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Comment by coleifer | Hacker News Reader

Prison is a deterrent, certainly, but it also exists to keep violent folks away from the rest of society so they can't do more harm.

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This study indicates that incarceration, at least as it is currently implemented, is emphatically not a deterrent for repeat violent offenders.

As for the public safety element, yes, but these people mostly weren’t locked up for life. What this shows, at least, in my opinion, is that much more intensive psychological and therapeutic interventions are needed, because if anything, incarceration as it currently exists would seem to exacerbate the problem.

Or, more simply, you could incarcerate repeat offenders for longer periods of time.

What is the concrete benefit of simplicity in this context, and how do you quantify whatever that benefit is?

Becaue the cost is both clear and intensive: Depriving a human being of liberty for additional years or decades. This should be done only when absolutely neccessary, should it not? We disapprove of imprisonable offenses intensely, but these are still human beings, with rights. It seems to me a humane system does not inflict thousands of cumulative additional incarceration years merely to keep the implementation of justice “simple.”

Simple in the sense that if you can identify this 1%, keeping them locked up or otherwise away from the rest of society longer will very effectively reduce crime. There is no way that therapy is going to be as effective. We are talking about repeated violent offenders here, really dangerous individuals. Of course they are still people but their happiness is secondary to keeping them from repeatedly inflicting harm on innocents.

>keeping them locked up or otherwise away from the rest of society longer will very effectively reduce crime.

The problem with this is it only looks at the problem from a maintenance perspective rather than a preventative root cause analysis. Like adressing the relationship between cyclical poverty and cyclical incarceration

I don't think people liked how Three Strikes laws have turned out.

I guess you could lock up ~1% of the population indefinitely, but by the time you've gotten to that point something else has clearly gone wrong, since most affluent countries are able to achieve relatively low violent crime rates without such widespread use of incarceration. If we were talking about 0.01% hard-core violent criminals then sure, just incarcerate them, but 3m+ people?

As far as I'm able to find, only two large countries in history have ever locked up more than even 0.5% of their population for extended periods of time: the USSR for approximately 15 years during the height of the Stalinist period (late 1930s to early 1950s), and the USA for about 30 years, from the late 1980s to present. So I wouldn't consider that a "normal" approach to managing crime.

I don't think comparisons to "other affluent countries" are apt; the socioeconomic and cultural makeup of the United States is so starkly different from pretty much any other country (even our immediate neighbors to the north and south).

In particular, the institution of slavery and perhaps even more so, the culture of segregation, condescension, and disdain that followed from The Reconstruction onwards resulted in such drastic dehumanization, disenfranchisement, and demoralization of a huge percentage of the population that has not been seen anywhere else in the world.

No solution can be drafted that does not address this ugly stain on our history (continuing to the present) and still ever hope to work, and whitewashing history books and tiptoeing around this elephant in the room in the name of political correctness does us all a disservice.

It's been seen plenty of places in the world. Probably most, by area anyway. There are still places where a significant portion of the population are not only disdained and disenfranchised, but actively killed without much consequence: the Rohingya for a current example, or the lowest castes in India

Absolutely. But few would make comparisons or draw parallels to them, whereas they'll be quick to do so for the Nordic nations or similar.

That would work but incarceration is an unscalable solution. Some CA stats:

  - $71k/person/year
  - 130,000 inmates
  - 135% of capacity 
  - highest rate of incarceration in the world

We're maxed out - and all this doesn't even solve the root issues of mental illness and poverty. We need alternative ideas with better ROI.

Sure. But what are these alternatives? 1% of the population are psychopaths and no one knows how to make them not be so. What else can we do but put them away?

Either why aren't 1% of people psychopaths in other developed nations or alternatively why are these 1% behaving in other nations.

Maybe we should figure out why they are "psychopaths", rather than locking them up and throwing away the key?

Hahah, apparently this is a controversial suggestion. Never realized HN is so right-wing.

The easy solution is prison but its also crazy expensive both in terms of raw cost and societal cost (broken up families, addiction, developing gang ties in jail, recidivism, opportunity cost of taking a working age person out of the job pool).

IMO there is no politically easy solution or we would have already done it. Society has to change how it views criminals and invest resources in the things that increase the likelihood of crime. For example, rich psychopaths commit a lot less violent crime than poor psychopaths. Social services, addiction counseling, education, etc help. But its extremely hard to convince people more resources should go to helping criminals vs punishing them.

Well, Gulag was profitable AFAIK

Studies show that things like three strike laws do reduce crime rates. But, for example in California, it costs $70k per year to jail them. Intensive outpatient therapy costs half as much. If we moved to two strikes and then mandatory high expensive therapy it could be more humans and cost effective.

We've taken that approach for quite a while in the US and the results are bad, to put it mildly.

"Our study suggests that 3 months of imprisonment in an impoverished environment may lead to reduced self-control, measured as increased risk taking and reduced attentional performance. This is a significant and societally relevant finding, as released prisoners may be less capable of living a lawful life than they were prior to their imprisonment, and may be more prone to impulsive risk-taking behavior. In other words, the impoverished environment may contribute to an enhanced risk of reoffending."

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0006...

You're missing the other half of the picture. How many were deterred because of prison? Would it have been 2 or 5 or 10% were it not for the deterrents? You can't say.

You're assuming people use logical, rational thought which has ample amounts of evidence against it. Jails used to be horrific, yet crime rates were higher. The presence of a jail sentence or even a death sentence as a deterrent is widely discredited. The only uses for prisons are to prevent future crimes by removing the ability to perform crimes and intensive rehabilitation. Most former convicts do not want to reoffend but the American social and legal system of punishing people for their entire lives for offenses committed once prevents effective reintegration into society.

All the science points to preventing initial conditions for conviction and significant improvements needed post release.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...

https://nij.gov/five-things/Pages/deterrence.aspx

https://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welc...

Most criminal cases don't get to a conviction. Ask a police officer. Save for very few countries (e.g. Japan)

The problem is that they become worse in prison. I’d be for a policy where once you went to jail you were never let out into the general population — you’d have to go live on an island with ex-prisoners.

Sort of like transportation?

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