Texas Prisons Cut Lunch on Weekends

[chaos]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/201 ... um=twitter

The state of Texas already made waves in September when it decided to stop honoring death row inmates' final meal requests. The decision was prompted by the huge meal requested by white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer.

Today, The New York Times reports that since April, the Texas prison system has been skipping lunch on weekends. Now inmates in 36 prisons are eating two meals: one served between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. and another served between 4 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.

The Times reports:

The meal reductions are part of an effort to trim $2.8 million in food-related expenses from the 2011 fiscal year budget of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the state prison agency. Other cuts the agency has made to its food service include replacing carton milk with powdered milk and using sliced bread instead of hamburger and hot dog buns.

Prison administrators said that the cuts were made in response to the state's multibillion-dollar budget shortfall in 2011, and that the weekend lunches were eliminated in consultation with the agency's health officials and dietitians. Michelle Lyons, an agency spokeswoman, said that inmates with health problems who have been prescribed a therapeutic diet continue to receive three meals per day.

To be fair to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, other states — Ohio, Arizona, Georgia — follow similar protocol. But the Times reports that the policy "appears to be out of step with the standards adopted by the American Correctional Association."

One state politician wasn't too worried. "If they don't like the menu, don't come there in the first place," State Sen. John Whitmire, a Democrat, told the Times.

[guysmiley]

Hey Perry (Sen), let the market do what it will huh? Some people there didn't kill anyone, just had some drugs. I think everything needs to be wiped out and started over.

[Larry B.]

Hey Perry (Sen), let the market do what it will huh? Some people there didn't kill anyone, just had some drugs. I think everything needs to be wiped out and started over.

I'd bold "everything".

[creep]

Hey Perry (Sen), let the market do what it will huh? Some people there didn't kill anyone, just had some drugs. I think everything needs to be wiped out and started over.

I'd bold "everything".

next year!

[Hokahey]

I would have no sympathy for inmates if it wasn't for the terrible drug laws in this country.

Half of all inmates in federal prisons are there for drugs, around 20% of inmates nationwide in state prisons are there for drugs and around 18% of inmates in California state prisons are there for drugs.

[Juana]

Yeah the drug laws are fucking insane lighten those up a bit and then the prisons could actually house the people they should be housing in the first place.

[Hokahey]

The fact that the government can regulate what we do to our own bodies is horrifying.

[Pure Method]

but we make so much money off of our insane drug laws! jobs for cops, DEA, etc. plus we can always blame drugs, and not ourselves

[Juana]

The fact that the government can regulate what we do to our own bodies is horrifying.

Well I think its more for kids I don't care about adults but I don't think 8 year olds should be doing various things, that being said a lot of dealers will sell to anyone. As for the rest I agree we shouldn't be told what we can or can't do but its probably to protect companies from stupid people suing them after ingesting whatever.

[Hokahey]

The fact that the government can regulate what we do to our own bodies is horrifying.

Well I think its more for kids I don't care about adults but I don't think 8 year olds should be doing various things, that being said a lot of dealers will sell to anyone. As for the rest I agree we shouldn't be told what we can or can't do but its probably to protect companies from stupid people suing them after ingesting whatever.

Well sure. Have a legal age to intoxicate yourself like drinking. Everything should just be 18 though. Smoke/drink/army/drugs/drive

Whatever. Something like that. When you're an adult you can do your thing so long as it doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights.

[Juana]

Yeah I agree with that. If you're old enough to die for the country you should be able to be old enough to do whatever you want to your own body.

[Hype]

The fact that the government can regulate what we do to our own bodies is horrifying.

Well I think its more for kids I don't care about adults but I don't think 8 year olds should be doing various things, that being said a lot of dealers will sell to anyone. As for the rest I agree we shouldn't be told what we can or can't do but its probably to protect companies from stupid people suing them after ingesting whatever.

Well sure. Have a legal age to intoxicate yourself like drinking. Everything should just be 18 though. Smoke/drink/army/drugs/drive

Whatever. Something like that. When you're an adult you can do your thing so long as it doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights.

Your damaging yourself infringes on everyone else's right (including, but not limited to, family, friends, acquaintances, employees, employers, and so on) to live on a planet with people who function optimally. We can't get off this planet, we're stuck with you morons, so it's in everyone's interest to limit the threat of self-immolation.

Neo-Liberalism has rotted the minds of far too many people, especially in the United States, to the point where they can't seem to understand anything else except the word 'freedom' (or synonyms like 'liberty') trotted out to justify nothing but blinkered preference-satisfaction. That's not liberty. It's the opposite. John Stuart Mill, one of the originators of the libertarian tradition, famously said: "Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." The 21st Century Libertarian mantra of "Git yer hands off mah property, you damn dirty goverment!" is nothing more than the myopic oinking of a dissatisifed pig. Hayek didn't accept these sorts of arguments, nor did Mill, nor did even Ayn "Undergraduate Degree in Philosophy" Rand (she repudiated any connection to 'Libertarianism'). I don't know who the hell contemporary libertarians are *really* getting their ideas from, but it sure isn't actual historical libertarian theorists. Maybe Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. But they're not libertarians. They're fucking crazy.

[kv]

Your damaging yourself infringes on everyone else's right (including, but not limited to, family, friends, acquaintances, employees, employers, and so on) to live on a planet with people who function optimally. We can't get off this planet, we're stuck with you morons, so it's in everyone's interest to limit the threat of self-immolation.

yep people under 21 drinking just means they kill more people doing so...21 should be the age for everything,,,sure those under are gonna do so anyway but better to not allow it to be legal till their brains are more adult like.

[Hokahey]

Your damaging yourself infringes on everyone else's right (including, but not limited to, family, friends, acquaintances, employees, employers, and so on) to live on a planet with people who function optimally. We can't get off this planet, we're stuck with you morons, so it's in everyone's interest to limit the threat of self-immolation.

First of all, bullshit. You've never used drugs Hype, so your ability to comment is limited to whatever you may have read or heard. Along those lines, Steve Jobs famously said had it not been for his experiences with psychedelics he would have never been the creative genius he was.

Second of all, taken to it's logical conclusion (as all theories and ideas should be), if following your thought process we'd have to ban cigarettes, alcohol, fattening foods etc. Evenm if you want to live in a fascists society, do I really need to explain to you how poorly prohibition works?

Neo-Liberalism has rotted the minds of far too many people, especially in the United States, to the point where they can't seem to understand anything else except the word 'freedom' (or synonyms like 'liberty') trotted out to justify nothing but blinkered preference-satisfaction. That's not liberty. It's the opposite. John Stuart Mill, one of the originators of the libertarian tradition, famously said: "Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." The 21st Century Libertarian mantra of "Git yer hands off mah property, you damn dirty goverment!" is nothing more than the myopic oinking of a dissatisifed pig. Hayek didn't accept these sorts of arguments, nor did Mill, nor did even Ayn "Undergraduate Degree in Philosophy" Rand (she repudiated any connection to 'Libertarianism'). I don't know who the hell contemporary libertarians are *really* getting their ideas from, but it sure isn't actual historical libertarian theorists. Maybe Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. But they're not libertarians. They're fucking crazy.

Your misunderstanding of Libertarianism is kind of sad. As is your attempt to shoehorn any and all ideas and opinions that don't involve complete government oversight of all aspects of our lives as "Libertarianism".

[Hype]

Hoka, you misunderstood me.

First of all, bullshit. You've never used drugs Hype, so your ability to comment is limited to whatever you may have read or heard. Along those lines, Steve Jobs famously said had it not been for his experiences with psychedelics he would have never been the creative genius he was.

That's not true. Of course I've used drugs (but even if I hadn't, this is a red herring -- I don't have to have murdered or have been a murder victim to say that you shouldn't murder -- the argument doesn't depend on having a first-personal knowledge of the effects). I didn't say people shouldn't. I said damaging oneself is something it's in everyone's interest to limit, by definition. I didn't say how they should do that. It's obviously the case that many substances don't, themselves, generally, damage people's ability to function. Maybe it's true that Jobs' self-reporting of the cause of his creativity is accurate, maybe it isn't, Single cases of self-reported effects don't count as evidence in favour of anything. You can't draw any valid inferences here because you can't distinguish correlation from causation. Maybe people who are inherently more creative are more drawn to experimentation with consciousness augmenting experiences, maybe that experimentation sometimes has beneficial effects. I didn't say anything about whether it does or doesn't. I made a claim about self-harm that was pretty straightforward, and general, without saying what, exactly, would constitute self-harm (self-immolation is actually 'killing oneself', though I take that to include any sufficiently negative harmful effect on an organism's ability to function at optimal level).

Second of all, taken to it's logical conclusion (as all theories and ideas should be), if following your thought process we'd have to ban cigarettes, alcohol, fattening foods etc. Evenm if you want to live in a fascists society, do I really need to explain to you how poorly prohibition works?

As I say above, no, that doesn't follow. Taken to its logical conclusion, my claim merely says that whatever methods best iimit harm to self (and thus, harm to others) should be employed. You jumped to the conclusion that this implies fascist prohibition of every harmful substance. But this isn't the logical conclusion. There are strong arguments to be made in favour of suggestion and guidance, through education, rather than direct coercive action (however, compare an analogous case: population control policies in China -- One Child Only, versus in India -- community-building support and education for women. In both cases, drastic drops in birth rate were reached, but arguably in the Indian case (at least in some states), the same effect was reached with less negative side-effects.) So it's simply spurious to attribute a prohibitionist position to me.

Your misunderstanding of Libertarianism is kind of sad. As is your attempt to shoehorn any and all ideas and opinions that don't involve complete government oversight of all aspects of our lives as "Libertarianism".

That's not a valid response to my criticisms. There's a valid appeal to authority here that I can trot out -- I have done, and am currently doing, graduate work in political philosophy. I have actually read broad swathes of Libertarian philosophy, and its critics. I know what Libertarianism is intended to be about. I get Hayek's reasons for trying to deny the possibility of any kind of distributive or social justice. I also know that Hayek and others, as I said, have repudiated many of the claims made by the current style of American neo-Liberal in their writings, and with good reasons.

My characterization of so-called neo-Liberals was harsh, but I think not unwarranted, given their bastardization of the concept of 'liberty' in a way such that no actual libertarian theorist actually uses it. Neo-liberalism of the folk-sort espoused by twits like Rand Paul would actually best be described as anarcho-fascism. Ron Paul's view isn't quite as bad as that, but it's not far off.

At the end of the day, my point was more that the neo-Liberal argument that says "I'm an adult, I can therefore do whatever I want to myself so long as I don't harm anyone else, therefore I can do <x>." Is half-right. They just generally fail to fully appreciate what it means to harm anyone else.

[Hype]

Your damaging yourself infringes on everyone else's right (including, but not limited to, family, friends, acquaintances, employees, employers, and so on) to live on a planet with people who function optimally. We can't get off this planet, we're stuck with you morons, so it's in everyone's interest to limit the threat of self-immolation.

yep people under 21 drinking just means they kill more people doing so...21 should be the age for everything,,,sure those under are gonna do so anyway but better to not allow it to be legal till their brains are more adult like.

That's why you can't rent a car until 25. I don't think it's true that drinking should be absolutely prohibited until age 21, though I think we agree about the reasons why it looks like it should. I think a plausible better system (though it couldn't be implemented immediately in many cases) would be one in which alcohol is permissible in very small quantities from the early teens, with dinner (half a glass of wine, or half a beer, or something), so that a culture of moderation is easily produced without demanding it.

I think Hoka and I would agree about this... prohibition often creates a culture of mystique for substances that makes their abuse more likely, in the absence of education.

[Hokahey]

I think Hoka and I would agree about this... prohibition often creates a culture of mystique for substances that makes their abuse more likely, in the absence of education.

It also creates an instant black market that raises prices to the benefit of bootleggers and wastes resources on attempting to stop people from doing what they're going to do regardless. One need only look at alcohol prohibition.

Chris Rock once said something to the effect of you could get rid of all drugs known to man and someone would be in their basement going " yo yo check this out you put a lima bean in the bottom of a baby bottle for a week, suck on it and you'll be fucked up."

For people that have experimented with a large swath of narcotics you realize just how silly it is to incarcerate people for them. I've gotten higher off of caffeine than cocaine. I understand the impact on my body is greater with the cocaine, but if everyone switched their double espresso to two lines of coke you wouldn't notice a difference. And if everyone switched from alcohol to pot the world would be a safer place.

Yes there are "harder" substances, but are you going to start shooting smack because you won't go to jail if you're caught with it?

It's all nonsense.

I understand "protecting" society. But what I do in my home to my body is of no concern to you. But the money wasted on fighting the war on drugs should be. What would happen to the drug cartels if there was no longer a black market? Our prison population?

[Hokahey]

That's not true. Of course I've used drugs

That's news.

(but even if I hadn't, this is a red herring -- I don't have to have murdered or have been a murder victim to say that you shouldn't murder -- the argument doesn't depend on having a first-personal knowledge of the effects).

Good point.

I didn't say people shouldn't. I said damaging oneself is something it's in everyone's interest to limit, by definition. I didn't say how they should do that. It's obviously the case that many substances don't, themselves, generally, damage people's ability to function.

Your quote seemed directly related to drug prohibition. Honestly it sounds like you're talking your way out of it.

Your damaging yourself infringes on everyone else's right (including, but not limited to, family, friends, acquaintances, employees, employers, and so on) to live on a planet with people who function optimally. We can't get off this planet, we're stuck with you morons, so it's in everyone's interest to limit the threat of self-immolation.

Maybe it's true that Jobs' self-reporting of the cause of his creativity is accurate, maybe it isn't, Single cases of self-reported effects don't count as evidence in favour of anything. You can't draw any valid inferences here because you can't distinguish correlation from causation. Maybe people who are inherently more creative are more drawn to experimentation with consciousness augmenting experiences, maybe that experimentation sometimes has beneficial effects.

Very true. I was only saying if we're going to rely on sketchy reporting we can always focus on the positive.

I didn't say anything about whether it does or doesn't. I made a claim about self-harm that was pretty straightforward, and general, without saying what, exactly, would constitute self-harm (self-immolation is actually 'killing oneself', though I take that to include any sufficiently negative harmful effect on an organism's ability to function at optimal level).

You're saying a lot here without actually saying anything about the topic at hand. As if you're speaking at a high level about it but then leaving room to say you're not talking about it all. Not sure what the point is or what your point is for that matter.

Second of all, taken to it's logical conclusion (as all theories and ideas should be), if following your thought process we'd have to ban cigarettes, alcohol, fattening foods etc. Evenm if you want to live in a fascists society, do I really need to explain to you how poorly prohibition works?

As I say above, no, that doesn't follow. Taken to its logical conclusion, my claim merely says that whatever methods best iimit harm to self (and thus, harm to others) should be employed. You jumped to the conclusion that this implies fascist prohibition of every harmful substance. But this isn't the logical conclusion.

This is all dependent on what you believe causes "self harm", which originally read very much like you were advocating drug prohibition. So I stand by my claim of what would be the logical conclusion to "limiting self harm." Unless you're now only saying education best limits it. But you're not coming right out and saying much of anything.

There are strong arguments to be made in favour of suggestion and guidance, through education, rather than direct coercive action (however, compare an analogous case: population control policies in China -- One Child Only, versus in India -- community-building support and education for women. In both cases, drastic drops in birth rate were reached, but arguably in the Indian case (at least in some states), the same effect was reached with less negative side-effects.) So it's simply spurious to attribute a prohibitionist position to me.

Now it sounds like we're getting somewhere, but you're still just providing an example of what else is possible instead of a concrete position.

Your misunderstanding of Libertarianism is kind of sad. As is your attempt to shoehorn any and all ideas and opinions that don't involve complete government oversight of all aspects of our lives as "Libertarianism".

That's not a valid response to my criticisms. There's a valid appeal to authority here that I can trot out -- I have done, and am currently doing, graduate work in political philosophy. I have actually read broad swathes of Libertarian philosophy, and its critics. I know what Libertarianism is intended to be about. I get Hayek's reasons for trying to deny the possibility of any kind of distributive or social justice. I also know that Hayek and others, as I said, have repudiated many of the claims made by the current style of American neo-Liberal in their writings, and with good reasons.

But then you suggest Libertarians are getting their ideas from people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, the likes of which true Libertarians despise. They are Neocons. It makes it sound like you don't actually understand such a simple difference between a Rush Limbaugh and a Ron Paul. You might as well confuse Obama

They just generally fail to fully appreciate what it means to harm anyone else.

I don't think that's true, and I don't see a concise explanation from you proving that.

[Hype]

The real, bottom-line, disagreement we have is about what 'freedom' or 'liberty' means. We disagree about what this means because, at least in part, we disagree (I'm fairly certain) about what individuals (individual human beings) are and what they can do and in where their value lies. We've had this argument before, though. I could've sworn I once wrote out a long thing about 'freedom' and talked about Isaiah Berlin's famous "Two Concepts of Liberty". It might've been a post at Xiola.org just before it went under, though, so maybe you missed it (I think it was in response to you, though).

I don't have time to systematically lay out my view and show why the libertarian position (irrespective of my claims that folk-libertarians and their pet-politicians seem to be ignorant of what the libertarian intellectual tradition actually says) doesn't have an adequate notion of 'freedom' (or 'liberty'). I can probably say a few things about it that might help you see what I mean, but it may not be fundamental enough. There are some very very intelligent libertarians in my dept. that I've had long arguments with about this, and we still don't agree. But, it's unlikely that this is due to some *obvious* failure in reasoning on either side. More likely, it's a matter of the issues being extremely complicated, and taking a lot of effort to boil down and get clear about.

One thing I can suggest is to just check out this article: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/ (with special attention to sections 2, 5 and 7). I will tentatively assert that I am probably most closely aligned to some kind of welfarism about distributive justice. That's the source of our disagreement. The disagreement is in one sense over whether freedom of some sort or welfare has primacy in issues of justice. Hayek famously presupposes (having given some semblance of an argument for it), and other libertarians when they make claims about justice presuppose, that there can be no such thing as distributive, or social, justice, because they think only actions of individuals can be just or unjust. There are good reasons to reject this. Some of them are in that article. One I have suggested is simply that it fails to adequately capture what it is for individuals to act. That is, it fails to adequately support a narrow notion of freedom such that all that is needed for justice is the negative liberty of removing constraints. There are good reasons to reject this view based on what individual human beings are, and can do. Here is an article on this issue: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liber ... -negative/ which very clearly states at least part of my objection:

Political liberalism tends to presuppose a negative definition of liberty: liberals generally claim that if one favors individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state. Critics of liberalism often contest this implication by contesting the negative definition of liberty: they argue that the pursuit of liberty understood as self-realization or as self-determination (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) can require state intervention of a kind not normally allowed by liberals.

[kv]

[quote="hokahey"] I've gotten higher off of caffeine than cocaine. I understand the impact on my body is greater with the cocaine, but if everyone switched their double espresso to two lines of coke you wouldn't notice a difference. /quote]

not that it's anything to gloat about or be proud of in anyway but you must have been getting some seriously stomped on coke...becuse good coke is night and day from a dbl expresso


side track over continue arguing with hypie

[Hype]

I should throw out one other thing that's completely relavent to this thread, where Hoka and I *might* agree, but for exactly the opposite reasons: I tend to think that in many, if not most, cases, punitive models of justice (that is, where the penalty for infringing on a law involves punishment) don't generally work. Incarceration often has the effect of increasing the liklihood of criminal recidivism and escalation of criminal behaviour. Even if this weren't the case, many criminals suffer from underlying problems (mental disorders, behavioural problems, social and economic inequity, etc.) that if alleviated could (and if had been alleviated would have) remove at least part of the causal mechanism at play in these people's behaviour. Hoka probably won't agree to my including socioeconomic inequity in the list of possible underlying problems that lead to criminality. But the empirical evidence supports my view. Even if this weren't the case, many crimes are punished to a degree that does not fit the crime. This is where Hoka and I probably agree most. It is certainly the case that the American prison system is overloaded with drug offences that are vastly less dangerous in comparison with many crimes that on the American punitive model are punished far less severely. (This is where Left-Libertarians and evil socialists like me tend to agree.) With that said, the answer is not less government, but a revision or rejection of a stark punitive model of justice. Obviously, certain criminals ought to be incarcerated (but not killed), because there is no existing means of preventing individuals from repeat-offending (and there may never be), and because current social mores dictate a certain amount of concern for the victims in sentencing. When it comes to the rest, other things have been tried ("boot camp"-release programs for young inmates is a great program done far too late. Children with obvious hyperactivity/concentration disorders and related issues should be given far more outlets in school or other publicly funded programs. The cancelling of extracurriculars anywhere is a tragedy), and there are many more possibilities.

Cutting lunch on weekends for criminals who are already in an institutionalized, anti-reality setting, makes no fucking sense at all.

Hey, look, another thing Hoka and I will agree on: http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/10/30 ... in-relief/

That's ridiculous. I do, however, think that it would probably be best for the medical use if they just isolated the useful molecules and synthesized them (and made it so you don't end up like Brian from Half-Baked.

It happened to a friend of mine. It could happen to you.

[Hokahey]

I've gotten higher off of caffeine than cocaine. I understand the impact on my body is greater with the cocaine, but if everyone switched their double espresso to two lines of coke you wouldn't notice a difference. /quote]

not that it's anything to gloat about or be proud of in anyway but you must have been getting some seriously stomped on coke...becuse good coke is night and day from a dbl expresso


side track over continue arguing with hypie

I knew someone would say this. For me, personally, that was the case. I won't go on and on about my experiences but I felt comfortable enough about them to make that comparison.

[Hype]

Two more important posts are waiting for you.

[Hokahey]

Two more important posts are waiting for you.

I'm crazy busy. I wouldn't dare give you anything less than somewhat thought out.

[Hype]

Two more important posts are waiting for you.

I'm crazy busy. I wouldn't dare give you anything less than somewhat thought out.

No worries. I'm insanely busy too.