> Lewis: Tell me about “spice,” which seems to have become the British prisoner’s drug of choice.
> Atkins: It was so ubiquitous. You could tell straightaway if someone was on it, they’d be zombified, with glazed eyes. They’d just be lying on their bed in a vegetative state.
> I think [spice users] are used to smoking strong cannabis. And you can't really get away with that, because of the smell. But spice doesn’t smell. The sniffer dogs can’t get it.
> It’s the law of unintended consequences. An older screw [prisoner officer] said, it used to be that inmates would smoke weed. But then [jails] brought in drug testing, and marijuana stays in the system for a month. So they stopped doing that, and started to do spice, which makes people vegetative and violent.
There's hundreds of laws like this outside of prison. You take one thing away [with good intention] and then people find a new thing. But the new thing leaves society worse off (in this case crazy and violent off spice).
I personally believe the whole obsession with prison time for punishment in the US is a good example of this. The general public gets very vindictive, then you send them to con-college and they come out a worse criminal. With difficulty finding a job but plenty of new friends in the criminal world and a reputation as a tough-guy.
Consequently the whole war on drugs is the perfect example of unintended side-effects. Creating a hundred-billion dollar black market funding the worst cartels and street gangs. And hey we have thousands of tough guys coming out of prison in need of work.
Zoning laws are another good example of something that sounds like a good idea that ultimately hurts communities more than it helps - resulting in the mass suburbanization of America and urban ghettos [1]. Now people are moving back to cities with a serious lack of housing density, food deserts [2], driving to work becomes mandatory, etc etc. Then there's the War on Terrorism.....
This is a serious problem. Lots of people openly support violence, torture, rape and murder as long as they happen to prisoners. It's all part of the punishment.
And I also think most people don't understand what prison populations look like. Federal prisons are dominated by non-violent crimes; this report states fewer than 5% of federal inmates' most serious crimes were violent offenses. (1) The proportions are different in state prisons, but there non-violent offenders still make up about half of the population.
People are also completely misinformed about recidivism. Not only does keeping someone in prison for longer increase their risk of reoffending, the sort of crimes people are most afraid of tend to have some of the lowest recidivism rates. For instance, murderers are the least likely to reoffend out of any criminal category (2). Of course, this does have to be balanced against the seriousness of the offense if they do reoffend. But unfortunately, solitary and isolated instances of the best approach failing are turned into big political talking points -- i.e., the murderer who is released on parole and kills someone else a day later. Things like this are extremely rare, but the risk they carry as political hand-grenades means that the worse approach gets enacted almost universally.
And don't even get me started on the human rights disaster that is capital punishment. A barbaric punishment, outlawed by most developed nations; which unintentionally kills innocent people; which is more expensive than life imprisonment; and which does absolutely zero good in (a) preventing future crimes -- it has provably no power as a deterrent -- and (b) bringing back the victims who have died. We kill people because it's "what they deserve," as if the state has any right to decide whether its own citizens live or die.
> We kill people because it's "what they deserve," as if the state has any right to decide whether its own citizens live or die.
Sounds about right.
True justice is to undo the damage caused by the perpetrator. Unfortunately, it's impossible to do that. There's no way to restore a murdered person back to life or restore people's ability to feel safe in their own homes after it's been violated. Some damage always remains and it just can't be completely fixed.
So it's all about revenge, making people pay for what they've done and causing just as much if not more damage in return. For some reason, people can't just accept that things happened and that there's no fix. There must be balance in the universe and they can't move on with their lives if something isn't done to the people who hurt them. So we have judges, people who literally count infractions and calculate punishment. People who perpetrate sanctioned violence.
It's not simply just about revenge, as I noted in my comment, about there's a hundred examples outside of jail including zoning laws where we're taking this same good-intentions approach to solving the problems we see and having either nothing happen to things leaving us worse off.
The fundamental problem is fear-driven policy making by people who think they know what's best for a community and having zero tolerance for the natural chaos that is natural to society.
The more we try to tamper that chaos and create an endless series of laws without thinking (or grasping) the unintended side-effects the more this will keep happening.
I think plenty of the worst stuff in our societies results from our creations, often from idealistic attempts to make the world a better place, which in fact have had the opposite effect.
Every time we create a new law or ban something or get vindictive we need to think back to all of the times that didn't work or had the complete opposite effect.
Cities and life worked better in the post-war 1950s because we didn't have a thousand laws and projects running simultaneously trying to make the world a better place. It embraced the chaos naturally, before the NIBMY brigades and busy-bodies created a system where "they know what's best for other people" when they really didn't
For example, when the "hippies" started smoking weed, people freaked out, but maybe it really wasn't the end of the world causing all of our problems. They were normal kids just like their parents going through a phase. Then the billions we put into stopping it has left us worse off.
Likewise we need to at what other moral panics (and lesser pancis) resulted in systems that are hurting us.
I don't know exactly what the solution is but I feel like as a society we need to take a good hard look at the various systems we put in place since the post-WW2 decades and ask if it's really made the world a better place.
The highest priority of all in the US (IMO) is prison reform since that is the population numbers are the glaring massive difference that other western countries don't have. And they don't have super violent cities like the US does and maybe there's a cause and effect here, or at a minimum the vindictive nature of it all is doing nothing to actually help the problem.
The second priority is the myriad of drug laws which have so obviously backfired, then our backwards approach to building/housing which has become a massive problem in every urban area in the country.
We need to embrace the chaos again and stop trying to control every little detail like we know what's best for other people.
Johnny Cash played a concert at Folsom Prison. Can't see the public going along with something like that anymore. This isn't proof of a higher appetite for rehabilitation but it does seem that attitudes were a bit softer at the time. Conjugal visits are another thing that have been mostly eliminated, with just a couple of states still allowing them.
Johnny Cash's concert was in the late 60s, before the string of prison riots in the 70s which left several correction officers dead and the rest of the industry hyper-defensive (all of the riots, except one involving Cuban exiles who were going to be deported, were due to prison conditions AFAIK).
By this point, the war on drugs was in full swing and the prisons were filling up as fast as humanly possible.
It's not just americans. No matter where we go we find humans with some sort of repressed aggressiveness in desperate need for an acceptable target to lash out against. Seems to be connected to authoritarianism.
Rehabilitation implies they want the criminals to be part of their society to begin with. They most likely want to keep dehumanizing and exploiting those groups.
There's a vast ocean of difference between "don't build a tannery here" and "the only thing you can build here is a single family home on a minimum quarter-acre lot"
Problems with zoning laws are independent of red lining.
Having lived near brothels for nearly a decade, it's honestly better than living near bars/pubs in terms of impact on my day-to-day. What's the issue with it that you're getting at?
At least brothels tend to have quiet clientele who want to arrive and leave without attention.
Tannery would be fine as long as it doesn't smell. Externalities are reasons for regulation and licensing, but zoning is just one extremely crude tool for enacting such.
While I agree with most of what you're saying, I'm not sure suburbanization is a good example. Some people, like me, like the suburban lifestyle and thrive in it. Others prefer city or rural. When dealing with a matter of opinion, I'm not sure one can say that suburbanization "hurts" communities - anymore than any other type of zoning, at least.
I'm just saying that the same could be said for cities and rural areas, just different (and some same) harmful effects, which makes suburbanization a bad example. One is not worse than the other - it's just a different set of trade-offs. It's nice that we all don't have to cram into uncomfortable cities or suffer through the banalities of rural areas, if we don't want to.
In a minimum security facility there are often no fences. I was at Morgantown and you could get anything you wanted for approximately 4x the retail value. It was so fucking hot there guys would have their families buy a "prison" issue fan on Amazon and send it to someone who's family lived in Morgantown. Then they'd run out and bring it back in the middle of the night. Cigarettes were $2 each or $20 for a pack. Dip is like $12 a can for the Kayak brand with a 99c sticker on it.
There were over 800 of us and around 10 staff on actual security detail at a time. There were maybe 40 searches a week and they were normally targeted on the people that they had suspicions about. It happened to me one time and they guy found my camel crush. Thankfully I had been there less than 3 weeks so he just assumed someone stashed it there since I moved into an empty bunk. After that I never had another issue.
Spice is horrible. We'd have people vomiting regularly. They'd get "stuck" outside when we got called back into the units. It's really gnarly stuff that I would not willingly ingest. The most popular drug was definitely suboxone. The drug tests were not working for subs when I was still there. Supposedly they were just starting to come out with some for it that the BOP used.
Every thing went in a cycle. One guy would run most of the smuggling for the white people. I'm not going to name names here, but his balance sheet showed about $75k in profit over a rolling 6 month period. Another ran it for most of the African Americans. Eventually runners would get caught or the ring leader would get busted with a cell phone. That gives you an immediate upgrade to the next highest level facility. Prices would jump until someone was crazy enough to start it all back up again.
Right before I left the biggest person got caught with a sim card. Prices for cigarettes went up to nearly $15 each. That was if you were remotely lucky enough to find one. A guy came back on probation violation and luckily enough I was his bunk mate. Things went back to regular within a couple of weeks. He made more in Morgantown than he did on the street...
Subs/meth/vape juices could be applied to paper inside of books or letters. Anything liquid and dried usually could come in that way, but in a minimum it's not even worth the hassle.
I've heard stories about people improvising "hooch" by letting apple or orange juice sit around and ferment and using that as a trade item for the other usual stuff. When I got stuck in a similar minimum security facility (no cells, just half-walls between groups of 4 beds so there was lots of socializing going on), people would trade their prescribed Seroquels and other such meds similarly.
I also found out about "making spread" and was amazed at the ingenuity of some folks and what they could do with ramen, water, some crumbled up cheetos and a pound cake. And how this was used in the internal economy. Fascinating stuff.
On the negative side, most of the people were in there for petty drug offenses, e.g. victimless crimes not involving violence which upset me greatly. Such a shame since most of these guys were obviously above-average IQ and otherwise nice, sometimes charismatic people. What a waste of tax dollars and lives.
That was not very popular at Morgantown. You could just buy actual alcohol from the street. It was usually 10 or 20 dollars for a peanut butter jar full of vodka, normally Grey Goose. It sounds "racial", but a lot of things were based on stereotypical vices. We had Newports and Grey Goose. You could request something specific, but then you'd be paying the 4x premium. You could usually get a better deal because they'd be bringing in entire cartons of Newports, etc.
There was one night nurse who didn't watch you take your pills so tightly. Most people who had the prescription didn't share it.
There is a lot of creative food. I don't know if I'd eat the cheesecake on the street, but it is good when you haven't had anything for a while. We'd occasionally get street food inside, but it was like McDonald's breakfast, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, or chicken wings.
There was not a lot of petty criminals at Morgantown. Simple possession rarely lands you in federal prison. The worst of the worst is conspiracy. It doesn't take much for you to be linked to a conspiracy. The mandatory minimums don't make sense for that kind of crime. There's a lot of marijuana + money laundering. I'd say around 15% of people really had no business having anywhere near their actual sentence length.
> I've heard stories about people improvising "hooch" by letting apple or orange juice sit around and ferment and using that as a trade item for the other usual stuff.
In one federal medium I was at, the guys from maintenance had broken through the wall behind a urinal and installed a still in the wall. They used a hot plate from a coffee maker. They covered it up by replacing the tiles and "caulking" between them with the institution issued tooth paste. I used those urinals for months without ever knowing about it.
It was dismantled after the unit orderly snitched about it. That guy was murdered the next week. It turned out he had also snitched on some co-defendants for a reduced sentence.
I heard the hooch from that still was stronger than whiskey and pretty nasty tasting.
Most guys just tried to make alcohol with some bread and oranges in a trash bag stuffed in a locker or under a bunk.
No there's no penalty. You don't have to do anything in a minimum or really a low. You can just mind your own little world. The majority of people don't smoke/drink/drugs/etc. Most people trade//buy food or whatever. That's still "black market" I guess. The people from the kitchen steal food, etc.
At higher levels things start to go more and more by the car system. You only associate with your race and your number. You get an ID number, which in my case is #####-083. The last three digits represent where you are from. 083 is Hampton Roads in Virginia. You ONLY hang out with your race and your area. It can go above just the city into more regional things. You only go outside of your car for business.
Not necessarily. Smuggling contraband into prison has got to be as old as the existence of prison itself, and there are numerous examples of contraband being snuck in and traded without the knowledge of the staff. It’s errant to assume that all cases of contraband existing in prison is due to corrupt staff.
In fact, this issue is becoming more and more of a challenge today as drone technology advances and decreases in price[0].
Smuggling is impossible unless staff turn a blind eye, or procedures are sufficiently lax. Preventing visitors from passing things to inmates is not rocket science, if you allow visitors at all.
As for drones, let me try to fly a drone over GCHQ or the Pentagon and let's see what happens... But over a prison and then actually drop something? "Oh well, what can we do? Can't even find what they drop..."
The point in all of this is that no-one cares too much so it happens, but it is avoidable.
I was expecting a bit more of a can-do attitude on HN instead of accepting this sorry state of affairs!
This is not true, I had a troubled youth and did a short stint in my late teens for trespassing.
There are a lot of ways you can get drugs in to prison without the aid of guards.
- Repeat offenders used to getting arrested (particularly drug dealers) would carry their drugs in what is termed a cock sock, which is as you may guess, a sock worn around the male bits to hold things. They would tie pre-weighed bags of drugs up in balloons, and if it smelled they were going to get arrested they would make an attempt to dig them out and swallow them, and then erm, retreive them later in the jail.
- A more creative way was for spouses/relatives to soak certain types of paper in a liquid solution in which had been dissolved drugs like meth, and then allowed to dry. The paper was then written on like a regular letter, and sprayed with perfume (which is a very normal thing in jail/prison) to mask any trace scent of the drug and the fact that it looked like it had been wet and dried.
- Inmates that were in the lower-security units such as day workers, in which they were taken out during the day to perform community service under supervision, would devise elaborate plans to smuggle things in. There were certain work areas that had things like public restrooms, and they would phone a girlfriend/wife the day before to go drop a bag of drugs in the ceiling of the bathroom and then retrieve it while working there the next day. They would place it you know where to avoid having it found when they were strip-searched when taken back to the unit. This was rare though, and more common was that they would pick up cigarette butts as they worked, empty out any remaining tobacco, and then stash it you know where in some sort of balloon/saran wrap to bring back to the unit to smoke. This was done by popping a socket, which is where you use pencil lead stuck inside of an outlet to spark a piece of paper (typically from a book or newspaper) rolled with aforementioned garbage-tobacco.
IF I HAVE ANYONE'S ATTENTION:
The American criminal justice system is one of the most dehumanizing, corrupt, and inhumane places I have ever seen.
I saw inmates have bones broken by guards for saying things they didn't like. They are not allowed to throw punches or kicks during restraints, so what they do is put 3-4 guards on a man and will repeatedly knee/elbow them, particularly in the head, whilst screaming STOP RESISTING, despite there being zero resistance.
It was a common tactic for them to strip a person to their underwear, and put them in a restraint-chair [0] with a hood over their face so that they cant see or move any limb, and then wheel them off to a back room and accidentally forget about them for 4-8 hours.
My father in law has a great story from when he was young: his brother worked out that the easiest way for a then-14-year-old to get tobacco was to head to the local prison. Prisoners then got a tobacco ration, but had no access to sweets. So he would chuck bags of lollies over the wall, and the prisoners would throw bags of tobacco back.
We used the brillo pads from the kitchen and a battery. I was very inept at doing it so I just lit it from someone's already lit cigarette. The most we ever did with outlets was making little stingers.
One stupid choice as a reckless 18 year old was enough of an experience for me to decide I was never going back there again.
Unfortunately that trespassing was the lowest-class felony so it has made it one hell of a time for me getting a job later in life, with HR policy in most places and the fact it never leaves your record.
I was very fortunate when I first got home. I went to a fairly good, borderline great, engineering school. I was lucky enough to be picked up back in my same field. Once I can get my security clearance back or even just naval base access it'll be better.
>The American criminal justice system is one of the most dehumanizing, corrupt, and inhumane places I have ever seen.
So this. There's an entire stack of industries that thrive on this inhumanity, too e.g. Corrections Corporation of America, all the medical, legal and culinary/janitorial staff, lawyers and their retainers...
Then again, I've heard jails in other countries are considerably worse, with dirt floors and 20 people in a cell, like Brazil. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the criminal justice system here in the US and decrease the abuse of basic human rights in its correctional facilities, though.
Good one. People just don't see how life in general is complicated. How much more details are hiding in someones else job. They don't see how their senses are limited.
Prison guard - standing all day with rifle, anyone can do that.
Nurse - giving pills and injections, what is so hard about it?
Software dev - sitting behind computer all day lazy slob, he could get some real job :)
> The only answer is corruption of the prison staff.
But what you're describing here seems just as likely to be a resourcing and procedure issue.
For example, do you think it's fair that all visitors must undergo a full cavity search before being allowed to see an inmate? Even attorneys? If not, then should the inmate go through that procedure after every visit? Will we all be happy with the increased costs to hire additional staff?
The creativity of prisoners is much higher than you expect. To 100% eliminate smuggling into prisons, you'd need to operate every facility as if its SuperMax.
Smuggling in and out of the visitation room is only possible at lower security facilities. They constantly monitor via video and after the fact on recorded video.
Once they busted the main supplier at Morgantown people got desperate and started trying the visitor's room. One poor guy in a wheelchair got busted with 2 cell phones, 4 packs of cigarettes, and pills coming out of visitation. Absolutely stupid. You could definitely get in suboxone or a couple of cigarettes. Anything bigger than that it wasn't going to work. When you go back in they pat you down, but randomly you can get a significantly more thorough search.
The only place where the guards are an issue are mediums. A $6 pack of cigarettes becomes $20 at a minimum, $50 at a low, and $100+ at a medium. At low and above you'll often find they're selling little matchstick sized cigarettes that are rolled up from the person responsible for cleaning up after guards. It's usually "used" chewing tobacco.
At the medium level you don't get to talk to visitors face to face normally. That makes even visitation smuggling impossible. It can only filter in from guards or from the satellite minimum security camp.
...or effective procedures would toss human rights into the bin. Client-Attorney communication secrecy and visitation rights are one point, body cavity searches and visitation rights for close relatives of inmates another.
You should consider doing more research on a topic before trying to present your opinion/viewpoint as fact. You are stating patently false things, which invalidates your credibility.
Perhaps you could enlighten me instead of being arrogant?
The state of prisons is avoidable and due to society not caring enough. Is that a false and ignorant claim? Why? I think you should explain because I think that may claim is patently observable and a matter of fact.
Of course it's avoidable. But no-one cares enough: As long as it is hard enough to escape then the public does not care too much whether inmates use drugs, rape/fight each other, or what not, especially if stopping that would mean spending more on prisons.
The fallacy (or hypocrisy) is to pass off lack of will as practical impossibility.
The UK and the US are among the richest countries on Earth and they are democracies. There is no escaping that the state of their prisons represents the collective decision of society (us all).
the key is to keep the prisoners naked at all times, with a plug in their rectum that alarms when taken out, resulting in a beating by the guards.
a better option, and one more befiting of these rich democracies is to just let them have some of those affects and get on with it. controlling every inch of their lives is the opposite of the democratic ideal
To tackle corruption of staff and, granted, to enforce serious procedures, is the easiest and most effective route to solve drug issues in prison. As long as drugs can enter prisons they will.
Clearly there does not seem to be much political will to do so. It's easier to pretend and, after all, the victims are only inmates.
There are many technically correct answers. The fire triangle shows that a root cause is not a singleton.
1. Them being alive. Obvious fix but not useful or moral.
1a. The less omnicidal but potentially more niche in practice answer is "get humans out of the loop" - that worked quite successfully with automated phone switchboards.
2. Their incentives being misaligned with the nominal goal. The easiest fix there is a "sarcastic AI" goal of making the corruption the explicit legal goal aligning them.
3. Lack of effective oversight - they can only be corrupt if they can get away with it without sufficient negative consequences. Certainty and speed is more important than magnitude and not being enough to be worth doing anyway in spite of punishment.
3a. Enforcement in practice suffers from "turtles all the way down" with who watches the watchers. Transparency and multilateralism can help but well international law is only a series of guidelines because of it being multilateral between powers.
> Atkins: It was so ubiquitous. You could tell straightaway if someone was on it, they’d be zombified, with glazed eyes. They’d just be lying on their bed in a vegetative state.
> I think [spice users] are used to smoking strong cannabis. And you can't really get away with that, because of the smell. But spice doesn’t smell. The sniffer dogs can’t get it.
> It’s the law of unintended consequences. An older screw [prisoner officer] said, it used to be that inmates would smoke weed. But then [jails] brought in drug testing, and marijuana stays in the system for a month. So they stopped doing that, and started to do spice, which makes people vegetative and violent.
There's hundreds of laws like this outside of prison. You take one thing away [with good intention] and then people find a new thing. But the new thing leaves society worse off (in this case crazy and violent off spice).
I personally believe the whole obsession with prison time for punishment in the US is a good example of this. The general public gets very vindictive, then you send them to con-college and they come out a worse criminal. With difficulty finding a job but plenty of new friends in the criminal world and a reputation as a tough-guy.
Consequently the whole war on drugs is the perfect example of unintended side-effects. Creating a hundred-billion dollar black market funding the worst cartels and street gangs. And hey we have thousands of tough guys coming out of prison in need of work.
Zoning laws are another good example of something that sounds like a good idea that ultimately hurts communities more than it helps - resulting in the mass suburbanization of America and urban ghettos [1]. Now people are moving back to cities with a serious lack of housing density, food deserts [2], driving to work becomes mandatory, etc etc. Then there's the War on Terrorism.....
I could go on.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-Transportation-M...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert