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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

At some level, you have to understand the fact that people who go to prison are generally very bad, violent people, and putting them together in the same place is bound to cause problems. Some things about prison conditions you can definitely control and those should be fixed. For example, the treatment of pregnant prisoners in US prisons is often horrible. (You hear stories of women going into labor and being forced to delivery in their cell.) But other things you can’t fully control because they emerge from interactions between the prisoners.

Look at schools. We live in a school district that’s extremely proactive about addressing bullying. Yet, our friend’s kid recently had water poured over her head on the bus. If you can’t banish physical violence in schools, among normal children, is there any prospect of doing the same in prisons?

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> Look at schools. We live in a school district that’s extremely proactive about addressing bullying. Yet, our friend’s kid recently had water poured over her head on the bus. If you can’t banish physical violence in schools, among normal children, is there any prospect of doing the same in prisons?

Pouring water on someone's head !== rape (obviously).

Saying that we can't do anything about extreme, widespread violence in the prison system because we haven't yet managed to completely eradicate the mildest forms of physical bullying in schools is a ridiculous argument.

If the problem really is the interaction between prisoners, then we should simply stop those specific interactions taking place (or change the circumstances, so that they don't result in violence).

I'd like to live in a society where we prioritise (funding for) that over pranks in schools.

Obviously the outcome is worse. And obviously prisoners are capable of much more extreme violence than school children. But all that is a function of the prisoners and their choices and actions, not the government. The kind of violence that happens in prisons isn’t easier to detect and prevent. A stabbing can happen in the blink of an eye.

I don’t see why you think funding is an issue. Our prisons are extremely well funded.

> But all that is a function of the prisoners and their choices and actions, not the government.

Seeing as the prisoners are in government custody, I don't see how the government can be ruled out as a factor of the aforementioned function.

> The kind of violence that happens in prisons isn’t easier to detect and prevent.

It is easier, though. A prison is a (comparatively tiny) sealed environment with strictly controlled borders, above-average monitoring (CCTV), and an extremely limited population.

The fact that, given these constraints, stabbings can still happen in the blink of an eye, or that rape can still happen, is (I believe) the entire point.

I suspect most people would favor improving school outcomes over prison inmate outcomes, when taxation and funding decisions are put to them. I’m not saying your point is not a virtuous one, but it’s likely an uphill battle to make that the majority opinion.

If you forced me to pick exactly one (not the actual choice society faces), I probably lean towards schools as well.

> At some level, you have to understand the fact that people who go to prison are generally very bad, violent people, ...

No. The vast majority are in for drug offenses and are not, generally, considered violent or bad.

Edit: I was wrong. Federal prison have way more drug offenders than violent offenders. State has more violent offenders than drug offenders. The way they're classified too is that the worst offense is the one on record. So if you are on drugs and hit someone, stats will tick up one more violent offense but not a drug offense.

No they're not. According this this[1] article drug crimes account for only 16% of inmates in state prisons. Violent crimes account for 54% of inmates.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-better-approach-to-violent-cr...

The difference is coming from the fact that convictions for drug crimes are shorter than conviction for violent crimes, which could explain why there's more drug-related convictions but less drug-related inmates

State prisons also house six times as many people as the federal prison system does, so the argument that the "vast majority are in for drug offenses" is essentially the opposite of the truth.

Only 20% of the total incarcerated population is in for a “drug offense.” Many of those are also very bad people. Almost all federal drug offenders are traffickers. Even if you don’t think that selling harmful substances to people is bad, there is the fact that many of these drug traffickers are involved in violent conduct. But the conviction often won’t reflect that conduct. Most violent and property crimes, unless performed on federal property, are state criminal law issues. Drug trafficking is usually the hook for federal law enforcement jurisdiction. The federal government doesn’t have jurisdiction to enforce state criminal laws. So someone may be incarcerated for a federal drug offense, even though there are state law violent and property crimes that could have been charged. (And states have little incentive to prosecute the state-law crimes for someone who is going to federal prison anyway.)

In order to get a more accurate picture, you have to not only look at the offense for which the prisoners are incarcerated, but also at prior criminal histories. (And even that will exclude situations where a first time drug offender is charged with a federal drug offense but there are also state violent and property offenses that could have been charged.)

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-numbers-dont-lie-its-...

> For example, in a forthcoming Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) study of the complete adult and juvenile criminal histories of prisoners from Milwaukee, WPRI analyst George Mitchell and I find that 91 percent of these urban criminals had one or more convictions for a violent crime. First-time drug offenders were less than 2 percent of the population. The imprisoned drug offenders had multiple arrests, bouts on probation, and adult and juvenile crimes, including auto theft, burglary, robbery, retail theft, domestic violence, sexual assault, drunk driving, jumping bail and, of course, drug dealing too.

> For example, in 1990, Harvard economist Anne Morrison Piehl and I studied a large sample of the Wisconsin prison population. We found that in the year before they were imprisoned, these prisoners committed a median of 12 crimes, excluding all drug crimes. In 1993 we studied a large sample of New Jersey prisoners and found exactly the same thing—they committed a median dozen crimes a year, again excluding all drug crimes. (Empirical studies by analysts at the National Bureau of Economic Research and elsewhere indicate that the average number of non-drug crimes that prisoners commit when free may be higher than twelve a year.)

For example, the treatment of pregnant prisoners in US prisons is often horrible.

As far as I know it's not just pregnant woman, but depending on the state there's a whole laundry list of additional abuse and cruelty doled out.

Abusive nutrition[1] and virtual slavery[2] come to mind.

While I can agree that a prison stay should not reflect guest services at the Ritz such abuses, and, as good example, people like Joe Arpaio[3] really shouldn't be part of the package.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio

edit : format of links

> Look at schools. We live in a school district that’s extremely proactive about addressing bullying. Yet, our friend’s kid recently had water poured over her head on the bus.

You can justifiably argue that schools are "prison light" - in particular in countries that have compulsory school attendance.

And then you look countries outside of the US and you wonder, what the hell happened?

Yes. For so many problems, I hear "see, it's impossible because of this or that", while ignoring that it's being done elsewhere just fine.

America is very different from other countries. For example, at the dawn of the 20th century, the US had a murder rate 10x higher than the UK. That was before prohibition, before the drug war, before significant gun control in either country. The best we ever did was in the 1950s, when the UK was shattered by WWII, and the US was enjoying an unprecedented economic boom. Even then our murder rate was 5x higher than the UK’s. (And note, that was after prohibition ended and before the drug war began.) That statistic says something really fundamental about Americans and the nature of American society.

People assume you can just look over the pond at policies used in Western Europe and get the same results here. But over and over it’s proven that’s not true. For example, we spend way more on education per student than the UK, but get much worse results. Conversely, some of the states in the US that have the most guns and loosest gun laws, like Idaho, are also the only ones to even come close to having murder rates as low as Western Europe.

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