That is true, but it isn’t the dividing line. RLUIPA, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act protects the religious rights of incarcerated people to engage in their religious practice unless their is a compelling reason to reject it. The shaman alleges that organic foods are central to his religious practice. It’s the same law that allows Muslim prisoners to pray and Jewish prisoners to keep kosher. The prisons usually keep incredibly tight tabs on it, so once he buys something that violates it from the commissary, they will yank the exception.
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I’m not against prison work /per se/, just against the conditions it’s under now. If prisoners wanted to work and it was uncoerced (I think ‘locked in a tiny room for 23 hours a day or work’ is pretty coerced), and they actually got a decent pay (at the very LEAST the minimum wage in their area), and abusive practices like making inmates pay for the cost of incarceration or forcing them to buy phone service and music from outfits with scandalously gougey prices (so they weren’t just being used as a pipeline from capital to capital) it would be great.
There was at one point a time in the US, before they started filling prisons up with people who should never be there at all, and manufacturing violent crime through the War on Drugs, where an inmate who wasn’t a serious risk could get schooling and career training.
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If a prison’s goal isn’t the rehabilitation and reintegration of people into society, then it is simply a factory for manufacturing suffering, for the purpose of having more suffering in the world.
Life After Hate and similar make it pretty obvious that some people that one might be tempted to think of as despicable and irredeemable can, in fact, gain a better perspective on the world and turn their lives around. There’s no reason to think of ‘got radicalized’ as a magical one-way street that people can’t come back from.
If attempts to rehabilitate someone do not, in fact, work out, so it’s dangerous to give them access to the outside, we at least have a duty to keep them in reasonably good conditions with whatever freedoms are compatible with other people’s safety.
Also, economically, keeping geriatric prisoners is a farce. With some exceptions, perhaps aging mob bosses whose criminal activities are more strategic, criminals over a certain age aren’t particularly violent and keeping them locked up is just a pointless expense.
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Should all prisoners be treated the same? I doubt it. Those serving limited terms, who may indeed be re-integrated into society, are not the subject here – the Marathon Bomber is. Why should we grant any respect to objectively dangerous individuals? Fuck their religious beliefs – if my religion drives me to mass murder, should I get ballcaps and vegan meals?
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It’s a state of mind. If the system endorses abitary and cruel behaviour, then the system is requiring guards to be arbitrary and cruel, which is going to generate some mental health issues.
Apart from anything else, that probably makes it contrary to OSHA regulations.
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Depends on the circumstances but quite likely.
Allowing him to purchase the hat at the prison commissary and then the guards confiscating it without good cause is absolutely feeding an unhealthy “this is a person I can choose to hurt with no repercussions” behavior in the guards.
The question is why did they confiscate it? Because they could and didn’t like him? To punish him for some real or imagined infraction? Or was he violating the hat rules somehow? Are there hat rules like you can’t wear hats in certain places or you can’t wear hats with the brim forward so the cameras can’t see your face? I don’t know but generally indulging people’s power trips is not healthy for them or the victim.
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He has a sink in his room. For everyone worried about access to the showers: have you never had to resort to the “bird bath” method? It’s really not bad, and you can get clean. Seriously, one doesn’t need to stand under a flowing stream in order to get clean. We are used to the luxury.
I’m all for humane treatment, but the shower thing seems a little overblown given the amenities in the cell.
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Do we know if a guard took it upon themself to confiscate the hat, or did an order come down from up the line? If a warden issued such an order, who is subhuman?
Nope. I smell horrible and am oily af after waking up. I need a daily shower
First, the idea of ‘life sentences’ in itself is rather suspect, as I mentioned with the issue of geriatric prisoners.
Second, you’re assuming he will remain ‘objectively dangerous’ for the rest of his life with no possibility of being less dangerous. This is doubtful.
Third, unless you’ve figured out how to murder people with vegetarian meals and ball caps, yes. Being objectively dangerous only justifies activities to limit danger, not sticking random punishments on them because they’re Extra Bad.
For that matter someone who’s going to be imprisoned for the majority of their life likely has the biggest claim to education, recreation, and socialization that can be provided without letting them endanger people.
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He should get the same treatment that Anders Breivik gets. Nothing less (and hopefully not much more)
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He certainly deserves his penalty, does not get a do-over, and is suffering the consequences of his unfortunate decision. But I can’t blame him for wanting to fight for the right to where a hat. Incidentally, my uncle of Irish heritage is a retired prison librarian for the Federal prison system in Canyon City and lives part-time in a house up in the nearby mountains he built himself with his own hands. We had a family reunion there several years ago. It’s a really quiet place, of course, unless you want to go whitewater rafting.
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He may have not been the “mastermind”, but his actions maimed and killed people. And he whines about having a hat.
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As noted by others, they shouldn’t sell stuff in the store if convicts aren’t allowed to have it. That’s just silly.
Meanwhile, with 350,000 dead people, it’s appalling to think that Boston mass murderer’s body count pales in comparison, so, I hope they will take a certain person’s red hat away when he is hopefully convicted and that they won’t sell red hats in the commissary.
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We should not design our entire prison system around edge cases. The vast, VAST majority of people incarcerated are not violent, nonredeemable offenders.
But even those who are deserve humane treatment, because we ALL deserve humane treatment. Being brutal to them because of the crime they committed does nothing to fix the general problem of violent crimes and in fact often ends up exacerbating these issues in society.
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(Tangental thoughts in comment form deleted)
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