News Go to jail, do not collect £200

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/03/21/video_games_jail/

 

Fair do's I say, LOL @ the PS2 situation.

If I ever went to prison for any stretch of time (god forbid) I'd rather have one of these than nothing

 

Nope. Shouldn't be allowed. You're going to prison to be punished, and by commiting the crime in the first place you are giving up your every day rights to work for money etc. So in prison, those rights shouldn't be in place, otherwise there is no difference to prison and the outside world.

 

Exactly:

"In an attempt to curb violence in prisons, inmates are being offered the chance to be thoroughly beaten should they step out of line."

Fixed

 

You know those rights they read you when you get arrested. The Miranda rights. Those are the only rights you have after you have been arrested. That includes prison time. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Aside from the violence that erupts from time to time and aside from the boyfriends named bubba prison doesn't seem like that bad of a place to me. They get to watch TV. They have all of their meals taken care of. They don't have to pay rent. We, the taxpayers, are paying for them to be comfortable after they have committed crimes against society. They should not be allowed societal rights once incarcerated. Basic human rights yes. Food, clothing, a bed and a toilet. After that, I feel they have no rights. Especially not rights to play games. Prison isn't supposed to be about having a good time. They are there to be "rehabilitated" for possible rentry to society. They are there to be punshished for their crimes. All we are doing is showing them that prison isn't such a bad place and it removes the threat as a deterrance.

 

Well call me old fashioned but I am of the school of thought where prisoners should be bashing rocks or chained to the wall.

 

isnt prison supposed to be a punishment? If they le me play WOW, it wouldnt be to bad....

 

Have any of you been to prison? (I haven't) I think you underestimate, how bad having your right to freedom removed is. Imagine never being able to go out when you want, no freedom to leave those four walls. This should be the punishment, the further past this line you go, i.e. forced labour, boredum enducement. The more you fester hatred, and diminish rehabilitation. Remember these consoles are only given as a reward, its not a blanket scheme. Id be interseted in seeing research into this sorta things effect, but i definately think its a positive on the surface

 

roffle!

 

I guess that would make me of the "Fire and brimstone" group. I believe prisoners should be chained to the wall while being bashed with rocks.

I've been to prison, as a "spectator" during a high school class years ago. Rikers Island. Also, one of my next door neighbors was a guard qith 17 years experience at the Island. From everything I saw and later heard these were not men. They were animals.

Rapists, murderers, drug peddlers, gang-bangers.....

As far as I am concerned these are not crimes so much as they are lifestyles and it's all but impossible to rehabilitate a lifestyle.

[/political rant]

Now, what I would do is make the game mandatory. And only have it play GTA. Only difference here would be to have the gamers hooked up to an Electro-Shock Therapy device such that everytime they killed an innocent or a cop they received a mild shock which ramped up in intensity and frequency with every successive kill.

It's called Pavlovian conditioning and it just might work!

 

i'm with wasabi on this one

 

And why are we giving them a toilet? whats wrong with a bucket?

 

No, prison is more for rehabilitation that punishment. If you make a prisoner break rocks, he leaves a criminal with great skills in hitting things with big hammers. Teach him to behave well and he leaves as a better person than he was when he went in. All treating people badly teaches people is how to do the same for others.

I think this is a great idea!

 

I expected a little more insight from you guys, the percentage of murderers/rapists in prison, must be in the single figures of a percent, if not decimal percentages.. These are solutions for your local thugs/theifs with a bad childhood, get some perspective

 

Well, would you rather prisoners come out of prison rehabilitated, fit for society?

Or have prison be such a horrible deterrent that they never commit a crime in the first place?

 

This is how prisons need to be run:

Rest of the story here.

 

What's with all the prison-bashers? Yes, there are some awful people in jail. Guess what: there are some pretty good people in jail too. What if you go to jail for the 5,000 illegally downloaded songs I know you have on your computer, in a directory aptly named "Downloaded" or the like? Would you like to be chained up to a wall and beaten?

People make mistakes. So many past studies have shown that prisoners can be rehabilitated much more successfully if their psyche is in a good place to begin with. This starts by rewarding them for good behavior, as this sets the foundation for "good behavior = good outcome".

And from the last 3 years I've taken of psychology courses, cptwasabi, I can assuredly state that electric shock after a behavior has absolutely nothing to do with Pavlovian training. Pavlov's studies have to do with precondition training, meaning the signal comes before the reward, and the reaction is largely subconscious and involuntary. Maybe you ought to read up before you go around spouting off BS.

Also, for the record, it's nowhere near impossible to rehabilitate a lifestyle. Ever heard of a rehabilitated sex offender? Google up on it, then come back and make a more intelligible second post.

 

Not even execution was enough of a deterrant to stop people comitting crimes, so I don't think chaining someone to a wall would be of much help.

Most people in prison aren't there because they're evil, they're there because they never learned how to be good. That is what prison is for.

 

All criminals are the same to me in that they knowingly break the law. That's the only criteria I have. It may be draconian but it's how I feel about it. There are no "white crimes". Breaking the law is breaking the law. As for the example of the stolen music, I have yet to hear a single argument for the willfull theft of intellectual property that rings true.

You must be a liberal as only a liberal would even think of calling a violation of the law a "mistake".

"Opps! My illegally owned gun just happened to go off and kill 2 and injure 3 innocent people. Whoopsie!!!"

And I have no idea what studies you are talking about but prison stopped being a place of rehabilitation about....oh....30 years ago or so.

Well, maybe you should go get a refund for those three years cause you ain't learned crap.

Pavlovian conditioning (aks Classical conditioning) revolved around the pairing of stimuli and is an associative learning process. By pairing these two stimuli a desired response is obtained and ingrained. Aversion therapy is a form of classical conditioning and one use of aversion therapy is electro shock therapy in which the unwanted personality trait (in this case killing a cop or civilian) is assocaited with the unpleasant electrical shock. If the conditioning takes then everytime the convicted thug gets the urge to kill again he remembers the shocks.

Seriously, ask your school for a refund.

Now I know you're just an illerate fool.

Did I say it was impossible? No, I said it was "all but impossible" which means that it's hard, tough, difficult, etc. but not impossible. In other words it's "every adjective one can think of to describe extreme difficulty but it's not impossible."

Seems like your schooling has failed on reading comprehension as well.

Now, that said, care to take a stab at the recidivism rate for sexual offenders? For familial incest and rape I have seen figures around 15% but for extrafamilial sex offenders I have seen 50% recidivism rates.

I'm all for the free expression of ideas but don't dare step to me like you know everything when you obviously don't have a clue.

 

The death penatly was never meant to be a deterrant and any who says otherwise is lying to you.

The DP was always meant to be the ultimate punishment for those crimes so despicable that by their very action it was obvious that rehabilitation was not even possible.

As for this whole "not learning to be good" thing I strongly disagree.

Humans, as most animals, are negative feedback creatures whcih means that we learn by our mistakes. Touch a candle, you get burned and you learn not to touch flame again. This is reflected in the fact that we have a criminal code and not a Good Samaritan code.

Our legal code tells us what we cannot do, not what we can or should do. If we were suppose to learn how to be good our legal system would tell us how to be good. Instead, our legal system just states those things which we should not do.

Criminals are in prison becuase they made the concious choice to violate the law and do something that they were not supposed to do. I can't think of that last time I ever heard someone say "But I didn't know that was the law" and even if they did try that crap, ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.

As far as I am concerned, as far as my experiences have shown me, there is little to no rehabilitation in jail. At least here in NY. Hell,, most street thugs up here consider it a badge of honor. Wanna take a look at how many people in our prison system here keep coming and going?

It's becuase prison is too easy for these scum. Break their sprits, make them never want to go back to that horrid place.

That be my motto!