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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I find the US prison system absolutely horrifying in all respects. As satisfying as it may be for victims to feel the person that did something to them is 'gone' they will eventually be let out, and when they do I want them to be ready to integrate with society.

Recidivism rates in the US show it is objectively not working, with state prisons leaving inmates to re-offend 76% of the time. [1] In Norway, much derided for their lavish prisons, it's 20%. [2]

Throwing people away and treating them like animals is an abject failure, compounded by the mandatory fill rates in private prison contracts. [3] It's time to revisit the whole system, top down, and make it less about punishment and more about making sure it doesn't happen again. And it should be done with data.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-zoukis/report-docu...

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-...

[3] https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/31/report-find...

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I am Norwegian, so I thought I'd add a few points, which I think greatly influence the difference.

1) Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge. In Norway it is a 3 year college education, where you learn about mental illness, why people become criminals, how to rehabilitate people etc. The prison guard job in Norway, is by American standards more like a social worker. Guards spend a lot of time doing activities with inmates. They are not simply there hit misbehaving inmates.

2) The criminal justice system is largely under professional control. We don't elect sheriffs, judges etc like in the US. So there is less opportunity for populist "though on crime" politics to win through. Policies are mainly driven by professionals in the field.

3) Norwegian culture isn't as hung up on good and evil as American culture. I guess that is partly because religion has little importance in Norway. Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. The world "evil" almost never surface in any discussion. It isn't just the justice system, but Norwegians themselves aren't very interested in revenge. E.g. I've never heard a single survivor from the Utøya massacre express a desire for revenge.

I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality.

> The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil.

What an interesting point.

incredibly common theme in many pre-Christian myth systems. the good/evil dualism in Christianity is the real aberration, despite its prominence.

one of the more credible hypotheses I've encountered about this phenomenon is that early Christianity adopted many of the positions of Gnostic Manichaeism [0] in order to absorb rival cults.

0- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism

Norbert Wiener (of cybernetics fame) made a distinction between Manichaean devils and Augustinian devils-- essentially between evil as a force opposed to good vs evil as merely a lack of goodness.

Essentially the distinction is between mischief and error.

Edit: see e.g. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/najafi2.php

Christianity is far from alone in its belief in good and evil. The idea that there's a battle between good and evil goes back to Zoroastrianism, which predates Christianity by hundreds of years. The other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, also have conceptions of good and evil, though they might not be viewed as being involved in a battle.

If you are at all interested in this topic, I cannot recommend this lecture series highly enough. I found it absolutely mind-blowing and a stunning revelation. Just give the first episode a shot.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-O...

Don't sit with your first revelation, though. Jordan Peterson is a great lecturer but he leverages that to promote a particular worldview of his own. There's a reason for the Buddhist saying 'if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.'

Please note that this is a metaphor for continually reworking your own ideas, not an exhortation to kill anyone who displays Buddha nature.

Fully aware of that and I fully agree. I am not putting him up as some sort of cult figure - he definitely has an agenda, and pushes it masterfully.

That said it is probably the best argued agenda I have ever heard. As a full-blown atheist I had never heard such a good defence - explanation, really - of religion, and it's no exaggeration to say the fellow has radically changed my thinking on the matter.

I think it is OK to not agree with someone one hundred percent but still urge any intelligent person to listen to what they have to say, if it has merit.

He's also a transphobic asshole who thinks the existence of "transgender ideology" is a crime against humanity comparable to Stalinism.

I don't know about the "crime against humanity" but it's pretty hard to disagree with him on that topic. Most opponents fall back to crude insults, as you have. I suspect that a majority of reasonable people would agree that new genders do not spring into existence simply because you imagine them, and that it is completely obvious that all humans are either male or female. Labelling this simple acknowledgement of reality "transphobia" is very dishonest.

>and that it is completely obvious that all humans are either male or female

Hello? Intersex people? This is patently false under even the simplest analysis.

If you are interested in a series of fantasy novels with a similar order/chaos mythology, I recommend the Saga of Recluce.

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

Makes me wonder how much we miss out on in the rest of the world because of the language barrier.

From a modern viewpoint, I fail to comprehend how Order/Chaos is not merely a special case of Good/Evil.

Biological life/intelligence, and the Earth it inhabits, is Order, an unusual low-entropy arrangement of matter; whereas the ultimate Chaos is the cosmological Heat Death.

A funny consequence is that Order vs. Chaos is almost entirely dependent on the scale you consider.

Perhaps it's the psychological effect that's salient--the honor/shame spectrum, rather than the good-explanation/bad-explanation spectrum.

While there is some overlap of Good/Evil and Order/Chaos it's pretty easy to show how "Order" can be "Evil".

Totalitarian regimes have that name because they demand total control and react strongly to any disorder. They are generally regarded as towards the "Evil" end of the Good/Evil spectrum.

In reality the OP is right - they are different things.

One does not have to assume that order is good, and chaos is evil.

Within a universe of absolute order, there can be no change, and no life can emerge. Within a universe of absolute chaos, there can be no structure, and no life can emerge. Neither is good, or evil, since those are human cultural constructs, and not fundamental physical laws or universal constants. Even life itself isn't necessarily good or evil, any more than a star or dust cloud is good or evil, it's just one of the many possible states that matter and energy can take as the universe inevitably exhausts itself.

Order and chaos are just abstractions. They moment you get down to root cause analysis- There is generally some definition of good and evil you have to settle to understand why things like order and chaos exist.

>Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil.

What? Why do people say stuff like this? The Norse myths were from a millennium ago, no one has believed in them for almost a thousand years. Maybe Norway is largely atheistic now but for the majority of its recent history it was a Lutheran nation and before that the nation had a Catholic tradition dating back to 900 A.D.

Even today Christianity is Norway`s biggest religion, enjoys regular church attendance of a quarter of its population, and has half of the population declaring they believe in a Christian, not Norse, conception of God.

Clearly Christianity has some influence on Norwegian thinking.

Not many Norwegians are believers in Norse myth, I think parent was referring to the fact that today's Norway is just less religious in general.

Yesterday's Norway is less relevant.

It's also bad understanding of Christian theology.

> Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil.

No, it's mostly focused on the contrast between being a follower of Christ or not. To that end, the character of God and Jesus are elaborated on at length. So subjects like "good" and "evil" come up as a part of that. Yes, Christ is described as being intrinsically good, but the end goal isn't to:

* do good things

* be a good person

* avoid evil things

* punish bad people

...that's not to say all those things are irrelevant, but they're certainly based on trusting Christ and His teachings. To be fair, the usual cast of Flanders clones (televangelists, Westboro Baptist) get this all really wrong, but just because they're wrong doesn't mean we should get it wrong, too.

It really doesn't matter what the "theology" is, or what academically people may understand it to be, it's how it manifests.

The argument was that the manifestation follows from the theology. I'm arguing that if the premises are true (culture follows from theology; culture and laws reflect that), then the originating philosophy (centered around good vs. evil) is something other than Christian theology.

True enough, while St. Augustine abandoned Manichaeism for Christianity, we've been busy reinventing it ever since.

> To be fair, the usual cast of Flanders clones (televangelists, Westboro Baptist) get this all really wrong, but just because they're wrong doesn't mean we should get it wrong, too.

If I had written your comment, this would have been the first line, not the last.

Obviously the GP was boiling down a more complex moral model into something simple enough for a social media comment. Whether (s)he knew enough about Christianity to know the difference between these two dichotomies is still unknown.

It's not trying to be a description of the theology, but of the practice.

In that respect it's quite accurate.

Being a good person and doing god things is absolutely important in Christianity. Jesus talked a lot about the need to do good: to give to the poor, feed the hungry, welcome the outcast and the stranger, etc.

During the course of history, numerous people have changed this into punishing bad people (for to varying degrees and widely varying definitions of "bad"), and that is I think one of the big ways where some branches of Christianity have gone astray. We are supposed to forgive, not to punish as harshly as possible and then some.

The Norse myths were from a millennium ago, no one has believed in them for almost a thousand years.

I can't quite see why Norse mythology wouldn't have had a direct impact on Norwegian culture that continues today. I don't know much about Norway but here in the UK we have laws that were passed 500 years ago that are still in use and that were strongly influenced by the church when they were enacted. You don't have to believe in something directly for it to influence your culture.

That's the common law system at work there. The Norwegian system by contrast is a civil law system.

> Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that.

It's interesting you say that. My only exposure to sagas was from reading Beowulf in school, which is a canonical example for the theme of "good vs. evil".

First of all, Beowulf - at least the written records we have of the poem - is decidedly Christian. It was supposedly written by a literate monk several centuries after Norway had been christianised.

It also isn't necessarily about good vs evil but indeed about order vs. chaos. Grendel's misdeed is not that he attacks and slaughters good and righteous men ,it is that while doing so he violates the sacred law of hospitality by attacking the king's great hall. In doing so Grendel flouts the 'natural' order and therefore can be seen as an embodiment of chaos rather than pure evil.

> Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge

First off, this varies by state. Second, a few weeks might be an exaggeration for most states. In California at least the academy is 12 weeks long and that comes after application screening, written & physical exams, background/psych checks, and interviews.

Far from a 3 year college degree though huh.

> I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality.

Or maybe it really sprung out of the Christian influence that came after the Viking culture, with teachings like: "Love your enemies" [Matthew 5:44 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A44&...]?

If that was true, we would expect the American Bible Belt to have some of the cushiest prisons in the developed world.

yet the norwegian prison system also has its problems. especially with regards to its 'hotel prisons' being antisocial and isolating compared to other kinds of prisons. this article is on solitary confinement. norwegians have something to learn here as well.

You're absolutely right. Looking for a solution here, the central problem with the US prison system seems to be the incentive structure.

Private prisons are paid based on how many inmates they have. Prisons are therefore incentivized to keep people as long as possible, and ensure that if a convict is ever released, that person commits another crime quickly and winds up back in prison.

Instead, what if the state paid prisons a one-time fee for accepting convicts (the amount would vary depending on the type of crime committed), and then penalized the prisons heavily for any recidivism after release?

Prisons would be incentivized to rehabilitate and free the prisoner as quickly as possible (since every additional day in prison costs them money) while minimizing the chance of that prisoner committing another crime when released. You'd see prisons offer education opportunities, vocational training, valuable job programs, relocation to other areas, ongoing therapy, and living conditions befitting a human being to reduce recidivism.

Fewer than 10% of prisoners are held in private prisons, so how are private prisons the 'central problem' with the US prison system?

You misunderstood my point. Both government-run and privately owned prisons are paid (or funded) based on how many inmates they have in custody.

I'm suggesting that private prisons could be solution to the problem if we change their incentive structure.

So you are proposing paying private prisons up front and then punishing them potentially ten to twenty years later. That doesn't sound workable politically nor does it sound like a good incentive structure.

I don't have the statistics here but it would be interesting to see what percentage of prisoners were serving 5+ years, maybe the ratio of prisoners serving shorter sentences would make this kind of solution more plausible.

Got it, your point seemed only mention private prisons so I was confused.

Yes, it would be interesting to see if market forces could be used to improve outcomes. It does seem that we politically prefer punishment to rehabilitation though, and the incentives are aligned accordingly...

I've always thought an easy solution would be to pay private prisons based on recidivism. e.g. The government gives twenty percent of all future tax income from the inmate to the prison company - until the inmate is incarcerated again.

The government gains an incentive not to jail people unnecessarily (loss of revenue). Prisons get an incentive to rehabilitate and educate.

Overall, I agree with you. Mass incarceration is largely about money.

Also, prisoners count towards the population of where the prison is located at census time. It allows mostly white, rural locations to increase their minority representation at census time, that's the kind of thing that's taken into consideration when government assistance is being handed out.

Additionally, this can help when apportioning congressional districts.

Hundreds or thousands of residents who can't vote are a great reward for congresspersons who can bring new prisons to their districts.

Are you familiar with the phrase 'thin end of the wedge'? The private prisons are to many people an unacceptable moral ill that treats incarceration as a source of profit, and whose continued existence provides cover for other institutional abuses.

Private prisons are a minuscule percentage of all incarcerated Americans.

18% of federal inmates. 75% of immigration inmates. Miniscule?

Federal prisoners are about 10% of all inmates. So yes, I would call 1.8% of federal inmates in private prisons miniscule.

> Instead, what if the state paid prisons a one-time fee for accepting convicts

I might to too cynical but I'm guessing that more prisoners would mysteriously die.

I don't think that is cynical at all. Such an incentive structure + the general public's lack of interest in the human rights of prisoners, would guarantee that outcome.

Then could we make a small change to the incentive structure such that this becomes a non-issue?

For instance, could the government pay out the fee over 10 or 20 years (perhaps paying it in full on release), and stop future payments if the prisoner dies while in custody?

You'll just end up playing whack-a-mole, only the moles getting whacked will be real people being treated unjustly. This is why I'm a deontologist. The pursuit of maximal utility is a fine thing, but people tend to vastly overestimate their powers of foresight and where that overestimation causes human suffering it's better avoided altogether. We already have comparative examples of systems that seem to work vastly better than our without being so radically different as to be beyond analysis, so I don't see why you're so desperate to preserve the possibility of a profit opportunity here.

why not let prisoners rate the prison, and withhold payments for poor reviews?

In many countries voters would vote in governments that promised to achieve 1 star prison ratings from prisoners.

While prisoners would be unlikely to rate their prison highly, perhaps reformed prisoners are slightly more likely to do so?

I also disagree with their idea.

I think we should just change the purpose of prison to one and only one thing: Reform. Leave justice out of it, and the rest will follow

I think you're being a little naive here. If you could wave a magic wand and make it so private prisons got a one-time fee for accepting convicts then I don't think they would invest more in preventing recidivism.

What would likely happen is that private prisons would spend even less on each inmate, doing the accounting to determine how much they have to cut from what they already spend to account for the amount of their fees if a prisoner reoffends. The already ridiculous cost of the prison phone system would skyrocket. Fees assessed to visitors would be increased or added. The cost of items in the commissary would go up. The private prisons would bump fees associated with being released from prison. Private prisons would also take on more forced labor contracts to cover the difference and pay the inmates even less for their time.

Further, you'll see a spike in prosecutions for in-prison crimes, causing a convict to be convicted on a new charge and more money being sent to the private prison to cover the sentencing on the new charge. So you're going to make the indefinite detention problem even worse - before, inmates got to leave. Now they may never get to leave.

In short, this is likely only a viable solution if you can force private prison owners to act morally.

Private prisons need to be regulated so heavily that they'll effectively cease to be private, or not exist at all IMO.

You seem to have missed the part when he writes about high penalization of recidivism.

Penalties would only be levied after an inmate actually got out of prison, and there is ample time for the prison to use the inmate for slave labor to more than offset whatever penalties you set.

Also expect for the corrections officers unions and police and sheriffs groups to start lobbying for mandatory life sentences because if there's one way to prevent recidivism it's to never actually release the prisoner.

Offending in prison to cause an additional sentence is arguably re-offending and can be treated as such.

I suspect you want to reward prisons for success rather than penalise for failure to re-habilitate. However frankly I also suspect there are actual experts in the field who should design the structure. The issue is that there is no political incentive in the States to do so.

Private prisons have serious issues, but public ones have issues as well; often they are underfunded, which allowed the private company world to get involved to offer a service for cheaper costs.

I would suggest the solution is properly around the question of the willingness of the US taxpayer to adequately fund the government services.

And public prisons still have tons of private interests involved in their running (contractors, etc.). So no prison is truly public.

US taxpayer here. I'm happy to fund prisoner rehabilitation, but I can't fund that without also funding an out of control military and a war on drugs. So, as a whole, I try to avoid taxes wherever I legally can.

Well, I can confidently say that your activities are executing a tragedy of the commons. Sorry.

Private prisons and the incentive for profit is a concern. What is more of a concern, and what leads to much more incarceration is the ambition of prosecutors to rack up convictions, and the embarrassment that is caused if someone discovers a conviction overturned. That's inventive to keep people in prison and don't bother asking if maybe you've got the wrong guy (that's the defense's problem). Also, in many municipalities, the public defenders are very lightly funded, to the degree where one defender works 100 cases at at time. It is in no way a fair trial in any resemblance to what the constitution envisioned.

That's the corruption, that's the stink in the system.

the challenge is that literally nobody is incentivized to make changes to this system.

the situation is really bad for politicians. A politican voting to reform a clearly broken prison system faces tons of risks to their career.

Even one wrong vote for improving the prison system will get you labeled as "soft on crime," a dangerous liability for Democrats and nearly a death sentence for Republicans.

Every change you make will inevitably produce a litany of stories about criminal X who was given "too little" punishment. The media will pick these highly emotional narratives up and the blame will be laid at your feet.

You can gain great political capital by making prisions more harsh (who doesn't like seeing a guilty man get punished?) but expose yourself to a ton of downside risk for trying to go the other way.

Nothing about this situation changes until societal perspectives change or politicians don't have to face downside risk for trying reform.

The politicians know that the media can take one criminal act and magnify it to the most important incident of the decade.

The most prominent example of this was the Polly Klaas murder in California in the early 90s. This one criminal act was magnified to the level of a major terrorist attack and kicked off three strikes and a major prison building and imprisonment boom that lasted two decades. It also led to a wave of "stranger danger" paranoia that ended the era when kids could go outside all by themselves and maybe even ride their bikes around the neighborhood.

Frankly, I blame the media for the whole prison thing. They don't look at statistics and instead blow everything totally out of proportion and make everybody paranoid. Usually there is a paper of record like the NYT or LA times that throws the pitch with some hugely blown out of proportion story and then it gets repeated by the rest of the media and then the politicians hit the pitched story with some ridiculously overreaching and draconian laws. For example there was a recent "Bitcoin kills children" story about kids dying from drugs they bought on the Internet with Bitcoin and voila there's an anti-bitcoin bill pulled out of the desk drawer and put on the agenda by the end of the week.

The media are responding to their own incentives, you might as well pass the blame again onto the readers/watchers. It's a structural problem, no one group is to blame. I'd say one major factor is the US seems to be mostly devoid of a shame/duty based culture. People need to be driven to act within generalizable moral codes across the whole society. The idea that if the market supports it and it is within the law then it is beyond criticism is in my opinion not sustainable.

The newspaper business has been losing a lot of money lately. They are just turning into toys for people who want to set the national agenda. Their value as propaganda and PR outlets vastly outweighs their value as subscription collecting or advertising venues. Advertisers will overpay for ads to get a good PR story anyway and with the enormous Web of interlocking ownership these days it's pretty easy to hide the connections.

Yeah but this isn't a new problem, I remember the whole Polly Klaas thing well, and if you look into history it's abundantly clear that this sort of sensationalism has long been a fixture of media. I was visiting the Museum of Oakland not too long ago and was struck by a letter written in the 19th century from a new arrival observing that 'the canard [a french term for a bullshit news article] is a fixture in American journalism...'

I'm not ascribing all responsibility to the media, though - it's one factor among many. I somewhat agree with the poster above about the US not having the same sort of shame/duty culture that prevails in the EU, and suggest that to some extent this derives from the coincidence of different philosophical and social cultural traditions in the US.

> A politican voting to reform a clearly broken prison system faces tons of risks to their career.

Can you say more about this? It sounds like you think that's normal in your community, to think that way. That's not how I hear the people around me talking about prison. I think most of us would support a candidate who talked about rehabilitation.

I worry that by trotting out this old meme as if it were an permanent fixture of our political system that you are actually strengthening it.

In my experience, the divide is similar to the War on Drugs. Most young people understand that it was a poor concept, initiated by racists, from the start. Many old people are still tethered to the propaganda of the past, so there are politicians that can just continue that line of thinking. As long as the current generation is in power (Boomers), we won't see much change for the better.

Obv not all Boomers are this way - to be clear, just way too many.

The only thing you gotta look at to confirm this is how elected judges rule when election time comes up. They get a lot tougher on crime.

Part of the problem is that even thought a lot of people generally agree that we are too harsh on criminals, they don't stick to that viewpoint when the rubber meets the road during situations they care about.

People who are liberal on sentencing get angry if short sentences are handed down in rape or financial crime cases.

Your last paragraph made me smile at the idea of having prisons filled with bankers instead of drug dealers. Do your point is certainly valid.

absolute/relative

There's an appropriate amount of punishment. It's too much for a joint and too little for the people who broke the economy.

This is not a contradiction or indication of hypocrisy.

If it's still about punishment, it's still coming from the wrong place, imo. Furthermore, everyone will have different opinions on which crimes are more heinous than others.

Most of the people I know aren't swayed by the "tough on crime" narrative. Certainly not me. But then again, I live in a techno-liberal-intellectual bubble. I believe this "punish those who do wrong" mentality (which is understandable on the face of it) is definitely built into the conservative wing of American politics.

Public opinion is swayed at a very superficial level. Emotional stories about convicts going free or people getting killed are always going to have a more substantial impact. Especially compared to mundane stores on successful prison reform -- 10% shorter prison sentences? 5% higher rehab rate? This guy who murdered people has a stable construction job now? Ignore the ideology, I think the optics of prison reform give us this unequal incentive structure.

What is wrong with being "soft on crime"?

being though on crime clearly does not work

The problem is that the general population is very removed from the prison system and inmates in general so they don't see the long-term effects. So when someone is 'locked up' for a long time they view that as redemption for their or someone else's suffering. So being 'soft on crime' would be viewed as taking away those victims vindication. (I'm not saying I agree with this, but I have just noticed through general conversation that people want criminals locked up for a long time. It is very short sighted and vengeful if you ask me.)

The problem isn't so much that the general population is so far removed, it's that the victims are so closely connected.

Why's an outsider gonna stand up for a rapist or a murderer when they've got their own problems and the victims will never forget nor will they stand down. You can't get upset at the victims for that, it's very natural.

I have empathy for some prisoners and a family member was according to him unfairly convicted (he ended up dying in prison), but I've also had family members murdered and sexually assaulted. As far as I'm concerned the people who did those things took innocence and ruined lives it's hard to feel too sorry for those actors when their lives are ruined, too.

That might be a little vindictive, but you can never give victims back their peace nor their normal lives and normal people don't commit heinous crimes.

Yes, they do.

A moment of too much passion, a stupid firstandlast time drug trip, money troubles and "normal people"-addictions- yes, perfectly normal people commit perfectly normal crimes. All the time. Some of them even have company.

Normal crime is just not reported, because nobody wants to hear about how the neighbourhood they moved too- is not so nice after all.

"tough on crime" is an election campaign strategy more than anything else.

This is why we have the Fourth Estate. Politicians won't vote to reform our prison system until that system's flaws and abuses and inefficiencies are made into a big public issue. We need more reporters and more columnists publishing more stories about this topic.

This is a civil rights issue, and it should be written about as such.

The fourth estate is owned by a few rich men.

Willie Horton was used in this way to have an incredible negative impact on the Dukakis campaign in 1998. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton

Oklahoma just passed a ballet referendum to scale back punishments for drug related and petty crimes. The state legislature has basically overruled a clear majority of the vote at the behest of the public unions who are deeply invested in maintaining the jobs of their members and damn the cost in ruined lives.

The solution is to push through the correct solution by playing the exact same game. Politicians interested in reform are for the most part far too quiet. Every time there is a violent crime committed by an ex-convict they need to use that politically to absolutely slam the criminal justice system until something is done. "Tough on the crime system" is just as good as "Tough on crime" if you're loud and obnoxious enough whenever a camera is put in your face.

> Recidivism rates in the US show it is objectively not working, with state prisons leaving inmates to re-offend 76% of the time.

The problem is that you're assuming that low recidivism rates are an actual goal of the US system as it stands. Look at actions, outcomes and actual effects of policies, not at the claims written by PR departments.

It's like voter ID laws in many states - the claim is that they're to prevent fraudulent voting, but they're very poor at addressing the kinds of voting fraud that actually occur. Further, if there's such a big problem with in person voting fraud does that mean that elections staff and prosecutors are completely incompetent since they're apparently unable to find and prosecute enough cases to be even a statistical ripple?

Add that to the long list of things that needed an overhaul in the US. Education, healthcare, minimum wage, the war on drugs, gun control. All things with that contribute to the enormous prison population in the US that are in dire need of an overhaul. But it will probably never happen because of widespread corruption and anti-intellectualism.

You should add hubris to your list of 'why it won't happen'. America is very proud and very rarely in my life have I seen a proud person admit to wrong, much less change their behavior.

US slavery was ended. Women got the vote. Segregation was ended. Gay marriage arrived. Eventually and painfully in many cases, but things do change.

I got some faith too. While the US has a very strong conservative base who supports backwards policies. Liberals are quite strong as well. I think the main issue is that liberalism in the US until Bernie Sanders, seemed to care little about economic equality, which lays at the heart of almost all other social problems.

They cared once upon a time. The watershed may have been with the civil rights movement. At that time, liberalism may have shifted focus from the economically disadvantaged to the structurally disadvantaged - disadvantaged by race, and then by gender, then by sexual orientation, then by not being sexually binary.

In doing so, though, those who were economically disadvantaged felt that the liberals - at least as represented by the Democrats - didn't care about them and their problems. This was a major factor in Trump's election.

> ...those who were economically disadvantaged felt that the liberals - at least as represented by the Democrats - didn't care about them and their problems

And if we're honest, they have good points. We shouldn't stop at "I'm sorry you feel that way" if we want to take care of people better.

>Recidivism rates in the US show it is objectively not working, with state prisons leaving inmates to re-offend 76% of the time. [1] In Norway, much derided for their lavish prisons, it's 20%. [2]

You can spin this and say that American criminals need to be locked up because they just cause more crime in general.

Some see that 76% figure and conclude prison makes them worse.

Others see it and think, well these are the bad apples, keep them locked up.

I'll give you this is a correlation-causation situation. That said, I see little reason to believe that intrinsic to being American is that 1% of the population should be in prison and of them 75% will have another go at it, when both these numbers dwarf the rest of the developed world.

America has some features that most developed counties don't, like a racial underclass and larger percentage of lower income families. There is also just something wrong with cultures in North & South America. We have really high murder rates in general.

America is sort of unique in that we have very strong rule of law but also have relatively high crime.

Also those recidivism rates you cited are apples and oranges. The US rate includes rearrest and the Norway is re-imprisonment.

This https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/table/p... attempt at apples to apples suggets the US is 36% compared to Norway's 20%. That's a big difference but other western nations are higher than evne ours. Canada, France, Netherlands, Germany, etc. all have similar recidivism rates.

The Scandinavian countries just have very little trouble makers it seems.

Well you see, all the Scandinavian troublemakers got onto boats and went a conquering. Eventually they started settling instead of conquering. So all the pansies stayed at home and bred more pansies and that's why modern Scandinavian countries have few troublemakers. As an example, the area around Manchester England was settled by the Scandinavian troublemakers and many of their descendants immigrated to the Americas (those who didn't became Football hooligans). Therefore the American troublemakers are actually a result of the Scandinavians shipping off all of their troublemakers. So it's all the Scandinavians fault.

> mandatory fill rates in private prison contracts

One day people will look back at this and go "they did WHAT?"

The age of savagery.

That day has come and gone. What will we do about it?

Something's rotten when you have for-profit prisons: https://www.aclu.org/banking-bondage-private-prisons-and-mas....

It isn't the for profit prisons doing things like rolling back Oklahoma's ballet referendum to ease up on crime or keeping California from even considering it. It's public unions lobbying to keep their jobs.

Punishment of criminals does nothing to help the victims. The justice system should be about:

1. restitution (where possible)

2. removal of criminals from society so they cannot continue to harm others

3. re-integration of such people back into society when they are no longer a threat

As a counter to your opening point - it certainly helped me. It made me feel safer and I had a sense of justice. Not saying it's the same for everyone or that it's necessarily a good thing but the punishment of the person committing the act helped me to move on.

>> As satisfying as it may be for victims

There are other reasons to reform the prison system too, but we as a people really need to work on this one. I know a few people who have been wronged in a big way. One of them (perhaps the most wronged - lost a child to a repeat DUI offender) publicly forgave the offender and didn't even show up to see him be sentenced. They're the only ones that seem to have been able to move on in any meaningful way. The others talk about nothing but what happened to them and were seriously depressed for a long time, even when they were long past the direct consequences of what happened. We all need to be willing to let things go a little more - for everyone's good.

> It's time to revisit the whole system, top down, and make it less about punishment and more about making sure it doesn't happen again. And it should be done with data.

I think the current system is actually less about punishment and more about oppression of certain social classes, namely non-whites and lower-class whites. It is a means of controlling social undesirables.

Prisons (especially private ones) should be getting a huge incentive for prisoners that do not come back like 3-5 years delayed grant or something.

This might have resolved a lot of issues with the current system.

Where is this North Korea? This isn't about crime. He was a political prisoner.

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