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No Grand Theft Auto In Prison?
Thanks to Frictionless Insight for pointing to an Australian article discussing a judge's suggestion that Grand Theft Auto-style games not be available in prison. According to the report, "Bradley Scott McConkey... led police on a 200km car chase at speeds of up to 180 kilometres per hour, as well as stealing cars at knifepoint and committing armed robbery on two businesses", and additionally, "...a psychologist's report said McConkey had played Playstation's Grand Theft Auto during a previous jail term." Due to the similarity of the games and the crime, the judge suggested "...the appropriateness of Grand Theft Auto-style games in a prison environment was questionable", since it "provides opportunities for rehearsing their destructive activities."
Oh my, my tax dollars are paying for that now? I want a Console for x-mass, send me one Uncle Sam!
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Why is my money paying for this? They shouldnt have tetris, let alone GTA. Hell, I dont have a playstation 2, why should a bank robber in jail?
/usr/games/fortune
That white collar crime is looking better and better. Hopefully I won't get sent to federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison.
Maybe I'm ignorant here, but I'm not surprised by the fact that they can't play GTA in prison... I'm surprised by the fact they have video games at ALL in prison. This is news to me. Maybe I should go rob somebody so I can get free food and housing, and now PS2 games in the slammer...
Don't take GTA away from them, just give them a version where they get gunned down in a hail of bullets within seconds of commiting a crime.
A little conditioning goes a long way.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
You're dealing with an adult who has demonstrated that they are irresponsible and a danger to society, not a minor who has avoided screwing up in real life even though he loves playing GTA. You're also dealing with a guy who is in prison: he doesn't get the bennies the good guys do. This is hardly a case of The Man being scared that video games will create monsters. The judge realized that with normal people that isn't going to happen, but with people who have demonstrated they can't manage their behavior and steal cars at knifepoint and lead police on high speed chases, it's a valid concern.
I am Jack's writable stack pointer.
The bigger issue is... I can play video games in prison? What the hell's with that?
works good for anger management.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
Is anyone else more concerned that Australia can't give a tougher sentence to people who commit violent crimes (armed robbery)? Admittedly, I don't know much about the Australian justice system. Do they actually put people away for the entirety of their sentence? If so then the sentence isn't TOO bad (seems like it could still be longer), but in America the above sentence would end up being under three years if the prisoner met enough parole conditions...
This is a nation founded as a prison colony. They think Rugby isn't rough enough so they made up Australian Rugby. They are psychos down there. Have you ever tried drinking with an Australian?? They have a death wish!
I don't question anything the Australians have done, except maybe using PAL instead of NTSC. I mean these are the people that "Hey, Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious: Get out!" Sound like a bright and psychotic bunch those Aussies
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
it "provides opportunities for rehearsing their destructive activities."
This is considered as credit for rockstar, for devloping such a realistic simulation. I would consider this as an ad more of it as anti-campaign..
The lunatic is in my head
Yep, assume all that, and it is a highly useful simulation.
Bradley Scott McConkey led police on a 200km car chase at speeds of up to 180 kilometres per hour, as well as stealing cars at knifepoint and committing armed robbery on two businesses. If he spent a total of 15 minutes stealing cars at knifepoint, and commiting armed robbery while maintaining a total average speed of 155kph when he was driving, how big is his butthole now?
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I'm thinking the key part of this article is the fact that he played it "during a previous jail sentence."
I mean, doesn't that give you some kind of clue to what you should let inmates play?
"Yeah, Hi, I've been incarcerated before."
"Oh, okay. Here's your copy of GTA3. Have a nice day."
I can't believe my tax dollars are paying prisons to make the problem worse. I know everyone says it, but prisons should be rehabilitating them for acceptance in everyday moral society... and most certainly keeping them from GTA until they are deemed stable enough to determine right from wrong.
Insert clever one liner here.
If the average inmate is as bad as GTA as I am it should be a massive deterrent to crime. I suck so much its unbelievable - although I can snipe and strafe and murder with the best of them in CS or UT, I cannot hit the broadside of a barn with a shotgun in GTA3 - I dont think i've ever completed an entire mission without a cheat code in any of the games.
Give them this game! Rockstar, make a harder version for criminals, one with alternate paths like community college and construction careers.
And books....you can't forget the books. We wouldn't want someone reading some murder mystery while in for a dime on manslaughter. Why don't we just cage them up in bamboo cells, call them animals, and set them all loose in Australia after they complete their term. GTA is whats happening in the real world, and if you keep your inmates secluded and sheltered from real life not only do you run the risk of culture shock when they get out, you make them less efficent in society. If you want to ban someone from playing GTA even after they run out their term, well, I suppose the ACLU would have something to say.
Wasn't Australia a British penal colony some times ago ? That would explain some things.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
Wasn't the original GTA completely banned in Australia? I thought they kept up the trend to present-day too. Why would the prisoner even have access to it?
They let inmates play video games, lift weights etc etc to keep them from rioting and raping each other. The same people whining about all these perks are the same people who would raise hell if any more money went into fixing the prison system; making them secure institutions that are harsh yet humane instead of a candyland for gangs.
"Fucking duh!"
-- (from the 2002 Live album)
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
...the problem is that violent crime is a successful option in the game. It's teaching - reinforcing gently but over and over and over again - that "violent crime can get you stuff".
When David Birnie, serial killer along with his wife Catherine, was given a computer in prison to write up his life story as a warning to others, he promptly began turning out sick porn which bore an uncanny resemblance to the perversions and murders he and his wife had actually committed. It's not the computer's fault, but the computer certainly helped to propagate Birnie's lethal sickness rather than provide a catharsis or a useful warning. Nobody will be surprised that his computer was taken away again.
Given the proportion of inmates service time for violence and/or stealing, a game like GTA could most moderately be described as a bloody stupid choice for a prison. The console is not really a problem, although you could argue with some justification that part of the intent of imprisoning someone is to make the consequences of their crime unattractive to them and that the console is frustrating that intent. But given that the US Army is using first-person role-playing games as part of their troop training (and as a recruiting tool), it seems amazingly stupid to allow anything like GTA there. Any violent or destructive game hardly furthers any of the purposes of a prison, but the gobbledok who let GTA in needs his head read.
BTW, posting this from Western Australia.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The obvious first step, then, would be to do something about illiteracy. And I'm not talking about boring traditional lessons even though they would be better than nothing.
Sitting them in front of television is much worse than useless (Anton LaVey, founder of Satanism, wrote "Kneeling before the cathode ray God, with our TV Guide concordance in hand, we maintain the illusion of choice by flipping channels (chapters and verses). It doesn't matter what is flashing on the screen - all that's important is that the TV stays on".
After noticing that, to let in an RPG that actively trains inmates to be violent thieves is just mind-blowingly dumb.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
/ME wonders aloud how GTA is going to help with option 1.
/ME also wonders why we have to do one option at a time.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and no points left on their licence, and the objective of driving safely around the city from goal to goal while the rest of the traffic drives it like they stole it and tries to carjack them.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is off topic but as a Londoner I feel strongly about it (and for the record, I don't think any adult in jail should have access to a games console unless they are, for example, in a minimum security facility, in which case it's not really relevent if they have access to violent games or not, because volient criminals and those likely to re-offend should not be in minium security jails (IMO)).
But I digress. On beggers...
You same the very same people year after year at places like Oxford Circus, going their way down the tube asking for money and stinking up the carrage and pestering people for money.
I keep running into these fuckers, they are quite happy to pick fights and shout out 'Cunt!' and 'Motherfucker!' at members of the public just because they don't hand over cash to them. I'm fed up with it and would like to see the lot of them doing hard labour, jail or the army. They are NOT simply nice people on the inside. They are NOT all down on their luck. Some of them (most of them, being relatively fit, young, 20-30 year olds) are violent, drug addicted, criminals who will quite happily rob you at knife point if they think they will get away with it. By these people a sandwich (suckered!) and they will very often *throw it at you!* and ask for money, not food (I've seen this happen more than once, and usually accompanied by swearing). Please, if you visit London, don't give money or food or ANY sympathy to these scum, some of us have to live with them. DO buy a copy of the Big Issue however - it provides gainful employment while rasing money for the homeless, it's quite respectable.
Some of these people are mentally ill and need to be cared for, most of the ones I see just need a swift kick up the arse to get in line with the rest of society and stop leeching of the state (to which we pay such high taxes in the UK), stinking up the city, putting off visitors and getting in the way (and being abusive to, and commiting crimes against) tax paying residents. I consider myself left wing, but I still strongly think people have a duty to the state.
There are LOTS of options in country like the UK, who's state employs more people in heath care and social services then any other government in Europe (dispite us not having the largest area, or the largest population), it even has more employees than any other *company* in Europe. Our state apparatus is a sociallist legacy, and very extensive.
Our homeless housing projects are by and large excellent. There are plenty of hostels in the UK, with beds that go empty every night. The waiting list is about 2 weeks (max) for a perminant place. There is no shorting of housing, but to see the same people, month after month, year after year, you wouldn't think it. A one bedroomed flat in London will easily set you back 1,500 USD a month, that's what people on the streets in London say they want, well no, tough shit, go and live somewhere else, they can get a job, work hard and come back in a few years and pay for one themselves - they have no right to expect the state to put them up for gratis in what is the 3rd most expensive city in the world.
If your living on the streets for years in a country like the UK (which, for those who don't know, has a huge excess of housing in the north). In many cities in Scotland the council *advertise* hosing vacancies ('Contact us, get council housing, no waiting list!') in reasonable areas. I had a friend, a young fit ~22 year old single white male with no dependants, who was employed and quite happily living at home apply to the council for housing (it's cheaper, he was curious to see if he could get anything), and got council housing within the *week*. He must have been the lowest priority canidate, and he still got something right away, he's know bought the house from the council because he liked it so much (and they have too many, so are trying to sell them off).
I bought a Scottish drunk in north London breakfast in a cafe and asked him how long he had been in London (I refused t
And I played the Lord Of The Rings game, so gimme your valuables, especially and gold rings because they're mine! My own! My precious!
When are lawyers going to stop pinning the guilt on the first handy schmuck that comes along?
Until then, I'm keeping a Taco Bell wrapper in my car so I can blame that little dog if I get pulled over.
Could someone tell me again why I bust my ass 10 hours a day, 4 days a week, while prisoners don't work (or do hospital laundry, tops) and get a playstation? Great message...if I commit a crime, I go to jail, sit around and play video games.
Meanwhile, I don't know a single state that doesn't have roads in need of work. I'm thinking we could help out the road crews a bit by assigning prison labor to the work the normal road crews dread because it's dangerous or exceedingly difficult. Prisoners can earn their fucking keep.
Help us build a better map!
I'm not with you 99%.
This sentence isn't too short. Incarceration simply does not work. I am not aware of the rehabilitation programs in Australia, nor the general crime situation.
But I can tell you how horrible of a mistake the "tough on crime" initiative in the US has been. It was founded on the studies of just one man (the name eludes me, I'm sure you could look it up if the topic interests you). That was in the early 1970's, and it sounded good to certain people, so longer sentences were instituted. They've been in place ever since, and since then the perecentage of Americans in the jail system has more then doubled (tripled?), and the crime rate, especially violent crimes, has been skyrocketing - very often from past inmates. Recidivism is far higher now than it was before Tough On Crime.
What's more amusing is that one guy who was so actively supporting the move to this, in just a few years had a complete turnaround, denounced the Tough On Crime initiative, but no one listened.
Summary: Long sentences do not work. The only effective way to "fix" someone is long, mandatory rehabilitation programs. Simply sticking somone in jail for a lot of years does nothing but make them dependent on the crime system.
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