I like how keeping a man alive to answer for his sick crimes instead of letting him take the easy way out is now torture.
We can’t know the exact circumstances around him wanting to take his own life but I would be willing to bet a substantial part of it was some combination of “I got caught and am now ashamed” and “Life has nothing more to offer me since I will be in prison”. Neither inspires any sympathy for me when stacked up against how he treated his victims and the possibility of preventing others from being victimized in the future by his cohorts, some of whom may not be known to law enforcement.
The greater good here was to shine a light under the rock and squash all the roaches. And his death will probably mean some of these fuckers get to continue to rape and hurt people.
You’re justifying away the fact that someone was willing to die rather than experience what we intended to put them through. I feel like whenever it comes to that, regardless of situation, we should allow them that option.
Personally, I find this reasoning kind of gross. It's conflating a criminal not wanting to be punished for their illicit deeds with a terminally ill person who doesn't want to suffer needlessly.
It’s up to us to decide how far we are willing to take criminal punishment. I don’t support capital punishment, so when faced with a punishment that the criminal in question appears to deem worse than death it gives me pause.
I like how keeping a man alive to answer for his sick crimes instead of letting him take the easy way out is now torture.
We can’t know the exact circumstances around him wanting to take his own life but I would be willing to bet a substantial part of it was some combination of “I got caught and am now ashamed” and “Life has nothing more to offer me since I will be in prison”. Neither inspires any sympathy for me when stacked up against how he treated his victims and the possibility of preventing others from being victimized in the future by his cohorts, some of whom may not be known to law enforcement.
The greater good here was to shine a light under the rock and squash all the roaches. And his death will probably mean some of these fuckers get to continue to rape and hurt people.
We understand that solitary confinement, as it already exists, is extremely damaging to people, massively overused, and causes severe mental distress.
Suicide watch is solitary confinement, in paper clothes, with lights on 100% of the time, with effectively no comfort, with a person watching you 100% of the time, without even the autonomy to go to the bathroom without getting explicit permission.
It serves a purpose in preventing suicide by stopping people who are temporarily at a peak of suicidal ideation from following through until they revert back to the mean. It is permissible only because, like many other medical interventions, a temporary loss in patient autonomy can be justified for the greater good of saving a life. Using it indiscriminately just because it's super important one person doesn't die because they might have useful information is horrific.
Yes, I understand Epstein did horrible things, and that his testimony would have been vitally important for both serving justice to his accomplices and providing closure for those harmed by him. But that doesn't mean that acting with no regard for morality towards him or pretending we don't know the effects of prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, and lack of autonomy and pretending we haven't called less than that torture, justifiably, when discussing regular prisoners (who have also quite possibly done horrific things with victims that deserve closure).
His own actions put him into a situation where he no longer wanted to live.
To be brutally honest, I don’t much care even if we were all to agree that it’s “cruel” to force someone to live with the circumstances of their own actions.
edit: These thoughts are based on a scenario where he wasn’t intentionally driven to suicide which I am not convinced didn’t happen here.
His own actions put him into a situation where he no longer wanted to live.
To be brutally honest, I don’t much care even if we were all to agree that it’s “cruel” to force someone to live with the circumstances of their own actions.
I reject this attitude because it's almost impossible to have this simultaneously while having any any concern about the horrors of our prison system in general. I cannot square the circle of both caring about the humanity of prisoners in general with being specifically willing to discard that as soon as somebody horrific enough comes along.
I ate an engineer
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I think a lifetime sentence in an American prison is a fine reason to kill yourself and maybe we should let people off themselves if they have a good reason and feel strongly about it but in this particular circumstance I feel justice would have been better served had the individual survived to testify and what not
Or we could make our prisons into less of a horrifying human rights abuse?
Either way requires advocacy for people like Jeffrey Epstein
Nah.
Prisons being as horrible as they are also affects people who’ve done the most minuscule things as well.
And if you care at all about reducing crime you would focus on rehabilitation, and you should because you want society to be safer. I’m not talking about Epstein here but the people who go in for a few years and come out as even more hardened criminals.
Prisons not being hell is good for humanitarian reasons, but it’s also good for you and me.
I’m not sure keeping him alive against his will is the right thing to do anyway.
Letting him have an easy way out after decades of being a jet setting pedo pimp and keeping his client list a secret sure as fuck wasn't the right thing to do.
I think a lifetime sentence in an American prison is a fine reason to kill yourself and maybe we should let people off themselves if they have a good reason and feel strongly about it but in this particular circumstance I feel justice would have been better served had the individual survived to testify and what not
At a certain point it's not about what the criminal wants, it's about what the victims deserve. Epstein's entire life, bodily autonomy included, was forfeit. It was vitally important to have that public trial so society as a whole could say "this is unacceptable and we will hold individuals accountable". It was vitally important so the victims could have their suffering recognized as wrong and to see their victimizer stripped of all his power.
In a roundabout yet definite way, Epstein killing himself means he got away with it.
I feel that when you have so grossly violated the rights of so many people, you forfeit your own rights. This isn't some guy who was smoking weed, this is one of the monsters of our age who was a convicted pedophile who was likely trafficking girls for powerful people to rape. We will never know the extent of his actual crimes, and his victims will never have a chance to confront him from a position of power (if they desired to do so). He owed a huge debt to society that will never be even partially repaid. His final crime was stealing that from his victims in particular, and society in general.
I do think our justice system is pretty messed up, and far too often focuses on punishment and vengeance instead of reformation and reconciliation. That said, there are times when it is made clear that there is no reformation and reconciliation possible. He was a convicted pedophile who didn't stop committing crimes after his first conviction, and was probably still raping young girls and providing them to others to rape. This is so far beyond the pale that exceptional measures were called for.
I think a lifetime sentence in an American prison is a fine reason to kill yourself and maybe we should let people off themselves if they have a good reason and feel strongly about it but in this particular circumstance I feel justice would have been better served had the individual survived to testify and what not
Or we could make our prisons into less of a horrifying human rights abuse?
Either way requires advocacy for people like Jeffrey Epstein
Nah.
Prisons being as horrible as they are also affects people who’ve done the most minuscule things as well.
And if you care at all about reducing crime you would focus on rehabilitation, and you should because you want society to be safer. I’m not talking about Epstein here but the people who go in for a few years and come out as even more hardened criminals.
Prisons not being hell is good for humanitarian reasons, but it’s also good for you and me.
Your opponents will note that this is still going to benefit the daily welfare of people like Jeffrey Epstein.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I think a lifetime sentence in an American prison is a fine reason to kill yourself and maybe we should let people off themselves if they have a good reason and feel strongly about it but in this particular circumstance I feel justice would have been better served had the individual survived to testify and what not
Or we could make our prisons into less of a horrifying human rights abuse?
Either way requires advocacy for people like Jeffrey Epstein
Nah.
Prisons being as horrible as they are also affects people who’ve done the most minuscule things as well.
And if you care at all about reducing crime you would focus on rehabilitation, and you should because you want society to be safer. I’m not talking about Epstein here but the people who go in for a few years and come out as even more hardened criminals.
Prisons not being hell is good for humanitarian reasons, but it’s also good for you and me.
Your opponents will note that this is still going to benefit the daily welfare of people like Jeffrey Epstein.
I think a lifetime sentence in an American prison is a fine reason to kill yourself and maybe we should let people off themselves if they have a good reason and feel strongly about it but in this particular circumstance I feel justice would have been better served had the individual survived to testify and what not
Or we could make our prisons into less of a horrifying human rights abuse?
Either way requires advocacy for people like Jeffrey Epstein
Nah.
Prisons being as horrible as they are also affects people who’ve done the most minuscule things as well.
And if you care at all about reducing crime you would focus on rehabilitation, and you should because you want society to be safer. I’m not talking about Epstein here but the people who go in for a few years and come out as even more hardened criminals.
Prisons not being hell is good for humanitarian reasons, but it’s also good for you and me.
Your opponents will note that this is still going to benefit the daily welfare of people like Jeffrey Epstein.
And?
That is the point where you both agree to disagree and the status quo is set.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
edited August 2019
If it’s personal satisfaction of someone else (someone bad) suffering, or a safer community and in the end fewer victims I’m gonna go with B.
Regardless of your thoughts on how the system should be set up for people like Epstein, that isn't how the system is set up. Suicide watch is not done indefinitely and in fact is usually as short or shorter than the duration Epstein was on watch. The fact Epstein was put off suicide watch is not suspicious or evidence of malice. The fact he was not guarded well afterwards and the mixed reporting on whether he was supposed to have a cellmate or not afterwards is evident of some level of negligence but still does not rise to "obvious malice" in my mind. His death is horrible for the victims and for the justice system, but a totally plausible explanation is, as both Nobeard and the thread I linked earlier said, that he was a narcissist and used suicide as a final means of exerting control over his situation. None of that requires any sort of conspiracy to have him killed (by the same co-conspirators who, notably, made such brilliant moves as having labelled evidence of their crimes lying around.)
I’m not sure keeping him alive against his will is the right thing to do anyway.
Letting him have an easy way out after decades of being a jet setting pedo pimp and keeping his client list a secret sure as fuck wasn't the right thing to do.
“Easy way out” is such a bizarre phrase. The guy’s dead now, and everyone knows what he did. It is a tragedy if the full extent of it is not allowed to come to light because of it, or if there are people who aren’t brought to justice because of it, but I can’t say I’m sure that what we would have had to do to get anything more out of him would’ve been worth violating our own ethics in the process.
There are a thousand more changes we can make to our society and our criminal justice system to better ensure the types of things he did never happen again, but I’m not sure that violating the rights of prisoners is one of them.
If it’s personal satisfaction of someone else (someone bad) suffering, or a safer community and in the end fewer victims I’m gonna go with B.
I'm with you, but the personal satisfaction of the suffering of someone else is so compelling a human concept that the needle is pretty firmly screwed into the A side.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
He attempted suicide and was not put in suicide watch? Our criminal justice system sucks.
He was, but was taken off six days later.
Thanks I haven't been following this case closely but also I'd think he would be covered indefinitely due to his value as a person that could name names of powerful people.
Just to be clear, this is still a conspiracy, just in the opposite direction of "he was murdered". The conspiracy being "A medical professional would be ordered to intentionally alter their normal standards of care and put somebody on suicide watch indefinitely not because it provides better outcomes or improves the well-being of the prisoner, but because they're so valuable to other people alive it's worth effectively torturing them indefinitely."
I wasn't peddling a conspiracy. Obviously there was a failure in the justice system because he was able to commit suicide while in custody.
If it’s personal satisfaction of someone else (someone bad) suffering, or a safer community and in the end fewer victims I’m gonna go with B.
I'm with you, but the personal satisfaction of the suffering of someone else is so compelling a human concept that the needle is pretty firmly screwed into the A side.
And I’m of the firm belief that exercising that organ is what leads to people like Jeffery Epstein in the first place.
If it’s personal satisfaction of someone else (someone bad) suffering, or a safer community and in the end fewer victims I’m gonna go with B.
Any kind of justice for his victims, at all, even a teensy bit, would be "torture" to Epstein. So no. His feeling <victims feelings.
Nobody is suggesting that we care about Epstein's feelings or comfort in particular, but that we act unto Epstein how we feel that we ought to act towards prisoners in general, even those accused of heinous crimes. Having him brought to trial and having him spend the rest of his life in prison as it stands is acceptable enough, regardless of how he feels about it. But enacting specific retributive policy or no longer caring about the rights of certain prisoners just because they're heinous enough (or have enough of a record) is how you wind up justifying doing horrible things to all prisoners, all the time, and undercuts any ability to talk about prison reform.
I can't support a policy/morality that very easily justifies, say, isolating the Central Park 5 in solitary confinement with 100% lights on and visual contact with the guards for weeks until their trial, but the language used to support doing whatever we want to Epstein easily justifies that and rings extremely similar to the "who cares, they're criminals" arguments I hear against prison reform in general.
I’m not sure keeping him alive against his will is the right thing to do anyway.
Letting him have an easy way out after decades of being a jet setting pedo pimp and keeping his client list a secret sure as fuck wasn't the right thing to do.
“Easy way out” is such a bizarre phrase. The guy’s dead now, and everyone knows what he did. It is a tragedy if the full extent of it is not allowed to come to light because of it, or if there are people who aren’t brought to justice because of it, but I can’t say I’m sure that what we would have had to do to get anything more out of him would’ve been worth violating our own ethics in the process.
There are a thousand more changes we can make to our society and our criminal justice system to better ensure the types of things he did never happen again, but I’m not sure that violating the rights of prisoners is one of them.
The only value that that man had left to society was the ability to turn over the people he had been whoring children to.
And he denied it because he was too up his own ass to deal with the consequences of his actions.
I’m not sure keeping him alive against his will is the right thing to do anyway.
Letting him have an easy way out after decades of being a jet setting pedo pimp and keeping his client list a secret sure as fuck wasn't the right thing to do.
“Easy way out” is such a bizarre phrase. The guy’s dead now, and everyone knows what he did. It is a tragedy if the full extent of it is not allowed to come to light because of it, or if there are people who aren’t brought to justice because of it, but I can’t say I’m sure that what we would have had to do to get anything more out of him would’ve been worth violating our own ethics in the process.
There are a thousand more changes we can make to our society and our criminal justice system to better ensure the types of things he did never happen again, but I’m not sure that violating the rights of prisoners is one of them.
The only value that that man had left to society was the ability to turn over the people he had been whoring children to.
And he denied it because he was too up his own ass to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Fuck him and his spiteful cowardice.
It may be emotionally gratifying to reduce the entire moral situation to that, but even in the case of someone like Epstein it is not so simple.
I think a lifetime sentence in an American prison is a fine reason to kill yourself and maybe we should let people off themselves if they have a good reason and feel strongly about it but in this particular circumstance I feel justice would have been better served had the individual survived to testify and what not
Or we could make our prisons into less of a horrifying human rights abuse?
Patently you should reduce the abuse of human rights it's disgusting even to be a question I can't imagine why you'd ask me though my opinion is irrelevant
I’m not sure keeping him alive against his will is the right thing to do anyway.
Letting him have an easy way out after decades of being a jet setting pedo pimp and keeping his client list a secret sure as fuck wasn't the right thing to do.
“Easy way out” is such a bizarre phrase. The guy’s dead now, and everyone knows what he did. It is a tragedy if the full extent of it is not allowed to come to light because of it, or if there are people who aren’t brought to justice because of it, but I can’t say I’m sure that what we would have had to do to get anything more out of him would’ve been worth violating our own ethics in the process.
There are a thousand more changes we can make to our society and our criminal justice system to better ensure the types of things he did never happen again, but I’m not sure that violating the rights of prisoners is one of them.
The only value that that man had left to society was the ability to turn over the people he had been whoring children to.
And he denied it because he was too up his own ass to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Fuck him and his spiteful cowardice.
It may be emotionally gratifying to reduce the entire moral situation to that, but even in the case of someone like Epstein it is not so simple.
It really is, your attempts to spin this around into being a treatise on the indignity of the american judicial system not withstanding.
If it’s personal satisfaction of someone else (someone bad) suffering, or a safer community and in the end fewer victims I’m gonna go with B.
Any kind of justice for his victims, at all, even a teensy bit, would be "torture" to Epstein. So no. His feeling <victims feelings.
Nobody is suggesting that we care about Epstein's feelings or comfort in particular, but that we act unto Epstein how we feel that we ought to act towards prisoners in general, even those accused of heinous crimes. Having him brought to trial and having him spend the rest of his life in prison as it stands is acceptable enough, regardless of how he feels about it. But enacting specific retributive policy or no longer caring about the rights of certain prisoners just because they're heinous enough (or have enough of a record) is how you wind up justifying doing horrible things to all prisoners, all the time, and undercuts any ability to talk about prison reform.
I can't support a policy/morality that very easily justifies, say, isolating the Central Park 5 in solitary confinement with 100% lights on and visual contact with the guards for weeks until their trial, but the language used to support doing whatever we want to Epstein easily justifies that and rings extremely similar to the "who cares, they're criminals" arguments I hear against prison reform in general.
I agree with this entirely. Apologies to @honk and others for misunderstanding your post.
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21stCenturyCall me Pixel, or Pix for short![They/Them]Registered Userregular
I think a lifetime sentence in an American prison is a fine reason to kill yourself and maybe we should let people off themselves if they have a good reason and feel strongly about it but in this particular circumstance I feel justice would have been better served had the individual survived to testify and what not
Or we could make our prisons into less of a horrifying human rights abuse?
Either way requires advocacy for people like Jeffrey Epstein
Nah.
Prisons being as horrible as they are also affects people who’ve done the most minuscule things as well.
And if you care at all about reducing crime you would focus on rehabilitation, and you should because you want society to be safer. I’m not talking about Epstein here but the people who go in for a few years and come out as even more hardened criminals.
Prisons not being hell is good for humanitarian reasons, but it’s also good for you and me.
Your opponents will note that this is still going to benefit the daily welfare of people like Jeffrey Epstein.
This definitely is why i dislike the American justice system.
This whole "well, treating bad people like people makes me uncomfortable so we better treat them all inhumanely" things boils my cabbage.
If it’s personal satisfaction of someone else (someone bad) suffering, or a safer community and in the end fewer victims I’m gonna go with B.
Any kind of justice for his victims, at all, even a teensy bit, would be "torture" to Epstein. So no. His feeling <victims feelings.
You’re literally not reading what I’m saying but ok.
Then can you please expand it? I'm not really seeing how not getting a trial or his victims not getting closure gets to B. Unless he was going to somehow be exonerated, he was not going to be in a position to victimise anyone else anyway
If it’s personal satisfaction of someone else (someone bad) suffering, or a safer community and in the end fewer victims I’m gonna go with B.
Any kind of justice for his victims, at all, even a teensy bit, would be "torture" to Epstein. So no. His feeling <victims feelings.
You’re literally not reading what I’m saying but ok.
Then can you please expand it? I'm not really seeing how not getting a trial or his victims not getting closure gets to B. Unless he was going to somehow be exonerated, he was not going to be in a position to victimise anyone else anyway
Heavily retributive policy or treating prisoners inhumanely because you view their crimes as justification to strip them of rights and dignity leads to worse recidivism rates and a society where prison only serves to make somebody into exactly the kind of person who can't operate outside of a prison ecosystem (or at all). In the context of this discussion RE: putting somebody on indefinite maximum-alert suicide watch, it is effectively suggesting a policy that can do significant long-term harm to all prisoners (see the twitter thread from before) who wind up on suicide watch or may just be considered for suicide watch, in a similar way solitary confinement causes negative mental health outcomes (we should also be against solitary).
Any policy that would allow Epstein to face this level of maximum-priority indefinite, total-loss-of-freedom suicide watch indefinitely could be used to justify this policy on other people in jail, whether they're innocent or not and whether their crimes are the kind of thing that we believe can be rehabilitated. But enacting that sort of suicide watch on somebody who can be rehabilitated is a very good way to ensure they aren't rehabilitated. It isn't worth doing this as a rule just to (potentially) ensure people get closure or justice, if it's even more successful at preventing suicide (i.e. suicide watch increases tendencies towards suicidal ideation; it may be less effective than the current step-down procedures).
TL;DR: Saying "fuck Epstein, put him in indefinite suicide watch" also means saying "fuck X random prisoner, put him in indefinite suicide watch", and that random prisoner is not going to come out of that experience as well rehabilitated as if we didn't have this policy.
To reiterate we've had a number of cases where an innocent person gets sent to jail. Sometimes the system screws up and many times it's just malice or a result of self interest. We also jail a ton of people for shit that should get one sent to jail. The whole issue with trying to justify having the US jails be a fucking cesspit, is that the human rights abuse doesn't just conveniently confine itself to just the monsters, it spreads to all the inmates, the monsters like Epstein, people that got falsely convicted and people that should be in there because of really petty theft or have a gram of pot on them. The shitty abuses hit everyone across the jails because the mindset quickly goes from "fuck guys like Epstein," to "fuck anyone that gets convicted because their is no way that our system might be all sorts of fucked up." Once you start allow for that culture, it attracts the absolute scum of the earth that is looking for a thin veneer to justify being fucking monsters to others "it's an inmate, my actions weren't wrong." It also is going to eventually leave the jail house and result in someone that is innocent being horribly harmed because monsters that are the absolute scum of the earth either won't be content with using convicts for their atrocities anymore or end up being the parent or mentor of the next monster that hunts outside the jailhouses. There is nothing positive to be gained by trying to justify keeping the US jailhouses as hotbeds of human right's abuses because of shithead like Epstein, but allowing or encourage the mindset will result in a ton of harm.
It's hard to say if Epstein offed himself because a sense of entitlement or if he was truly terrified of what the US prison system is. It might have been both. That's a problem because no one should be thinking that suicide is preferable to being in actually jail, that the "peasants have to go to" and not bullshit setups that Epstein and his ilk tend to get. I'd be less pissed about this situation if the US prison system was in a state where people didn't commit suicide to avoid the sure atrocity that is the US prison system. I mean, even in that scenario Epstein might have still committed suicide but hat would then be completely on him and result of him either an absolute coward or the typical entitled shit that we see from white men that cheat and rape their way to the top.
Also putting aside suicide watch. I feel like even if he wasn't suicidal, that I'm not thrilled there wasn't a better setup because dude probably already had enemies and getting caught probably ensured that someone or multiple people with power would have a vested interest in his permanent silence.
We can definitely have special rules for prisoners at the "mob boss" level of criminality, where they were at the head of a vile organization. We don't have to treat some random flasher like that. Do you think that El Chapo was treated like a footsoldier of his organization? The authorities went above and beyond to ensure that he faced justice, especially since he had escaped before.
Please don't pretend that using special measures to keep important prisoners alive to testify means that we will keep all suicidal prisoners miserable in a lighted cell, constantly watched, for years. There simply isn't the resources to do so, so save the crocodile tears. Expecting Epstein to be treated like a gentleman when common prisoners are not is exactly why he served time in his office last time.
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MeeqeLord of the pants most fancySomeplace amazingRegistered Userregular
Yes, it will. This is not a well run portion of the government, the last think we should is expand the remit of tools they have access to. Law enforcement under no circumstances should be allowed to be more inhumane than they already are.
Criminala of this scale are truly monstrous. Let's not become that, even with the worst of humanity.
Criminala of this scale are truly monstrous. Let's not become that, even with the worst of humanity.
How terribly noble. But this isn't about punishing a lone monster via cruel and unusual punishment. This was about not letting the leader of a pedophile gang get away without implicating his co-conspirators.
The problem is NOT that he got away unpunished. It's not sadism. It's that the rest of his gang are out there abusing young girls right now and we might have caught them if he testified.
A simple monitored camera in his cell would have sufficed. But what actually happened is that the prison seems to have been very careful that no-one prevented this sicko from succeeding in his suicide attempt. Almost as if they wanted him gone. Because they hated pedos or because someone got a phonecall? We'll never know.
Well, its being reported that the prison Epstein was at was terribly short-staffed (which isn't unusual). One guard was apparently on his fifth straight day of overtime. Saying that someone should have been watching Epstein 24/7 is great and all, but saying the prison was "very careful" about anything is a big leap. They don't have the resources to be.
Criminala of this scale are truly monstrous. Let's not become that, even with the worst of humanity.
How terribly noble. But this isn't about punishing a lone monster via cruel and unusual punishment. This was about not letting the leader of a pedophile gang get away without implicating his co-conspirators.
The problem is NOT that he got away unpunished. It's not sadism. It's that the rest of his gang are out there abusing young girls right now and we might have caught them if he testified.
A simple monitored camera in his cell would have sufficed. But what actually happened is that the prison seems to have been very careful that no-one prevented this sicko from succeeding in his suicide attempt. Almost as if they wanted him gone. Because they hated pedos or because someone got a phonecall? We'll never know.
It's still more likely carelessness than carefulness. If you need 1:1 or a VMT, that's a resource issue and you've got to figure out call schedules, rotate people, etc. Not like he's the only suicide risk in the place, the only one pending trial, or the only gang leader. In reality, assigning someone q30min checks is spotty even when you utilize experienced nurses and HCAs instead of variably trained correctional officers or ancillary staff. Even current WHO guidelines don't recommend constant observation solely based on pre-trial status. The guidelines instead recommend expert and intuitive evaluation of whether or not someone is suicidal. Remove that decision making autonomy from the healthcare provider and there will assuredly be a lot of pushback for a lot of reasons.
What you propose is no small change and will require a renewed and significant investment into correctional facility infrastructure and mental health administration. The bottom line is, nobody cared before whether people killed themselves in prison. Now we suddenly care and act surprised that our prison system is so incompetent.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Somebody died in the custody of the US government. Regardless of how exactly that happened, somebody fucked up. People don’t just die from suicide when you’re doing everything right.
Blame it on the system or conditions at this particular prison, whatever. Somebody fucked up.
I'm perfectly fine with saying there were specific and institutional fuckups at a number of levels that led to the current outcome. My point is A: that those fuckups are not really a sign of somebody "very carefully" orchestrating them for specific reasons, and B: that any proposed solution that involves taking authority from (not necessarily independent, granted) medical professionals and giving it to the prisons that are already institutionally fucking up and hurting prisoners is going to make those specific and institutional factors worse, because every extra ability to control or hurt "mob boss" prisoners will be, say, immediately used against anybody caught with a bullshit distribution charge for a gram of pot.
Putting someone on suicide watch also requires a clinician to sign off on it. I sure as hell am not going to sign off on doing it indefinitely just because he is of high value to someone else. I fuck around with it because the guy writing my checks wants me to and suddenly I am out of a career after a board complaint. We don't spend the money we need to on properly staffing facilities and that is a real shame. It creates extremely dangerous situations where something like this can happen. The answer is comprehensive prison reform and not exploiting rules meant to help people in dire need.
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It’s up to us to decide how far we are willing to take criminal punishment. I don’t support capital punishment, so when faced with a punishment that the criminal in question appears to deem worse than death it gives me pause.
We understand that solitary confinement, as it already exists, is extremely damaging to people, massively overused, and causes severe mental distress.
Suicide watch is solitary confinement, in paper clothes, with lights on 100% of the time, with effectively no comfort, with a person watching you 100% of the time, without even the autonomy to go to the bathroom without getting explicit permission.
It serves a purpose in preventing suicide by stopping people who are temporarily at a peak of suicidal ideation from following through until they revert back to the mean. It is permissible only because, like many other medical interventions, a temporary loss in patient autonomy can be justified for the greater good of saving a life. Using it indiscriminately just because it's super important one person doesn't die because they might have useful information is horrific.
Yes, I understand Epstein did horrible things, and that his testimony would have been vitally important for both serving justice to his accomplices and providing closure for those harmed by him. But that doesn't mean that acting with no regard for morality towards him or pretending we don't know the effects of prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, and lack of autonomy and pretending we haven't called less than that torture, justifiably, when discussing regular prisoners (who have also quite possibly done horrific things with victims that deserve closure).
To be brutally honest, I don’t much care even if we were all to agree that it’s “cruel” to force someone to live with the circumstances of their own actions.
edit: These thoughts are based on a scenario where he wasn’t intentionally driven to suicide which I am not convinced didn’t happen here.
I reject this attitude because it's almost impossible to have this simultaneously while having any any concern about the horrors of our prison system in general. I cannot square the circle of both caring about the humanity of prisoners in general with being specifically willing to discard that as soon as somebody horrific enough comes along.
Nah.
Prisons being as horrible as they are also affects people who’ve done the most minuscule things as well.
And if you care at all about reducing crime you would focus on rehabilitation, and you should because you want society to be safer. I’m not talking about Epstein here but the people who go in for a few years and come out as even more hardened criminals.
Prisons not being hell is good for humanitarian reasons, but it’s also good for you and me.
Letting him have an easy way out after decades of being a jet setting pedo pimp and keeping his client list a secret sure as fuck wasn't the right thing to do.
At a certain point it's not about what the criminal wants, it's about what the victims deserve. Epstein's entire life, bodily autonomy included, was forfeit. It was vitally important to have that public trial so society as a whole could say "this is unacceptable and we will hold individuals accountable". It was vitally important so the victims could have their suffering recognized as wrong and to see their victimizer stripped of all his power.
In a roundabout yet definite way, Epstein killing himself means he got away with it.
I do think our justice system is pretty messed up, and far too often focuses on punishment and vengeance instead of reformation and reconciliation. That said, there are times when it is made clear that there is no reformation and reconciliation possible. He was a convicted pedophile who didn't stop committing crimes after his first conviction, and was probably still raping young girls and providing them to others to rape. This is so far beyond the pale that exceptional measures were called for.
Your opponents will note that this is still going to benefit the daily welfare of people like Jeffrey Epstein.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
And?
That is the point where you both agree to disagree and the status quo is set.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Any kind of justice for his victims, at all, even a teensy bit, would be "torture" to Epstein. So no. His feeling <victims feelings.
Regardless of your thoughts on how the system should be set up for people like Epstein, that isn't how the system is set up. Suicide watch is not done indefinitely and in fact is usually as short or shorter than the duration Epstein was on watch. The fact Epstein was put off suicide watch is not suspicious or evidence of malice. The fact he was not guarded well afterwards and the mixed reporting on whether he was supposed to have a cellmate or not afterwards is evident of some level of negligence but still does not rise to "obvious malice" in my mind. His death is horrible for the victims and for the justice system, but a totally plausible explanation is, as both Nobeard and the thread I linked earlier said, that he was a narcissist and used suicide as a final means of exerting control over his situation. None of that requires any sort of conspiracy to have him killed (by the same co-conspirators who, notably, made such brilliant moves as having labelled evidence of their crimes lying around.)
“Easy way out” is such a bizarre phrase. The guy’s dead now, and everyone knows what he did. It is a tragedy if the full extent of it is not allowed to come to light because of it, or if there are people who aren’t brought to justice because of it, but I can’t say I’m sure that what we would have had to do to get anything more out of him would’ve been worth violating our own ethics in the process.
There are a thousand more changes we can make to our society and our criminal justice system to better ensure the types of things he did never happen again, but I’m not sure that violating the rights of prisoners is one of them.
I'm with you, but the personal satisfaction of the suffering of someone else is so compelling a human concept that the needle is pretty firmly screwed into the A side.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
You’re literally not reading what I’m saying but ok.
I wasn't peddling a conspiracy. Obviously there was a failure in the justice system because he was able to commit suicide while in custody.
And I’m of the firm belief that exercising that organ is what leads to people like Jeffery Epstein in the first place.
Nobody is suggesting that we care about Epstein's feelings or comfort in particular, but that we act unto Epstein how we feel that we ought to act towards prisoners in general, even those accused of heinous crimes. Having him brought to trial and having him spend the rest of his life in prison as it stands is acceptable enough, regardless of how he feels about it. But enacting specific retributive policy or no longer caring about the rights of certain prisoners just because they're heinous enough (or have enough of a record) is how you wind up justifying doing horrible things to all prisoners, all the time, and undercuts any ability to talk about prison reform.
I can't support a policy/morality that very easily justifies, say, isolating the Central Park 5 in solitary confinement with 100% lights on and visual contact with the guards for weeks until their trial, but the language used to support doing whatever we want to Epstein easily justifies that and rings extremely similar to the "who cares, they're criminals" arguments I hear against prison reform in general.
The only value that that man had left to society was the ability to turn over the people he had been whoring children to.
And he denied it because he was too up his own ass to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Fuck him and his spiteful cowardice.
It may be emotionally gratifying to reduce the entire moral situation to that, but even in the case of someone like Epstein it is not so simple.
Patently you should reduce the abuse of human rights it's disgusting even to be a question I can't imagine why you'd ask me though my opinion is irrelevant
It really is, your attempts to spin this around into being a treatise on the indignity of the american judicial system not withstanding.
I agree with this entirely. Apologies to @honk and others for misunderstanding your post.
This definitely is why i dislike the American justice system.
This whole "well, treating bad people like people makes me uncomfortable so we better treat them all inhumanely" things boils my cabbage.
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Then can you please expand it? I'm not really seeing how not getting a trial or his victims not getting closure gets to B. Unless he was going to somehow be exonerated, he was not going to be in a position to victimise anyone else anyway
Heavily retributive policy or treating prisoners inhumanely because you view their crimes as justification to strip them of rights and dignity leads to worse recidivism rates and a society where prison only serves to make somebody into exactly the kind of person who can't operate outside of a prison ecosystem (or at all). In the context of this discussion RE: putting somebody on indefinite maximum-alert suicide watch, it is effectively suggesting a policy that can do significant long-term harm to all prisoners (see the twitter thread from before) who wind up on suicide watch or may just be considered for suicide watch, in a similar way solitary confinement causes negative mental health outcomes (we should also be against solitary).
Any policy that would allow Epstein to face this level of maximum-priority indefinite, total-loss-of-freedom suicide watch indefinitely could be used to justify this policy on other people in jail, whether they're innocent or not and whether their crimes are the kind of thing that we believe can be rehabilitated. But enacting that sort of suicide watch on somebody who can be rehabilitated is a very good way to ensure they aren't rehabilitated. It isn't worth doing this as a rule just to (potentially) ensure people get closure or justice, if it's even more successful at preventing suicide (i.e. suicide watch increases tendencies towards suicidal ideation; it may be less effective than the current step-down procedures).
TL;DR: Saying "fuck Epstein, put him in indefinite suicide watch" also means saying "fuck X random prisoner, put him in indefinite suicide watch", and that random prisoner is not going to come out of that experience as well rehabilitated as if we didn't have this policy.
It's hard to say if Epstein offed himself because a sense of entitlement or if he was truly terrified of what the US prison system is. It might have been both. That's a problem because no one should be thinking that suicide is preferable to being in actually jail, that the "peasants have to go to" and not bullshit setups that Epstein and his ilk tend to get. I'd be less pissed about this situation if the US prison system was in a state where people didn't commit suicide to avoid the sure atrocity that is the US prison system. I mean, even in that scenario Epstein might have still committed suicide but hat would then be completely on him and result of him either an absolute coward or the typical entitled shit that we see from white men that cheat and rape their way to the top.
Also putting aside suicide watch. I feel like even if he wasn't suicidal, that I'm not thrilled there wasn't a better setup because dude probably already had enemies and getting caught probably ensured that someone or multiple people with power would have a vested interest in his permanent silence.
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Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Please don't pretend that using special measures to keep important prisoners alive to testify means that we will keep all suicidal prisoners miserable in a lighted cell, constantly watched, for years. There simply isn't the resources to do so, so save the crocodile tears. Expecting Epstein to be treated like a gentleman when common prisoners are not is exactly why he served time in his office last time.
Criminala of this scale are truly monstrous. Let's not become that, even with the worst of humanity.
How terribly noble. But this isn't about punishing a lone monster via cruel and unusual punishment. This was about not letting the leader of a pedophile gang get away without implicating his co-conspirators.
The problem is NOT that he got away unpunished. It's not sadism. It's that the rest of his gang are out there abusing young girls right now and we might have caught them if he testified.
A simple monitored camera in his cell would have sufficed. But what actually happened is that the prison seems to have been very careful that no-one prevented this sicko from succeeding in his suicide attempt. Almost as if they wanted him gone. Because they hated pedos or because someone got a phonecall? We'll never know.
Oh, wait, they don’t give a shit? Oh. Hm. Well, in that case, maybe they shouldn’t have fucked up on a prisoner as high profile as this one.
It's still more likely carelessness than carefulness. If you need 1:1 or a VMT, that's a resource issue and you've got to figure out call schedules, rotate people, etc. Not like he's the only suicide risk in the place, the only one pending trial, or the only gang leader. In reality, assigning someone q30min checks is spotty even when you utilize experienced nurses and HCAs instead of variably trained correctional officers or ancillary staff. Even current WHO guidelines don't recommend constant observation solely based on pre-trial status. The guidelines instead recommend expert and intuitive evaluation of whether or not someone is suicidal. Remove that decision making autonomy from the healthcare provider and there will assuredly be a lot of pushback for a lot of reasons.
What you propose is no small change and will require a renewed and significant investment into correctional facility infrastructure and mental health administration. The bottom line is, nobody cared before whether people killed themselves in prison. Now we suddenly care and act surprised that our prison system is so incompetent.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Blame it on the system or conditions at this particular prison, whatever. Somebody fucked up.