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Comment by superuser2 | Hacker News Reader

This is also what happens when well-intentioned people are vastly more successful at fighting prison construction than fighting mass incarceration.

Our prisons are routinely at 1.5x, 2x, 3x capacity. Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one, people living on cots in a gymnasium with no privacy whatsoever, in such close quarters that even the most patient people would be at each other's throats.

Until the prison population actually declines, we ought to at least be building prisons fast enough to stay at design capacity.

Google your state - you'll be amazed. Prisons aren't designed to be comfortable, but they sure as hell get a lot less comfortable with too many people in them.

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> Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one...

Is there any evidence that people "against the prison industrial complex" are directly responsible for the rate at which new prisons are being constructed? I'm not sure but I'm inclined to think that this would have more to do with strained budgets than any successful activism.

Edit: I looked into this a bit with California as an example.

In 2011, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that required California to dramatically reduce its prison population.

"Justice Kennedy, citing the lower court decision, said there was 'no realistic possibility that California would be able to build itself out of this crisis,' in light of the state’s financial problems."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html

The opinion of the lower court:

"Relying on expert testimony, the court ruled that the California prison system, the nation’s largest with more than 150,000 inmates, could reduce its population by shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole, which they said would have no adverse impact on public safety."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/us/10prison.html

>Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one

if you trace whom prison guard unions support you'd notice that it is the prison-industrial complex who is a major player responsible for incarcerating more people. Having crowded prisons helps a lot to overcome any opposition to new prisons exactly because of the logic like yours.

There's a simple solution to that, set people free. We don't need to build more prisons, we already imprison more of our population than any other country in the world, we have too many prisons and too many people in them. We need to imprison less people. Release all inmates who committed victim-less crimes, if more room is needed, release all inmates who committed non violent crimes-there are better ways to deal with them than prison. Prison should be for violent criminals only. Release all drug users, release all drug pushers, none of those people belong in jail.

You miss the point. It's easier to stop prisons being built then to set people free. But it would probably be easier to deal with the whole problem if in fact we were a lot stricter about ensuring proper prison capacity, construction and staffing were followed.

But then again, doing any of that is a lot harder then egging on the narrative that prison is actually meant to be a mad max wasteland, and pretending we're totally not responsible for turning a blind eye to the rape, murder and gangs we let happen there.

No, I don't miss the point, I just don't agree that building more prisons is acceptable.

I agree that we should have less people in prison.

In order to be lucid about the situation though, it's important to realise that a very large part of the prison population is in there for violent offences. Even knowing this, I still believe we should be reducing sentences (I have a hard time justifying putting anyone in a cage for 15 years as a punishment...) but there probably needs to be some alternative things going on too.

To put some numbers on the part of the prison population there for violent offenses:

* Bureau of Justice Statistics says 53% of state prsionsers and 7% (what?!) of federal prisoners (2014): http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14_Summary.pdf * Federal Bureau of Prisons says 46.5% drug offences (no specification on violent v. non-violent) and 9.2% immigration as the third largest group. Second largest is more violent sounding, though: Weapons, Explosives, Arson 16.9% (2016): https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

I don't think non-violent crime should always mean no prison, but I suspect there are better ways of dealing with the majority of them.

Also, since you mentioned shorter terms, here are the BOP's numbers of sentence length: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_sente...

Heres something to consider;

Drawing such a sharp distinction between violent and non violent crimes omits many real-world factors.

What kind of criminal is this person is different from what was this criminal convicted of. I can be a part time drug dealer, shooting rival gang members, robbing houses and pimping whores. But land myself in prison for 10 years due to my 6th possession charge. If you draw a hard distinction statistically, I fall into the 'I can't believe we imprison people for having a little pot'

Additionally, what is a non-violent crime? Looks like good chunk of prison inmates are property crimes, larceny, burglars, thief. What percentage do you suspect of these non-violent offenders were armed during the commission of their crimes? What percentage would have turned violent if confronted during their crime? I suspect that these people who steal your car, break into your home and business and steal your things are effectively violent offenders.

> I can be a part time drug dealer, shooting rival gang members, robbing houses and pimping whores. But land myself in prison for 10 years due to my 6th possession charge. If you draw a hard distinction statistically, I fall into the 'I can't believe we imprison people for having a little pot'

"You" are a strawman invented to support strict drug laws. How about we jail people for crimes we can actually prove they did, rather then assuming that if you sell pot, you must be "pimpin hoes" and "shooting rival gang members".

> What percentage would have turned violent if confronted during their crime? I suspect that these people who steal your car, break into your home and business and steal your things are effectively violent offenders.

I suspect not, but either way, I don't particularly feel like throwing them in prisons helps things at all. Read up on the gang presence in prisons: its its not like giving someone 10 years for stealing cash from your car is going to rehabilitate them very effectively, and certainly not with the state of prisons being what it is.

> In order to be lucid about the situation though, it's important to realise that a very large part of the prison population is in there for violent offences.

When that's 100%, then other things can be explored, but a large part of the prison population is also not violent and that's a place to make change.

> victim-less crimes

I think I found the double-think.

But absolutely, incarceration is used as a tool of suppressing "undesirables" according to the writers of law. The co-conspirator of Watergate is making waves online again this past week for having talked about how the Nixon administration planned the war on drugs as a means to destroy hippie and black communities through mass incarceration and prosecution.

According to this site[1], felons incarcerated for drugs comprise 16% of the total prison population. 64.8% are incarcerated for violent offenses and property crimes, both of which have victims.

The most interesting part, to me, is the "public-order" criminals. When my girlfriend worked corrections, she noted that at the state level, the vast majority of prisoners were in for violent crimes - rape, robbery, murder, arson, etc. At the county level, however, a large number of prisoners were in for what she termed as "criminalized insanity." They're too mentally ill to function, so they live on the streets until they get arrested for doing some small crime - loitering, public urination, trespassing, etc. They get locked up for a few days, get a court date, and get released. Then they go right back to the streets, miss their court date, get arrested again for a bench warrant next time they have a run-in with the law, get sentenced to a slightly longer stay, get released on probation, violate probation, get arrested again the next time they have a run-in with the law...

Wash, rinse, repeat. All of this is really short-term... and yet they're forming 13.8% of the incarcerated population. We're spending an enormous amount of resources on what amounts to impromptu, ad-hoc, half-assed mental healthcare, and none of it works. But eliminating it entirely and saying, "Go forth and sin no more" is going to do absolutely nothing unless there are corresponding programs that can actually help such people.

That kind of coordination - saying, "Okay, we're going to have to spend $x million extra dollars extra for a few years until the mental health benefits start to decrease the cost of jails and prisons" - is extremely difficult, if not impossible to accomplish.

Regarding drug pushers and prison - I constantly swing back and forth on this issue, mostly because they are morally degenerate for exploiting human weakness for profit. If you google Whiteclay, Nebraska and go to images[2], you'll find a whole bunch of pictures of wasted Indians lying in alleyways right outside the (white-owned) liquor stores. It's created an enormous amount of frustration in the community, and the response from the government is "Well, it's not illegal to sell alcohol to alcoholics."

I give pause to the folks who demand unrestricted drug use for everyone, (which is what decriminalization is - if something's restrictions have no teeth, namely incarceration, it's unrestricted. Same exact reason why financial laws are flouted so often - no teeth) because this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale.

The real question, and one that I can't even begin to unravel because there's so much goddamn bullshit on the Internet from agenda-pushers on both sides, is "Is this state of affairs, where a large portion of the population is incarcerated for vice, preferable to a state of affairs where vice is openly permitted?"

Personally, as someone who lives in a relatively affluent suburb, I'd say that legalizing everything would be a massive boon to me. My taxes will go down, and more importantly I'm insulated from the consequences by a lack of public transit and vigilant cops who are, er, unfriendly to the lowlives who occasionally wander away from the city. The folks in the city and poorer towns, who actually get to deal with the massive consequences of widespread addiction, might beg to differ.

[1] http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteclay+nebraska&client=ub...

> this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale

There are plenty of middle ground options between criminalization and total freedom. And in fact, if you look at the way alcohol is handled, you see a lot of those. It isn't illegal to possess alcohol in large quantities or to drink to excess, but in some places, public intoxication is illegal (or seen as something of a public nuisance that police are expected to humanely help with). It isn't illegal to sell alcohol, but sometimes it is illegal to knowingly sell it to a drunk person. There are age limits. It's banned at certain events. So forth.

There are a lot of rules, and they vary a lot, and I wouldn't go so far as to say they are rational, exactly, but some are humane. And some do strike a good balance between allowing people to choose to enjoy responsibly (or even irresponsibly), while limiting the danger and nuisance to the rest of society, and while -- on the third hand -- limiting how predatory you can be in selling it and preying on human weakness.

It would probably be naive to suppose that the exact same set of rules would work for all substances, but it does suggest that outright criminalization and junkies on the sidewalk aren't the only options.

> they are morally degenerate for exploiting human weakness for profit.

Are you proposing that selling alcohol should be punishable by imprisonment?

> this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale.

I think that you're engaging in hyperbole. A liquor store or bar is not unambiguously evil. Most _users_ of the drug alcohol are not _abusers_ -- they consume at least somewhat responsibly, are not addicted, do not impose a burden on society, and get a net positive amount of utility from their use of the drug.

You can s/alcohol/pretty much any other drug/ in the previous paragraph, though it's certainly the case that some drugs have lower total utility across society than others.

> "Is this state of affairs, where a large portion of the population is incarcerated for vice, preferable to a state of affairs where vice is openly permitted?"

That's a good question, but it's still the wrong question. The right question is who owns my body, me or the government? Drugs should be legal not because it results in a better society, but because it in results a free society where a person can't be jailed for what he does to himself.

Thought experiment:

What would happen if the laws were amended so that, should someone be sentenced to prison time, and all prisons within a reasonable radius are at capacity, that either the person with the lowest amount of time to serve in that prison (barring violent offenses) is automatically set free, or the sentence is commuted to probation or such?

There's an argument to be made here that cramming two people into a parking-space-sized cell is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, so the state really should have to decide if placing Joe Potsmoker in for a year is worth releasing Bill Burgalar five years early. Just saying "fuck it, throw 'em all in" shouldn't be an option.

(This is assuming that prison has any reformative value at all, of course...)

If the laws were amended as you suggest, what would happen is it prison capacities would be constantly redefined, rather like the debt ceiling. You'd need the law to impose a hard limit on prisoners per square foot or something to make it reasonably hard to evade. Also, if it's easier and cheaper to change the law than build a new prison, it won't work.

You've definitely identified the crux of the problem, though - prison capacities need to be treated as hard limits not to be exceeded, and not some nominal "design" number, which is routinely exceeded without limitation. If more people need to be incarcerated than there is capacity for, the solution needs to be building a new prison.

To be unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, a punishment needs to be well, cruel and unusual. Prison overcrowding may be cruel, but it's not unusual.

This happens. Not on a 1:1 basis, but early release to alleviate overcrowding somewhat is not unheard of.

The careers of the politicians responsible are eviscerated, spectacularly, when the people they released go on to commit violent crimes.

then you get a interesting, new, prisoner dilemma puzzle.

if you are the leader of a big gang, and still have power on the people outside, you can make enough gang-newcomers go to jail until you are free.

Thousands of them? And they'd all have to get longer sentences than you? Not going to work.

the boss usually gets nabbed by things like tax evasion, so easy to get then on top of the list.

How about shifts? Prison holds 1000? Make a gang of 4000. You can each serve a week a month to criminalize with impunity.

Fines, community service, probation, a possible rule for minimum months served, the off chance that the system isn't run by idiots and they spread out the load with other prisons, the other off chance of judges not being idiots and giving a non-minimal sentence to someone that has no remorse.

Also 'Make a gang of 4000', sure...

We should call it the Kanban Prison System.

> but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one

I've not met anyone who is against prison construction that is not also against long sentences and against sentences for trivial crap. It's the state's half-arsed job that's responsible, not the people who are trying to make the place better.

We definitely shouldn't be building prisons just for capacity, because then when they are slated to close, it become another political football: "jobs", "soft on crime", so on and so forth. The solution is to stop jailing people to such a ridiculous degree - in the US it's basically j-curved since the '90s.

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