>and you are not supposed to enjoy it if you are.

Hard disagree. Prison is the one you're not supposed to enjoy, jail is the place you use to keep people BEFORE they are judged.

A jail should limit the people held only as much as needed for the safety of the public and the handlers, but no punishment should be inflicted because no one's a convicted criminal (yet).

And in any case, prison should have a strong component of making the guilty person fit to live among others. A person that's been made to sit still staring at the wall for all their waking life for years is a person I definitely don't want as a neighbour, because there's no way they come out of that sane.

Society can be optimized for the law-abiding without being needlessly cruel.

Jail's job is to keep you around during your legal process. You're not supposed to enjoy jail but it's not supposed to be torture, either. Torture does not belong in a civilized society and especially should not be used against those who have not even been formally charged. much less convicted, of a crime.

Sorry, I think you mean abiding*. But laws are not some moral edicts handed down by god. They can and often are wrong or seriously misguided. Laws can and should be broken if and only if the agent at hand has a thorough understanding of why they are violating the law. Breaking a law and antisocial behavior are not necessarily equivalent.

This is not about enjoying or not enjoying jail. If you happen to live and work in Japan in a typical job, getting arrested and held within this process for 23 days almost certainly means you're getting fired because you essentially have no contact with the outside world and even if you manage to sneak a word out through your lawyer, most of the employment contracts have clauses to extent of automatic termination for both missing enough days and breaking moral character.

So even if the prosecution decides to drop your case, you're already fucked -- this is not how proper justice system should work.

> You are not supposed to be in jail

Especially If you’re wrongfully arrested. “Optimizing society for law abiding people” means the opposite of what you think it means.

While I agree jail doesn't need to be enjoyable, it should at least be humane and free from torture (psychological or physical).

Also remember that this article is about an experience before any charges were filed, before she'd seen a court room, before she even had the opportunity to prove her innocence or be convicted. "You are not supposed to be in jail" is a laughably naive way of looking at this type of situation.

> It makes sense to optimize society for law obiding people.

I agree, and this system is meant to hold people before they have evidence meaning it can hurt law abiding people.

Right, but there's a core conceit we use in the US (mostly) that you are innocent until you are proven guilty, and if you are wrongfully accused (as was evidently the case from the author), you should perhaps NOT be put into such a grim set of living conditions with essentially no rights.

In this case, the author evidently _was_ a law abiding person, so the optimization failed, senselessly, likely out of a systemic effort to strike enough fear in the populace to over-index towards avoiding the possibility of this sort of situation. (Much like Singapore caning people for minor offenses.)

Whether or not you agree that such draconian punishments or processes are effective or fair is a different discussion, but this person was LITERALLY not supposed to be in jail, so how fair is it that they were removed from polite society for over a month in such poor conditions and at considerable expense?

If someone was arrested and their charges dropped, then what the government did was torture to a law abiding citizen and they should have a duty to compensate them appropriately.

Wait until you will be thrown in jail and tortured for nothing. I have seen frw individuals like you who think "oh I obey the lay so this wouldn't happen to me".

They change their mind oh so quickly after