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%.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bullets don't need to be cheap. China solved the cost issue: simply charge the family for the cost of the bullet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
Do you favor retribution as a end, or a means?
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.
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.
-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.
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.
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...
Whatever the case may be, there is also the matter of them being a bad influence on each other.
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.
This point is completely proven to be false by the fact that people are having their QOL indicators trashed.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.