Court To Prisoner: No Xbox 360 For You

jonklinger writes "An Israeli Court rejected the appeal of a prisoner who requested to have an Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 because there is no possibility to remove the internet connectivity apparatus from the device without harming its functionality. Therefore, prisoners cannot engage in gaming and will have to result to other kinds of violence."

Re:English, motherfarker...!

[Samantha Wright]

I have some fun but irrelevant news for you: "an" is older than "a"; the word is ultimately cognate with "one". If you go back far enough, it's the only indefinite article used. Wikipedia also talks about an hilarious process called 'juncture loss' [wikipedia.org].

Re:There is always a way

[SuricouRaven]

Because busy prisoners are peaceful prisoners. If they are gaming then they aren't planning riots, organising gangs or maintaining their drug-smuggling networks.

Re:There is always a way

[Ravon Rodriguez]

And how exactly will turning the prison system into an adult daycare promote rehabilitation? IMO, this is why the number of repeat offenders is so high. Give them high school and college courses, or let them otherwise learn a useful life skill; do anything but make prison an extended vacation for them.

Re:There is always a way

[h4rr4r]

How do you plan to use that to fill up 100% of their time? Idle hands and all that jazz.

Harsher prisons only mean harsher people when they are finally let out.

Re:Boo Friggin Hoo

[j-beda]

The PRIMARY purpose of prison is punishment and separating someone from society so they don't pose a threat; a DETERRENT from committing crimes in the future. Rehabilitation is important, but is not the primary function of a prison, despite the fact it's important. However, allowing someone to play video games does NOTHING to rehabilitate them.

Other than fulfilling your sense of "justice" (or maybe "vengeance") why do you think punishment should be the primary purpose of prison? Do you have any evidence that less pleasant jails act as a more effective deterrent than more pleasant ones?

I would think that the primary purpose of the whole police/judicial system would be to minimize the harm that "miscreants" do to society at large. Thus the primary goal of the whole system should be prevention of crime. For the individual criminal incarcerated, society's primary interest would be to minimize repeat offense, but I suppose if there was evidence that mistreatment of prisoners had significant deterrent effect I guess that would be a consideration. However the opposite seems to be the case in what studies I could easily find. See for example from 2007

http://faculty.som.yale.edu/keithchen/papers/Final_ALER07.pdf [yale.edu]

Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? A Discontinuity-based Approach
M. Keith Chen, Yale University and Cowles Foundation, and Jesse M. Shapiro, University of Chicago and NBER

We estimate the causal effect of prison conditions on recidivism rates by exploiting a discontinuity in the assignment of federal prisoners to security levels. Inmates housed in higher security levels are no less likely to recidivate than those housed in minimum security; if anything, our estimates suggest that harsher prison conditions lead to more post-release crime. Though small sample sizes limit the precision of our estimates, we argue that our findings may have important implications for prison policy, and that our methodology is likely to be applicable beyond the particular