Comment by hugh_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hugh_ | Hacker News Reader

One of my favourite theories on prison reform: a huge problem with prisons is the formation of gangs and other social structures within the prison walls; not only do these promote the emergence of a criminal culture within the prison, they also make the prisoners harder to guard.

This could be solved by keeping everybody in solitary confinement, but that's overly cruel. Instead, I'd propose splitting the prison into a whole bunch of separate units, each consisting of maybe a dozen prisoners, who would share facilities and never interact with prisoners outside their own unit. Every month, the units would be broken down and prisoners reassigned to different units, preferably arranged so that no prisoner would encounter the same fellow prisoner twice in one sentence. This way we could give prisoners enough social interaction to stop 'em going crazy while preventing them from ever constructing any more than the most rudimentary social structures.

Any downsides I'm not considering? I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.

I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.

This would not be the case. Enforcing such a policy would be prohibitively expensive. Following the theme of the article, we can't even afford < 12 student classes, and schools are much cheaper than prisons.

In my opinion the solution is simple: put less people in prison. This chart says it all for me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-...

Let's assume that the fraction of people in prison has grown over the last 70 years. This is either because sentencing has got harsher or because people are committing more crimes. Anecdotally, though, sentencing seems to have got less harsh -- for instance in the 1950s the Boggs act resulted in minimum mandatory sentences of 5-20 years for a first drug offense. Thus, we must conclude that people are committing more crimes than before.

Now, either they're committing more crimes because sentencing has got less harsh, or they're committing more crimes because of other social factors (eg the growth of gang culture, drug culture, et cetera). Either way it's not clear to me that making sentencing even less harsh than it already is will solve anything.

>This is either because sentencing has got harsher or because people are committing more crimes.

Or because more crimes are being prosecuted. It's completely false to say that it must be for one or other or those two reasons.

Just that many prisoners already know each other from their own neighborhoods. The groundwork of the social structure is already in place. The problem is not guarding prisoners, the problem with prison reform is that it doesn't reform anything. The question is what do we want prisoners to do once they're out? There is always a political push for longer sentences but it's economically infeasible. So if we're then asking what we can do to make these people productive members of society again, then that takes money.

Yes, that's the problem. They need to get an incentive to prepare for life outside prison. Many of the prisoners don't have the education or the skills to get a real alternative. If they have a choice of a minimum wage or selling drugs, they will often choose the easy way.

I think the best solution would be to increase prison sentences, but give a similar (if not greater) reduction if they choose to re-educate/train themselves. They would also have to show a real intent, so that they don't just sit there without making an effort.

This will not work for everyone, but I am sure that it will reduce the number of prisoners with 3 strikes.

The second problem is the actual workplaces. The state should pay a large amount of the ex-prisoner's salary for the first year, and a smaller amount in the second year. This will encourage companies to hire them. I'm not an economist, but I assume that this cost will be payed back by keeping them out of prisons.

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