Rare interesting Reddit content: 2x lifetime resident of CDCR bought a shitty smartphone from a guard for $800, now posts daily horror imagery of prisonslop, hornyposts on NSFW subs and has fallen in love with yugioh

The Norwegian bit you're thinking of isn't the standard prison, it's my understanding that normal prison in Norway is pretty shitty. The cabin set is for, if I recall, the best of the best as they're nearing release and have a clean prison record. It's not reflective of what virtually any Norwegian criminals go through. nvm misread lol you mean breivik

There's a huge spectrum in between American hellhole prison and luxury camping resort though. But generally speaking yeah, if you set it up right—provide programming, teach skills, medicate those who need it and obviously add guards (at a distance), and so on—then giving convicts the reins for their own quality of life and learning to create and build and provide healthily for themselves you're going to get much better results than depriving them of all aspects of their humanity for years and then kicking them back out into the streets with nothing to live for and no way of living for anything.

Clearly we have neither the space, manpower, resources, anything to do this for the entirety of our inconceivably massive incarcerated population and I'm not at all proposing this as a fix. Just that it would work in theory, provided we did have that kind of resources.

I mean, there's a difference between making prison a luxury hotel out of some recidivism theory, and making it fit for human habitation and dignity out of basic principle. I think most of us can get behind the second one.

The rabbit hole with that goes even deeper and more insane than you'd ever guess. Some institutions even give any money saved by decreasing cost or amount of food directly to the warden/COs/etc. This isn't even hush hush or anything, it's just that no one is aware of it because no one ever thinks to look into it.

Prison reform would be a universally popular concept if the face of reform wasn't the nonsensical abolition movement; every aspect of the reality is horrifying. Most people locked up aren't there for killing or raping, either, so the most common intellectually bankrupt retort from midwits ("why shouldn't murderers suffer forever?") is even more r-slurred than it seems on its face.

Nothing else more urgent though. Not anything that would prevent people from doing things that would send them to prison or save/improve the lives of people who didn't end up in prison?

I will write my thoughts on this comment later

I feel like prison reform is one of those things that no one really cares about but we all agree is probably needed. With the exception of a select sliver of people largely on the right (though also some on the left) everyone has seen how going to prison in of itself ruins entire lives. It's just such a fricked situation because of how people treat people who've gone to prison; even if we get rid of the laws disenfranchising prisoners how do we get rid of the stigma that people will treat you? And especially when some prisoners definitely deserve some level of stigma, it just muddies the waters further.

And so to an extent I understand why leftists have been letting "teens" run amuck, the penalties for imprisonment are just so high, and our legal system (when run to form) undervalues them. In California the max penalties for a misdemeanor are being fined $1k or county jail for up to a year. I would much rather be fined 50k over spending a night sentenced in jail just because of the stain it leaves, let alone jails themselves.

I don't really understand how we'd even go about fixing it. Create an intermediate place for non-violent offenders? But then it'd just get ruined in the same way correctional facilities are looked at. I also like the probation/parole system, but that doesn't fix every issue. It's just a shit situation and I'm unsure how to fix it, especially with how violent America is and how overcrowded our prisons can be.

I feel bad for not doing more, but I feel like it's a trap most people fall into with the prison system. Someone thinks about helping prisoners, but unless they have a felon fetish (re: ) they think about it a moment and realize they'd rather volunteer to save puppies or something. It's hard to gather sympathy for "criminals" being hurt, even if it's not fair. So unless you have a direct relative in the system, you usually couldn't care less.