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[Ed note] Background taken from: The Intercept :
Barrett Brown, whose column received the 2016 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary, is an imprisoned U.S. journalist and the founder of Project PM, a crowd-sourced investigation into the cyber-industrial complex. In 2012, the FBI raided his house, and later that year Barrett was indicted on 12 federal charges relating to the 2011 Stratfor hack. The most controversial charge, linking to the hacked data, was dropped, but in 2015 Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison.
[/Ed note]
I never really got a chance to play any pen-and-paper role-playing games growing up, so being thrown into a prison system in which such things as Dungeons and Dragons are relatively common constituted one of the silver linings of my 2012 arrest, along with not having to deal with an infestation of those little German roaches that had colonized my kitchen or having to see "World War Z."
As it happens, I'd actually learned about the prevalence of tabletop games among inmates a few months before my own incarceration, in the days after the FBI first raided both my apartment and my mother's home in March 2012 and seized laptops and papers without yet making an arrest. As they themselves noted in the search warrant, which the late Michael Hastings published at BuzzFeed, the focus of the investigation was my collaborative journalism outfit Project PM as well as echelon2.org, the online repository where we posted our ongoing findings on the still-mysterious "intelligence contracting" sector (which has since been moved here). The warrant listed HBGary Federal and Endgame Systems — two firms on which we'd focused particular attention — as topics for the FBI's search. This was revealing. A year prior, a raid by Anonymous on the servers of HBGary had revealed, among other things, the firm's leading role in a conspiracy by a consortium calling itself Team Themis to conduct an array of covert operations against WikiLeaks and even journalists like Glenn Greenwald, prompting a congressional inquiry that would ultimately be squashed by a Republican committee chairman.
Is playing an immersive fantasy game with people who have poor impulse control wise?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by t-3 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:57PM
Is playing an immersive fantasy game with people who have poor impulse control wise?
I can see how you would think this, but it couldn't be farther from the truth. People in prison are generally very polite and respective of each other's boundaries because if you're not - you might get killed. Those who cause problems get killed or moved to higher security levels.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @05:31AM
The interesting conversations are the ones on reddit where the guards talk about different prisons. They said a womans prision there is constant middling shit going on. They ranked it as a constant 6-7 out of 10. For a mens prison he ranked it as either 1 OR 10. It was either not bad or total fucking chaos.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @06:58AM
Against that, it is a high-stress environment and people who tailor their conduct to likely consequences are statistically under-represented there. Except that Three Rivers has a minimum security camp attached. I would guess he's in the camp which means he's surrounded by people who have avoided getting into fights
Polite and respectful, agreed, is the expected norm of behavior. If you're ever sent to prison, honoring everyone else's boundaries greatly reduces your risk of getting hurt. Those last shreds of dignity and privacy people have in prison are guarded fanatically.
If you avoid one thing, it's being an informant. If you avoid two things, sex and drugs. Three things, gangs, gambling, and gossip. A poker game in maximum security would create all the risks hinted at in the article.
Oh, as long as we're on the subject of prison conditions, if you believe in a Club Fed with tennis courts read http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/04/cia-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-released-prison-heres-his-final-letter-loretto [commondreams.org] .
Anyway from all I've read you're in more danger from health "services" than from the inmates, especially in low security.