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Cake day: August 24th, 2019

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  • China does suspended death sentences. If in a 2 year period after your sentencing new charges come to light, you will get the death sentence. I think the point is to incentivize the guilty to admit to all their crimes and not hide anything from the prosecution. I don’t know how well it works as I don’t have data but on paper at least it makes sense. If you get life in prison for your 10 crimes, you might as well admit to the other 4 since the only way it can get worse for you is for police to find out about them and your life in prison turns into death. It’s not a scenario where you gain anything by not talking.


  • The Soviets believed that reform happened through labor and by all accounts they were right, the recidivism rate in the USSR was something like 12-18%. This seems high in isolation but even today recidivism rates are higher.

    This requires an understanding of the causes of crime which are pretty much common knowledge at this point so I’m not going to repeat them. But there is a difference between capitalist labor and proletarian labor. In the USSR, prisoners worked on public interests projects, maybe even projects that they would benefit from later (such as the Volga Canal for inmates living in Moscow). Giving back to the collective from which you took in the form of labor. Gulags were pretty much self-sufficient villages, some didn’t even need guards but I assume had officials working there. Being able to still have contact with the outside world and socially as well is very important for inmates and to be honest I don’t think capitalist countries are going about it in the right way. There’s been several stories here of inmates taken outside who managed to escape from their leisurely walks and hurt people in the process. But I think this is more of a structural problem, trying to do too much too fast. They know this is beneficial for inmates but the structure in place is the penitentiary structure and not able to accommodate this new method properly.

    In capitalist countries, prison labor only enriches the bourgeoisie and serves no common purpose. Rolling cigarettes or stamping license plates is not in the public interest.










  • There’s a commune like this in Denmark, very historical, called Christiania. Due to some legal loophole the grounds of an old barracks in the center of Copenhagen were not under the jurisdiction of any government and so people started moving in and occupying the grounds. In their first years they drove out the LGBT community from the grounds, and then were plagued with gang violence for the next 30 years. Their economy relied entirely on selling weed to clueless tourists. Also lots of “no photo” signs everywhere.

    Starting in 2012 Christiania started buying up the property because of gang violence, and part of the deal to do that was that they had to build low-income housing. This also put an end to the effective commune, as it is now administered by a foundation that exists under Danish law. Though they’ve been relying on city services such as water, electricity and waste management since 1994.