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Comment by JCharante | Hacker News Reader

Portland, ME is a place where within an hour you could walk from the suburbs of the city to downtown to the very end of the peninsola.

I'm really glad he turned his life around, but I'm also terrified at the thought that someone got shot at a place where I've walked countless times at night after school. The Old Port is a very small district, and life just seems ridiculously safe there.

I think ideally this is the path that should be encouraged for inmates. We already spend so much feeding and housing them, what's more to try to educate them some more? Obviously not all inmates fit this description such as the Unibomber, but it seems like job training or preperation for getting degrees seems like a better investment than letting them out of prison without anyelse to do but more crime.

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> I think ideally this is the path that should be encouraged for inmates. We already spend so much feeding and housing them, what's more to try to educate them some more?

Part of the problem, in my opinion (which may be wrong; this is just how I view it), is that our penal system focuses on punitive measures rather than rehabilitative.

It's the same for drug addicts. While rehabilitation might be most costly upfront, the reduced risk of repeat offenses would almost certainly pay for itself, not to mention the related drop in crime stemming from such activities. I recognize it's not perfect, but it's certainly better than throwing otherwise non-violent offenders into jail with no hope and no help.

Our system isn't really punitive or rehabilitative, though we pay lip service to both. (truly punitive would involve torture, and truly rehabilitative is simply impossible)

What we are really doing is called incapacitation. For a period of time, we eliminate the possibility of performing the crime. You can't rob a bank if you can't get to a bank. If a person does a mugging every week, but that person spends 80% of grown-up life in prison, we reduce muggings by 80%.

This seems like it's missing the punitive character of imprisonment.

But even ignoring the suffering inflicted by the prison system, both on the incarcerated person and their family, your example should make us ask -- when does it even make sense to put a person in prison to remove the opportunity to do crime?

How much do you think a person takes per mugging? People don't carry that much cash these days -- suppose one mugging gets you $100 (seems high). Apparently the cost of keeping someone in prison varies by a lot from state to state, but an average value is around $33k, which comes out to around ~$630 per week -- i.e. we're likely paying more to keep your hypothetical criminal in prison than they would cause in crime on the outside.

And when you look at stuff like drug crimes, it gets hard to even figure out what the actual cost to society is for the crime -- but we put a lot of people in prison.

Even if you disregard the suffering inflicted by incarceration, even if innocent people are never convicted, sometimes prison is a bad deal for _everyone_.

Also,

> truly rehabilitative is simply impossible

How did you reach that conclusion? Surely such a broad statement deserves some support.

https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-stat...

People carry out muggings with the threat of harming and killing people. A mugging isn’t a mugging unless the person is willing to back up and sometimes follow through with their threats. The punishment for them is high because sometimes people die.

Muggings without violence or threats are called pickpocketing. Penalties are far less severe. If penalties for mugging/robberies were lowered to pick pocketing levels, Paris would have muggers in every train and far fewer pickpockets.

> If penalties for mugging/robberies were lowered to pick pocketing levels, Paris would have muggers in every train and far fewer pickpockets.

This is a good point!

But I think this effect is less about the "incapacitation" issue discussed above (i.e. we would have muggers on every train because we wouldn't have detained the muggers for long enough), and more about deterrence (i.e. we would have muggers on every train because pickpockets would lose a disincentive from mugging).

There are multiple dimensions to picking how societies respond to crimes:

- denunciation: we publicly send the signal that your behavior was bad

- retribution: we want you to suffer

- rehabilitation: we want to help you become a better citizen

- incapacitation: we want to stop you from committing crime

- deterrence: we want other people to be afraid to commit crimes

- ...

And all of these carry different associated values. My suspicion is that when people attempt to justify the prison system based purely on the incapacitation effect, they're trying to don some faultless, sterile, harmless guise. "I'm not a bad guy for wanting people to be in prison; I just want my neighborhood to be safe!" But I think often a desire for denunciation, or retribution, or even angst about deterrence is at play.

I wasn't trying to justify the prison system based on anything. We use incapacitation, but that doesn't justify anything.

I wasn't trying to don some faultless, sterile, harmless guise. To eliminate your suspicion: my preference is for a combination of retribution, deterrence, and restitution. I'm in no way ashamed to say that I prefer those over incapacitation. Sadly, the USA mainly uses incapacitation, probably because it causes the least outrage.

BTW, you left some items off your list:

- restitution: the criminal must pay back the victim or the society for the harm caused (with money, organs, etc.)

- religion: we must do something (crucifixion, stoning, amputation, etc.) demanded by God

Perhaps it is useful to separate means from ends. Of course, we both agree that we want less crime (as an end), but I might favor rehabilitation as an end - I want prisoners to find their way back to productive society because I care - but not as a means - I might not think rehabilitating inmates reduces crime.

Do you favor retribution as a end, or a means?

When the very natural human desire for retribution is not satisfied by the law, people will obtain retribution outside of the law. This is how you get people torn apart and burned by angry mobs. Civilization thus requires that the law act to satisfy that desire for retribution.

Because the desire for retribution is nearly universal, we can tell that it is in our DNA. It clearly offers a selective advantage. It works.

Retribution is the desire, but notice how it very effectively creates both deterrence (don't want to be torn apart by a mob) and incapacitation (can't commit crime after being torn apart by a mob). This is why it has the selective advantage.

So, unless you want brutal violence as a system of justice, don't oppose making the criminals suffer. People need to see criminals punished, and they will take matters into their own hands as needed to ensure it happens.

> If penalties for mugging/robberies were lowered to pick pocketing levels, Paris would have muggers in every train and far fewer pickpockets.

Do you really believe that? I honestly think there's a fundamental difference in character between willingness to commit non-violent crime, and willingness to commit violent crime. One's just selfish, while the other is likely to be negative-sum in utility in a way that makes most people write it off as a fundamentally unsound strategy unless they're true sociopaths.

There are countries where law enforcement is weak to virtually nonexistent. They’re not desirable living locations by any means.

Deterrence is one of the main pillars of law enforcement. There are plenty of people who reach the end of their rope and act out of desperation. Deterrence is something that limits that. There is a point where that effect plateaus and people will take the risk regardless of penalty, but lowering penalties to the point of being worthless does let crime breed.

Just look at countries where corruption laws are ignored or unwritten. They’re corrupt. Countries that don’t protect women have more crimes against women. It’s how it goes.

A lot of claims without any evidence... care to provide any?

Otherwise you just sound like a person who likes to lock up people as much as possible with hope that everything will be magically allright then. Well, as history shows, crime reduction unfortunately doesn't work like that.

The harm of a mugging is far in excess of the money taken.

Start with PTSD. The victim might never feel safe again. The victim might have many years of waking up in a panic from a recurring nightmare.

Muggings cause violence. The mugger threatens it. The victim doesn't know if payment will appease the mugger. Both the mugger and the victim may initiate actual violence. They and the bystanders can end up maimed or dead.

Muggings cause people to prefer commuting all alone in SUVs. You could say that this has a cost in smog, road repair, road widening, and the price placed on safe commuting. Safety becomes something you have to pay for, and not everybody can afford it.

Walkable neighborhoods can not exist if muggers are free to operate.

You're really fixated on your hypothetical habitual mugger. By appealing to some unquantifiable suffering on the part of the victim, you seem to want readers to accept an implicit claim that any cost to imprison a person, for any duration, under any conditions must be acceptable and justified.

Prisoners also are victims, and suffer trauma. It seems roughly 1/5 male inmates are assaulted by guards, and roughly the same number are assaulted by other prisoners. And then there's sexual assault, which has glaring gaps in reporting.

I think there's an obvious question we should be asking here -- when does incarceration cause more violence than it prevents?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/attacks-and-ass...

To clarify, how would you suggest we factor in the non-monetary harm caused to a mugging victim?

It shouldn't even be physically possible for a prisoner to assault another prisoner. I'd even give the prisoners privacy so that they can't see or hear each other. Oddly, people argue that it is somehow cruel to protect the prisoners from each other. There is no pleasing everybody, and some people can't ever be pleased.

> It shouldn't even be physically possible for a prisoner to assault another prisoner. I'd even give the prisoners privacy so that they can't see or hear each other. Oddly, people argue that it is somehow cruel to protect the prisoners from each other.

Solitary confinement is cruel. It isn't protecting one prisoner from another.

Solitary confinement increases the chance of heart attack, hypertension and stroke by 30% [0]. That's because it is a stressful environment that people are not meant to function in.

[0] https://massivesci.com/notes/cardiovascular-health-compariso...

Dude have you been every been mugged? I almost have been (ran away before they could corner me), and the damage being done is not about the possessions. It is a scary and even traumatic experience when a group of people follows you and tries to surround you at night when you are alone.

It damages your feeling of safety when outside (and I live in a very safe country). It cost me a year to lose my anxiety to go out when darkness sets in, even when just getting groceries. And I sometimes still am paranoid.

> suppose one mugging gets you $100 ... cost of keeping someone in prison ... around ~$630 per week

These aren't useful numbers to compare. Even if the criminal gained zero material value from his crime (say he just enjoys setting cars on fire) the rest of society may be willing to spend a small fortune to stop him from doing so. Even a completely cold-blooded insurance company would be willing to spend money on that.

The relevant value isn't what the criminal gains -- it's what society loses (e.g. the cost of the property damage from burning the car). Yes, the rest of society does seem to want to spend an absurd amount of money keeping people incarcerated. But is that a wise choice? And is it really to prevent harm (crime)? If the goal is crime prevention, aren't there less extravagant ways of achieving the same impact or better?

Have you ever been mugged?

I have. I escaped without losing anything - I can cross "jumped out of a moving cab at gunpoint in Panama City traffic" off my bucket list - but it left an emotional scar. Nothing lifechanging, but there's a little bit of anger that wasn't there before.

I'd love to explore evidence-based alternatives to incarceration. I'd also consider caning - but only if it really hurt.

As the earlier poster said, half of the point of prison is that it keeps people out of the general public and thereby temporarily unable to commit crimes against them. Now, we'd certainly like to reform them in prison, but the idea that we can simply, e.g., lift everyone out of poverty and eliminate crime is unrealistic. Certainly, it might remove some portion of crime, but it's not going to stop, say, the serial killers who are primarily motivated by sexual gratification.

Dahmer, for example, killed because it gave him a sexual high and he didn't like having anal sex performed on him, so his gay boyfriends didn't work out and he sought to create a zombie who would never leave him via a crude lobotomy technique. I suppose there's some argument that even he reformed in prison--he converted to Christianity and later helped those studying serial killers--but I wonder how many people would have been willing to let him move in next door to test the extent of his reformation had he not died in prison?

None of this is to say that prison is good or even desirable. One of the worst things it has done is to create a culture for criminals and criminal gangs and thereby facilitate the growth of criminal organizations.

I don't have any grand solutions to any of this, unfortunately, but neither do I believe some of those offered by others.

> it's what society loses

That's incalculable. You can't reduce the effects of crime to basic capitalist mechanics. Crime doesn't only impact the fair market economy - there's a wealth of second order effects both on people and at a macro level.

You're right that there's other levers we can use to reduce crime that don't involve simply bolting a door shut on them, but it seems an odd way to argue the point to me.

> society does seem to want to spend an absurd amount of money keeping people incarcerated. But is that a wise choice?

If I told my right wing, tough-on-crime uncle that keeping people in prison was expensive, he'd say we should just shoot them as bullets are cheap, or possibly that we should cut 'luxuries' like gym equipment and free education, charge prisoners rent and force them to do hard labour.

I think people who would advocate for a more Scandinavian system are unlikely to convince my uncle on cost grounds.

I like your uncle.

Bullets don't need to be cheap. China solved the cost issue: simply charge the family for the cost of the bullet.

No, society does not want to spend an absurd amount of money keeping people incarcerated.

About half of society strongly opposes letting criminals run free, out causing mayhem and destroying our civilization.

About half of society strongly opposes letting a judge order a bailiff to fix the issue with a $0.25 bullet as soon as the verdict is in.

That leaves us with the option nobody likes, which is that we spend an absurd amount of money keeping people incarcerated. Most of society grudgingly accepts this.

Have they tried paying them directly to not perform muggings? Or better still in programs that reduce the desire/necessity to mug. The current system does not appear to work, probably worth trying something else...

The harm from having your life threatened and losing $10 is much more than $10. I’d vote for a political system where muggers are executed, and so would many others — you won’t find much support for catch and release.

> ...truly rehabilitative is simply impossible

-While comparing the US to Norway is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, I'd like to point out that our (vee-eery rehabilitation-oriented) correctional system does have one of the lowest recidivism rates world-wide, at approx. 20%. (This is an overall value; I assume there are significant differences between various kinds of crime, but couldn't find any statistics)

Almost from the day your sentencing starts, the prison staff cooperate with social services to ease your return to society - inmates are offered education or vocational training.

As your release draws nearer, security is lowered if you've behaved reasonably well - to the extent that many prisoners serve the last part of their term in halfway houses where they need to observe a curfew, but are allowed to leave in the daytime to apply for jobs, go to work or school; you may also have visits from family or (I believe, vetted!) friends in evenings - all to make the transition as gentle as possible.

There's no such thing as truly rehabilitative for a group - had it been, recidivism would be zero - but for many individuals, I believe a more rehabilitation-oriented correctional system may be just what they need to turn their lives around and become productive members of society.

I believe this approach is strongly beneficial both to the imprisoned individual as well as to society as a whole.

> truly punitive would involve torture

And it does. Methods like solitary do classify as torture under international laws.

The not approved, but still happens, "code red"s that get employed by both staff and inmates, are very clearly torturous.

Slave labor, could also classify as torture. Especially when those meager wages are decimated by the basic costs of things. Such as the per-minute charges to read free ebooks that has been rolling out, or the ridiculous charges to connect by phone or email to anyone not living in the same hell that you are - something that has been shown to help the mental state of the incarcerated.

Anything other than solitary is torture. Exposure to other criminals is cruel. Having a cellmate who could kill you in your sleep is especially shocking; sleep deprivation is unquestionably torture.

An inmate died after being locked in a scalding shower for two hours. His guards won’t be charged.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/2...

Just one of the many cases of institutionalised torture.

And it is the states, the prisons responsibility to find a humane way to incarcerate people, if you fail so miserably at it, it just shows how morally bankrupt your country is.

Solitary confinement increases the chance of heart attack, hypertension and stroke by 30% [0]. That's because it is a stressful environment that people are not meant to function in.

That's 30% up when compared to those prisoners who might be fearing that their cell might kill them. Solitary is more stressful than that environment, objectively.

[0] https://massivesci.com/notes/cardiovascular-health-compariso...

> Solitary is more stressful than that environment, objectively.

That entirely depends on the person. Go talk to a corrections officer. Some folks go mad in solitary, others find relief from the daily threat of physical violence and do OK.

Countering data with anecdotes is useless. It doesn't aid any discussion. Any piece of data can have a contrary anecdote. Gravity can have anecdotes that say it doesn't exist.

Some may well find solitary helpful. However, if the vast majority of data finds that it is harmful, physically and mentally, then we should not use those outliers to gauge whether or not something is effective.

Question: do you know anyone who has served in prison? What do you propose to do with those inmates with life sentences who are raping and murdering in open population? And thank god protective custody (in same place/conditions as solitary) is available, for the sake of the people at risk of rape and murder in open population.

I don't doubt that living in a small area has measurable effect on the mental and cardiovascular health of many inmates. But what is the alternative? Let those inmates live in open population? Try for a moment to imagine being a physically weak inmate in a prison where some psychopath has decided you're a snitch. Can you imagine the fear that induces? And then when the violence happens, the weak inmate will be lucky to come out alive.

Seriously, that's a real question. What's the alternative for murderous, raping inmates who pose an active thread to inmates and wardens? Maximum security prisons have many of them. Where do they go with no solitary?

> Question: do you know anyone who has served in prison?

Yes, but that's irrelevant to the conversation at hand. That solitary is torture and hurts people far more than it helps them. That that's what the science says.

As I've said, anecdotes are irrelevant. Data is.

> But what is the alternative? Let those inmates live in open population?

> ...

> Maximum security prisons have many of them. Where do they go with no solitary?

Maximum security prisons don't just have the two extremes of solitary and open population. Normal prisons usually have more than gen pop and solitary.

If rehabilitation is the goal, and not just punishment, then prisons tend to be less violent overall. These statistical outliers who go around attacking everyone also reduce in frequency.

Happily, your efforts will likely be for naught. Even if most people don't care about the many incarcerated victims of prisoner violence, powerful people do care about violence against prison wardens and staff, so solitary is unlikely to go away.

I'm 100% for significant prison reform. We have far, far too many nonviolent offenders, or offenders who made a one-time really poor decision in a bar fight or something similar, housed together in prison with psychopaths, gang members, and ultra-violent inmates. But until the day comes when only habitually violent prisoners are housed together in prison, facilities for solitary confinement are needed, not only for violent prisoners, but for people in protective custody.

The study applies to "a third of individuals in solitary confinement". I guess those were the extroverts. What about the other two thirds of individuals in solitary confinement? It seems likely that those people don't support the desired conclusion.

Whatever the case may be, there is also the matter of them being a bad influence on each other.

1/3rd of people is more than statistically significant, so yes, it does support that conclusion. That solitary is bad for your health, and worse than general prison life.

> 1/3rd of people is more than statistically significant, so yes, it does support that conclusion.

It decidedly does not support the conclusion. The percent of the population studies were those who had filed a lawsuit about solitary confinement. This is the definition of a biased sample.

> Anything other than solitary is torture.

This point is completely proven to be false by the fact that people are having their QOL indicators trashed.

1) You're replying to the wrong comment.

2) Your basis for "This point is completely proven to be false by the fact that people are having their QOL indicators trashed" is what? The statistically-biased study you posted?

> 1) You're replying to the wrong comment.

Are you not in this thread? [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176652

> 2) Your basis for "This point is completely proven to be false by the fact that people are having their QOL indicators trashed" is what? The statistically-biased study you posted?

You didn't like that study? And thus refuse to have any other conversation? Fine. Lets have some more.

[0] https://www.themarshallproject.org/documents/3234404-Aiming-... - The government knows it is harmful, and is tracking and pushing for reduction of its use.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... - It increases mortality after release. (Study where N=229,297).

[2] https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us1012ForUpl... - It stunts the growth of juveniles and leads to a variety of mental health problems.

[3] http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/appsych/opus/issues/2015/spring/co... - Here's an earlier study that also covers the hyptension systems already mentioned.

[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cbm.627 - In juveniles, it increases recidivism, and causes mental and physical health problems.

QoL indicators from all studies are showing problems. Solitary Confinement is above the threshold where it can be safely used against any one person.

> And thus refuse to have any other conversation?

Where are you getting this stuff? I never said anything about refusing to have any other conversation. And you responded to the wrong comment above. You quoted another commenter and responded to it in a reply to me. That's not how threaded forums work.

Are you confusing me with other HNer again here?

> Are you confusing me with other HNer again here?

Nope.

> You quoted another commenter and responded to it in a reply to me. That's not how threaded forums work.

That's exactly how thread topics work. That's the context of the conversation.

Yeah, this really gets me. How can a civilized society allow for systematic torture of people. The two are mutually exclusive.

I've read that another reason is to try and get people who are a bad influence out of the area. For example, some parts of Baltimore are so bad that there is almost no chance for kids growing up to have a life not influenced by violence, so they just try and lock people up as long as possible so they won't be a negative influence on the people in the area. Trying to rehabilitate them would probably be pointless because they are going to go back to live in the same shitty situation that led them to a life of crime in the first place. It'd be like sending an alcoholic or drug addict who just finished rehab right back to the same people and circumstances that made them need rehab.

It's too bad there's no free land to exile people to any more. (I mean, we could build walled-off exile colonies inland, but that'd be pretty dystopian, unless they could somehow get from there to other countries that aren't exiling them.)

Honestly, the situation in too many places- okay, one is one too many, so way too many places- is like taking someone home from rehab and dropping them off at a liquor store.

Gonna be honest, it doesn't sound like you have a lot of relevant experience on the effects of incarceration.

I'm no expert either, but prison is a lot more than just making sure people can't commit crimes. I also think reasonable people could disagree about whether the treatment of some of our prisoners constitutes torture or not.

> truly punitive would involve torture, and truly rehabilitative is simply impossible

Wait, the only true punishment is to torture someone, and it is impossible to help someone move away from a life of crime? What system of belief is that derived from, because it doesn't derive from any modern rights-based cultural or legal tradition.

The world is full of examples of people who didn't commit crimes after receiving mild punishment, and were successfully rehabilitated away from crime.

I think the charitable reading of GP is that revenge/rehabilition/removal are the three possible objectives, for which the purest forms would be something like torture / re-education / exile.

Every real system is some mix of these functions. We don't want to do torture, but we do talk about retribution, a bit. Perfect repair is unattainable, but we do talk a lot about rehabilitation. We don't talk much about removal, but (GP argues) this is in fact a rather large part of what our system is actually designed to do.

> Perfect repair is unattainable

It is unattainable because "perfect" is undefined for both the imprisoned and free people.

Arguments involving the idea of achieving perfect rehabilitation are the enemy of the good in this case. It's just as pointless to talk about perfectly repairing prisoners as it is to talk about perfectly repairing any of us. We're all variously damaged goods.

I agree with the GP that the system is designed for removal, but disagree that a system geared towards rehabilitation is impossible, if only by the existence proof provided by the number of people who have been rehabilitated to the point that they are no longer a danger to themselves and society.

I'm not sure what the GP thinks is the value that torture brings to the discussion, at least in societies that presume to operate on a foundation of human rights. Torture is literally psychopathic behavior, itself warranting punishment by removal via imprisonment. And with some notable and terrible exceptions, our laws back that up.

Can it not simply be defined as making them unwilling to commit further crimes?

As for torture, in my view, they're simply saying that our goal is not really punitive because we're not actively trying to make prisoners miserable. Our incompetence, uncaringness and willingness to allow prisoners to be taken advantage passively creates misery, though.

No one is suggesting that we should torture anyone, only using it to point out that the prison misery comes more from apathy about prison conditions rather than some active attempt to create misery.

It's helpful to think about pure forms, sometimes, even if you completely understand that the real world is all shades of gray. You don't have to be wielding them as "the enemy of the good", just trying to understand the different components of what you're doing.

Explicitly mentioning that the purest form of retribution would be torture is (IMO) a way to argue that this ought to be a smaller component of what we do. Being sent to prison by definition involves a loss of some freedoms, it's not going to be pleasant. But exactly how unpleasant, this is at least partly within our control.

> Explicitly mentioning that the purest form of retribution would be torture is (IMO) a way to argue that this ought to be a smaller component of what we do.

Why should it be any component of what we do? You don't have to be religious to recognize the need to call it unacceptable as a basic societal principle.

I think you have to qualify “basic societal principle” with regard to any measure of penalization for crime being “torture.” There are posts in this thread who say solitary is torture, saying high monetary fines are torture, the whole spectrum...

So you need to define torture, and then find a punishment which you find to not be torture and convince general society that it is both proportional and effective punishment for some specific criminal act.

How about $10-13k in fees / mandatory education classes for a DUI in California? That is pretty punitive AND crippling.

The classes are given by for profit companies.

Also does nothing to stop the small percentage of hardcore repeat dui offenders. They still find a way to drive.

If those fees were linked to wealth or income that would seem reasonable. $10k is going to really cause problems for an average person, for a holywood superstar though it should be more like $1m

A firefighter who's DUI because they had a couple of beers on a Friday night, then got called to hospital 50 miles away because their daughter had just been stabbed, and instinctively jumped in his car to get there asap, shouldn't be treated in the same way as a $900k/year architect who's been guzzling champagne at a product launch after launch party, then drives their $400k car 3 miles home

> How about $10-13k in fees / mandatory education classes for a DUI in California? That is pretty punitive AND crippling.

Slate Star Codex talks about that in their Moloch article. Long story short, no politician can be for the reduction of these sorts of things. The first one that tries will be lambasted in public when someone who did less fees or less 'for-profit training' has another bender and kills little Timmy.

Sentencing will always go up, unless acted upon by actors who aren't subject to voting forces. So will fees and fines and plenty of other torturous actions.

The underlying assumption of the incapacitation argument is that people can't change. Which evidently is wrong as other countries achieve much lower recidivism rates.

This essentially moral assumption (that people are inherently good/evil) is shared with the punitive approach.

If a country actually wants to lower crime, bank robbers and muggings, the empirical evidence clearly points in one direction: A focus on rehabilitation, and in the long run lowering of inequality through wealth redistribution. The latter isn't really plausible at first glance, but has been a stable observation for decades. Example source: https://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/Crime%26In...

Not sure why you are downvoted, what you say is literally the thinking behind current criminal justice in the US. The idea is that the person is completely evil and the only thing is to stop them from following their nature is long term incapacitation. I think this fundamental fact about how the system is structured and how the people in it think is really lost on people pushing reform. Getting literally millions of state and federal employees to change their beliefs on this is something that will happen over generations, not with the passing of a few laws. This philosophy is cooked in for some decades to come, unfortunately.

This is an interesting thought though the math in final sentence feels off.

we reduce muggings by 80% of that individual's potential to commit muggings

Yes. We also keep other individuals in prison. If they are similar (once per week, 80% in prison) then the 80% applies in general.

The numbers vary and the specific values are unimportant to understanding the basic idea. The point is that keeping criminals away from victims is how we actually reduce crime.

Our system does involve torture.

> I'm also terrified at the thought that someone got shot at a place where I've walked countless times at night after school.

Why would you be terrified by this? There were 36 homicides last year in Portland and 49 traffic deaths, yet almost nobody says they're terrified of cars. And even of these 36 homicides, most were perpetrated by someone the person knew. Studies put it at around 90% where the person killed knew the attacker rather than just someone unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

So you're 13 times more likely to die from a car than from a homicide in Portland if you're not involved with dangerous people.

And yes, you're right: life is ridiculously safe there.

Its a nonsequitor but Its pretty absurd that people are much less afraid of dying by car or drowning than by being shot. The hysteria around it is pretty insane.

Agree with your point but is there a reason you used the Unibomber as your example? He was a math professor at Berkeley, surely if anyone in prison can produce good research he probably can...

I think the point was that you probably couldn't rehabilitate him by teaching him maths.

Damn good reason to teach him some philosophy then,

Pretty sure he already has a path there...

I used the Unibomber as an example because, like solveit said, lack of an education or jobs available to him probably wasn't part of the reason why he chose to commit crimes (out of desperation).

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