Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like this is a for-profit business. I'm very leery of the trend towards private prisons. Was a non-profit considered here?

Are participants required to have a smartphone to install the app to be a part of the release program?

View on HN

We spent most of our professional lives in non profits and the last 6 years in for profit. We believe the business will better serve people with the structure for many reasons, such as hiring, not having to deal with foundations or individual donors, etc. We believe good people can run and create good companies.

First it is great you are tackling a real social issue.

If it works it looks like it could have a positive impact. How ever I have a few concerns/questions

1. How will the incentives be aligned? More people standing trial = larger potential market.

2. This is a false dichotomy. “Not having to deal with foundations”

There are other models that do not require you to take donor funding. Take a look at the model by Muhammad Yunus[0] or writing by Porter on shared value [1]. For e.g one could generate cash flow for expenses without having investors looking for a return.

3. While a profit motive can be useful to encourage innovation and competitiveness, this can have negative consequences. For e.g in this case what is good for business is not necessarily good for society.(more suspects)

4. Would you consider this a fundamental solution?

5. What outcome are you after?

6. Is there a way to prevent people even Being suspected of a crime? Preventing them committing a crime?

7. Using leverage points from Donella Meadows [2] Where does this fall?

8. Have you looked at systems theory? Very useful for really complex social challenges like the one you are trying to tackle acumen has a free course. [3].

8. Is this solution a short term one with a more long term(fundamental) plan for the future?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Bank

[1] https://hbr.org/2011/01/the-big-idea-creating-shared-value

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points

[3] https://www.plusacumen.org/courses/systems-practice

That was the first thing that I thought as well. This is another program like private prisons.

I have a hard time seeing how you can align the incentives of a business like this with greater societal interests.

That said, I'm hoping they can. I too am skeptical that a for-profit model can work here, but as long as the incentives are appropriately aligned (they profit when incarceration rates drop and recidivism rates decline), there's a possibility it can work.

It'll almost certainly be a fee for service model.

(municipalities simply won't write contracts with big rewards tied to incarceration or recidivism rates)

There is such a thing as for profit for good. Perhaps they believe they can be both better and cheaper than prisons at the same time. That allows them to provide a compelling pitch to governments and convince them to direct funds to Promise instead of prisons. The government wins because it's cheaper, their users win because they are not incarcerated, and they win because they have cash flow. These types of businesses are not impossible to create.

> There is such a thing as for profit for good.

Their association with Y Combinator doesn't help with that impression. How many other venture funded start ups exist to provide a societal benefit while making only a modest return? Isn't the goal a big exit?

They might not be venture funded yet, but they aren't at Y Combinator for the coffee, right? I know this sounds super cynical, so please tell me why I'm wrong. Why is this a good thing?

> How many other venture funded start ups exist to provide a societal benefit while making only a modest return?

YC has a non-profits program. https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/

I don't see any indication that Promise is going non-profit, though.

Who says anything about a modest return? How much does the U.S. spend on prisons? How much does the world spend on prisons? Say they operate at a 30% discount, how much revenue is that? Off the top of my head, a lot.

>These types of businesses are not impossible to create.

This is amazingly uninformed. Let’s stop pretending private businesses were born yesterday and just consult history. Privatization of human rights is despicable and this is not a lesson that needs to be learned again. Do you know why we never had private prisons before? They incentivize corruption of the most vulnerable fabric of our society. No excuse.

I agree that for-profit prisons are not good for society. But does this one (granted, massive) mistake mean that we can no longer try to innovate in this space? Does it mean that the only model is publicly funded rehabilitation? That's obviously not worked either.

Exactly. I think there's a lot of things to consider around it all, for-profit prisons have a LOT of problems. But if we found that microwaving food for prisoners saved a lot of time cooking and thus also the amount of time we had to pay for people to cook for prisons that would be a good thing...at least it would be if that money gets funneled back to the point that a taxpayer is paying less. As it is I assume it just goes into the pocket of whoever runs the for-profit prison.

> does this one (granted, massive) mistake mean that we can no longer try to innovate in this space?

No, but we should learn from those mistakes, right?

When a company makes money from prisoners and more prisoners mean more money, then the incentives are a problem.

> Do you know why we never had private prisons before?

You mean, before 1852?

A profit motive can lead to perverse and unforeseen incentives, even despite the best intentions of the founders, who someday will not be running the company.

The private prison industry routinely lobbies for higher fines & longer sentences because it is to their benefit to have more people go to prison. Promise appears to have a similar incentive.

This aims to be much closer: http://benefitcorp.net/faq. Companies with the ability to operate for-profit, but without the obligation for maximizing shareholder profit.

Would it be more ethical to only profit based on recidivism?

Eg, Promise is only paid if the prisoner doesn't go back to prison?

Not necessarily. That gives them a financial incentive to send people their algorithms deem "iffy" to jail instead of accepting them into the program.

The read I have is that they are aiming downstream of the detention decision, providing services related to probation and parole.

I wouldn't be real surprised if their initial targets are places that have large, established probation systems, offering the tech as an aid to government employed probation officers. Easier than taking on legal responsibility for the probationers.

For anyone wondering, this is definitely sarcasm.

Well, it wouldn't be recidivism, but rather if the accused committed another crime prior to their trial date. Or, if they missed their trial date.

It's easy to keep getting confused around if we're dealing with accused criminals or convicted felons, as both are in jail. Sounds like Promise is focusing on the accused.

Yes this would be a very interesting and ethical incentive model to explore.

We love this! Right now the incentives are wrong. Contractors are paid per person, per day, which creates the wrong incentives.

Consider a business model based on per day an individual did not recidivate, pro-rated by a prediction model for initial likelihood of recidivism, and severity of crime.

This would perhaps ascribe a number for level of difficulty, and an initial estimate for how hard the case is.

Keep in mind that a convicted offender on the streets may suffer from a potential for revenge and retaliation, and thus is possibly safer in jail, however horrible jail may be. This would augment a recidivism predictor further, if you cannot isolate them from their victims, should victims be bitter about the perception of your service lacking punitive action.

Want to sell bonds that mature when the group of monitored individuals is NOT incarcerated? I’m asking about the payment logistics... it’s a boring but important($$$) part.

To me this looks like a for-profit parole system. It's essentially the same thing as various state and county level governments' parole systems are already intended to do, but implemented by a private contractor. Much the same way that private prisons accomplish the same function as state-owned prisons.

If you were recruiting new staff positions for this startup I don't see how the job functions for the persons interacting with the "clients" are much different from a parole officer. Just with more "web 2.0" technology, IoT tech for ankle tracking bracelets, etc.

We agree on general concern about for profit prisons. Diana and I met working at a non profit. She founded the Ella Baker Center and I worked in the labor movement. However, we created a company with those values because we believed this put us in the best position to scale the solutions we believed in.

What is your general concern about for-profit prisons?

> However, we created a company with those values because we believed this put us in the best position to scale the solutions we believed in.

You could just have created a non-profit and reinvest all money - way easier to scale. Values mean shit to the shareholders who invested in you :) They care about returns. I can only image what kind of monsters are born when blindly hunting for profit. Actually, I don't have to imagine, I just need to look at the current for-profit rehabilitation industry. Not saying you're the same, you're probably not but you will at some point yield decision power to the for-profit interest of the company. And let's assume this picks up and becomes immensely successful. What's stopping the company from hiring lobbyists to support legislation which keeps people 'in the system'?

Addressing some concerns here (which I don't think will go away as you become more successful), consider registering as a Public Benefit Corporation or at least announcing that that is in your game plan.

Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation

For background:

A Public Benefit Corporation makes it explicit legally for corporations to act morally, ethically and responsibly in regard to society, the environment, the natural world and the world at large.

The Certificate of Incorporation must list the company's altruistic goals and overall mission statement. However, in every other manner, the structure of a Public Benefit Corporation can mirror the structure of any type of Corporation.

This is a pretty weak line of reasoning IMHO. There are plenty of non-profit organizations which scale very large and address large societal problems. For instance, most hospitals.

Why couldn't the same thing be done to solve this problem, especially given your concern for eliminating perverse incentives in the justice system?

Are you offering hospitals as a good or as a bad example?

It sounds to me like this is for profit on purpose. That's not a terrible thing: it's not a prison...

The smartphone question is important. I wonder if an inexpensive device custom built can replace it.

> That's not a terrible thing: it's not a prison...

I think that's splitting a lot of hairs. If working with Promise is a condition of release, it's possible (and likely) that Promise now has the power to send you to prison if they deem you non-compliant with your release terms.

We have pretty clear examples of how for-profit criminal justice can go wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

To date, 90 percent of the population we are working with in our current counties have smart phones.

>It sounds like this is a for-profit business. I'm very leery of the trend towards private prisons.

(I completely agree, and sare the same concerns - Especially given the precedent of US incarceration and private entity involvement, which many would consider slavery. However...)

On a long term scale, I believe that Capitalism will become more trustworthy and aligned with demand than government.

Or at the very least, Capitalism will 'pave the road', and hand off to a socialist system upon maturity and consensus.

While the free market is (in its pure form) money driven (ignoring externalities), we appear to be in a new age of enlightenment. I believe that this is bringing about a new form of capitalism which provides a platform for ethics.

In essence, this boils down to "Government is too slow to legislate and bring about change, and doesn't accurately reflect views. The people are tired of waiting and not being listened to, and will turn to the free market for the supply they want".

If Promise and other companies are able to hold themselves accountable to their customers, governing bodies (eventually), but most importantly the population at large (contributing in a meritocratic way), I can see this a) working very well, b) far more quickly than any other system, and c) innovating and maturing components ready for adoption by government.

The alternative could be waiting 50 years or an entire lifetime to get the change people want. Plan B to me would be governments launching online platforms for democratic (and later, technocratic/meritocratic) referendum systems on a local/small level, then with trust delegating decisions more and more to citizens.

Hard to justify all the above succinctly, so I presume this will not be convincing to all. Would love to hear Promise's opinions on this.

This is a great point -- it should be required to be at least not-for-profit, if not non-profit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com