Former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin has been stabbed by another inmate at a federal prison in Arizona where he's serving time for the murder of George Floyd.
I don't feel bad for the guy, but I don't celebrate this sort of vigilante justice, either. Prisoners should be safe from other prisoners. Prison is not meant to be torture, and recidivism is a massive problem in the United States. Chauvin will have 20 years to contemplate his crimes, and treating him and every other prisoner will only reinforce their criminal proclivities.
yup. And there is a reason why laws are written to disproportionately affect certain groups- like how crack cocaine gets more jail time than powder, or marijuana convictions...
Loopholes are things intentionally built into structures with the purpose of allowing something through. I find it weird so many people think loopholes aren't something intentional.
I'm having a lot of trouble finding a source that backs up this position. Everything I'm reading says that loopholes are typically oversights, not intentional inclusions.
That being said, the 13th amendment's allowance for prisoner slavery is not a loophole at all, it's an explicit allowance. Loopholes are not explicit, that's kinda the whole point of them. It's a bit like saying that the standard deduction on your taxes is a loophole. It's just an explicitly defined feature.
While that, in fact, does happen, when a large portion of loopholes benefit corporations are written by people employed, or otherwise invested in, those corporations you would have to be lying to yourself, or ignorant of the situation, to believe loopholes are generally unintended.
The above is one example of how this is done. Bills are written to model what the industry wants to get out of legislation. Then they use LLMs to construct legislation after being trained on those models. They then collude to push these bills to as many places as possible, greasing palms the whole way. Sometimes these are just out-right legislation for the purposes of enriching the industry, more often though they are bills written with carefully designed language to allow for specific technicalities, or for stipulations of compliance to be so vague as to be unenforceable, or to use a bunch of jargon and complex linguistics to make a law read one way to the laymen, but another to the professionals that will actually be interacting with these laws.
FWIW the vast majority of prisons in the US are not corporate run (>90%), but those majority government-run prisons still provide a lot of free/cheap manufacturing labor to private companies.
The government itself is to blame, not just private prisons.
i think you’re responding to a normative statement by making a descriptive statement.
for those unaware, here’s a quick explanation from wikipedia: a normative statement is “meant to talk about the world as it should be”, while a descriptive statement is “meant to describe the world as it is”.
i wasn’t trying to talk about grammar at all, i was only trying to focus only on the meaning of what was said. but i probably could’ve made my point more clearly, so ill try to do that now.
here’s an “example”: one person says “things should be done this way” and the other person says “well things aren’t being done that way”. these two statements aren’t in opposition to each other. in fact, it’s perfectly possible both people agree with each other. maybe things aren’t being done a certain way, and they should be done differently.
the terms “normative” and “descriptive” might seem overly complicated to someone who hasn’t seen them before (they did the first time i saw them), but i thought i’d use them because they’re useful concepts to keep in mind. they’ve helped me communicate and resolve conflicts in my own life. i’ve been both people in the example above, and it’s helpful to be able to know when it’s happening.
The idea of "not killing" and "I wish he was dead" can't seem live in most people's head. I think he's human waste, he should be dead, and I wouldn't have lamented his death. BUT!!! I don't want him to die and I don't want someone to kill him.
Yes, our prisons should be safe for those who are confined within them. I agree with that, and that less people should be confined in the first place.
But there is a qualitative difference between "he was stabbed due to being a cop (or due to being THAT cop)" vs "He got into an altercation that resulted in him being stabbed, but which could have happened to anyone."
I think the kneejerk assumption is that he was targeted, which is worse IMO.
Not that I shed a single tear for the fate of Derek Chauvin, mind you.
Would you rather be in an unsafe environment where you are taking the same risks as anyone else by being there, or an unsafe environment where you are likely to be specifically and personally targeted for being you?