- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
In an interview published Friday by New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR), US navy veteran Jason Riddle said: “It’s almost like [Trump] was trying to say it didn’t happen. And it happened. I did those things, and they weren’t pardonable.
“I don’t want the pardon. And I … reject the pardon.”
Riddle entered the US Senate parliamentarian’s office, drank a bottle of wine, stole a book and inflicted damage at the Capitol when Trump supporters attacked the building on 6 January 2021 in a desperate attempt to the then president in office after he lost the presidency to Joe Biden weeks earlier, according to court documents. He received a 90-day prison sentence and was fined $750 in April 2022 for pleading guilty to committing misdemeanors in an attack that was linked to several deaths, including officer suicides.
To me, the idea of prison being resorts, for someone who has done something so wrong, it’s kind of strange to me. The idea that someone can do something so wrong and end up at a resort, yet there are people who work so hard every single day at their jobs, they can’t afford a sick day, they can’t afford a day off, they can’t afford a vacation, a resort is an unknown thing to them. Hell, some of those people even have to work a second job just to barely pay the bills.
It’s really interesting to think about, and quite fucked up unfortunately.
Maybe the answer isnt that the prison conditions should be worse, but that law abiding citizens shouldn’t have to scrape and struggle to barely get by.
All of this.
America’s warped view of what prison should be hasn’t changed from its British foundations, and they’re filled with mostly poor people who’re often used as chattle for corporations.
Thing is, on the outside they are probably also just poor people used as chattel for corporations.
Until we fix that, making prisons resorts will only lead to more people committing crimes in order to escape their “free” lives.
This is because of how horrible our living/working conditions in the US are, but also because of what we think of when we think of prison. We think of the place we would send a hardened criminal to, not a place where we send people who get arrested for drug or alcohol use related crimes - a place that is essentially a rehab facility.
People who go to jail in the US are much more likely to commit worse crimes when they get out, for a variety of factors, including how difficult it is to get a job with a criminal record, but also because of the conditions of living in prison. All of those people who get sent to a federal penitentiary for smoking weed, or arrested for being homeless, are likely to have become the hardened criminals we think of while they were in there.
I understand what you’re saying, but you are still implicitly agreeing with the idea hardened criminals should be treated more harshly. If your goal is rehabilitation and not punishment, this is the wrong mentality.
I didn’t mean that as my personal mindset, but that of our American culture. When I said “hardened criminals,” I was using the cultural sense of the phrase that refers to those guilty of more serious crimes and repeat offenders, nothing more.
The vast majority of people in prison are there for stupid reasons, and most would never be there in the first place if there were better social safety nets and support programs in the first place. And of those who do end up in prison, everybody would be far better served by rehabilitation programs than punishment for the sake of punishment. That serves no purpose other than to be cruel.
There are, of course, those very few people who are better off locked away from the general populace, like CEOs. But even then, the point is to prevent them from doing harm, not inflicting pain and misery on them.
The American prison system is good at 2 things: creating profit off of slave labor and creating repeat offenders who are likely to turn to things like theft, drugs, or dangerous forms of sex work (prostitution, becoming human trafficking victims, etc.) out of desperation after they get out.