> Finding their jailhouse diet bland, monotonous, and insubstantial, inmates in the California penal system invent alternative meals. “Spread,” the generic term for these creations, describes the inmate-created foods most often built around a single ingredient, instant ramen noodles. Beginning with this noodle base, the inmates concoct variations that approximate their favorite foods on the outside, often those with distinctive flavorings and textures.
On the east coast inmates call these Chichis. Ramen is the base ingredient but they add whatever they can buy off the commissary carts. Chichis are really bad for the inmates with hypertension.
Pretty sad that we treat caged animals better than people. And just like abusing a dog doesn't fix behavioral problems, prisons that punish without rehabilitation don't change people's ways.
Look up factory farming. Zoo animals live in luxury compared to most farm animals. So no, we don't really treat caged animals better than humans. (Both situations are despicable, though.)
Perhaps prisons should consider serving Ramen noodles for some of their meals?
It's hard to imagine anything else is cheaper than dried noodles, especially when purchased in the sort of bulk quantities that prisons would buy. We're talking a few cents per meal.
They're easy to prepare and like the article says: "cheap, tasty, and rich in calories".
Making non-instant ramen is pretty easy though, especially if you have to feed hundreds of people. It basically amounts to making an asian-spiced soup, throwing in veggies and some soup-meats (or good meat if you're feeling fancy), maybe an egg or two if you can get them on the cheap and add ramen.
It's still pretty cheap (depending on what you put in of course), and it's not that bad in terms of nutrients. But hey, it's more expensive than the "bricks 'n goo" they serve these days.
They discuss why meals are often bland and unappetizing in this article [1].
> It’s not that the authorities haven’t noticed the blandness. The food lacks strong flavoring and other distinctions by design. To appeal to the widest possible population, spices are added sparingly; even salt is omitted because of some inmates’ dietary restrictions.
However, it's also made to be nutritious and I don't think ramen would quality.
> While jail food is undeniably bland, it is nutritious, at least according to the standards followed by Title 15 regulations based on Section 6030 of the California Penal Code.
> Although the research is based on anecdotal evidence from fewer than 60 inmates and staff from one male state prison, the author points to other findings indicating that the trend toward using ramen noodles for exchanges is evident in other prisons.
I can confirm this. My wife used to work at a prison in California, and she told me about ramen being used as currency by the inmates. They would refer to ramen packets as "soups".
It sounded like the inmates got just enough calories to survive, and often supplemented their diet by purchasing additional food with whatever money was given to them by family or was earned through jobs (which paid 10 cents an hour or something ridiculous like that). Ramen is cheap, has lots of calories, and lasts a long time, making it very popular.
They also made their own alcoholic concoctions by storing fruit and various other things in their mouths and spitting it into a plastic bag, letting it ferment over time. That was referred to as "pruno". Pruno was considered contraband and would be confiscated upon discovery, so it was hidden in places like the toilet to prevent discovery. Pruno often turned out to be toxic in some manner, and sometimes made inmates very sick. It didn't stop them from making it though.
Bizarre how Americans never seem to think prisons are bad enough. As long as there are prisons worse than American ones the prisons are too good. It seems like the thinking is that if prisons don't get bland or disgusting food, then they are rewarding crime.
It was actually surprising to read that prisons in my home country Norway, which are significantly more humane are not really much more expensive than American ones. There prisoners often get to cook meals themselves. In some prisons they have their own unit with a proper kitchen. I guess part of the reason American prisons are relatively expensive despite the horrible treatment is that they spend so much money on heavy security measures. Norwegian prisons attempt to create an atmosphere that reduce the propensity for violent behavior and thus reducing the need for heavy fortifications.
What's particularly annoying to me is that they talk about prison rape as if it's a natural part of the punishment.
Growing up in Denmark, I recall an incident on the news where someone drove a bulldozer through the wall of a prison. Only a handful of prisoners actually ran. The others decided to stay inside.
They are quite happy to do things that will allow prisoners to reintegrate. For instance, a friend of the family did something quite stupid and ended up in jail. He was still allowed out on weekends to teach me how to swim. With supervision of course, but his crime was violent you wouldn't expect someone with that sentence to be let out in the US system.
The flipside of course is you get a guy like Breivik. He basically gets the maximum, but for a nutter like him it's almost not even a punishment. He's like nothing more than his own suite, a playstation, and peace and quiet to write his ideas.
> He's like nothing more than his own suite, a playstation, and peace and quiet to write his ideas.
Denying him any chance to rightfully complain about prison conditions is probably the most effective punishment you can come up with.
When the Baader-Meinhof gang was thrown into inhumane solitary confinement, it and their hunger strikes and suicides made them martyrs to their cause, spawning a new generation of terrorists that picked up their banners.
Meanwhile, Breivik complaining that his PlayStation is too old and that he can't play the newest games makes him a joke figure.
> What's particularly annoying to me is that they talk about prison rape as if it's a natural part of the punishment.
This seems to have become a standard idea in American TV shows. It's usually something along the lines of a cop threatening a suspect into cooperating..."You wouldn't want to go to jail, a pretty boy like you would be reeeal popular in there."
I've noticed it even in mainstream shows that are otherwise not particularly violent or shocking. I'm pretty sure there was even a line like this in The Simpsons once. These references seem to go unnoticed by the same people who go crazy whenever anyone jokes about female rape.
Now I'm not saying that popular culture is necessarily an accurate reflection of reality, but it's terrifying to imagine that it might be, and even more scary to think that the American public are ok with that.
> Breivik. He basically gets the maximum, but for a nutter like him it's almost not even a punishment. He's like nothing more than his own suite, a playstation, and peace and quiet to write his ideas.
There isn't a lot that can be done about him though - a more punishing regime isn't going to change him for the better. At least in his cushy little suite he is kept away from the general populous reducing the harm he can do as much as (humanely) possible.
>The flipside of course is you get a guy like Breivik
I'm sure he would still hold the same views, maybe even more so if he was made to live in Squallor. It may make people feel better, but I don't know if that is enough.
The thing is: none of us are (effectively) locked up for life so it is hard for us to judge what his experience feels like.
Also remember that people thought that what we call "white torture" today wasn't torture. Many people today, if you ask them, probably wouldn't think it is torture.
The system is set up for rehabilitation and reintegration to society. So even with Breivik, with his maximum security, they set it up so that he has a slim chance of doing so. And to be fair, his case is pretty unique as is far from the norm it seems.
I don't get your comment. So that an adult male is raped is a lesser problem than either a teenager or a female is raped. I find this conclusion quite disgusting. Also take into account that most of the incarcerated people are male, adult and poor.
>I don't get your comment. So that an adult male is raped is a lesser problem than either a teenager or a female is raped. I find this conclusion quite disgusting.
I agree: you don't get my comment.
Note how I never wrote that "an adult male [being] raped is a lesser problem than either a teenager or a female [being] raped". Note also how my comment was an argument against prison rape.
What I alluded to is that most of the people who casually joke about prison rape, would never joke about female rape or teenage rapes.
So, what I meant is that they should consider prison rape under the same light, since it also includes those things -- which is an easier sell to make them see the brutality of the situation, even those that don't particularly care about a murdered being raped, etc.
What I alluded to is that most of the people who casually joke about prison rape, would never joke about female rape or teenage rapes.
The sentiment is worded much better that way. The other wording could too easily be interpreted as implying that the rape of men is better than the rape of women and children.
With someone like Breivik, who, whether or not what he's done is ever forgivable, will nevertheless never be allowed to walk free again, what is the point of locking them up behind bars for the rest of their lives?
The death penalty can be abused, but there are some clear cases where it is the most reasonable solution. Charlie Manson has been in jail for 45 years; probably Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be kept alive for decades as well.
>The death penalty can be abused, but there are some clear cases where it is the most reasonable solution. Charlie Manson has been in jail for 45 years; probably Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be kept alive for decades as well.
And the death penalty is "the most reasonable solution" in those cases because? It's "too much" to keep people alive?
In that case, maybe don't have a system that gives life sentences with wild abandon -- e.g. for BS "3 strikes offences", etc., and has the biggest incarceration rate in the world by a wide wide wide margin.
No, because these people have done terrible things, and society will not allow them to be redeemed. Is it more cruel to put somebody in a box for decades, or put a bullet in their brain and get it over with? I know which I would prefer.
Three strikes laws are idiotic, as are most manifestations of the US criminal justice system. I object to the knee-jerk reaction that the death penalty is inherently bad, in all cases, under any circumstances, and if you don't think so too, you're a terrible, awful, probably racist bigot.
>No, because these people have done terrible things, and society will not allow them to be redeemed.
Society can do much more than we give it credit for. Not all societies hold primitive eye-for-an-eye beliefs or worse.
>I object to the knee-jerk reaction that the death penalty is inherently bad, in all cases, under any circumstances
Well, societies that abolished it don't think so. At least their legislators and majority don't. Outliers will always think whatever they want (and grieving relatives of victims and such are the last that should be asked in those matters).
For me the death penalty is not different from things like torture, slavery, judicial rape, etc. Wrong under any circumstances.
Another surprising thing about Norway prisons is that they do work. Criminals come out of prisons rehabilitated more often than not, meanwhile, in countries with harsh prison conditions, petty criminals simply become hardened criminals. That, combined with no prospect of good career, leads to the endless crime-prison loop.
Please quit branding us under one umbrella. Many of us don't like the current situation. Even those of us on the right (Libertarian) find the system appalling.
This is purely a power play and money machine of the political class (the true one percent). Prisons, if not the whole police state, are all products of the political class. It is there means to spread money to constituencies that they favor, punish those they don't like, and put away people they don't want to deal with. Oh, it also makes tons of money for local, state, and national, politicians.
The idea we put people in prison for drug use, financial improprieties, and such, never fails to depress me. Prison should be only for violent offenders. People who willingly harm others should be locked up. Then they should be prevented from harming fellow prisoners and also stopped from forming gangs/violent associations within.
However that later issue is overlooked because it feeds the cycle. Prisons make many people worse and that sends them right back to the system to make even more money.
tl;dr Prisons are profit centers of the political class.
In Europe, prisons are more focused on rehabilitation, whereas US prisons are more focused on punishment.
This can also be seen in the different sentences. Whereas in Norway (maximum sentence 21 years) or Germany (mostly out of prison after 15 years), you can be sentenced for life or even death in the US.
It obviously works out more expensive and doesn't seem really fair, but bad people must be punished!!1
> This can also be seen in the different sentences. Whereas in Norway (maximum sentence 21 years) or Germany (mostly out of prison after 15 years), you can be sentenced for life or even death in the US.
Things are not that clear cut, you can't get "hard" sentenced to life (or death) in Norway but you can be sentenced to indeterminate-length "preventive detention": the sentence can be renewed for up to 5 years at a time indefinitely.
But those sentences are extremely rare and reserved for violent psychopaths. Norway currently has 76 people serving one.
In the US, it's possible and not even that rare to end up with life sentences for things like non-violent drugs offenses and repeated petty theft (three strikes), so there are >150,000 people with actual life sentences. Plus all the people serving something like 80 years, which is notionally definite, but in practice also a life sentence.
If that's not manifestly unjust, I don't know what is. I have no idea how 3 strikes laws and mandatory minimums are constitutional in the USA, I'm no constitutional scholar (or American), but I'm fairly sure that it violates separation of powers.
Regardless, the above link is a very good reason for judicial discretion, among other reasons.
> In Europe, prisons are more focused on rehabilitation, whereas US prisons are more focused on punishment.
Not all of Europe. Here in the Netherlands we have the high security prison in Vught where there are no guards during airing time. So the guards put all kinds of nutters, murderers, and psychopaths in a big field together, lock all the gates, and stand on the other side looking. If bad happens, sorry can't do something about it, wouldn't be safe for the guards.
I'm deeply ashamed of this. We Dutch like to be so enlightened and moralistic but this sort of shit really kills it. We need to adopt the Norwegian system.
>In Europe, prisons are more focused on rehabilitation, whereas US prisons are more focused on punishment.
It's because American at its core is the place built by descendants of the religious nuts that were rightfully thrown out of Europe. As for new immigrants, they usually just adopt the prevalent national ideology...
Personally, I'm surprised and relieved that the federal government has recently decided to abandon private prison contracts.
It's a very positive and unexpected development, no doubt. But I'm disillusioned by the inevitability that public prisons will implement many of the same cost-savings with a priority over humane methods to decrease recidivism.
Most importantly, despite the federal sentencing guidelines, even many minor offenders will be incarcerated for sentences vastly exceeding your Nordic standards. Evidence shows that this is counterproductive, but it is supported by the voter, and won't likely end soon...
So we've just removed the incentive for an accused person to show up to court? Bail serves a purpose.
However the amounts of bail could be recalculated to be relevant to a specific prisoner's condition. A million dollar bail to a poor person might as well be 100 billion which is the same as no bail. That same bail to a rich person would be the equivalent to a $1000 bail to a poor person.
So bail shouldn't be eliminated but scaled appropriately to the financial situation of the prisoner.
The US is unusual in first-world countries in having this system. England&Wales releases most of its summary (US: misdemeanor) suspects without bail surety. Indictable (US: felony) offences are 40% not bailed at all but remanded, usually because these offences involve violence.
The UK system also allows another person to stand as guarantor without having to put the money up front, which means there's none of the short term loan shark business of "bail bondsmen".
Making bail a multiple of something like gross total income and remove the need for the judge to set a dollar amount should help. So basically instead of saying "Bail is set at $50000" the judge can just say "bail is set at X month income or Y% of net worth" without having to take any consideration of the accused financial situation into account . Of course you'll probably need some minimums and few other tweaks, but on the whole it feels like a better method.
Prefer the UK system, of which versions seems to work well in other countries too. The US has a strange love affair with using money to solve problems that ultimately require community involvement and social bonds to solve. Brings to mind the Hunter S. Thompson analogy that the quintessential American rôle is that of a used car salesman.
Norwegian prisons are designed to rehabilitate people and turn them into productive taxpayers.
American prisons implement an underlying revenge culture. (Or "justice" as it is called).
You can argue all you want about cost and effect, but it all boils down to a fundamentally different way of viewing human beings that have made mistakes and what society wants from them.
Complete speculation, but it probably has to do with how Americans look at the use of their tax dollars. To Americans, setting up prisons where prisoners are in suites, and can leave on weekends, it sounds nicer than the lives of some free people! All of this on the American tax dollar also. Why reward prisoners for breaking the law, so make prison terrible.
The National Institute for Justice (which is the research, development and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice) says that prison is an ineffective deterent: http://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
Not as much as you'd expect. There are plenty of studies that confirm this (I'm too lazy to google them for you). The problem is, that when crimes are done, one does not usually think rationally or does not expect to be caught (or else he wouldn't do that in first place). Another big category of crimes (especially violent ones) are the ones committed out of passion, where severity of sentence does not play significant role either.
What matters in deterrence is getting caught, more than the actual duration or intensity of the punishment.
(It's also important that people are not punished when they're not guilty, which the US tends to forget. The other side of reinforcement learning. The tendency of US police to administer adhoc punishment up to and including execution on the street is a problem. You can't say "don't commit crimes or you'll be in trouble with the police" when simply driving while black can get you in trouble with the police.)
The evidence supporting it is very weak, especially the assumption the more punishment always leads to more deterrence. The more effective deterrence in many cases is increasing the probability of getting caught, not increasing the punishment for the few that do get caught.
When even The Bloody Code[1] didn't stop people from offending, you have to question the effectiveness of future punishment as a reason to not commit a crime.
I do not think it is, no. I think the difference in deterrence between prison, and prison where you might starve is likely to be very low.
The real question is not whether rehabilitation-based prison systems give better outcomes across factors such as reoffending and reintegration into society (they do, but at a perceived higher cost), but how to transition from a punitive system to a rehabilitative system.
Norway is an 85% ethnically homogeneous country with the population of a large US city. It's totally the approach and nothing else that describes the difference between life in the two prison systems.
I can understand the scale argument when we're talking about things like railroads or internet connectivity, but how exactly does it impact this issue? The jailing system seems quite "horizontally scalable" to me.
The US is not a ethnically homogenous society like Norway is. Neither does Norway have a wide spread gang culture like the US has in African American neighbourhoods where even law abiding African Americans that want to have a normal life can't because no one is effectively policing these areas for various reasons.
These people have to put up with living in high crime areas where laws are generally not enforced, most people have no legal jobs and instead criminals and gangs set the rules for everyone.
What makes you believe that what you are doing in your culture is automatically applicable to certain US subcultures?
I can tell you from the experience we had here in Austria and Germany with Arab immigrants that our way of handling such issues does not work at all with them.
While a typical German is afraid of consequences should he get into conflict with the law and will stop and rethink what he is doing an Arab immigrant often wont.
That's because they are used to a much more cruel enforcement of laws, thus they regard our way of punishing them as a mere slap on the wrist and will continue with their behaviour.
You would be amazed if you knew how many of them got convicted 6,7,8 or even more times within the first year of arrival.
Just look at whats going on in neighbouring Sweden at the moment. Does this kind of liberal law enforcement work there?
My startup Infinite Food[0] is building a network of automated food preparation and retail service locations based upon robotics, with an initial focus on noodle soups. While we are launching in mainland China, prisons are one of the network locations that we have in mind for international expansion. In a prison context, we see a single purpose, locked-down tablet being lent to prisoners, upon which they can select, customize or create from scratch a meal from a relatively broad range of fresh ingredients, and their cooked meal would be ready to eat within a few minutes. Currently raising seed!
Hrrm, maybe. I personally wouldn't consider it spamming as it's literally a startup in the area of noodle soup, which was the subject. Thanks for the tip though!
HN users have varying views on what crosses the line into spamming. I think if your comment had done more engaging with what's intellectually interesting in the current thread, instead of sounding promotional, it would have done better. It's also likely that some HN users are sensitive to the issue of profiting from prisons.
It's fine for established HN users to bring up their projects/products in an on-topic way, as long as they don't overdo it participate on HN for more than just that.
> Finding their jailhouse diet bland, monotonous, and insubstantial, inmates in the California penal system invent alternative meals. “Spread,” the generic term for these creations, describes the inmate-created foods most often built around a single ingredient, instant ramen noodles. Beginning with this noodle base, the inmates concoct variations that approximate their favorite foods on the outside, often those with distinctive flavorings and textures.