media diet – Page 3 – Jenneral HQ

From Vicky Mochama and Ishmael Daro’s excellent podcast, Safe Space.

Guests:
Anna Mehler Paperny (Reuters investigative reporter)
Sharmeen Khan (activist w End Immigration Detention Network)

What is Canada’s prison system like? Who does it disproportionately hurt? What can alternatives look like? Although we heard more about prisons during Harper’s years as part of his platform was being tough on crime, nothing has changed since 2014.

Ivan Zinger report of national prison system

solitary confinement is overused
few mental health resources for inmates-no resources for integration of prisoners after incarceration
overrepresentation of indigenous people behind bars is “deeply entrenched”: despite only making up 5% of the population of Canada, they make up around ¼th of all inmates in Canada. And it’s worse for women
black inmates are fastest growing popn – 69% growth in black inmates from 05-16 in federal system

Common misconceptions:

most people behind bars have done something bad. Truth: in provincial jails, a significant portion are not charged, and are merely waiting for their day in court.
there are limits to how long you can put someone in solitary confinement for. Truth: as of now, any prisoner could be placed in SC for any length of time.
criminal justice system is impartial, benevolent and fair. Truth: there are systemic structures embedded within it that lead to people/groups being incarcerated. eg. the school to prison pipeline
indefinite immigration detention isn’t a thing in Canada. Truth: there are people in max security that haven’t been charged because they overstayed their visas/are here illegally – for years upon years with no movement in justice system. One man stayed in jail for 13 years before being allowed to return to Jamaica

“Administrative Segregation”

What Canada calls solitary confinement

you’re not there to be punished, and you haven’t even done anything wrong, it’s for your own safety and the safety of others

United Nations: 15 days is the most you can do, is considered torture beyond that. People deteriorate rapidly in solitary
Language makes it sounds more necessary, gives it distance from what it does. It makes it sound bloodless.
“Disciplinary segregation: is actually for punishment, but vast majority are in administrative segregation
2016: first nations man held in solitary confinement in Ontario for 4 years and lost his speech. No substantive change since then. Howard Sapers, Ombudsman, has recommended systemic reviews, stricter rules around SC, prohibition on placement of people with mental illnesses (currently, many are put in because of their mental illness, which makes them difficult to deal with)

Canada’s prisons are the "new residential schools”

When a large amount of a certain community is incarcerated, that community starts to function differently. Adults can’t find jobs, pay rent, or keep custody of their kids (which is especially awful because of a historical loss of custody on a large scale). Because of this huge disparity in who we’re locking up, courts should take into account circumstances and try their very best to divert indigenous from the prison system. Gladue reports exist, but they don’t seem to be available at the right time. They should be available when they’re at the bail hearing stage (when you might be locked up to await trial), not at sentencing.

Other Systemic Issues

Nonviolent drug crime convictions are majorily POC, but white hipsters can smoke a joint no problem. There’s a perception that POC commit more crime, but a large factor is the more intense surveillance that goes on in their communities. This increased surveillance also makes it harder to get bail – harder to get surety since less people have been not involved with the justice system. So then more people in these communities “have to” go to jail – meaning losing housing, losing jobs, losing custody.

More people awaiting sentencing than actually serving sentences in jail. During 2015-16, 15,000 adults were in remand and 10,000 in custody.

those 15,000 people are still legally innocent
justices are terrified to appear soft on criminals, so risk is over-estimated in population awaiting trial
getting out on bail depends on who you know, and what assets/resources they have. even though criminal code hasn’t changed, and still says that bail should be default unless there is a perception of high risk.
Ontario: 67% of people can’t get bail, country average is 60%.
The US has a cash bail system, which is unfair against poor. In Canada, essentially you need to have another person vouch for you (surety) with an amount of money that they can pledge (isn’t given away, but needs to demonstrate that they have that amount) to give if you breach bail. But they have to have time to spend in court, have a house for you to sleep in for like months, etc. It’s a very high burden on social networks to ask for these commitments.
the supreme court has said that these expectations are onerous and shouldnt be the norm.

re:prison abolition, we will need to destroy poverty first

after white feminists campaigned for cracking down on domestic abuse, many communities were destroyed.
prisons didn’t make women safer, didn’t impact rates of abuse and assault-so now we look at transformative solutions, because using the court systems hurt the community more.
women who don’t want to go to the police for domestic abuse because their status is tied to their husbands, for ex, could really benefit from alternative approaches
looking at this from my own personal perspective, the idea of letting domestic abusers go is really, really distasteful to think about. But we need to think about this. Our sense of justice can’t blind us here.

thinking about rehabilitation is a method towards prison abolition

Sweden started closing down jails because they had no more prisoners
Always going to be child molesters and serial murders, but the vast majority people are there for nonviolent crimes.
communities should talk about practising self-determination, what to do with people who harm, and how to heal from that.
In Canada, more indigenous communities should be empowered to create and run healing circles.

So one morbid hobby that I have is using QALY measures to calculate roughly how many people any single policy decision would kill. Thankfully I don’t get to indulge it much since most policies that I encounter aren’t completely terrible, but today, my friends, we have truly been blessed.

So the FDA recently imposed a bunch of e-cigarette regulations, including forbidding them from advertising true claims about how they are safer than cigarettes, stopping vape shops from helping their customers assemble and fix vapes, forbidding companies from making them safer or more pleasant to use, and having such a stringent and expensive review process that it’s pretty much the equivalent of banning them completely after a 2 year grace period.

Because when doing the cost-benefit calculations, they assigned no value to smokers who will die because they reverted back from vaping to smoking cigarettes.

Alright, lets do the math. Let’s do this very, very conservatively.

So we know that

smoking is associated with 1.9 fewer years of QALE for U.S. adults.

A reuters/ipsos poll tells us that 10% of US adults vape (

(i.e. 24.5 million of 245 million), and also provides us with this helpful graphic to work with:

(source)

From this we know that 30% of that 24.5 million has used it to successfully quit using conventional tobacco. That is 7.35 million people who used to smoke cigarettes, and then quit because of e-cigarettes.

Is vaping harmful? According to this post by the Scientific American,

Given the long and sorry list of harmful and toxic chemicals in cigarettes, vaping is almost certainly less dangerous to your health.

But also (from the same article):

There is evidence that e-cigs deliver some toxic stuff of their own such as formaldehyde (a known carcinogen), nitrosamines (linked to cancer) and lead (a neurotoxin). Though the toxicant levels of e-cigs may be “9–450 times lower than in cigarette smoke,” [emphasis mine] as this study suggests, levels of formaldehyde and metals have been found to be comparable to or higher than those found in conventional cigarettes. Silicate particles, which are a cause of lung disease, have also been found in e-cigarette vapors.

Hmm, so definitely less harmful than smoking, but by how much? Let’s lowball, like, a lot, and say that there’s only a 50% difference in harm levels between vapes and cigarettes (so that 1 vape session is as toxic as half of a cigarette). Realistically, the difference in safety between vapes and traditional cigarettes is likely much larger.

And let’s lowball a lot again, and say that only half of the 7.35 million people who used vapes to quit their smoking habit revert back to smoking cigarettes. So 3,675,000 people. And again, realistically, the number is likely larger than that.

(I’m sure that there are probably actual numbers for these, but I’m just too lazy to look them up. I may edit this later on to reflect research findings.)

Alright, it’s time for the math.

Our parameters:

1.9 fewer QALYs for American adult smokers
3,675,000 people reverting to smoking
50% risk difference between vaping and smoking

it’s fairly simple to calculate the damage in terms of QALY:

Plugging in our numbers gives us a total loss of 13,965,000 QALYs.

Assuming an average lifespan of 80 years, that’s a loss of 174,562.5 lives.

Remember that we’ve been pretty conservative in estimating our variables, so the actual cost in lives is likely much more. And also, this equation only accounts for people who started smoking e-cigarettes. So future Americans who start smoking because e-cigarettes stopped being commercially available are also not represented here.

So, yeah. The sheer stupidity of this is frankly rage-inducing. Please don’t do this if you do cost-benefit analyses professionally.

I’m reminded of this pretty good quote from the Discworld series:

“I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!”

“No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”

― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

Tag: media diet

Canada’s Broken Prison System

On Incredibly Botched Cost-Benefit Calculations