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Comment by king_panic | Hacker News Reader

VICE's "Raised in the System" feature on juvenile prisioners shows how detrimental sending kids away to juvenile detention centers is. They are 30 times more likely to be sent to prisons as adults, completely unequipped to integrate back into society when they return from detention and the crimes they're sent away for can mostly be explained by adolescent tendencies that most people grow out of.

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Putting a kid in there almost feels like a purposeful reinforcement of the same behavior. It feels like society is saying, "Oh, you're looking for a career in crime? Let's put you in crime college for a few years so that you'll be better prepared for your new life of crime when you get out."

Also, our society is set up so that once you are labeled a criminal, that label sticks with you for the rest of your life. Many aspects of legitimate law-abiding life, particularly employment and housing, get harder once you’ve been convicted of something, even after you’ve served your time. Every application that asks for your criminal history or “have you ever been convicted” cements this class distinction.

If we want fewer repeat offenders, maybe we should stop punishing them after they fulfill their punishment.

A new restaurant just opened in my neighborhood called "All Square". They are staffed entirely by ex-cons, as a way to get them decent jobs. Cool idea, I'd love to see it become more widespread.

On the flip-side, however, many average people don't want former criminals in their society, near their kids, etc.

How do you separate the ones who actually want to get back on track and live a normal life, and the ones that plan on committing more crimes as soon as they get out? If you were to offer your home as a halfway house or something similar, would you feel safe without any sort of guarantee for your safety?

I would start by drawing a distinction between misdemeanors and felonies, since that could be done immediately. Make it so everything less than a felony conviction is not part of a background check. Including arrests, etc. So as long as you've not been convicted of a felony, then you get to say no to all those filter questions on job & housing applications.

Then I would make it a requirement that every state offer a realistic way to have felonies expunged by petition after a certain length of time. Prove you're not a problem, get back to a clean record.

Honestly, there are a lot of people I don't want around me or my kids who haven't been convicted of a crime. It's hardly a perfect filter as it is.

Set a criminal record expiration date depending on crime? Small crimes would expire quickly (but get refreshed/increased if you commit another small crime), more serious crimes would take longer to expire. Some study would be necessary on crime rate vs. time since last detention leave -- the principle being employers shouldn't need to unknowingly bear above a threshold of risk on their property/life (you need to balance doing good to ex-cons and protecting society).

Even better might be spending directly on ex-cons to better integrate them back into society (education, training, etc), instead of spending copious amounts on detention, security, punishment. The resulting decrease in recidivism probability is likely well worth it in most cases.

Also programs for locating at-risk for crime individuals and making sure they have better alternatives, to lower crime rate in first place.

The main problem is I'm quite skeptical that you could consider most criminals as "rational"/well informed of their possibilities and consequences of choices. Therefore increasing punishment probably doesn't change significantly their behavior, only might worsen the outcome once they leave detention in a negatively-reinforcing environment, not to mention consume public resources that could be better employed -- like targeted education clearing the minds of at risk individuals on what are the likely outcomes of criminal life compared to alternatives.

>former criminals in their society, near their kids, etc.

This is mostly a result of words. If someone who committed a crime 2 years ago and someone who committed a crime 42 years ago are both "former criminals", people will avoid both of them.

>How do you separate the ones who actually want to get back on track and live a normal life, and the ones that plan on committing more crimes as soon as they get out?

Time is not perfect, but it is simple, effective and hard to cheat.

Make sure everyone has the skills and means to survive in the world. Don't expect the public to provide halfway houses, but instead provide that as part of your criminal justice system. If someone commits more crimes, punish them for the crimes and perhaps, take a different approach with the rehabilitation portion of their sentence the second time around.

I would also add that the means bit is rather important. If I was getting out and realized how slim my chances of actually getting a job and supporting myself were, I might plan on doing more crimes. There isn't much incentive not to. On the other hand, if I knew I'd be OK just by going through the program, I'm more likely to do that.

Evidently there are many people who agree with you. One of them founded, and now many support an awesome foundation called the Delancey Street Foundation. It is in San Francisco (and now other places). They provide housing and employment, via their own internal businesses, which employ those they are helping to reintegrate into society. Their cafe and restaurant are really great if you're in the neighborhood in San Francisco! Their story of starting with a small house and growing into a block-sized complex is really inspiring!

http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/

I used to live 2 blocks from Delancey. I had them move me into my apartment, move me out, hired them for two office moves, and they were the labor for the SF-end of a significant datacenter move. Great guys, hard workers. The professionalism at the cafe is almost military, I had breakfast there almost every morning for 2 years. It's part of the reason I'm so fat.

And it is also hard to miss that the racial distribution of the prisoners is very skewed. HN likes customer acquisition probability funnels, you can apply a similar technique looking at how poorer and more minority schools have more police presence on campus, causing those juvenile populations to experience harsher consequences for the same crimes as more wealthy schools, leading to more detention sentences for a subgroup, leading to "crime college" and onward until we arrive at one input to the wealth gap between minority families and others.

A lot of these sort of features engage in bad science for the sake of shocking numbers and headlines. For instance is that 30x more likely compared to juveniles who were tried and convicted of the same offense, but avoided detention, or is it compared to the general population? I expect we're almost certainly looking at the latter, but then suddenly it's a completely meaningless statistic meant to mislead rather than inform.

What bothers me about the discussion about this in Europe is that it keeps focusing on how sorrowful and tough this system is ...

... on the people who work in it. Not on the kids. They hardly get mentioned at all.

The kids barely get mentioned at all. And of course, when the system abuses kids (including literally), the employees/bureaucrats are protected/shielded from consequences and the kids ?

Sometimes it seems like half of them commit suicide. This is distressingly common thread in the stories about these people. Now I get it, stories only make it out if they're dramatic enough, but still.

In the name of being "nice" to the kids they are locked up, excluded from schooling, imprisoned (including in solitary confinement for weeks), beaten ("pain impulses" is the psychological term), constantly moved around (so they don't have safety and predictability), and so on.

Everything is done to prevent these kids from, even if they want to, get a normal life going. But you know who this is hard on ? The employees of youth services. That's who it's hard on.

This has been going on for decades like this. The result is that most of the employees never even sees the kids. Everyone's working on figuring out what to do (without seeing the kids, of course), on dividing up the kids, on "influencing" the laws and advising government/parliament, on administrativa like processing request forms, on ... and the kids systematically aren't happy with their performance.

And the saddest part is. These people are being judged against the lowest standards you can possibly imagine. These kids, most of them have been in youth services since 10 years old or less. They have never known differently, and so they accept the abuses of the system. Getting thrown out of their residence into the street every friday evening, because they can't pay for a weekend presence, then incarcerated by the police because they weren't back on monday morning ... Kids comment "that's inconvenient, I cried a bit", and move on in the conversation as if that's the most normal thing to have happen to you. Like this is hitting your head on a door. "Oh well".

But even these kids judging these people by those sorts of extreme low standards ... aren't happy with the system, mostly because of the psychological safety issue: the kids can't predict what the youth services system will do to them in 2 months, and it's just 100% forced on them. So they can't plan, they can't compensate, they can't achieve anything, because it's just ripped away from them by someone they've never seen before 2 months down the line.

Needless to say, the standards youth services uses to judge parents are getting ever stricter, and what they themselves do is ... remniscent of the stories we used to hear from Eastern Germans when I was young.

Reality is that it's pretty damn clear that leaving a kid with alcohol addicted parents is a far superior option to putting the kid, even part time, into youth services.

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