Why America's prisons are an unconstitutional moral horror (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Why America's prisons are an unconstitutional moral horror (2019)

mcall.com

269 pointsdan-robertson304 comments

One of the problems not mentioned is mandatory sentencing guidelines that were passed as part of a "get tough on crime" laws of the 80s and 90s in the US. These laws do a lot to reduce the discretion in sentencing available to judges. My mom, who was a judge told me a lot about this.

Say you are young and you do something very stupid. You get high and you go into a store with a friend who is also high and threatens the clerk with a knife to steal something. Maybe you don't do anything more than run away with your friend after he steals something. After you are arrested a prosecutor can probably charge you with half a dozen crimes, all associated with the event. The prosecutor is incentivized to charge you with a bunch of stuff to get you to plead guilty instead of going to trial which is very expensive.

Maybe the police picked you up and you are the wrong person. Maybe you are young and you think you shouldn't go to prison because someone you barely know did something stupid and all you did was run away when they ran away. If you ask for your day in court you are going to face all these charges and probably the prosecution will win. DAs are usually better than defense attorneys unless you can afford a very good one. So you lose.

A judge might look at your past behavior. Decide you are not a really dangerous person and think, if this person were locked up for a year or two they would learn their lesson and be productive members of society. But with many charges and mandatory sentencing, there is nothing to do but lock up the person for a really long time. So long that their productive life is ruined.

Mandatory sentencing also helps weaponize charges in the plea bargaining process because it prevents a judge from applying their judgement to make the sentence fit the crime. So take a plea bargain of a couple years for an auto theft or lose in court and face ten years or more with a bunch of other charges tacked on.

What would happen if the chief public defender of a large city declared that no public defender would accept any plea deal and that they would be taking everything to trial?

The courts would immediately be clogged and prosecutors would be forced to drop many charges because they wouldn't be able to have a trial within the mandated 70 days.

Prosecutors would be forced to choose the cases that they actually believed important as opposed to the current as-many-charges-and-cases-as-they-can.

More realistically, that chief public defender would be fired or harassed out of office within days.

It's probably unconstitutional for them to refuse plea deals en masse if it creates a massive violation of one's right to a speedy trial.

I'm not a lawyer but as far as I know it's the duty of the courts to provide for a speedy trial. And all the chief defender need do is state that in their opinion, plea deals are not fair and that they would not be taking any. If the courts couldn't keep up, then that's their problem.

If the government wants to bring in more judges and prosecutors, that's its perogative.

I think you underestimate the forces arrayed against this hypothetical chief public defender.

Perhaps.

But in some jurisdictions, there are so many defendants that they don't have enough courtrooms to run trials 24/7 to get them done in 70 days.

Speedy trial can vary from state to state. If not in custody, PA considers anything under 4 or 5 years from the charge being brought to be speedy.

That feels like a non-standard usage of “speedy”, even accounting for linguistic drift since 1789.

Not really. All such descriptors are standardly applied in a comparative manner - it is normal to describe a snail as "speedy" if it's faster than other snails, regardless of whether it's faster than other centipedes.

But that purely linguistic analysis only tells you that "speedy trial" has no objective meaning, which can't be the intent of the phrase. The right to a "speedy trial" was supposed to ensure that trials occur speedily relative to some context which is now lost.

Not really. Rules of statutory construction generally say that you need to use a definition from the dictionary if it's not defined in the statute. Webster's basically says without delay.

However, it's somewhat ambiguous. The principle of lenity is supposed to interpret ambiguity in favor of the defendant... it rarely happens.

> Webster's basically says without delay.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/speedy

The entire gloss is "marked by swiftness of motion or action. Also: prompt sense 2".

Prompt 2 is "performed readily or immediately". We can reasonably interpret "immediately" as "without delay", but we then run into the problem that that is explicitly one of two options.

Sorry, DDG showed a definition. The link under it was from Webster's.

The definition DDG shows is also "characterized by rapid motion; swift".

"Accomplished or arrived at without delay; prompt"

Yes, where the dictionary gives you two glosses, you're not free to take one of them as being the only possible meaning.

Nor are you

Putting your life in limbo for 5 years is madness. How do you accept such a thing?

Land of the free indeed. SMH.

The right to a speedy trial is provided for in the sixth amendment. It controls across all states.

But it's not defined. States make their own determination, to a degree. The limit for in-cusutody is pretty low and close to 60 days (don't know the case law). Noncustodial prosecution can last years.

Within 70 days or so is pretty average as far as I know. I think we're most concerned with defendants in custody.

That's for defendants in custody. If not in custody, many states can have you wait months or years.

Ok. That means they are at large and wanted.

I guess I'm not addressing them.

No. If they let you out on bail, or decide to book and release you, then the time limit is different.

Can you refuse bail? And demand a trial?

I guess in this case there would be a massive pressure put on the probation office. However they may just not assign officers.

They set the bail at the preliminary hearing, then you can pay it if you want to be free. If you don't pay it, then your trial will be expedited, but you will wait in jail until then.

Sometimes 60 days is too fast for the lawyers so the defense and prosecution might request a continuance to test evidence, find witnesses, etc.

I don't think probation officers are really the bottle neck. Judge availability would be the main point of pain. The vast majority of cases end in a plea deal without a trial. This already involves layers, prosecutors, probation officers, etc. But it doesn't usually involve a judge, except maybe for approval. But that's still at lot less time than a trial would be.

Apparently in NY it's less than 6 years[1] or life[2]:

[1]"New York top court clears man held six years at Rikers Island without trial" https://cn.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUSKCN1FZ2YZ

[2]"Browder tragically ended his life in 2015 after suffering beatings, two years of solitary confinement, and egregious conditions during the three years he was incarcerated on Rikers Island—all because of a baseless accusation that he stole a backpack. " https://www.nyclu.org/en/news/new-york-may-finally-do-someth...

In cases where you see people in jail for years it's because the defendant has waived their right to a speedy trial until they are next in court.

Every time they go to court, they waive their right to a speedy trial until the next time they're in court. If they didn't, the judge would set a trial date for within a short period of time (less than 70 days).

In practice, defendants will waive dates to fit into the judge's calendar.

The Browder case is appalling. For those claiming it was the fault of the defendant for waiving their right to a speedy trial, look at the “trial” section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder

Over and over the prosecution was not ready and over and over the judge allowed it.

I think there's also a case-load angle here. Don't public defenders usually have hundreds of active cases?

Could they ethically do that?

As then the prosecution has no reason to grant any leniency, so whichever clients they tried would receive far longer sentences.

Sacrificing some clients to get others off does not seem permissible.

I believe they are also required to present the deal to their clients.

The prosecutors don't sentence defendants, judges do.

Additionally, judges would know what was going on and presumably take it under consideration.

Depending on the jurisdiction, though, the judge may be an elected official that doesn't want to look "soft on crime" for re-election or even may be receiving a big chunk of campaign donations from private prison organizations.

It's an interesting open question whether judges should be elected or not (though I lean toward no due to the lack of visibility of their actions)... but what isn't up for debate is how corrupt the US election system is - as long as campaign finance is broken we can't expect the judiciary to fix things for us.

The electorate would likely demand the immediate sacking of the chief public defender.

Mob rule by proxy

I don't know about the electorate, but other local officials certainly would. Most people can agree that the criminal justice system is broken and needs reform. But efforts to actually fix it are almost always painted as being "soft on crime" by fear mongering political opponents who care far less about reform than getting votes by any means necessary.

Probably. But it'd be interesting if the mayor said nope, this is what we're doing.

A more likely outcome would be a doubling or tripling down on the legal threats to the defendant. It’s not the public defender’s call to make, and prosecutors are already pretty good at scaring the shit out of the defendants.

And commiting prosecutorial misconduct with no consequences.

Why is this downvoted? I've witnessed it. How else would you describe a trooper and ADA knew that a charge was incorrect and still let it stand, including pretrial restrictions only under the incorrect charge.

The beauty of it is that they pretty much already throw as many charges that they can.

I've seen an ADA and trooper hold a charge on someone even though they knew it was the wrong charge. That charge carried pretrial restrictions that the correct charge did not.

Lawyers don't accept plea deals. Clients accept plea deals.

Lawyers are required by professional ethics (and possibly by law in some places) to present plea deals to their clients. Having it be otherwise would be problematic.

True.

However, in practice, most defendants take the advice of their lawyers. If public defenders advised not to take a deal, they probably wouldn't take them.

This is definitely the weak point of this plan, I admit.

The problem is that the existing system is in a stable equilibrium. A lawyer generally can't advise most clients to not take a plea deal because not taking the plea deal will have a worse outcome for that client.

It's literally the prisoner's dilemma. You have to have all the lawyers and all the clients act in concert. But if someone defects, they get the plea deal (better than getting stuck in jail and going to trial) and the others get screwed.

It is tricky for sure. It's a fantasy, I admit.

I would truly like to see prosecutors have to take all cases to trial.

The flagrant disregard for prosecutorial ethics is just appalling.

They can also give advice as to whether or not accepting the plea deal is in the client’s best interests. That mechanism seems like it would be nearly equally effective, especially in today’s “one strange trick” society.

Also judges must approve of a plea deal. I wonder if judges even know the likelihood of a given defendant accepting a plea deal even though they are innocent?

Judges get final authority to approve plea deals. Most of the time they do but it is not automatic.

This is a nitpick. in 99% of cases the lawyer is going to present the deal and then state an opinion on what might be a good course of action.

It's not a nitpick. Yes lawyers state opinions, but they are ethically bound to serve their client's interest, not to use their client as a pawn in an attempt to overhaul the justice system.

It could be a legitimate strategy depending on the circumstances, and depending if they can get other public defenders to tag-along.

And in 99% of cases the client is gonna make their own decision bec if the lawyer tried to coerce them in any way they can lose their license.

Your comment reeks of the same virulent narcissism that plagues humanity (thank you modern advertisement). Much like those incarcerated (clients) who rely on asymmetrical information (plea deals, lawyers), you've been groomed to unconsciously defend yet another human trafficking pipeline/system.

Why doesn’t one do this?

Because it exposes their individual clients to greater risk?

In some cases, the defendant can't afford bail and would be forced to sit in jail until the trial.

In these cases, the public defender waives the right to a speedy trial. It's how defendants are allowed to be held without trial for an excessive amount of time.

They just have to not waive that right and the trial must proceed within 70 days or so.

I think that depends on the state and details. If you're not in custody, the limit is generally measured in years.

If public defenders are waiving that right without informed consent, then people need to file complaints with the bar

Yes. It is unethical. Your duty is to your client, not to your public policy position, even if your political position is just and even if it would benefit other hypothetical clients in the future.

And this is exactly how it should be - people's futures shouldn't be bargaining chips to use to push through political reform, least of all the futures of those who may be wrongly accused.

If we want to see change in the justice system we need wider societal education and to force that change from the outside, but that butts up against a lot of "hard on crime" rhetoric.

It's unethical to charge defendants with crimes that a prosecutor truly believes they can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

So therefore it's unethical for a prosecutor to accept a plea deal less than all charges.

"In the interest of Justice" is a pretty thin excuse.

Unfortunately, while I wish you were correct, you are not. I often wish ethics committees of state bars would adopt the ABA Criminal Justice Standards on the Prosecution Function, specifically Standard 3-4.3(a), but they have not. The ethical standard is "probable cause."

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/criminal_justice/standard...

I stand corrected. I forgot that!

I understand this and it makes sense.

How can a public defender ethically represent a client when they have so little time to prepare for a case? If you have 30 cases at a time and minutes to spend with your client how can you do your job to the standard deserved by a defendant?

If the above isn't too difficult, then suspending plea deals shouldn't be much of a stretch?

Many cases on the misdemeanor docket can legitimately be summed up in a few minutes. For example, there are only two elements to DWLS... were you driving? was your license suspended? Cruiser video, officer testimony, and certified DMV records are enough.

For others, you can always request a continuance and make sure you put on the record that the current timeline will force you to be ineffective.

Would it still be unethical if your client was supportive of the larger strategy?

If your client were unaware of the strategy, would it be unethical to tell them?

I'd be worried that prosecutors would go after cases that serve their own purpose and that those wouldn't be the cases most deserving of prosecution. For example, I would want every violent and sexual offense to be prosecuted before even a single drug case is considered. But would a prosecutor give up a a mid-level drug dealer to go after a sexual assault case or a mugging?

If a prosecutor can't prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, I think we don't want them charging a crime regardless of what the crime is.

Ideally there shouldn't be any dropped cases. But of course that requires adequate funding. You know, maybe depending money on expanding the number of courts/judges instead of marble floors and hardwood paneling.

And we need to do away with most law enforcement discretion (this includes DAs). Enforcement is extremely uneven. If the law using going to be enforced in many situations, then why enforce it at all?

This brings up another point. Is this a justice system? How can it be when the cost to defend one's self in court (with or without a lawyer) is more expensive than the fine. You can be punished more defending yourself as an innocent person than as a guilty one who pleads guilty.

i'd be down for expanding courts and enforcing (criminal) laws evenly and justly if we combined that with reviewing and aggressively purging unnecessary and unjust laws first. i'd conjecture we'd lose basically nothing in terms of justice and crime if we did that.

Exactly. There seem to be a lot of non value added laws that are selectively enforced.

Well, no, they would be forced to choose the cases where they think they have the best odds of winning. And you'd end up with Japan, where confessions are extracted out of prisoners during pretrial detention and 99.9% of those brought to trial are convicted.

That said, even this would probably be an improvement, since plea bargains are an almost uniquely American horror.

Japan has a 99.3% conviction rate, but only a 37% indictment rate, implying roughly two thirds of those arrested and held are let go without charge.

Probably even lower indictment rates, since I’m sure a lot of paperwork get’s ‘lost’ on the more embarrassing cases.

If you can spend years held before trial that’s all still cold comfort

It's somewhat difficult to get Japanese police to even investigate crimes. I once had my pocket picked, went to the police station to report it, and they basically refused to mark it as theft and recorded it as lost instead.

They did this in San Bernardino and Riverside counties about a decade ago when the DAs refused to bargain over drug rehab diversions for non-violent/non-dealer defendants.

Nearly member of the defense bar (led by the public defenders, but including private counsel) convinced their clients to refuse to waive the rights to a speedy trial. SB and Riverside ran out of courtrooms to hold trials in by 10a that Monday, and were forced to ask LA and OC county for help. By that Wednesday, the backlog grew so large that defendants' cases were being dropped because the constitutional deadline for bringing their case to trial had passed.

The following week, both DAs gave in completely.

You’re referring to this right?

https://www.courts.ca.gov/partners/documents/Crush_of_Cases_...

No, the events in that article happened because Riverside decided it didn't want to pay for the courtrooms it needed for the volume of cases its court system was dealing with.

However, the experiences of the defense bar during that time did inspire the subsequent events to which I was referring, which was in late 2009 or early 2010.

It's hard to find articles about it online since it was an esoteric maneuver that AFAIK was only covered by local (now defunct) papers.

You should look into philidelphia’s district attorney. He led his campaign with plea reform.

Also look into private prisons and Unicor. Essentially slave labor for GSA. Truly horrible conditions. There is not one semblance of rehabilitation in the US prison system.

Prisoners should be paid at least the minimum wage, with a portion of their wages going to the victims.

You can't do that. Putting this on the defender is the wrong target.

The two structural changes that I would make are:

1) Any monetary collection by the "justice system" goes to a victim or into a fund which gets redistributed to the general public at the end of the year.

No more funding things with fines (aka regressive tax on the poor). You want funding--it comes out of taxes, period. This stops a lot of the perverse incentives in the system.

Marijuana legalization is mostly held up because the fines from it fund the "justice system".

2) Prosecutors may not offer plea deals.

As we have seen time and again, this devolves into abuse of office. Prosecutors offer deals with far fewer consequences to rich, non-minority defendants.

I would actually go one further:

3) Prosecutors don't get any ability to pick the jury.

The court should be able to strike people for various bias reasons. The defense should be able to strike people with some limitations.

The prosecution should have to make the case with the jury provided by the court system and the defense. Prosecutors already have far too many advantages when conducting a trial (too many jurors are "He's in the chair--he's guilty."). If they can't make a criminal conviction with those, then they shouldn't be prosecuting it in the first place.

One issue is all the leverage prosecutors have. Things like charges that are deliberately inflated, or 3rd strike rules, defendants already on probation for something else, etc. Many defendants have to take a plea deal because the prosecution has lots of leverage.

I wonder how other countries, where the whole "plea deal" notion doesn't even exist, manage the problem?

Already many crimes go unpunished, you’re proposing that nearly all “petty” crimes be consequence-free just think for a second how much worse Seattle or SF would get if the police arrested even fewer criminals and even fewer ppl would prosecuted for theft and home invasions?

What you’re suggesting is a total breakdown in societal norms bec you see a problem and don’t understand the root cause so you just want to treat one symptom. Why not take some time to understand the root cause instead, and come up with a solution that doesn’t have immediately worse outcomes for literally all of the rest of society.

Also, if somehow the courts managed to take all these cases to trial, for every trial that the public defender lost, she could appeal that they did not receive adequate representation. I don't think she would win those appeals, just because the courts act with spite to anyone who rocks the boat, but it would be correct; there is no way that any public defender could handle that many cases going to trial. They already aren't allotted enough time just to plea bargain.

The courts are actually pretty capable of rubber-stamping guilty verdicts very quickly. They can also scale up and hire more assistant prosecutors etc.

And American citizens have the privilege of paying for this barbarism to the tune of ~$40,000/yr.

It is a criminal waste of taxpayer capital, and it is a criminal waste of human life.

A complete fucking for everyone involved, other than the people at the capital getting kick-backs from industries profiting off of the prison industrial complex, and the owners of the prisons themselves.

Depending on the kind of damage a given person may do when not in prison, the cost of keeping said person in-prison may be cheaper than the damage they do to society. For example, an arsonist that just burns down buildings for the lawls, it is cheaper to keep them contained in some fashion.

Now, do we need to rework how our prison and penal system work overall? For sure! Once you have a felony on your record, you are a pariah within society and it makes it much harder to start over. As well, how we deal with mental health issues still seems less-than-ideal.

But we still have yet to figure out how to differentiate between someone that tries to do better after 1 bad decision/mistake or someone that keeps being a drain on society (due to continued criminal activity). We tried the 3-strike model, that that doesn't seem to have worked out great. I honestly don't know of good approaches here.

I think your underlying premise (of the gp too) is flawed because it seems to imply that we need to contain people in order to save money. I don't think that is a reasonable standard for reworking our prison and penal systems.

Society overall needs a punishment/rehab system for people that do things that go against the rules of society. Prisons are the system we have right now. Maybe we need to experiment with other ideas?

I am just saying that rehabilitation should be the focus not the monetary cost-benefit. The latter seems to cause politicians to prioritize private prisons to "save money" while causing tons of damage in second order effects that aren't always $$$.

Rehabilitation seems to me to be the most economical solution. While there may be a higher up front cost, if we can be more successful on that path than just locking someone up, the productivity that person adds to society will be earned back.

So I argue that it is a cost benefit analysis, you just have to look in the long term.

There are self-evidently some people (clearly at least 2, pretty surely thousands, not likely a million in the US) who have proven themselves unfit to live freely in society.

Society has to address the topic somehow. For me, it’s not about saving money but there’s also obviously some limit to how much resources society will devote to the topic if an equally effective but much cheaper method is available.

“We’re going to raise your taxes so we can treat prisoners better!” has not been tried as a campaign slogan to my knowledge, but it would poll pretty poorly I’d think.

> an arsonist that just burns down buildings for the lawls

Yeah there aren't many people like that and the people who are like that don't belong in a prison.

Anyways, one of the best ways to make someone "a continued drain on society due to continued criminal activity" is to put them in prison, give them a career-killing record that will follow them forever, and put them in contact with other criminals on a daily basis.

Prison is a self-reinforcing system that is itself the drain on society.

> Yeah there aren't many people like that and the people who are like that don't belong in a prison.

So where do they belong? If you say "mental hospital", what's to stop them from simply leaving? If the answer is anything other than "nothing" how is said mental hospital any different from a prison?

I guess the question is, if not prison, what do you do with the people that prove time and again to be incompatible with society?

What should ideally be happening would be rehabilitating them in an environment that doesn't constantly reinforce the idea that they're subhuman garbage.

Involuntary in-patient psych care is different than prison because it is focused on improving someone's life, managing a potentially dangerous condition, etc. They (should be) a hopeful place, a place of healing. They don't always live up to that, of course, but at least the objectives are correct.

Prisons are not places of rehabilitation in the US, and a person who is suffering from a severe mental illness is likely to suffer profound abuse in prison.

Involuntary psychiatric facilities also have a rather checkered past when it comes to human rights, to put it mildly.

Anywhere you hold someone against their will eventually becomes fraught, no matter what the stated purpose of the facility is.

True, though I'd much rather have a well funded, competently run mental health facility than a well funded, competently run prison.

There's an extremely wide gamut of potential answers to this question. "Either we lock them up and throw away the key in a violent retributive system or we let them roam the streets free of all social constraint" is a false dilemma.

At any rate, it's not necessary to pick a specific answer from the massive pile of alternative approaches tried, theorized, and developed in modern history to say that this one thing that is done in the US right now is clearly not the right answer.

how we deal with mental health issues still seems less-than-ideal.

To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time taking anyone serious that still uses a euphemism for this.

> Depending on the kind of damage a given person may do when not in prison, the cost of keeping said person in-prison may be cheaper than the damage they do to society.

This is definitely true. Prison is sometimes justified as "punishment" and sometimes justified as "protection"of the vulnerable. Both approaches have merit and society generally uses both.

However, if you look at the system as a whole, terrible prison conditions are an obstacle to protecting society. As we have seen fit to imprison some people for less than the entire term of their natural life, you will notice that this means we release people. When people who have been abused by a needlessly cruel prison system are released, it is harder for them to re-integrate into society, and much more likely that they will re-offend, perhaps with the assistance of people who they met in prison (often their only resource upon release.)

Unless you are prepared to argue here that substantially all sentences ought to be life sentences (or death sentences) it is thus critical for the project of protecting society that prison is not cruelly abusive. Rest assured that it is still punishment to be locked in a small room! It is altogether unnecessary and counterproductive for you to rot in the small room, to ruin your health with the food, to lose your teeth for lack of basic dental care, to be abused by guards for fun, to be abused by other inmates, or to be raped, but all of this is common. It is especially counterproductive for prisoners to be denied access to means of self-betterment such as reading material, or to have their reading material replaced with rent-a-book tablets charging exorbitant prices, but this too is a trend in some states.

And this is, of course, just a start; there are of course many other inhumane things in US prisons that harm society as a whole, so much so that it is hard to enumerate a meaningful inventory — perhaps you could start with the article linked?

Nor is it in the service of society that prison guards should put a man in a shower and turn on scalding hot water and leave it on until he dies, but it happened to Darren Rainey. Nor is it in the service of protecting society that prison cards should leave a man in a cell, naked, with the floor covered in sewage, but it happened to Trent Taylor, and the guards were afforded qualified immunity.

And most people who are not literally Nazis and have a shred of moral fiber would not say that involuntarily sterilizing women in prison, and lying to them about it and saying they have cancer, is something that protects society, but it was happening in California AS RECENTLY AS 2014 — yes, the year of our lord two thousand and fourteen, that is not a typo. And the next time you start hearing about "private prisons" remember that this was in a state run facility. (Documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoD7VgFl9EI )

The psychopath question is a valid one, and I think it is unfair to dismiss it entirely, so let me address it.

There are some people who are born without empathy or morals, and they will do cruel and evil things just for kicks. I do think that prisons will exist in some capacity basically forever, but I would apply my philosophy as a software engineer to this problem as well:

- Look at other places that have a successful implementation, study how they do it.

- Copy it and adapt it to my use case.

There are prison systems that are more cruel, but there are also prison systems that are LESS cruel and get better results. Either way, we have some holes we need to plug in our own system which seems to be optimized to make the right people money while being as cruel as possible.

However, most prisoners are not psychopaths and our money would be better spent setting up programs to help people escape poverty and have a decent quality of life to make criminal behavior less attractive. A lot of criminal activity emerges as a by-product of poverty. Illegal drugs and all of the crime that goes along with that [0] would be remediated if people were not so desperate to escape poverty. Additionally crimes associated with vagrancy [1] would be remediated.

0: ( Such as territory conflicts leading to violence, selling the illegal drugs on the street, etc. )

1: ( bike theft, sleeping in illegal places, trespassing, drug possession )

> We tried the 3-strike model, that that doesn't seem to have worked out great.

How would it have worked? Prison isn't about reform in this country, it's about punishment. And there's basically no support once you're out, which just leads to criminals going back to what they were doing before going in because they don't have any other options.

For starters, how about a government infrastructure program that offers former convicts a reliable source of income? Society benefits from both their labor and in theory the fact they aren't committing crimes to feed themselves.

> And there's basically no support once you're out, which just leads to criminals going back to what they were doing before going in because they don't have any other options.

It’s even worse than that. If you weren’t a hardened criminal when you go in, chances are, you will have all the skills to be one when you get out. It’s like vocational training for your only option of criminality when you get out.

Someone who goes to prison for cheating on their taxes or having a baggie of coke comes out with the same scarlet letter of unemployability as someone who goes in for murder.

Prison is literally a factory that creates future crime.

I was under the impression that there are far less psychotic arsonists than people entering the prison system for petty crime.

I read that some nordic countries have programs that are more focused on rehabilitation that seem to work relatively well for those who want to atone for their mistakes and be better. In terms of implementations, I believe solutions exist.

The problem IMHO is that there's a deep culture of polarization and punitiveness in the US. Consider for example someone who gets arrested for drug possession. In many parts of the country, it's not at all uncommon for people to think that junkies should rot in jail. Treating it as a public health issue doesn't even cross their minds. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that many people subconsciously think that once a person enters the prison system, they can be discriminated forever as if they were sub-human.

But if as a society, there's never a notion of change/forgiveness, how is one expected to leave the vicious cycle?

When it comes to child development, it's fairly well documented that chronically punitive interventions don't work. This same line of research needs to be more broadly publicized for adults as well. I don't believe there can be change in the penal system unless society can first get over the hollywood idea of "bad guy in jail == happy ending" and realize that in real life, things keep rolling after the movie credits.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. The trouble is that empathy in regard to forgiveness is highly selective. Our current court system is designed to humiliate someone and potentially punish someone. To me, this sounds like an organized system for vengeance.

> But if as a society, there's never a notion of change/forgiveness, how is one expected to leave the vicious cycle?

People still believe that certain things are irredeemable. As long as one person is allowed to sit around and tout that for one thing, then another person will do it for another thing, so on and so forth. Morals are hazy like that.

What you're asking for is a fundamental societal shift where pretty much everyone drops their baggage at the door. I'm hopeful, but I don't see that coming true.

> ... other than the people at the capital getting kick-backs from industries profiting off of the prison industrial complex, and the owners of the prisons themselves.

And the mostly white communities that get to boost their representative power by counting prisoners in their census, while stripping them of their right to vote.

1. https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/

2. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/racialgeography/report.html

Bear in mind that judicial punishment in most countries, regardless of skin colour, generally involves a prison system of one sort or another.

This is not simply a US thing, nor is it a racial thing. This discussion is far broader than that.

Bear in mind that the criminal incarceration system in this country in its founding documents is constructed to create an involuntary labor force.

> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/

that provision doesn't necessarily imply maliciousness though. for instance, allowing for prisoners to be required to do work for the jurisdiction, and usually for the prison itself, while incarcerated. it's not unreasonable to expect prisoners to work off their debt to society in some manner (better yet if it develops the useful skills and experience at the same time).

but where that goes wrong is when prisoners are working for private interests for slave wages (i.e., food and shelter) and the difference being pocketed by said private interest rather than going to pay for said incarceration.

The 21st century EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is interpreted similarly:

> For the purpose of this article the term "forced or compulsory labour" shall not include: (a) any work required to be done in the ordinary course of detention imposed according to the provisions of Article 5 of this Convention or during conditional release from such detention; (b) any service of a military character or, in case of conscientious objectors in countries where they are recognised, service exacted instead of compulsory military service; (c) any service exacted in case of an emergency or calamity threatening the life or well being of the community; (d) any work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations.

https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/5-prohibition-sl...

See earlier 1953 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) Article 4 at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Convention_for_the_P...

This doesn't invalidate the point, it reinforces it. It's a system that continues, rooted in the structural foundations of the governments of historically colonial/slave-trading powers.

It's not exactly surprising to see an exemption carved out for it in European documents.

It's indeed lamentable that we live in a society where forced community and military service is considered necessary. But it's a tad myopic to believe such constitutional exceptions are rooted in "colonial/slave-trading powers". You're pushing a narrative that just doesn't fit the facts. Just because penal systems were coopted to further discriminatory ends doesn't mean these exclusions are intrinsically rooted in Jim Crow or colonialism. Such a misdiagnosis is a recipe for failure in reform--both regarding specific, discriminatory abuses, and more general abuses that arise from the fact these exceptions are far more deeply and universally rooted in global human civilization. Show me a single country that doesn't impose incarceration, for example? (Incarceration isn't usually an enumerated exclusion simply because, for whatever reasons, it's more typically understood that incarceration or similar deprivation of rights is implicitly excluded from any enumerated right granting freedom of movement. Indeed, the labor as punishment exclusion is presumably more common precisely because societies happen to be more self-aware about the conflict given the relatively recent history in the West abolishing slavery and servitude.)

Right, but the parent's point is that this aspect skews representation quite a bit. (I'm not sure of the constitutionality) but one option would be to not count prisoners or non-voters when tallying up representatives. My understanding is that Canada allows people in prison to vote--this would solve it more simply. I also understand the jurisdiction for someone in prison is their address prior to being incarcerated--which sounds like an even better solution.

I know it's SOP to strip voting for felons. It's been enough of a challenge to restore voting rights in many areas, but there are other ways to address this problem and basically incentivize this.

Prison gerrymandering is a triple-whammy in a sense. Not only is the prisoner stripped of their right to vote, the [likely white] community where the prison is located is allowed to count the prisoner in their census for the purposes of allocating resources at every level of government AND the community where the prisoner is from loses a Census taker.

I recently heard someone describe it as an echo of the three-fifths compromise. I also hadn't realized HR1 and other bills look to be making progress at getting rid of the practice:

https://www.congress.gov/amendment/116th-congress/house-amen...

Black Americans are 0.5% of the population of the world, but fully 8% of its prisoners. Race is certainly relevant when you're talking about the US.

Now do crime stats

Poor people commit more crimes.

We made sure black people were poor by enslaving them and then systematically discriminating.

We white people owe the descendants of slaves reparations. Inequality gets worse over generations, not better.

Mormons were prosecuted too. Kicked out of Missouri. They GTFO'd and trekked west and established new settlements. Jews also have a history of prejudice, yet they seem to always leave their next generation better off.

At some point people just have to fight for what's theirs in this world, not always gonna be someone to help us up.

That view is unreasonable and those are deeply incomparable examples.

Yeah, that's really not so different from being sold naked in irons at slave auctions for centuries. Also similar is the way everyone can identify jews by the star on their foreheads, and mormons by the bright glow of their genitals.

The Mormons kicked out of Missouri were free people before and after. They had access to all kinds of resources, were allowed to get an education, own land, accumulate wealth and (with limited exceptions) vote, etc.

Meanwhile basically all Black people in America were enslaved for the next 30 years, millions died under slavery and millions were suddenly freed and given nothing. "Separate but equal" wasn't even for another 30 years and segregation & Jim Crow were another 70 years after that!

By the time Black people were reasonably allowed to participate in US society, politics & business they had been forcibly held back in the only ways to get ahead (accumulating education, land and money) by hundreds of years.

Yes. Any wealth accumulation even by free Black communities was repeatedly undermined and destroyed.

The bombing of Black Wall Street (Greenwood-Tulsa) is the most infamous example: the only air bombings to be set upon the continental United States were a campaign of racial terror.

Numerous examples exist of freedman communities being completely eradicated using public works projects. Entire towns flooded when it came to decisions to create dams and neighborhoods bulldozed when the interstate expressways were run through cities.

https://twitter.com/ericabuddington/status/13752633634716549...

> the only air bombings to be set upon the continental United States were a campaign of racial terror.

They weren't the only aerial bombings in the continental US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

By income level, ignoring race.

Now adjust for context.

I just did, and you didn't like it :)

Race Realism is widely discredited bullshit, thanks

Hahahaha

That begs the question entirely. Only the people convicted of a crime make up the relevant crime statistics.

People who aren't arrested and convicted don't show up in crime stats, so crime stats and punishment stats are identical. You're begging the question.

Since males are also incarcerated at a rate many multiples of females, is the prison system also sexist?

Or is your explanation for that „that males commit more crimes“?

You might want to be careful applying this logic to the black incarceration rates, then.

Prisons aren't disproportionately located in majority-female areas.

Prisons are, however, disproportionately located in majority-white areas. Prison gerrymandering allows majority white communities to count Black prisoners from outside their community in their census while stripping them of their ability to vote. It gives the white community more power and resources, and takes not only from the prisoner their right to vote, but from the prisoner's community a census taker. The Census is literally how representatives in the House are allocated and per-capita funding is divided.

The prison location has nothing to do with the location of the crime. Not every town has a prison, and prisoners often get shifted around to different prisons for various reasons (security requirements etc.)

Also, pretty much all of the US is „majority female“, even if it‘s just by 1.6%.

A far simpler explanation for the same pattern would be that prisons take up a lot of space, and are therefore often located outside of urban centers, and rural areas also happen to be whiter than average. People generally also don't want to live near prisons, making it politically expedient to stick them somewhere out of sight in the boonies.

Those reasons seem a lot more convincing to me than a concerted effort to shave a few fractions of a percent off census data.

The benefit of the doubt can only go so far, extending it to this issue is an exercise in willful ignorance of the history of this country[1] and how it has systematically accumulated and protected white wealth at the expense of people of color. It's not just "a fraction of a percent." It's one in five. "One in five people in prison for at least 10 years is a black man incarcerated before age 25.[2]"

You have no idea the sheer magnitude of the problem we have here.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619...

2. https://apps.urban.org/features/long-prison-terms/demographi...

I think prison demographics have a lot more to do with inequalities in the justice system and how different communities are policed than it does who actually "commits more crimes", especially when you start looking at things like fraud and non-violent drug offenses.

You’re intentionally jettisoning historical context (3/5 compromise + wording of fourteenth amendment) here

Could you elaborate what you refer two with those two concepts? As you can see, I am not doing anything intentional as I don‘t know enough about the „3/5 compromise“ and the 14th admt

First, my bad! I mixed up 13 and 14 -- I meant the 13th amendment.

So first, the 3/5 compromise:

When the constitution was being drafted, there was a disagreement between the free and slave states (actually, I'm not sure if there were any free states, or if at the time the North was just not reliant on slave labor and essentially winding it down).

The north wanted slaves to not count towards your state's population for the purposes of apportioning house representatives. Since slaves could not vote, they argued, they shouldn't count towards your representation in the federal government.

The south, on the other hand, wanted slaves to count towards the state's population for apportioning house representatives. Since slaves still required the same resources to survive as non-slaves, they argued, they should be counted.

This ultimately led to the "3/5 compromise": slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of apportioning house representatives.

Now, fast forward to the federal abolishment of slavery, the 13th amendment. It explicitly says "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." So it is very squarely placing prisoners in the same historical context as slaves, and they were thought of and reasoned about as such.

So in the end, it seems straightforward to me that the state of slavery and prisons in America deliberately reduces the representation of black people. This is by design. While it does effectively increase the representation of women, there's far less of an argument to be made that it's an intentional feature of the system.

NOTE: In checking these sources, I discovered that the 14th amendment (actually the 14th this time) says that voters who have become ineligible to vote shouldn't be counted towards your representation. Maybe it was superceded by a later amendment?

SECOND NOTE: Here's an NPR article mentioning the prisons-count-as-population-for-representation concept: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806...

The implication of your comment is that there is something inherent in black people that makes them more likely to end up in prison. Are sure you want go down that road?

One could rephrase your comment like this:

The implication of your comment is that there is something inherent in males that makes them more likely to end up in prison. Are sure you want go down that road?

That‘s the point I‘m trying to make.

Testosterone perhaps?

Are you arguing that communities should be allowed to artificially inflate their voting population with non-voting prisoners? Do you think that's just and fair?

I do not care about details of US election laws. For what‘s worth, no, I do not believe communities should be able to inflate their voting population like that, but I have literally never heard of this topic ever being an issue anywhere else in the world. So that‘s like me asking „Do you think that it‘s fair that kids have free from school on carnival days“? You wouldn‘t care about this super-localized societal micro-issue either, assuming you‘re from the US and not Brazil.

OP provided two links for context, both of which were clear about being about the US prison system.

You've picked an odd subthread to take your stand in then, since that's explicitly the topic of the post you are replying to.

Looking at the U.S.A., it seems obvious to me that the following four things are true:

- Males commit more crimes than females

- Males are more easily, and longer incarcerated than females on the same evidence.

- Blacks commit more crimes than whites

- Blacks are are more easily, and loner incarcerated than whites on the same evidence

“careful?”, I'll be frank that I smell the stench of U.S.A. culture war identity politics where facts that should obvious to everyone are not examined on their veracity, but on “What team might the messenger be playing for?”. — what is there to be “careful” about what seems to be the obvious?

I really wish I could fully agree but in a nation of over three hundred million it is easily expected to have a few hundred thousand not fit to be in society.

now what we should be doing is removing any one not convicted of a violent crime from any prison. This means mostly drug offenses and this would mean we would have to stop putting people in jail for business activities.

see this is what I find interesting about HN. People will scream their lungs out that prisons are bad ignoring yet turn around and cheer on threads here wanting to put executives into them.

Sorry, make up your mind. Violent crimes deserve prison all others deserve probation and fines

~$40,000/inmate/year... :(

Is it cheaper in other countries? It makes sense when considering they're paying for housing, food, infrastructure, maintenance, security, and overhead.

It’s far cheaper - because they mostly have an order of magnitude fewer prisoners per capita.

That's not how economy of scale works.

Capitalism here means getting the highest price per inmate, and getting the most inmates you can.

Efficiencies of scale are profits, not cost savings

I've no idea why you're getting downvoted.

Private prisons in the US negotiate agreements with the states with minimum occupancy clauses. [1]

Speaking of an amoral dereliction of duty of care.

[1] http://www.aublr.org/2017/11/private-prison-contracts-minimu...

Because what he describes is extortion not free market, there is a difference.

I think on a superficial level the whole system is not setup to deliver quality outcomes for anyone.

Prison is not a free market and is not subject to market efficiencies. The purpose is to extract the maximum possible value from human suffering. They do this by charging them obscene prices for every basic necessity, double charging the government for their needs, renting them out as slave labor (mandatory work at wages of a couple of dollars per day), and then lobbying fiercely to keep their position. The private prisons want it to be more costly, beacuse they have monopoly contracts and guaranteed sales.

The price per prisoner isn't the relevant metric. Total price to society, from the cost of maintaining and manning prisons, from the cost of lost human connections with those imprisoned, and from lost productivity from those imprisoned, is a relevant metric. A prison system with a 36% 2-year recidivism rate (United States) is a failure when compared to a prison system with only 20% 2-year recidivism rate (Norway), no matter how cheaply it may be managed.

The goal of a functioning prison system is to manage itself out of existence.

Prisoners, and taxpayers, do not benefit from economies of scale.

It depends. The US isn't the most or least expensive.

https://ipa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IPA-Report-Aus...

See page 5.

The US incarceration rate, though, is just nuts.

Not really. In 2014 the average in Europe was 103 euro per day, making that 37,595 euro per year per inmate. The variance is quite high since Sweden for example pays on average 226,665 euro per year, while Bulgaria pays 1,095 on average per year.

Interestingly, Norway which is famous for its rehabilitation focused prison system is cheaper than the one in Sweden, with around half the cost.

I'm actually a bit surprised it's that low, I was guessing more in the range of $70k myself.

I've read it can be that high, but the $40k amount, I believe is an average.

Don't forget the average American who believes prison is synonymous for revenge. Born and raised here, and it's always been shocking how prison is entirely about punishment and very little time spent on rehabilitation. "Revenge system" is more accurate probably.

If someone killed a family member of mine id believe in the revenge system pretty fast.

Laws are supposed to codify what we want the ideal society to be, not what our rage-fueled selves crave.

Right, it also serves to remove that person from society as they are a threat to others. When you kill someone, it stops being about you and your "rehabilitation" and more about other people.

When you kill someone, it stops being about you and your "rehabilitation" and more about other people.

That's not correct, and tells something about your preconception. I was told by someone who had been to prison that those doing time for murder or manslaughter are considered less dangerous, they killed their target and that was that. The ones in there for GBH, those are the ones you have to look out for, they have low impulse control and low intelligence and are basically incorrigible.

I'm not sure if I take this comment seriously and answer it to be honest.

The comment was meant extremely seriously. It's the old conflict of intent versus outcomes. A murderer certainly intended to kill his target, but such a person isn't necessarily volatile or dangerous. But an impulsive person may well kill a person or three even though he didn't intend to. What's worse, and what should society do about it?

I would, if I were you. Seriously.

From a policy POV, the comment is entirely serious and rational, appropriate.

GBH == Grievous Bodily Harm, for anyone else who didn't know before.

Do you have a citation for that assertion? I’ve got plenty to the contrary.

Laws from what I’ve seen are to codify expected behavior so it isn’t arbitrary. The tone and nature of them is up to the legislator.

From a jurisprudence perspective, they really mostly codify our collective morals as norms, so if you assume we all aim to have our morals to be as close to an ideal as possible–which I think is a fair assumption–, then the original statement is true.

Which is not to say that we do in fact write laws that codify those ideals, hence the words "supposed to" in my prior comment.

I can probably dig up a citation tomorrow when I hope have a little more free time, but not making any promises either, sorry

Have you read Lessig on this topic in his book, "Code?"

One chapter covers the basic forces regulating behavior:

Physics - The world and our understanding of it place bounds on what can and cannot be done.

Money and Markets - The cost of things place bounds on what can and cannot be done.

Both of these prevent behavior, as in taking behavior off the table no matter how compelling it may otherwise be.

The other two, norms and laws lack this property, instead act post fact.

Laws - Describe acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and carry consequences, remedies for unacceptable behavior.

Physics takes driving above some speeds impossible. Speed bumps, etc...

Speed limits do not actually prevent anything, only impose costs, by way of example.

Norms - Work like laws, only are largely enforced socially.

There is a lot more in the book.

My point here is leaning on law to manage behavior is not particularly effective. Getting more of the better behavior more of the time is systemic. Requires action on all fronts.

I have personally never come across a political ideology that I consider to be properly self-consistent in regards to justice, I don’t think any society has a rational idea of what they want their justice system to do. Speaking generally, the right place a lot of importance on law and order, as well as individual liberty. Yet those ideals are in direct contention. The left is very concerned protecting marginalized groups from injustices, but the communities of marginalized groups tend to be the most heavily impacted by crime. Why not come to some agreement on what we want our justice system to do before trying to reform it? Because most theories for reform that I come across tend to either imagine that victims of crime aren’t important, or that the rights of the accused aren’t important.

Of the 2.3 million people currently serving time in the US prison system, less than 10% are incarcerated for some kind of homicide. When you consider that murder carries the longest sentences, the proportion looks even smaller.

The idea that all prisoners can be compared to murderers is a major reinforcing myth that perpetuates the system of abuse and allows people to tell themselves it's okay. It's not okay.

The world looks at us in horror, rightly.

Thats fair. As long as its not serious (violent) or repeated crime.

This is a pretty sad and myopic view of humanity. People are functions of their environment. A bad environment causes criminality. Putting people with criminal histories in an environment where they're surrounded by and threatened by other criminals serves to reinforce the unwanted behavior.

The duty of the state shouldn't be to exact revenge (which by the way, studies show, after a threshold incremental punishment does nothing) but rather to give folks the tools to escape their environments. That means showing them how to live in the real world.

At the end of the day the state should measure the efficacy of a prison system against recidivism and total population crime rate. The individual cases shouldn't really factor in.

Whats sad? That violent people should be removed from society to prevent them from injuring other people? At some point you reject making excuses and put in a hard-stop. Being in a constant state of understanding is not how you govern a country if you want it to be peaceful and cleaned up. People need to be in charge of their actions at the end of the day.

That's a pretty big misreading of my point.

> That violent people should be removed from society to prevent them from injuring other people?

No, I made it clear that I believe the efficacy of a prison system should be measured by total population crime rate and recidivism rates. The US prison system fails to achieve the goal you're implying it does. It has a very high recidivism and reconviction rate. In a sense, my point is more that "we've tried it your way and it's not working."

The goal should be to, as you say, "stop people from injuring other people" in the future. You can't un-injure someone in the past, and the constitution provides for proportional punishments in the 8th amendment if I'm not mistaken, so people will end up out of prison at some point. The question on my mind is how to make sure that when they do, they don't injure more people.

Recidivism rates are available for your review: [1]. My point is rather that the plan you're advocating for isn't achieving the result that you're telling me it is.

> Being in a constant state of understanding is not how you govern a country if you want it to be peaceful and cleaned up.

Being data-driven is how you achieve goals, and the data says this is the wrong approach.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6743246/

While I'm sure you'd be pretty mad - as would I, that doesn't make it an optimal approach. Unless you lock up or kill these people, they'll return to society. Once they do, you want them not to cause the same harm to others. Rehabilitation is the right play.

Im pretty good with 40 year sentences for egregious cases of murders and rapists. If they want to give it another shot when they're 70 years old, have at it.

If we ballpark the average annual cost per inmate at $40K, that's a $1.6M price tag on "pretty good" -- assuming the costs don't continue to rise dramatically.

The ideal justice system would not help you get revenge on someone who killed your family, but dissuade anyone from killing your family in the first place?

Alternatively, the “revenge system” is superior to the “blood feud system” because the “never mind, no biggie system” isn’t likely palatable to many crime victims (although on the last claim I don’t have any specific knowledge, maybe they would go for it on the whole).

Crime victims should honestly have zero input into the law. They're simply too emotionally invested to approach it rationally.

I think he's saying that if you completely ignore the "natural" desire of some the victims for at least some punishment you will just end up with said victims taking justice into their own hands. So if you are so lenient to the point where a lot of victims & society in general start disregarding the justice system because they think its unjust, you could just end up with a lot of extra judicial revenge.

In a way I kind of agree. Because while yes the victims shouldn't have a say in what sentence or punishment a perpetrator gets, taking it to the extreme and just completely disregarding the other party's grievances is probably dangerous and undermines the justice system. If you get a lot of people feeling that there is no justice to be had from the system, you end up with a super dangerous situation & I know how deeply that feeling can erode the social fabric since it happened in my home country.

First of all, other systems in other societies point to that it is not the only possibility. Second, the laws and regulations transform how society views criminals. I think in more modern crime systems (I come from Sweden) criminals are often viewed as victims themselves and the main goal is rehabilitation (quite obvious since it will lead to the most reduction in crime over time).

Why do Americans believe vigilante justice is more inevitable than the citizens of other developed countries?

Because we know the absurd amount of guns that surrounds us at any given time, and are acutely aware of how flimsy hunting and personal protection are as excuses for the intent behind the ownership of small arsenals.

Cant disagree! The knee-jerk reaction of “there aughtta be a law” to any wrong is part of the problem.

Surely in modern society we can do better than Weregild forms of justice and pseudo-medieval revenge systems. It's mind numbing that when people think crime and punishment the only references we use are ancient germanic codes.

So you're kind of mocking the guy above but it's a real thing: the American criminal justice theory shifted towards retributive justice (where the point is to punish criminals) around the middle of last century. There are alternative models including reformative justice (where the point is to reform the offenders) and restorative justice (where the point is to try to undo or balance out the damage done by crimes).

There are many reform advocates that suggest things should shift more towards those latter two, but the current state is that the main point is to do something bad to someone who did something bad.

For sure, in theory practice is no different.

to most people the whole concept of "justice" is revenge, and "just" means being able to get what other people have. It permiates all aspects of society.

When I first watched U.S.A. legal dramata on television, I was a bit taken back by how natural and normal they make revenge-oriented legal arguments sound.

It's not portrayed as an unusual thing that the entire system seems to purely be designed for retribution and all the characters act as though that be obvious.

The overwhelming majority of the world thinks that justice should incorporate revenge. The punishment component of justice only serves two purposes, deterrence and revenge. Controversies about sentencing being too lenient happen routinely all over the world, and the basis of those controversies tends to be that the revenge wasn’t sufficient, not that the deterrence isn’t effective.

I don't know why the first thing that came to my mind was that $40k/yr is about the same amount a grad student receives in the US (including stipend, tuition waivers, health insurance etc.).

The current prison systems in the US (and the UK to a lesser extent) are insane and counterproductive. It’s hard to imagine how someone would make it through a sentence in one of these places without becoming a hardened criminal, a drug addict, or both.

Our prisons are factories which churn out career criminals. It has to be stopped. Countless lives are being lost to, or permanently ruined by, ex-prisoners who might otherwise have been rehabilitated into a more normal life, after serving their time.

Prison should not be fun. Perhaps it shouldn’t even be comfortable. But we can’t go on with prisons like they are now.

For EU users: https://archive.is/rChRr

While I do agree that the system has many opportunities for improvement, the idea that the vast majority of the people “in the system” can be rehabilitated is comical. Most people that can be rehabilitated have their run in with the law and straighten their act out. You don’t end up with a mile long rap sheet and on parole if you are amenable to rehabilitation. Let alone prison. You just don’t. If you actually knew a parole officer and heard what they had to deal with on a day to day basis, for very little money, you would become a “tough on crime” person. The bigger question is why do we have a culture and society where so many turn to a literal “life of crime”. Why do people begin stealing, doing drugs, and committing violence to begin with. A lot of it begins at home, but nobody wants to talk about that.

Why do you think that a lot more Americans end up in prison compared to say Norwegians ? Is it culture ?

Destruction of the family unit. Lack of economic opportunities. And many sub-cultures that glorify and fetishize crime.

Don’t the three factors you list all feed into each other ? I recently found a shocking statistic that the lifetime probability for a black man to go to prison is 30 %. That directly leads to social breakdown and lack of economic opportunities. This directly leads to crime being seen as the way out.

Jailing more and more people is a death spiral.

Not even getting into the issues of prisons being run as for profit institutions that can use prisoners as slave labor. Or that prisoners can have their voting rights removed. Or that all this disproportionately falls on certain groups.

I think it is safe to assume that they do and have a synergistic effect with pumping people into the criminal justice system. And I do think there is plenty of reform, such as eliminating a for profit motive in incarceration. But putting 100% of the focus and onus on reforming the system is never going to give us the results we want. By the time people have done enough crime to end up on parole or in prison very few are coming back. We need to resolve some of the deeper issues, and they are not easy to solve. How can the government force a family to stay together? They can’t. But they could address lack of economic opportunities. As we know finances are one of the main drivers of failed relationships and homes. We have to admit to ourselves that not every person is cut out for college or a desk job. These people need meaningful work. Instead we export those jobs and import the misery.

I’m not an American but I think it’s not fair to focus on the jobs being exporting rather than the people doing the exporting. There’s no shortage of funding for wars. Wars in the Middle East have cost 5-10 trillion as per various estimates. There are trillions of dollars held abroad in tax havens that the government is too afraid to touch. America has enough money to give every family high quality education, college, daycare and welfare Cheques.

I agree on the endless overseas misadventures. As far as the economics go, the government makes it easy to crush the blue collar working class. I do not fault the business for doing what they do when the government makes it so very easy for them. My idea would be to come up with a metric like the human development index and use that to calculate the tariff placed on goods produced in other countries. Obviously countries which abuse labor and do not respect human rights, such as China, would face a huge tariff. A country such as Canada would face little or no tariff.

I completely disagree with putting people on welfare. It should be there as a safety net, not a lifestyle. People will be much happier and less prone to engage in crime of if they are occupied in gainful employment.

Too many stories of people being deprived of bare essentials in US prisons like water and access to a toilet. It’s absolutely horrific.

While I was in federal prison (during COVID-19) at another area of the prison inmates were allowed out of their cells for 30 minutes every 3 days and they had to choose between: (a) take a shower (b) make a phone call or (c) speak to staff or file some kind of paperwork. Note that they are essentially required to pick (a) since other inmates have to live within 4 feet of them and if they "willingly" choose to not shower they will be seen as disrespecting others.

This was because of COVID-19 causing a "lockdown" but I was told that this situation wasn't new and that over the last few years that area of the prison was locked down about 30% of the time.

It's also worth mentioning that the area of the prison was a holding area mostly for minimum security inmates - eg. inmates that have non-violent records with some other qualifications.

Shot Caller starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau should be mandatory in US high school civics courses.

Well to do family man enters the California penal system for a DUI, is systemically raped, assaulted, and has his family's life threatened on the outside. In order to survive he is forced to join a white supremacist gang and participate in criminal activities that evolve into a life long sentence. This is "justice" apparently.

Is this actually reality in the US though? Pretty much everyone I’ve known who went to jail said you could just keep to yourself and you’d be fine. Most people in jail aren’t hardened criminals.

Depends on if it's jail or prison, and what level of security/crimes.

Jail is usually short term, so is less of a clique/gang issue (except some areas).

Right, but the folks I’ve talked to about it in a prison context basically said if you can stay away from the drugs / alcohol you won’t get caught up in the gang stuff. Most “prisons” in the US are minimum security prison camps; if you go to prison for DUI you’d almost certainly end up there. Most of the people there are non-violent offenders with short sentences.

The ones with the gang problems are maximum security, but unless you were involved with real serious shit (murder, armed robbery, rape, etc) you won’t end up there if you behave. This is discounting some of the racial bias however (if you’re black or Hispanic you’re much more likely to end up in high security prisons).

i've spent a night in the pokey once or twice, yeah, mostly people just want to be left alone (prison is different thing than jail though). It's a weird feeling when the door shuts and you know you can't get out. Most people are pretty quiet and just thinking about how bad they screwed up heh.

When I saw 'raped', there's also the story of Abner Luoima.

That's a fictional drama.

There are better resources for learning about the American prison system, just like you probably shouldn't learn about MI6 from James Bond.

Fictional dramas are shown in schools all the time, even if they're not an official part of the curriculum. If we can be shown Pocahontas and The Patriot (a film where among other things Mel Gibson slays 30+ British soldiers with a tomahawk of all things) we can be shown one that portrays American cruelties as well.

> If we can be shown Pocahontas and The Patriot...

I don't think schools should include either of these, either, beyond "we're having a relaxing movie day as a treat". Certainly no one should base their understanding of American history on them.

From the Wikipedia entry of this movie, it sounds like he killed someone while driving drunk. Hard to call that a "DUI."

> One night he drives his wife and friends home after dinner and causes a collision which kills one of his friends. Advised to take a plea deal due to him being under the influence of alcohol at the time of the accident, Jacob is sentenced to 16 months at the California Institution for Men in Chino.

People should learn from made up stories?

Absolutely. Are you serious? Do you not learn anything from literature?

Yes I'm serious. Sure you can learn from made up stories if they reflect reality or are metaphors for it. But some exaggerated Hollywood story isn't go to teach you anything if it isn't grounded in reality.

Felon (2008) is a decent drama movie that follows an interesting story as well. It's worth mentioning that the vast majority of people locked up aren't there for DUI, rape, murder, theft, etc. They are there because some plant is illegal.

If this was all "working" I don't think I would be as upset. If the streets were clear of drug addicts and addiction rate was low, then it would all be "worth" the cost were paying both in dollars and cost of violating others rights. But, it doesn't work.

>They are there because some plant is illegal.

That's a common belief, but it isn't true. More than half of people in state prisons are serving sentences for violent crimes. I see you were in the Feds, so it's almost half that are in there for a drug-trafficking offense. Your perception is likely somewhat skewed since you were in a low or camp, not a medium or pen. As you certainly know, there are security classifications in the BOP, and non-violent drug-traffickers typically won't be housed with the rapists and murderers. Someone with 0-11 points isn't going to be around someone with 24+ points.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths...

That's an interesting perspective, however those Low/Minimum security zones account for more than half of the entire federal population:

Minimum 23,439 (15.4%) Low 55,133 (36.3%)

https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_sec_l...

Also consider that there are inmates that didn't actually commit violent crimes that are labeled as such because they received gun enhancements to their sentence for the ownership of a firearm even if not on their person during the "furtherance of the crime". Yes, there are people who are sitting in prison longer than they should be because they had legally owned firearms at their house while they were growing a plant.

That article you linked tries to paint an invalid picture of how prison populations are kept artificially high to protect the jobs and industries that surround correction institutions. There are union groups across different sectors that rally hard to ensure that humans are warehoused to pay the bills.

To illustrate how full the low/minimum prisons are with drug offenders your first day there everyone will greet you and if you're there for drug related crimes the second anyone hears "drug" they just wave their hand because they have heard the story so many times and there is almost never any variation. I'm not a drug offender, I was there for a computer-hacking related charge, but I basically got to the point where I could guess all the different elements of their story like how much they were getting paid per drug run (it seems to be about $2,000 per run for the low level mules, if anyone is curious)

>however those Low/Minimum security zones account for more than half of the entire federal population

OK, but your claim that the "vast majority" of people locked up are there "because some plant is illegal" is still not valid. It would only be true if you're looking at only the people in camp/low classifications, which is why I argue that your perception is skewed. In reality, a little less than half of people in the Federal system are there for drug-trafficking offenses.

>Also consider that there are inmates that didn't actually commit violent crimes that are labeled as such because they received gun enhancements

This is not true. A 922(g) or other gun crime or enhancement does not count as a violent crime, it's a public order offense.

>firearms at their house while they were growing a plant

You keep circling back to this "growing a plant" thing, do you have information on how many people are imprisoned on marijuana charges? From all the drug-traffickers I met in the federal system, none were there for marijuana offenses. Every drug-trafficker I met was there for methamphetamine, cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin, or some combination thereof. Can you show some data on the breakdown of substance types that backs up your claim?

>That article you linked tries to paint an invalid picture of how prison populations are kept artificially high to protect the jobs and industries that surround correction institutions. There are union groups across different sectors that rally hard to ensure that humans are warehoused to pay the bills.

The article mentions public-sector employee unions being the ones with an interest in keeping prisons open and staffed, do you have examples of the union groups in different sectors that do so? It would seem to me that a union in a sector that doesn't rely cheap prison labor would have no interest in keeping those prisons open.

I'm not even disagreeing that the prison population should be reduced, but your numbers and assertions are wrong.

Aside: If anyone here has some spare time as the pandemic ends, here is the BoP guide to volunteering in prisons:

https://www.bop.gov/jobs/volunteer.jsp

Volunteering can take many forms including:

-Vocational training

-Alcoholics Anonymous

-Narcotics Anonymous

-Tutoring

-Leisure-time activities

-Spiritual counseling

-Religious services

-Marriage and family issues

-Preparing/participating in mock job fairs

Additionally, you can donate to help those in prison. Book donations are especially popular and appreciated:

https://prisonbookprogram.org/donate-books/

Please, contact your local prison to find out more and what they specifically are interested in.

https://www.usa.gov/prisons

For those interested on the history of the prison industrial complex and political fundraising and how New York State Governor Mario Cuomo (Governor Andrew Cuomos dad) started it:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-pri...

Cruelty is the point

> I am familiar with the cynical riposte that jail isn't supposed to be fun. But we Americans can do better than that. The punishments received should be those mandated by the legal system, as properly expressed through the decisions of judges and juries. Some people might wish to argue for tougher penalties for some crimes and thus for some criminals, and that is a debate worth having. That is precisely the point: Such judgments should be made after public debate, not by gang powers within a prison.

I’m not sure they’re meaning it should be the point, but that our system, as designed, is to inflict as much harm (not justice) as we can on people that we think are less than us.

They may not agree with it morally at all, but that could be what they see.

Yeah, I took it as an indictment of the current system, not a defense of it. If they'd meant it to be a defense they likely would have said something like "if you can't do the time don't do the crime" and "It's called consequences", and other neutral to positive phrases. 'Cruelty' is generally considered a negative term; to apply it to something else is usually to pass judgement on that something else.

I believe they're suggesting that these systems are designed to be cruel, and that there are people who desire that.

I was astonished while I was working on COVID-19 in jails that the statement "Someone shouldn't die of COVID because they can't afford bail" as something that got active pushback by some people.

"The Cruelty is the Point — President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear" is a 2018 Adam Serwer essay from The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...

I concur that "the cruelty is the point" captures the driving force behind "Why America's prisons are an unconstitutional moral horror".

This describes Trumpism to a T, thanks.

I think Serwer described something much older, something that transcends 2018's political actors and today's American political party alignments. Imposing suffering affirms your own power and the powerlessness of your enemies — and that's something intrinsic to the darker side of human nature.

The current moral malady of the US prison system goes back to the 90s and the infamous 1994 crime bill which intensified the racial iniquities of the US justice system. It was bad long before that, too — it's not something which started with the 2016 presidential election. But in my view, "the cruelty is the point" also describes the sentiments of the 1990s crime panic.

Except there point in the Constitution that says otherwise.

The Constitution isn't inviolable. It only holds up as long as people are willing to defend it. And there are very few people who care about the livelihood of prisoners.

Prisons are part of the justice system. The people working there must be willing to abide by the Constitution, or they shouldn't be working there.

Sure I get your point, in the end the Constitution is only a piece of paper, it's not inviolable de facto but by law it is.

Force lawyers to do Public Defense like medical residency for drs. for 3 years. problem solved

The horror of prisons is tied just as much to the people that occupy them. If there wasn’t so much violence in prison, it would be easier to create a better living environment.

Why do you think there is so much violence in prisons?

Is it because it is full of criminals?

Other economies prisons are full of criminals too. Its the USA and I believe Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and Russia which seem to have this persisting gang culture in prison. And, also have extremely violent prison culture.

The Netherlands has a much less violent prison culture. Britain is hardly perfect but has a much less violent prison culture.

They're all full of criminals.

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Enjoy: https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2016/03/26050/

Please don't post flamebait to HN. It's great to include relevant links to other sources, but not with snarky one liners, especially when the topic is inflammatory.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As with the health care debate, the US is also an outlier when discussing prisons: "The United States has ... the highest incarceration rate in the world"[1]

Canada has less than 1/6th the US incarceration rate and Mexico just over 1/5th.

Interesting to keep this in mind while reading the rest of these comments.

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

This is what a lot of the other “well if you commit crimes then you go to jail” people in this thread are missing. They need to explain why Americans commit 6 times more crimes than Canadians.

Probably all those white supremacists that those other counties don’t have.

If you’re sarcastically implying what I think you’re implying which is that certain minorities commit a disproportionate number of crimes in the US, that still doesn’t explain it. All countries even wealthy ones have disaffected minorities that are economically and socially backward. But among the first world countries only America has such a severe crime problem.

I’m sarcastically implying that attempting to apply someone else’s marginally successful model to a totally different culture is a recipe for a bad time.

Canada is not a “totally different culture”. Also, your definition of marginally is ... odd.

And why does the US almost 3x the rate of nations like China which we like to point out as human rights repressive. (and yes that includes third party estimates of political prisoners).

I’m not sure if people in the US realize that they make a big issue about forced labor in China while having one of the worlds largest prison populations that is also subject to forced labor. I rarely see this discussed.

They don't; the USA is ridiculously tough on minor offenses, or even behaviors that are not even wrong, like possessing drugs.

Idk about Canada but I know I do not want anything to do with a country that has its own people fleeing in droves. If Mexico has everything figured out societally they wouldn’t be running to us so fast. Not to mention all the people who pass through to get the US.

And btw, those same Mexicans don’t ask for permission to pass through the US to get to Canada for a better life... they ask to stay here or they just do stay here, if Canada really were the better option more ppl would be trying to get there vs stay in the US.

On paper Mexico is a liberal paradise: low incarceration rates, large social safety nets, large federally owned companies; and yet, in practice, that translates to an unmotivated workforce, an absolutely corrupt police force, and an inability to bring many people out of poverty.

You realize a lot of the people who you are falsely identifying as Mexicans are from other Central and South American countries?

You realize that makes your argument worse.

I’m extremely soft on crime because I believe that countries which have adopted this stance have reduced levels of crime. As a Canadian, this is clear as day to me just by comparing the US to Canada.

It’s annoying when talking to people who disagree because their argument is in essence that I don’t understand the concept of revenge or that my (perceived) permissiveness is a character fault. They also foolishly believe that maximum penalties act as a deterrent.

If someone commits a serious crime and the punishment is profoundly life altering then that person is just so much more likely to become violent, kill witnesses, try their luck at a high speed chase, whatever.

Having a parent in jail statistically raises the likelihood of delinquency. Growing up in poverty can feel like it’s own type of prison. It’s just so obvious to me why the crime rate is so high. But people who support the death penalty (as an example) are just so firmly stuck in the nature vs nurture mentality.

“So you think that someone who rapes and kills children should walk away?” They always fall on this line as though people like me just simply don’t get it when from the way I see it, it’s them who have blood lust for murder and they just don’t care at all to consider the systemic effect that their mentality has.

“Soft on crime” is a generational investment so that the next batch of kids won’t be as fucked up as we are.

You're talking specifically about murder and such.

Surely, the reason the incarceration rate is 6 times higher in the USA than in Canada isn't because Canada is soft on first degree murder.

Much softer than America. There is no death penalty, for example.

Mexico might not be a good example because they have problems such as cartels being more powerful than the state military and cartel members holding public executions while police turn a blind eye.

It's a fascinating example for two reasons: 1) the drug cartels are powerful because of the massively lucrative drug trade with the US and 2) overall crime in Mexico is actually pretty comparable or lower than the US in many areas, especially if you account for inter-cartel violence [1]

[1] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Mexico/Uni...

The only reason American prisons are so horrific is that criminal gangs run them. There should be cameras everywhere, and every infraction should be punished. Once prisons stop being a lord of the flies horror show, restorative justice could be possible.

Man, there's a lot of sympathy for criminals in this thread. While there are always marginal cases that pull at the heart strings, generally speaking I don't actually care that rapists are having a bad time of it in prison. I genuinely don't. And that ambivalence extends to other criminal categories too. Usually this conversation devolves into a conversation around drug prosecutions and what many people see as excessive penalties. Historically, my answer has been that I favor drug legalization (meaning that's not so much a conversation about prisons sucking too much, but rather whether we're enforcing the right laws). But I have to admit I've grown more skeptical of legalization as I've seen what rampant drug use has done to west coast cities. Prison sentences, particularly uncomfortable ones, do in fact serve to deter crime, even if not all of it.

The standard problem with this view is that most prison sentences end, at which point society has to deal with the personalities that prison has forged.

To the degree they have committed a felony, either admitted or proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the personality has in most circumstances already been forged. While one can argue about rehabilitation and its efficacy, there are many urgent problems in society, and improving the conditions of prisoners in the hope of marginally improving rehabilitation efforts does not strike me as terribly pressing.

All this cruelty is incredibly expensive. Reducing it would mean more left over for those pressing problems, not less.

I encourage you to do some reading about the difference between Retributive Justice and Restorative Justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice

I've done plenty, starting well before law school. I mentioned deterrence and I never argued against rehabilitation.

"A restorative justice program aims to get offenders to take responsibility for their actions, to understand the harm they have caused, to give them an opportunity to redeem themselves and to discourage them from causing further harm."

What about this idea doesn't appeal to you? Why do you prefer to have them suffer?

I never said I preferred anyone suffer. I just said I'm ambivalent. But to your question, I am highly skeptical of the efficacy of those methods, and I think they come at marginal cost to deterrence. I also think there are better places for society to put its money than improving the lot of rapists in prison. I'm also of the opinion that, relative to other countries, US prisons are not the hell the author makes them out to be. By way of example: https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2016/03/26050/

How do you reconcile cases of wrongful imprisonment?

Only that it is exceedingly rare. Proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" is a very demanding standard, and is not even shared by all countries in the west, much less the rest of the world. Talk to any prosecutor and you will be assured that, notwithstanding the popular narrative, many, many more guilty people go free in the US than the other way around. But in any event, to the degree there are those who are wrongfully imprisoned, I cannot imagine that supporting an argument that other prisoners should somehow be treated better.

I find your entire position very upsetting. Compassion for everyone should be the ideal.

The notion that very human laws, can lead to very negative outcomes for people seems like a terrible system.

In addition, an estimated 40,000 people are wrongfully imprisoned in the US right now.

https://www.orentcriminallaw.com/wrongful-convictions-infogr...

I’m more inclined to attribute those “very negative outcomes” to the life choices of the criminals, which all too often come at the cost of innocent lives and livelihoods.

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