We're at an impasse then, because it seems you are arguing for relatively open borders or at least leaning in that direction.
And i categorically disagree with that.
Question: Why do we do disease and criminal checks between the US and canada or mexico and not between, say, Mississippi and Tennessee? DC and West Virginia? and I'm not looking for "Because of statue 34 a that says you don't do interstate checkpoints in 'merica... I mean, what is the real reason we don't have them, and that we get away with not having them?
We're at an impasse then, because it seems you are arguing for relatively open borders or at least leaning in that direction.
And i categorically disagree with that.
One way to lessen the costs and impact is to increase opportunities for legal immigration though. The US could benefit hugely from it and it obviously has the room for it.
And no nation has open borders but they all vary in how much effort they expend in enforcing the rules. The argument here is really just one for a change in policy, not a change in the law. Spending less on tracking down immigrants and locking them up doesn't make the borders more open.
Because they would be expensive, the states don't have to deal with it, and the federal government has the primary power over interstate commerce through the commerce clause.
And those checks are primarily done on people who are going to be staying for a while (Student visas, immigration requests, work visas etc.) a tourist visa generally doesn't get those kind of checks.
“Do you understand what I'm saying?" shouted Moist. "You can't just go around killing people!"
"Why Not? You Do." The golem lowered his arm.
"What?" snapped Moist. "I do not! Who told you that?"
"I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.
"I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"
"No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
If we assume that a persons' morality is a product of their actions and that the morality of actions is determined by their consequences, then essentially every person in the world is evil.
Think about it for a moment. If you buy a house for $350,000 for yourself and your family instead of buying an inferior house for $250,000 and giving $100,000 to a malaria charity, you have made a decision that ultimately dooms many people to death. The exact number is open to debate, but objectively speaking, you made a choice that led to people dying who would otherwise be alive.
This line of argument can be seen in both Augustine of Hippo's theory of sin and Jesus' idea of "let he who is is without sin throw the first stone".
Basically, everybody in the world acts in an immoral fashion. Therefore we have a choice to either punish everybody for their sins (ala Augustine and certain medieval Christian schools of thought) or abandon the idea of justice-based morality and treat everybody equally because we are all guilty. This leads us to utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism leads us to the understanding that our contemporary prison system is a morally bankrupt idea. Either punish everybody for their crimes and create a literal Hell on Earth or just try to help everybody regardless of their past.
As the Bible says: "judge not lest ye be judged yourself". The people who cry out for harsh justice probably don't want to see what a truly just world, where all sins were punished, would look like.
EDIT- Here is metal band Iced Earth to illustrate my point.
Great article from Chris Hedges. While you may disagree with his conclusions, he drops some sobering statistics on the terrible debt prisoners can find themselves in.
Great article from Chris Hedges. While you may disagree with his conclusions, he drops some sobering statistics on the terrible debt prisoners can find themselves in.
I disagree with the statement that race is not a thing in prisons anymore. Of course it's a thing, even if we are beginning to arrest more white people. I'm all for evening things out, but I don't think we're there yet.
Otherwise, it's a pretty comprehensive condemnation of prisons as a system of American slavery/indentured servitude.
He was tried for the murder of a prison guard and convicted twice, but both convictions were overturned. Nevertheless, he stayed in solitary.
That's straight-up torture.
It's also worth pointing out that he was, in essence, a political prisoner as well - there's a good deal of evidence that the trials and punishment were intended as retribution for his advocacy for prisoner rights.
He was tried for the murder of a prison guard and convicted twice, but both convictions were overturned. Nevertheless, he stayed in solitary.
That's straight-up torture.
It's also worth pointing out that he was, in essence, a political prisoner as well - there's a good deal of evidence that the trials and punishment were intended as retribution for his advocacy for prisoner rights.
He was tried for the murder of a prison guard and convicted twice, but both convictions were overturned. Nevertheless, he stayed in solitary.
That's straight-up torture.
It's also worth pointing out that he was, in essence, a political prisoner as well - there's a good deal of evidence that the trials and punishment were intended as retribution for his advocacy for prisoner rights.
He was tried for the murder of a prison guard and convicted twice, but both convictions were overturned. Nevertheless, he stayed in solitary.
That's straight-up torture.
It's also worth pointing out that he was, in essence, a political prisoner as well - there's a good deal of evidence that the trials and punishment were intended as retribution for his advocacy for prisoner rights.
As inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Woodfox -- who was originally convicted of armed robbery -- and Herman Wallace and Robert King had organized a chapter of the Black Panthers and had begun mobilizing other African American inmates against brutal conditions inside the prison. In 1972, Woodfox and Wallace were accused of murdering Miller and placed in solitary confinement. King, convicted in the death of another inmate, was also placed in solitary — and the three were kept there for decades.
They maintained that they were kept in solitary as payback for their political activities. Dubbed the Angola 3, they became a cause celebre for prison reform advocates. King spent 29 years in solitary confinement before being released in 2001. Wallace was released from prison in 2013, at age 71, and died days later of complications of liver cancer. King discussed his experiences in the documentary "In the Land of the Free."
This combined with the many, many people who have been at Rikers for years without ever being tried is just the pinnacle of bullshit.
And on that note, Kalief Browder, who was held in Rikers for three fucking years without ever being tried, took his own life recently. It's clear that he never was able to get over the severe mental trauma of the Kafkaesque atrocity he was put through.
As inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Woodfox
Angola is...troublesome. Its very existence certainly cements Louisiana's True Detective image of a corrupt, Old South state of swamps and mansions, rotten to the core.
The largest prison in the United States by population, the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary sits on roughly 18,000 acres of fields in the back end of nowhere by the Mississippi state line. And I mean nowhere- in 1999 the nearest town was thirty miles away. The prison staff, all 1,700 of them, live on the prison grounds and in most cases have been living there (and guarding prisoners) for generations, as the prison was cobbled together out of former plantations in the early 1800s. They work on prison grounds, they relax on prison grounds, there's a school for their children, and there's a cemetery for when they die. Few of them graduate high school.
Most of the prison is taken up by fields. Angola was designed to be as self-sufficient and self-supporting as possible, so the inmates grow their own food (including 2,000 heads of cattle) and raise cash crops. This includes cotton.
Some more facts-
74% of the inmates are serving life sentences.
"You've got to keep the inmates working all day so they're tired at night"- Burl Cain, warden since 1995
It is the only prison in the U.S. with its own radio station. It also has an inmate-run magazine, and weirdly enough, a rodeo.
The prison used to send its best inmate cooks to work in the Louisiana Governor's mansion. Prisoners were famously pardoned for musical ability.
Louisiana has the right to imprison criminals, and they can certainly be made to raise food, but making them pick crops by hand and weed with hoes while a prison guard rides by on horseback looks a heck of a lot like slavery. The Mississippi River surrounds the prison on three sides- if you give the prisoners tractors, they're not going to be able to escape. Plus there's the fact that the death row built in 2006 lacks A/C or cross ventilation, and you throw in the Governor's mansion thing and it starts to look even worse, if anything could look worse than that cotton picture.
Clean up your act, Louisiana.
edit- seriously the very existence of the prison like this puts the lie to the Supreme Court's "racism is over" VRA decision.
A man who was picked up on a bench warrant for rolling a stop ended up enduring a 10-day road trip with a private prisoner transport service that, according to a federal lawsuit, left him with debilitating post-traumatic stress.
Darren Richardson, of Florida, described 10 hellish days in a bus being transported to a Pike County, Pennsylvania prison by Prisoner Transport Services of America in a lawsuit reported by ThinkProgress. According to the suit filed in May, guards pointed a shotgun at his head, urinated on him, verbally abused him and tried to extort him.
“Upon entering the bus, Plaintiff was asked by the Sergeant for his jewelry in return for a pleasant ride,” the lawsuit states. Guards allegedly withheld food from him because he wouldn’t give them his jewelry.
According to Richardson’s lawsuit, the ride happened between June 5 and June 15 of 2013. In the course of transit, he didn’t go to the restroom for six days and didn’t eat for four.
He reports watching guards taking debit cards from inmates to buy cigarettes and other items at gas stations. “The guards hassled an older man for his social security money in order to purchase cigarettes,” according to court documents.
When being transferred to another bus, he was told by a guard that he was about to endure “a ride from Hell!” The guard then urinated on Richardson, according to the suit.
Richardson’s legs were shackled and he was kept in a 3′-by-5′ cage, rendering him unable to move around or stand. As a result, blood circulation had been cut off to the point that upon arrival to Pike County Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania, his legs were purple from the knee down and his feet were black.
He was so traumatized that he requested to be kept in solitary confinement in the Pike County prison to minimize his interaction with others, the lawsuit states.
As result of his experience, Richardson now suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, loss of a normal life and permanent disability, according to the complaint.
It’s not the first time PTS and other private prisoner transport businesses have been accused of life-changing abuse. Last year, the Miami Herald reports Denise Isaacs, a frail 54 year old, was found unconscious when the van she was riding in stopped at Taco Bell. Guards only called 911 after their own efforts to revive her failed.
Yes, I realize that almost all of that is bolded.
There are dogs at my local pound that are treated better than this.
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
As inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Woodfox
Angola is...troublesome. Its very existence certainly cements Louisiana's True Detective image of a corrupt, Old South state of swamps and mansions, rotten to the core.
The largest prison in the United States by population, the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary sits on roughly 18,000 acres of fields in the back end of nowhere by the Mississippi state line. And I mean nowhere- in 1999 the nearest town was thirty miles away. The prison staff, all 1,700 of them, live on the prison grounds and in most cases have been living there (and guarding prisoners) for generations, as the prison was cobbled together out of former plantations in the early 1800s. They work on prison grounds, they relax on prison grounds, there's a school for their children, and there's a cemetery for when they die. Few of them graduate high school.
Most of the prison is taken up by fields. Angola was designed to be as self-sufficient and self-supporting as possible, so the inmates grow their own food (including 2,000 heads of cattle) and raise cash crops. This includes cotton.
Some more facts-
74% of the inmates are serving life sentences.
"You've got to keep the inmates working all day so they're tired at night"- Burl Cain, warden since 1995
It is the only prison in the U.S. with its own radio station. It also has an inmate-run magazine, and weirdly enough, a rodeo.
The prison used to send its best inmate cooks to work in the Louisiana Governor's mansion. Prisoners were famously pardoned for musical ability.
Louisiana has the right to imprison criminals, and they can certainly be made to raise food, but making them pick crops by hand and weed with hoes while a prison guard rides by on horseback looks a heck of a lot like slavery. The Mississippi River surrounds the prison on three sides- if you give the prisoners tractors, they're not going to be able to escape. Plus there's the fact that the death row built in 2006 lacks A/C or cross ventilation, and you throw in the Governor's mansion thing and it starts to look even worse, if anything could look worse than that cotton picture.
Clean up your act, Louisiana.
edit- seriously the very existence of the prison like this puts the lie to the Supreme Court's "racism is over" VRA decision.
Jesus fucking christ, Louisiana is running a prisoner plantation isolated from the real world.
Like, this entire page is awful, no question, and I'm not trying to downplay Louisiana or the fucked up bullshit happening there
But four days without food
Six days with no trip to the restroom
Blood circulation so restricted that your legs and feet turn purple and black, respectively
Getting pissed on
What the hell does it take to make the general public to realize that American prisoners are commonly treated worse than garbage?
What happens is that america has this fucked up idea that when you're a prisoner everything bad that happens to you is perfectly fine, witness all the male on male rape jokes.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
What the hell does it take to make the general public to realize that American prisoners are commonly treated worse than garbage?
First they'll have to think that prisoners actually are better than garbage and deserve to be treated better than garbage, because right now the average american honestly cares more about what happens to their garbage than the neighbor who can't make bail.
When someone says "Can't do the time, don't do the crime" they are knowingly advocating for prison rape for anyone who ever goes to prison for any reason ever. There's also no possible way to claim ignorance about it either because of how much our mainstream culture fucking jokes about prison rape.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Why the hell was he being transported for 10 straight days anyway? Were they driving in circles? Did they take him across the entire country for running a stop sign? None of this makes any sense.
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
Why the hell was he being transported for 10 straight days anyway? Were they driving in circles? Did they take him across the entire country for running a stop sign? None of this makes any sense.
Probably have to make multiple stops to pick up prisoners, maybe in out of the way routes.
typically, if you were to refuse to work it would result in some kind of disciplinary action that would lead to being denied parole (meaning you could easily end up serving every day of your sentence inside)
So that guy was picked up on a bench warrant...was he even convicted of anything yet? Or just awaiting a trial? Not that it makes anything that happened acceptable either way (all of us in here understand that) but it's the kind of thing that needs to be emphasized for the terrible people who support this treatment because zomg criminals...this kind of thing can happen to you for basically no reason at all. For forgetting to pay a speeding ticket. For looking at a cop wrong. You don't need to a rapist, murderer, or pothead.
Also I recall reading somewhere that putting guys on never ending bus rides to prison was "a thing." Mouth off to one of the guards at your jail or on the bus, and they can "misroute" you for like a month.
Wouldn't shock me. Like noted torture enthusiast Joe Arpaio runs the jail, not the prison, you know that place you go when you are awaiting trial or if convicted serving less than a year. Yeah everyone jerking off over making people get beaten to death or die of heat stroke are doing it to low risk offenders or people who aren't even convicted of shit yet. GOD BLESS MERICA!!!
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Hey, it's a contract. The government want to make sure that "People were Employed" and that "Jobs were created." You can't back out just because you don't have the political will to throw people in jail on fake charges without a trial.
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
Posts
Question: Why do we do disease and criminal checks between the US and canada or mexico and not between, say, Mississippi and Tennessee? DC and West Virginia? and I'm not looking for "Because of statue 34 a that says you don't do interstate checkpoints in 'merica... I mean, what is the real reason we don't have them, and that we get away with not having them?
I host a podcast about movies.
One way to lessen the costs and impact is to increase opportunities for legal immigration though. The US could benefit hugely from it and it obviously has the room for it.
And no nation has open borders but they all vary in how much effort they expend in enforcing the rules. The argument here is really just one for a change in policy, not a change in the law. Spending less on tracking down immigrants and locking them up doesn't make the borders more open.
And those checks are primarily done on people who are going to be staying for a while (Student visas, immigration requests, work visas etc.) a tourist visa generally doesn't get those kind of checks.
Think about it for a moment. If you buy a house for $350,000 for yourself and your family instead of buying an inferior house for $250,000 and giving $100,000 to a malaria charity, you have made a decision that ultimately dooms many people to death. The exact number is open to debate, but objectively speaking, you made a choice that led to people dying who would otherwise be alive.
This line of argument can be seen in both Augustine of Hippo's theory of sin and Jesus' idea of "let he who is is without sin throw the first stone".
Basically, everybody in the world acts in an immoral fashion. Therefore we have a choice to either punish everybody for their sins (ala Augustine and certain medieval Christian schools of thought) or abandon the idea of justice-based morality and treat everybody equally because we are all guilty. This leads us to utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism leads us to the understanding that our contemporary prison system is a morally bankrupt idea. Either punish everybody for their crimes and create a literal Hell on Earth or just try to help everybody regardless of their past.
As the Bible says: "judge not lest ye be judged yourself". The people who cry out for harsh justice probably don't want to see what a truly just world, where all sins were punished, would look like.
EDIT- Here is metal band Iced Earth to illustrate my point.
I disagree with the statement that race is not a thing in prisons anymore. Of course it's a thing, even if we are beginning to arrest more white people. I'm all for evening things out, but I don't think we're there yet.
Otherwise, it's a pretty comprehensive condemnation of prisons as a system of American slavery/indentured servitude.
Albert Woodfox to be freed after 43 years in solitary
He was tried for the murder of a prison guard and convicted twice, but both convictions were overturned. Nevertheless, he stayed in solitary.
That's straight-up torture.
It's also worth pointing out that he was, in essence, a political prisoner as well - there's a good deal of evidence that the trials and punishment were intended as retribution for his advocacy for prisoner rights.
Link? The article doesn't mention that.
Innocent until proven guilty is a dead concept unless you're rich, and if you're rich enough it's more like Innocent and never guilty.
I can't find a good source that's only about that topic, but this article about another one of the Angola 3 also hints at it. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/angola-3-herman-wallace-liver-cancer-solitary
It was brought up in the LA Times reporting on the matter:
And on that note, Kalief Browder, who was held in Rikers for three fucking years without ever being tried, took his own life recently. It's clear that he never was able to get over the severe mental trauma of the Kafkaesque atrocity he was put through.
Over an attack that took place 2 1/2 years ago. So, progress?
Don't kill people by kicking them to death
Maybe don't do that
Seems a drastic reaction.
Angola is...troublesome. Its very existence certainly cements Louisiana's True Detective image of a corrupt, Old South state of swamps and mansions, rotten to the core.
The largest prison in the United States by population, the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary sits on roughly 18,000 acres of fields in the back end of nowhere by the Mississippi state line. And I mean nowhere- in 1999 the nearest town was thirty miles away. The prison staff, all 1,700 of them, live on the prison grounds and in most cases have been living there (and guarding prisoners) for generations, as the prison was cobbled together out of former plantations in the early 1800s. They work on prison grounds, they relax on prison grounds, there's a school for their children, and there's a cemetery for when they die. Few of them graduate high school.
Most of the prison is taken up by fields. Angola was designed to be as self-sufficient and self-supporting as possible, so the inmates grow their own food (including 2,000 heads of cattle) and raise cash crops. This includes cotton.
Some more facts-
74% of the inmates are serving life sentences.
"You've got to keep the inmates working all day so they're tired at night"- Burl Cain, warden since 1995
It is the only prison in the U.S. with its own radio station. It also has an inmate-run magazine, and weirdly enough, a rodeo.
The prison used to send its best inmate cooks to work in the Louisiana Governor's mansion. Prisoners were famously pardoned for musical ability.
Louisiana has the right to imprison criminals, and they can certainly be made to raise food, but making them pick crops by hand and weed with hoes while a prison guard rides by on horseback looks a heck of a lot like slavery. The Mississippi River surrounds the prison on three sides- if you give the prisoners tractors, they're not going to be able to escape. Plus there's the fact that the death row built in 2006 lacks A/C or cross ventilation, and you throw in the Governor's mansion thing and it starts to look even worse, if anything could look worse than that cotton picture.
Clean up your act, Louisiana.
edit- seriously the very existence of the prison like this puts the lie to the Supreme Court's "racism is over" VRA decision.
Yes, I realize that almost all of that is bolded.
There are dogs at my local pound that are treated better than this.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Jesus fucking christ, Louisiana is running a prisoner plantation isolated from the real world.
Because prison privatization is a huge issue in this country and the Mariners' performance is unrelated to that.
Oh, right, rhetorical.
God @Preacher, just stop believing bad things!
But four days without food
Six days with no trip to the restroom
Blood circulation so restricted that your legs and feet turn purple and black, respectively
Getting pissed on
What the hell does it take to make the general public to realize that American prisoners are commonly treated worse than garbage?
What happens is that america has this fucked up idea that when you're a prisoner everything bad that happens to you is perfectly fine, witness all the male on male rape jokes.
pleasepaypreacher.net
First they'll have to think that prisoners actually are better than garbage and deserve to be treated better than garbage, because right now the average american honestly cares more about what happens to their garbage than the neighbor who can't make bail.
When someone says "Can't do the time, don't do the crime" they are knowingly advocating for prison rape for anyone who ever goes to prison for any reason ever. There's also no possible way to claim ignorance about it either because of how much our mainstream culture fucking jokes about prison rape.
Probably have to make multiple stops to pick up prisoners, maybe in out of the way routes.
I'm guessing they beat them, but I mean, legally what are they supposed to do
my guess is it would lead to seg pop
People have died in their vans. The nurse at the prison who looked at Richardson's legs said it wasn't the worst she has seen.
I have to wonder if they knew they were giving their company the first three initials of the disorder that they give to their prisoners.
Also I recall reading somewhere that putting guys on never ending bus rides to prison was "a thing." Mouth off to one of the guards at your jail or on the bus, and they can "misroute" you for like a month.
pleasepaypreacher.net
You have just the worst fucking super power, and we'd all like you to stop?
... also because Reality has been giving The Onion a run for its money forever.
Also, this PTS bit is the kind of thing I hope John Oliver takes and runs into the ground.
At least he doesn't work for The Onion. The feedback loop would kill us all within weeks.
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What?!? Private prisons suing states for millions if they don’t stay full
Edit: Better link, more general but itself with better links: http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/how-for-profit-prisons-have-become-the-biggest-lobby-no-one-is-talking-about/