I feel like the prison system is the victim of perverse incentives.
The goal given to them is "house this person securely for a specific length of time at the lowest cost possible". They are rewarded for cutting costs.
But the total cost we pay is the cost to imprison this person the second and third time when they re-offend. It's the policing costs when they're homeless because they can't find housing or get a job. It's the health care costs they can never pay for when all of the above inevitably leads to further problems.
To reduce the lifetime cost of this person on society (financially and otherwise) we should be incentivising prisons to actually rehabilitate.
But we won't, because our society is largely based on Calvinist nonsense that says there are "bad people" and we should celebrate those people having bad things happen to them.
Going a step further, we can reduce costs by funding social services that help prevent people from ending up in prison in the first place. I agree with your assessment of our Calvinist thinking.
I think this understanding is incorrect. My understanding is that housing services, mental health services, medical services, transportation infrastructure, and related things like maternity and paternity leave, good labor rights, good pay and fair working conditions all lead to a reduction in low level crime and homelessness. There is no need for a single silver bullet if we have a collection of policies that work. To just pick one issue here is a nice article about housing:
This is true, but I think RCT-like conditions are hard to create in the social sciences. This does not mean we are unable to make informed policy choices based on the available data.
For interventions they're not that hard, and 99% of correlations that suggest interventions fail to find an effect when they try and RCT. While it's true it's evidence, it is very very very weak evidence.
> 99% of correlations that suggest interventions fail to find an effect
I'm genuinely trying to square your thinking with the specific services I listed in an earlier comment:
> housing services
It seems obvious and intuitive to me that providing discounted housing services would clearly have an effect. Clearly if we can manage spiraling housing costs, more people can stay housed and fewer people will be destitute. And the case in Vienna supports this notion:
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...
Have you found an RCT-like study that provided affordable housing of this quality and failed to find an effect?
> mental health services
I would be surprised if you found that providing quality mental health services does not have an effect.
> medical services
This is another one which seems obvious and intuitive to me. A fair number of people in the USA end up homeless or destitute due to medical debt or lack of appropriate medical care. Every other major country offers some form of free medical care and I cannot see how this would fail to have an effect.
> transportation infrastructure
If you follow the urbanists on youtube or websites like Strong Towns it seems clear that requiring everyone to have a car places a heavy burden on the poor, and it seems obvious to me that if you have good transportation infrastructure (high speed rail between cities and good metro rail in cities, appropriate zoning for walkable neighborhoods), then it becomes much easier for the poor. This is not something that you can easily study as an RCT.
> and related things like maternity and paternity leave, good labor rights, good pay and fair working conditions
Again these are obviously beneficial.
I feel like I provided a lot of good examples and I am surprised by the continued assertion of "very very very weak evidence". Really? For every one of these things?
Let me start with what I agree with, we should try all of them in a fashion that tests if they work, and if any of them did role them out everywhere.
I also agree that many of these have beneficial effects besides a reduction in crime and we should maybe provide these services anyway because it makes peoples lives better.
I also agree we should manage spiraling housing costs by upzoning everywhere. I think affordable housing could actually make things worse by concentrating poverty.
I'm not convince transportation infrastructure helps the poor more than direct cash transfers. The US is really terrible at building cost effective transportation infrastructure, and most of the places that have it are terrible places to be poor like San Francisco or New York.
The only example I need is one replicated natural experiment or RCT that shows any of these working.
I encourage you to read the short article about Vienna, which explicitly addresses the concern of concentrating poverty. Vienna has avoided this by building good affordable housing in desirable locations which is owned by the city government, and then they only require people to be poor upon entering the housing. As their income rises, which is a predictable effect of affordable housing, they are allowed to stay. This means that the housing is mixed income rather than concentrated poverty. The city owns or controls approximately half of all available housing units in the city, which helps keep private rents reasonable as well through market pressure.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...
I think the research is out there to support these policies, whether the data is an RCT or something else, as I hope the above argument highlights. If you remain neutral while you wait for an RCT, there can be real world consequences for vulnerable people.
I do agree that the US is terrible at building transportation infrastructure, but as advocates like Strong Towns point out, we're actually bankrupting local towns with car-dependent sprawl (due to high tax burdens to maintain the infrastructure) so we really must improve that one regardless. That it will benefit the poor is simply another reason to accelerate these changes.
It's the difference between "Look at all these policies that reduce crime." to "Here are some good ideas for policies we should test out in as controlled an environment as possible to see if they reduce crime".
In Germany are about 1/3 people in prison because they used a train or bus without ticket. If you can't pay you will end up in prison. Imagine how much money this does cost.
I was also curious about this statement. According to wikipedia, one third of the Plötzensee Prison inmates are there due to fare evasion. Or rather, they were when the articles that wikipedia cites were written. Of course, being a juvenile prison in Berlin, it might have the highest rate of fare evader inmates of any prison in the country (which would explain why the articles write about that prison specifically).
You don't get it. The fines are HUGE and the prison sentences really short.
So what do you choose? Pay x000 euro? Or go to prison for 1 day, a week at most? There are a substantial number of people picking the second option. Hell, people joke it's about the experience.
(Also this is in fact mostly about speeding tickets, not public transport fares)
Bavaria is the second most well off state so it seems a little unreasonable to assume the average numbers must be near that. These are the kind of crimes disproportionately concerning the poor.
I'd want to see a citation on that, only thing I could find so far is this quote "Peter Biesenbach, justice minister in Germany's most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia, said that over one-in-ten verdicts handed down in his state dealt with fare-dodgers."
I can't imagine that 1 in ten verdicts for fare dodging would result in one third of the prison population being fare dodgers.
Not OP but I believe they're talking about the total prison population and not the total population. They're saying that roughly 19,000 people (roughly 1/3 of 56,557) are in prison in Germany due to the inability to pay a fine that was given to them for riding on a train or bus without a ticket.
I am German and support the degradation of this "crime" to a delict, but even if 1/3 of the emprisoned is there bc of riding without a ticket, which I can hardly believe without a source, you leave out a very important aspect. Most if not all of those aren't emprisoned because they were caught 3 times without a ticket, but because they were on probation when they were caught. Most of those got probation immedeately in court.
The law was created in the 1930s by the Nazi government because people "hacked" the new ticket machines, which weren't as secure as today. This wasn't an issue before when selling tickets was done by humans. Sadly western Germany always has been too conservative to change it, the reunification would have been a good chance to overthink every law that originated from the 3rd Reich.
It will make more sense once you realize the judicial system, cops, prisons etc demand their tribute and if less people are breaking the current laws more will have to be invented or prison sentences made longer.
Government apparatuses don't shrink in size. This is why the war on drugs started after prohibition, Henry Anslinger had to go after the evil marijuana. If people stop committing crimes we'll just have to invent more.
Prison creates absolute animals. We shouldn't put people in prison unless they're going to be there for their entire lives. Singapore-style caning is probably much better for both the convict and the broader society -- take the incorrigible violent criminals and lock them up for life without parole, and cane the rest.
This policy is a bit outside of the Overton window, but caning really does seem more humane and effective than the nightmare of American prisons (I would take 3 strokes from a cane (will scar and you can't sit down for a few weeks) over 6 months in prison). It's not just the crowded brutality that we subject people to in prison but the painful fact that once you are out you are ruined. Caning is quick and convincing. The punishment is administered and the convict can get on with their life and keep their job, their house and their family. From a conditioning standpoint I would also suspect that the severe bout of physical pain is a more effective tool than a few years of psychological torture.
The data above had Norway at 20% at 2 years, so it would be surprising to still be 20% at 5 years.
They're also low population, and quite wealthy from the giant oil fields national income.
If you broke the 330 million in the US into 5 million sized chunks, you likely find well performing outliers like Norway too. That's the problem when assuming a small thing should scale.
The article is a quote from someone talking offhand who is not a researcher.
The wiki claim has three sources listed, none of which state the claim. The first claims 20%, no timeframe (so may well be the same 2 year value stated lots of places), the second sources the 20% in 2 years and a report (which looks to be a decent study, but does not have any claim of 25% at 5 years), and the third again has the 20% at 2 years with a linked report (the report also has that data).
Not one is a very good source, and if the person speaking for an interview were right, you'd think that data would appear all the times the 20% at 2 appears.
Given that, and that the data I cited was from a careful study [1] including lots of research from many countries (including the 20% at 2 years results from Norway), I tend to think the 25% is more or less made up wishful thinking. If it were defensible, it would be cited in other studies that aggregate all this data.
When you find something online, try to determine it's original source. Someone simply saying something is not generally true unless it's from a reputable place that actually measured it.
Interesting - from this data it does appear that US is on the lower end of the spectrum. I will say that this dataset is very hard to parse - a lot of information and very little is apples to apples in a simple ranked chart. Also some countries (Denmark for instance) have fluctuated wildly in a span of ~10 years, which suggests that what is treated as a crime might be a driving variable here. I would be really curious to see a more detailed analysis of this data that segments the population by offender class (if you lump in non-violent and violent offenders I would imagine that you are making more of a commentary of the relative enforcement of these respective crimes).
45% after 5 years hardly seems low; it's pretty similar to other countries in that list. The short-term recidivism is pretty low (though there isn't that level of data for most countries listed).
The source publication concludes "that international comparisons are currently not valid" due to inconsistencies between countries' data and lack of transparency.
This is such an insane comment even for HN. Is no one really going to point out savage an idea this is for handling prisons? There are countries that have incredibly low recid rates without deciding to black hole someone for their life or committing violence against them.
Interesting. As an expert on world penal systems and criminal rehabilitation, how do other more civilized countries rehabilitate a woman refusing to wear a hijab, or a guy who refuses to renounce Falun Gong?
Even though I'm not a fan of private prisons, I wonder what would happen if they had a contract that gave bonuses for every year a former inmate stayed out of jail? Maybe that's already been tried.
That's why the judicial-prison economy developed - to establish a financial relation between the two. We know it as "kids for cash"[1] and judges can make "millions of dollars" in payments from private facilities.
Outlawing such arrangements only pushes the blackmarket economy of kids for cash underground. Instead, of course, it should be regulated.
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems downright wrong for judges to have any financial incentive for ANY decision they make. Why would that be something we want to regulate? Seems like a judge should lose their position if they have a conflict of interest and rule anyway.
>Seems like a judge should lose their position if they have a conflict of interest and rule anyway.
That's pretty much what happened to the judge in the article linked by GP (you should read it, it's horrifying). Mostly because it's hard to work as a judge when you're serving a 17.5 year prison sentence.
I know it sounds wrong, but the same goes for guns, drugs, and just about anything else illegal. If it's banned, it's just pushed underground where it can't be regulated at all.
Besides, if there isn't a market for child-imprisonment, then we won't be able to accurately price it as a commodity. Not being able to price commodified child-imprisonment means the market for it will be much more inefficient than it needs to be. Efficient markets imply positive public good. It's really that simple.
Wow what a horribly worded idea. I can't tell if you are trolling everyone or if you are a diehard libertarian capitalist.
The implications from your suggestion would imply that regulating behavior outside of markets has never existed in the lifespan of the human race. I agree incentives are what regulate behavior but leaping from child-imprisionment is bad to we should make it legal and efficient is the only/best/reasonable solution disregards so much human legacy and sidesteps so many societal issues with normalizing this bullshit while allowing the horrible shit to live and grow. This shouldn't be normalized. Maybe child-imprisonment shouldn't exist in the first place? Why is your market based idea so easily reached for instead of taking a step back and saying this shouldn't happen under any circumstance or only in very rare circumstances? Why try and motivate behavior at the end of a cycle instead of totally doing away with the cycle to begin with?
Ideas like this show a moral bankruptcy that has become so ingrained in our Technocratic elites and we wonder why there is such a disconnection between different groups in our society.
Ideally, moral value would be signaled by market-based price discovery. Economic progress is one of creating markets for more things, not fewer. Markets for some things but not others reeks of special pleading.
If I was forced to admit that sometimes markets were bad, then I'd have to re-evaluate our entire economic system - what if healthcare markets, gun markets, even employment markets were up for debate? Under what criteria would one even evaluate those? Moreover, how could we even tell if they were genuinely bad or good, or if the particular cultural context and social indoctrination predisposed me to think they were good through social conditioning?
Why, for example, would a market for health care be good, but a market for child-imprisonment be bad? If a market for child-imprisonment were susceptible to bad actors, perverse incentives, and bad outcomes, then it stands to reason the same could be said of all markets. That's a rather large implication, I'm sure we agree on.
If humane child imprisonment is valued by the market participants, then that's what the market will provide. If a market doesn't signal that it's important, then it's definitionally not important. That's what price signalling is all about.
Kelseyfrog is trolling and enjoys using straw-man arguments to poke fun at other ideologies. I've debated with them before. Have you ever seen an ancap with pronouns in their profile lol? It's sarcasm.
I like debating. I use debate to test out theories and ideas all the time. It's a great way to learn what works and what doesn't. You don't have to believe everything you debate. The idea that people have to earnestly debate their own beliefs is a limiting mindset.
It seems like what people are trying to say is that market outcomes dictate market success. Eg: bad market outcomes = bad place to hold a market, but no one is flat out saying it. At the same time, we have the idea that markets are "the best thing we have and any limits on markets produce negative outcomes." This is a contradiction and at this point at this place, I don't think debating that topic directly is going to teach me anything. Debating the fringes, however is.
It's the same thing as saying "X doesn't work" on StackOverflow and getting people to prove that it does. It's that we're doing it with something non-tech this time.
You are stating private jails don't control the government. You're right, the opposite is true: government officials control private jails, which means delivering inmates and redirecting profits ...
Last big scandal about large scale wrongful imprisonment - of children, no less - the people profiting from this were:
1) Directly profiting
* the District Attorney
* 2 judges
* the director of ... of the Juvenile Probation Office
* the brother of the District Attorney, who ran the prison
2) Involved, capable of stopping the abuse, not proven to have personally profited, yet they cooperated:
* the district attorney
* a supreme court lawyer
* a supreme court justice personally
* the whole Pennsylvania supreme court
* the governor of Pennsylvania
* Pennsylvania's Judicial Conduct Board
* the FBI
3) the only parties the justice system considered guilty
* the brother of the District Attorney, who ran the prison. Note: he's still in business. The SAME business. He was convicted for a small amount, because he lied about paying off judges. He, and his brother the district attorney, are of course completely innocent of plotting for a decade to wrongfully imprison children, for profit.
The scheme continued for 7 YEARS after complaints about corruption were filed.
As always, we come to the same point as always: people claiming the government can be trusted, because of $reason. Separation of powers, because of the law, because ... You forget the government is a system made up of people. Guarantees, laws, contracts, achieve nothing the quality of people in government doesn't achieve. And we all know that quality is lacking somewhat. Also, this cannot be fixed by better laws, better such guarantees, any of that ...
> You are stating private jails don't control the government. You're right, the opposite is true: government officials control private jails, which means delivering inmates and redirecting profits ...
This gets brought up all the time as evidence of something systemic, but the linked article only mentions two judges convicted. Is there any evidence this is widespread?
This scandal was widespread. A LOT of people could have put a stop to it, and all but 2 were government officials. A LOT of people were warned this was happening, and sometimes went so far as to abuse it (ie. schools would threaten kids). The district attorney apologized regularly to victims.
I agree that these are all examples of justice system employees abusing their positions, but the examples given are slightly short of the original claim of "delivering inmates and redirecting profits", which implies some sort of concerted effort to send more people to jail for the purpose of enriching oneself. That's present in the cash 4 kids scandal, but really present when a corrections employee is mistreating prisoners. I certainly don't think the people
No I agree the problem is MUCH more the state sending people to prison for absurdly long terms without cause make the state, rather than any individual, a (usually tiny) amount of money without embarrassing politicians.
That problem is endemic, and occurs everywhere, and is also individuals enriching themselves, just a bit more indirect.
But these individuals that DO abuse the system for personal enrichment, they are the worst of all.
The prison industrial complex has lobbyists who do influence those decisions. They could start focusing on making the penalties harsher for minor crimes.
The is an incredibly naive view of the way the world works. The prison system has money ie power. They have the power to get people elected. Judges law enforcement and prison system are all one system and looking out for each other at the highest levels.
Correction Officer lobby groups consistently fight any legalization (marijuana or otherwise), any loosening of alcohol restrictions in states where there are, and are steadily advocating for higher and stricter sentencing.
I don’t know of a single argument that can’t be dismantled with “right, and people have never been found to cheat the system?”…
Is judges colluding with prison operators a frequent and normal occurrence? The US prison system is bad, but to my knowledge these things are the exception.
Frequent not. But judicial deference to prosecutors is, and offering/acceptance of plea bargains with terrible terms is as well. And prosecutors bring bullshit cases all the time, for a variety of reasons. I have first hand experience of this as a (luckily, successful) defendant.
Yes, this. Certainly these companies have done the math, and clearly see that the worse inmates are treated the more likely they are to become repeat customers.
Well, what if the ex-con's former prison had a bond on them- if this person ends up committing a crime against your business, you get the full costs covered, less 10%.
The prison would be incentivized to do this so as to help prevent recidivism. They'd also be incentivized to get that person the help they need so they don't commit crimes and can do the job too.
Actually the average cost of incarceration appears to be about 30k - if that was offered as a flat credit against employment cost (or some portion of that like 20k) for some term after the end of a sentence then the US would have a much stronger tool against recidivism.
The reason I would be hesitant to hire the ex-con is not because they're bad. OR I think they're going to be bad to me and thus I need extra insurance or whatever.
The reason I wouldn't hire them is because the system salivates to put those people back in the system, and I prefer to hire someone less likely to get pulled into the abyss at any random moment and cause me to lose out on my trained workforce. Their PO, any officer scanning automatic plate readers, customs agents, whoever, they're all chomping at the bit to pull that person back out of society and employment.
I was flagged on suspicion of being a criminal and now customs invents absurd shit every time I cross the border. Last time they got a federal search warrant out of thin air based on lies and dragged me to a hospital to internally search me for drugs. Every single time I go through it's something else with hours long detainment. They explicitly told me one one occasion if I was a felon they would fuck with me even more than they have.
I'm not a theologian, but my understanding is that 5-point Calvinism actually claims all people are bad (total depravity of Man) and that Christians shouldn't think they're better than other people, since it's not the person's choice if they believe in God or not (irresistible grace).
Though, maybe in practice Calvinism deviates from theory.
All 5 points are just different facets of the belief in predestination - that we are ultimately incapable of changing our moral standing, our fate, that only God can do that for us. In practice it means that there are an elect few who are capable of good (and in my educational experience, are tasked with "building the kingdom of God", aka running things) and everyone else deserves what is coming to them even if they could incidentally do good by the accident of common grace. There really isn't any incentive to not treat everyone not in your church as garbage and deserving of punishment. The only difference is now there isn't, for any one believer, a good reason to even try to listen to the pleas and arguments of someone outside your belief structure, because you're both under total depravity, but you feel, and are assured by those who believe the same as you, that you have God's blessing and are incapable of losing it.
Obviously not everyone believes all of it to the same extent, and they may have a softer padding between these beliefs and how they act within the real world, but based on my experience (30+ years of living in small Calvinist communities) most people who take the title Calvinist, and even most who rather take the label Reformed (because Calvinism has earned its bad name) do believe this to a fair extent.
Indeed so, but by the same logic it's not the person's choice to be hypocritical while reaping the mundane rewards of apparent piety.
Philosopher Slavoj Zižek argues that it is religion/ideology that allows for the commission of atrocities, by ascribing cosmic importance to otherwise banal conflicts over resources and prior injuries.
In nature, predatory animals might hunt prey to extinction and then die off themselves. But this is more likely to happen in theoretical models or very isolated/extreme environments with an unusually narrow 'fault tolerance. In more complex environments, adversarial populations wax and wane chaotically, selection pressure yield evolutionary innovations and arms races that allow breakouts from local minima, and so on.
A History of Warfare by John Keegan is a good introduction (with an excellent bibliography) to the anthropology of warfare, and has a particularly good treatment of initially adaptive social mores can end in catastrophe when they bump into resource limits or experience an external shock. Keegan emphasizes the role of technologies (both physical and social) which confer overwhelming advantages in conflict, which may or may not be sustainable. For example, pastoral herding/hunting practices developed on the large scale of the Mongolian steppe allowed nomadic hordes under leaders like Genghis Khan to overwhelm less dynamic agricultural societies. But lacking deep administrative foundations (quite literally, due to a lack of construction materials and incentives) they were unable to lock in their massive tactical advantages over a longer timescale.
War by Azar Gat has a deeper exploration of competition between socio-cultural systems and incorporates fresher scholarship, but at the price of being somewhat more tendentious and a much less engaging read.
Specifically, the concept I'm referring to is Predestination[0], or the more extreme version 'Double predestination', wherein God pre-ordained who the Good people are and who the Bad people are, and you know you're the Good people because bad things aren't happening to you, and you know that that person must be a Bad person because bad things happen to them.
If you're born to a wealthy privileged life, this belief says that you deserve it because you're one of God's chosen- that's why life is so good. And it's a good thing that all those bad things happen to other people because they are bad people. God didn't choose them.
This is an extreme view, but the seeds of it are everywhere in our society. Just the term "bad guys" is used to imply a generic evil that we need to stop. Meanwhile real life is far more nuanced (with most true sociopaths actually doing very well in finance and politics).
What you're describing is more commonly known as the "Prosperity Gospel" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology - which is a niche theology that claims believers will experience "health and wealth" on earth.
Predestination is a much more mainstream Christian doctrine that has nothing to do with "good people" vs "bad people", or even "good actions" vs "sinful actions". Predestination means some people are "destined" to salvation and others are not.
Predestination is a challenging theology that has to balance God being all knowing (omniscient) and free will.
Again, I'm not a theologian, but this sounds like some mixture of predestination and prosperity gospel, not merely predestination. Most of Jesus's most influential early followers were hunted down and tortured by the Roman authorities, which wouldn't seem to jive with the proposed criteria.
This reads like you are suggesting that Calvinism is the same as early Christianity. There was no single organized Christian belief to speak of, and very likely what organization there was looked nothing like the church of 16th century Geneva let alone that of 18th to 21st century America.
I'm saying if the way to know that you're predestined to be saved is that bad things aren't happening to you, that doesn't square with Jesus, Peter, and Paul, and many other early leaders having been tortured and killed by the Romans.
Presumably, the Calvinists believed that Peter, Paul, and others were predestined to be saved, and that Jesus was on the right side of history.
This is the first I've heard that John Calvin preached that bad things don't happen to people who are predestined for salvation.
One essay that touches briefly on this is Million Dollar Murray [0], about a homeless man and how the unwillingness of society to deal with his homelessness cost the taxpayers of Reno more than a million dollars. One of the points in the essay was that many difficult problems had "power law" distributions [1] (where the action is all at one extreme).
And one successful program for treating homelessness handed out keys to apartments. The "moral hazard" involved offends lots of people: "I pay my rent! Why should some one/freeloader/whatever get a free place to live when I have to pay?" Outrage seems to be the driving force in media these days. Which is why nothing will change.
>The "moral hazard" involved offends lots of people: "I pay my rent! Why should some one/freeloader/whatever get a free place to live when I have to pay?" Outrage seems to be the driving force in media these days. Which is why nothing will change.
I find it strange that you're just shrugging off the objections as "outrage", rather than trying to engage/address them in any serious way. I think the concept of fairness, and the fact that people might be incentivized to freeload are legitimate concerns. You might not think they're valid, but if you want their tax dollars to fund the social programs you want, it seems entirely reasonable that their concerns be addressed.
Just offer it to anyone, with home or without, but who is willing to spend every night there and agrees that this will be verified. These are likely not places where people choose to live.
Compare it to prison with free healthcare, food and many more additional costs plus costs to society associated with whatever made somebody go to prison in the first place.
I mean, if you think about country income (or lack thereof) and spending, even ignoring military, corruption, church etc. There are still way bigger things to worry about regarding your tax dollars. There is tons of freeloading, exploitation and injustice, but if somebody is willing to accept living in slums to just have some roof over his head, he probably needs it, for whatever reason.
And even giving absolutely zero empathy, assuming no mental problems, childhood traumas etc., counting these specific irrelevant cents, it still may simply be the most economic solution from the society perspective.
> These are likely not places where people choose to live.
How crappy/nice would it be? On one end of the spectrum is something like the camps set up at the border to house asylum seekers, and on the other is basically section 8 housing. You'd probably have to pay me a significant sum of money to stay in the former, but I would seriously consider the latter if it meant not having to pay thousands in rent in an expensive metro. The problem is that the nicer you make it, the more people would be attracted to using it for freeloading purposes, but if you make it too crappy, then people would rather sleep on the streets than use it. We see this for homeless shelters in some cities, for instance.
>Compare it to prison with free healthcare, food and many more additional costs plus costs to society associated with whatever made somebody go to prison in the first place.
Right, but the reason for prison isn't just keeping someone housed, there's also the additional concern that they're presumably a danger to society and therefore must be contained. Therefore the argument of "you don't want people to get free housing but are okay with prisoners getting free housing" isn't the type of gotcha you think it is.
>I mean, if you think about country income (or lack thereof) and spending, even ignoring military, corruption, church etc. There are still way bigger things to worry about regarding your tax dollars. There is tons of freeloading, exploitation and injustice, but if somebody is willing to accept living in slums to just have some roof over his head, he probably needs it, for whatever reason.
This is an entirely unpersuasive argument. Think about it from the flip side. Suppose the Other Side wants to increase funding for the police, and you object because you think that the police have shown a history of wasting the money on armored trucks and tacticool gear. They then reply with, "who cares? there are way bigger wastes of money you should worry about!" would you be convinced?
>And even giving absolutely zero empathy, assuming no mental problems, childhood traumas etc., counting these specific irrelevant cents, it still may simply be the most economic solution from the society perspective.
Has there been a serious attempt at estimating the costs? Taking (cost of a studio apartment) x (number of homeless in america) doesn't really get to the true costs, because:
1. it doesn't factor in the induced demand from people freeloading
2. that a studio apartment completely solves the homeless problem. for instance, for people with mental health/drug addiction issues, they might trash the place and cost more than a studio apartment, or might choose to live on the streets altogether.
> Why should some freeloader get a free place to live when I have to pay.
You too can have this "free" housing; all it will cost is your choice of living location and proving that you're incredibly poor.
If that sounds like a good deal, then this taxpayer is all for you mooching off the same system. But as with "I'm moving to Canada" I doubt we'll see significant movement.
So this outrage is emotional bluster, like a child who never learned to share.
>You too can have this "free" housing; all it will cost is your choice of living location and proving that you're incredibly poor.
>So this outrage is emotional bluster, like a child who never learned to share.
You're repeating the same mistake as the parent, by refusing to seriously engage with the opposition, instead arguing against a strawman version the opposition's argument, and then concluding that they must be insincere. If I had to steelman the opposition's positions, I would go with the following:
1. They think it's fundamentally not their responsibility to help society's downtrodden
2. They think think we have a responsibility to help society's downtrodden, but only the ones who physically can't support themselves. "free housing for everyone who's incredibly poor" wouldn't be compatible with this view, because it's possible for you to be be poor through laziness or whatever.
"It's fair because you too can get free housing if you're poor" doesn't address either of these concerns.
>like a child who never learned to share.
Okay, and what if they actually don't want to share? This isn't kindergarten where you can appeal to the teacher to forcibly get them to share. This is the real world, which means you need to amass a coalition of supporters to back you. Name-calling your opponents isn't going to help do that.
The steelman arguments help, thanks for sharing those.
> 1. Not society's responsibility to help the downtrodden
Sadly, this fits the evidence. Thankfully most religions and ethical systems don't agree with it. This worldview is most common when a weakened population is under stress (e.g. scarcity, attack, change).
> 2. Only help those who physically can't support themselves.
Putting aside how many mental disabilities this rules out, I don't buy it because if it were true, there'd be agreement about this category of homeless people, which there isn't.
Further, all a lazy freeloader would have to do is cripple himself to get free housing. Same scenario to giving up your house and income for a "free" home.
> what if they don't want to share… can't appeal to a teacher
A government does exactly that, for example making us all pay taxes (that no individual wants to) for the benefit of all, like collective defense.
>Putting aside how many mental disabilities this rules out
"physical" was probably the wrong choice of words, but the general sense is basically people who couldn't support themselves, according to some arbitrary definition. People with mental illnesses might be included, but of course that's subject to debate. There's a spectrum between "you get free housing if you're even a little depressed" and "depression isn't real and people should just choose not to be sad".
>I don't buy it because if it were true, there'd be agreement about this category of homeless people, which there isn't.
I don't think this is true. There might not be universal support for giving quadriplegics some sort of financial assistance, but there should be enough support to comfortably get a ballot measure/bill passed. The problem comes down to politics. The side pushing for assistance doesn't want to be seen as weak and "settling" for only quadriplegics, and the side that doesn't want assistance doesn't want to start a slipper slope. In the end the question of "should we give assistance to quadriplegics" turns into a referendum on whether we should help people in general.
>Further, all a lazy freeloader would have to do is cripple himself to get free housing. Same scenario to giving up your house and income for a "free" home.
Right, you're not going to be prevent all the freeloaders, but at least with a physical disability requirement it would be unpleasant enough that nobody would seriously go through with it. The same applies for committing a crime just so you can get free housing + food + healthcare. Despite the scattered stories you hear about it in the media, it's just not really a common thing poor people do.
>A government does exactly that, for example making us all pay taxes (that no individual wants to) for the benefit of all, like collective defense.
Right, but getting government to do something requires popular support, which clearly isn't present hence why people are on hacker news complaining about "outrage" is preventing their preferred policy from being implemented. The whole point of the kindergarten example is that the teacher can unilaterally do the "right" thing, without the need for popular support.
>I find it strange that you're just shrugging off the objections as "outrage", rather than trying to engage/address them in any serious way. I think the concept of fairness, and the fact that people might be incentivized to freeload are legitimate concerns. You might not think they're valid, but if you want their tax dollars to fund the social programs you want, it seems entirely reasonable that their concerns be addressed.
Your argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense without that sense of outrage. Especially if you make the ridiculous economic argument you're making.
Firstly, there are serious housing shortages in many places in the US, driving up prices and making housing unaffordable for many.
What's more, it's really hard to hold a job when you have no place to shower or store your stuff (I know this from personal experience), so homeless folks could be contributing to society (BTW, the data says that less than 10% of homeless folks have drug abuse/serious mental illness issues).
As such, providing most homeless folks with real housing (as compared with "shelters" which are dangerous and often unsanitary) can boost the economy by giving more folks the opportunity to work, make a living and contribute to the community/society.
It's really very simple. As James Ridgeway[1] pointed out back in 1988 or so (I've searched and searched for the Village Voice article over the years, but haven't been able to find it online) when he asked (then answered his own question):
"What do homeless people want?"
The answer being, "homes, mostly."
This is not a new issue, nor is it particularly complicated.
The vast majority of homeless people are willing and able to support themselves, but circumstance (medical bills, lawsuits, layoffs death of a partner/fellow breadwinner) has taken away their ability to afford rent. And given that a majority of Americans[2] (~60%) can't come up with $1,000 for an emergency expense should give you some pause.
Spending some money to get folks to a place where they can once again support themselves and their children (yes, I'm going with the "think of the children" trope, although in this case it seems useful/relevant), so they can earn a living in excess of that expenditure helps the homeless people, the economy where that person resides and the community in which they live.
And since "housing" people in shelters is more expensive[0] than putting these unfortunate folks in apartments, that's another strong reason to find permanent housing for homeless folks.
tl;dr: Since the economics of homelessness and our response to it broadly calls out for paying (at least until folks are able to pay themselves) rent on permanent housing rather than the half-assed measures that cost more, your argument about "fairness" falls really flat.
>Your argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense without that sense of outrage.
Or maybe perhaps you're not fully understanding their position? It's super tempting to write them off as "they're just being illogical/evil/bigoted, how can they possibly disagree with my position when my position so obviously right!?", but that's not going to help you change minds, or figure out which part of your policy needs to be changed to get widespread support.
That's basically what the parent post is stuck at. The guy has a policy proposal that he thinks is good and wants to get passed, but clearly he doesn't have enough supporters to do so. Instead of figuring out why people oppose his proposal, he rounds off all the opposition to "offense" and "outrage", then sulks about how "nothing will change".
> Especially if you make the ridiculous economic argument you're making.
What "economic argument" did I make? I literally made zero arguments in support or in opposition to the proposed policy itself last comment. I was only pointing out how the parent was rounding off all opposition as "outrage", and how that was wrong way to approach this.
Moreover, the whole "economic argument" that comprises the bulk of your comment also misses the point, because people care more than just dollars and cents. As you might be able to infer, the "Why should some one/freeloader/whatever get a free place to live when I have to pay" argument isn't really an economic one at all. It doesn't try to analyze the costs of the program vs its benefits, or even point out how unaffordable it would be. Instead, it tries to invoke the concept of fairness, or what is right, which makes it moral argument rather than an economic one. Suppose, you move into a neighborhood and the local mob demands $100/month from you as "protection". You're a highly paid software engineer, so you can totally afford it. Hell, it's probably not even worth your time to report it to the police, given how much you make per hour. Given this, would you feel right about paying the protection money? Sure, you can invoke a bunch of economic theory about how the mob is basically extracting rents from your community, and activities like that are a drag on the economy and is therefore bad, but most people have a more straightforward argument, that it's wrong for people to demand money from you for no reason. Needless to say, this isn't to say that giving people free housing is like a mob extracting protection, it's to point out that the "economic argument" isn't the be all end all of policy debates.
>>Your argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense without that sense of outrage.
>Or maybe perhaps you're not fully understanding their position? It's super tempting to write them off as "they're just being illogical/evil/bigoted, how can they possibly disagree with my position when my position so obviously right!?", but that's not going to help you change minds, or figure out which part of your policy needs to be changed to get widespread support.
>That's basically what the parent post is stuck at. The guy has a policy proposal that he thinks is good and wants to get passed, but clearly he doesn't have enough supporters to do so. Instead of figuring out why people oppose his proposal, he rounds off all the opposition to "offense" and "outrage", then sulks about how "nothing will change".
No. I understand just fine. "Why should I pay rent when someone else doesn't have to. That's not fair!" sounds like outrage to me.
GP may well be attempting to persuade, but I'm not GP. And my goal here isn't to convince or convert. I gave that up years ago.
Because you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. And "someone is getting something I'm not! That's so unfair!" is a poster boy for unreasoned belief.
All that said, I agree that GP might catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (but not balsamic vinegar).
>What "economic argument" did I make? I literally made zero arguments in support or in opposition to the proposed policy itself last comment. I was only pointing out how the parent was rounding off all opposition as "outrage", and how that was wrong way to approach this.
You said:
"I think the concept of fairness, and the fact that people might be incentivized to freeload are legitimate concerns. You might not think they're valid, but if you want their tax dollars to fund the social programs you want, it seems entirely reasonable that their concerns be addressed."
First, moral and economic arguments aren't mutually exclusive. Second, policies concerning the disbursement of public funds are definitely economic arguments, even if there are other arguments that might be relevant. And finally, one can certainly make the moral argument that helping those in need in your community makes that community stronger and is a moral good.
>Moreover, the whole "economic argument" that comprises the bulk of your comment also misses the point, because people care more than just dollars and cents. As you might be able to infer, the "Why should some one/freeloader/whatever get a free place to live when I have to pay" argument isn't really an economic one at all."
That falls flat because the homeless already get free housing: at homeless shelters.
I've yet to hear anyone say "why should some one/freeloader/whatever get a free cot and a plastic box for their belongings at a homeless shelter when I have to pay?"
And since outcomes for folks who are put in actual apartments are better than for those in shelters and it costs less to do so, the entire argument falls apart.
Yes, I get that folks making an argument based on feelings don't focus on boring things like cost analyses, but that doesn't make such arguments any more valid, nor does it excuse local legislators/executives from doing those "boring" things -- after all, it's what we've elected them to do.
Victim isn't the right word because none of it is accidental. It's intentional design dating all the way back to 13th amendment which states.
"The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. "
My brother in law was released recently from 12+ years of incarceration in the federal system. His crime was armed robbery, first offense, no one was injured, and he profited a grand total of $35,000.
He spent 12 years doing slave labor for a $1.25 while being charged absorbent fees to make phone calls, send emails (something like $5 for 10 minutes), and purchase the daily necessities like deodorant and medicine. After 12 years, he still owes reparation where even if he was paid a bare minimum wage he could have easily repaid his debt to society.
The US has the largest number of incarnated adults in the developed world because our government and capitalism demands it be so. We are a society whose engine has always been driven by slave labor. Until I was exposed to it in this manner, I would have been a "who cares do the crime pay the price" but that price extends so far, impacts everyone in a prisoners family even if they did no crime, and sets them up for failure when reentering the world.
None of it is accidental, all the way down to stubborn insistence on impeding criminal reform around drugs and petty crime to the prison industrial complex being the single biggest contributor to anti-pot reform pacs and advertising.
Companies make billions over charging and exploiting convicts in every conceivable way right down to sheriffs feeding them trash and keeping the delta in the food budget to buy themselves homes and luxuries.
> 12+ years of incarceration in the federal system. His crime was armed robbery, first offense, no one was injured, and he profited a grand total of $35,000.
No one was harmed. But the crime involved threat of death. So threatening to kill at least one person is a pretty serious crime. It’s good that no one was killed, but definitely the intent to kill for personal gain was part of the reason for such a lengthy sentence.
There are many flaws with the prison system but I wanted to point out the logical flaw of “no one was killed in this game of Russian roulette so it’s not that bad of a thing” kind of thinking. Threatening someone’s life for $35k is a big deal, I think.
I fully agree he earned punishment and it was a serious crime. (he says the gun was never loaded but that's neither here nor there). My question is the scope and breadth of the punishment and whether the system is about restitution and rehabilitation or pure punitive action. How do people come out after 10+ years having received no training, support or rehabilitation and step into a completely changed society from when they went in. Luckily, my brother in law has us to support him. Many don't have that option.
Is 12 years being enslaved for $1.25 fitting with another 3 on probation and in halfway houses? I don't believe it is especially when watching white collar folks steal millions, do infinitely more damage, and be released in 1/3 the time to pick up where they left off.
Ultimately, being forced into slave labor and having to pay hundreds per a month to talk to family despite research showing it's one of the best ways to drive good behavior and rehabilitation in prisoners, is cruel and unusual punishment even if the crime committed means the person is never getting out.
Even if we agree on the length of sentence, for someone who did work the entirety of their 12 year sentence, in roles that would have paid $50-70K a year to emerge still owing restitution on a paltry debt of less than a new car, is a travesty.
> How do people come out after 10+ years having received no training, support or rehabilitation and step into a completely changed society from when they went in.
Completely agreed. And it's not just that -- ex-prisoners also come out without any social network other than what they may have gained among prisoners, and they face extreme social stigma that makes finding work difficult even if they had the skills and connections.
One positive has been that he didn't have any issues getting work. He had a factory job within a few days and has already been offered potential advancement to a salaried role. I wouldn't be surprised if some of that stemmed from white middle class privilege and the fact that it was a impulsive action (potentially related to mental illness) on his part rather than a lifetime of gang affiliations that led to his crimes. He has no visible markers of incarceration and easily blends into any crowd of middle aged white guys.
I don’t think the prison system is about rehabilitation. I think it’s based on the principal of protecting the population from people likely to commit crimes. P who commit crimes are much more likely than the general population to commit a crime, so the more years they are behind bars, the less chance they commit crimes.
The slave labor is punishment, and I believe the only form of slavery allowed under the US constitution. I think the prison could pay nothing but they choose practically nothing.
I agree on reforming exploitative services like $5/minute phone calls. I don’t think prisoners should be abused financially. I wish I could vote for candidates who supported this kind of reform.
In elections near me, this isn’t even an issue where candidates differentiate. There were a few candidates that were running for reform but they were more along the lines of not prosecuting certain misdemeanors.
I think the whit collar crime being punished less than violent crime kind of makes sense. I’d rather someone steal $1M than injure someone. It’s pretty mercenary to say that someone stealing $5M without violence is worse than someone stealing $35k with violence. I also don’t think prison sentences have clear relationships for comparison.
Is your brothers crime worse than raping 5 people? He would have received less jail time. Is that right? I’m not sure.
Someone tried to rob me at gunpoint many years ago. Pointed a gun to my head when I got a flat tire innocently trying to bike home from a bad part of town. Why was I in a bad part of town? Working in a hospital with the people helping the people in a bad part of town.
I didn't try to kill them, even though I managed to fight the upper hand off of them. When the scuffle ended all I said was "don't point things at my head."
Choose to believe me or not. Don't make presumptions about eagerness.
I’m supposed to take comfort in the fact that you’re more violent in hypothetical situations?
The death penalty will always be executed with a certain false positive rate. Willing it as a form of punishment necessarily entails willing the death of innocent people, who crucially can’t be brought back in the event that the state realizes it was mistaken.
You know the process for executing someone is very long, expensive road. Eager is the worst possible description of the death penalty.
There are plenty of criticisms for the death penalty but now you're changing the goalposts as you realize your description written in a science fiction feel good reality was a bad fit.
The GP wasn’t trying to make light of his brother-in-laws crime (if he was, he wouldn’t have said what the conviction was). His point was that his brother-in-law has been exploited while serving his time and that is what leads to a high number of reoffenders.
For what it’s worth, I agree with his point. The west looks down on revenge ruling, “an eye for an eye” etc. Yet the US prison system isn’t any more evolved.
The worst part of it is because we are talking about “bad people”, any defence of their treatment is easy to dismiss - and I get why. Arguing that someone who commuted armed robbery should have rights too does sound like a perverse thing to say. But ignoring those rights just allows problems to proliferate. So all your prison system does is the proverbial cutting off ones nose to spite ones face.
> The GP wasn’t trying to make light of his brother-in-laws crime (if he was, he wouldn’t have said what the conviction was).
He was making doing exactly that when he said no one was injured. Just because someone wasn't physically injured doesn't mean they weren't profoundly harmed by being a victim or armed robbery. How long did it take that victim to feel safe in their community again? His brother-in-law took that away from someone and deserves harsh punishment.
…and your comment sums up exactly the point I was making about how hard it is to have a grown up conversation about this subject matter.
I get the need for justice but what you’re describing is revenge, not justice. Justice needs to contain a rehabilitation part and not just punishment. The point the GP was making is that the rehabilitation part has been substituted for exploitation. Regardless of whether you think the sentencing was just or not, and to be clear: I don’t think even the GP was suggesting that his brother-in-law didn’t deserve jail time, if you don’t try and rehabilitate then you’re just encouraging your offenders to go out and reoffend. Thus perpetuating the cycle of crime and increasing the number of peoples who are physically and mentally scared from crimes in the process.
Rehabilitating inmates doesnt need to be done for altruistic purposes. There’s a very self reason to do so: those inmates will become less likely to commit further crimes upon release.
And that is the crux of the argument here. It’s what the discussion should be focused on, rather than a pseudo-morality debate about whether they deserve the time. Because literally no one believes there shouldn’t be punishment for crimes. But what we don’t agree on is whether criminals deserve a chance to reform.
I don't think he's objecting to the sentence, but the financial aspects--and I agree. Put somebody in jail and the basics of life should be provided. I don't mind commissary accounts for luxuries, but the basics should cost $0. And I include communication in that.
Treating prisoners as captive markets to be bled is not good for society.
Lol yeah, armed robbery is effectively the charge for someone that was totally willing to kill while robbing but due to circumstances did not need to. That should not be considered a light crime.
Umm based on the statute and elements of the crime they were charged with and found guilty of.
Whoever, while committing a robbery, is armed with a dangerous weapon or any article used or fashioned in a manner to lead the victim to reasonably believe it to be a dangerous weapon, or inflicts bodily harm upon another, is guilty of aggravated robbery in the first degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 20 years or to payment of a fine of not more than $35,000, or both.
Or is your stance that a person committing robbery with a weapon and threatening to use it should instead be considered a hapless person that has not chosen to act in a way that is highly likely to cause great injury or death? Like a gun is "ok" and should not be considered as evidence of intent to commit harm during the act of robbery unless they shoot it?
"Or is your stance that a person committing robbery..."
Consider the crime of attempted murder.(IMAL) that's when a person attempted to commit murder but failed. So they had intent and action, they just failed
Armed robbery is someone whose intent is to rob someone and they are successful at the act of robbery.
The reason the robber is armed is not to harm the person but as a threat. If their intent is to harm the person that's an additional crime (assault, murder, attempted murder)
"that is highly likely to cause great injury or death?"
Highly likely for the robbery or if they carry out the threat. I believe the vast majority of robberies where violence was threatened don't end in violence. I don't have data for this so if you contest it I'll recind that claim.
If they shoot and miss, assault or murder they get additional uplifted charges (like you list above because of the ACT not just intent). Robbing with a weapon is in itself prima facie evidence of willingness to use that weapon and why there is uplifted punishment for "armed robbery" vs "robbery".
If they simply rob without a weapon, there are generally robbery charges with lessor penalties.
There is a clear uplift of risk/jeopardy of death or harm when using a weapon while committing robbery -- the person committing the crime is only partially in control of the outcome: the victim, witnesses, law enforcement interruption or an infinite number of random events can all trigger the harm (which is attached to the original crime). But this is well known and a decision the assailant made before committing the act -- they inherently are willing to kill or harm the second they chose to use the weapon in the act even if their intent walking into it was not to kill specifically.
I guess we just disagree, but I am very happy the laws and punishments are written to align with my POV.
Because they brought a gun. I’m not sure how you truly know someone’s intention. But getting a gun, loading it, and threatening someone with it is perhaps the closest to knowing they are willing to use it.
I think that people can’t even know themselves as many who claim they didn’t mean to, still “accidentally” shot someone.
But in the case of sentencing guidelines, you don’t need to know whether they will or not. If they use lethal force that’s a multiplier in prison time.
And I’m ok with that. I don’t care to get into nuance with people who threaten innocent people with death.
Note, there are exceptions when the gun isn’t loaded and the sentence is not the same as a loaded gun.
Have to agree. We punish violent crime and corruption lightly; nonviolent crime inhumanely unforgivingly. If there was no violence, threat of violence, fraud or corruption, the limit should be two years. If there was, the minimum should be much higher.
I would go further. Prison should only be used for violent crimes with a high degree of intentionality.
It's been said that if you asked someone to design a process to create more criminals, they would likely invent prisons: mix as many skilled criminals, with random unfortunate individuals, so that they can share their knowledge of criminality, and have to fight to survive.
Prison is bad as a deterrent and is terrible at reforming criminals. The only thing prison is good at, is keeping violent people off the street. There's absolutely no reason why non-violent offenders should be in a prison, give them any other punishment instead.
Because of the mandatory guidelines at the time (which have since been declared unconstitutional) any felony committed while in possession of a firearm federally had a 15 year minimum with no discretion for the judge.
there's someone close to me in prison for murder. for me, there's no getting around what they did. at the same time, i've come in contact with the criminal justice system through them, and there's also no getting around what it is: a disgusting and irredeemable machine of exploitation. i didn't always used to see it that way, but now i know better.
The late 1800s and early 1900s exploited this on behalf of White Supremacy. All of the Jim Crow states had laws against vagrancy which were only enforced against "colored" people. If you failed to have a job, local law enforcement would arrest you for "vagrancy" and the prison would rent your body out to work on the "chain gang". Prisoners got paid nothing. The politically connected "good old boys" would get paid for renting out the prisoners.
>The US has the largest number of incarnated adults in the developed world because our government and capitalism demands it be so
No, US has the largest number of adults in prison because we have a very ideologically diverse population, as well as a semblance of personal freedom, which necessarily will result in more people committing crimes. Nothing to do with capitalism. In fact, a true capitalism-based solutions would actually be organized forced labor camps - instead of sitting in cells prisoners would be forced to work, and have access to food and medicine to continue to optimize their productivity.
Also, as an aside
>Until I was exposed to it in this manner, I would have been a "who cares do the crime pay the price" but that price extends so far, impacts everyone in a prisoners family even if they did no crime, and sets them up for failure when reentering the world.
If you hold a position but change this solely because of a personal experience, you don't actually believe in either side of the issue, you just go with what feels right.
Functions is a strong word. Yes, convict labor is cheap. But its availability is generally not manufactured. Im sure that there are some sociopathic people that would absolutely love the idea of putting more people in prison to take advantage of cheap labor, but the system we live is pretty robust to that kind of bullshit, with a few exceptions of course.
You may be too generous. The slaving mindset lives on, and the goal for private prisons is "how can I make the most money off this captive person". Obscene long-distance rates, pay-per-use computers, and now this proposed mail rule, are all about creating new revenue streams for an extractive business.
> But we won't, because our society is largely based on Calvinist nonsense that says there are "bad people" and we should celebrate those people having bad things happen to them.
I'd argue it's just the opposite. If people believed Calvinism, then they would believe that all humanity has an innate capacity for evil and it's only circumstances that lead some people to become criminals and others judges. As I see it, the logical conclusion is that by changing people's circumstances we would be able to reform criminals.
However, I'm increasingly suspecting that many if not most people who profess to be Christians are actually just tribalists.
Regarding the recidivism in this analysis [1], the US doesn't look totally out of place vs European countries that consider prison's core reason to be rehabilitation (e.g. Denmark, Germany).
Which suggests that the US's longer sentences and higher incarceration rate are unnecessary for reducing recidivism, which is often what's argued as justification (keep those people off the streets, etc).
It suggests that the OP was misinformed and deductions from false data should be considered carefully. Might still be. Might also be total nonsense. It's a claim that rests on no data.
I think generally you can't compare the US with European countries on many things. The US are much more individualist, wealth is much less equally distributed, the population is much more diverse, there's still a lot of the frontier mindset. That'll create a different profile which you can see in e.g. entrepreneurship, and probably also in crime-rate.
Note that house them securely only means them from the outside. From the bit I know, threats from the inside are overlooked. I don’t know how private prisons avoid liability when someone is injured, raped or killed. Why isn’t it considered negligence on their end?
> Calvinist nonsense that says there are "bad people" and we should celebrate those people having bad things happen to them.
Can you talk more about how the doctrine of total depravity (I’m assuming that’s the “Calvinist nonsense” you meant) connects to putting people in prison?
Based on what you said earlier (“they are rewarded for cutting costs”), it seems entirely out of selfishness on the part of the prisons/cities/states, rather than a desire to exhibit specific harm on prisoners, that causes reductions in quality of life like this. But I do genuinely want to hear what you think regarding my question above.
Parenting is hard. Parenting someone who is already an adult is harder still. Beyond incentives, they might not have the resources to rehabilitate the prisoners.
Part of the problem is that caring for someone requires their cooperation or else it is exhausting. Caring for the least cooperative people requires even more resources.
To illustrate this: If you lived in a 3-bedroom apartment, how would you personally feel about taking on the task of housing someone off of craigslist in exchange for them promising to pay 1/2 of your rent?
How would you feel about doing that for someone recently convicted of larceny or arson or selling fentanyl?
>Parenting is hard. Parenting someone who is already an adult is harder still. Beyond incentives, they might not have the resources to rehabilitate the prisoners.
The social and economic benefits of rehabilitation far outweigh any costs incurred in rehabilitating folks.
Communities would be wealthier and safer if we didn't penalize convicted persons for the rest of their lives, by denying them jobs, housing and access to the financial system.
And since we do penalize folks that way, is it any wonder they turn to more potentially lucrative illegal pursuits?
And the economic argument is even stronger than the social argument. All those folks could learn skills and provide boosts to local economies if they were allowed to get decent jobs. That would improve overall GDP and provide a strong incentive for convicted felons to walk the straight and narrow.
Is it necessarily easy? No. But it makes societal and economic sense.
The resource they are given are provided by society, it's up to society to decide how to allocate them.
If we realize that it's barely more expensive or even cheaper in the long run to rehabilitate instead of punishing purely, we can decide to allocate more resources to rehabilitation (at least in theory)
According to federal data the average annual cost per prisoner in federal prisons is about $115,000.
Thought experiment: Imagine that instead of that, we identified people likely to become criminals, using all that new fangled crime prediction AI that police forces are so excited about. Then just given them say half that amount as UBI, so $50,000/year and say you can have this as long as you don't do crime. Peoples lives improve, less crime, save money.
My first gut reaction was $115k/person/year was way too high... But apparently a person in a NYC prison costs $560k/year[1]...That amount of money can definitely do a lot of good to rehabilitate a person.
However
> we identified people likely to become criminals
This tricky, because people will think it is GOOD to marked by the algorithm; key free money! Then these algorithm will likely be used in court as evidence that a person likely commit a crime. Sadly, this is already happening today [2]
> you can have this as long as you don't do crime.
So if you are convicted of a crime, in addition to all the stuff convictions currently do to prevent you from getting a job and beating any chance to better yourself besides crime, you also loose that UBI making you even MORE desperate than you were before. All you have done is increase the longer term punishment of prision.
Not to mention it encourages first time convictions so the city can save money. There are many vindictive judges, who will say something like "You don't deserve the money the goverment is giving you."
For anyone who is wondering why the prison costs 560k/year a big portion of that is the cost per inmate quadrupled due to a dropping prison populations.
So its a thought experiment and so this AI is very smart, like even better than Microsoft's Tay. And maybe it not just on the person's behavior but also family wealth, living location, history, convictions of family members, and so on. Lots of things that are hard to manipulate or would take generations to do so.
If you are convicted of a crime even if you had this free money, then likely you are doing crime for fun and not out of necessity, so jail is the best place for you.
Cities may actually decline to convict because jailing people is more expensive, so maybe this would be a counter-effect.
It is likely impossible for the AI to be that smart. You are talking almost about doing pre-crime. The AI could figure out you're going to murder someone before you even know yourself!
But more seriously, even if the AI was super smart, it's still limited on it's inputs. The factors you listed are how the current crime AIs determine likely hood the person committed the crime.
This AI is very smart and people trust it. If it says you committed the crime then you must have done it!
> If you are convicted of a crime even if you had this free money, then likely you are doing crime for fun and not out of necessity, so jail is the best place for you.
> Cities may actually decline to convict because jailing people is more expensive, so maybe this would be a counter-effect.
These are exactly my points. Being marked by the AI gives you money, but people won't trust you.
If you're on trail it's this big weight people want to hate you. The jury isn't likely getting the money, why should this person on trail get it.
The judge has an incentive to incarcerate.
Even as a thought experiment, this idea can not stand.
Then you would encourage people to have behaviors that trend towards criminal so they would get paid.
But I agree with the thrust of the idea - investing that money in reducing factors that would cause people to turn to crime is a good idea. I assume it's already being done but maybe not as effectively as we would hope?
You would get rid of a small percentage of crime. A lot of crime happens out of either cultural ideals, or inability to control emotions.
My opinion is that the money should be spent on labor camps, specifically towards guaranteeing good nutrition, secure housing, access to medicine, with oversight on a government level, but everyone is forced to work. You would solve for things like inner prison violence/drug trade, since people will be physically and mentally exhausted, and best of all, everyone finishing their sentences will have had a good number of years of blue collar work. If some dude spent 5 years every day welding up structures for solar panels, I guarantee you companies are gonna want to interview him to make use of his skills.
Are you using metrics that are gameable? For instance some predictors of future criminality are past criminality, and education level.
This heavily incentivizes people to commit crimes and drop out of school.
So you are forced to only use metrics that are outside their control such as parent's previous income level. And you'll get nowhere near a 50% false positive rate using only these metrics.
Not to mention all of the frustration felt by their neighbor who is working 40 hours a week and taking home $25,000 a year, while they sit at home playing xbox for 50k a year.
> their neighbor who is working 40 hours a week and taking home $25,000 a year, while they sit at home playing xbox for 50k a year
And they wouldn't be mad that inmates are getting $100k/yr in court mandated housing services sitting in a cell doing nothing because for some insane reason we decided that it's a good use of our money and their time? Does it suddenly make it okay as long as they're suffering while they do it?
> Does it suddenly make it okay as long as they're suffering while they do it?
Yes. What a stupid question, of course people would rather pay money to punish criminals than to pay that money to have them play videogames.
You might argue that people shouldn't think that way, but not only do all apes have a sense of fairness, almost all other semi intelligent creatures do too.
Asking people to go go against a built-in drive is like asking teenagers to practice abstinence.
If we didn't have prisons would we punish criminals in a different way or just let criminal commit as many crimes as they'd like? I guess taking a hand or a foot is cheaper than a prison but most people think prison is more human.
Does the difference matter? You're still out $100k/yr. If you pay for my rent, food, clothes, electricity, heat, water, gym membership, healthcare, internet, and a one person subscription to rent-a-prison-guard the fact that I'm not seeing the cash is immaterial.
> would we punish criminals in a different way
Yes, this is implied. The most popular alternative is "house arrest" (i.e "adult grounding") where you're monitored but allowed to go to work, school, and essential places like the doctor, grocery store, etc.. If you need more we can keep stacking on things like garnished wages, daily detention, mandatory community service.
I think that's way more human. The number of people that, for the safety of others, need to be separated from society I think it's vanishingly small, and smaller than that the number who are such a danger that they require confinement in cells.
State prisons are 60% violent offences. Robbery, assault, rape, and murder. Another ~8% are burglaries which have a high likelihood of leading to violence.
Well let the other 40% out and then we can start looking at the 60%.
This kind of thinking makes no sense in a world where prison sentences are finite. If you think being arrested for a “violent” offense means you are such a danger to others you have to be physically separated from society then you might as well make all prison sentences for life.
“But people can reform” — Great then let them out the moment that happens. Get rid of minimum sentencing.
The thing I care about when it comes to “violent” offenses isn’t what they did but why. If I had an oracle that could see into their soul and know with certainty they would never reoffend I wouldn’t even bother locking them up at all. And if their offense was situational I want to see that corrected first. For $100k/yr we can be a lot more creative about setting people up for success. That kind of money is at the level of send them off to college or trade school, full time caretaker, the very best psych care, rehab, full-on relocation, or pulling them entirely out of poverty.
Prison being the place where people with issues society has decided we don’t want to deal with is heartbreaking. If we have any other option we should take it.
> The thing I care about when it comes to “violent” offenses isn’t what they did but why. If I had an oracle that could see into their soul and know with certainty they would never reoffend I wouldn’t even bother locking them up at all.
Business man built a giant company and is about to get divorced. Wife is about to get half of everything because he got married before he had any success. He likes her to keep it.
Highly situational murder, zero risk to reoffend. You're saying because he had a zero recidivism rate we shouldn't jail him?
Definitely, what is even the point of jailing him? You want him jailed as punishment not for anyone’s actual safety. To
me that is exceedingly cruel and a waste of a human life. We can do better than that.
- Instead of losing half his money he now loses 75% of it.
- Instead of alimony 40% of his earnings and appreciation of assets are garnished.
All the money gets split between the wife’s family and a charity that financially supports the victims of violent crime.
- He loses all stake in the company he built and can’t hold any position in the company or a position the company contracts with. All his shares get returned to the company itself like a buyback (that he doesn’t benefit from).
- He is not allowed to remarry.
- He will get tattooed with a symbol people will recognize as a domestic abuser on his pelvis. It won’t show in normal circumstances but any intimate partner will know and he’ll have to explain it for the rest of his life.
If that’s not punishment enough for you then come
up with your own scheme. Just so long as it’s not torture and he can continue living a semi-normal life among the rest of society since he’s not actually a danger to anyone.
Bet our hypothetical homeboy will regret his murder a million times more than sitting in a luxury prison for rich people while his stocks appreciate.
The AI is very smart and can't be gamed. It's a thought experiment, the AI is amazingly accurate. That neighbor earning $25k a year would rightfully be upset, minimum wage is a joke.
This has the effect of discouraging people from working. So the question becomes how many are left who would be willing to work? And would we need a 80% tax rate on all transactions between people to fund it? And would that be a really bad idea?
> This has the effect of discouraging people from working.
Does it? I don't know that we can say it will, for sure. You're just assuming people are lazy, probably. Maybe it will discourage people from doing bullshit jobs and working on shitty advertising crapola, and instead we will have another human renaissance period of amazing things. Everyone I know, even those who aren't college educated and on the track to success since birth, would absolutely do amazing things for their communities with their time if they weren't doing stupid bullshit to enrich others.
People say a lot of things. I constantly say I hate working and wish I could play vidya all day, but in reality when I'm on vacation I fucking hate it.
You only get the money if you are likely to be a criminal. Since it is based on 'AI', that would mean people from poor and crime prone areas because pattern-matching. So you weren't already in that situation, then you'd have to figure out how to make your family very poor and move to a poor crime prone area. That's alot of friction for most to bother with. If everyone in that area qualifies and get the money, over time it likely that crime would decrease and economic activity would increase, school funding improves, and so on and so and eventually this place will no longer be seen by the AI to produce criminals.
I meant the people in the crime ridden area will have that incentive.
Another thing worth pointing out is this gives money to the young and the male more than anyone else.
Actually, do we even need the AI? We could give every African American male between the ages of 14 and 30 who lives in a crime ridden area, has been arrested, has an absentee father and has at least one friend in prison the money...
I'm not sure the more general approach wouldn't work, but "funnel a ton of money into poor crime ridden area" sounds obvious enough as a solution that its probably been tried. Anyone know what the results were?
I have vague recollections that a lot of gang crime is more about subculture incentives rather than money directly.
newfangled AI bullshit is a key component of the pitch. If you say you just want to help people and make the world better, there will be zero traction. But, say you have newfangled AI bullshit and now everybody is talking about it and trying to invest in newfangled AI bullshit companies and those companies then use that money on lobbyists who then 'contribute' to politicians who then pass the bills. It's not the world I want, but its the one we got.
>To reduce the lifetime cost of this person on society (financially and otherwise) we should be incentivising prisons to actually rehabilitate
As an American, I think that rehabilitation should be the goal. But for the most part, it isn't. But not just to "cut costs."
There's the human cost of lost potential, which is worth much more than money. But the current system also penalizes families and communities and society at-large by limiting the opportunities for those who have been convicted of a crime.
The issues with incarceration in the US go much deeper than that. You mention homelessness/joblessness. That's a very real issue, that's a result of stigmatizing (often for life) people convicted of a crime. But that's not a result of the system of incarceration, rather it's a result of government and societal devaluing of human life. And more's the pity.
As to this specific situation, I'd note that there are no prisons in New York City.
Rather, they are jails[0]:
Jail and prison are often used interchangeably as places of confinement. If
you want to be specific jail can be used to describe a place for those
awaiting trial or held for minor crimes, whereas prison describes a place for
criminals convicted of serious crimes.
Which means that the majority of folks in the institutions discussed in the post are either being held before trial (which means they haven't been found guilty of a crime) or those found guilty of minor offenses (mostly misdemeanors).
As such, this move is even more egregious, as many (most?) of these folks haven't even been convicted of a crime.
Yes, the US systems (note the plural, there are at least 51) of incarceration tend (sometimes pretty hard) towards retribution and exploitation, But they are not monolithic. They're mostly bad, but some are worse than others.
NYC had been moving in a more positive direction, with bail reform and plans to shut down the notorious Riker's Island[2] in favor of multiple, smaller jails across NYC.
However, just last week, after body/security cam footage of a mentally ill Riker's Island inmate (not convicted of a crime, but awaiting trial) being violently transferred to a "mental health" unit of the jail, the Corrections Department (DOC) [3] restricted access for the Board of Corrections (BOC) [4] (the oversight agency for the Corrections department) to such videos.
This was pretty obviously retribution for the release of the video to the media.
And now they want to further punish/exploit those who are incarcerated (again, many/most of whom haven't been convicted of a crime) with this.
It's pretty awful, but, at least in this case, please don't paint these folks with the broad brush of "criminal" as many have not been adjudged to be guilty of any crime, or are serving a short sentence for minor crimes (shoplifting, public urination, etc.).
I am not pleased with how the DOC is backsliding and will hold my elected representatives accountable in 2025 (City Council, Mayor, etc.) for these punitive and egregious abuses.
Understand that I'm not making light of your point WRT inhumane conditions and retribution/abuse/exploitation in the various US systems of incarceration. You're quite correct. I expounded because this is even more egregious than usual given the population involved.
I'd also say that our current systems don't just harm those who are incarcerated, but also the communities they come from and the economy, as those with criminal convictions are limited by the stigma of criminal convictions in the economic activity they can generate.
It's a lose-lose proposition and it requires fixing. Sadly, I won't hold my breath. :(
>Take a look at any "tough on crime" or "conservative" politician, and the majority of then will say stuff to that regard.
It's not just the conservatives. HN will happily argue for disproportionate punishments for "risk of life and limb" type crimes in which there was no criminal intent and nobody was harmed. "Anti-social" crimes or "crimes that make a mockery of the system" (turnstyle jumping, vandalism of public property, stuff like that) are a pretty close second.
Yes, please. I’m pretty sure Calvinism says that everybody is corrupted by sin (not just prisoners) and that everybody is in need of God’s grace.
There’s certainly nothing about celebrating when something bad happens to somebody.
That’s "good things happen to (some) bad people. Rejoice!" Quite the opposite of what was said above.
I don’t consider myself a Calvinist, so I don’t have skin in the game.
However, sweeping statements like this prevent you from understanding the "real" root causes.
Maybe the original commenter meant to blame puritans?
I was thinking the other day about how jails are powerful in all the wrong ways. Inmates harm each other and their crimes are not always prosecuted. Guards beat someone to death and no charges are ever filed. Prisons have the power to hide crimes when convenient, but don't have the power to stop gang activity and drugs inside the prison. This is what corrupted power looks like.
Digitized mail is one more straw on the camel's back. It is an example of the deeper issue: the prison-industrial complex going backwards on rehabilitation, because it is following the bad incentives written into law.
Meanwhile, in Norway, the incarceration rate is 10x lower, while the 2-year recidivism is about 20% instead of the US's 50-60% [1].
Here's an idea: pay prisons a meaningful amount when people coming out of them stay out and/or get jobs. For example, a bonus each year for five years.
Another idea: penalize them for every death or recidivism.
>Here's an idea: pay prisons a meaningful amount when people coming out of them stay out and/or get jobs. For example, a bonus each year for five years.
I get that you see financial incentives to prisons as the solution. However, that doesn't really solve the problem. Because it's not the prison or its administrators who deny housing and employment to those released from prison.
Which is why many folks (myself included) support "Ban the box"[0] laws.
Unless and until the societal stigma of incarceration (or even just an arrest -- both are public records) is satisfactorily addressed, this issue can't be solved. And certainly not with incentives to prison administrators.
I agree with all of that (except maybe the "another idea" that was added via your edit). The U.S. prison system is in need of deep reform and this article is another great example of why. It's a completely misguided proposal that puts yet another private and profit-driven entity in a position of power over prisoners, extracting money from them and providing little if any value to the system.
The article still has nothing to do with police departments, though.
Yes. To connect this with my point. The prisons will end up with a fancy IT mail system. The jail will be able to provide digital mail for a fee, while not providing physical safety for the inmates. Priorities are wrong.
>The article is about prison mail. It has nothing to do with police officers and does not mention the "government monopoly on violence."
No. The article is about jail mail. While "prison" and "jail" are often used interchangeably, they are not (at least in the US) the same thing.
Jails are for folks being detained before trial (i.e., they are innocent as they haven't been proven/pled guilty) or incarcerated for minor crimes (with a sentence of less than 1-2 years).
Prisons are for people who have been convicted of serious crimes (with sentences longer than a year or two).
That's not to say that those in prison should be exploited/abused, but this policy change affects those who haven't even been convicted of a crime.
As a rule, I'm usually disgusted by the US "justice" system. I'm even more disgusted now.
It's about both prisons and jails. From the article:
> The proposed changes follow a nationwide trend of prisons and jails moving to stop incarcerated people from receiving physical mail. Prisons in Pennsylvania stopped physical mail in 2018, and prisons in Massachusetts started sending incarcerated people photocopies of original letters. Last year, prisons in New Mexico and Florida adopted similar changes, and Texas has also limited in-person mail.
Obviously it's a bit more relevant to prisons where prisoners tend to stay longer and are more likely to receive mail.
Also, none of this shows that the article has anything to do with police department corruption.
Yeah, but WRT this horrendously egregious policy, I didn't (and won't) address facilities other than NYC jails, as that's most relevant to me.
This article isn't about front line police, yet you keep bringing them up. Why is that?
In fact, I didn't mention the police at all (although, as others have noted, corrections officers generally are sworn LEOs), so I don't know why you have such a hard on for cops[0].
No, not all cops are sadistic, power-drunk scumbags. But one is too many. cf. Daniel Pantaleo[1], Derek Chauvin[2] or Joseph Franco[3]. There are hundreds more that we know about. Which leaves many, many more we don't know about.
Why don't you invite some of these folks over for dinner so you can tell them how much you love and respect them? Well not Chauvin, as he's in prison, but you better hurry because Mr. Franco will be soon too.
[0]When I was a kid, it was clear that the police were just the biggest and best armed gang -- with qualified immunity -- in NYC. And since I saw and experienced that dynamic a bunch of times over the years, the police themselves proved that to be true. Over and over again. There have been a few positive changes over the last decade or so, but not nearly enough. Certainly not enough to change my view of the police.
>This is literally my point in this thread. The article is not about the police and I don't understand why people are steering the discussion that way.
I didn't even mention police. You did.
So who is it that's steering the discussion in that direction?
Jails are for very short sentences and short term pre-trial incarceration. This can lead to some really dumb "X% of people in jail Y" type states that sound outrageous until you realize that X is drawn from a very specific subset of the incarcerated population.
I wish it was as clear as string vs float, but it isn't. People get stuck in jails for 3-Undefined years all the time, all over the US. The only difference is "big state owned" and "many sizes incorporated area owned". Some states have laws that define this clearly, some don't. In many cases, even though it might be against the law, a prison is over-filled, so they outsource to county jails, and in others, the jail is over-filled so they outsource to another incarceration facility. It's a shit show, and I feel really bad for people that are caught in it.
Even worse, in some jurisdictions the incoming pipeline for hires routes through running the jail or prisons.
The mindset behind being a good cop and a good prison guard are totally different. Exposing hires to the corruption and violence inside prisons right before sending them to police the streets creates a very adversarial mindset against the public.
“Government monopoly on violence” is a phrase that I see constantly see on the internet that makes less and less sense the more you think about. Of all the news I read of killings near where I live none are the government doing it, and certainly it’s a minority of homicides nationally done by active government employees. And outside the world of crime there’s plenty of violent sports, plenty of violent non-criminal activity happens. I’d bet most people I know have experienced non government violence.
There is a pretty huge difference between corrections officers working for the department of corrections and police officers working for the police department.
Where I am (Jefferson County, KY), corrections officers are routinely used as additional back-up during protests or other times when the police feel they need more manpower. They are also routinely hired to work as security when they are off duty, where they wear their uniforms and are allowed to make arrests.
In my jurisdiction, they are legally a type of sworn law enforcement officer and regularly appear in public in ways that are more-or-less indistinguishable from police officers.
And a huge similarity: they are given power over people and routinely use this power to harm, rather than help heal. Our 4-yr old has police trauma from police coming to bother us about them playing outside naked because traumatized older people ignorant of other cultures won't stop calling them.
Instead of visiting those people, they harass a child and parents for something that's legal. The child has nightmare of police shooting them.
This isn't because of misunderstanding, but because the nature of these systems and the sick sm cultures involved. Not talking about it persists it.
Trying to keep conversations strictly on-topic is a form of putting on blinders. It's also a neurotypical conversation style.
> And a huge similarity: they are given power over people and routinely use this power to harm, rather than help heal. Our 4-yr old has police trauma from police coming to bother us about them playing outside naked
That's horrible and I'm really sorry to hear it. I've let our daughter play outside naked and I'd be absolutely livid if law enforcement bothered us about it.
But that still has nothing to do with jails scanning mail (or even police "corruption").
The article stated most contraband in the jail is passed via the guards, not through the mail. Prison guards are LEOs, just part of a different agency than the police most of us see in town.
> Prison guards are LEOs, just part of a different agency than the police most of us see in town.
So what? You might as well say the article is about dogs eating mail, dogs are mammals, so I'm going to talk about how much I hate elephants even though they don't eat mail.
What's the big deal? People on HN explore adjacent topics quite frequently, and the idea that both police and prisons exist to exert power over (and frequently choose to exercise violence upon) the population is a very common and uncontroversial feeling.
Not trying to "out" you here, just trying to understand why you're fighting so hard on their behalf, but do you maybe have a friend or relative that works in the police? Nothing wrong with it, but I have seen that this causes people to be more willing to turn a blind eye towards (or even to outright forgive and excuse) some of the darker things they do. Often viewing them as victims to be defended, while many of the rest of us tend to want the police to be more accountable and generally less violent.
> What's the big deal? People on HN explore adjacent topics quite frequently, and the idea that both police and prisons exist to exert power over (and frequently choose to exercise violence upon) the population is a very common and uncontroversial feeling.
It's popular right now to bash the police as corrupt and as not having people's best interest at heart. But the fact is that those are only some of the police. And when we start throwing out our respect for the institution as a whole, that's when we'll start seeing real corruption.
The big deal to me is that not everything has to be about police officers. The article raises a real issue about prisons scanning mail and refusing to deliver paper copies. That's horrible, and there is a ton of interesting stuff to discuss there. Why do we need to steer it towards yet another uninteresting and rote "police are all corrupt" "hell yeah suck it bootlickers" discussion?
> Not trying to "out" you here, just trying to understand why you're fighting so hard on their behalf, but do you maybe have a friend or relative that works in the police? Nothing wrong with it, but I have seen that this causes people to be more willing to turn a blind eye towards (or even to outright forgive and excuse) some of the darker things they do. Often viewing them as victims to be defended, while many of the rest of us tend to want the police to be more accountable and generally less violent.
I have zero relatives in law enforcement and I don't work in law enforcement. But I really think the rote "police suck" attitude and the current popularity of completely thoughtless police bashing is really going to hurt us all in the long run.
The flaw in your reasoning is that because some police officers have done bad things all police officers are bad. That's not true and it's not supported by the evidence.
> some police officers have done bad things all police officers are bad
The flaw here is that there are countless examples of one police officer doing something terrible, and an entire department rallying around them in support. Or the opposite - like Adrian Schoolcraft attempting to blow the whistle, and being terrorized by the NYPD as a result.
The police generally do suck, and in the US at least they cost a lot of money and do little good while also doing some pretty shitty things and getting away with it. That's going to lead a lot of people to hate them for life, and it would take a herculean effort to reverse that. This is why I wondered if there's maybe a family/friend connection, because while I’m
not exactly screaming for the abolishment of the Police altogether, I do think it's sort of absurd to come out swinging in defence the police as the exist in many countries
No, because my point here is that we shouldn’t be steering this thread into a discussion of police corruption, which has nothing to do with the article.
I’m skeptical of you because you do continue to push your point that the police are not corrupt, and that you don’t any provide evidence to prove your aforementioned point. Additionally, because a discussion isn’t completely related to the article doesn’t mean it can’t be discussed here so it doesn’t make sense to try to shut it down because you both disagree with it and disagree that it belongs here.
Every time they try to do this, part of the effects are to ban prisoners from receiving books. If you can't receive physical mail... how do you get books to read?
Once they remember this is a thing (and that the pesky first ammendment even for prisoners probably means they can't just ban all reading material), they say that prisoners have to read only "e-reader" books from approved vendors at inflated prices and limited selection -- or if they are lucky, they can still get physical books from only approved vendors at inflated prices and limited selection. (the latter which prisons are always trying to do even before/without limiting paper mail too).
Not being able to receive mail is bad enough, but the consequences on receiving books double it down. One of the few avenues to self-improvement, education, or even just recreation prisoners have.
The way we approach prisons are insane. We take people who have done something from their worst selves, and put them in an environment which seems almost designed to force them to continue to practice being their worst selves, with no other paths available.
I was locked up in the feds, and the last two years I was there they went to this policy. Let me assure you if did absolutely nothing to stymie the flow of drugs. There are a hundred different ways people get stuff on the inside, and even if those hundred different ways were stopped there would be a new hundred in no time.
The quality of the mail scans were terrible. Problems like missing portions of letters and B&W scans of greetings cards (which BTW is against copyright laws).
I can't speak for the state level, but as far as the federal level the prison system is 0% rehabilitation. It is a profit mongering machine if you follow the money. For example the judge that sentenced me has a stake in the unicor federal prison industries factory I worked at, as well as the halfway house I was required to stay at when I got out even though I had a job and home immediately upon release.
>There are a hundred different ways people get stuff on the inside, and even if those hundred different ways were stopped there would be a new hundred in no time.
Remove humans from process that cannot be corrupted. That's how you would stop contraband.
What else will we do with all these surplus unproductive labor pools? Everyone knows if someone isn't useful to the stock market, they deserve to suffer.
I mean, to be cynical: those friends and family didn't stop them committing (serious) crimes in the first place. Maybe prison SHOULD be time for a clean break with bad influences...
So you lock them in with all the other bad influences?
American prisons are in no way a "clean break with bad influences". The entire system is basically set up how it'd be if you asked someone to make sure recidivism was high as possible. Long harsh sentences for non-violent crime, low contact with the outside, no real job training, roadblocks for jobs for ex-cons on the outside, stuck with a ton of debt in court fees on release plus a parole system designed to put people back in jail.
To reduce crime you need to either support a community or create opportunity. Instead we starve communities to fund putting people in jail and block them from opportunities once they make it outside.
Your comment is unpopular but in some ways it's probably right. I think family, indirectly, forces a lot of crime. Once you have kids to feed the desperation is real. You may be able to support yourself on minimum wage but add a kid or two into the mix and no real skills and the result is having a family results in crime. Toss a court order for child support on top of that, and hey it's go to jail for non-payment or go to jail for theft or whatever -- at least the theft charge has a definite ending whereas child support they can chase you literally forever for that.
When I look at peak imprisonment rates it corresponds pretty well to when men are at max pressure to provide for dependents. Most of us wouldn't hurt someone else for our own good even if starving but look your starving kid in the face and the question becomes more difficult and theoretical about morality and risk of getting caught may go out the window.
It's unreal how much money prisons make off of Prisoners' families. Selling items for 2-4x as much as retail, selling them items and not allowing them to give them away when they leave, making phone calls super expensive, etc. A large majority of this money comes from the Prisoner's family. And because they're prisoners most people will never really care until it happens to them.
And this isn't really just a US thing, I know the UK sells them items at far greater than retail and I suspect most countries do.
Let's not forget about spending money per-email when messaging an inmate (and paying extra to include a photo).
Is that program administered by the state? Do the funds go toward paying money owed to victims or funding the prisons? Nope. Private companies (like JPAY) are making money hand-over-fist with no benefit to the prisoners nor the victims nor the state.
The justice system in general is a huge financial drag on anyone connected to someone accused of a crime. Unless they just cut them loose completely. Court fees. Fees for all kinds of stuff in jail or prison. Lawyer costs. Rehab instead of prison? Pay that (huge, inflated) bill or off to prison they go. Hell I think there are even parole fees, at least some places. It seemingly never ends (I've been lucky not to be close enough to experience it personally, but have seen it from a shortish distance)
I'd bet it's a big part of why the poverty/crime cycle is so hard to break. Families already on the margin pushed off the edge by all the expenses associated with having someone close to you get charged with a crime (again, unless you just totally cut them loose and pretend they're dead, not caring at all what happens to them).
One previous job I had a part where our application was being used to track court fees and restitution. The anonymized (names & addresses were, the rest was not) data used in the development environment was heartbreaking.
Many of the fees are set by state legislators. If you got a $50 fine for "whatever", there would be close to $1,000 added in fees for misdemeanors (things you cannot be imprisoned for more than 365 days). Felonies (things that you can get more than 1 year in prison for) were not handled by this level of court.
In Switzerland the internal shops sell at premium prices as well. But regulations are way less intrusive on what you can receive, or on any other aspect as a matter of fact. The theoretical goal of "reeducation" is thus placed slightly closer.
Guess where prisoners get all those books they read? From family in the mail. Guess how they stay in touch with what is going on in the world. With magazine and newspapers. Oh, they are replacing that with free tablets? That is so nice. Wait... those tablets charge a per minute usage fee? Ah. They are free to have, but not to use. And of course, you have to pay EACH TIME you want to read the same book over on them, at a per minute fee, for people with an on average lower reading proficiency.
I understand your point - prisons want to exploit prisoners and their families for profit by brokering imports into their facilities.
I also think that many people who have bleeding hearts for these criminals and their families haven’t been direct victims of crimes themselves.
Often these criminals are terrible people who act horrifically and with malice but act so sorry for themselves when they’re caught and on trial. Their families usually only care for the criminal they’re related to and never to the victims no matter that the criminal did. I don’t see families of criminals giving money to the victim of the criminal, do you? Sometimes the families and cultural influence are factors that attribute to a criminal’s motivation to commit a crime.
Trust me, I’ve been there! Finding the balance of incentives not to commit crime is difficult because crimes are often committed by violent people who do not respond strongly to logical or legal reasoning but respond somewhat to force and fear. The key, I think, is providing people with resources and care far before they’re at the age where they usually commit crimes.
There’s also something to consider about the western and eastern views of individualism. An eastern view might consider this prisoner as a component of their family or their community.
So you want to use the excuse of drug smuggling to punish criminals above their judges ordered constitutionally legal sentence? Got it. Thanks for elaborating on your reasoning and why you don't believe 'all men are created equal' and have constitutional rights (with criminals, what we are discussing here is a protected right to 'familial association' if you want to look it up in case law and Supreme Court precedent). We don't have constitutional rights because they are easy, but because that is what the United States of America has said since it's founding is the right thing to do and the core of what it is as a country.
I’m not sure your argument is valid, I’m not sure of the point you’re trying to make as it relates to the point I was trying to make.
That being said, a government isn’t infringing on the rights of citizens when the government incidentally creates a situation where the citizen’s ability to exercise their rights is limited. I as a free person have the right to protest, that doesn’t mean the government is obligated to pay for my posters or advertisements, nor are they obligated to protect me, that doesn’t mean they’re infringing on my right to assemble and protest. I’m also not sure that reading books or news is a constitutional right, although writing and reporting is a constitutional right. A government not providing a means for prisoners to purchase or read books does not mean they’re actively infringing on any rights, it’s purely incidental if the prisoner has no access to literature because the government has no obligation to provide literature to prisoners. There is the question of cruel and unusual punishment, but if we go by historical precedent which is important to consider then not providing literature to prisoners is not a cruel punishment.
Not as badly. Biden signed a bill capping the per minute rate for phone calls from prison. When it takes effect, the costs will be capped at 25 cents per minute.
It's also the largest or second largest jail in the country depending on how you count, and close to the largest in the world. It makes sense to go for the largest and lowest-hanging fruit if it somehow remains uneaten even after many decades of reporting and investigations.
Agreed! Just a reminder that NY Daily News is only slightly to the left of the Post so we can't discount the subtler message here -- "this data extrapolates to every jail in the US 1:1." (An oversimplification, the article also quotes someone saying this practice "seems cruel" for ex.)
In Ireland, physical mail in some prisons was stopped during the pandemic. People were soaking the paper in "spice", sending the letter in, and then the prisoners smoking it to get high. As a result, the censors started just giving photocopies of the letters to the prisoner.
Unfortunately, this meant that letters I had sent in took over 8 months to get to the recipient.
A sheet of that went for $2500 in the feds during COVID in 2021. $750 to the inmate inside that got it in, $750 to the inmate that sold it, and the rest to the non-inmates.
Edit: The saddest was when they stopped letting people get pictures/cards made by their kids. Only manufacture cards were allowed in at that point. We were still getting an epidemic of K2 in somehow though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Every time the state wants to force a human being into a locked cage, they need to find a volunteer to be locked in a cage for the same amount of time as the person being involuntarily locked away. The forcibly imprisoned and voluntarily imprisoned must be imprisoned in the same facility, but are not informed who their imprisoned partner is.
The volunteer cannot be paid for their service, they must elect to do it because of their glowing sense of civic duty.
Prison guards may not have any access to information about whether or not an imprisoned person is a convicted offender or volunteer. Upon going in, volunteers must post a bond equal to 10% of their total wealth. If they disclose to any prison employee that they are a volunteer, they are discharged from prison immediately (a new volunteer must be found, if one is not available, the forcibly imprisoned person is discharged immediately) and forfeit the bond. 90% of the forfeited bond will go to the imprisoned person they are volunteering for, 10% of the bond will go to the prison employee that they disclosed to (as a reward for the employee reporting their serious offense).
Bonus points: The volunteer must be sourced from the inverse wealth percentile as the potential involuntary prisoner (i.e. if you want to lock up someone from the bottom 10th percentile of wealth, you must find a prison volunteer from the top 90th percentile of wealth).
Since prisons are such a wonderful peaceful place where troubled folks are taken care of and rehabilitated (couldn't we all use some quiet time for reflection?), finding plenty of volunteers should be no problem. I am certain that many wealthy scions of public society will volunteer for life imprisonment due to their great concern for civil society.
Prison guards smuggle drugs. Then they invent all these weird policies to avoid admitting that. Until the pandemic they claimed it was visitors, but when shutting down visits didn't change the rate of drug detection they invented this drug impregnated paper crap.
I'd want to give prisoners access to an offline copy of the internet...
Lets start with a dump of wikipedia on cheap $40 android phones with the radios disabled.
Plenty of prisoners would like to learn stuff given the opportunity. No reason not to let them, especially the ones who will be getting out of prison one day.
Hahaha. During COVID, our warden just flat refused to receive mail, because they couldn't 'lose' peoples compassionate release requests when received via certified mail like they did when you tried to use the internal 'grievance process' system that somehow had an 80% loss rate that the courts were just fine with. Oh, and if you had a problem with the grievance process? The BOP and Courts require... you guessed it... that you follow the grievance process to address. You can't even get access to the courts until you exhaust the grievance process which takes 3-6 months and minimum $24 in postage (a lot when you make $5 a month) and another $10-20 in copier fees.
I'm not sure the technology itself is evil, it is the business model that is the problem. Which is to say that you don't need to be a software developer to be morally compromised, you could be a secretary/recruiter/etc and still feel compromised by this employer's practices.
The only reason they aren't just trying to charge for physical mail letter reviews is that that is too transparent, the public understands exactly how immoral that is. Once you add technology a lot of people's brains shut off because of the "complexity" they assume exists, particularly once the vendor starts with the buzzword vomit (e.g. "High Security cloud service utilizes the latest deep learning technology to detect abuse and illegal subjects, then we have a team of experienced experts for secondary review").
So tech is the smoke-screen here, but it is immoral no matter how you slice it.
A sense of a large portion of the porn industry, whether domestic or international, is developed through coercion, abuse, and sometimes straight up sex trafficking of vulnerable people? For every legitimate actress/actor who is involved in the industry in a safe manner, there are several who were tricked into a production. I think as a society we've generally moving to accepting the sex industry as a necessary vice, but there's a lot of seedy stuff happening behind the scenes.
Won't try to get into an argument about what is more negatively impacting society (FAANG or sex industry) but I think it's easier to empathize with the fact that that's someone's child on screen that more likely than not, had no idea what they were getting into.
> that's someone's child on screen that more likely than not, had no idea what they were getting into.
Do you have sources on this? Abuse was rampant throughout the adult media industry prior to the wide availability of broadband Internet in the late 90s, but since then there has been an ever increasing tide of completely willing participants who go into it with open eyes as a way to support themselves.
Why bother trying to "trick" or force someone into it when it's umpteen times easier to find a willing participant.
Human-slavery situations notwithstanding, of course. Such productions are not mainstream.
Nothing per se, but I’d hazard that very few porn sites can make the claim that they don’t host videos that were posted un-consensually or under exploitive circumstances, nor that they are taking meaningful steps to limit the display of those videos to minors.
I understand the first part of the claim - many people indeed do consider porn immoral, for whatever personal reasons they have. I may disagree with them, but your statement is still valid, and more power to them as long as they keep it to themselves.
I do not understand the second part of the claim, that "most porn has connection to sex trafficking". This seems a fairly strong statement (there's a huge amount of porn, so "Most" is gonna be a very large number), and have never seen anything remotely accurate supporting it (occasional allusions from those who consider porn immoral, but with no meaningful statistical significance). Not to say there isn't a considerable Venn diagram, and that Venn diagram should be reduced through strong law enforcement, but "most" seems wildly inaccurate.
It might be hard to digest but a large majority of people in the industry go in by choice. We should have tougher law enforcement to weed out the bad apples, but that is difficult since this isssue seems to involve two things that are extremely nebulous and difficult to weigh. Sex and morality.
Interesting that you want stats. In the interest of science - would you be willing to talk to actual prostitutes from down the street to those on social media and platforms like only fans - to collect the data yourself. Thats within your means to do is it not?
If you are genuinely interested in the well being of prostitutes that is.
> Right, they just use force, fraud, and coercion as they recruit, transport, and provide their victims as prostitutes. Totally different...
It is different.
My point is trafficking is bigger than prostitution.
They are probably referring to cases like the Pornhub scandal, GirlsDoPorn or recently arrested Andrew Tate who is alleged to have lured and exploited young women for camgirl work.
US-made porn I'd agree with you, the unions and other associations (e.g. APAG) have a pretty good eye, and the record-keeping requirements help out as well.
Internationally however? Oh hell no. Particularly Eastern Europe has been rife with stories of exploitation for decades, and some Asian countries have an even worse problem with sexual exploitation of minors. For example, Andrew Tate, moron that he is, just made the error of publicly admitting that the police doesn't care about sexual exploitation on camera - now he forced the hands of the police to act.
The same logic applies to industrial farming, at least in USA. Literal slave labor produces a bunch of the food that we eat and export. It probably isn't >50% though. This is a really interesting ethical argument though. How exploitative does an industry need to be before we'll consider it unacceptable?
I’ve communicated no judgement that I’m OK with the subset that is. Since you’ve accused me of being OK with it, I’ll now respond to unambiguously and strenuously deny that accusation.
Yeah? Want to know a reliable marker for a history of abuse, fraud, violence, and criminal tendencies?
Pornography.
Like many here, I have several adult daughters, and I’ve given a lot of thought to what role pornography has in our society.
You can sit there and act like my position is unreasonable, but while you do so, women are being trafficked for porn, suffering violence for porn, being drugged for porn, being coerced by their boyfriends and spouses for porn, and more.
Frankly, you can all spare me the bullshit, as if there could be one iota of legitimacy to the entire adult entertainment industry. Absolutely sickening.
You may be completely right but this is not the way to go about showing it to everyone. We don't want garden-variety internet flamewar here—it's exactly the opposite of curious conversation.
Dang, garden variety is normalization of extremely victimizing behaviors surrounding an industry?
My posts haven’t been rude or unclear. I never made a sharp or crass remark directed at anybody in particular.
You’re characterizing my dismissal of defensive statements about pornography as inciting a flamewar?
I’ve read the guidelines. I need for you to explain to me in clear and unambiguous terms exactly what I’ve said that is not acceptable for HN and why it cannot be allowed whilst speech supporting an industry that systematically abducts, trafficks, abuses and exploits women is acceptable and not say, garden-variety misogyny.
Curious conversation? This place has a point system, fake names, and a voting mechanic, so, give us all a break with the platitudes.
Your comments in this thread include fulmination/name-calling ("Absolutely sickening") and flamebait ("Frankly, you can all spare me the bullshit") in the sense that the HN guidelines use those terms.
Also snark/sneering ("Ah, I didn't realize this was a safe space for perverts who hate women. Cool. Cool cool cool. Very cool.")
We ban accounts that post like that, regardless of how right they are or feel they are, so please don't keep posting like that.
Most people will respond with "immorality" or likewise.
What it amounts to is badly interpreted bible verses by the 3 Abrahamic religions as a means of social control over the taboo of sex.
As someone who follows the old religions, I see this everywhere. The men are expected to be open to sex, but women who do are seen as whores. But, that's where the taboo of sexwork comes from.
And to link it back to the article, Calvinism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism ) is the primary and dominant reason why prisons are as brutish as they are. The basic gist of this form of Protestant Christianity is that 'you are predestined to be a horrible person and predestined to be in prison, so we have the right to treat you inhumanely as possible because you deserve it'. Capitalist monopoly forces also have a bearing here in the price gouging, but the basic infrastructure of a prison is brutish because "you deserve it", in a Calvinist sense.
It's another way to isolate prisoners. Lots of them hang on to letters and feel a connection with their loved ones and the world at large. Now, the cops want to even take that away from them. Prison should be more about reformation than punishment.
I wish I could ban my physical mail... why are we cutting down trees, hauling it with diesel, to have me throw it away, have that hauled with diesel, to a landfill...
Hmmm, this one seems Ok / good idea? The bad part is jails that try to replace in person visits with paid video calls. Besides obvious humanitarian part, preserving inmates ties to family and community is obviously important for eventual reintegration and for reducing offense rates of inmate's children. But here? A letter is a letter and free individuals don't get much physical mail anymore. There are obvious angles for abuse and inmates don't have a right to privacy, for good reasons. Digitize mail, keep in person visits and allow properly screened physical presents for inmates with good behavior.
Imagine being deprived of your freedom and not being able to have letters you can read anytime, only when you’re permitted to use a computer. Seems even more unfair than it already is.
Man, this is one of the more soulless comments ive read on HN. Imagine the father who's been locked up on trumped up drug charges, now unable to get a letter from his kid.
You could only arrive at your opinion if you think that the US Justice system is fair, and that inmates aren't people. I strongly suggest you rethink this.
Imagine a Godfather locked up on accurate drug charges ordering hits on his rivals using invisible ink? Introducing a digital layer reliably prevents all kind of exploits. If the issue is innocence, you are not going to solve this with half steps, in fact an innocent guy can end up being stabbed by a razor smuggled in a postcard. If people are guilty, they are still humans but we have no reason to trust them and need to protect ourselves from their potential bad intents as much as possible.
The privatize the digital scanning part is the issue. It’ll just be another thing for some company to charge for. Just deliver the damn mail and stop trying to turn jails and prisons into a profit center.
Did you read the article? It explicitly says several other US states have already done this, and it hasn't reduced the prevelance of drugs in the system. So I really don't see why this is a "good idea"?
>>inmates don't have a right to privacy, for good reasons.
They do though. It's severely limited, but it exists. Article also mentions this, if you read it?
Who said drugs are the only problem? How about handmade weapons (can cut someone's throat with a glass shard), hidden messages, non-hidden messages missed during inspection? Once things are digitized they can be investigated if something happens and anyone aiding criminal acts can be held responsible.
Inmates certainly have privacy to consult their lawyer. They should not have privacy to plan additional crimes with arbitrary people outside. If at some point we decide they earned an exception, that can be handled accordingly.
I think you are misunderstanding. The letters are always opened and checked for contraband. But they aren't read.
>>They should not have privacy to plan additional crimes with arbitrary people outside.
And how does this system prevent them from doing such a thing? The letters still won't be read by anyone - just digitized, in some mistaken belief that this will prevent contraband getting into prisons(which it won't - because letters aren't and never were the source of it - corrupt guards are). This is purely a scheme to give private corporations money - I literally don't understand why so many people here are defending it.
Human inspection is not perfect, creatively concealed objects and hidden messages can be overlooked. Digitization creates a strong barrier to any trickery. Plus, if there is a suspicion regarding a particular inmate, then a record of his/her correspondence can be examined for clues.
Again, very few free individuals communicate by paper letters or use strong end to end encryption on their e-mail. Why the sudden special consideration for criminals? I am not opposed to allowing physical presents including say a scented postcard if circumstances warrant it (minor offense or good behavior).
>> Digitization creates a strong barrier to any trickery.
Again, please explain how exactly. No one is actually proposing reading the letters anywhere, if for no reason other than the insane amount of labour that this would involve. Even if they did, inmates who want to conduct nefarious activities will use code and send perfectly innocent messages that no prison worker nor AI will spot as that. So you're going to spend millions of taxpayers money reading people's letters with literally nothing to show for it.
So your options are:
1) Spend millions scanning and reading every letter, which won't actually do anything to prevent criminal activity in and out of prison
2) acknowledge that letters maybe should remain private and save yourself millions analysing useless noise
3) go full on totalitarian and forbid prisoners communicating with the outside world completely(and ignore the fact that they will anyway, because corruption within prison system is a thing), dealing immeasurable harm to people in the prison system and their families
And finally - if you think about it for a second, all the arguments you used can be used against in-person visitation. Should the in-person visits be monitored and recorded too? After all, what if the prisoners issue commands for people outside to commit crimes in those meetings, we have to record everything just in case, right?
Again, I'll repeat what I said - all of the above is just a scheme to stuff private pockets with taxpayers money, at the cost of misery inflicted on prisoners(because hey, they are prisoners, they don't deserve any sensible treatment, right?)
How else would inmates communicate with family and friends?
Phone? Cost prohibitive in most states.
Internet? Banned or several restricted in many places.
In person visitation? Hard to schedule, especially if you aren't being held near your family's residence.
I think there's a meaningful distinction between "privatized prison" and "service provided to prison by private company." The trouble with privatized prisons is that the incentives are all wrong. (Those incentives being: cut costs, cut corners, minimize oversight/hide failures, increase number of inmates.)
On the other hand, privatizing some services makes sense, depending on how you structure the deal. Same reason your tech employer buys some software—you can supply some things at better quality for cheaper price by trading for them. The catch: don't establish a monopoly where the provider can set costs and pass costs directly to inmates.
For example, a lot of jails, especially smaller jails, have a private company run their medical care. The doctor doesn't bill for every visit, they negotiate a rate with the county. It's cheaper than the county employing a doctor directly. One doctor can serve many counties. (I know one who serves 8 plus a few juvenile detention centers.) And if the doctor or nurse quits, the company has enough scale they can make sure somebody else shows up for the next shift. "Privatized?" yes. But also way better than the alternative in practice.
In most states, private prisons get guaranteed minimum occupancy rates in their contracts with the states. If, for some miracle, people stopped committing crimes, and no more got incarcerated, these prisons were guaranteed a minimum profit level.
I don't disagree. These should be run as non-profits (which are not a cure-all either but slightly better). However note that prison privatization is not a US only thing --it's being adopted by many countries around the world.
Somehow the left has become incredibly radical about every other issue, but isn't dealing with the basics like this, which have been discussed for many decades and most of the public would support reforming?
Most of the public supports "reform," sure. Just half the country wants reform that looks like more privatization, harsher sentences, less probation/parole, more pre-trial incarceration, fewer books available, lower cost/quality food, fewer medical services available, etc. etc.
Trump actually took a big step in the right direction with the First Step Act and the GOP was... chilly to it, to say the least.
I don’t actually think half the country supports all the things you said. Some people are for harsher sentences, sure, but if they had the option of a compromise where the sentences were slightly longer but the conditions much better I suspect they might accept such a compromise.
Sure, "half the country supports some combination of [list of bad and counterproductive reforms]." Consider it edited!
The reality is that some people view prison as a punitive system, and others do not. These people can agree or disagree on specific reforms but fundamentally it's very hard to see eye-to-eye because they are operating toward totally different goals.
Biden just signed a bill to reduce the cost of Prison phone calls by a significant amount [1]. Here's more details on how excessive the charges were. https://harvardpolitics.com/jail-phone-calls/ . Is your argument that because the Democrats haven't tackled the issue with privatization of mail and/or haven't spoken out about it they don't care? Maybe they will, maybe not, at least they have done something.
All the sponsors of this bill are Democrats or independent. To be fair it was approved by voice vote so some number of Republicans might have been ok with it? (I'm not sure how that works)[2]
The establishment left i.e. "The Democratic party" is on many issues left in name only, and actually comprised of pro-war, pro-censorship, anti-labor, right-wing corporatists. This is much more of a problem with the party in DC than the People. The focus is exclusively on social issues as a diversion from the corrupt theft of our tax dollars for their executive buddies.
Hard disagree. If I were in prison, it would make a great difference to me to keep a drawing that my child sent me in my cell, vs. maybe being able to look at a bad scan of it. Plus, when would I actually get to see the scan?
Sure — but you’re not in prison. The kinds of people in there are probably receiving smuggled goods or other illicit materials, not pleasant drawings from kids.
I feel sad after reading this comment. People in prison are still people. Many of them have committed crimes against society; some are imprisoned unjustly; all are deserving of human dignity and love. People in prison have families, children, loved ones, and it's an undeniable fact that strong social support networks reduce recidivism.
People in prison are not monsters. They're people.
I won't deny that illicit substances flowing into prisons is a problem. But painting all prisoners as smugglers who are incapable of receiving affection, love, or support is absurd.
Did you know you can be jailed for watching the sun rise on top of a church? They can and will charge your ass with burglary. It isnt fitting, but if you start acting just the least bit weird and a cop catches you well, hope you have access to adequate legal representation.
The criminal justice system does not punish for the benefit of the victim by retribution, but rather for the benefit of the state. Criminal cases in court are the state vs the defendant. The victim is not a party.
Because how we treat others speaks a lot about ourselves. This is the shortest TLDR on a philosophical argument going on literally for millenia. It's the same reason why prisoners are given a mattress to sleep on and warm water to wash with, even though you could argue many of them don't deserve even that.
"The kinds of people in there" are not very different from you or me and treating them as other is merely a cognitive opioid to comfort ourselves with treating prisoners with cruelty.
There are some in prison that screwed up and want to change.
Many in prison would slit a throat, scam, mug, assault, rape etc without any kind of remorse. These people are not like you and I.
Some of these do some variation of “find Jesus” and try and change.
Many do not. Or they take decades to change ways.
At Some point dangerous people need to be locked away.
Fear of punishment is the only thing that keeps a small percentage of the population from doing these things on a regular basis.
Think how people act in real life vs being Anonymous online.
The truth of the matter is there are plenty of children coerced into false confessions, and there are plenty of freely-going CEO rapists and scammers.
There's very little about people who are imprisoned that justify depriving them of being able to communicate with people who aren't imprisoned. For one, how will they communicate if they are being raped, physically abused, or medically neglected by the prison?
At some point, they are human, and if you've ever spent any time even volunteering around the "system" you would begin to understand exactly how wrong, and how utterly heartless this kind of thinking is. How we treat the helpless defines our humanity.
Right, but you're not in prison either making you distinct from those that are. You're painting with a very large brush assuming that the only possessions a prisoner might have are contraband. If you think they don't have pictures of family or notes/letters/drawings from kids, you'd be sorely mistaken.
> I meant it more like “but you’re not in prison, because you’re distinct from those who are”.
This is a wretched assumption that dehumanizes everyone in prison by implying that they are a part of some lesser subspecies that does not deserve humane treatment.
Is there anything resembling evidence that the current system of incarceration selects the "kinds of people" to whom you refer, rather than arbitrarily from the population, weighted by money and melanin?
>Is there anything resembling evidence that the current system of incarceration selects the "kinds of people" to whom you refer
The National Crime Victimization Survey?
I mean people always try and say that the FBI crime stats are wrong/falsified/whatever but I rarely if ever see any attempts to debunk the NCVS which corroborates the FBI crime numbers.
Are you saying that no one in prison is there because they committed a crime? While I’d be certain that there are false positives, you seem to be asserting that the entire prison population is composed of false positives.
Assuming your end goal with prison is to spit out a member of society at the end, not just a harder, worse criminal, cutting off all their ties to people they know really isn't a great thing to do. There's a big difference between a handwritten letter and a picture on a screen to a person who wants to get out and try again at making something of themselves. Of course if all you want is more criminal activity from them then making their only physical contact other criminals is a great plan.
> On Friday night while sorting mail in the Bronx, the officer's hands went numb despite wearing gloves. Workers administered Narcan, a drug used to help reverse an overdose, and sent her to the hospital. She was treated and released.
Fentanyl. Does. Not. Work. Like. That.
Cops are having panic attacks, not fentanyl exposures - in most cases the described symptoms don't even match fentanyl's effects.
> Last month, a 33-year-old clinical toxicologist and emergency-medicine pharmacist named Ryan Feldman co-published a case study about the time he accidentally spilled a mammoth dose of pure liquid fentanyl all over himself at work; he simply washed it off, with no adverse effects.
> There are many such videos of police officers quickly showing overt symptoms or even collapsing after exposure to minute quantities of fentanyl - or even just possible fentanyl - and these are just not pharmacologically possible. Fentanyl is not absorbed through the skin like this. Yes, there are indeed fentanyl skin patches for hospital pain relief, but these are formulated with other agents to make the skin more permeable under the patch (as are all such skin-patch dosage forms). Think about it: you do not see opioid addicts rubbing small bits of fentanyl on the backs of their hands for a quick hit.
> In a Washington DC jail, on March 15, 2018, at least a dozen employees became
sick when a package arrived in the facility mailroom containing what was first thought to be fentanyl, but later determined to be synthetic cannabinoid. At least seven of the effected employees, who suffered from dizziness and breathing difficulties, were taken to the hospital for treatment. (Coffin, 2018)
That's almost certainly another panic attack. As the NYT article mentions, "mass psychogenic illness". What form of synthetic marijuana makes an entire room of people go into respiratory trouble just from being in the same room?
The goal given to them is "house this person securely for a specific length of time at the lowest cost possible". They are rewarded for cutting costs.
But the total cost we pay is the cost to imprison this person the second and third time when they re-offend. It's the policing costs when they're homeless because they can't find housing or get a job. It's the health care costs they can never pay for when all of the above inevitably leads to further problems.
To reduce the lifetime cost of this person on society (financially and otherwise) we should be incentivising prisons to actually rehabilitate.
But we won't, because our society is largely based on Calvinist nonsense that says there are "bad people" and we should celebrate those people having bad things happen to them.