Controversial TSA Nudie X-Ray Machines Sent To Prisons

An anonymous reader writes "The controversial TSA backscatter X-ray machines are being sent to prisons. According to Federal times, 'The controversial airport screening machines that angered privacy advocates and members of Congress for its revealing images are finding new homes in state and local prisons across the country, according to the Transportation Security Administration.' 154 backscatter X-rays have already ended up in Iowa, Louisiana, and Virginia prisons. TSA is working to find homes for the remaining machines. Per the article: '"TSA and the vendor are working with other government agencies interested in receiving the units for their security mission needs and for use in a different environment," TSA spokesman Ross Feinstein said.'"

Comments

Miss world competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the USA hosts it, then it is good to be 100% sure that one of the contestants is not a terrorist.

Admission of Guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

They were treating us like prisoners.

Re:Admission of Guilt

[TheCarp]

Not true at all. If a prisoner sues the prison believing the machines to be unsafe, the prisoner is more likely to get a fair hearing and the prison unlikely to to get away with glossing over health and safety issues related to the machines....whereas the TSA had the carte blanche in the name of Fatherland Security!

Re:Admission of Guilt

[TWX]

Not true at all. If a prisoner sues the prison believing the machines to be unsafe, the prisoner is more likely to get a fair hearing and the prison unlikely to to get away with glossing over health and safety issues related to the machines....whereas the TSA had the carte blanche in the name of Fatherland Security!

Right. Because being a prisoner guarantees one's rights, access to legal counsel, timely medical care, and protection from being violently abused...

Re:Admission of Guilt

[Gr8Apes]

....whereas the TSA had the carte blanche in the name of Fatherland Security!

and yet you could always opt out. Don't be a sheep.

When you go to prison

[buchner.johannes]

You should only lose one right: Freedom.

Not
  - security of your personal well being
  - privacy
  - respect to the human
  - torture (psychological or physical)
  - physical punishment.

The punishment is withdrawing freedom, not becoming a sub-human. Once you leave prison, you should be considered a typical citizen again -- you served your sentence, so it must not carry on forever.

That said, punishment is known to not be efficient, and not a deterrent for others (as most crimes are not driven by thinking long about the consequences). So modern prisons focus on re-constituting the citizen to full capacity. Because it works better than punishing.

Re:When you go to prison

[JaredOfEuropa]

True, though you could argue that being locked up with other dangerous criminals, ensuring your security can only be assured by a decrease in privacy (frisking, cell inspections). And once you're a ward of the state, the state assumes a much larger than normal responsibility for your security.

Also, punishment works pretty well to prevent criminals from committing crimes while in jail (sure, not 100%, as others pointed out before). That's not about being hard on crime; it's about applying the most beneficial (to society) and just (to the criminal) consequence of crime, recidivism as well as the seriousness of the offense being other factors. A warning for first timers, correction for repeaters, and if you make it clear that you won't listen to reason, society will be better off with you behind bars for a few years.

Re:When you go to prison

[LordLimecat]

. So modern prisons focus on re-constituting the citizen to full capacity. Because it works better than punishing.

Always relevant in these discussions:
According to the Humanitarian theory, to punish a man because he deserves it, and as much as he deserves, is mere revenge, and, therefore, barbarous and immoral. It is maintained that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter others by example or to mend the criminal. When this theory is combined, as frequently happens, with the belief that all crime is more or less pathological, the idea of mending tails off into that of healing or curing and punishment becomes therapeutic. Thus it appears at first sight that we have passed from the harsh and self-righteous notion of giving the wicked their deserts to the charitable and enlightened one of tending the psychologically sick.......

My contention is that this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being.

The reason is this. The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust. I do not here contend that the question ‘Is it deserved?’ is the only one we can reasonably ask about a punishment. We may very properly ask whether it is likely to deter others and to reform the criminal. But neither of these two last questions is a question about justice. There is no sense in talking about a ‘just deterrent’ or a ‘just cure’. We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.

Making all criminals subject to a clinical internment: Im sure that couldnt possibly go wrong. Insane asylums of the early 1900s? Unit 731? Josef Mengele? Pre-emptive organ harvesting? Nah, Im sure your idea would work out fine.

Re:When you go to prison

[LordLimecat]

It is utterly hilarious that you would mock systems of retributive justice in (apparent) favor of ones of clinical rehabilitation-- considering just how Orwellian it is to turn the justice system into a clinical one.

Has no one read 1984? Is no one concerned with just how ominous things like a justice system focused on "reconstituting" (or, perhaps, "reeducating?) would be?

Re:When you go to prison

[ThisIsAnonymous]

I think your Not list makes sense other than on Privacy. I don't see how we could imprison anyone without the loss of privacy. The very act of locking someone up would seem to involve some type of monitoring (so you know if they are actually locked up) which in turn means they lose some of their privacy (since you know where they are at all times).

Re:When you go to prison

[umghhh]

There is always a way around the difficulties. I would imagine that a prison is in itself a terrible thing to be in, no need for torture and some such. There are people there that can be helped in form of taking medication, by showing how to control their anger. There are also others that can be corrected by the fact they have been caught already. There are still others, for whom no amount of correction will help, who see prison term as unfortunate period of time they have to serve and possibly shorten in any way available. You have all those people - no need to apply not tested drugs combination to execute people that possibly did not commit the crime they are dying for, or put into inhumane conditions for smoking a prism of #. If I understand this correctly you are arguing that any form of changing of the mind, however peaceful and voluntary, ultimately leads to scenarios Orwell described in 1984 or Borges in Clockwork Orange. That is simply not true and if terrible things happen there is a way for the society to improve on that.

Re:When you go to prison

[jythie]

'effective' is a problematic term. Specifically, one has to look at the purpose of 'punishment' before one can determine if it is being effective or not, and the goal of punishment has nothing to do with deterrent, it is to please 3rd parties.

Re:When you go to prison

[ILongForDarkness]

I'm not sure how correctional correctional facilities are. I think some people will stop doing crime when they get out because they've had a theoretical punishment turn into an actual one they've experienced. A 20 yr old might think: "oh I won't get caught I'm too smart" and even if I do jails have become so easy now that big deal I'll be bored for a few years. But after having actually experienced it, and having things they didn't even think about happening (like loosing family members while in, or having their kids grow up without them etc) they don't want to go through it again. It isn't necessarily that they've been "corrected" from their bad behaviour just their relative weighting of the alternatives have been adjusted: it is no longer worth the time to do the crime.

Re:When you go to prison

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on the person. Some people live in areas where there are no jobs, period, so in order to make money, criminal activities have to be done to put food on the plate.

Other people just were not raised in an environment other than "they have it, you don't, you take it".

Finally there are the drug addicted types who just have no higher functioning other than to grab something for their next high.

Yes, there are the hardened criminals. Those and the habitually violent ones are the ones that need to be separated from society.

However, I wonder something. For a fraction of the cost of the SWAT teams and weaponry, we could give every single American citizen minimum wage, even if they do nothing at all but watch Springer re-runs. That is about $22,000 a year. It costs more to keep someone in prison, even in a minimum security lockup.

Couple this with drug decriminalization, even though one side would be screaming about "the dole" or a welfare state, it would go far to reduce crime and boost mental health in general. You build morale in a country, people start policing themselves.

In the long run, it would save money and reduce crime. It is sad, but people have to turn to crime to feed themselves in the US, and if this were not the case, the cost of this stipend to all US citizens would be a drop in the bucket compared to the financial losses due to crime and having to keep buying the latest/great security gadget.

Blecch, I feel like a leftie, but sometimes paying for a social safety net is as important to national security as finding another 10,000 RPM fully auto pistol.

Re:When you go to prison

[ILongForDarkness]

I don't see how punishment is immoral: if as the first paragraph states it is in proportion to the damage of the crime. Not everything is monitary but say someone steals your wallet with $200 in it. If months later cops catch the criminal would it be unreasonable for them to take $200 from the criminals wallet and give it to you even if it isn't the same $200 they took? With emotional/physical damages it is harder to balance things out of course but neither of the alternative reasons are acceptable to me for a simple reason: changing moral norms/noisy governments/religions.

Deterrence: what if you do a crime with low impact but that the government decides is a politically great thing to be seen as cracking down on? Say gay sex a hundred years ago, or smoking pot. Getting the required level of deterrence might require a hugely disproportionate punishment on the few that you catch.

curative: social norms change and governments generally follow the lead of the masses/majority religion. So things that are otherwise not clearly harmful might be illegal for no other reason than because the government decides to run a christian/muslim/flying spaghetti monster society. What if your "crime" is a matter of personal choice and victimless? What if you don't want to be cured? When people are clearly mentally ill we might force them to be cured under the assumption that they aren't mentally able to understand the consequences of their refusing treatment (or the benefits of having treatment). But psychology is too easily controlled by societies definition of socially acceptable that you'll end up in the same situation: governments/religions will dictate what is "sane" behaviour. Example: people don't masturbate in public because it is seen as rude (and decades of religious indoctrination tells them sex is embarassing/immoral/private). But say someone wanted to have a wank on a bus, who was hurt? At worse it would be a health hazard if they don't clean up after themselves as people are quite capable of looking the other way when they don't want to see something if they chose to stare and get offended inside I'd argue that would be their problem not his.

Re:When you go to prison

[Artifakt]

Removal doesn't, by itself imply punishment, at least not punishment appropriate to a particular crime. We could remove criminals from society permanently by hanging them all, even the ones who merely wrote bad checks. We could make all sentences life without possibility of parole, or punish with massive but brief periods of torture where the criminal was not kept from society for more than a few days or so, or various methods that would have no real connection between what crime was committed and the severity of the punishment.

  But once we start trying to make punishment fit the crime, we have real problems with removal being a consideration. We let criminals have access to lawyers, send and recieve mail, have visitors, and so on. We limit access to the rest of society, but except in cases such as solitary confinement and supermax lock downs, we don't take those limits to the extreme. We just put enough restrictions of the criminals we can control them. We have to put control restrictions on them whether the goal is to punish, to deter, or to rehabilitate. As, for example, putting them out on parole where they rejoin the general society, but restricting them associating with other former criminals. Sure, those restrictions may feel like punishments to the individual, but the individual criminal has to be controlled to achieve any of the possible goals, justice, deterrence, punishment, rehabilitation, whatever. A criminal who thinks society has no right to punish him may think of the same restrictions as abuses, bullying, or the consequences of class struggle, and not consider it as 'punishment' at all. .

If removal from society is a legitimate motive, then what happens (to take a real world case of which I have personal knowledge) when a criminal is a large, muscular male who has a history of unarmed assaults on citizens, specific to bar fights, and he gets shanked in the pen and ends up a parapelegic with limited movement of the upper body and a regular need for dialysis? Should this result in automatic release? All this guy ever did was get drunk and then get into fights, and he doesn't sound like he poses much risk of that now, so do we still need to remove him from society? I can see a parole board taking the protection of society issue into account here, but I can see them taking a lot of other things into account as well, such as whether he may get better medical care on the outside.

And what about rapists? Should their sentences take into account whether their testosterone levels are still similar to when they went in or not? Should we free the teacher who molested her student because she has passed through menopause and so may (or arguably, may not).have much less interest in reoffending? (I may be stretching that last point a bit - we don't usually seem to sentence female teachers to all that much time for sex with their students, we don't know how much menopause will affect a given woman's sex drive, etc.).

I'm not saying you are wrong to factor in removal, just that a. we can't always count it as a factor at all, and b. we don't often know how to evaluate what society needs and what the criminal needs, even if we want to factor in removal.

Re:When you go to prison

[erikkemperman]

Decriminalisation of drugs would also go some way toward slightly less insane levels of incarceration? Having 5% of the population the US account for 25% of the world's prisoners. That is just batshit unhinged.

Re:When you go to prison

[LordLimecat]

Rather than forcing rehabilitation on prisoners, what about giving them a choice to participate in rehabilitation programs?

I would be less opposed to it, except that A) im pretty certain it would end up mandatory (slippery slopes are real), and B) it seems to undermine a system based on justice if someone can choose to get out of justice.

Im all for providing resources during incarceration to allow people to get their act together, but I dont think its healthy to ever lose sight of the fact that their incarceration is, first and foremost, punitive.

Re:When you go to prison

[LordLimecat]

The "fundamental issues leading to imprisonment" are that a free-willed individual broke society's rules.

There are factors that can cause people to go down a bad path, and we should work to address them-- but lets not ever make the mistake of shifting responsibility away from the person who made the choices.

Re:When you go to prison

[Your.Master]

For a fraction of the cost of the SWAT teams and weaponry, we could give every single American citizen minimum wage, even if they do nothing at all but watch Springer re-runs. That is about $22,000 a year.

This doesn't sound true. American citizens are about 300 million people. Giving them all $22k per year means about 6.6 trillion dollars. Let's me generous and say the "fraction" you allude to is 1/2, then we need 13.2 trillion dollars spent on swat. From what I've read, the total US police expenditure is closer to $100 billion, which is orders of magnitude less.

You *may* be able to "top up" the very poorest US citizens with that kind of budget (though I'm skeptical), and maybe we decide that children don't count or something, but you couldn't give every single American citizen minimum wage.

I think the US could afford to consider doing it, but it would be more than the cost of SWAT teams and weaponry.

Health Concerns

[Agilulf]

Weren't these machines banned in Europe over health concerns from radiation exposure? I know that these are prisoners but shouldn't the health effects of such a machine be studied prior to deploying stuff like this out into the world? http://science.howstuffworks.c...

Re:Health Concerns

[Anonymous Coward]

It damages your corneas quite rapidly. I saw a poster at the ARVO annual meeting a fortnight ago by a researcher called Masami Kojima. Basically, there's lots of things that emit that wavelength -- your car's radar cruise control being one that I remember -- but that's pretty weak. These scanners... not so weak. It increases the temperature of your corneas as your eyes absorb the radiation; a few degrees can cause a fair bit of damage. You so don't want to be stuck in one, and I'd worry about cumulative exposure if I were a really regular traveler.

Re:Health Concerns

[Jason Levine]

That's because everything is forgiven if you shout TERRORISM loud enough.

Also, most politicians won't even consider going against the TSA on this because they are too afraid of being called "soft on terrorism" during their next election campaign. Fear isn't just for keeping the populace in line - it keeps the politicians in line also.

Re:Health Concerns

[TWX]

It's not power so much as distance. Radiation is subject to inverse-square law, and the closer the emission source and the wider the emitter, the more radiation received by the subject. Since the point of these machines was to invasively scan the entire body it would make sense that it would subject the body to a lot of radiation.

The solution will probably be something as pedestrian as special goggles that the prisoners are given the option to wear, something that looks like those small swim goggles but are made out of a different material. Of course prisoners won't really understand that, won't be told of the health risks, and thus won't ask for them, so they'll just hang on a peg on the operator's console and gather dust.

Re:No, no, send the pervs!

[Trepidity]

Don't worry, plenty of them already have employment as prison guards...

Re:No, no, send the pervs!

[rmdingler]

Right.

What happened to the good ole days when these contraptions were vetted on prisoner populations before being approved for widespread public use?

so to make this perfectly clear

[nimbius]

The people who would be inconvenienced by a fully nude rendering of their body presented to a remote office worker making minimum wage have objected to said technology. These people are politicians and businessmen, members of the plutocracy in some cases and powerful individuals in other cases. The machines were withdrawn because they were perturbed, not you.

when we say, 'privacy concerns raised by airport passengers do not apply in many cases to prisoners' what we mean is that we reserve the right to treat United States citizens designated as prisoners, or detained by law enforcement while charged with a crime, like human fucking garbage. We categorically embrace the power to bombard those in custody arbitrarily and at our will with ionizing radiation that depicts them nude and has been proven by numerous security experts to be easily thwarted. We endorse the ability to do this with or without their consent because theyve written a bad check, been charged with an unpaid parking ticket, or have a warrant for an unreturned library book.

This is a bigger deal than most readers understand. Namely because America has the highest rate of incarceration in the known world. We arrest and imprison people at or above the height of the Soviet Union, so to conject that the reader would not be subject to this type of technology in the future isnt at all certain. In a "detention facility" or "correctional center" as its known it is implicitly understood that your moral and ethical treatise concerning the dangers and repercusssions of using this technology are tolerated only as long as it takes your corrections officer to apply her riot baton to designated 'departmentally approved areas' of your tender human body.

The systemic repercussions of widespread application of X-Ray backscatter systems in the various private penal colonies of the united states, while financially sound at its salesmans word, certainly isnt a long term bet to hedge. Incidences of debilitating cancers will need medical treatment for both guards and prisoners alike as has been shown in the incidences of cancer for certain groups of TSA screeners. Liability for introducing a prisoner or employee to a cancer suspect agent will likely follow the course of most other folly of american scientific perversion in the hands of government. It will likely be assigned to the government, who in turn will insist it was the technology, and in turn the manufacturer will absolve itself through a complex series of medical puppet shows, out of court settlements, and evasive restructuring practices so as to ensure no real harm comes to the corporation. Once your sentence is complete, and you emerge from prison, the biblical retribution set upon you is now the denial of employment, housing, food stamps, medicare, and finally a malignant cancer risk substantially greater than the rest of society as your corrections system applied background scanners quietly and incessantly for the duration of your incarceration.

I can't imagine anything going wrong here

[c]

Besides the privacy and safety concerns of these things, I was under the impression that a major flaw is that it's a bit too easy to sneak things through them.

Is it really a smart idea to move these things from a place where security is theatre to a place where the targets actually *are* sneaking weapons through security and using those to actually kill other people?

Re:Moved from the 'open' prison to closed prisons.

[TWX]

You can't choose who you live with (that would be 'racist'), so you are a prisoner.

You mean I can't live with Scarlett Johansson? Darn the luck!

You can't simply GET AWAY from people you don't want to associate with (murderers just released from prison, paedophiles just released from prison, gang members, etc.) so you are a prisoner.

There are no violent ex-cons or gang members in my neighborhood or at my place of work...

You aren't entitled to a fair amount of land, from birth, just for being alive, because somebody else STOLE the land from your parents, so you and they have to work as indentured servants in order to just be able to afford a place to live. The 'laws' are made so that you can't build any sort of house you want, even if you did have land - you have to spend a fortune on a house, so you are still a slave - still in prison.

No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.

Let me repeat that, so it sinks in...

No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.

There are only so many resources on this planet. We are all in competition for those resources. Communities, cities, nations, alliances, are all there for the purpose of attempting to ensure the best access to resources. Different cultures throughout history have been better at it than others, and I'm certain that the current balance will eventually change. Within those spheres of cooperation exists a degree of competition though, as cooperation doesn't automatically mean succor. If parents want their children to succeed then they need to set their children up on a path to help make them succeed. That generally requires having a certain degree of stability of their own to start with, and then generally requires the parents to make some sacrifices of their own to commit the time and resources to the children that they might otherwise want to spend on themselves.

My very strong opinion is that if you can't afford to have children, then don't have children. 'Afford' includes the willingness to commit that time, effort, and money required to do right by them. There are so many ways of avoiding having children while still enjoying a full life that it's stupid to have kids when one isn't prepared to go all-in.

Land isn't your birthright. Your birthright, whether born in Beverly Hills or in Khartoum, is to struggle to get or to keep what you need to live. That's it. The universe owes you nothing.