John Oliver on Prisons

[Steve James]

Interesting, and sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pz3syET3DY

[Michael]

I seriously wonder if the Bastille was as bad in 1789 as a USA supermax today. Difficult to say, but they're probably pretty close, when adjusted for today's dollars tortures. Bradley Manning is one well-known example, how he was tortured for 3 years in solitary, obviously the greatest anyone has been punished in relation to the illegal and aggressive second US war on Iraq.

Somewhere between 25,000 and 80,000 prisoners in the USA are in solitary confinement, the vast majority for lengthy periods of time, months and years.

What is Solitary Confinement?
In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. led the world in a new practice of imprisoning people in solitary cells, without access to any human contact or stimulation, as a method of rehabilitation. The results were disastrous, as prisoners quickly became severely mentally disturbed. The practice was all but abandoned. Over a century later, it has made an unfortunate comeback. Instead of torturing prisoners with solitary confinement in dark and dirty underground holes, prisoners are now subjected to solitary confinement in well-lit, sterile boxes. The psychological repercussions are similar.

[Steve James]

It's absolutely amazing that we have more prisoners than China. But, I'm not sure whether that's a result of a lower execution rate, on one hand, and the incarceration of people for drug offenses, on the other.

Well, I believe that many conditions in prisons are better now than they were years ago. I don't think it's possible to compare the Bastille to a modern prison. In fact, we invented the modern prison. In fact, a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, actually came to the US to study the prison system specifically --because it was considered a model. Of course, he ended up writing about much more than that. http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0410/p15s01-bogn.html