I don't understand why Texas voters support such inhumane conditions. All these "Christians" who support this kind of cruel punishment need to have a "come to Jesus" moment, literally.
There is so much nuance with this. On the one hand, Texas has hot enough days where it is inhumane/dangerous to not have A/C. But also plenty of days that are hot, but bearable. There are plenty of citizens not in prison that live without AC and make due with fans. HVAC systems are ridiculusly expensive. $1.5 billion is about $10K a person. Too bad they can't just give each prisoner a window unit for $200 a piece.
Fans have no cooling effect once the ambient temperature exceeds human body temperature, so "making do with fans" is literally making do with nothing.
Those citizens "making do" generally have freedom of movement, free access to cool water, air-conditioned businesses or vehicles, and are not locked down in a concrete facility.
$1.5 billion is about $10K a person. Too bad they can't just give each prisoner a window unit for $200 a piece.
The former almost certainly includes other installation part, utility, and labor costs. Even if you could give everyone a $200 window unit, you'd need to deliver, install, upgrade utilities, maintain them, etc.
I don't understand why Texas voters support such inhumane conditions.
I'm in Texas. I'm a little confused as to why you think I should care. For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison... and for those correctly convicted, I'm not especially worried about making them more comfortable.
The entire point of punishment is the cruelty. It doesn't really work without it... it's unclear if you're quibbling over the amount of cruelty, or if you think that there exists some sort of cruelty-free punishment that the rest of us just haven't heard of.
Rehabilitation has never really been the point of the US prison or even correctional system at all.
The fact you can serve your time, earnestly work on rehabilitating yourself, jump through all the hoops, etc. but still be under the economic death sentence more or less summarizes how people feel about it.
It’s basically NIMBY applied to the justice system. Everyone loves to pretend they want rehabilitation but also wants someone else to do it. This shows up in hiring, apartment leasing, social benefits, etc.
Everyone loves to pretend they want rehabilitation but also wants someone else to do it.
People on the left love to pretend this, perhaps. Those of us on the right make no such pretense. It's about punishment, sequestration, and deterrence in that order. Rehabilitation doesn't even enter our minds.
Why do you pretend? It wouldn't surprise anyone if you were to just be honest and that you don't care about rehabilitation either, it's rather that you don't want a justice system at all. We all know that already. There's no reason to hide it.
And here I was thinking that prisons should be about keeping people who can't operate in society without damaging society away from society. I mean, even better would be to find a way to help them operate in society, but apparently we're not even all at the baseline.
Then that's what they should have written. Leaving it ambiguous gives us the opportunity to take someone who says cruelty is the point at their word, though. They want people to suffer, they are a sadist.
I think there's a basic floor for how we should treat other people, regardless of the circumstances. Things like access to food and water, shelter, etc.
I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it, but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.
I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it,
This is an absurd claim. How does punishment work without cruelty? Remember, that I allow for people to disagree on the quantity of cruelty (supposing that can be quantified)... so you're proposing cruelty-free punishment. This misses the entire point of what punishment is. Perhaps your reading comprehension is faulty, and you confuse the word with "rehabilitation". I see that alot.
but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.
Hah! I hadn't even read that sentence yet when I wrote the above! Damn I'm good. Rehabilitation is science fiction. No one has even ever proposed a theory on how or why it's supposed to happen, let alone engineered a method to induce it to occur. On reddit, these conversations are often hilarious, but maybe here on Hackernews it will be glorious. Why do you think you need to do to cause a violent criminal to rehabilitate? If the method is performed diligently, what percentage of violent criminals rehabilitate, and what sort of timeline are we talking? Why do the failures (and let's be honest, there are failures in every manufacturing process) fail? Can these be sorted out beforehand?
But at the end of the day, there is still a big problem. Justice is what society promises to the victims so that they will refrain from revenge; the state must carry out the revenge for them. It does so for several reasons: to discourage eternal feuds, to ensure that the correct culprit is targeted, and to avoid normally nonviolent people from growing accustomed to violence. To satisfy their monkey need for vengeance in the most civilized manner possible. If you fail to satisfy it, then these people are obligated to do it themselves. Rehabilitation alone can't substitute, even if it were possible. For the lesser criminals, incarceration suffices. For those more depraved, we don't want them rehabilitated. It serves no need at all.
1. Even correct convictions can later be found to be wrong. Death is irreversible and financially restituting someone's death can never benefit one wrongfully killed.
2. Unless death is the sentence, a sentence should not result in death. If you don't closely control and monitor when the state can do something, it increases the risk of misuse of that power by the state.
3. If cruelty and punishment really worked, crime would decrease over time, not increase.
4. The AC can be set to 75. That's not luxury but won't kill anyone with heatstroke.
For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison
What a remarkable thing to write. Even knowing that some innocent people are there, you want them to suffer the risk of death and severe harm from heat.
That's a pretty messed up morality. I don't even know where to start on this one.
How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
Its also messed up ethics.
The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta. And from the first time this ever came up it came up as the government saying justice should be balanced. "eye for an eye" == "Punishment fits the crime"
How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
I'm an atheist. There is no god nor gods. But if I had to have a god, I don't think I'd choose one of the abrahamic ones. There are many to choose from who aren't big on mercy.
Its also messed up ethics.
I don't accept your ethical framework. It's a system of bullshit rules made up by people who care for me not even a little to put me and my family at a disadvantage against a civilization that doesn't even want to go on living.
The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta.
Then you're doing it wrong. It can only prevent vendetta if the victims feel as if they receive justice... if those who do wrong are punished. If you remove the punishment/cruelty from the equation, they will simply do that part themselves. Unless you're hoping to emasculate and disarm them so thoroughly that they have no hope of doing so... but I guess that was the ethics stuff you were talking about above.
Just because these people don't worship or believe the same things as your sect of christianity does not stop them from believing in the teachings of Christ. They just don't agree with you while holding positions of power.
Prosperity gospel is a real thing too, also the fastest sect of christianity growing in the world.
It's because Texas is the OG of human suffering. Texas gave up territory than end slavery: This is why Oklahoma looks so weird (the "panhandle"). After the so-called Missouri compromise, in order to remain a slave-state, Texas gave up that piece of land. Also, Texas declared independence not once, but twice, to remain a slave state. First, from Mexico: "Many Anglo-American settlers were from the southern United States and brought enslaved workers, using legal loopholes like indentured servitude to bypass Mexican restrictions against slavery. They feared Mexico would abolish the practice entirely". And then, famously, of course, fighting to remain independent during the Civil War.
Your point is valid, but it is worth noting that the panhandle territory was a notoriously inhospitable place to try and exist (for European settlers at least, who called it "no mans land"), so it wasn't like Texas was giving up a gem, none of the surrounding states wanted it.
Texas ceded said land to another state, what they viewed as another nation, such that they could keep the practice of human ownership alive and well. The quality of the land is immaterial to this statement, let alone noteworthy
"TDCJ has acknowledged that at least 23 people died from heat-related causes in its facilities between 1998 and 2012 — a likely underestimate, Pitman wrote in his order last year. Inmate advocates say at least 10 additional deaths between 2022 and 2025 can be attributed to the high temperatures, including three people whose autopsy reports reference heat as a possible contributing factor."
Not entirely sure what European A/C regulations you’re referring to. Europe doesn’t have A/C because historically it’s not been needed, and when you have cities that are hundreds of years old, often filled with buildings that are designed to passively keep cool, it’s a right pain in the arse to retrofit everything.
As a result Europe doesn’t culturally expect A/C every where, and has been slow to adopt it. But obviously climate change is forcing many to reconsider those cultural norms.
Being incarcerated and having very little control over every aspect of your life IS punishment. The violence, sexual violence and extreme conditions are not necessary.
It should be the understanding of a society that no human being is just 'bad'. A human being became 'bad' by a definiton of a society due to circumstances like upbringing, environment etc. and a society which failed you.
Prison is the removal of you from society due to impatibility of current values and should help you become 'better'.
Be happy that you had good/avg parents, the mental strength to help yourself, money, luck, body strength, whatever it was which allowed you to comment on HN instead of being in a prison.
Meanwhile in this thread, everyone is getting worked up about how evil Texas Christians supposedly are, as though a red flag was waved in front of a bull.
Well, letting the humanist rehabilitation part aside, there is that social aspect of a sanctioning instance to prisons. Expectations of sanctions do drive human behavior.
I'm not against the idea of the society taking control over the life of one of its own (lets be fair, our planet is small, we are too interconnected) we can't just put people somewere else.
But cruelty shouldn't be part of this. Help and rehabiliation
Just out of college I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I took a job at a prison near Phoenix AZ. It was outdoors, the cells had no AC. In a 10 hour shift in 115 (46c) degree weather I would go through 1.5 gallons (5.6 liters) of water. Every single day at least one inmate would pass out from the heat. At least they got heat for the winter.
Thankfully I left all that behind a long time ago. Though I just checked and they still don’t have AC.
There is a fairly famous quote: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
May we teach our children the only thing that truly matters is how we regard the dignity of people.
I find most successful Americans I meet are so self-obsessed they are left with an incredibly low capacity for empathy for those in lower classes than them. Wild how they think they are so different than Nazis.
I don't understand why Texas voters support such inhumane conditions. All these "Christians" who support this kind of cruel punishment need to have a "come to Jesus" moment, literally.
There is so much nuance with this. On the one hand, Texas has hot enough days where it is inhumane/dangerous to not have A/C. But also plenty of days that are hot, but bearable. There are plenty of citizens not in prison that live without AC and make due with fans. HVAC systems are ridiculusly expensive. $1.5 billion is about $10K a person. Too bad they can't just give each prisoner a window unit for $200 a piece.
Fans have no cooling effect once the ambient temperature exceeds human body temperature, so "making do with fans" is literally making do with nothing.
Those citizens "making do" generally have freedom of movement, free access to cool water, air-conditioned businesses or vehicles, and are not locked down in a concrete facility.
There is a absolutely no nuance to this.
Sweat is a wet-bulb cooling process which always cools below ambient for any humidity less than 100%.
How much do you think it costs, in total, per prisoner today, per year?
Yeah. A one-shot investment of 10k$ per prisoner to avoid more manslaughter cases is peanuts, really.
The former almost certainly includes other installation part, utility, and labor costs. Even if you could give everyone a $200 window unit, you'd need to deliver, install, upgrade utilities, maintain them, etc.
I'm in Texas. I'm a little confused as to why you think I should care. For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison... and for those correctly convicted, I'm not especially worried about making them more comfortable.
The entire point of punishment is the cruelty. It doesn't really work without it... it's unclear if you're quibbling over the amount of cruelty, or if you think that there exists some sort of cruelty-free punishment that the rest of us just haven't heard of.
The point of imprisonment is cruelty? Many would disagree. I can think of a few other reasons for it...
Might as well make every criminal offense a capital punishment, if rehabilitation isn’t the point anymore.
Why even waste your money on for-profit prisons if you want the prisoners to die?
Rehabilitation has never really been the point of the US prison or even correctional system at all.
The fact you can serve your time, earnestly work on rehabilitating yourself, jump through all the hoops, etc. but still be under the economic death sentence more or less summarizes how people feel about it.
It’s basically NIMBY applied to the justice system. Everyone loves to pretend they want rehabilitation but also wants someone else to do it. This shows up in hiring, apartment leasing, social benefits, etc.
People on the left love to pretend this, perhaps. Those of us on the right make no such pretense. It's about punishment, sequestration, and deterrence in that order. Rehabilitation doesn't even enter our minds.
Why do you pretend? It wouldn't surprise anyone if you were to just be honest and that you don't care about rehabilitation either, it's rather that you don't want a justice system at all. We all know that already. There's no reason to hide it.
This guy doesn't want them to die, he wants them to suffer.
The US Constitution has a whole bit about forbidding cruel and unusual punishments.
And here I was thinking that prisons should be about keeping people who can't operate in society without damaging society away from society. I mean, even better would be to find a way to help them operate in society, but apparently we're not even all at the baseline.
???
The user just posted
"Run from me, I will hurt you and I will enjoy it"
Which is insanely ironic, that's the exact same kind of person he'd throw in jail.
I think he meant they should be freed.
Then that's what they should have written. Leaving it ambiguous gives us the opportunity to take someone who says cruelty is the point at their word, though. They want people to suffer, they are a sadist.
Comes down to your level of empathy I guess.
I think there's a basic floor for how we should treat other people, regardless of the circumstances. Things like access to food and water, shelter, etc.
I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it, but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.
This is an absurd claim. How does punishment work without cruelty? Remember, that I allow for people to disagree on the quantity of cruelty (supposing that can be quantified)... so you're proposing cruelty-free punishment. This misses the entire point of what punishment is. Perhaps your reading comprehension is faulty, and you confuse the word with "rehabilitation". I see that alot.
Hah! I hadn't even read that sentence yet when I wrote the above! Damn I'm good. Rehabilitation is science fiction. No one has even ever proposed a theory on how or why it's supposed to happen, let alone engineered a method to induce it to occur. On reddit, these conversations are often hilarious, but maybe here on Hackernews it will be glorious. Why do you think you need to do to cause a violent criminal to rehabilitate? If the method is performed diligently, what percentage of violent criminals rehabilitate, and what sort of timeline are we talking? Why do the failures (and let's be honest, there are failures in every manufacturing process) fail? Can these be sorted out beforehand?
But at the end of the day, there is still a big problem. Justice is what society promises to the victims so that they will refrain from revenge; the state must carry out the revenge for them. It does so for several reasons: to discourage eternal feuds, to ensure that the correct culprit is targeted, and to avoid normally nonviolent people from growing accustomed to violence. To satisfy their monkey need for vengeance in the most civilized manner possible. If you fail to satisfy it, then these people are obligated to do it themselves. Rehabilitation alone can't substitute, even if it were possible. For the lesser criminals, incarceration suffices. For those more depraved, we don't want them rehabilitated. It serves no need at all.
All fun and games until is you in the prison.
Maybe start here https://innocenceproject.org/ before you let everyone around here see how much of a sociopath you are.
Jesus fucking Christ
1. Even correct convictions can later be found to be wrong. Death is irreversible and financially restituting someone's death can never benefit one wrongfully killed.
2. Unless death is the sentence, a sentence should not result in death. If you don't closely control and monitor when the state can do something, it increases the risk of misuse of that power by the state.
3. If cruelty and punishment really worked, crime would decrease over time, not increase.
4. The AC can be set to 75. That's not luxury but won't kill anyone with heatstroke.
What a remarkable thing to write. Even knowing that some innocent people are there, you want them to suffer the risk of death and severe harm from heat.
That's a pretty messed up morality. I don't even know where to start on this one.
How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
Its also messed up ethics.
The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta. And from the first time this ever came up it came up as the government saying justice should be balanced. "eye for an eye" == "Punishment fits the crime"
I'm an atheist. There is no god nor gods. But if I had to have a god, I don't think I'd choose one of the abrahamic ones. There are many to choose from who aren't big on mercy.
I don't accept your ethical framework. It's a system of bullshit rules made up by people who care for me not even a little to put me and my family at a disadvantage against a civilization that doesn't even want to go on living.
Then you're doing it wrong. It can only prevent vendetta if the victims feel as if they receive justice... if those who do wrong are punished. If you remove the punishment/cruelty from the equation, they will simply do that part themselves. Unless you're hoping to emasculate and disarm them so thoroughly that they have no hope of doing so... but I guess that was the ethics stuff you were talking about above.
Yikes
You say this until it hits you.
But hey, you don't seem to be very empathic about your luck in life.
You could have been just the person in prison.
Btw. some religions believe in rebirth, you might become a prisoner.
Some believe in an infinite rebirth of universities, which will lead you to be in a prision in another reallity.
Even on a logically viewpoint it would be better for your 'other lives' to not be cruel to other human beings.
The one time I observed an ex-con post here, someone quickly doxxed him, the mob declared him evil, and quickly flagged all his posts and comments.
They don't want cruelty, just their livelihoods taken away.
These are Nationalist Christians (Nat-C’s), not actual followers of Jesus.
"They are hurting the right people". This is 100% their mentality.
But largely supported by people that would call themselves actual Christians FYI, and not even right wing extremist either.
Just because these people don't worship or believe the same things as your sect of christianity does not stop them from believing in the teachings of Christ. They just don't agree with you while holding positions of power.
Prosperity gospel is a real thing too, also the fastest sect of christianity growing in the world.
It's because Texas is the OG of human suffering. Texas gave up territory than end slavery: This is why Oklahoma looks so weird (the "panhandle"). After the so-called Missouri compromise, in order to remain a slave-state, Texas gave up that piece of land. Also, Texas declared independence not once, but twice, to remain a slave state. First, from Mexico: "Many Anglo-American settlers were from the southern United States and brought enslaved workers, using legal loopholes like indentured servitude to bypass Mexican restrictions against slavery. They feared Mexico would abolish the practice entirely". And then, famously, of course, fighting to remain independent during the Civil War.
Your point is valid, but it is worth noting that the panhandle territory was a notoriously inhospitable place to try and exist (for European settlers at least, who called it "no mans land"), so it wasn't like Texas was giving up a gem, none of the surrounding states wanted it.
Isn’t that part of the llano estacado? The Comanche lived there just fine.
Texas ceded said land to another state, what they viewed as another nation, such that they could keep the practice of human ownership alive and well. The quality of the land is immaterial to this statement, let alone noteworthy
Director Lumpkin should be criminally responsible for these conditions and deaths he has been indifferent to.
Such an appropriate-sounding name he has.
"TDCJ has acknowledged that at least 23 people died from heat-related causes in its facilities between 1998 and 2012 — a likely underestimate, Pitman wrote in his order last year. Inmate advocates say at least 10 additional deaths between 2022 and 2025 can be attributed to the high temperatures, including three people whose autopsy reports reference heat as a possible contributing factor."
(from OP)
Meanwhile in Europe tens of thousands are dying: https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-do-tens-of-thousa...
"European A/C regulations have been ruled cruel and unusual punishment by US district judge"
Nobody in Europe is being forbidden access to heat mitigation with force. Spare us this obvious conservative propaganda.
Not entirely sure what European A/C regulations you’re referring to. Europe doesn’t have A/C because historically it’s not been needed, and when you have cities that are hundreds of years old, often filled with buildings that are designed to passively keep cool, it’s a right pain in the arse to retrofit everything.
As a result Europe doesn’t culturally expect A/C every where, and has been slow to adopt it. But obviously climate change is forcing many to reconsider those cultural norms.
They're trolling, and doing a poor job of it. Downvote, flag, or ignore. Don't feed them.
The only truly endless resource is man's inhumanity to his fellow man.
The US needs to get over this whole ‘punishment’ view of prison. It either a social-safety quarantine, or a rehabilitation
It's punishment. Any society that thinks otherwise is going to have to relearn the hard way.
Being incarcerated and having very little control over every aspect of your life IS punishment. The violence, sexual violence and extreme conditions are not necessary.
No it shouldn't.
It should be the understanding of a society that no human being is just 'bad'. A human being became 'bad' by a definiton of a society due to circumstances like upbringing, environment etc. and a society which failed you.
Prison is the removal of you from society due to impatibility of current values and should help you become 'better'.
Be happy that you had good/avg parents, the mental strength to help yourself, money, luck, body strength, whatever it was which allowed you to comment on HN instead of being in a prison.
It's always someone else's fault.
Its a brain, a brain which gets teached how to act and behave.
Some learn how to think critical, some don't. Some are intelligent, some are empathic, some don't understand the world very well.
Don't simplify this by a snarky and ignorant comment.
I'm not even against moving people out of our society, its fucked up enough that this is necessayr, but i'm against cruelty and i'm for helping.
I don't need a degree in sociology to want the dude who broke into my car removed from society.
If he finds the experience improving, so much the better, but it is not my primary concern.
Yeah feel free to continue thinking that simple and be ignorant.
Its easier eh?
But lets be clear, you will be on the reciving side or have been already anyway.
Or if never, you speak from a point of privilige...
Meanwhile in this thread, everyone is getting worked up about how evil Texas Christians supposedly are, as though a red flag was waved in front of a bull.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
And?
My comment is independent form the others.
Well, letting the humanist rehabilitation part aside, there is that social aspect of a sanctioning instance to prisons. Expectations of sanctions do drive human behavior.
I'm not against the idea of the society taking control over the life of one of its own (lets be fair, our planet is small, we are too interconnected) we can't just put people somewere else.
But cruelty shouldn't be part of this. Help and rehabiliation
No, it's social safety quarantine. If you just want to punish someone, there are much cheaper and more effective ways (e.g. caning)
No. It's resocialization. > Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%. The U.S. has one of the highest: 76.6% https://harvardpolitics.com/recidivism-american-progress/
And as you probably know, prisons in those two countries are not alike.
Prison is punitive by design.
If it was better than the conditions they endured on the outside people would enticed to commit crimes.
Just out of college I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I took a job at a prison near Phoenix AZ. It was outdoors, the cells had no AC. In a 10 hour shift in 115 (46c) degree weather I would go through 1.5 gallons (5.6 liters) of water. Every single day at least one inmate would pass out from the heat. At least they got heat for the winter.
Thankfully I left all that behind a long time ago. Though I just checked and they still don’t have AC.
There is a fairly famous quote: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Was it a privately owned prison? How much freedom do private prisons have to turn opaque for inspectors?
Arizona was thinly populated before A/C.
This feels like a non sequitur?
I think the point they’re making is that it’s unliveable in Arizona without AC.
May we teach our children the only thing that truly matters is how we regard the dignity of people.
I find most successful Americans I meet are so self-obsessed they are left with an incredibly low capacity for empathy for those in lower classes than them. Wild how they think they are so different than Nazis.
[delayed]