[HN Gopher] Inmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences b...
___________________________________________________________________
Inmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book
reviews
Author : thunderbong
Score : 108 points
Date : 2023-04-14 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| typon wrote:
| Shortening sentences using longer sentences
| harveywi wrote:
| It is as if "Crime and Punishment" were written for this exact
| purpose.
| csours wrote:
| It's good to use a variety of sentence length, as the case
| requires.
| [deleted]
| ankaAr wrote:
| Noobs..
|
| Argentinian condemned vice president got a sentence reduction
| doing some courses (short ones), some from prison, some from his
| home (he was at home confinament because he alleged he must care
| of their childs (?
|
| DDBB programmer(? Electrician Another electrician one, but
| longer. Events organizer Philosophy
|
| He got almost 1 year cut.
|
| He was condemned because he bought the company that printed paper
| money :D
|
| What a nice country!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Noobs? Our entire government is made up of corrupt officials.
| The lawyer of the biggest organized drug trafficking gang in
| the country is in the supreme court and electoral court and by
| now the nation has essentially turned into a judiciary monarchy
| of sorts. They basically erased our president's crimes, undid
| the entire investigation into him and his party and basically
| buried everything, and now this corrupt communist ex-con is in
| power. They're trying to ban Bolsonaro from politics right now
| for "abuse of political power" or some other equally vague made
| up crime. Biden actually backed this communist and then had to
| watch him strengthen ties with China. Our impeached former
| president is now chief of some BRICS bank thing and making like
| $100k+ a month to do fuck all. It's comical. This country ain't
| for amateurs.
| zac23or wrote:
| Homicides in Brazil lead to 6 years in prison. The system doesn't
| work, but we have these gems like "if inmates read books...", the
| cherry on top of shit.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Make a racist joke or something though and you'll probably get
| 20+ years.
| pkaye wrote:
| Initially I was reading "sentences" as a line of text and nothing
| made sense.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Yeah I was thinking this might be a trick. Prisoners who write
| book reviews are eligible to have their sentences shortened
| [during the editing process].
| geodel wrote:
| It made total sense to me. With increase in command over
| language inmates started using shorter sentences instead of
| long ones without break.
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| Amazon Meconical Turk
| Takennickname wrote:
| Bet this is gonna be true in less than 10 years. Train some AI
| to shorten your sentence.
| csours wrote:
| Meconvictical ? (I like this one because it sounds really dumb)
|
| Meconvictal ?
| ugh123 wrote:
| >Each well-written review would shave four days off an inmate's
| sentence.
|
| What about lifers?
| jutrewag wrote:
| Wow. So you could write enough reviews in a month to shave off
| 10+ years.
| scohesc wrote:
| Part of me wonders if some of the prisoners have others write
| book reports for them.
|
| Kind of like an Con(vict)GPT of some sorts.
|
| It's a very interesting idea - allows the prisoners that really
| want to improve and change their lives the opportunity to lower
| their sentence and get out quicker.
|
| Also has the side effect of becoming more educated potentially.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Part of me wonders if some of the prisoners have others write
| book reports for them.
|
| Why would someone write a report for others if they could
| shorten their own sentence instead?
|
| Also:
|
| > Because the inmates were passionate readers, they were
| encouraged to write book reviews.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Why would someone write a report for others if they could
| shorten their own sentence instead?
|
| I think they mean sort of "ghost-reviewing", possibly under
| threats. Like I tell you to write a book review in my name,
| or I'd beat you up.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| If it's the same program described here[1], there's a cap on
| how much credit a prisoner could get per year. Once they hit
| that point, many people would take the opportunity to make
| their life on the inside easier. However supposedly they were
| proctored while writing the book reports to avoid blatant
| cheating.
|
| 1: https://www.npr.org/2017/07/04/535530400/in-brazil-some-
| inma...
| antibasilisk wrote:
| >Why would someone write a report for others if they could
| shorten their own sentence instead?
|
| There are things people might prefer to a shortened sentence,
| such as money on the outside.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >Why would someone write a report for others if they could
| shorten their own sentence instead?
|
| Isn't this like asking why economies exist?
| hervature wrote:
| Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's a fair point.
| The dollar someone else might pay for you to reduce their
| sentence might be higher than you would get outside. It's
| all about comparative advantage.
| mkmk wrote:
| Short documentary on the subject here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ5dM-uRPPo (english subtitles)
| bloomingeek wrote:
| If I was ever stupid enough to commit a crime worthy of prison, I
| would want to have an active, outside job. Example: cleaning up
| old cemeteries, repairing park trails, working in a recycle
| facilities... I realize there's the possibility of liability, and
| yes, I have seen the movie "Cool Hand Luke", but non-activity is
| almost inhuman. Punishment is essential, but common sense must
| prevail.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| > stupid enough to commit a crime worthy of prison
|
| This is a terrible attitude. Go read some of the other
| comments, and maybe learn a bit about the prison-industrial
| complex and how it incentivizes to law-enforcement agencies to
| maximize the number of people in prison. Try arguing that this
| system would only target "stupid people", and not, say,
| communities that are easy targets, and historically over-
| policed.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Good idea to learn useful skills. Just two caveats:
|
| 1) This can easily become cheap labor for outside companies, like
| book publishers, in this case. Books with many reviews sell
| better than books with none, I've been told. Any self-published
| author will receive unsolicited email offering to review their
| books.
|
| 2) With respect to "rehabilitation": a substantial number of
| prison inmates have psychopathic traits [1]. That's not to say
| they're unemployable; it may even be an asset in some professions
| [2] /s
|
| [1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work-
| eb...?
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Get ChatGPT to do it, commit more crimes.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| In Romania writing books reduced the prison sentences by months,
| not days. Writing a book is not even hard because there was no
| problem to get "help" from outside with the content.
| lsllc wrote:
| Here's a list of books for review: * Shawshank
| Redemption * The Count of Monte Cristo * Papillon
| * How to Escape From Prison * The Great Escape
|
| Actually, I wonder if prison libraries are allow to carry such
| books that might inspire prisoners to escape or otherwise give
| them ideas.
| noirscape wrote:
| IIRC prison libraries do get screened for that sorta thing.
| Overly violent novels for example aren't allowed in prisons
| because of concerns that it might lead to criminals thinking
| violence is more acceptable. (So no Fight Club for example.)
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Are you concerned that the prisoners would think of escape only
| after reading said book? I think you'd be able to spot the
| deception the first time an inmate asked for a poster of Rita
| Hayworth.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Anecdotally, my brother in law was in US prison (federal) and we
| would send him books all the time and he would read them and
| trade them around for other books. It's hard to contextualize how
| much nothing they have to do in prison. Reading is literally one
| of the only things you could be guaranteed to be able to do on a
| day to day basis regardless of lock down status.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I have seen videos where they trained dogs or had adopted
| rescue cats. I think a lot of prisoners would do way better if
| they got a chance to feel like a productive member of society.
| Them being firefighters in California wildfires comes to mind
| too.
| capableweb wrote:
| There is generally two types of prisons in the world, one is
| "Punish"/"Keep rest of the world safe" prisons, and the other
| is "Rehabilitation" prisons. The latter tries to make people
| be able to re-integrate after finishing the sentence, while
| the first doesn't care as long as they are imprisoned and
| kept away from the rest of "normal folks". Convincing people
| that rehabilitation is possible is a huge job, and I don't
| see that happening in the US anytime soon.
| wefarrell wrote:
| Rehabilitation requires education and social services and
| once you start providing those resources to prisoners
| people question the logic of giving prisoners something for
| free that everyone else has to pay for. Why should a
| prisoner get access to college classes while a law abiding
| citizen has to pay tens of thousands of dollars? Of course
| it winds up saving the state money by decreasing
| recidivism, but it raises inconvenient questions.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The correct answer, of course, is that everyone should
| have access to basic educational and social services.
| This is unpopular with many in the US.
| diveandfight wrote:
| Rather than types, maybe those qualities are more like ends
| on a spectrum?
| strken wrote:
| Maybe even axes on a graph, where prisons strive to be on
| the Pareto front at different points.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| It's a very US thing to present issues as one side or the
| other, "Left or Right", "Capitalist or Socialist" with
| nothing between. In reality almost everything is on a
| (multi-dimensional) spectrum with a lot of nuance. This
| binary thinking is reinforced by TV and social media and
| is tearing the country apart.
| quacked wrote:
| "Rehabilitation" is in many cases a misnomer. There's a
| difference between Rehabilitating someone who developed a
| problem and Habilitating someone who was never taught to
| think with a moral compass. People in the US could be
| convinced to get behind major prison reform if the
| reformers weren't so insistent on representing every felon
| as Jean Valjean.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "People in the US could be convinced to get behind major
| prison reform if the reformers weren't so insistent on
| representing every felon as Jean Valjean."
|
| It's pretty crazy to blame the current situation on
| reformers. In reality it's the war on drugs and "tough on
| crime". I know a lot of normally reasonable people who
| think prisoners deserve to be raped in prison and don't
| deserve health care.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Right. It's well known that Nixon started the "War on
| Drugs" as a way to target hippies and black people. And
| "tough on crime" has just led to people spending more
| time in prison in spite of falling crime rates:
| https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2020/oct/1/new-
| study-sh...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I was watching an interesting video of a young woman who
| had just gotten a DUI. She didn't understand why it was a
| "thing" because she hadn't hit anyone. She managed to
| argue herself into two months in the county jail because
| she didn't understand and did not _want_ to understand.
| She also tried, briefly, to make a case that she was too
| attractive for prison. Upon questioning, it was fairly
| clear that she would go on to reoffend.
|
| I saw another video of five teens who liked throwing
| heavy rocks over a busy overpass. They had done this more
| than once. Of course, they ended up killing someone,
| after which text messages were exchanged with much LOL
| and LFMOA and HAHAHA. Apparently, they had pre-planned
| some kind of defense where everyone would agree that the
| eldest of the bunch was the only one throwing the rocks,
| as well. The four youngest got a year of probation. The
| eldest got three and a quarter years in prison. He's out
| and the rest are long clear of their probation.
|
| I am unsure what could be done to rehabilitate these
| individuals rather than merely coercing lip service from
| them.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I am equally unsure. But I believe we have a
| responsibility to try to help the weakest members of our
| society become better people, and if that means locking
| them up for a while and trying to teach them a moral
| compass that's what we should try even if it's doomed to
| failure. It can't be any worse than what we're currently
| doing.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Psychopathic individuals mainly use therapy as post-
| graduate training in how to simulate human emotion. Just
| ask some shrinks. They don't learn a moral compass; they
| learn how to pretend they have one.
|
| Of course, not all inmates are psychopathic, but 15-25%
| manifest those traits, according to
| https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-
| psychopathy.
| noirscape wrote:
| General (not targeted) guidance counseling once they're
| out of prison probably would help here. Just help to get
| them back on their feet for the woman. Regular checkups,
| seeing how she's doing, giving the indication someone
| cares about her. This can do a lot to help someone
| understand what they did wrong and can help them
| understand that being a part of society means thinking
| about others as well. (Chiefly, don't do this in a way
| that's denigrating to her as a person.)
|
| Involve CPS with all the teenagers.
|
| The woman probably had other things in her life that
| caused her to end up with that remorseless of a
| personality - granted I suspect a part of this might also
| just be the American general tendency to take rights as
| "fuck you got mine", instead of "we have to share this
| place together", which might be hard to deal with
| (assuming this is US).
|
| The teenagers probably had inattentive parents or a bad
| school life, which turned them to doing shit that is
| pretty much harassing people that eventually would get
| someone killed. It sounds almost certain like there's
| secondary circumstances involved - petty theft is usually
| scared out (since teenagers tend to do it because of the
| "taboo", the fact that most kids don't see real
| consequences of their actions until then and finally that
| it's seen as the least egregious crime that isn't like...
| a speeding violation or a parking ticket), but if that
| defense is as you say, it sounds more deliberate and more
| deeply rooted.
|
| Crimes are sometimes a symptom of other things, not the
| cause.
| jeffwask wrote:
| He had a job running the commissary but even that only filled
| so much time. He would have loved anything that allowed him
| to learn a skill he could have used on release.
| [deleted]
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| > Them being firefighters in California wildfires comes to
| mind too
|
| Those are the ones that aren't allowed to work as
| firefighters once they're out of prison due to their criminal
| records, right?
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912193742/california-bill-
| cle...
| anonporridge wrote:
| Correct. It's not rehabilitation or job training, it's
| legal slave labor to do one of the most dangerous jobs we
| have, as explicitly allowed for by the 13th Amendment of
| the Constitution.
|
| The United States still has legal slavery, just with extra
| steps.
| pb7 wrote:
| Except no one is forcing them, they choose to do it
| because it gives them purpose.
| hkt wrote:
| > just with extra steps
|
| I thought the whole thing here was that for inmates,
| there weren't any extra steps?
|
| I'll confess to not knowing much about this though (I'm
| not American)
| hirsin wrote:
| The extra steps are the ones between them being a free
| person and an inmate.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Like making loitering a crime and then using police and
| prosecutor discretion to selectively enforce said crime
| only against poor minorities.
|
| And like magic! You can re-enslave the people who were
| 'freed'.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| We (society) should get them access to Khan Academy plus a
| ChatGPT style interface for interactive tutoring. Imagine
| giving each prisoner a tablet, possibly wrapped in the kids
| edition foam so they couldn't hit each other with it, and
| letting them work through basic education in every field
| they're interested in.
|
| I expect people who worked on it would come out of a
| substantial sentence better educated than most.
| egypturnash wrote:
| That would be nice, but first you have to get around the
| nightmarish world of for-profit corporations that control all
| prisoner access to information and communication in the US.
| The system is designed to bleed every penny possible from
| prisoners and their families, not to rehabilitate them.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think for profit prisons are a small fraction of the
| carceral system. Most prisons are government run.
|
| Even in the case of private prisons what we need is to
| align incentives. We shouldn't be mainly paying per inmate,
| but rather give the private prison X% of the inmate's taxes
| after release and nothing if the inmate offends again. The
| idea is, we don't want to incentivize prisons to just hold
| people - that actually incentivizes the prisons to promote
| recidivism. We do want the prisons to impart job and life
| skills that will make the prisoner a productive and law
| abiding member of society after release.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-14 23:01 UTC)