Shamelessly nicked from a Pexxa post on the old CSB...
Prisons can restrict the rights of inmates to nerd out, a federal appeals court has found.
In an opinion issued on Monday , a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected the claims in a lawsuit challenging a ban on the game Dungeons & Dragons by the Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.
The suit was brought by a prisoner, Kevin T. Singer, who argued that his First Amendment and 14th Amendment rights were violated by the prison’s decision to ban the game and confiscate his books and other materials, including a 96-page handwritten manuscript he had created for the game.
Mr. Singer, “a D&D enthusiast since childhood,” according to the court’s opinion, was sentenced to life in prison in 2002 for bludgeoning and stabbing his sister’s boyfriend to death.
Prison officials said they had banned the game at the recommendation of the prison’s specialist on gangs, who said it could lead to gang behavior and fantasies about escape.
Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,” prison officials said in court. That could make it more difficult to rehabilitate prisoners and could endanger public safety, they said.
The court, which is based in Chicago, acknowledged that there was no evidence of marauding gangs spurred to their acts of destruction by swinging imaginary mauls, but it ruled nonetheless that the prison’s decision was “rationally related” to legitimate goals of prison administration.
“We are pleased with the ruling,” said John Dipko, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, who added that the prison rules “enable us to continue our mission of keeping our state safe.”
Authorities at the territory's jail have moved to tighten up prisoners' access to the internet in the wake of security scares in recent weeks.
Version 2.0 of the Alexander Maconochie Centre's policy on computer use by inmates, giving prison management wider powers to ban a prisoner from using the internet, email and other resources, was posted on the ACT Government's website yesterday.
The move comes after a prisoner used internet access to send a garbled message to The Canberra Times and the newspaper uncovered the hole in the Alexander Maconochie Centre's computer network which had been used to send the expletive-laden message.
A week later, it emerged that a man police describe as a ''computer expert'' on remand at the jail accused of a range of child-sex offences, including using children to produce pornography, was among two inmates who had been given unfettered access to the web through their official work detail.
Accused paedophile Aaron James Holliday was employed along with a sentenced prisoner to work as administrative assistants with the prison's education program. The men were each paid more than $60 a week for performing their duties.
The second inmate, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is serving a nine-year sentence for raping his wife's 10-year-old brother.
The discovery that the pair had managed to secure unsupervised internet access sparked a police investigation into their online activities while behind bars.
Under the new policy, which takes effect immediately, access to internet, email and to the LEARN online resource remains a ''privilege'' for prisoners but can be withdrawn for any reason at the superintendent's discretion.
Any thoughts on what prisoners should have a "right" to while incarcerated...
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
If they can have books, croswords, Sudoku puzzles, and the like...why not allow them to have D&D?
Prison officials said they had banned the game at the recommendation of the prison’s specialist on gangs, who said it could lead to gang behavior and fantasies about escape.
Taking that to its logical conclusion, they should not be permitted fiction of any type.
Sean wrote:Personally I believe that prisoners should have rights to nine-tenths of fuck all!
Rehabilitation is a wonderful thing but without real punishment there is no real incentive to stay on the straight and narrow.
Punishment is an inefficient method of changing human behavior. It is necessary to a limited degree and has some limited utility but beyond that there are far better methods available.
When does a "plaything" (eg D&D, the internet) become a "right"?
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
A rapist who deliberately targeted white women has complained that prisoners are being ‘horribly treated’ by having PlayStations and DVD players confiscated.
Illegal immigrant Amos Moobeng, who was jailed for nine years in 2009 after being found guilty of raping a teenager he had lured her back to his flat in Exeter, said he was ‘horrified’ at the recent crackdown.
Black South African Moobeng, now 37, said bosses at the 646 prisoner-capacity HMP Dartmoor in Devon were ‘bullying’ convicts by removing privileges.
He said: ‘There is something rather alarming going on here at HMP Dartmoor. I will call it Operation Dis-enhancement – a massive and ruthless campaign to take away every prisoners enhanced status and make us all standard or basic.
‘Whether this is a cost-cutting exercise or simply because the screws cannot stomach seeing us with DVDs, PlayStations, and wearing our own clothes – now banned on visits, incidentally – is something only they know.’
Moobeng, who raped an 18-year-old after luring her and a friend back to his home in 2007, said he was hauled before the prison governor and asked to justify his status as an ‘enhanced prisoner’.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Giving prisoners the opportunity to earn extra privileges encourages good behaviour and thus makes the prison run more smoothly and with greater safety for the staff. Removing privileges arbitrarily defeats that objective, increasing the risk of violence.
"The dildo of consequence rarely comes lubed." -- Eileen Rose
MEXICO CITY: The high heels and dark glasses worn by the prisoner Sandra Avila Beltran were already against regulations, but it was the Botox injections given to her in her cell that finally cost two prison officials their jobs.
The head of Mexico City's main women's jail and its medical chief have been sacked amid revelations that they allowed a plastic surgeon to enter the prison and administer beauty treatments to the alleged cocaine trafficker.
Sources within the prison authority said the treatments consisted of several Botox injections to the face, administered over several hours, and that a liposuction operation was planned to take place at the jail in the near future.
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Avila Beltran, 50, has long been alleged to enjoy special privileges that allow her to wear non-regulation clothing to keep up appearances behind bars.
The woman nicknamed Queen of the Pacific was arrested in Mexico City in September 2007 and charged with conspiracy to traffic drugs and money-laundering. Authorities said she was a key link between the Sinaloa cartel and the Colombian suppliers of cocaine. She insisted she made her living by renting houses and selling clothes.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Notice that Beltran is an "alleged cvocaine trafficker" and has been "charged with conspiracy to traffic drugs and money-laundering." If she has been convicted, I would think that the article would say so.
Maybe having different rules for presumptively innocent people who have not been convicted than for presumptively guilty people who have been convicted is a good thing. Maybe keeping someone jailed for more than three years without having convicted her is not.
Reason is valuable only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.
Actually she was acquitted in December, though her sentence is under appeal. It looks like she is still being held pending the outcome of a U.S. extradition request.
"The dildo of consequence rarely comes lubed." -- Eileen Rose
Her acquittal is being appealed? (I assume that if she was acquitted, she was not sentenced for the alleged crime of which she was acquitted.) Any system which allows the appeal of an acquittal is a system that needs overthrowing. Forget the video games, the entire prison population of Mexico should revolt.
Reason is valuable only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.
The Hen wrote:Why anyone needs to "keep up appearances" when they are in jail for drug-runnihng is beyond me.
For whom is she keeping these appearances for?
Am guessing shes been watching re runs of Prisoner Cell Block H and is fighting the aging process so she dosn't look like Bea, Lizzie, Dor or Vinegar Tits!!
