Posted on 04/05/2012 12:22:36 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
“Nobody punks me off for a bag of chips.”
That was what Troy Campbell told fellow inmates at the Toronto “Don” Jail after stomping on the head of Jeff Munro, 32, on Nov. 7, 2009. He was angry that Munro, a “vulnerable” inmate with a history of psychiatric illness, had stolen and eaten a half a bag of Ruffles potato chips.
Campbell, in custody for robbery and aggravated assault, returned to Munro’s cell two or three times and assaulted him with his feet as he lay on his bed, Crown Margaret Creal told court, reading from an agreed statement of facts.
“Witnesses could hear the sound of the victim crying,” she said of Munro, who had worked several years earlier as a dancer on a Caribbean cruise.
On Tuesday, Campbell pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, reduced from first-degree murder. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
Campbell, 26, had “special status” inside the notorious jail, conferred on him by his jailers for assisting guards distributing food to other inmates and cleaning tasks.
(Excerpt) Read more at thestar.com ...
Thank God that Canada doesn’t have the death penalty for this troubled, carbohydrate deficient yet loquacious young man.
For some reason Frank Zappa's Stinkfoot comes to mind.
who had worked several years earlier as a dancer on a Caribbean cruise
O_o
Well, they do have ridges. Nobody kills for a flat chip.
I really don’t think prisoners should have access to each other in prison - for rape, for murder, for drug exchange, for escape planning, whatever. They really should be kept apart.
Agreed. Lock them in their cells, feed them once a day (they are smart enough to ration their food for three meals) hose them off before lights out.
Prison is supposed to be punishment, not play school.
Pehaps he should have eaten only one.
“Except that people go crazy in isolation. It’s bad enough that it’s used as a punishment in prison. “
I’d so way rather be in my own little cell than have random thugs wandering through.
You’d think so, right? But most people don’t actually want that.
Then you reduce the time of the sentences to match the severity of isolation. That way you minimize rapes and violence, keep the inmates safe, and minimize the cost to the people for incarcerating them - while making it true punishment that they never want to go back to.
A mixing prison population is a recipe for disaster on innumerable levels, and turns into a breeding ground for the vilest sort of training a human being can be exposed to. It's flat-out wrong, and NO ONE comes out changed for the better.
It’s better for them to go crazy by themselves than go crazy on other inmates. I don’t know why I should care what they want since they didn’t care enough about what they want to stay out of prison. They’re not there to fulfill their wants.
You guys should read this:
““Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts—regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.”
“In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that solitary confinement is bad for people.
I don’t suppose there is any evidence anywhere that living in a barely controlled environment full of psychotic prisoners is bad for people? If they care about what’s good for them they should try to stay out of prison in the first place. But being convicted of a crime shouldn’t become a sentence to a Lord of the Flies situation with hardcore criminals.
‘There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that solitary confinement is bad for people.”
I am not trying to be harsh, but to keep prisoners physically safe.
Personally I don’t want any other prisoners at liberty to mess with me. I don’t mind seeing them, talking to them, whatever, but I don’t want them having access to my body.
So you’re saying that mental health should take a back seat compared to physical safety?
Leave them in solitary long enough, and they might bash their brains in, or go insane in some other way. Wait, we do want to let them out eventually right?
I think you’re assuming that isolation is tolerable, just because it sounds less scary than being in prison with other people.
“He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”
“Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.”
“So you’re saying that mental health should take a back seat compared to physical safety?
Leave them in solitary long enough, and they might bash their brains in, or go insane in some other way. Wait, we do want to let them out eventually right?”
How about we have mental health AND physical safety?
I think it can be done. A prisoner should be able to be protected from abusers and molesters. Without being in some sort of hole that forbids any human interaction.
You will get no argument from me there. The Prison-Industrial complex is evil too, but most people here don’t get to see it.
And why do we have so many inmates? The drug war and government expansion with no end in sight.
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