What are some "new" rights you'd like to see countries commit to?

sumofchemicals@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 206 points –

I know some places are more progressive in this regard. But from the U.S., I'd like to see every person entitled to:

  • shelter
  • food
  • healthcare
  • education and higher education

(As an aside, not sure "right" is the best term here, I think of these more as commitments that society would make because we have abundance. One advantage of the word "right" is that a person is justified in expecting it - it's not welfare/ a benefit / a privilege)

135

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

Anyone held in prison, jail, or other confinement shall be permitted to post up to one kilobyte (1024 characters) of text every day. These posts shall be published on a public web site operated by the imprisoning authority, and in print form in the imprisoning authority's capital city or other central location. These posts shall be tagged with the prisoner's name, geographic location, and any identification number the imprisoning authority uses.

This serves a few purposes:

  • No government or other authority may hold a prisoner secretly.
  • All prisoners may plead their innocence to anyone who cares to hear.
  • No prisoner is to be held in such complete isolation that they can't communicate to the public about the conditions of their imprisonment.
  • Anyone interested in auditing the state of their government's prisons may begin by inspecting the stated locations of prisoners.
  • Any prisoner who is not literate shall be afforded literacy education to enable them to participate.

This may go awry if some prisoners are not remorseful. For example, let's say an extremist murdered some women because he believes them to be inferior. They could use this as a platform it to spout their ideals and to convince others to do it. It would also make it trivial to pass messages from imprisoned gang members outwards to the still-free members. Not exactly things we want to encourage.

It's also never going to be an effective method for transparency once the government/facility inevitably starts censoring certain contributors for more or less legitimate safety concerns. Most inmates already have ways to communicate with the outside world anyway through their lawyers and families, so I don't really see the point for either side of the cell door.

Yeah because what if the prisoners are like Hannibal Lector and use their speech to remote control people and commit crimes from prison?

I think there's some legitimate concern about essentially giving prisoners a broadcast. You're right that they ought to have some minimum amount of guaranteed communication, but more in the sense that they can call their family or friends without having to pay fees.

Also would love to see solitary confinement outlawed.

Also another problem would be that some languages are more character-efficient than others. E.g. Chinese vs English vs Navajo.

Yeah but what if the prisoners use their 1024 kb to talk about ivermectin, or about eating tide pods, or claiming that sriracha hot sauce is overhyped garbage, or other harmful disinformation?

Didn't think of that did ya?

/s