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Comment by nknwn | Hacker News Reader

In having served almost 10 years in prison for drugs. I can say that medium and maximum security prisons are often a breeding ground for killers, and dangerous people.

Young kids who have done something incredibly stupid usually end up in these places. They are then immediately put in a situation to fuck or fight. This behavior will often escalate to extreme violence or to be broken psychologically, then owned by other inmates, bought and sold like property. Can that kind of behavior be unlearned? I doubt it... I would argue that at best, people can only learn to do something better, but always lurking in the background.

This is only one of many of the bizarre insanities of prison life. I personally don't disagree with the idea of punishment or prison. I would however say that prisons are extremely dysfunctional.

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I call prison "criminal university". It's just fucking stupid.

We get a whole bunch of violent / profession criminals together so they can learn from each other and build their networks. Then brand them as criminals so they can't get a job when they come out, thus ensuring they reoffend. Oh and we incarcerate for non violent crimes, so entry level criminals have the opportunity to learn from the best and progress their career.

Is this similar to "go to the hospital to get sick"?

Not quite. Society is still conflicted over whether prison is for punishment or rehabilitation. In the US, I think it trends mostly punishment with lip service to rehabilitation.

If you run the hospital poorly enough, that's exactly what happens.

"Poorly" seems a bit harsh. From a conceptual standpoint, hospitals are, in some sense, a terrible idea: why would you want to concentrate contagious individuals (let along concentrate them in proximity to people with unrelated sicknesses). The only reason we have hospitals is the only way we can afford to provide medical care to the population.

According to the CDC, "On any given day, about one in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection. "

http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/surveillance/index.html

I don't see how you can have a humane prison not be a criminal university. I mean, in the old days, they would just throw you in cell and leave you there for years. Your meals would come in through a slot in the door and you would poop and pee in a pot. No face-to-face interaction with other prisoners. No shared cells. No recreational time in open areas where you can form cliques. The only communication that happened between prisoners was via tapping or other coded acoustics.

Allowing prisoners to interact face to face in open and closed environments is going to introduce these extra complexities of prisoners "poisoning" other prisoners.

It's not that socializing is the problem, it's that there is no enforcement -- your safety inside is guaranteed by nothing; so participation in a gang is inevitable as an outgrowth of the lack of safety.

Can you provide a source that in the "old days" all prison was solitary confinement?

Eastern State Penitentiary is considered the first "true penitentiary" Wikipedia[1] has pretty good coverage of its history, including starting with an all solitary system.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_State_Penitentiary

* in the US.

We've certainly had prisons before 1829 elsewhere in the world.

Sure, there were prisons in ancient times too. I think the 1829 example may be more relevant.

That's wrong. It's false that prison was like you describe in "the old days". In fact, any statement about historical fact that begins with "in the old days", generalising wildly different realities across time and space into one short anecdotal tidbit is most certainly going to be wrong.

"I don't see how you can have a humane prison not be a criminal university."

By having it promote positive improvement and rehabilitation rather than purely punishment.

Here is what a humane prison looks like:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35813470 http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison

"A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members" ~Pope John Paul II

By treating prisoners humanely, a society is showing how it treats those who are at the bottom rungs of it. It is a reflection on the society itself.

A lot of people call those prisons "dorms" and they say that prisoners live in better conditions than a lot of people outside of prison.

And yet, they don't make the jump to the idea that maybe people shouldn't be living in worse conditions.

Definitely, I am a big believer in Housing First and affordable housing by allowing high density development, as it is a viable path forward for cities and it defends suburbs from pressure to redevelop much more destructive low density redevelopment.

I'm getting off-topic here but can you share some resources on how low density developments are much more destructive? I'm usually very pro low density housing (and also very anti high density housing) so I'd like to have some new perspectives on this. Thanks.

Consider this: My local road takes up ~40,000 square metres of space all in (road, front yards, houses, back yards). That houses 660 families. Near the local train station they'll be housing that same amount in <2,000 square metres of high density housing.

So to handle twice the population, we could either free up ~2,000 square metres, or re-develop the entire road two have twice the density, leading to the loss of most of the single dwelling houses and private gardens.

It's not so much that low density is bad, as that not having high density takes choice away once there's no more space and you have to start increasing density anyway, often in all kinds of suboptimal ways.

Maybe city planners should borrow some ideas from CS, namely how to handle destructive operations while maintaining O(1) average cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_array

Why can't we consider expanding to new non-developed areas in this scenario?

The main reason I'm anti high density areas is it's unhealthy: people are stressed, there's no sense of community, commerce space is scarce and extremely expensive to rent so { banks, supermarkets, estate agents } take all of them making any new commercial idea almost impossible to put through thus less employment too. I don't know much about this though, it's just my thoughts after living in very different areas and cities and how I feel about it.

>people are stressed

You ever asked us?

>there's no sense of community

Says who? Ronald Reagan?

>commerce space is scarce and extremely expensive to rent so { banks, supermarkets, estate agents } take all of them making any new commercial idea almost impossible to put through thus less employment too

I guess I'll go tell all the shops and such in Davis Square that they don't exist.

> Why can't we consider expanding to new non-developed areas in this scenario?

Because a lot of people want to keep relatively untouched nature too.

> people are stressed

I don't see any evidence that this is caused by high density living.

> there's no sense of community

Most suburban areas, in my experience, have little sense of community. Maybe small villages are different, but in the suburban areas I've lived, at most I knew my immediate neighbours. People often tend to drive too and from the places where they are involved in community activities. If anything, I feel more connected to communities that form separate from the residential areas, and there tend to be more of them in high density city centres.

> commerce space is scarce

Is it? Near me, the densest areas have plenty of available commercial units cheaply available.

More importantly: Building densely allow for far more flexibility with the rest of the space.

Ain't gonna happen.

It's a long chain of logic, but fractional reserve banking, at the levels we're seeing, prevents it.

Most of our money supply is created through debt. As a result, housing is bought through debt rather than owned. The competition for better homes drives prices astronomical. The only way to actually get affordable housing is to either move people where there is no competition (e.g. desert of Arizona), or to reduce reserve limits.

Fractional reserve banking generates trillions for big banks, and the electorate doesn't get it. It's not going away.

I implore you to take some time and read at least one or two credible papers on the subject, because your understanding of fractional reserve banking is frankly too misinformed to unpack in the space of a forum comment. Suffice it to say I've certainly never seen any indication that removing easy availability of credit results in positive outcomes for the classes who already lack in capital. I'll include some links for you to get started at the bottom.

What can be addressed is the concept of affordable housing. Housing, to a certain degree follows a pretty tight supply and demand curve; put simply if you want affordable housing, pressure your local government to green light permits to build affordable housing[2].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_theory_of_money [2]http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-cities-see-apartment-rents-f...

Not many here in Norway say that because here it is demonstrably untrue. Pretty much the only people who have to live in significantly worse conditions are illegal immigrants begging on the streets and sleeping rough.

In short, punishment should be banished away. Not banished to a certain location.

We as society wants that certain people do not live among us. But that does not imply they have to live in worst condition. So the solution, instead of prision have contained societies. Both private and public run. So then going to prision would mean relocating to one of the contained societies [1], completely upto the the "offender". In these societies they will have their own system of governence.

[1] They would also would be allowed to move to another country.

> They would also would be allowed to move to another country

If those countries are having them, that is. In medieval times banishment for the most part was equivalent to death (or turning to a life of crime as a bandit).

While a nice idea in theory, how would a contained society actually work? Prisons already are miniature societies (just generally not very humanely run ones). It'd still be a prison, albeit a larger one, wouldn't it? Worst case it'd be something like Manhattan in Escape from New York.

I'm not saying it couldn't work but it's not an easy thing to get right.

> how would a contained society actually work?

If a society is understanding enough to have CS, it safe to expect they would also not use CS for non-violent crimes.

So now what would CS for violent criminals with no skill look like ? Ok so this would be a prision/rehabilitation-center in traditional sense but with a twist that they can also leave provided the country have them.

Take a look at humane prisons that work in other countries. If treating people humanely meant that folks learned more criminal ways, Norway would have an awful time with this. The opposite is true, however. For the most part, folks are committed to trying to make the prisoners a good neighbor upon being releases - from day 1 of being released.

What you describe - some of the prisons of the "old days" also produced ex-offenders that were seriously mentally ill. That is very easily the effect of having solitary of that sort for so many years. Even if you do wind up being able to mentally withstand the place, you get released with no knowledge of what has happened - which happens now, actually.

Thanks for your comment.

It seems that there are many unreported rapes in American prisons. When you read the real stories and how wardens don't care or enable such system, your faith in human nature is over. You realize how fucked up bureocrats are. If Americans – liberals and conservatives – truly cared about human rights they would have started a riot about such issues years ago. They set up a mass whining for the new president of US in less than 24 hours, people clearly don't care about the inhuman treatment of prisoners. Read the testimony of activist Stephen Donaldson. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-20/news/ls-60064_1_priso...

Same with cars, global climate change, and pollution. People only know how to respond to events.

You're confusing corruption for incompetence.

It's true. You have to look far outside of the system to find people who take prison abolition seriously. Anarchists, mostly.

Step 1 is do not look to abolish prison. When you start with such an extreme position no one is going to listen.

Considering that prisons in their current form overflowing with brutality and cruelty are an acceptable mainstream position, I'd rather not care about being extreme. If one believes that prisons as a structure inevitably lead to arbitrarily bad abuse of power, then one is for the abolition of prison.

Without prison, people would demand eye-for-an-eye justice. Without that either, people would dish it out themselves. We'd be back to lynchings.

Be careful what you wish for.

Lynchings were aided and abetted by the state and the prison-industrial complex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_incarceration

What do you propose as an alternative? No law enforcement at all?

I can't speak for OP, but I'd think Anarchists can swing to both extremes. Self defense is not the same as enforcing a dictated law. This is reduction ad absurdum, but still worth thinking about. IMHO, anarchy is not an alternative to other rules, it's the foundation of free will, the empty set that is part of every other set. Of course, anarchism as a label is used with a different message.

There are many traditions of communal justice that aren't retributive. Keywords that can be googled are restorative justice and transformative justice, for example. Traditional conflict resolution still persists in areas where the reach of the state does not extend. Approaches to justice that eschew centralized authority have a very different character, and I understand that it can be difficult to come up with such examples on one's own. It requires a different approach to the problem.

In any case, prison abolition is a wide topic with a lot of point of views and I could not do any of them justice in an Internet comment. I hate referring someone to wikipedia, but all the other sources I'd cite have a distinctly leftist approach and I think wikipedia is probably the most approachable entrypoint for someone who does not already ascribe to certain ideological premises: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_incarceration

I've never been to prison but when I read this article I feel despondent. Here are people asking for some really tiny, minor things. The whole argument is predicated on the idea that prison is about rehabilitation. It's not. Prison is about destroying people. Punishing them for having the audacity to exist after revealing the fact that their identity does not fit the dominant narrative.

I am fundamentally opposed to prison in all but the most extreme cases. I also happen to believe a bunch of other things that would also see me branded as a radical by society, but I digress. Prison is fundamentally destructive as an institution. It is slavery by another name and it must be dismantled, though I don't know how we begin the process.

> though I don't know how we begin the process.

Its political, and at least in the US, it traces its roots back to corruption and how unrepresentative the US government is of its citizens.

If you want to fix almost all societal problems, you first need a system of government that fears and respects its people. I don't care which permutation of state you pick, but if you want a government to care what you say, it has to care about its people.

Most countries have that problem. Its less overbearing because most European states have better implementations of near the same parliamentary system, but even those governments are often too centralized and too easily corrupted, and that breeds an unrepresentative state.

Making a government that acts in the will of its people is absolutely step one to fixing the problems it causes. Then you just need to persuade the people and thus the representatives to change it.

There is no reason to believe that harsh prison systems are representative of the will of the people. In the 1990s, three strikes laws in California were enacted by public referendum. The margin was 3-1. 75% of people voted to put people in prison for life for three felonies--and they didn't even have to be violent felonies. And it was one of the most liberal states in the country!

It should be noted that the CA three strikes law was also weakened to only encompass "serious" or violent felonies in 2012 - also by public referendum.

> Punishing them for having the audacity to exist after revealing the fact that their identity does not fit the dominant narrative.

So under that sweeping generalization, you consider rape and murder equivalent to, say, coming out as homosexual??

Reform is necessary, but you can't just boil everything down into apologetics of "institutional discrimination against the morally-impaired."

As Bryan Stevenson says, a person is more than the worst mistake they've made. The inhumanity of American prisons is reprehensible, and limits the potential of our most vulnerable populations. Imagine if Obama has been imprisoned for smoking a joint in his really years. Is that moment of indiscretion worth voiding a whole life?

For those interested in keeping up with our contributing to the effort to fix the US prison system, please check out the Ella Baker center, http://ellabakercenter.org. Started by Van Jones twenty years ago, they've been on the forefront of resisting unnecessary prison expansions, reducing the rate at which juveniles are put in prison, and more.

prison is inhuman punishment. it doesn't stop or correct crime. and in return causes huge social problems.

You are right. Because these same people, are released in 5-10-20 years and are then someone's neighbor.

Rarely any job skills to speak of.

Often very little in the way of education or resources to improve.

So the end result 80-90% of the time is to resort to the familiar crowd and routine.

We need to bring Exile back. That and death sentances federally.

It is largely the poor and uneducated people who go to prison.

They don't just "go to prison", that demographic commits crimes that send them to prison.

And the other demographics commit crimes that don't end up with the justice system^ sending them to prison. They're often the same crime.

^ Crimes don't do anything, of course. It's the people in charge who decide who goes to prison.

And can't pay for lawyers to get them off.

Exile to where? Alaska?

There would be a perverse irony in Trump sending American murderers and rapists to Mexico.

Not the worst idea ever: it's large, inhospitable and the climate is not especially conducive to layabouts (although the long winter darkness would probably be well-correlated to depression and violence).

We could try mars. We just send more and more in batches with resources. Until they start dying off in too large a quantity.

Hey, if it worked for the Americas and Australia.

Worse: Delaware

You get to pick. Then we drop you off with a helicopter.

It seems USA is hell bent on turning into the very thing it once despised...

For some things it is certainly important. If someone is a known murderer, what would you do? You have to section that person off somehow. Regardless of what you call that sectioning it is a prison.

"knowing" someone is a murderer is actually quite difficult with all the recent discoveries of "junk science" that have historically been used to prove guilt.

? What's your point?

His point is that a lot of people have been and keep being sent to prison thanks to DNA testing and other methods, recently proven to be unreliable.

Therefore falsifying the premise to the entire argument GP was replying to.

> If someone is a known murderer, what would you do? You have to section that person off somehow.

That's a pretty simplistic way to look at it. Do you know how likely a known murderer is to commit any offense, much less another murder? Researchers spend a lot of effort into trying to figure that out, here's a quote[0] from one such paper:

> Our study indicates that it is a misconception that homicide offenders released after long-term incarceration are hardly ever involved in violent crimes upon release. This misconception stems from several studies that have found that homicide offenders rarely re-offend with a second homicide. After analyzing a large volume of data, our study found that none of the 336 released homicide offenders committed another homicide, but approximately one-third of both the felony homicide offenders and general altercation precipitated homicide offenders do re-offend with new violent or drug offenses.

> Additionally, homicide is not a homogeneous behavior. Homicide perpetrators are not the same in terms of motivation, environmental factors, demographics, and interpersonal dynamics. Different factors of complex combinations precipitate homicides that range from felony murders in the midst of an armed robbery to murders involving sex, love, and emotion, and murders for money and property to murders because of drug use and alcohol consumption

[0] - http://www.newjersey.gov/corrections/pdf/REU/Recidivism_Amon...

I don't profess to know the answer of the underlying question - how you should "deal" with criminals. But reading that study, none of the factors that lead to recidivism are treated in prison(alcohol, drug addiction), some are actually exacerbated(poor economical situation, low education).

You're conflating homicide and murder. Legally there are many types of homicides. The manslaughter types are already sentenced less because as you point out they are less likely to occur again. I agree with your points, but wanted to note that the law already has some framework to deal with the differences.

> re-offend with new violent or drug offenses.

Putting drug offenses in there kind of makes those numbers pointless.

I agree with you. Prison as punishment is senseless.

We have two options. We insulate the person indefinitely or we condition the person for possible return into the society.

My understanding is that we should only accept solitary confinement where the prisoner does not have any contact with other prisoners but has a constant concealing by professionals and does have other conditions to maintain its decency.

As an outsider I always just assumed those who ran prisons and designed them wanted them to be set up that way.

On the other hand I always assumed it's due to short-term thinking and incentives misalignment. Incarceration is a quick way to quarantine criminals and fill the need for justice of the offended. A person who ends up in prison (especially the high-security one) is likely to be away for many, many years - at which point what happens when they're released is someone else's problem. Humans are good at dealing with distant consequences in the abstract, but extremely poor at it in practice. So prisons are what they are by default.

Of course there are other issues at play too. For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education. Or another example - you can't really make prisoners do useful work for the society (as opposed to just rotting in their cells), because it disrupts the market economy and becomes a powerful force for administrators to threaten their local communities ("do X, or else I unleash my 300+ strong force of unpaid workers and drive you out of market").

The more I think about prisons, the more I see it's a very convoluted issue, and there isn't any obvious, simple solution.

> For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education.

If this turns out to be a serious problem then perhaps your society has other issues it should be dealing with?

'Nice' prisons certainly seem to work pretty well in Norway: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-pr...

> If this turns out to be a serious problem then perhaps your society has other issues it should be dealing with?

Of course! Which makes the whole thing even more difficult, because now instead of dealing with issues in isolation, you have to untangle the complex web of interdependencies.

A number of years ago around 2006 I read a story of a man in his 60s that went into a bank, handed a teller a note to not be scared, put some cash in a bag, and that he won't hurt her. She complied, and he sat on the floor and waited for police to arrive. He wanted to go to prison and was committing a felony because he couldn't find a job, social security wasn't enough, he couldn't qualify for disability, he couldn't afford healthcare, and he had run out of options for housing now that the bank had foreclosed on his house.

Something is wrong when people are finding the idea of an institution meant to punish people a better life than living in our "free" society that people keep insisting is the best country in the history of the world.

The "easiest" fix to this issue would be fixing education. If it's generally easy/inexpensive to get a good education for every citizen (e.g. via a taxation based social contract) that particular incentive goes away. Different societies have different positions on this. I'm generally very much in the "less government please" camp but for certain areas where there's a potential for multiplier effects or where more equality of opportunity is very likely to have a positive effect on society as a whole (education, health, justice, possibly defense etc.) I don't mind tax-based measures to provide more equality.

Norway is an extreme monoculture with low population sitting on oil reserves. They have so much money per capita, they end up being fine no matter what stuff they do. It doesn't mean their "solutions" work elsewhere, especially in gang infested areas.

Nor does it mean that their ideas aren't worth considering. Sweden for instance has a much larger population, much larger land area, more natural resources (except the oil of course) and more industry. Yet they have a bigger problem with crime and concentrations of poorly integrated immigrants.

Both are Scandinavian counties with a lot of shared history and are both commonly regarded as 'monocultures' yet they have noticeably different social problems. It seems plausible that some of the differences could be traced to different government policies.

And, anyway, no one believes that you can just transplant policies, but even when you cannot just copy you can still learn.

Lastly, we don't end up being fine whatever we do; the stability of Norwegian society has a lot to do with the state of mind that led to the establishment of the oil fund that ensures that the money from the oil is not squandered (like it was in the UK). The general population is broadly supportive of this and the ideas of self reliance, individual and collective responsibility, and assistance for those in need permeate the culture here. No I don't believe it is perfect here, we still have a long way to go, and we must stay vigilant to ensure that the good that we have is preserved and the bad continually rooted out.

> For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education.

That particular problem seems technically easy to solve (politically is another matter, of course). Just let people volunteer to go to prison without actually committing a crime, and make sure they are informed of other options at that interview. We could use the rate at which people do this as a measure of other poverty assistance efforts, and the reasons for doing it to design new efforts.

> Or another example - you can't really make prisoners do useful work for the society (as opposed to just rotting in their cells), because it disrupts the market economy and becomes a powerful force for administrators to threaten their local communities ("do X, or else I unleash my 300+ strong force of unpaid workers and drive you out of market").

You can if you can arrange for the prisoners to be paid at market rate for such things -- though I not only admit, but want to emphasize that this is easier said than done.

> need for justice of the offended

"need for justice" makes it looks like it's a normal and even healthy thing.

Many people outside of the US are horrified at the thought families of murder victims going to watch the execution of the perpetrator.

Desire to see the perpetrator suffer is called revenge and is seen by many as a psychological problem in the victims that need therapy and healing.

On the other hand, it can be equally traumatizing for the victim's family to see the perpetrator get off with a slap on the wrist.

We don't have to go into the extremes either way.

Also, the desire for punishment is is not about seeing the perpetrator suffer, but about paying for the damage they've done. If someone bumps your car, would you describe the desire for the guilty party to pay for the damages to be a mental illness?

What do you mean with "pay"? If you mean restitution, that's entirely different than punishment.

> For instance, a prison can't be too nice, lest it turns into a free vocational school and people will find committing crimes and getting caught to be an excellent way to get education.

Because heaven forbid we provide free education, vocational or otherwise. /s

EDIT: Sorry, that was snarky. But i agree with a sibling post that apparently Norway is doing alright with their approach. I'd rather see someone going to prison as a failing of society, and consider the cost of incarceration one that society should bear as a result, with the hope of re-integrating the person.

But i do understand your sentiment, i agree with the incentive misalignment.

My point was that while free education is great (and I did benefit from such in my country), you shouldn't have to commit a crime as a part of an entrance exam...

I'm sorry.

What can (non-american) outsiders do to help fix/improve this situation (in American prisons)?

You probably can't do anything about the actual prison experience, but you can help the individuals both before, during and after.

There are organizations that try to keep people out of prison by giving them activities or trade training.

And there are organizations that try to help people find jobs after leaving prison.

You could find some you like and help them financially.

Another positive influence is the religious community, so you can help those as well. People with strong religious ties tend to have a much easier time joining their community after prison.

There are also some religious communities that try to reach people in prison, and you could help them.

I think (as non-american) that the best you can do is to try to convince your American friends (you may have to acquire them first) that the idea of the prison is not a punishment but isolation of the danger and reconditioning to the return back into the society.

My understanding is that the last one can not happen in open prisons but only in solitary confinement where a single prisoner does not have any contact with other prisoners but still has constant concealing by professionals and does have other conditions to maintain its decency.

Nuke us.

I really don't have words for this.

The problem is we the people. We treat anyone in prison or with a government label of felon, sex offender etc. as less than human being. I can't blame the prison university.

Thanks for sharing this. I would be interested to read more about it. People like who have not been counting their years migh have some imagination, but imagination does not replace experience. Perhaps you should make a write up of your time and observations.

Has temporary imprisonment ever been shown to have a positive impact?

>>Young kids who have done something incredibly stupid

>>They are then immediately put in a situation to fuck or fight.

IMHO this aspect of prison life is common knowledge. I wonder how incredibly stupid one has to be to risk getting jailed. And looking at the numbers that is not a marginal phenomenon.

A great many things can cause you to be party to something incredibly stupid - something mildly stupid escalating, doing something without full understanding of the consequences...

Even if you do grasp the risk at hand, other pressures can drive you to make stupid choices.

Regardless of how you got there, though, it should not be a given that you're going to come out of it worse than you went in.

>> something mildly stupid escalating, doing something without full understanding of the consequences...

I still do not get how someone can not understand the consequences. Have they never seen any movie? Really? Never talk to former inmates?

And yet this is a fact, because otherwise hardly anyone would be in prison. It seems you're confused about this.

A hint: lot of the "incredibly stupid" things are being done in the heat of the moment. Other times, people don't really imagine something bad could happen to them. Then, sometimes people think they have no other choice - maybe they're "in too deep", or maybe it's the only way they can think of supporting their family, etc. Sometimes people just take a huge risk for potential huge gains (think of it as criminal world equivalent of starting a startup).

Humans are not perfect reasoning machines with infinite computation speed.

The vast majority of prison inmates have a long history of offenses and didn't just do one stupid thing.

They had to have started on this road of offenses somehow, and I'd wager it usually starts with the mildly stupid things.

That doesn't speak very highly of the rehabilitative capacity of prison then, does it? Why are we even sending them?

They can't hurt the rest of us while they rot in prison.

That's really it. Rehabilitation and retribution are only minor factors, for the liberal and conservative voters respectively. The main factor is just stopping crime by warehousing people until they die or get too old to cause trouble.

It's expensive, but you have to admit that it is extremely effective.

LOL, Your comment about stopping crime by locking people up made me laugh hard.

I've done time in the federal system, and on one of my transfers between prisons, I got to sit beside a supermax transfer prisoner. Really, he was a pretty nice fellow. Said he had to kill a guard once in a while to get out and see the sights and have some decent food. He was on his way to court for that murder case trial.

>> yet this is a fact, because otherwise hardly anyone would be in prison.

The explanation that some people just ignore the laws and think they can get away with it is too simple, isn't it?

>> Humans are not perfect reasoning machines

Neider are they "stupid saints". They sometimes just take a huge risk for whatever reason. And sometimes this risk involves getting jailed, because society consider some kind of risks as undesired and make you pay a high price for taking them.

Knowing, abstractly, that doing X can result in Y punishment, and having internalized it to the point that you think of this fact as a deterrent when you're considering whether to do X, are not the same thing.

It's similar to (but not the same, I think, as) the difference between not doing X because you've been told Y will happen, and not doing X because you have memories of doing X and Y happening - the latter is a lot more deeply ingrained.

Consider newly-minted adults in prosperous environments leaving their parents' home for college for the first time - they have a theoretical knowledge of the various stresses, risks, and concerns that will arise when they live on their own, but until they've actually done it for a while and had various mishaps, it won't be nearly as well-calibrated and digested into their thinking.

Or consider the uptick of music piracy when the internet was just becoming ubiquitous - people knew, abstractly, that it was theft, and could carry consequences, but that didn't enter into most of their considerations.

"Piracy is theft"

Digital piracy is not theft. It's like taking pictures in a museum when it's not allowed. It's taking a picture of public buildings in the wrong country. It's copyright infringement and an issue for the civil court, not the criminal court.

Edit: your other points are good though :)

Regardless of whether piracy is or isn't a theft, it's actually a pretty good example. The fact is, people can and are fined and imprisoned for piracy. And yet this fact is very remote to most people who pirate copyrighted content.

I don't think many people are imprisoned for piracy, if any. I'm not talking about filming in a movie theater, i'm talking downloading content for free.

I should have specified; I did not intend to actually weigh in on whether or not it was analogous to theft of material goods, just that people had a vague notion that it was acquiring something without paying for it and that it was not legally permissible.

>>difference between not doing X because you've been told Y will happen, and not doing X because you have memories of doing X and Y happening

I do not have to have memories about being raped in the jail to know that it is a bad experience. Am I a genius?

Funny fact: I moved out with 14 to a big city for a special school and lived in a dormitory with normal guys. None of us got jailed.

I hear only bad excuses.

According to some scientists [1], death penalty cases have a 4.1% error rate. There's logical arguments that the error rate for life sentences is higher and for non capital felonies it might be a lot higher. Rape-Murders have a 3.3% floor with an estimated 5% ceiling [2].

I wouldn't be shocked if the rate for the none capital convictions was in the neighborhood of 10%...well actually I am shocked about it. There's probably also discrimination and some demographics get a lot more false convictions than others (I'd guess being poor doesn't help for example).

[1]: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7230

[2]: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042842?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

The fact that none of you got jailed is actually more relevant than you seem to think.

If, say, a decent portion of your classmates, including people you were friends with, were regularly accused of crimes and occasionally imprisoned for them, what effect do you think it might have on your perception of how "wrong" the acts they committed were?

When cognitive dissonance arises from trying to reconcile actions that are on the opposite end of the spectrum from how you associate a person, the outcome is generally not that one of those two absolutes remains and the other shifts, but that both perceptions shift.

I'm not claiming that any of this justifies poor decisions, only that it's quite feasible to have a heavily warped view ingrained in you, and that, if a split-second comes where a mildly poor decision could get exponentially worse, it's not generally the case that you spend minutes consciously considering all the options and rehearsing them - you make a decision without consciously reviewing why, and a skewed view can make a hell of a difference then.

If saying that "for doing illegal things you can get jailed and raped therefore do not do illegal things under any circumstances, except protecting yourself and your loved ones" is a warped view, than I take your comment as a compliment.

>>if a split-second comes where a mildly poor decision could get exponentially worse

I think you talk abot non existent things. Can you please explain me how can an average illegal act be a "split-second poor decision"? You can not steal a car or start dealng drugs in a split-second. Except you are Flash.

Many people who understand the consequences end up in jail. Are you saying they deserve the inhuman treatment because they knew about it?

Am I?

Why the snark? Is this discussion funny to you? If you don't want to contribute civilly, please don't.

Since when is putting words I did not said in my mouth "contributing civilly"? If you make a gunfight out of a conversation do not blame me if you get shot.

you: >>Young kids who have done something incredibly stupid
>>They are then immediately put in a situation to fuck or fight.

IMHO this aspect of prison life is common knowledge. I wonder how incredibly stupid one has to be to risk getting jailed. And looking at the numbers that is not a marginal phenomenon.

I read this as

- it is common knowledge that prison includes fighting and rape

- if you know this (and you should), you accept this as part of your punishment for doing something that sends you to prison

You support this interpretation later on:

you: I still do not get how someone can not understand the consequences.

lolc: Many people who understand the consequences end up in jail. Are you saying they deserve the inhuman treatment because they knew about it?

To me, that's pretty close to how lolc is rephrasing your position, and asking if that's indeed what you mean. And they're not stating that is your position, which would be putting words in your mouth. They're asking you to clarify whether or not that's a fair restatement.

I see two assumptions made in the restatement:

- "fuck or fight" is inhuman[e] treatment. I'd say it is. Do you?

- "knowing the consequences, you act" => "you deserve the consequences" This seems like an acceptable assumption as well. What do you think?

Do you think this is a reasonable interpretation of what you said? That's how I read it, and squares with how I read lolc as interpreting what you said as well, while asking to confirm if that's what you mean. That's not putting words in your mouth.

This may not be what you mean. You're being asked to clarify. If it's not, I'd expect you explain where the interpretation is wrong, not just imply that it is ("Am I?") and leave it up to them to try again. And please clarify if I've mischaracterized what you've said as well.

Given that you find it useful to compare this conversation to a gunfight, it's likely wrong for me to expect you to be civil about it. I'm responding to clarify how I read the situation, and will leave it at that.

[Minor edits for clarity.]

>> To me, that's pretty close to how lolc is rephrasing your position

>> "you deserve the consequences" [...] Do you think this is a reasonable interpretation of what you said? That's how I read it, and squares with how I read lolc as interpreting what you said as well

I did not said that anyone deserves an inhumant treatment like this. If you rephrase what I said and doing so it gets "pretty close to" or "reasonable interpreted as" something really stupid, that is not my fault. Both of us are better off if you just stop rephrasing my sentences, don't you think?

Get tipsy with friends. Get into a disagreement with them. Jokularly push one of them to make a point. They trip, fall backwards, head hits pavement. Dead or coma.

Hello manslaughter.

It's very easy to do something stupid without realizing it in the moment.

What percentage of people are incarcerated for something like that?

I don't know. I imagine it depends a lot on factors mostly to do with how much a jury/judge likes you.

Generally we treat killing others, even if you didn't mean to, very harshly. It's very easy to get incarcerated for a crash caused while driving tipsy, for instance, especially if somebody dies.

I imagine manslaughter is one of those things where you only have to fuck up once, completely by accident, to ruin your life (and a few others' obviously) quite terribly.

I never hat anybody, neider sober nor tipsy, except of self defense. This is not the definition of not being stupid but of being normal. If you want to be treated like a human being behave yourself like one.

Please tell me the situation you described putted 2 M people into jail! You must have the highest "accidental death" rate of the universe.

It was an example of something innocent leading to grave consequences. Obviously it doesn't happen to 2 million people.

Friends often shove and shoulder-punch each other without it being self-defence. It's usually not even considered "hitting". But accidents do happen. Especially when substances affect people's sense of balance and floors are uneven.

Here's a much more common way to go to prison for something silly: You have a baggie of weed in your car. You roll through a stop sign. Get pulled over. Cop smells the weed. You go to jail. Oh, you just bought plenty so you can share with friends (they all pitched in). Bam, charged with intent to sell. Serious jail time.

It's really easy to go to prison for stupid stuff.[1]

In fact, on average everyone commits 3 felonies per day. --> http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487044715045744389...

[1] Hell, as a teenager I got arrested for shoplifting something like 20 euro worth of candy. No jail, but talk about stupid reasons to get arrested.

Human beings are notoriously bad at estimating risk.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/perceived_ris...

People know that they can die a horribly painful death from using a car, but they still drive. They do so not by making an informed risk/benefit analysis, they do by simply assuming that it won't happen to them. Same for crime and getting caught. We are not able to rationally deal with big risks, we only know the extremes of letting them completely dominate our decisions (e.g. people who will never use a bike in traffic, or only with a lucky charm on their head) or pretending that they don't exist.

Knowing of consequences does not imply being aware of them.

Innocent people are commonly put in jail. Then you have judges who get kickbacks by putting people in jail. And yes, poorer people in particular, end up much often in the wrong place/wrong time.

We should start by getting rid of private, for profit prisons. Next we should actually make them safe places. I originally thought the headline was a joke because prisoners (gangs to be precise) already run prisons.

> how incredibly stupid one has to be

because literally everyone was raised in the same privileged home you were ? Nobody was abused or neglected and not taught right from wrong ? everyone is literally just like you ?

No, not everybody is like me. I take responsibility for my actions and do not blame others, my parents or the society. And yes, the whole generation of my parents and also mine was abused by the russians. We had the highest suicide and alcoholism rates of the world. And I got over it.

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