Prisons not only make the convicts inside them worse, but from my experience and POV, it makes the people observing and interacting with them worse as well.
I say this because while I seem to observe this prison-is-terrible-the-convicts-need-compassion, not one person here has offered to help me in any meaningful way, even though I have documented my trials and tribulations over and over [0][1][2].
I have a 30 year history of software development, with 14 or so with the LAMP-stack. No one reading this is willing to even talk about some side project or prove-yourself 2 week gig? Ok right I get it...this isn't a help wanted or job board fine that's cool.
But still, I'm not getting it anymore...is everyone just into some sort of bullshit social signalling exercise or, perhaps worse, are willing to try to help ex-cons as long as they are funneled into low paying exploitative back-breaking jobs with no future that almost surely will lead 95% back into crime?
If so, can we start being honest about that's what all this discussion is about..."boy someone should sure do something about how screwed these people are but hell no it won't be me."
Yeah, so I'm frustrated and scared and broke and all that, so try to forgive my rant...I'm sure I'll come to regret it as I do so much else in my life.
Eh, they do the same thing to homeless people. (Or women.)
In my experience, it helps to focus on the "I need a job" part (or other specific, constructive assistance) and not so much on the "my life is a shit show" part. I have some sites I can link you to that might be useful to you.
Sorry, I can't do more for you. I do sympathize, but I'm basically broke at the moment myself and I absolutely am not in some kind of position to hire anyone. I just scrape by myself every month, but I do write and try to put out useful information for people in need.
With all due respect I would never hire someone who has been arrested for meth and heroin because it screams potential problems. Regardless of why you may take them they still affect you in the same way they affect a recreational user. All the meth users I have known have become erratic, depressed and eventually stopped and recovered or spiralled out of control. Heroin less so depending on the consistency and quality of supply, consumption methods and ability to service the addiction. The cost of a bad hire is too much. Business is hard enough when you have the perfect team so any signal that an employee may be difficult is enough to turn employers off. This isn't about your technical abilities.
My advice, given your considerable experience, would be to start your own business or if you can't validate any solid ideas start a consultancy. It's highly unlikely your consultancy clients will look up your record.
>With all due respect I would never hire someone who has been arrested for meth and heroin because it screams potential problems.
Is there a term of limitations on that? What if it was 7 years ago? 10? 20? I understand your point of view and it's rational, but as time goes by, do you think it becomes irrational?
Possibly. 7 years or longer I would probably give it much less weight though you can't un-know something like this so it's hard to say it wouldn't affect my decision at all. I guess it depends what the interim 7 years look like.
Non-violent drug offenders being sent to prison is closer to a human rights abuse than a just outcome.
Edit - to be more concise: It's just amazing to me the number of people willing to listen to and preach high and mighty politics while still the world has people willing to work, not do anything to hurt anybody else, and yet they can have such a hard time in a world with so much.
I'll be the first to support the full legalisation and regulation of the recreational drugs market. Abuse of recreational drugs needs to be treated as an illness. I believe happy, healthy and fulfilled individuals don't abuse drugs. Drug abuse is a symptom of a deeper malaise in society as well as in the individual. We, as individuals, reflect our environments in our patterns and behaviours. I am also a big fan of universal basic income as it provides a buffer when needed. On top of this we need educational programs that promote upward mobility, self-reliance and adaptability in a ever changing world. IMO we should be doing the opposite of what we are in so many areas of government and policy. It's hard to know where to start. Thankfully, though it may not seem like it, we are moving in the right direction. Public awareness and consciousness is improving with each generation.
> I'll be the first to support the full legalisation and regulation of the recreational drugs market. Abuse of recreational drugs needs to be treated as an illness.
Catch is, a person having an arrest record for drug possession isn't at all evidence of drug abuse, past or present. That's precisely why I believe criminal records shouldn't be publicly available except in certain cases.
I doubt my record shows this but I've almost been arrested once for carrying an open container. I was driving a friend's car home for him. The officer made me take the breathalyzer test several times. I was not drunk.
In the end I paid the fine because it wasn't worth hiring a lawyer over (and I did have an open container in the car even if it wasn't mine).
What I fear about decriminalization is that it will become a cash cow for local governments (I have much disdain for local and state governments in general but particularly in this case because anything that boosts revenue without increasing taxes is usually seem as a good thing).
> Prisons not only make the convicts inside them worse, but from my experience and POV, it makes the people observing and interacting with them worse as well.
I'm afraid you are spot on. The fact prison most of the time makes people worse (truth be said it does act positively for some people sometimes, albeit rarely) is almost irrelevant here. I think the real problem is how the society at large clusters ex-convicts in a certain moral bucket, ad vitam eternal, when they are out. The idea that they have paid their debt to the society is ... just an idea in reality, and sadly, when they are released, the real punishment begins and makes them pay in all kinds of senses.
Firstly, I know it's not an easy subject with no perfect solution, and perhaps I'm a bit radical, but I think the very concept of rehabilitation will always just be a total joke as long as there is a culture of 'public records'. Especially in this google age. Nowadays, discriminations is getting less and less popular in this country, except towards ex-convicts, that's an open bar right there.
Secondly, disproportionate punishments. I mean, your case is such a perfect illustration. Ninety days in jail for possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use. And as you said with quotes, it was a "deal". Honestly, being an immigrant to this country myself, I'm probably not very well placed to criticize or comment that kind of realities of the justice system but to be honest, I often wonder whether or not people actually realize it's totally out of this world insane, and that very few others places on this planet would have justice systems inflicting such crazy punishments. I kind of suspect most people are in favor of those punishments actually, sometimes just culturally with a moral compass still a bit reminiscent of puritanism, and sometimes based on the belief that harsh sanctions can provide deterrence. One candidate in the last presidential election attempted to pitch the fact that 1.5% of Americans are behind bars as one issue to talk about, but it didn't seem to tackle much interest.
I largely agree but this whole issue needs to be looked at through eyes of compassion first and foremost. Jesus stood by a woman who was about to be stoned for adultery and told her would-be killers that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. Then he began to write in the sand, it doesn't say what he wrote, but it was probably some of the sins of the would be stoners and they fled quickly,
realizing they were no better than she was. I think most americans who would applaud a 90 day sentence for a small quantity of drugs for personal use would feel guilty reading that story in the Bible in that context.
People forget that those who turn to hard drugs don't tend to do so because they're simply rebels spoiling for a fight with the justice system. They do so because they're people and people have problems, every single one of us. There needs to be a return to compassion but as long as drug users are vilified in every possible way on every possible television show, that won't change. Hollywood could lead the return to compassion if it wanted to by raising awareness of what is actually happening in people's lives, how drugs are seen as a (usually bad) solution or an escape and give concrete workable examples of how that can change. In the end, it's a problem of ignorance, i.e. people believe and act one way when they would be best off doing something entirely different were they armed with more information about their problems. Rather than 90 days in jail, it could be 9 weeks of counseling for one or two hours while the person remains a productive member of society.
So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem?
My take on it is somewhat similar with the difference being that since the scene involved invoking a Mosaic law we should look that up and there we find that the 'justification' for capital punishment is that 'lest' the rest of the (presumably holy) community gets infected as in "one bad apple" process. That would make writing on the sand an analog for the /futility/ of keeping /records/ of judgment for an un-Holy people who are (spiritually) as sands in a dune subject to careless winds of material existence.
> So I just don't think attacking this as a problem with long sentences is going to do anything to help anyone. You might get sentences greatly reduced, but have you actually helped the root problem?
The justice system isn't supposed to deal with root problems, but it is supposed to punish crime with a sentence that is both guaranteed, proportional, and rapidly executed. In this case, the very fact this guy goes to jail for drug possession is just completely insane.
a good (compassionate) justice system is supposed to deal with:
- safety, for society (removing direct threats)
- deterrence, for other would-be criminals in society
- rehabilitation, providing the opportunity to "be better" for the convicted
- providing a minimal "lightning rod" to address and quell the (human/societal) instinctual/primal urge for vengeance
Note that the latter is no more than a smokescreen to distract ourselves when we're not being aware of what this lust for vengeance basically is. On the animal level (present in all primates and certain mammals), there is a very fundamental desire for "fairness". It's a very rudimentary "moral" system, evolved to deal with a fundamentally amoral universe. It kind of works but it's not very optimal. Humans are smarter than that now, and we can observe this desire and figure out better systems. It's called "ethics", we've been puzzling over it for thousands of years, it's not solved but we have figured out a thing or two.
Vengeance is the opposite of forgiveness. If you know about forgiveness, if you ever had to forgive something that was somewhat hard to forgive, and did the necessary introspection to succeed, you've learned this: You do the forgiving for yourself, not for the other person. It's a change in your perception of their guilt, you're not clearing a "guilt flag" in them, they still did what they did, you don't need to forget, you don't need to offer them anything, you don't even need to let them know you've forgiven them. Forgiveness is the decision to let go of this primal lust for vengeance. And that can be a hard decision if the thing the other did is very bad. And that's good because it should not be a light decision. Enacting the vengeance can temper this lust, but if you've already found better ways that deal with the first three points above, that is its only function left.
So we can find better, more compassionate ways to deal with that, too. Which is why some form of punishment must be part of a justice system; It doesn't feel fair otherwise and you can't expect the whole of society to just get over that. Because we're still monkeys and in large numbers, on average, even more so. But just like we've subverted so many of our other primal urges in ways that are more useful in a modern society, we can really make this punishment as symbolic as our primal instincts allow for. If we've taken care of those first three points, that's really all there's left to do.
And you don't need a lot, at all. It needs to be cemented in culture, but it can be done. Proof is, assuming that US humans are sufficiently similar to humans everywhere (which I like to believe, don't you? :) ), all those societies on this earth that have way less harsh punishments, shorter sentences and less awful prisons (US prisons are a bit on the... ehm.. medieval side of the spectrum). They don't get up in arms or feel that justice isn't "fair" enough any more than that nameless, shifting part of society that will always complain punishment isn't harsh enough. Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.
I think I agree with you, though vengeance is related to crimes against someone. Drug usage or possession is not of that kind. It's often seen as harm done to yourself, maybe.
> - deterrence, for other would-be criminals in society
In fact, the whole concept of criminal deterrence could be seen as an equation with several variables: the outcome of the crime, the probability of being caught, and how harsh the punishment will be. The idea that sentencing a micro-sample of (very unlucky) people with extreme punishment will detere others from transgressing the law is arguable, I personally believe it's incorrect, now even if I'm wrong it'd be deterrence based on fear of unfair punishment, instead of fear of punishment. A model with certainty of fair punishment seams more performant to achieve deterrence (it also probably costs way more money!). It also has the benefit of not ruining the lives of the unlucky members of the micro-sample :P
> And you don't need a lot, at all. It needs to be cemented in culture, but it can be done. Proof is, assuming that US humans are sufficiently similar to humans everywhere (which I like to believe, don't you? :) ), all those societies on this earth that have way less harsh punishments, shorter sentences and less awful prisons (US prisons are a bit on the... ehm.. medieval side of the spectrum). They don't get up in arms or feel that justice isn't "fair" enough any more than that nameless, shifting part of society that will always complain punishment isn't harsh enough. Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.
Of course they are! Humans are the same everywhere! And by the way, the very concept of 'penitentiary' was invented in this country at the end of the 19th century. Europeans were somehow curious about this new word, all they new about was a 'prison', a place where criminals were put for punishment, period. And at this time, on the other side of the Atlantic, this new nation was experiment with a new approach: the 'penitentiary' would be a prison, where convicts are given a chance to repel, improve themselves (learn new skills, study, etc). Delegations of diplomates were sent to study the American penitentiary system and ended up as a model for improvements. My apologies if I awkwardly made it look like I believe the current insanity of the system is just a cultural outcome, I obviously don't. Historical incarceration stats seem to show it's a rather recent trend:
> Which doesn't actually get any less than it is in the US with harsher punishments. Neither are these societies being overrun by criminals.
They aren't overrun by criminals for sure. Now, truth be said, there's considerably less crime (especially petty) in the US than in western Europe. Harsher sentences are probably a factor to some extent, probably not as important as efficacy of law enforcement, or certain cultural traits (e.g: Americans aren't kidding with private property). I'd personally trade a bit more crime in exchange of fair sentences :)
May I ask you a question about your story in [0]? You said that you could not call anyone because you did not remember any numbers. Is that how it works? When they let you make a phone call after arrest, you can only call numbers you know by heart? You can't look them up? That sounds insane, who commits phone numbers to memory nowadays?
The story seems to confirm my criticism of the "never talk to police" mantra. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14345776) If you're going to take that to heart, you need a step 2: "Ok I got arrested, maybe for BS like annoying the cop by not talking, maybe not, but now I need a way to procure a good lawyer and let someone on the outside know, probably giving them power of attorney so they can make certain arrangements." (Edit: Though it's probably a good idea to have most of that step 2 planned out regardless of if you talk to cops or not.)
You don't get to keep your phone once arrested and booked. If the person processing your items is nice, they will look up a number for you in your phone and write it down on some scratch paper which you can take into holding.
That's ridiculous. What if the person isn't nice? What if you didn't have your phone with you in the first place? Or it got damaged or lost? How did this even work before mobile phones that stored contact lists, which really isn't that long ago?
What should any of that matter as to whether you get justice or not?
I swear, with this stuff, the plea bargaining, juries, "expensive lawyers", sometimes I get the idea that the US justice system is designed to provide plot devices for TV series of police/justice procedurals, and everything else is an afterthought. How often do people say, after dealing with police/justice, "I felt like I was in a bad movie"?
If the person isn't nice you are SOL. I got arrested once during a commute for an unpaid parking ticket from college, cue cop placing cuffs on me tightly, slamming me against the squad car, searching the vehicle, then hauling me off to county for booking. They refused to let me look up numbers on my phone and I was left to call my parents 3 hours away to come pay the cash only bond.
It was a pretty eye opening experience. Especially on the arresting officer's part because they get no clue as to why they are arresting you beyond "FAILURE TO APPEAR" that shows on their screen, so they assume the worst.
I'm also confused by how things went down. Can't you ask your lawyer to contact someone for you? And why did you lose your things - can't your son collect the items that were in your apartment and arrange for storage? Did you not have any savings put aside? I'm willing to believe the story told, but I'm curious about these points.
Maybe there were no relatives living in the same city. Maybe living relatives are all estranged. Maybe they have their own catastrophic troubles which make it infeasible to help.
If not for this individual, then for others. Statistically, going to jail will cause severe dislocation and disruption at least some of the time. Fragile circumstance are fragile.
I own a LAMP stack web agency with 85 employees. If you aren't just blowing hot air, visit coalitiontechnologies.com/jobs and apply. If you pass my skills tests and want a reasonable salary, I will hire you.
This is one of the things I'm frightened of. I'm a successful software engineer, you've probably heard me speak at various conferences, I contribute to popular open source projects, but ... I have a twenty-year heroin habit. So, any minor interaction with law enforcement has the potential to spiral into a drug related cluster fuck, just as happened in your case. I'm fortunate that my employer is aware of my situation, and I'm working my way towards being clean long-term, but if I was in the US I think my situation would be far more precarious. I wish you luck getting yourself back together, and you have my utmost respect and congratulations for kicking the heroin cold turkey - nobody who has not been there themselves can ever properly realise what an achievement that is - keep up the good work, I know it will be a struggle every day from now on. I hope you get the rest of the help you need.
I want to be one person to offer to help me in any meaningful way I can. I'm deeply familiar with being in a situation where everyone says someone ought to do something about it, often followed with "but that's just the way things are." It's especially frustrating coming from people who objectively can help and choose not to.
I've been in the same boat as you: frustrated, scared, and broke. I'm also guessing you're feeling a bit lonely & desperate?
I'm still broke and looking for work. I also have my own ideas I'm pursuing and would love help with. I think some of my stuff could be relatively easy to get funding for, too. If you're interested in talking to me about them or anything else you'd like to be heard on, my contact info is in my profile.
With respect to why these systemic problems go addressed and why people who say there needs to be change aren't stepping up, I think it boils down to how complex the general situation is and how difficult compassion can specifically be when it involves talking action. The general problem requires the ability to think in a way that at least includes:
- Seeing past notions of good & evil
- Designing a system using nonviolent principles
- Accounting for 1st-7th person perspectives (hierarchical levels of humanity's dynamic system)
The problem of helping you specifically is society teaches us to want to help without really teaching us how to. I'd say we're pretty much taught to do the opposite, most of the time. Behaviors are like beliefs: they can't be removed without having something to replace them with. I've had to learn to very specifically request things I want from others without expecting them to provide it. This is definitely a skill and it takes potentially painful work to develop. It's also worth the effort.
I hope you find what you need and will reach out to me, even if simply for mutual support.
Steal. It's your only way out for convicts in this system. You too don't need to be compassionate and can freely ignore anyone's desire for safety, as you have been labeled as not deserving of either.
> not one person here has offered to help me in any meaningful way
Part of the issue is that most - maybe practically all - people calling for compassion for convicts are workers rather than managers, and not in a position to employ anyone.
often people just leave you when you go to prison.
A friend of mine had a boyfriend who was in prison and she was the only one visiting. None of his friends came and he was just in for a few weeks because he doged the train fare too often.
Unsurprisingly people who have done long stretches of time in Norway's prison system disagree with this article. Only a few prisoners enjoy the freedom of this island, which is equivalent to a trustee camp in a US min security prison. The rest who were given 10+ year sentences are in complete isolation in what the media loves to refer to as hotel prisons. In these cells everything is provided for you including your own shower, therefore there's no reasons for the guards to ever let you out and you stay in there 23hrs per day. Because the media calls them hotels, it prevents any prisoner from being able to complain and be taken seriously, so often these guys will either light their cells on fire and hopefully get transferred to one of the older style jails so they can talk to other inmates, or they just kill themselves.
Do you have a source where we can read more? Everything I'm finding is an article gushing about how humane Norway's prisons are. I keep finding headlines like "Twice as many suicides in Norwegian prisons" from The Norway Post, but their site won't actually load for me, and the Google cache on those results looks like it's probably their homepage.
So what I've found so far seems to back you up: We're looking at Norway being something like an order of magnitude worse when it comes to prisons. But I'd like to find better data.
Norway also exports prisoners to the Netherlands to serve time as they are at capacity in some facilities. Renting a foreign countries' prison is not mentioned by the media over here touting the Norwegian system.
My source is primarily from anecdotes of friends I knew arrested in Oslo who spent long periods of isolation during pretrial and were told by other prisoners which jails to avoid getting transfered to, all of which are the new prisons because they are extreme in isolation. There's some other anecdotes here comparing old style jails to Bergen "luxury" prison https://youtu.be/iA1L2kg3wRw and here https://youtu.be/iWhdzIJMEmQ talking about Norway's most hated man Anders Breivik who like everybody else assumed life in a Norwegian prison would be easy until they experienced the reality of solitary confinement. Even worse, because Breivik sued and won a lawsuit against the prison for isolation an appeals court was forced to overturn that decision because he is Breivik and a terrorist monster so there was political pressure to do so, and this means the top court in Norway has officially ruled that solitary confinement does not violate the prisoner's human rights.
There's also papers in journals around about disabled minimum security prisoners in Norway being forced into isolation in these new prisons as the trustee camps and old jails can't accommodate them, of which I can't find immediately.
Anders Breivik isn't the best case for setting a precedence, as far as I could read the ruling was grounded in the fact that he was dangerous and that other prisoners would be a danger to him.
Obviously, that case has particularities that do not transfer to other cases. Such as the man being universally hated.
But it is true, that Norwegian prison system isn't perfect. And unnecessary pretrial isolation justified as restricting contact to outside conspirators is not uncommon.
All that said, Norway is the still the best place start your criminal career :)
> Anders Breivik isn't the best case for setting a precedence, as far as I could read the ruling was grounded in the fact that he was dangerous and that other prisoners would be a danger to him.
Norway has civil law rather than common law - doesn't this mean that this decision doesn't work as precedent, as that's only really seen in common law?
> Norway has civil law rather than common law - doesn't this mean that this decision doesn't work as precedent, as that's only really seen in common law?
Precedent exists in civil law systems also. The difference is that in civil law systems precedent is generally seen as persuasive rather than binding, and lower-level judges have greater freedom to disregard precedent than in common law systems. That said, I think the difference between common law and civil law systems is a matter of degree rather than a stark boundary. Even when they aren't formally speaking bound by precedent, lower civil law courts will tend to respect the past rulings of the higher courts and apply them–no judge likes being overturned on appeal. And, in common law systems, not all precedents are binding, some are merely persuasive; and there is the procedure of "distinguishing" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing – which enables judges to justify not following a precedent even while still formally affirming it as binding.
Isn't that basically solitary confinement, which is deemed a violation of the UN convention against torture? I was under the impression from the numerous articles that there are plenty of common rooms, kitchens, workshops, and other activities for inmates in those prisons.
Also, could you please provide a source for your statement that "Unsurprisingly people who have done long stretches of time in Norway's prison system disagree with this article?"
Solitary is very popular in the Scandinavian prison systems. It is even used extensively pretrial, for long periods of time. This is often forgotten when talking about the lenient Scandinavian prisons.
The rest who were given 10+ year sentences are in complete isolation
I think you'll have to provide sources for that. Edit: actually I think you are completely wrong. Extraordinary claims etc etc.
There's only one prisoner I know of that gets this treatment and it is ABB. (BTW: He should have been found insane and sentenced to mandatory therapy. Would still end up locked up but 1. he would hate it and 2. we would have a chance of actually restoring his sanity: )
Edit: read just recently that how prisoners pee or spit in the food of certain inmates and how these same inmates have to pay for protection.
Can you explain how this works if they are locked up in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day?
sending them to an island sound like micro-exile. I think that would be a way to fix overpopulation, create an island devoid of much and get the prisoners to make it more habitable in preparation for the general population.
Is it possible to punish and rehabilitate at the same time? I ask partly because I have small kids. When they do bad things, I try to focus on educating them and not punishing. Then again, most of the bad things they do (making a mess, being too loud, etc.) are relatively benign. If they were to do something really horrible and victimize some other kid, I would probably punish them, but at the same time I would hope I could teach them never to do such a thing again.
I think that's the moral dilemma with prison systems. It's easy in abstract to say that we should just focus on rehabilitation and take this utilitarian argument about what's best for society. But I know that if, for example, someone were to harm my children, I would have trouble being convinced that that person needs free college and housing (partly paid for by me). Even if that statistically led to a better outcome for society, it would not seem like justice; rather it would seem that person is being rewarded for harming my family. This I think is a general problem with utilitarianism - that when we just focus on group outcomes, we sometimes lose sight of things like individual rights and justice, messy moral concepts that don't always create optimal group results.
Maybe there is some way to do both things or differentiate between types of criminals. I don't really have a solution. Just posing the conundrum.
Every situation involves them losing their freedom. Even in this cage free prison they are stuck there under someone else's control. This is a punishment, and I don't see why justice needs more than this. A victim may wish for harsher punishment, but that won't actually help their problems.
Totally agree. Vengeance sounds great until you get it - and you realize you still have the same problems, and maybe a few new ones.
Perhaps like rehabilitating offenders, we also need to rehabilitate victims as well. Being a victim can be as troubling than being an offender because it's not really in your control. This can really be hard on people, especially mental health, PTSD, anxiety, fear of people, etc.
I'm not even sure such a system exists - it seems like the victim would be on their own for finding care and help with that?
In the Netherlands there is a program for exactly that, "slachtofferhulp" ("victim help"). I'm not entirely sure what it entails, but I've been offered it even after merely witnessing the shop on the corner of my street being robbed from a distance (the thief ran past me just as I stepped outside my house, so I made a statement to the police).
Well okay he did threaten me, raising the knife while saying "don't even think about it" [standing in his way/stopping him]. But he didn't come at me, and I was certain I could have outrun him if he did (by running towards the shop, which he was focused on getting away from, after all), I remained at distance. Of course, this being the Netherlands, there was about zero risk the guy would pull a gun (especially after brandishing a rather cheap looking chef's knife).
Exactly. Taking away someone's liberty is a substantial punishment, and the imposition of longer sentences for more serious crimes should slake the natural desire for vengeance to some degree.
But the victim is not the only stakeholder in the justice system. There are also the accused (prisoner's rights), and society at large (lower recidivism). The interests of all need to be balanced.
Justice needs more than this because victims will wish for harsher punishment. The public will not feel satisfied and trust in the justice system will lessen, etc. You can tell people but you can't honestly expect the whole of society to just become "enlightened" about this. Desire for vengeance is a thing, it lives in us, and even though I can personally (usually) rationally decide to let it go, I feel it's still there and when I'm angry, quite prominently so.
It's not a good thing, but you can't just ignore it. Justice needs to deal with this, otherwise it won't be accepted.
Fortunately this desire isn't very smart and can be tricked easily. If you paint something as terrible punishment and people see it as such, that is enough. Unlike, say, public safety, it doesn't actually need to be real to fully benefit society.
Watching dog whisperer, I learn that there is a difference between punishment and discipline. Do not punish.
When you take action like yelling or grounding out of frustration, anger, fear, or ___, it is a punishment.
When you take action from a calmer standpoint, it is called discipline.
Sometimes I wonder if that is actually a problem with our justice system. We deal justice in cold blood, calmly, burocratically, often months after the act. (And OTOH also without possibility of negotiation or mercy.)
I wonder if it wouldn't be better to deal punishments out immediately, and in anger rather than calmly. I'm not suggesting this, just playing devil's advocate, but maybe bring back corporal punishment.
From a behaviorist or evolutionary psychology standpoint, it would seem that we are more predisposed to learn from a swift, "personal" punishment, than from a delayed, unpersonal punishment.
I remember reading about a case study in a region where the central goverment collapsed, and there was effectively no police and no prisons. People went to a justice system very loosely based on local traditions. The punishment for most wrongdoings would be that people showed up and rough-handled you and beat you up, taking some compensation from you as they saw fit. There was always someone watching the punishment to ensure that it didn't go to far. It sounds quite brutal, but the thing I remember was that the rate of repeat offenders was among the lowest every measured (although I wonder how good you could measure that in a "failed state"). For the life of me I can't find this story anymore though.
Again, I'm not suggesting anything like that, so please don't downvote if you disagree with corporal punishment. I think it's interesting to contemplate the choices we have made in our justice system and their effectiveness, though.
I understand the comment is in the context of the article. My comment was in the context of creating and maintaining leadership.
Calmness breeds calmness and calm decisions that last a long time. Where as fear creates an artificial set of rules that disappear when the fear factor is gone.
In the case of crimes against community, punishment does not help as much as greater involvement in community and stronger connection to those who lose.
We also have prison therapists. There are other programs I know I'm forgetting. Overall building a rehabilitation system is hard. If I had to choose between the task of building that and the task of building genera; AI, I think building general AI might be easier.
Kill two birds with one stone: build general AI, feed it data about prison conditions, programs, and recidivism rates, and let the AI figure out how best to rehabilitate criminals. :)
Not that I don't get what you're saying, not that I never want revenge, but still, since I also tell this myself: can you imagine someone hurting a child who has not been damaged in some way? I'm not claiming to be perfectly healthy, but healthy enough that I cannot fathom it, just like I cannot fathom rape. And how many people are responsible for how many thousands of dead children torn to shreds by wars of aggression and get invited to how many gala dinners each year, on your dime? Even just that should make us pause. Do we punish the weak because they deserve it, or because we can't get at those who deserve it even more?
The parents who today don't have the time or energy to raise their kids well, maybe because they have to work 17 jobs to survive or whatever, and the marketing which doesn't care for anyone other than inspiring fears and wants they would be happier without and taking their money, create the sociopaths, and education systems that pigeonhole people cutting off what doesn't fit, and so on, those create the sociopaths of tomorrow much more than those poor fucks themselves do. The guy spitting at the window in the subway while twitching to music and some hellish mixture of drugs didn't have the same life as me, just making bad choices. Maybe in some cases that's true, but generally I consider the fact I'm not a murderer something I should be grateful for, not something to be proud of. Justice is a big word, and like "why?" it can have many iterations.
I'm not saying this to put you on the spot, but this is how it ends up for me, that's the train of thought that sometimes even replaced my thirst for revenge with things I like better, and which I think are better for me. I think the best revenge is to attain the ability to get revenge and then not get it, to no longer need it.
If turning the other cheek is weakness, why does this make my jaw drop and give me goosebumps?
Imagine if the relatives of 9/11 victims calling out against meeting violence with violence, against murdering more innocents, would have been listened to. The Middle East would still be a mess, but orders of magnitude less so. It just used the people who griefed to sow more grief. Justice, hmm.
There is the reaction you want to have, and there is the reaction that would make your loved one who was harmed proud. Food for thought, anyway :)
Yes, people have a desire for justice, for fairness. This desire is natural, as well as it is right. Therefore it deserves to be addressed properly. It is also however, as you say, not what is best for society. Therefore its harm needs to be minimized, while still properly addressing the desire.
Which is why we have mostly symbolic punishments. And they work very well. Already, most of our punishments are symbolic substitutes for much, much worse punishments we could do (and used to do) to people. We don't chop off body parts any more, banish people or torture people to death (well the US does, but I hope we agree this is not a required part of a good justice system).
You deserve to have your desire for justice and fairness met, while society deserves to have its needs for public safety, deterrence and rehabilitation met. You can't really get the benefits of safety or rehabilitation symbolically.
Is it possible to punish and rehabilitate at the same time? I ask partly because I have small kids
Maybe, but the criminal mind is not the same as the (normal) child mind. Perhaps there are "types" of criminals, but the psychopathy criminals' actions is startlingly uniform. A corner crack dealer and Bernie Madoff are more separated by their means at their disposal, less their intent.
> The whole point of the criminal legal system is not about individual justice. It's a crime against the state.
I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. You can call murder a crime against the state all you want, but I'll be damned if there isn't a very long history of inviting the family of the victim to witness state-sanctioned executions. Criminal punishment definitely incorporates individual justice.
When you hear "state" for laws old enough to be common-law, think more of "community." A murderer makes random strangers in town mad on the victim's behalf, so they go kill the murderer. They aren't killing them to get justice for the victim; they're killing them because the victim was someone they knew as a member of the community and they feel pain at their loss. This pain, in aggregate, is the pain the "state" feels in response to an act, and lashes out in response to. It's the reason that terrorism is a bigger deal than plain treason: both affect the government itself in some sense, but terrorism inflicts pain on the people in aggregate, and so the people-in-aggregate, in their roles as "legislature" and "jury", seek to punish it more strongly.
If that were true, murdering someone with little to no connections (e.g. a homeless person) wouldn't be a crime.
As a citizen my motivation for punishing murder is to keep society stable and my family safe. It doesn't matter who was murdered, it matters that the perpetrator is tried.
A few weeks ago, running the subway in a major North American city, I kept admiring how people were polite and waited for other people to leave the trains before entering, how many times I saw someone give up their seats for the elderly (not that they really needed, there were a lot of empty seats elsewhere). That got me thinking if those same people would be as polite if they were in the same train but with 20x more people around. I think extreme situations are a great equalizer in crowded situations and it's my feeling they would behave the same: not wait for anyone, not give up seats, etc.
My point is, what works for Norway (population: 5.2m, prison population: 3874 or 0.0745% [0]) is never going to work for Brazil (population: 207m, prison population: 659020 or 0.31% [1]).
I like the idea of these idyllic prisons but inmates that will fit those are the exception here. Nevertheless, the system should offer them and help good inmates to be removed from the terrible traditional prisons so they don't become worse. It's often said that prisons are like college for criminals.
In summary, I love the idea but let's not pretend that by just having those prisons that things will change drastically. It's a complex situation and there are problems everywhere (bad laws, slow courts, poverty, etc).
"You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners", was actually said by a Russian–he knew what he was talking about.
The US could start by no longer jailing drug consumers or first-time low-level street dealers. It just really really doesn't work anyway. That would reduce the prison population by what? 2/3? Suddenly you have 3x the budget and space, which should allow for quite a few improvements.
But what really needs to be done with it the basic idea of prison as some sort of moral retribution. Come up with a formula to quantify and compare the outcomes of the criminal justice system, then start maximising. The US could easily study the effects of prison and other punishments (as well as social programs, medial intervention etc) in every detail imaginary.
(Also I don't quite get your analogy. Are you saying Americans tend to be violent because there are too many of them for one country? FWIW the US is No 182 in terms of population density, barely ahead of Norway at No. 202. Far far ahead are Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and most of Europe, all of which have only a fraction of the violent crime of the US)
> The US could start by no longer jailing drug consumers or first-time low-level street dealers. It just really really doesn't work anyway. That would reduce the prison population by what? 2/3? Suddenly you have 3x the budget and space, which should allow for quite a few improvements.
Nothing like that: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/rel.... Releasing every prisoner with a drug crime as their most serious offense would reduce the prison population by 14%. (Almost all that is low level dealers--few people are in prison for mere possession.)
It would be a good step, but people overestimate how big an impact it would have.
14% is huge, especially considering how many people commit crime because their life was destroyed by a drug conviction (their own or their parent's) leading to further crime.
John Pfaff studies this at Fordham and also rebuts this variant of the argument: if you look, there's no strong correlation between people ever convicted of any drug crime and later sentencing.
(His book, _Locked In_, is pretty great).
Reminder: nobody, including Pfaff, is saying it's good we lock up drug offenders like this. It's bad, and we should stop. It's just not a solution to mass incarceration. To address that, we need an across-the-board fix for aggressive prosecution, which is what appears to be the most important factor ratcheting up prison populations.
I would guess that 14% underestimates the impact of not locking people up for drug crimes in the first place.
Rationale: there likely are quite a few prisoners who were initially were convicted on a minor drug crime, couldn't find work afterwards, then turned to theft or robbery, and now are emprisoned for a crime that's more serious than a drugs crime.
I also think one should look at people locked up for having intercourse with minors in those cases where the criminal is just over age and the minor is just under age. Even assuming that needs punishment, the repercussions for one's life are to harsh.
It's complex, and you're right to a first approximation. People (like GP poster) greatly overestimate the proportion of prisoners who could be easily and immediately released if the War on Drugs was ended.
On the 'could be greater than 14% side" you'd also want to know how many people are losing day release/probation/parole for dirty urine; even non-drug parolees and probationers might be tested.
Probably the other palatable change that would reduce incarceration rates would be to stop using jails as de facto asylums.
That's the problem. A lot of people in the US like the idea of punishing and giving out moral retributions more than improving society in the long term.
As an American, it's a tough situation. I recognize that our strategies don't work and that mass incarceration with no socialization programs is an obvious failure, but at the same time I demand people be punished if they hurt me, not just inconvenienced. I don't care about a populations' propensity to reoffend at a societal level, I care that a specific individual hurt me and they need to make it right somehow or suffer consequences. If there is no perception of justice then I think we can expect extra-judicial retaliations.
> I don't care about a populations' propensity to reoffend at a societal level, I care that a specific individual hurt me and they need to make it right somehow or suffer consequences.
This seems pretty shortsighted to what incarceration can do to say, families. While you say you _demand_ people be punished if they hurt you, you're also demanding their family and kids be punished as well. Did the kid ask for this?
This is the kind of cycle that easily repeats. Children from broken / distressed homes have more trouble in life and are more likely to offend.
And the cycle begins again. Making everyone worse.
By that logic, you wouldn't fire an underperforming employee, because it could negatively affect their family and kids?
I'm not saying getting fired and going to prison have equivalent effects, but expecting that no person should be punished because it can detrimentally affect people close to them doesn't seem like a reasonable argument.
That's an interesting point. The big difference between prison and business are that the business is out to make a profit from you being there. If that's not happening, then sure, you should be let go. You could say the same thing about downsizing employees, since they are not even underperforming, but you don't need them anymore. It's not a business place to take up the slack for society. That's government's job.
Do I think there's a place for government to provide unemployment and welfare benefits for families? Yes, and they do.
The point I was trying to make is that there's a difference between being punished because it's good for society, and punished to provide a sense of vengeance or justice for the victim.
We should isolate people that are a danger to society, like murderers. But as soon as it's about the "feeling of justice" for the victim, emotions get complicated and are hard to measure and be fair about.
What we really need is all this in balance and to look at the macro level, as well as the micro, and try to find something that works.
If the employee didn't have any other good options, and the company could survive it, then certainly.
Of course this is easy for me to say.. In Norway unemployment benefits are good an unemployment rate low, so it's quite likely that the person would be fine. But even so, it is less likely that someone would be fired for 'underperforming' compared to say the US.
For almost anyone with a career, a life plan, a family, friends or any community or social status etc, being convicted of a crime is already a massive consequence. It will often affect their life forever, even if they clean up their act afterward. Serving time in a real prison is an even bigger deal.
Are you only talking about people that have "nothing to lose"?
"An eye for an eye" doesn't work in practice because the punishment is not harsh enough to deter the crime in the first place, at least in terms of petty crimes. If the punishment for stealing $50 from someone is that I have to pay $50, I'm gonna be stealing all day long if I believe I have a better than 50% chance of not getting caught.
For more serious crimes, like DUI, the punishments are not severe enough. You don't lose your license until you have multiple DUIs. Even then, you will likely continue driving illegally while intoxicated until you t-bone another car and kill the family inside. Then the court/jury will "struggle" to determine if you deserve the death penalty.
In fact, the harshness of punishment in general is not an effective deterrent, as illustrated by the death penalty. If you're serious about actually lowering crime rates, look elsewhere.
Actually I believe prison should be the option of last resort as nobody benefits from locking someone up where they can't work or benefit society. I would prefer compensation in the form of money or labor if possible. If not, then that individual should be sent to prison.
As an American, I don't want people punished if they hurt or wrong me. I want them rehabilitated so they don't go and hurt me or someone else in the future.
The action is done, hurting the perpetrator in return won't restore me, I just don't want it to happen again.
But that has to be part of why we have a state. To make the most rational decision possible when individuals can only make emotional ones. It can't be the state's place to carry out people's personal vendettas no matter how justified they might seem. That's no way to run a civilization. If there's one good thing bureaucracy does it's ironing out some of the violent irrationalities and impulsivities inherent to human judgment.
Out of 1.5 million in federal and state prisons, about 700,000 were convicted of violent crimes. And of course the remainder are not exclusively low level drug crimes.
(the population in jails is usually less than 100,000 so it won't tip the balance)
Better drug policy could well impact the levels of violent crime and so impact the future prison population, but forgiving sentences for drug related violent crime is a step further than forgiving sentences for petty drug crimes.
I used to go to a boxing gym near Baltimore where a lot of people came from "bad" neighborhoods. A lot of the young guys had experienced a life where a lot of friends and neighbors had been in jail for drugs. Once you have been in jail its really hard to find a decent job so a lot of them go into drug dealing which often leads to violence. Jailing people for drugs destroys the whole social fabric of a community.
I don't think you can separate low-level drug offenses from violent crime. One leads to the other.
> Once you have been in jail its really hard to find a decent job
And that's another aspect that needs addressing, and can be done regardless of legal/political changes.
Someone's been in jail/prison? Then they apply for a job with your company when they get out? Categorically denying them employment without regard to their previous offense is silly, although it's definitely policy at some (many?) companies. Helping people get back to a 'normal' life is something we all can take part in in various ways - not closing the door on applicants is another thing we can do.
Someone's been in jail/prison? Then they apply for a job with your company when they get out? Categorically denying them employment without regard to their previous offense is silly, although it's definitely policy at some (many?) companies. Helping people get back to a 'normal' life is something we all can take part in in various ways - not closing the door on applicants is another thing we can do.
I agree, and here's the thing. Almost all companies I've worked for in the past decade have done drug testing and background checks on me, so if I had had issues in my youth I wouldn't have been hired. And this is IT, I wasn't applying to be a police officer, lawyer, or crane operator.
Pass laws to RESTRICT companies from doing these types of unjustified checks (or have them justify them) instead of unlocking the prisons and letting criminals out. That communities are destroyed is a powerful argument, but I'm sorry, I don't need gangsters running around in my neighborhood. I'd much prefer they serve their time, and be able to work wherever they want (within reason) once they're out.
But in the U.S. we feel that businesses should have much 'freedom' as we call it, to hire and fire unimpeded.
It's all unjustified to you until you actually have someone who steals to support their drug addiction, threatens coworkers, commits violence, or worse. So many people here seem to love the idea that drug users are these innocent people wrong by society, but it's usually because they are already insulated from them in their workplaces.
All it takes is someone high behind the wheels of a forklift to understand why these policies are in place, or someone in charge of industrial machinery showing up drunk or stoned or worse. Or a nurse who essentially robs the hospital blind to feed an addiction.
The point I was calling for was to start using some degree of common sense vs blanket "zero tolerance" policies wrt hiring.
Someone who was let out of prison 3 days ago with a record of violent/armed robbery is very likely not the same sort of potential problem as someone who did 6 months in prison 23 years ago for possession of marijuana.
I thought my last paragraph there addressed this fairly well.
If you are talking about reducing the prison population that exists right now, they sort of have to be separate. A murder that is the end result of a chain of events containing a lot of difficult choices is still a murder.
Yeah I understand, do you think the last paragraph in my first comment misses that point?
My point is that we have people already in prison for past violent crimes, many of them, so even a policy change that has a big future impact still isn't going to quickly reduce the prison population by 2/3.
I didn't read your comment closely enough. Sorry. I agree that there won't be a quick reduction but at least the influx of new prisoners would be reduced and neighborhoods wouldn't get destroyed anymore.
I agree it's not 2/3rds, but it's a significant amount.
"249,900 state prisoners (19%) were sentenced to at least 1 year for property offenses. Sixteen percent of state prisoners were serving sentences for drug-related offenses"
Note that a fair amount of "property offenses" are really drug offenses. You steal things to feed your habit.
And..."Nearly half of federal prisoners incarcerated on September 30, 2015 had been sentenced for drug offenses, the most recent date for which federal offense data were available"
Country level population density is a nonsensical stat since most countries have varying levels of density. Sf/nyc/boston/chicao contain a big chunk of the us pop. Just because there is land in idaho does not mean you can count it.
I agree with you for the most part, except in certain situations. The problem is how to distinguish these situations as I dont believe in a black and white its always x time for y crime, that sort of thing.
For example, a rampant child abuser (sexual) who would say get life in prison. I think they should suffer the entire time, somehow, bring on that moral retribution. I would have to think long and hard to try to come up with something feasible though and not trample too much on morality, ethics, human rights, etc. For instance I chose a lifetime sentence for that example as there would be no need to rehabilitate.
well, that's a minefield, but maybe those make good examples. The instinct to throw these people into a dark hole and lose the key is strong. However, if you despise them so much because you think their crimes are so horrendous, that's even more reason to find something that works. Otherwise, you're placing your wish for revenge above the protection of their victims–exactly the sort of failure to control an instinct you're judging so harshly.
Because this narrative of child abuse as the-worst-of-the-worst crimes does nothing to stop people (harsher punishment really doesn't work very well beyond a certain level). But it does scare people away from seeking help.
I wouldn't have a problem with talking to a psychiatrist, or even friend or family member, about some anger problem that I feared might make me harm someone. They'd understand. But being attracted to children? That sounds like a really quick method to lose everything you have, just by asking for help.
And asking for help would be exactly what we want people with the potential to do: because it's pretty much accepted that sexual orientations are innate, and that sex drive is among the most powerful, hard-to-repress emotions. Of course people who harm others because of a lack of self-control have failed, morally. But, wow, did they not win the birth lottery.
Yeah, which is why I agree for the most part for most crimes. On the one hand, footing the bill to rehabilitate very gross crimes like that doesnt seem like just punishment, and I suppose thats the problem is I think they should be punished. Not sure you can have it both ways, but perhaps.
I do think harsher punishments would be additional incentive for people to keep themselves in check, but that obviously wont work with some, and may incur other undesirable consequences. Anyways, difficult problem for sure.
The problem with drugs in the USA is how big a problem that it is. The prescription drugs have a lot to do with it and there needs to be some proper acknowledgement as to what has happened. Before then it was Oliver North and co that were behind the 'crack epidemic'. I think treatment should be more what the Norwegians would do in their drug clinics, so we do the best we can to get those with the 'addiction disease' able to stay on the rails. We just can't have these people doing crimes that are of such a cost to society, causing narcissistic harm to children they have for these kids to find themselves in drugs leading to the same cycle of crime. Therefore there does have to be time for drug crime - big stick punishment - but in the current situation there needs to be some treatment of people who have been wrongly led up the path of addiction. This needs to be done Norwegian style too, with compassion.
We also need to think about when it is okay and when it is not okay to experiment with drugs. There is a difference between trying everything going at raves/parties/whatever as a student when it really does not matter if you drop out, the university still gets your money and they grumble but that is it, you are a statistic. Nobody is ever going to read that thesis anyway, what is the harm in advancing socially even if that involves being far from sober?
But if you are not a student then someone is being responsible for you or you are responsible for someone else and it is not fair to be a single parent paying for drugs by selling drugs, just to friends in a scene. That constitutes child abuse, there is harm in having a single parent battling horrible drug inflicted injuries and deep dysphoria being the 'role model'. Do you put that person in prison with their child in care? Who decides that? Are they just a low level street dealer, to be let off? So their customers can cheat/lie/steal whatever it takes to pay their bills?
Or the sales director who comes a cropper due to addiction getting the better of him or her. Perhaps major sales opportunities were lost and perhaps the wife didn't see much of him, maybe a lot went on but not the stealing or violence that goes with the life of a street junkie. People change jobs all the time, it is no biggie, nobody is indispensable. So why the lengthy prison sentence if there has been no harm outside of company (and bedtime) under-performance?
Maybe the drug could be anything from sugar to crack with that not mattering, it being the aspect of societal harm that matters when it comes to time in the cells.
Now if we could make those cells nice places to be so people could start their lives over, out of the environment that has all the triggers that enforce their addiction. This isn't working in the 'rehab' we have today as there is no power to get people to stay the course.
You can undo a part of a 10 year sentence by releasing an innocent person earlier. And you can offer monetary compensation. None of this is possible with a death sentence.
The simple answer is that it's not a relevant question. It doesn't happen in Norway because there's no reason for anyone to join a drug gang the like of which there are in Brazil. If you were to be cynical about it, you could say that the Norwegian welfare state is so generous it will pay people to sit on their ass and do no harm.
Anyone who joins a drug gang in Norway does so out of lifestyle problems, not economic problems. The gangs are correspondingly small.
All that said, Norway has very unenlightened drug policies, and drug related deaths are very common compared to other European countries. There's a small but nasty subculture of bad criminals and bad police that will make life hard for you if you enter it. But at least money doesn't force you to.
Well even in Norway, the prison in the article is not the norm, it is the exception.
>Inmates do not start their sentences at Bastoy. They must do time in a conventional lockup and apply to be transferred, having convinced the authorities that they wish to reform.
I work with a lot of criminals. In my experience, many times, the ones that go to jail go there because they really are bad people and have no wish to reform. It would be very difficult to change and reform these people just with outside intervention.
However, for the ones with a genuine wish to reform, it would be nice to get them into a facility like this.
I guess the real problem is there is no real easy solution for how to deal with bad people. I think there needs to be a mixed solution that takes into account the individual and their wish to reform. And really from that perspective, we do have many similar institutions in the West, like half way houses and various criminal rehabilitation programs.
> My point is, what works for Norway (population: 5.2m, prison population: 3874 or 0.0745% [0]) is never going to work for Brazil (population: 207m, prison population: 659020 or 0.31% [1]).
Actually the population density of Brazil is just 1.5 times that of Norway. Not a great difference.
If you were to place New York City on Mars, you could have its population density be any value you want simply by expanding its political borders.
When comparing countries, it's the distribution that matters. If I have 50 people spread throughout my house, or 50 people shoved into a single room in my house, my house will have the same population density, but in the latter case I'll have 50 pretty irritable people. The same is true for a country. Take Canada: It's population density is quite low, but that doesn't paint a very accurate picture of living conditions, since the vast majority of the population lives within a much smaller region along the US border.
In any case, I agree with the sibling that population density is not the statistic the GP is using in support of his position. He is using prisoner per capita, which is 3x higher for Brazil than Norway and surely has at least some effect on the ability of Brazil to treat its prisoners in the same way.
While I dont really agree with the original argument, while what you say is true, I dont think population density was the point. Prison population as a percentage of the total was. Brazil has ~4.2 times higher prison population compared to total. You could argue that compounds with the 1.5 times population density though which would come out to ~6.4 times prison population density.
Though 659k vs 3.9k prisoners is a pretty significant difference if you look at it that way.
Yeah, I have come to understand the whole population scale argument is just an example of American (or in this case Brazilian) exceptionalism. Basically just a right wing taking point that denied the reasons in favour of a blanket 'this well not work here' fallacious argument.
It's prison population / N prisons. So, each prison could have equivalent populations. Further, the costs don't drop with overcrowding etc, your just taking out a loan with interest. Underpay now, and you will overpay in the future.
That's a good point and I failed to match my argument with more information about the context. Brazil is a failed state (both politically and financially), so with more inmates and less money (for more prisons and rehabilitation projects), that creates quite the situation.
I'm not sure if size is an excuse. Isn't density a much larger problem. The US certainly had the space to properly house it's inmates. Is it larger proportion of the population that's in prison that's the problem? Why is that the case? The US being large doesn't seem like it should cause that.
I wonder if the "but that would.never work in america" people ever think about the old head and shoulders commercials
...they probably didn't get the joke.
This article is a fine example of IYI - "intellectual yet idiot" as Taleb terms it. Verbal cleverness + plausible statistics + apples/oranges comparison = what? Equals: "We have the answer to everything, but sadly the rulers and electorate aren't as wise/clever/compassionate as us." Others in this thread have pointed out specific fallacies in this article - for example there are prisoners in the US using chainsaws and axes; there are prisoners in Norway in solitary confinement who would be in general population in a US prison.
But let's zoom up to the bigger syndrome. Notice the author quotes at least one offender, but doesn't bother talking to any corrections officers. Did it occur to him that someone who worked in a prison for 20 years might know a little bit more about corrections than someone who read a bunch of studies and statistics?
Symptomatic of a broader problem - the chattering classes, who consume and generate information, are increasingly cut off from the real world, and increasingly influential. Of course it's easy to have opinions about how something "should" work when you have no experience and no skin in the game.
20 years of individual experience does not give you nearly as much data as "a bunch of studies and statistics". Being glib about the scientific method doesn't make you better than it.
Trying to build programs without real-world experience causes problems. And real-world experience isn't part of the mandatory skillset of those who interpret data.
Let me give you a clear, humorous example of something real-world experience will give you that studies will not:
Real world experience is not the thing that gets you to put on a parachute when jumping out of a plane. Parachutes weren't invented by people jumping out of planes with different things strapped to their backs until they found something that worked. They built thing and changed them and then tested those changes by building/testing wind tunnels. My god the amount of effort it must have taken to develop a way of packing a parachute so that it would open reliably must have been enormous.
On the other hand anyone with nothing but real world experience jumping out of airplanes with parachutes on would say, from experience, that parachutes are 100% safe. Someone could easily come along and develop a much safer parachute, and get zero adoption from the people with "real world experience" who assume that their experience is unbiased and sufficiently powerful to be representative.
The quantitative model is the only force by which humans reason. Anything that you can't model is merely happening to you, and that's what you hold in high esteem?
So what you are saying is that human experience is worthless? Is that really a position you want to commit to? Or are you willing to admit that practical experience has some value?
Adam just raised seed funding to build the next great mobile app. He needs a high performance back end which will support rapid iteration. He looks at two candidates for tech lead:
Bob has 20 years experience in server software development and led the back-end development at a previous mobile startup.
Charlie is an econ PHD from Yale and has many statistics at his fingertips about software development. He has never written any software.
I think there is something deeply funny about reading a discussion on how someone else is an "Intellectual Yet Idiot" and then watching them immediately turn it around with a bizarre seed-funding analogy (you might even say an apples/oranges comparison!)
That's not exactly what I meant by "skin in the game". What I'd like to offer to any would be reformer and rehabilitator:
1. You will pick an inmate who you think has maximum chance of reform. He must be someone facing 5 years or more imprisonment. He must consent to the experiment.
2. He will be released into your custody and live in your apartment/house.
3. You will receive a check for the estimated total savings you created by housing this inmate. Typically 6 figures.
4. You are responsible for his good behavior for his lifetime. If he commits any offense, you will pay the same penalty as the offender. In addition you will be financially liable for restitution if any, and the costs of imprisoning him.
It's not particularly hard to find people serving 5+ years in US prisons who one could gamble are no more or less a threat to society that the average person.
Having said that, I could make you the same offer, except I choose for you a as-of-now non-offending police officer, corrections officer, doctor, fireman, military service man or other upstanding citizen, for whom who will take life-long responsibility. If they commit a crime your penalty will match theirs.
If that doesn't sound super appealing, it might have something to do with playing Russian roulette, rather than an argument against rehabilitation.
I think both your points are valid: the "Black Swan" nature of the criminal liability, and the baseline risk. How can we reformulate the scenario to avoid both? Also, I want to emphasize the reformer's level of belief in his reform, rather than ability to pick the perfect inmate.
How about these changes?
* No criminal liability for the reformer - it all gets converted to civil financial liability. So a murder might be $1M; simple theft might be triple the value of the stolen article.
* Reformer's initial payment includes an offset for "average criminality", using the above dollar conversions. So if the reformee exhibits average criminality in the remainder of his life, the reformer only pays back that offset.
* Inmate is picked by lottery, excluding those with strong signs of unreformability.
I'm afraid these mods make the example less intuitive.
You have divided society into two: the criminal and the innocent. I do not detect an iota of empathy for the criminal in your analysis.
Our imperfect justice system often allocates individuals into "criminal" and "innocent" buckets unfairly. Don't assume that you and those you love are immune.
Prisoners have rights. Prisoners should be treated humanely. Prisoners are human.
I don't quite see how your comment relates to mine.
I just offered you a scenario where you can exercise compassion and make a lot of money at the same time. But you would have to shoulder responsibility. Would you do it?
If I were the inmate, I would most likely accept "early release" to a would-be reformer. I would happily sleep on the guy's floor to get out of even a minimum security prison.
I see a number of advantages for me. Not least, I have someone who really, really wants me to succeed on the outside.
But you haven't yet told me what you'd do, either as inmate or prospective reformer.
The author wrote: "In America some prisoners are released after long sentences with little more than clothes and a bus fare."
Rubbish. In the county where I live, Essex in MA, inmates are given the clothes they were wearing when arrested and a ride to the courthouse where they were convicted, and turned loose. Pity the guy arrested in May who gets out in January. They shoplift at the local Marshalls on their way home. I wonder why?
I have been released twice from the Florida DOC, both times from a panhandle camp (Gulf C.I) that was approximately 9 hours from my home.
They definitely DO NOT give you the clothes "you were arrested in" as long ago those clothes were thrown away (at the "reception center" along with your cell phone, which was almost certainly stolen by the COs and/or convicts, and all other property you may have had)
My first time through, in 2004, my ex-wife actually sent me a beautiful set of clothes to be released in. They were of course "lost". She was so upset when she came to pick me up the assholes in release were actually threatening to lock her and/or me up because she was making such a stink about me having no clothes for release.
I ended up getting very ill fitting cheap-ass pants and a white t-shirt, and back then, a $100 dollar bill. That's it. Thankfully, I had her to pick me up and drive me home.
The second time through I wasn't so lucky. In 2014 I was given the same shit clothes, only $50 this time as they changed the release policy, and a bus ticket. That is it. No cell phone, no wallet...nothing.
It sounds like you are talking about jail, not prison.
Why are we looking at Norway? Because it is doing something right, or because it fits the authors preplanned narrative?
Singapore has much lower crime stats than Norway and the USA [1,2]. Let's take a look at how Singapore treats its prisoners.
The punishment for even minor crimes (like graffiti) includes caning[3]. They stick you in a prison cell for months, and on some random morning, they will wake you up and give you the sentenced number of hard beatings to your backside. The beating is done by someone with specialized training to inflict maximum pain (while remaining safe). So for months, every day you are scared, never sleeping soundly, as you don't know if this will be the night of your beating.
-Would the graffiti rate in the USA go up or down if the USA imposed the same penalties as Singapore?
-Would reducing recidivism rates by 20-50%, as the article claims possible, really be enough to lower crime in the USA to a OECD average level [4]?
-Norway and Singapore each have ~5M people. Singapore has 130 rapes a year, Norway has 1,000. How do you justify leaving the Norway justice system in place to the additional 800 rape victims in Norway, when a better system for reducing crime has been invented?[5]
Maybe the US is stuck in middle-no-mans land that leads to bad outcomes. To address this, they could either make prisons into hotels/universities (Norway) or impose stricter penalties (Singapore). But if someone did something terrible to one of my family members, I know which system I'd prefer.
[5] Of course, it's never fully accurate to measure systems by comparing numbers across different cultures/measurement systems. The main point remains though.
I was raped once, long ago. So I have read quite a great deal on the subject, among other things that to my mind are pertinent but not worth going into here.
Without knowing anything more about the two countries than what you have said, my assumption would be that rape is much more underreported in Singapore rather than being less common. The definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent. An awful lot of people are raped in a non-violent way by people they know. This often occurs after consuming alcohol or other drugs. For example, date rape on college campuses (U.S.) almost always involves alcohol. In such cases, the victims may feel confused as to whether or not it really was rape. There is also the detail that people will cover up crimes if they don't agree with the law or they feel that the punishment is excessive for the crime involved. Victims also will cover up that they were raped and not report it in order to protect their own reputation. The victims of rape often feel ashamed, are often accused of "asking for it" based on how they were dressed, etc.
What you describe (as punishment for even minor crimes in Singapore) is basically psychological and physical torture. I seriously doubt that a culture that officially embraces that is one where people all get along so beautifully that rape has practically gone extinct. An atmosphere of fear and loathing is highly unlikely to foster some sort of Utopian outcome.
Thanks for sharing. I think you're likely right about differences in measurement between the two countries.
That said - Singapore still has lower murder rates than Norway (something I assume is more easily measured). This could be cultural and not due to the justice system, but I think it's still worth pointing out that the super-harsh method happens in the developed world today, whereas the article just talked about the hotel/education Norwegian method.
From what I have read, investment in family, children and education goes a lot further to reduce crime than harsher prison sentences and the like. I have seen it said that every dollar spent on preschool saves multiple dollars years down the road on prisons.
The two cultures are undoubtedly different in many different metrics. It is incredibly hard to compare two different cultures in a way that yields specific meaningful conclusions for a single metric. Each difference has multiple different implications. Teasing apart the complex web of differences is vastly harder than most comments in internet discussion seem to appreciate.
> Norway and Singapore each have ~5M people. Singapore has 130 rapes a year, Norway has 1,000. How do you justify leaving the Norway justice system in place to the additional 800 rape victims in Norway, when a better system for reducing crime has been invented?
I feel obligated to point out that you are assuming that the rate of reporting (and being believed by the authorities making these statistics!) (EDIT: as well as the strictness of the legal definition thereof) is equal in both countries. I have my doubts about that.
Scandinavian countries have a wide range of definitions of rape (which is a good thing). That means a lot of situations that are not classified as rape in other countries are included.
In 2015, 97 of the rapes in Norway were classified as "assault rapes". That means that someone used violence/force, drugs or threats to rape her (or him).
One example taken from Singapore is that if a woman is penetrated anally it is not classified as rape, but sexual assault.
Another example taken from Singapore is that a married man can by definition not commit rape against his wife unless they have been living apart. Marital status does not give any protection in Scandinavia when someone says no.
Seeing how the definition of rape in Singapore is so different than in Scandinavia makes me think we can't compare the numbers without giving proper context.
Yes, I tried to point that out in my [5] above. But Singapore seems better in basically all crime metrics, including murder and crimes that are perhaps better defined and reported.
Still leaves questions as to how much is cultural and how much is because of the justice system. But it's tough for me to imagine a world where caning doesn't decrease the amount of graffiti, auto thefts, bank robberies, etc.
-How many would start doing crimes of opportunity (graffiti, auto thefts, bank robberies, etc) because caning was implemented? (an absurd question)
-How many who currently do those crimes would not do those crimes if there is the possibility of significant unwanted punishment?
The fact that recidivism is so high suggests this is not a problem of catching and sentencing criminals (recidivism is only those who are caught/charged!). This is a problem of the punishment not being enough to deter the actions.
Perhaps it's also a cultural difference? Notice how Japan has the same rate of homicides as Singapore? Perhaps it's a cultural thing more so than a policy thing working out in Asia.
Comparing countries with corporal punishment with their intentional homicide rate leads to no conclusion.
The United States have tried harsher punishments for decades now, and it's not working out. Perhaps a different method is devised?
Besides, you may approve of legal corporal punishment, but I am not sure everyone in the West does.
I think the cultural difference piece is hard to judge, but it's very difficult for me (a mostly uninformed reader) to figure that piece out. I think no matter how you try and get the stats, that piece will remain.
I think my main takeaway is that the US has a pretty bad system currently. Our prisons do seem like breeding grounds for criminals, and our recidivism rate is high. One way to end recidivism is potentially with education. Another way to reduce the problem of recidivism is by locking a repeat offender up for life[1].
I'm not sure the answer, but clearly there's room for improvement in the US system.
Our crime statistics are just so much worse in the US, it seems like we need radical, generational changes to try and make our crime rates more like similar European countries.
More Chicagoans have been killed in gun violence since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.[2]
In the top 50 world cities by murder rate, 46/50 are in countries that you might expect (Brazil, Mexico, Honduras, etc)[3]. But 4 are in one of the richest countries in the world, with St. Louis premiering at #14. A 20-30% drop by making our prisons universities is not enough to make these numbers tolerable to me. We need massive change (not just with criminal justice... obviously education, culture, economics all play a part).
> Our crime statistics are just so much worse in the US, it seems like we need radical, generational changes to try and make our crime rates more like similar European countries.
This requires a choice - a commitment to actually do what's necessary to reduce violence, by recognising and fixing the systemic factors. Glasgow attempted this recently with great success: http://www.actiononviolence.org.uk/about-us
Glasgow now has 5.1 homicides per 100,000 people, compared to the worst rate in the US (St. Louis, 59.3 homicides per 100,000 people).
Some of the techniques were in fact imported from the US:
> "In tackling gang crime the unit imported a successful anti-gang violence initiative spearheaded in Boston in the 1990s. The Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) programme broke up Glasgow's long established gangs by offering members an alternative to the violent lives they were living . The VRU also successfully lobbied for increases in maximum sentences for carrying knives."
I think one has to include that factor in a thorough analysis of this issue. The US has a much higher murder rate than other developed countries; 3.9 murders per year per 100k population, compared to 0.6/100k in Norway, 0.3/100k in Singapore, and around 1/100k in the major EU countries [1].
I think it's entirely possible that different punishment regimes are effective at different levels of violence in the population. But I don't know that there is a good way of quantifying that point, since we're talking about interventions at the state level. Or it could be that once your society gets the murder rate down to < 1/100k, something else has changed in your society and it doesn't matter how you punish your criminals.
Certainly there's something different about the US; a good analysis here [2], though that is specifically on the mind-killer subject of gun violence. Pinker's "The better angels of our nature" has some interesting ideas on this subject too.
Right. It seems awfully silly to show a chart of "prisoners per 100k people" without a chart of "violent crimes per 100,000 people".
Sure, the US has 10x the incarceration rate of Norway, but we also have 6.5x the murder rate.
You can say our prisons aren't effective at reducing crime, but when a country has way more crime, you'd expect them to have way more prisoners. It's not an argument of "over-incarceration" (as is often heard).
It seems likely that there are some factors contributing to the US's higher murder rate that would also be expected to spill over into the violent crime rate. I'd like to dig into whether the US has higher non-violent crime rates than other countries as well, but can't find any good summaries right now.
So I think I'd expect to see a lot more violent crime if you increased the murder rate by 6.5x, and that might get you close to 6.5x the prison population depending on the breakdown of the difference in crime rates. But having said that, it seems likely that there are a few factors contributing to the incarceration rate, not just the higher base rate of violent crime.
You would, if other crimes are caused by the same factors you used to increase murders -- lead supplements, immigration, or encouraging Kristallnachts.
The better way is to reduce poverty. You can build whatever "rehibilitation" program you want, but if the future holds no promise, why follow the rules?
prisons are just the beginning. when you get out you can find yourself prevented from obtaining a job, a residence, and even assistance, because of local, state, and federal laws.
The Renew Act of 2017 is trying to expand the age limits for expungement of records of first time offenders.[1] its a start but there are more opportunities to fix the system post prison too. you don't even have to go to prison to have a record that prevents you from being productive in society.
one of favorite examples are the volunteers for smoke jumping, putting out forest fires. there are states where its illegal for a person who did this job in prison to obtain the same outside. if we keep up the barriers where do we truly expect people to go?
"Oregon, which insists that programmes to reform felons are measured for effectiveness, has a recidivism rate less than half as high as California’s."
Assuming it's not a statistical blip, I wonder why Oregon is so different to California. Seems to me that a politician who promises to reduce the recidivism rate and thereby save taxpayer dollars would get more votes.
Yeah, this article is a bit confusing. The US has prisons just like this. Prisoners who commit less severe crimes or prisoners who have a good record are eligible.
Do journalists think every US prison is like Pelican Bay? Do they think Shawshank Redemption is representative of the norm in the US?
Like any other commercial media, the main goal of The Economist is to get readers/subscribers. Slanted, inflammatory stories do a better job at that than objective, well-researched pieces that present a fuller picture.
The USA has "boys homes" that do this. As a child, I attended one such place where we all had to grow our own vegetables, to this day I can grow vegetables.
Privatized prisons (in the USA) are money makers, holding mostly low to medium risk offenders, you can even buy shares on the stock market.
With more police on patrol there will be less crime. Spend less money on prisons and more money on local police force.
The American system of justice is not to rehabilitate, but to humiliate, punish, and torture. Worse, we outsource this to the private prison system which has an incentive to keep people in prison. You go to prison in America you will be brutally tortured, humiliated, and will emerge far worse than when you went in. That is the fault of every American citizen - not the politicians - but the people. Because it is the citizenry who punishes the politician that appears even remotely soft on prisoners, or supports prison reform. America is a vengeful society, overflowing with righteous indignation.
The idea of "tough on crime" was born from the political elites though. Read the Rick Perlstein trilogy, particularly the first two books "Before the Storm" and "Nixonland", which go into this depth. It was used to exploit racial resentment in the civil rights era as part of the "Southern Strategy" as Democrats began accepting civil rights into their political program (and eventually to blame the Civil Rights Act for crime). Racism is obviously a persistent problem here, as well as classism (which is often an unexamined cultural phenomenon in the US) and a culture of vengeance. Vengeance is a DISTINCTLY American idea that has been with us since our calvinist roots and is part of our cultural image in everything from our forever war of foreign intervention to our films (particularly Tarantino films exhibit this). It's a sick, contemptible cultural tenet.
We can begin to reverse this by electing DAs like Philly just has: Larry Krasner, a civil rights attorney who has made lowering sentences where he has prosecutorial discretion and refusing to try insufficient cases a part of his platform ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsEFPHMrAKc ). It will also take citizen pressure to ensure these people follow through on their program as they join a thoroughly racist, punitive institution. Also, people must be willing to elect representatives that will cut criminal penalties across the board. Simply cutting them for nonviolent crimes will not solve the problem: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the...
As a non-American, I have to say this is the most puzzling thing about the US: The abundance of anger and indignation in public debate. I guess it's a natural consequence of a winner-takes-all voting system in combination with a vast and heterogeneous population.
On the contrary. <rapidly fashions tinfoil hat> The US is a representative democracy with only 2 credible political parties. In such a system, if you are one of the incumbents, it pays to polarise every issue: that way no third part can emerge. At the very worst, you are out of power for 8-12 years, but you always come back into power. If you manage to get you hooks into the media, then you can encourage them to polarise every issue too. They'll love it, because confirmation bias is a powerful force. It leads to rabid followers of the various institutions -- who deride the followers of the other institutions.
Hmmm... tin foil hats are comfy. I think I'll wear this one for a while...
A winner-takes-all voting system results in only two parties (Regional third parties can exist, but not national ones). No conspiracy required, only maths.
I studied comparative politics in college and this is absolutely true. Different voting system have different outcomes due to the nature of the rules. Unsurprisingly, every attempt to make a more fair voting/systems ends up with its own pros and cons, such as giving minority parties disproportionate influence due to need for coalitions.
In Canada, we have a first past-the-post voting system (if you get the majority of the votes in the riding, you get the seat) and we have at least 3 parties federally (Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP). Technically, we have 4 (including the Bloc Québecois but they're only in one province). So, it's entirely possible to have a winner take all voting system and have more than two parties. Things have fluctuated over the years and we've had 5 parties when the Progressive Conservatives had a split and the Reform Party was created, but they eventually merged once they realized that they couldn't win if they split the votes.
There's been at least one attempt to try and change the voting system, but the side involved in presenting the pros of the new system really did a terrible job.
Well, it sort of depends on the size of the "voting blocs" in which there are winner-takes-all. If the voting bloc was a single person then you have proportional representation, more or less. In the US, the voting blocs are the states, and they are usually very big, so the US is very far from PR.
How big are these voting blocs in Canada?
Anyway, it's interesting to me that even PR systems usually end up having two major parties (with a host of smaller parties around them). I guess that's because many voters cannot bother to educate themselves about the smaller parties or because there's usually one big question of the day that can be answered in a yes/no fashion...
I work in lobbying so I'm on the periphery of something very interesting: The idea of voting blocs, and being able to identify who is going to vote which way, based on discernible facts such as race, gender, culture, religion, occupation, income, etc. This is the new holy grail in politics.
I believe that with the right algorithms and data stream (i.e. Facebook) you can calculate a parties relative strength in the electorate, based on voter characteristics. Then apply layers of other data. For example, apply crime statistics to it. Ex. Murder victim has characteristics that would make it more likely than not they are liberal. Democrats -1. Murderer is caught and has characteristics that they are more than likely Conservative. Republicans -1. Result null.
Terrorist walks into a gay nightclub and kills 49 people who have characteristics that they are most likely o vote liberal. Democrats -49. Terrorist enters a military base and murderers 13 people who have characteristics that would appear most likely to vote conservative. Republicans -13. All +/- a statistical norm.
Very cold calculus... I think government officials and political parties are doing this right now, harvesting immense data to say with certainty: In a particular voting district, we can reasonably say with x turnout we will have a result of y; x1:y1, etc.
In Canada, there's a few hundred districts across the country, so each one is no more than a few hundred thousand people at most. But, I'd say most are under 50k people. Those districts each get to elect one person to parliament. If one party gets a majority of the seats in parliament, they form the government (a majority government). If they don't (but have the largest number of seats for a single party), they try and form a coalition and form a minority government. If they can't form a coalition, the next largest party gets a chance to do it and if so they form the government. Realistically, this second option doesn't really happen.
So, doesn't a district elect a congressperson? If so, the voting bloc isn't a whole state, except I guess for electing the President and senators. Canada doesn't have an elected senate and we don't have anything like an elected President. We have a Prime Minister, but they're the head of the governing party in parliament. We also have a Governor-General, who represents the Queen as our head of state, but it's mostly a ceremonial position, except when there's a change in government. Even then, they're highly constrained and it's basically ceremonial there too.
I agree with that in general, but it's a bit oversimplified. America is also a dangerous and violent society--our per capita murder rate has averaged 5-10x higher than the U.K. for over a century (long before private prisons and modern mass media).
I agree that it's a moral failing if the people that we don't deal with that problem in a more graceful and humane way.
Explain how Simpson's Paradox works here. Explain how it can be mathematically possible for each state/city/etc to have a lower murder per capita than the national murder per capita. Use concrete numbers as examples.
> That's a logical fallacy (Simpson's Paradox). It could be the case that when you condition on each neighborhood, the per capita murder rate is lower than Britain's, but the overall per capita murder rate is higher.
One, phrase your statement properly. You intended to compare neighborhood to corresponding neighborhood between the two countries. Not "Britain's".
Two, as others have mentioned. You have no basis for invoking Simpson's Paradox.
> Explain how Simpson's Paradox works here. Explain how it can be mathematically possible for each state/city/etc to have a lower murder per capita than the national murder per capita. Use concrete numbers as examples.
Three, how does your example satisfy my comment?
Four, I know Simpson's Paradox. I also know the difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something.
Your math is wrong, rayiner didn't mention neighborhood variation at all, and Simpson paradox is relevant to changes over time or resampling, not simple rate comparisons
What's your evidence that this is Simpson's Paradox? In order for that to be the case, you'd have to have a significantly higher proportion of the US population living in the most dangerous neighborhoods as compared to the UK. That may be the case, but I'd be reluctant to assume that.
Yeah, I don't think the muder rate in the US vs. the UK actually exhibits that.
I was just pointing out that it's not okay to say "the unconditional rate of murder in A is greater than the unconditional rate of murder in B, therefore A is more dangerous than B". While it may be true that A is more dangerous than B, the implication is wrong.
>You go to prison in America you will be brutally tortured
Having read the article for context, I think you could gain some perspective from it:
>In Syrian prisons, dissidents are beaten, given electric shocks, crushed in a folding board called the “flying carpet” and hanged in their thousands after two-minute “trials”. More commonly, prisons are vile because they are overcrowded and ill-managed, so the nastier inmates (and guards) can do what they please. At some Brazilian lockups, for example, heavily outnumbered guards patrol the perimeter and allow gang bosses to impose order within.
This does not tell the whole story. There is also a huge racial element to how and why we lock people up (and for how long). The documentary 13 explored this in depth and showed how whites used "prison/jail" to makeup for the lost free labor of slaves. Or how Regan used "the war on drugs to simply lock up blacks. To have a discussion about the American prison system and never mention race shows just how bias the HN crowd is; even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Agreed much of our drug policy and criminal system systematically keeps down black people. Not sure that one comment skipping a discussion of race implies all of HN is biased, though
I disagree; and your watered down comment is an example of what I was talking about. It does not just "systematically" keep people down. That is just your elitist way of saying "meh, the system is not optimized for your success but get over it". In reality; the system was actually designed to incarcerate a certain group of people, not because of American's "Puritan” roots but because America is racist as hell and always has been but it does not benefit the HN crowd (mainly White/Asian/Indian etc…) to admit or examine this issue since it does not reinforce the image of how they want to see themselves. That is how an entire discussion on this issue can take place without even a mention of the driving force behind America’s incarceration strategy.
You simply assert that America set out to incarcerate Blacks because it is sore about giving them freedom? Perhaps it's a bit more complex than that.
Growing up African American (or for that matter Native American) you are far more likely to be in a single parent household, therefore poorer. Your schools are often worse as a result. Girls mature a couple years faster. All this leads to a vicious cycle of younger pregnancies, often out of wedlock. Add to this that anyone growing up in a tough neighborhood needs to "toughen up". And you have a lot of vicious cycles perpetuating this kind of life.
It is not race-related. Nigerians for example who immigrated in the 20th century have culture that differs in many respects. The average Nigerian American family income is higher than many other ethnicities including Dutch and French Americans.
There has got to be a way to help communities combat destructive cultural elements without getting all bent out of shape about racism. I feel there is a very vocal industry out there that wants everyone to say Blacks are victims, and shouts down any hint that they have the power to choose what they do in their own family and neighborhood just like everybody else.
I am black, I don't need you to explain what "growing up black" is like. Your entire argument is that of a naive outsider that does not understand the parallels between race and culture.
Why are responses like these such cryptic hit-and-run allusions to lack of knowledge and assertions of bias? Why not directly engage with facts, statistics, right here instead of saying one should read an entire book, while offering nothing to directly address the substance of what we discussed?
Look, there are members of the "Black race" who have a different culture and make more money and themselves look down upon "ghetto culture". Here are some elements of the culture:
swearing frequently,
guffawing loudly in public places,
escalating arguments to violence over trivial things,
filming themselves on youtube abusing defenseless people, etc. etc.
Look, I come from Russia. I can readily admit - and so can many Russians - that certain sectors of Russian society have similar tendencies to drink and violent escalations etc. These are just facts and they are not race related, they are culture related.
I am a man. I realize men are disproportionstely profiled by police vs women for violent crimes and are incarcerated far, far more often than women. Yet I am willing to deal with facts about men's behavior vs women's behavior on the average without yelling systemic sexism and that men are victims. We have to be able to deal with facts as adults and men, just like women, have the power over their behavior and probability of going to jail. When it comes to men vs women you presumably agree w me, but somehow you seem to suggest that speaking in non racial terms is racist. Why, because you think African Americans are incapable of making choices that other ethnicities (Han Chinese, Jews) can make when it comes to eg raising a family?
No, my "systematically" meant "by design, throughout the system". Also, I definitely didn't say "meh", act particularly elitist, say anything about the system vs "your success", or try to make excuses for America based on "Puritan roots". I think the system is racist as hell.
I'd love to have a real discussion about this, but you're putting words in my mouth, versus responding to my actual comment and trying to have a conversation
>Because it is the citizenry who punishes the politician that appears even remotely soft on prisoners, or supports prison reform.
So, because the man on the street rejects shorter sentences or decriminilization, he is to blame for "brutal torture and humiliation" and privatization? Nah.
Would a prison dichotomy be a good idea? That is, the reformable criminals go to rehabilitation, and the ones for which there is no hope go in for life (or at least until old age)?
What are you trying to optimize for? The American system exists to satiate our citizenry's craving for cruelty (and to express hatred for minorities), and in that capacity it is a resounding success.
But we sort of have that already. First offences tend to get lesser sanctions, including probation, which is an attempt to curb bad behavior without imprisonment. In California at least, the three strikes law means that three convictions above a certain threshold result in a life sentence. This sometimes makes the news when the third conviction is relatively minor, like shoplifting. California also has lifetime confinement for dangerous child molestors after completion of sentence.
And even with incarceration, there are opportunities for rehabilitation. When my SO was working at the county jail, they had "weekend time" for first-time offenders who managed to get themselves some time. You report every Friday night, spend the weekend in jail, and then get released Sunday evening.
The idea is that you keep your job and ability to pay rent, but you still do time. If you fail to appear or do something stupid, you serve the whole term in jail.
She said it was about 50-50. The people who behaved could do their entire term without even losing their job. Unfortunately, plenty of people didn't even show up for their first Friday, and then they'd be utterly outraged that they had to spend all of the next three months in jail. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Why is it a problem for the free public that people get worse in prison if they never get out? Obviously there's something wrong here. While your caricature reflects an underlying truth, it's certainly way too exaggerated.
The systemic voter suppression of minority populations through felony disenfranchisement and disparities in enforcement are at odds with what Americans profess as an ideal, that "all men are created equal".
Christianity? That is a stretch. Christians believe in divine forgiveness and some sects even believe man does not have the right to punish man; that doing so is doing God's job.
Punishment as retribution is way, way older than Christianity.
Are we hanging onto it in the United States as a relic of our (specifically) Puritan origins? Possibly.
What I meant is that it could be a manifestation of an archetype in the Christian imagination - the 5th circle of hell. I did not have any conscious implementation of a doctrine for dealing with punishment in mind.
American prison is actuall not a system but a culture. Think of how hard it is to change a culture, you probably need new leadership with enough power like a CEO at Microsoft to do something drastic in a reasonable amount of time, say 10 year frame.
"The Economist is 160+ years old, and back then anonymity was the norm. Then the industry went on a slightly disturbing path toward writer celebrity, and we simply chose not to participate."
One takeaway from the article (if nothing else) was to give them responsibility. I like that. Demanding something from prisoners is more likely to change them than punishment and waiting.
One advantage the Norwegian prison system has is that it is filled with Norwegians, I would be careful generalizing conclusions from it.
That being said, one concept I rarely see discussed is the use of basic income as an incentive against crime, particularly violent crime: if you lost your citizens dividend after conviction and slowly earned it back every year upon release that would act as a powerful and immediate incentive to avoid violence.
I say this because while I seem to observe this prison-is-terrible-the-convicts-need-compassion, not one person here has offered to help me in any meaningful way, even though I have documented my trials and tribulations over and over [0][1][2].
I have a 30 year history of software development, with 14 or so with the LAMP-stack. No one reading this is willing to even talk about some side project or prove-yourself 2 week gig? Ok right I get it...this isn't a help wanted or job board fine that's cool.
But still, I'm not getting it anymore...is everyone just into some sort of bullshit social signalling exercise or, perhaps worse, are willing to try to help ex-cons as long as they are funneled into low paying exploitative back-breaking jobs with no future that almost surely will lead 95% back into crime?
If so, can we start being honest about that's what all this discussion is about..."boy someone should sure do something about how screwed these people are but hell no it won't be me."
Yeah, so I'm frustrated and scared and broke and all that, so try to forgive my rant...I'm sure I'll come to regret it as I do so much else in my life.
[0] https://postmoderncoder.svbtle.com/fear-and-jaywalking-in-la... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14394324 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14302656