A natural experiment study of the effects of imprisonment on violence

It’s important to remember that American incarceration is a lagging trend, not a leading trend. Incarceration rates were flat for a long time before trending up in the 1970s. That followed about a decade behind a long period of increase in crime that started in the 1960s and lasted through the 1990s.

Consider when children make a mistake or do something silly - often they are chastised or punished rather than educated and forgiven. Because of this we learn to lie about, hide, or pretend to misremember mistakes in a bid to mitigate the punishment we know we're about to receive. Later in life we're remembered by the things we've done in the past, and if you've done something bad enough (or even just silly or ignorant) it'll hang over you like a shadow for the rest of your life. Even if you personally feel like you've grown and moved on, there is always the risk that someone will dig up your past and throw it at you. In the end we live in fear of our past and feel controlled by it and that makes it harder to look into the future to become the person we might like to be. Those with sufficiently unfortunate pasts are increasingly rejected by society so they have no alternative but to continue adding to their unfortunate past because the communities that contributed to their past are the only ones that accept them.

Personally accepting that the mistakes you make don't define you as a person can go a long way to freeing yourself from some of the burden, but culturally it still lingers. Ultimately though there is a huge difference between shoplifting when you were a dumb kid, and becoming a serial killer. The threshold for redemption clearly varies with the severity of the crime, however it seems to me that in many cases we simply reject any chance of redemption outright and this probably hurts us more in the long run than it needs to.

By some accounts, prison is an opportunity to network and gain mentors and knowledge towards furthering a career as a criminal.

There's no real intention of transformation or revenge, just a form of quarantine.

If considered as a criminal networking opportunity, it's likely to transform people into those who would seek revenge, and it would have the opposite effect intended by quarantine.

EDIT: I'm reminded of a folk dance group I was once a part of. Usually, we were obscure, and the one or two new people who might show up would become immersed in what we did, and would quickly learn to dance. Once, there was a local newspaper article about us, and 16 newcomers showed up all at once. It was very difficult that evening, and I think a lot of the newcomers didn't learn much.

If we want incarceration to make people less criminal, not more criminal, then the prisoners should not be spending their time with criminals. The prisoners should be spending their time with mentors, teachers, and counselors.

Consider criminalization of loitering and its effects on poor people, criminalization of "gang association" (even when in practice it can mean "cousin of a gang member" or "babysat the child of a gang member's sister"), and the soft-touch handling of Oxycontin addicts while crack cocaine users get life in prison.

I don't know if that conclusion is actually true or not. It seems as though it would be as long as criminality didn't increase after incarceration to an extent that more than canceled the reduction during incarceration, but they claim that doesn't happen. Well, okay then, longer sentences reduce crime by, as they say, "incapacitating" the criminal during his incarceration.

They seem to be burying that lede.

These studies are always done on people who were undeterred by the possibility of incarceration in the first place.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger selection bias. It’d be like testing the efficacy of a drug, but only on patients for whom it didn’t work the first time.