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> 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.....
I could go on.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-Transportation-M...
> The general public gets very vindictive
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.
(1) http://apps.urban.org/features/reducing-federal-mass-incarce... (2) https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html
> Consequently the whole war on drugs is the perfect example of unintended side-effects.
Actually we know now that Nixon was explicitly targeting blacks and hippies, so not a great example—it seems to have worked pretty well.
>Consequently the whole war on drugs is the perfect example of unintended side-effects.
It was anything but unintended.
Actually zoning laws are a pretty good idea.
I don't assume that you want to live near a tannery, or a brothel[1], no?
What you're referring to and which was an utterly racist policy is red lining[2]
[1] Legal in a lot of places in an appropriate zone.
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.
This misses the elephant in the room: How can they "find" anything in prison?
The only answer is corruption of the prison staff. That has to be the root cause.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/rise-in-pris...
>>A December 2017 parliamentary report said up to 90 percent of prisoners have mental-health problems, and 12 percent turn to self-harm or attempt suicide multiple times.
How could it be otherwise? Even ignoring the likely correlation between psychological problems and incarceration... Prison is a terrible environment by its nature and by design.
Would we be surprised if concentration camp or gulag inhabitants had mental health issues?
Effectively, psychological injury is part of the punishment.
It's strange to think that prisons are relatively new.
> Prison is a terrible environment by its nature and by design.
Usually, yes. But not necessarily.
A prison could be more like a residential college or a boarding school.
How many prisoners entered with mental health problems? Probably the majority.
I can strongly recommend "A Bit of a Stretch" - I read it after reading "The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken" which is pretty terrifying.
An honest look at criminal justice is actually terrifying, even moreso because we don't even have a lead on alternatives.
Thank God for that, it would be absurd and harmful to mix tax evaders and murderers. And more expensive since the entire prison needs to be safe enough for its most violent inmate.
The _visibility_ of the class system is one thing that surprised me about the UK. It seems to be a very visibly stratified society. Unlike in the US where everyone likes to pretend they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and assumes there's ample social mobility (which there isn't as much as they think), in the UK most folks seem to know exactly where they belong, and they seem to be more content with their position in the class hierarchy. Or at least that's the perception from spending a month in London and vicinity. I'm sure someone will argue vehemently against it.
Economic class seems very visible in the Bay Area, to me as a Brit visitor.
Class is as much cultural and, in terms of upper class, hereditary here in the UK. I could never be upper class as I don’t have the right ancestors.
"class" means something different in the UK than it does in the US. Wealth is often a side-effect but there are plenty of aristocrats without money who would still be considered upper-class.
It's more a combination of social graces and breeding. In the USA, someone like Donald Trump would be considered upper class but would never be considered so in the UK.
"Class" in the US is more explicitly defined by race then elsewhere, because the US was founded as a white supremacist slaveowning society.
The "class system" in the title reminded me of a report I read yesterday that Harvey Weinstein hired a "prison consultant" a while ago to prepare him for a potential (and now highly likely) imprisonment.
A fictionalized example is in the original (1969) film "The Italian Job".
And also the UK TV series Porridge - which probably never got shown on US television.
Spice, in case anyone isn't familiar: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/synthetic-c...
YANML so I shall remain anonymous, and we will agree that what is below is a work of imaginative fiction:
I was presented with the temptation to commit the same crime that sent this guy to jail.
I made a movie with my brother and dad. We figured, how different could this be from software? (it wasn't really) Things got financially very complex, when more money got spent than we had. (I was not the one that spent it) Things got even more complex when my dad signed a deal with a production company to get us out of the hole (without my brother or I agreeing he could do this) They put in some money to pay invoices, and agreed to pay us ~$300,000 but as I recall being told, when it came to paying the money they wanted invoices for about a million worth of fake spend.
according to one of their staff members, they themselves were in the hole after making a movie with an oscar winner who'd who'd spent the whole shoot blitzed on coke. I didn't speak to them ever again after a confrontation on the last day of the shoot. I heard they were shocked when we refused to provide fake invoices, incredulous, that we wouldn't do something they considered film industry normal. (it's common, it's not normal)
What happened after that I can only piece together from rumours, which as I understand were:
They had assumed that we would provide the invoices and already submitted tax claims for film producer tax incentive payouts.
These supporting invoices were requested and they fled the country.
Every now and then someone tells me that they recognise me from tv.
TLDR: I got no money, but I didn't go to jail
> People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the capitalist dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or born in the wrong place to have all the things that society has told them they should have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it all, not just the wealth but the stuff. Trainers [sneakers] are a big deal, watches are a big deal, cars are a big deal.
This almost nails it. The reality is that the British lower classes can have all the stuff they want; trainers, watches, cars are within the grasp of anyone above the poverty line. But wealth is almost unattianble for the lower classes in the UK. It just doesn't go in that direction.
> are within the grasp of anyone above the poverty line
...often supplied with predatory loans.
PS4 Pro, 1TB, Fortnite edition: £799 ($1033 USD) over 108 weeks. https://www.perfecthome.co.uk/detail/index/sArticle/3170
> Atkins: People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the capitalist dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or born in the wrong place to have all the things that society has told them they should have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it all, not just the wealth but the stuff.
My favorite part. They don’t realize that capitalism itself is regressing to a class-based system. People like Trump, Johnson, Cameron can fake invoices, but the interviewer, just an ordinary member of the public has to play by the rules.
> ... capitalism itself is regressing to a class-based system.
Capitalism has always been a class-based system. There's the people who work for wages, and the people who live off rents from their capital.
Did he have to slop out?
I'm confused by why this is a surprise. It has literally been a cliche in the US for decades. Although prison in UK does sound marginally better than in the US despite having the same budget issues.
Oddly, this quote seemed appealing: "Prison moves at a glacial pace. As you adapt to the environment, you start moving at a glacial pace." Probably because I'm not rich.
> In June 2016 [...] He was sentenced to five years in prison and sent to Wandsworth
> He was released in December 2018.
Theses 5 years were pretty fast
Almost all custodial sentences in the UK, you serve half in prison and half on license; this means you aren't in prison, but are monitored by the Probation Service. They can recall you to prison if you step out of line. Essentially, your actual prison sentence is half what it sounds like.
Early release isn't available for some violent or sexual offenders.
https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/about-sentencing/senten...
> A jail sentence means more than just time in prison. If an offender is sent to prison, the judge will decide how long he should spend in custody, but time in prison is just one part of the sentence. Offenders always complete their full sentence but usually half the time is spent in prison and the rest is spent on licence. While on licence, an offender can be sent back to prison if they break its terms.
> The system of serving half a sentence in prison and half on licence was introduced by Parliament, and is not something that judges or magistrates have any control over.
https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/about-sentencing/types-...
> Offenders sentenced to two years or more will serve half their sentence in prison and serve the rest of the sentence in the community on licence. While on licence an offender will be subject to supervision and the licence will include conditions. If an offender breaches their conditions, they may be recalled to prison.
The supervision will continue for longer than the sentence.
They literally give you a 50% discount on that prison time by default and the rest you are released on probation, miss appointment or any crime and straight in front of a judge and can easily end up serving the rest of the sentence.
Sadly this whole automated 50% discount upon your sentence has made many people despair at the whole system and often see headlines of some heinous crime and how they are out after a few years.
Of course this whole process was from what I can tell a accounting way to cope with prisoner numbers and with that, curtail building more jails.
But many sentences are a joke already in the public eye, without the addition of some automatic 50% discount.
Today, they are trying to end that 50% discount for certain types of criminals - terrorist types being one and in the UK, been two well news instances this year of criminals of that category being out early and committing violence that in the first instance, led to deaths.
I will also add that many career criminals know the legal and law system better than those that enforce it and with that, know how to game the system and how to play it. With that personally I have no faith in our police at all, though that is based upon experience of drug dealers moving into the flats below and the police being beyond useless, even with hard evidence and literally passing on details of those who informed upon them onto the criminals - be that having a word, passing on statements, lapping up their lies.
One case, they called round to raid the place and knocked on the door whilst the gang was there, they were made to wait 5 minutes whilst the gang flushed the heroin and crack cocaine down the toilet - took 3 flushes to get rid of it. Then they let them in, surprisingly they found nothing.
I literally had to take the law into my own hands in the end and built a contact microphone and wired up the walls and recorded their activity and literally blackmailed them to bugger off, I then got evidence against the corrupt police and had a wee chat and they are now no longer with the police.
I tried all the legal avenues and did all the right things and got utterly and totally shafted/ignored and frankly after 50 years, utterly lost faith in the police in the UK these days. Which still saddens me and brings a tear to my eyes. I won't even touch upon the health impact of noisy neibours and the associated antics of drug dealing but let's just say, PTSD comes from many forms.
He was arrested in 2012 already and probably spend a significant amount of time in prison before he was sentenced.
Its pretty normal in a lot of places in the US as well to only actually serve 40-60% of a sentence.
I'm guessing any group of humanity will naturally form hierarchies. Seems like part of human nature.
There are evolutionarily-created biases, which often counter each other. So, yes, it's part of human nature, but so is a sense of fairness. Cultures differentially encourage and build on these native biases in different ways.
A deeply historically-entrenched class system is to a natural hierarchy bias is as an ocean is to a pond. I grew up in the UK, and the upper class were quite literally a different type of human, placed by history and the structures of society above us in every way. In my local town, even their school was physically placed to look over us. They spoke with different accents. Their schools were allotted places in the top universities. We were allotted places in local farms. Their failed children were given positions (often in the old colonies) which guaranteed them lifelong ease and comfort. This was all a long way removed from 'natural hierarchy'.
Sure. Humans are also naturally violent. We naturally get tuberculosis, too. As conscious beings, it's up to us to decide the good and bad in our natural heritage. To amplify the former and mitigate the latter.
No, there have existed non-hierarchical groups of humans, and all human endeavors are natural.
Any group of humans will naturally form social relations. Some of these relations will be power-responsibility relations, where people trade responsibilities to do things which maintain the society in exchange for the power to choose how the things are done. This does not entail hierarchy, because it does not entail rootedness; there need not be any single person nor group of people who hold ultimate power and responsibility.
Interestingly, you know what does naturally form hierarchies? Capitalist markets, especially those which alienate laborers from the profits of labor. It is straightforward maths to show that markets tend to accumulate wealth in a few lucky individuals, and that wealth alone can be used to manipulate markets arbitrarily.
No, American jails have a class system.
British ones contain one.
Please elaborate. As it is, this flew over my head.
"People of the prisoner class have really, really bought into the capitalist dream. But they were too unlucky, ill-educated, unfortunate, or born in the wrong place to have all the things that society has told them they should have. They were taught from a very early age: You can have it all, not just the wealth but the stuff. Trainers [sneakers] are a big deal, watches are a big deal, cars are a big deal."
I'd say this is fraudulent writing but it would be stating the obvious since written by someone literally convicted of fraud. The "stuff" comes before wealth for most people in all systems but it is actually in socialist societies where personal wealth does not generally exist that the acquisition of basic consumer goods is given central significance, gifting them becomes an accepted and expected way to get people dispensing nominally free or fixed-cost social services to deliver first preferential and later merely adequate service.
So the Atlantic/Hellen Lewis consider it a negative that non-violent and mentally healthy people aren't housed together with violent and mentally ill ones ? Isn't this basically what the US prison reform advocates want to see their system make its way up to ?
No, the article didn't say that at all.
In the US, this is called "minimum security" (see Orange is the New Black) and "Club Fed" for posh accommodations for high status people.
The Atlantic's breathless headline is misleading as usual.
It seems to me that it is referring to the "class" system within Wandsworth prison.