail.

I made a movie with my brother and dad. We figured, how different could this
be from software? (it wasn't really) Things got financially very complex, when
more money got spent than we had. (I was not the one that spent it) Things got
even more complex when my dad signed a deal with a production company to get
us out of the hole (without my brother or I agreeing he could do this) They
put in some money to pay invoices, and agreed to pay us ~$300,000 but as I
recall being told, when it came to paying the money they wanted invoices for
about a million worth of fake spend.

according to one of their staff members, they themselves were in the hole
after making a movie with an oscar winner who'd who'd spent the whole shoot
blitzed on coke. I didn't speak to them ever again after a confrontation on
the last day of the shoot. I heard they were shocked when we refused to
provide fake invoices, incredulous, that we wouldn't do something they
considered film industry normal. (it's common, it's not normal)

What happened after that I can only piece together from rumours, which as I
understand were:

They had assumed that we would provide the invoices and already submitted tax
claims for film producer tax incentive payouts.

These supporting invoices were requested and they fled the country.

Every now and then someone tells me that they recognise me from tv.

TLDR: I got no money, but I didn't go to jail

------
crispyporkbites
> _People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the capitalist
> dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or born in the
> wrong place to have all the things that society has told them they should
> have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it all, not just
> the wealth but the stuff. Trainers [sneakers] are a big deal, watches are a
> big deal, cars are a big deal._

This almost nails it. The reality is that the British lower classes can have
all the stuff they want; trainers, watches, cars are within the grasp of
anyone above the poverty line. But wealth is almost unattianble for the lower
classes in the UK. It just doesn't go in that direction.

~~~
DanBC
> are within the grasp of anyone above the poverty line

...often supplied with predatory loans.

PS4 Pro, 1TB, Fortnite edition: £799 ($1033 USD) over 108 weeks.
[https://www.perfecthome.co.uk/detail/index/sArticle/3170](https://www.perfecthome.co.uk/detail/index/sArticle/3170)

------
riazrizvi
> Atkins: People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the
> capitalist dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or
> born in the wrong place to have all the things that society has told them
> they should have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it
> all, not just the wealth but the stuff.

My favorite part. They don’t realize that capitalism itself is regressing to a
class-based system. People like Trump, Johnson, Cameron can fake invoices, but
the interviewer, just an ordinary member of the public has to play by the
rules.

~~~
ciconia
> ... capitalism itself is regressing to a class-based system.

Capitalism has _always_ been a class-based system. There's the people who work
for wages, and the people who live off rents from their capital.

~~~
riazrizvi
Capitalism is primarily about private property ownership to incentivize
enterprise. It is more class-based when more private-property starts off in
the hands of people by birth. It is more meritocratic the more that property
migrates into the hands of people that work to benefit society more.

Examples of class-based systems. India's caste-system that disadvantages
lower-castes. Pre-civil war America's racially implemented Constitution that
disadvantaged non-whites (and women?). Fundamentalist Sharia Law systems that
disadvantage non-muslims and women. You can tell you live in a more class-
based capital system when the top slots are occupied more by birthright vs
other systems.

BTW I think it's clearer to narrow talk to specific policies that make a
system more class-based vs more meritocratic, and to remember to define them
in terms of which particular groups of people they target. Because then we can
see that meritocratic capitalism, boosted by the major revolutions we
celebrate around the world, slowly gets eroded by things like redlining in the
States, or low inheritance taxes etc.

------
sys_64738
Did he have to slop out?

------
0xff00ffee
I'm confused by why this is a surprise. It has literally been a cliche in the
US for decades. Although prison in UK does sound marginally better than in the
US despite having the same budget issues.

Oddly, this quote seemed appealing: "Prison moves at a glacial pace. As you
adapt to the environment, you start moving at a glacial pace." Probably
because I'm not rich.

------
pysxul
> In June 2016 [...] He was sentenced to five years in prison and sent to
> Wandsworth

> He was released in December 2018.

Theses 5 years were pretty fast

~~~
Denvercoder9
He was arrested in 2012 already and probably spend a significant amount of
time in prison before he was sentenced.

~~~
JoeSmithson
No, that was almost certainly on bail

------
jxramos
I'm guessing any group of humanity will naturally form hierarchies. Seems like
part of human nature.

~~~
wpietri
Sure. Humans are also naturally violent. We naturally get tuberculosis, too.
As conscious beings, it's up to us to decide the good and bad in our natural
heritage. To amplify the former and mitigate the latter.

~~~
jsjddbbwj
What's wrong with hierarchies?

~~~
wpietri
I am having trouble taking this as a sincere question. You've honestly never
seen or heard of hierarchical power being misused? I mean, just to pick one
enormous historical trend, there's a reason the world has mostly gotten rid of
monarchies, and it's not because we thought crowns and scepters were maybe a
bit tacky.

~~~
philwelch
> I mean, just to pick one enormous historical trend, there's a reason the
> world has mostly gotten rid of monarchies, and it's not because we thought
> crowns and scepters were maybe a bit tacky.

How did that work out for them?

* The abolition of the English monarchy led to the brutal military dictatorship of Cromwell, which ended only with the reestablishment of the monarchy.

* The abolition of the French monarchy led to the military dictatorship of Napoleon, which ended in a cataclysmic continent-wide war and the reestablishment of the Bourbon monarchy.

* The abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies led to Hitler.

* The abolition of the Russian monarchy led to the Soviet Union and the mass murder of tens of millions.

* The abolition of the Chinese imperial monarchy led to a half-century-long civil war between Nationalist, Communist, and warlord factions, leading ultimately to a Communist dictatorship and the mass murder of tens of millions.

Hierarchical power is a human universal, and trying to abolish it without
recognizing this fact only leads to its reemergence in even more violent forms
within the space of a few years, decades if you're lucky.

~~~
chacha2
The Rhetoric of Reaction Albert O. Hirschman [1]

Hirschman describes the reactionary narratives thus:

\- According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some
feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate
the condition one wishes to remedy.

\- The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be
unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent."

\- Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or
reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhetoric_of_Reaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhetoric_of_Reaction)

~~~
philwelch
Which is not what I'm doing at all.

If we're going to talk about the abolition of monarchies, how is it that some
of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world today are
constitutional monarchies? Norway, Australia, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark,
Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Japan, Luxembourg, and Spain
all rank within the top 25 of countries by HDI as well as the top 25 of
countries by Democracy Index. All of those countries are monarchies.

And you still haven't addressed the historical fact that the styles of
radicalism that led to the abolition of monarchies in England, France, and
Russia utterly failed to make things better and, in fact, largely made things
worse. That doesn't mean it's futile or counterproductive to improve society,
but merely removing the existing hierarchy and attempting to install something
bespoke in its place has historically been a failing proposition, while
reforming and improving an existing system has historically been much more
successful.

~~~
wpietri
When I said "mostly gotten rid of monarchies", I include constitutional
monarchies in that. The monarchs in at least most of those countries have
approximately zero power compared with their historical antecedents.

If anything, they're a fine example of the kind of dealing realistically with
our heritage I'm talking about. Actual monarchies have a track record I would
generously call mixed, and perhaps more properly call horrific. But being
half-evolved primates, humans seem to like having an officially recognized big
monkey to rally around. So we keep the Queen of England around as something
akin to a hood ornament on the car of that nation. It works, even if it's not
particularly rational. But then, neither are we.

------
yarrel
No, American jails have a class system.

British ones contain one.

~~~
emiliobumachar
Please elaborate. As it is, this flew over my head.

~~~
lidHanteyk
It's to do with British English vs. American English. In the USA, a TV remote
control has batteries; in the UK, a telly clicker contains batteries.

~~~
mprev
My remotes have batteries. The box I bought the batteries in contained them.
Now they’re in use, they’re not contained as that’s a temporary state before
use.

------
seemslegit
"People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the capitalist
dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or born in the
wrong place to have all the things that society has told them they should
have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it all, not just
the wealth but the stuff. Trainers [sneakers] are a big deal, watches are a
big deal, cars are a big deal."

I'd say this is fraudulent writing but it would be stating the obvious since
written by someone literally convicted of fraud. The "stuff" comes _before_
wealth for most people in all systems but it is actually in socialist
societies where personal wealth does not generally exist that the acquisition
of basic consumer goods is given central significance, gifting them becomes an
accepted and expected way to get people dispensing nominally free or fixed-
cost social services to deliver first preferential and later merely adequate
service.

------
seemslegit
So the Atlantic/Hellen Lewis consider it a negative that non-violent and
mentally healthy people aren't housed together with violent and mentally ill
ones ? Isn't this basically what the US prison reform advocates want to see
their system make its way _up_ to ?

~~~
skrebbel
No, the article didn't say that at all.

~~~
seemslegit
It kinda does, the "lower class" here is violent and mentally unstable, the
"white-collar club" is non-violent and functional in the prison environment,
in spite of their best attempts to try and to throw in a racial aspect no
evidence is brought that it plays a role, no hints or accusations that money
is used to bribe guards or prison authorities.

Anyone with basic penology background will consider it a textbook success on
progressive grounds - the default in most places is that the prison "upper
class" are the violent career criminals who keep the population in check for
the prison guards as the white-collar prisoners pay them protection money.

------
lonelappde
In the US, this is called "minimum security" (see Orange is the New Black) and
"Club Fed" for posh accommodations for high status people.

The Atlantic's breathless headline is misleading as usual.

~~~
arethuza
It seems to me that it is referring to the "class" system _within_ Wandsworth
prison.

