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Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.).

~$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.

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

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