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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

As a company that will make money from people committing crime, what is your incentive to reduce crime or otherwise prevent repeat offenders?

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We really appreciate this question because we believe that the incentives in the criminal justice system are often wrong. Our goal is to get people out of jail and keep them out. Our program is set up for the purpose of getting them out of custody. We will also evaluate ourselves based on how we do at reducing recidivism.

You appreciate the question so much that you avoid the answer?

What is your business incentive to reduce crime rate? How reduction of the crime rate is making your business more profitable?

What is a dating websites incentive to couple people up? They have seemingly reverse incentives too. The better a dating website is the less potential users it might eventually have.

I don't think that anyone here is trying to say that this is the only industry in existence that has reverse incentives (in that their success could limit their future).

I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare online dating to an industry which, quite literally, destroys peoples lives and often unfairly targets disadvantaged groups.

One possible business incentive is that if Promise's outcomes actually cause an increase in crime, governments will be far less likely to hire them.

That's clearly not the way it's working out for private prisons.

You didn't really address the incentive, just simply stated your goals. I think clearly there is a financial incentive for a for-profit company to keep people in the system.

If you have ideological views that people > profit (which I suspect you do, and I completely agree with), then that can be an incentive. But I think it is important to recognize that people and the systems they build can be corrupted over time. What happens when people that don't have the same ideology take control? The profit incentive won't change, but the ideological one may.

I wasn't the one that asked the question initially, but it's possible that's what he/she was getting at.

We have introduced recidivism as part of our performance metrics. Currently, contractors are paid per day, per person. We believe it creates the wrong incentive. The best way to correct is to incentivize companies to have people not reenter the system.

How are you paid?

Doesn't your board have the obligation to maximize shareholder value? Is it possible that would conflict with the metrics you mention as the driving force of your company? Is it possible that a Public Benefit Corporation might be a more suitable entity to serve this sort of need?

This doesn't answer the question. Getting people out of jail is already rewarded as part of your business model. But you would also benefit by more people being tried and found guilty. I wonder if there is an answer. What about something like establishing a fund that is...funded based on recidivism? If recidivism is high, you cannot distribute profits, they must be channeled back into R&D to improve your services.

Perhaps repeat criminals on Promise are not eligible to use it in the future. All a repeat criminal in this case does is lower the governments trust in the product.

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