This issue has been reported the same way going back at least 20 years. Climate change doesn't make prisons in the US South any more of a human rights violation. Urgent action on this issue has been needed... for a long time.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."
When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.
Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.
The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That's the solution.
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INFO
• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• Killings by law enforcement in Canada
• Killings by law enforcement in the United Kingdom
• Killings by law enforcement in the United States
• Know your rights: Filming the police
• Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of 'I can’t breathe' (as of 2020)
• Police aren't primarily about helping you or solving crimes.
• Police lie under oath, a lot
• Police spin: An object lesson in Copspeak
• Police unions and arbitrators keep abusive cops on the street
• Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States
• When the police knock on your door
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MODERATORS
Can't see your logic. Some decrepit old prison with no air conditioning was 95° in the summer twenty years ago, now it's 105°, but you don't think climate change is making such prisons more of a human rights violation?
Yeah because it was already too hot then. In other words if it kills 12 people in the summer of 2006 and 50 people now in 2023, it's worse but whether or not it is a violation of human rights is a yes or no question, and the answer is yes.
Uh... What? Can you make an even more outrageously bad headline?
Wtl tho?
Wtl?
Where’s the lie?
That it is not a torture chamber and that climate change has nothing to do with it.
Simply install AC and there can be all the climate change with zero impact in houses.
Building prisons shitty is not climate change. And while heat is crap, it is not torture.
Have you ever been in a prison?
Prisons were built for pre-climate change conditions.
If heat can’t be torture, how do children left in cars die?
Not in a prison we discuss here.
Installing AC later on is no problem.
Just because something can be harmful does not make it torture.
Yet intense heat has so affected imprisoned Louisiana adults that officials have had to step up suicide watches. At the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation found indoor temperatures reaching 145 degrees last year. In Texas, where 70% of prison living quarters reportedly lack air conditioning, incarceration becomes execution, as climate change drives already blistering summer temperatures even higher.
In what sense is locking people in 145° cells not torture?
That is crazy hot. And obviously very bad. I don't know the right term for that (negligence?), but it is not torture, just like with the child in the car. Torture is with intent to get something etc., this here are "simply" shitty people that risk the health of others to... save money?
Torture, says the Oxford dictionary, is "the action or practice of inflicting severe pain or suffering on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something."
Your argument, then, is that since the prisoners would be confined in the same cells even on a cool spring morning, it's not 'torture' to confine them there when it's 145°.
Is that where you stand?
Using the term torture for something that is negligence would strip all meaning of actual torture. Actual torture is on a whole different level. That is what I am trying to say. That does not mean that this negligence is without consequences or harmless.