Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

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Rehabilitation IS societally useful. However, it does require that the prime focus is rehabilitation rather than punishment.

In my native Norway, rehabilitation has been the focus to such an extent that foreign media come to do stories on the 'holiday camps' prison time is served in.

It somehow works, though. Recidivism is very low. Here's a few examples on how inmates do their time

-Education is encouraged - whether it is to a learn a trade or getting a degree (presumably lectures are mostly followed via teleconference).

-Counselling is available to help you deal with whatever issues landed you in prison in the first place.

-As you near the end of your sentence, restrictions are gradually lifted to ease the transition back into society - lower-security units, daytime leave to report to work, halfway houses where inmates can live a normal-ish life in the daytime but need to observe a curfew in evenings/nights.

-After you get out, you have regular one on ones with the social services, helping you find a place to stay, work, family counselling if required etc.

-Companies are offered part of your pay refunded by the state for a limited time if they hire you.

All in all, I guess it can be argued that our pendulum has swung too far towards rehabilitation - but if the point of prison is to reduce the long-term risk and cost of crime, we're doing reasonably well.

I feel the difference is that Norway is far more homogeneous and the intent to rehabilitate is sincere. On the other hand I feel like a lot of the criminal justice system in the USA is segregationist under the covers. When you look at it this way then it's working as desired.

Why do you think the intention to rehabilitate in the US isn’t sincere?

Frontline did a report on people on parole. It’s a punishing system, even when you’re out of the systems you’re usually one drink away from being thrown back in

It’s a very good example of something where all the individual players are trying, but so much of how the system works makes results be harsh and cruel

Much of the system (including punishing probation) is designed to give racists a lot of discretion to oppress ethnic groups they dislike. Intention of rank-and-file may be to rehabilitate, but that doesn't matter if the intention of the lawmakers and higher-ups is to keep certain ethnic groups in jail (while maintaining a pretense of impartiality.)

What racists?

Nixon, the drug war, and lots of little laws that aim to harass and incarcerate blacks were enacted, and still exist, purely out of racism. There are audio recordings that prove the intention. Many more recent policies do the same as well, but less overtly.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

-former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman

https://www-m.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-ri...

There are reasons to be skeptical of this quote.

As user GatorD42 pointed out when this was brought up before:

>...Baum claims Ehrlichman said that to him in 1994 while he was researching for a book he published in 1996 about the drug war. He didn't include the quote in that book, but instead published it in 2012 and again in 2016, after Ehrlichman had died (in 1999).

If the quote was said by Ehrlichman, it doesn't actually describe the drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs", the actual substance of his policies seem to be different than what people think it was:

>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).

http://www.samefacts.com/2011/06/drug-policy/who-started-the...

I feel like you just answered your own question. If it was sincere, it wouldn't be so easy to have the system reset you back to step 1 in the 'rehabilitation'.

> Why do you think the intention to rehabilitate in the US isn’t sincere?

High recidivism (shows it's at least a failure), focus on punishment (mandatory minimums, etc...) for things like drug possession, cruel bail system, "tough on crime" judges, legalized prison slavery, heavy use of solitary confinement, outright criminal levels of cruelty, normalized prison rape, stigmatization of felons, etc...

They had prisoners fight california wildfires for slave wages. They justified it as it was voluntary and they were learning a skill.

Felons can't become firefighters in california.

What does homogeneous have to do with prison rehabilitation? I'm not attacking you, genuinely curious.

The implication is reduction of bad intent due to in-group/out-group discrimination (i.e. racism, classism, other -isms)

If I think "that guy/girl in prison could be my neighbour, cousin, god help me even my kid" I will care about them and want them to be rehabilitated. They're a relatable person to me.

If I think "it's one of those people from the other side of the tracks" it won't feel like a person with whom I could have a close connection. I might not care as much.

Not saying it's a good thing, though.

> I might not care as much

I'd say you would care too much! (abstract/general 'you', not @CalRobert). The problem any sort of reform faces is antipathy, not apathy.

The unstated argument to all the homogeneity arguments I've come across (intended or not) is: "We are too bigoted for that to work here, we'd never allow the $OUTGROUP to have it that good", with a side-dish of "they'd be bigoted too, if they weren't homogeneous". When laid bare, it's an appeal to ignorance.

> When laid bare, it's an appeal to ignorance.

Or you could say that it's an appeal to numerous studies (psychological and sociological), most of human history, and prudence...

I can't speak for all those who've made homogeneity arguments, but I've made them before in the context of Norway and will say this:

Often, you'll hear people say something like, "Norway did X and it works, so we should do X in the U.S." These are typically fairly naive claims. Regardless of the normative dimension of the claim (whether X is worth doing in the U.S. in the first place), there is a non-trivial amount of complexity that is swept under the rug. For instance, NYC has twice the population of Norway. The U.S. really is significantly more demographically diverse than Norway (or, if this claim isn't good, then we can just say they are equally diverse, but at the scale of the U.S. this diversity increases complexity a non-trivial amount). The U.S. has a more fragmented legal system. Etc. Etc. Etc.

If a Martian were asked which nation would be easier to implement new policies in, maintain those policies, and have them bring about the desired end, which do you think they'd choose? I wager they would immediately choose Norway.

Western democracies love to talk about Norway, but in my native Singapore, which has a comparable population to Norway, crime rate is way lower than Norway. Yet we have some of the most draconian laws ever which run antithetical to the liberal ideals in Norway. Fact is, a country with a small population is much easier to control than a country the size of US or China.

We also have a much more diverse population than Norway, so if anything, US should be looking towards us for inspiration.

Interesting. In the past, I had never considered Singapore in this regard.

> What does homogeneous have to do with prison rehabilitation?

It's all white people.

Sorry to be so glib, but I don't think I've ever seen "homogenous" used by someone who wasn't engaged in at least borderline racist dog whistling. The entire idea of it is based on the notion that people cannot successfully mix together, and therefore should not try.

The replies I've seen to your question all seem to have a pretty negative framing. I'm going to try to give you an answer that isn't so negative.

Instead of using race as the example, let's use language.

You have three people. Two have spoken English their entire lives. The third grew up speaking French and learned English later.

They need to do something really hard to get right, something easy to mess up. Mistakes come at a high cost.

When the two English speakers work together, things work. They go smoothly. They can manage to overcome challenges and meet goals.

When they try to work with the French speaker, you see a lot more problems. It's frustrating. He does things they didn't expect. It is easy to feel like he's intentionally screwing things up.

Homogeneous demographic groups have an easier time all being on the same page. They spend less time and effort trying to bridge differences in experience, attitude, etc.

You get ugly terms like Mansplaining and Whitesplaining because "privileged" people -- people for whom life has tended to work -- often feel that their life works because they were taught the right information and if people who are having a hard time just had the same info, their life would also work. And then the person getting the info gets mad because they feel like they are being treated like they are stupid and not trying rather than like their life actually works differently because they are different and the world treats them differently.

maybe not in purpose, but thin vailed racism here, saying non white people don't want to really be readapted

So if rehabilitation is so effective maybe we can 'rehabilitate' people before they end up in prison in the first place :p. How do people end up deprived of education and counselling in the first place, and could that be remedied.

In many cases, the idea of rehabilitating people either before or after prison is nearly impossible. There are almost half a million people in the American prison system for drug offenses. If someone is released from prison for cannabis possession, they can likely drive a few hours to a place where it's perfectly legal (at the state level), and even encouraged by the culture. How could you possibly rehabilitate someone from something with those kinds of mixed messages?

This is a strange reply. What makes you think that that is what the poster to whom you reply is concerned about?

People don't commit violent crimes for weed. The crime is having weed. And things that are not weed are not being legalized state-by-state.

The subject is analyzing prison's role in rehabilitation. If we consider prison a failure as a rehabilitation device, then maybe we should focus on rehabilitation before prison. This is a reasonable suggestion. However, if the reason they're in prison is for drug possession, which makes up a huge portion of the prison population, I'm suggesting that any kind of rehabilitation is nearly impossible. With cannabis legalization finished, many states actually are looking to legalize other substances, and even if they don't, there's strong social pressure in American culture to try other illegal substances, leading to a huge prison population.

So I'm saying that it in many cases, the problem isn't so much that prison is a failure as a rehabilitation center and we should focus on rehabilitation elsewhere, it's that people are in prison for things they simply don't want to be rehabilitated for and have strong influences to continue doing. The culture is inherently resistant to being rehabilitated from things that it doesn't consider harmful.

To use an example that might be more neutral, what if copyright enforcement was more severe and we had half a million people in prison for watching unlicensed YouTube videos? We might analyze the failure of the prison system in rehabilitating people from watching the wrong streams and focus more on education so that people could identify properly licened content before they watched it. But unless the people actually considered this behavior harmful, it would be an impossible task, and we would see ever increasing numbers of people in prison for watching the wrong videos.

I mean, sure, all of that is true.

But we also have very high recidivism rates for stuff like "armed robbery", independent of social-issue crimes like marijuana possession. And society generally has an Opinion about armed robbery. (It's bad!)

They don't need rehabilitation, they need to have not been put in prison for a fucking plant in the first place.

Go to prison for weed. Get out. Realize how fucked things are now that you're a felon on parole.

It occurs to me that when your program results in a situation where recidivism is "very low", it might become much easier to distinguish those who fell upon bad circumstances from the ones with more deep-rooted mental issues-- like treatment resistant compulsive behavior, or perhaps even more importantly, psychopathic traits.

In my view, these are the real dynamos of the 'criminal world', where predatory traits are baked into their behavior patterns at a lower level. There are compelling opportunities for more research here (https://modlab.yale.edu/news/can-psychopaths-be-cured) and isolating variables is a good way to help move things forward.

There is an inherent racism to a lot of US sentencing and prison policies, as well as an assumption that those who commit crimes are irrevocably criminal. It's a very dated view of why people become criminals.

>Rehabilitation IS societally useful.

This is very true. As an example, recidivism in Sweden is around 40%[0], compared to around 68%[1] in the states.

[0] - https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/...

[1] - https://www.bjs.gov/content/reentry/recidivism.cfm

> Recidivism is very low.

Anders Breivik got 21 years for killing 77 people. Are you worried about when he gets out in 2033?

Hard cases make bad law.

Focusing on what (to you, as an outsider) seems to be outlandish is honoring the breach rather than the observance.

And unlike, say, the United States--there's only been one of him. This country has folks trying for high scores on a very regular basis. (Remember Las Vegas? That was 18 months ago. 59 deaths.)

Perhaps it is worth looking at trends and impacts rather than media splashes.

He very likely won't ever get out. He is allowed to have his case reviewed after 21 years (as it's how life in prison works in some European countries such as Norway, Sweden and Germany, not sure about others) but realistically he will never be out even if he's reformed as it will be a danger for his own life if he is back into the general population.

UK as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Her_Majesty%27s_pleasure

Not at all, he'll be way beyond the age window where men commit violent crimes. Old age mellows.

He'll also be under close supervision.

He'll be in his early 50s. I know plenty of men at that age that could crush me regardless of what statistics say otherwise.

He won't.

Norwegian law opens for in essence indefinite terms for inmates deemed a lasting danger to society.

ABB was sentenced under this statute and may well be locked up for the rest of his days; he may, however, at regular intervals apply to a board for release. He must then convince this board that he is no longer a threat to society and good luck with that.

I remember there being some amount of objection to his freedom to communicate while in prison (sending letters espousing his ideology, and such). Although this evidence of his continued ideology will probably help ensure he isn't released.

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