No blue screen of death. Winner winner chicken dinner!

Gotcha beat, I had a Vic20 then upgraded to a C64!

Reminds me of something my mom did a few weeks ago. She got a scam call from some guy saying he was with Microsoft and he detected a virus on her computer. (First clue it was a scam? They have an iMac. Why would Microsoft be calling?)

But, hey... It’s virus free and does not need anti-virus, firewalls and constant update of any of that shit.

don’t forget about Quantum Leap

In the United States, your rights are immutable. The Constitution applies just as much to Charles Manson and Ted Kazinsky as it does to you and me. Dangerous criminals need to be kept apart from society, but they are still American citizens and deserve fair (albeit confined) treatment as such.

Why? People not in prison do not have any of those things given to them for free. Why should law abiding citizens, 50% of whom live paycheck to paycheck and are in debt over their head, pay for any of that?

Dehumanizing those people will certainly teach them not to dehumanize.

But why? What purpose does it serve? Revenge, yes. And if that’s all you care about then I guess we have no point of agreement from which to argue.

I think there’s a lot of room between ‘exact same rights as citizens’ and dehumanized non-citizens being held within the U.S. Sure, we restrict rights for people who break crimes. We also restrict rights for children and the mentally ill or unfit. Restricting rights for punitive purposes makes sense but treating…

If prisoners have the exact same rights as citizens, then why are we wasting money keeping them in prison in the first place?

Guilty of what exactly?

No, that is not at all true. You are still a citizen if you are incarcerated. You still have rights. Inmates are not to be treated like animals. You want someone locked up for, say, dealing drugs, to be tortured and to devolve psychologically for five years and then be let out to live among you? That makes no sense.

We still should not dehumanize criminals, most of whom are expected to rejoin society at some point.

Whatever crime they committed, the overwhelming majority will re-enter society some day. Do you think emphasizing punishment via dehumanization is what will turn prisoners into productive citizens ready to contribute to society and avoid victimizing again? Or does reintegration into society take a back seat to…

That’s a very shortsighted view. Most prisoners are eventually released and it would be infinitely better to have rehabilitated ex-cons rather than career criminals in our midst.

If the goal of prison is simply to punish people as harshly as possible than we are doing a bang-up job.

How much better could our society be if we treated prisoners not only like human beings but actually like citizens? We expect them to serve their time and then rejoin society, but we completely dehumanize them the entire time they’re in prison. What purpose does that serve?

Yes. How “strange” that a black man, when confronted by a cop, would put his hands in the air. It couldn’t possibly be that he wanted to preemptively signal that he was unarmed, given that so many other black person-cop interactions turn deadly without provocation.

I’m doing fine for myself. :)