Summations Only

Hundreds of OWS people have been or will be arrested. It is instructive to consider how they will be treated by the police.If past experience is any guide, they will be systematically humiliated and taunted. They will be subjected to strip searches by hostile guards and matrons. If they are especially defiant, verbally or otherwise, they will be subjected to cavity searches. If they are eloquent in their defiance, they will be threatened with sexual violence at the hands of the general jail or prison population.In the same way that our shameful prison system produces harder, meaner, unemployable and more alienated alumni, the protesters will find their arrest and incarceration a life-changing event. It will impact their lives in a myriad of ways: employability, insurance rates, lasting emotional and psychological trauma, and--perhaps--their will to resist a morally bankrupt and economically bankrupting society.

I was referring to another video where the police had actual strobe lights that were reportedly used for the sole purpose to blind the cameras and hide their actions.

For anyone whose knee jerk reaction is to say that this is not slavery, let me note that the 13th Amendment specifically allows enslaving people as punishment for crimes. This is in fact, constitutionally allowed, legal, slavery. I'm sure that makes the practice more palatable in some circles.

I think you have to be a little bit cautious about waving that graph around as some sort of gotcha. There's a whole heap of problems with it.Firstly, the collection of measurements used to create the quality of life index are somewhat arbitrary. You have in there 'trust', which is a bit vague. Does this mean how people respond to a 'Do you trust the government' question? And, if so, is this really a significant measure of qualifty of life? There's no measure of morbidity or quality-adjusted years of life, which I think most people would consider a increibly significant indicator of quality of life. Teenage births are counted, which might not at all be any reflection of quality of life, depending on the social environment and resources provided to teenage mothers.Aside from the arbitrary nature of categories, we don't have any idea from this graph how they were weighted. If the US is a big outlier in one category (as I believe it is for teenage births), then a significant change in the weighting of that one factor could dramatically effect the whole measurement, which makes this cobbled together collection of measurements even more arbitrary and much less informative.Then there's the further question of whether all the statistics gathered are directly comparable from country to country. It's often pointed out that the US counts stillborns in their life expectancy statistics, whilst most European countries don't, which makes life expectancy and infant mortality figures for the US look worse than they really are. Comparing figures on mental illness is also very difficult, since this may be telling you far more about diagnosis practices and social awareness of mental issues than it is about the actual mental health of a population. The Japanese may have bette rmental health than Americans, or they may associate greater stigma with visiting a psychiatrist than an American and thus never be diagnosed with any problems.Now, it may be that we could adjust the weightings to a figure I've agreed with, correct all the problems with inaccurate data comparisons through some godlike knowledge and include the measurements that I would consider most significant and see that the correlation holds exactly. But we can't know that from this graph. I don't think this graph contains enough information for us to consider that it tells us anything at all.

This is one of our prisons, now i cant find the pictures from the inside but its not a bad place to live and on the plus side everything is free, the rooms, the tvs, the food, ....So i kinda am in favor of "enslaving" prisoners for punishment cause this clearly is not a punishment.Im not saying we should use them as miners or gladiators, .... Just give them something to do like cleaning up parks, building roads, .... make them actually pay their debt to society, not accumulate new ones.

Thanks for the picture frako, but all it tells us about the Slovenian prison system is that prisons are buildings. I'm not sure how it's supposed to make the case that things are too soft.And removal of freedom is a punishment. You lose years of your life, during which you can't associate with who you like, can't go where you like, you lose any job you had, you can't make more income, and you are watched all the time, you have to live every night in a room that can be as small as 9 meters-squared and which, at least in some Slovenian prisons, is open bars so the guards can keep their eye on you.Maybe if you're homeless and destitute you might be happy to sacrifice freedom, privacy and independence for square meals and a roof a over your head, but for anyone else I don't see how you cannot consider prison punishment.

Well Firstly u can only loose 40 years of your life used to be 30 the max punishment the law would allow, even though i usually laugh when i hear an US criminal got 5 consecutive life sentences but i kinda agree with that system.Secondly for good behavior you can get the weekend off and go home lol crazy but true.thirdly you actually get an income from the state around 100 EUR per month i know its nothing but still accumulating more debt to societyTo me it looks like a free hotel, sure you cant go out when you like but you got allot of indoor activities like fitness, tv, computers .....p.s. the only picture of the inside i could find.but i do have some of the womens prison U can work here if you want and get payed for it Inside playground for basketball .... cant see verry well Edited by frako, : No reason given.Edited by frako, : No reason given.Edited by frako, : No reason given.

40 years is not a trifling time period. If you're any older than mid-twenties when you went in, you be at retirement age when you came out if you served your full sentence. 40 years is more than half of the life-expectancy at birth in Slovenia. It's not strange - most countries in Europe have some kind of day release system. And this depends on your sentence. If you're serving in a closed prison then no, you can't, and this is where the more serious and violent offenders would be. This I didn't know, and it seems somewhat unnessecary, since your basic needs are catered for. Is the cost of food and the like deducted from this 100 Euros? Hotels don't have the little windows on the doors, and they let you come and go as you please.Also, from your picture we have no way of knowing what level of security this ward is. Are these holding cells for remand prisoners (ie. people who still haven't been convicted of any crime)? Is it an open prison, where people serving short sentences for minor crimes would be held? Is it really necessary to hold such people in a dank, rat-infested pit?

My previous post was sent before you added all the pictures of the women's prison. It seems unfair to only show the pictures you find of the lowest security prisons for the least violent offenders, so I'm trying to balance it with some photos of Dob prison. They're hard to find, though, since 'dob' is such a stupid word. They have a basketball court too - the horror!Sadly, this is the best picture I can find of the inside of a cell:

yea well dob has 3 programs, closed, half closed and open program and it is the biggest and i also think the oldest prison in Slovenia, that prison also held Metod Trobec our verry own serial killer he used to rape then murder then burn the remains of women he was the last person to get a life sentance that was then reduced to 20 years because he was lacking a few wheels in his head.I addmint its the worst prison in Slovenia but still it holds 300 people the newer ones are way fancier but hold less people. The newest in koper holds 110 people the one that has the picture from outside.and they still get weekends off for good behaveyur When you send a child to his room for bad behaviur do you let him keep his pc, video games, tv ... privileges or do you take them away. The people in prison are there because they done things wrong so they should not get to use entertainment facilities, no basketball, no football (soccer) no pc, and no tv.

No its basically cigarette money We kinda have a fucked up system,you only get to wait for your court conviction in prison if a judge says so (flight risk) and you only wait for 6 months after that the judge can make you wait for a noter 6 months after that you wait at home, this happens rarely if a person has already fled once or is not a citizen of Slovenia, at most what happens is that you have to post bail which is usually something the person can manage and this also happens rarely. Normally you are a free man until the sentence is passed as long as you keep your court dates and everything else in order and if you are leaving the country you have to notify the court system, they can decline though and take away your passport.So if you have a few euros to spend and your crime is not that grate, you can basically use the system for the crime to "expire", like getting a doctors note that you are to sick to attend court, or getting your lawyer to write appeals constantly to shift your court date pass the expiration date and you dont get a sentence at all.

There is a world of difference between being sent to a room for a few hours, and being locked in a building with other criminals for years at a time. Do you really want prisons to be a place where criminals have to make their own entertainment? That seems like a recipe for disaster.Either way, since prison reform is not high on the agenda of Occupy Wall Street (other than perhaps stopping them being run for profit as hinted at earlier), maybe this is a good item to extract out of this thread into a new thread?

There is also a difference between taking a cookie from a cookie jar and robbing a bank and the bank robbers get tv privileges. They should have no entertainment at all not organized by them or the prison. They should eat sleap and work for the duration of their sentence, not Lay arround eat sleap watch tv play basketball, go in to a fitness room, go on the net, play stuff on the pc ..... To me it seems like a recipe for not ever going to prison again Your right if someone makes one ill participate

Which is why I also provided a link to the talk itself.But I would definitely say trust is a quality of life issue and that it is really horrible in the US.We cannot trust news, we cannot trust politicians, we cannot trust clergy, we cannot trust teachers, we cannot trust doctors, we cannot trust law enforcement, we cannot trust the governments.If that is not a quality of life issue then what is?

Yea the whole non bias thing goes down the drain when you have to report about someone that sighns your check or your bosses check. Well no one can trust politicians there is no honest politician in the world. Who would trust a person who reads bedtime stories as truth, i mean you have to be some kind of an idiot Why? I trust teachers Well i dont like doctors but if my life was at stake id trust them. Well duh who would trust a person who was handed a gun cause he could not find a noter job. Well you can trust them to do one thing make their own lives better not minding the cost to others. It is but to change it the whole system needs to be changed preferably getting rid of any government and politician and enstating a true democratic rule of referendums
"should we do this? Well let everybody vote."But the main issue would still stand 99% have shit and 1% has everything else.