I always find it unbelievable that they let these kinds of hierarchies arise in prisons, especially in American prisons (from what I've heard, European prisons have it too, but to a much lesser degree). Someone told me they allow it on purpose to help keep order. Maybe it is also a consequence of overfull, understaffed prisons.
It's probably naive, but one thing I would do if I was in charge would be to aggressively break up any kind of hierarchy or authority among inmates - not least to prevent prison from turning into a "crime school".
Edit: some people suggest these gangs arise due to the size of prisons and the large inflow of new inmates [1], whereas in the old days (-1950s) prison used to organize itself according to some kind of convict code.
>I always find it unbelievable that they let these kinds of hierarchies arise in prisons, especially in American prisons (from what I've heard, European prisons have it too, but to a much lesser degree). Someone told me they allow it on purpose to help keep order. Maybe it is also a consequence of overfull, understaffed prisons.
A few years back I took a tour of the main prison in Amsterdam. The warden actually talked about this and said they specifically organize their prisoners into as diverse blocks as possible to avoid any sort of gangs/groupings from starting. He claimed it made the prison significantly safer, as everyone was looking out for only their own wellbeing. The prison was safe enough for us to walk around among the prisoners (who were not cuffed or restrained in anyway), so I think it was working quite well for them.
> The warden actually talked about this and said they specifically organize their prisoners into as diverse blocks as possible to avoid any sort of gangs/groupings from starting. He claimed it made the prison significantly safer, as everyone was looking out for only their own wellbeing. The prison was safe enough for us to walk around among the prisoners (who were not cuffed or restrained in anyway), so I think it was working quite well for them.
I'd be careful reading too much into that. Wardens in the US would say the exact same thing; the actual effects of it obviously don't bear out. As for being handcuffed or restrained: in most prisons in the US, prisoners generally aren't actually cuffed or restrained unless they're being punished.
>in most prisons in the US, prisoners generally aren't actually cuffed or restrained unless they're being punished.
Maybe I wasn't very clear, this was while we were walking around among them and talking with the prisoners. I don't think any US prisons would allow students (this was for a study abroad class) to walk among and interact with unrestrained prisoners for safety reasons.
> I don't think any US prisons would allow students (this was for a study abroad class) to walk among and interact with unrestrained prisoners for safety reasons.
My impression is that in the USA, they like to try to "scare em straight" by having guards and inmates terrorize troubled children, compounding their trauma and all but guaranteeing they end up in prison later.
Unfortunately our prison systems are not designed for rehabilitation but rather for profit, control and punishment. The fact that prisons are underfunded to the point that rape and assault are taken for granted is a disappointing statement on our society and value for human life.
Controlling the gangs would require an investment in policing and education, something the prison industry and our politicians are in no way prepared to do.
When a person is sent to prison they are essentially remanded to the state and the state should bear any and all responsibility to ensure their safety. People in authority, especially the prison staff should be held personally liable for this. They are not except in extreme cases and then only rarely.
Prisons are treated as a means to simply house and profit from society's dregs and in many cases its most vulnerable. In addition these troubled, and oft petty criminals are trapped with the most violent. How someone is expected to emerge from prison and become a productive member of the society that put them there is beyond me.
>It's probably naive [...] not least to prevent prison from turning into a "crime school".
I am very confident the type of people working in SV could make a huge impact, if only running prisons was like software development.
But the goal of US prison is not to solve difficult problems. It is simply to benefit the US prison-police-state-complex.
The other problem is it would be like when designing, your functions, or people, don't do what they're supposed to do and have a mind of their own. For example, an HBO documentary on death row inmate Troy Kell noted he was being punished for heroin overdose[1]. Thing is, he is in solitary. How does a guy in solitary become a heroin addict? Well, like the article mentioned, the drugs come in through the guards. Sometimes this, and things like Abu Ghraib, the Stanford Prison Experiment and regular police killings make me wonder if the authorities here are any better than the guys inside.
> I am very confident the type of people working in SV could make a huge impact, if only running prisons was like software development.
> But the goal of US prison is not to solve difficult problems. It is simply to benefit the US prison-police-state-complex.
See, that's why they couldn't make a real impact. The whole system is set up with the wrong incentives. From the SV/startup perspective, it's like one of your suppliers being the nephew of your biggest investor and a stipulation of the investment. Sucks to be you if they do a shitty job and cost you money, or make it hard to achieve goals. They know they have leverage over you, so you're stuck.
Prisons could kill large amounts of people that enter them, and release people as sexually molested PTSD wrecks that have little normal economic recourse and new ideas and connections about how to make money in extra-legal ways, and society still wouldn't care enough to change things. This is obvious, because that's what prisons do in the U.S. and we haven't changed jack-shit.
I don't have high hopes for change. A decade ago there was a lot of media attention and articles about how California used to be the shining example of the U.S. prison system (in the 1970's), with extremely low recidivism rates, and inmates leaving prison with a skill or craft they learned inside and able to find gainful employment. Nothing came from it during two terms of a Democrat president after that, I doubt we'll get change from a Republican one now, especially with his particular rhetoric on crime. Until we as a society get past "Justice == punishment" and focus quite a bit on rehabilitation, we're cutting off our nose to spite out face.
'Move fast and break things'...'disruption'? There's a lot going on in prison dynamics that are way out of SV's scope- this is people's 24/7 lives. Not saying it can't be improved, but SV engineers don't have a fantastic track record of foresight when it comes to downstream psychological effects.
Pretty great article. I wonder how common this man's experience is; specifically that his identity as a Jew is defined in some way by oppression. I was raised as a Jew in New York and hardly saw any overt antisemitism (the few times I did as a child I remember quite clearly), but unlike the author of this article I was always aware of it. I think for me my identity as a Jew was reinforced by the perception that there were people who would want to hurt me because I was Jewish, regardless of whether I identified myself as such.
YouTube is proof of how rare anti Jew behavior is in the US. It happens but very rarely and always involves uneducated poor people.
I dare someone to deny me service or try to lynch me. I will sue using the courts and physically defend my house and family through the glorious protection of the second amendment.
The US certainly isn't teetering into anti-semitism to the degree Europe is, but YouTube is still full of vile comments, some "ironic" and others less so.
The US prison system is far beyond fucked up. It destroys humans instead of rehabilitating them, a great majority of which could without a doubt be rehabilitated.
I kind of lost all sympathy with him when he advocated violence for opposing views. Live by the fist, die by the fist. He's living his own Hell, where his own vices are coming back to torture him.
The author is a communist, and communists killed more people than the Nazis did. The difference was that it was "self-genocide", and had a few more ideological layers involved.
Still, I would rather meet communists with words, rather than throw them out of helicopters. Don't you see how that's more reasonable?
If Nazis or Communists are actually taking action like fighting/murdering/jailing, then I will join in the fight against them. But while they only use words, even though their words are disgusting vitriol, using force against them only helps their cause and cheapens our own.
First of all, I don't think the author claims to be a communist anywhere, just that his parents were, at one time, members of the communist party. Second of all, popular estimates of the death toll of communism are ludicrously exaggerated, sometimes outright fabricated, and often include a lot of questionable cases. The Black Book of Communism, where the infamous 100 million figure comes from, includes Soviet soldiers that died in WW2 and vastly inflates the number of people who died in gulags and famines, among many other inaccuracies. The gulag figure is orders of magnitude bigger than the number of people who were even sentenced to forced labor in first place. It is widely regarded as complete trash by serious historians. This is not to discount the very real human suffering under dictators like Stalin and Mao, but to compare famines resulting for incompetence to the deliberate industrialized slaughter of 11 million people is just stupid.
On the subject of fighting Nazis, I'll leave you with a quote from Hitler himself, perhaps the pre-eminent expert on Nazis: "Only one thing could have stopped our movement – if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement."
I find it hard to feel sorry for him. He clearly brought the prison sentence on himself. On the other hand, it is not right that anyone should suffer discrimination.
Regardless of our feelings toward any individual and their punishment, it's necessary to look at this problem from an organizational level. Groups of prisoners seeking out individuals with some attribute, including those having committed the most heinous crimes, is a sign that the prison as an organization is not fulfilling its duties. First and foremost, a prison is about control. I don't see it as a place that should allow anarchic dog-eat-dog behavior while someone bars the door, but rather the authorities have a monopoly on violence. They set the ground rules for behavior. Otherwise, what is the whole apparatus of guards and administration for?
I remember seeing an HN post a couple years ago about a startup focusing on education in jails. Anyone has more info on what's the name of that startup and what its up to?
When I read these types of articles, there is always an underlining irony present there...
Out of all the diverse groups of people in the prison, only the racist whites (Nazis) would tolerate and give protection to this person - yet this person's entire write-up is predominantly against this same group of people.
A further explanation is provided to the reader that picks up on this: while these Natzi-people must truly hate him, they only truly protect him because there exists an even deeper more-menacing underlining racism within them.
All the other groups, are just fine, nothing more than a structured response to the racism.
While low on details, the story ends with the realization that while white discrimination is an evil unlike any other discrimination, it does allow the strong to find their true roots.
This story would be told quite differently if this person went to prison in a Muslim country.
This guy is one of those insufferably left-wing Jews who are borderline tankies most of the time. Most Jews, both my mom and dad, for example, either are indifferent or outright dislike other groups more than they do modern day white supremacists. My dad, who by the way isn't some country bumpkin, but is a senior VP of engineering at a company HQ'd in Palo Alto which I won't name, has made so many passionate rants about blacks, Hispanics, Asians, communists/socialists (both my parents are from the Soviet Union), etc., that I couldn't even remember the individual instances anymore. Funny enough, Benjamin Netanyahu's son recently said the left is currently a bigger threat to Jews than white supremacists currently are. In my own life, I've heard way more antisemitic remarks from blacks and mestizos, and even Asians, than from whites, even though I've been around many more whites in my life.
Im a Jew and this sounds like bullshit to me. I wonder if anyone interviewed his fellow prisoners to see how real his was.
This prison culture exists but his view is tainted by being a total outsider to it, and it appears, a desire to gain sympathy by exaggerating.
He sounds like a rich kid in prison getting manipulated and bullied because he’s not able to defend himself or attract allies.
The fact that he claims to have dealt with nazis in America outside of prison makes me think he’s a huge liar.
There are no nazis in America. There are racist poor idiots in prison and outside that wish they were nazis. The few that try anything violent get locked up in prison like the common criminals they are. Other violent crime is a massively bigger problem.
Trust me, I’ll be the first one ready to fight if anyone starts killing Jews.
That tiny tiny tiny rally in Virginia was organized by agent provocateurs probably from Russia.
My first memory of Jewishness in America was my local synagogue being burned down, with swastikas spray painted on the sidewalk out front.
In JR High I was mocked for being a Jew - for my people having killed Jesus. Also for being chubby and smart, but Jew was easy to throw into the mix. My uniformly Catholic teachers pretended not to hear it.
Russian provocateurs may have organized the rally, but it was Americans that showed up to carry torches and chant about blood and soil.
When I spent a summer in Raleigh NC, one person told me I could not be a Jew, obviously, because I had neither horns nor tail.
You’re welcome to play No True Scotsman, but if you think anything short of throwing people in a gas chamber is nothing but bullshit you need to pull your head out of the sand.
My first memory of Jewishness in America was my local synagogue being burned down, with swastikas spray painted on the sidewalk out front.
Were those Nazis that committed those acts, or wannabes? I think that is parent's point. How many of those "Nazis" can name a single plank of the Nazi platform? (And I'm sure that more than one can do just that, but not even a majority.) In other words, are they Nazis or more like the character Otto in the movie A Fish Called Wanda?
Otto West: Apes don't read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.
But at the end of the day, IMO, it's all just semantics. Some people irrationally hate Jews, some have a distaste for blacks. Whether or not they fit a particular label or not is a distraction from the fact that there are violently hateful people out there, and there weren't Jews they'd find someone else to hate that isn't like them.
>Were those Nazis that committed those acts, or wannabes?
I'm pretty sure a wannabe means they want to be, and not only that but they'll transform their behavior to mirror that which they want to be.
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
As a person with relatives and ancestors from Germany who were persecuted, killed, and hurt during the Holocaust, I'd say any idiots who try to even act like the Nazis of that era should be labeled as such, lest we allow that behavior to fester.
> Were those Nazis that committed those acts, or wannabes?
Does it matter? If you throw up a symbol of the Nazis while burning down a synagogue (that is to say, performing one of their most memorable policies), what distinguishes a wannabe from a real Nazi? Enumerating the policies which Hitler campaigned with?
That's my underlying question. There was more to the 30-40s era Nazi platform than just hating non-white Christians. But now it's "don't like Jews? Nazi!" and the haters pick that up by spraying symbols, and then we all play along by pulling out the fainting couch. Do we do anyone a service by acting like dealing with ignorant, hateful white people is the same as defeating Hitler himself? Personally, I think we'd do everyone a great service by ditching the labels, a label the wannabes hope you pin on them, and just call it like it is: un-American white people who don't buy into the melting pot ideal that has made the country what it is.
There definitely is an overuse of the word "fascist" and "Nazi" but if you're chanting blood and soil, reading the Daily Stormer and advocating for the same violence the original Nazi's were, then I think it is absolutely appropriate to use that label, to me anything else is downplaying the threat of those ideas.
to me anything else is downplaying the threat of those ideas.
Fair enough. My perspective comes from growing up in Indiana, probably one of the last places left that still had the occasional KKK rally. And frankly were it not for what they advocated, it was kind of pathetic. A dozen or so middle-aged rednecks pissed off about how it's not 1954 anymore, wearing Halloween costumes. The protesters would outnumber the participants. And there frequent calls to just quit protesting. Let them have their little get-together with an audience of...no one. I think that would be a lovely idea.
Keep an eye on them, that's for sure. If they commit a crime, investigate it, prosecute them. But otherwise quit giving them press, quit giving them labels that they like. Because calling them Nazis gives them credibility they don't deserve, IMO. They're surrounded by people that think they're assholes, so they only have the power we choose to give them. They can't pass any laws, they'll never get anywhere near a majority (underlying racism in the current political system is a long way from these nutters). Unlike the U. S. South of last century, the police generally aren't on their side. So keep a close watch, keep them contained, keep the amount of press proportional to the participation. If it's the "million Nazi march" on the Mall in D. C., then the NYT and WAPost should most certainly report. But if it's twelve sad, old guys in funny outfits, could we not make it tomorrow's headline?
It's probably naive, but one thing I would do if I was in charge would be to aggressively break up any kind of hierarchy or authority among inmates - not least to prevent prison from turning into a "crime school".
Edit: some people suggest these gangs arise due to the size of prisons and the large inflow of new inmates [1], whereas in the old days (-1950s) prison used to organize itself according to some kind of convict code.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/end-prison-gan...