Private Prisons Are Behind the Push for Homeless Criminalization | Hacker News Reader

Private Prisons Are Behind the Push for Homeless Criminalization

invisiblepeople.tv

696 pointstrasz601 comments

Mandatory reference: the kids-for-cash scheme [0] where private prisons paid a judge to send them children, often for the tiniest offense.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Extra context (from Wikipedia but somewhat buried):

The two judges receiving bribes were sentenced to 17.5 & 28 years in prison respectively.

The bribing company is still in operation today. One of the co-owners was sentenced to 18 months in prison for "failing to report a felony". The other co-owner at the time is now the sole owner and was not charged. His brother was and still is the District Attorney.

The fact that the bribing company is still operating and the owners or executives haven't been locked up for a long time, is plain disgusting. Executives should get locked up for the crimes they and their companies commit. Same with HSBC that only got a fine for massive money laundering.

In America, corporations are people but only when it comes to tax breaks. When it comes to criminal law, corporations are instruments of funding for lawmakers.

"I'll believe corporations are people when Texas sentences one to death."

(No idea who first said that. Someone on the internet, probably.)

I don't get this. HOW do you get to this conclusion?

Directly involved:

* the District Attorney

* 2 judges

* the director of ... of the Juvenile Probation Office

* the brother of the District Attorney, who ran the prison (he was convicted, NOT because he paid off corrupt judges, but because he lied about that)

* a supreme court lawyer

Indirectly involved:

* a supreme court justice personally

* the whole Pennsylvania supreme court

* the governor of Pennsylvania

* Pennsylvania's Judicial Conduct Board

* the FBI

Clearly the problem is "corporate america". Which means, Facebook and ExxonMobil, I guess? Seriously?

All were at the very least presented with evidence this was happening (most participated in it), all refused to help obviously wrongfully convicted children.

And when this was finally dealt with? What was the problem that needed fixing? What got the ball rolling you ask? Hundreds of complaints about improper sentencing? No. The district attorney realising obvious wrongdoing happening for years, quite literally right in front of them? No.

A childish squabble over who has to do what job, by court employees, resulting in judges accusing each other. One accuses the other of "conspiring" to remove her, and infighting over shared ownership of a Florida condo ... which lead to press coverage of what one judge was accusing others off ...

Needless to say, the justice system, judges, public prosecutor, the county and the state of Pennsylvania, needed to put the blame somewhere. Somehow, not a SINGLE dollar of damages has to come from them. One might add that had this in fact been private sector wrongdoing that there would be no question that the justice department, as the employer, would have been responsible for damages caused by their employees, the judges.

So: yes, clearly everything that's wrong with America is corporations and the private sector ... not at all corrupt government, who then even refuses to take responsibility for the actions of their employees, and then used parts of the damages to fund their own operations ...

Lots of other problems, such as the crime of treating the children so badly in the juvenile facility EVEN IF they would have been correctly convicted are still, shall we say "open problems". No convictions, no attempts at fixing anything. Everything from access to medical care to the temperature of the facilities is still illegal. To save the government a buck.

Clearly capitalism is what's to blame here ... that the public sector might do enormous damage due to corruption is apparently not possible, yet it's absurdly clear this is exactly what happened here on a very large scale (thousands of children). That they're still just openly violating the law in the very same place this happened, they're still mistreating juveniles (and adult convicts for that matter).

Frankly I'd argue power needs to be taken away from these people JUST based on the pathetic childish accusations between the judges that brought this to light.

Like HBC and Canada who continues to contribute to the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

Canada is not a country, it's a corporation, and should be held accountable as both. It has 0 claim to the land and they know it.

They launder money too

Why am i getting downvoted for speaking the truth?

Fk off racist pigs

I’m sure this had no bearing whatsoever on the fact that they weren’t charged but their father just so happened to have been a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice who (coincidentally, I’m sure) retired the same year the scheme began.

> His brother was and still is the District Attorney.

But of course he recused himself from the case for the obvious conflict of interest right? Right???

I didn't know this, thanks. And it's horrifying.

If you're ever in the mood to feel absolutely awful about the world, watch the video on https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2011/02/mom_blames_luzerne... (it's one of the references on the Cash-for-Kids Wikipedia page).

One kid was locked up by these evil people for a minor drug paraphernalia charge. He spiraled after that and ended up committing suicide. The video is the mom confronting the corrupt judge and the river of BS from his lawyer.

Why have I never heard of this?

How would a "important things in the world" algorithm work ?

One that is not "maximise engagement" but "maximise understanding of important shit"

Thank you for posting

It wouldn't. You need journalists to do that, who are both real people and real journalists. I think many of our divisions come from news sources that are either not curated by real people, or from journalists who are not real journalists.

It's not an algorithm, but I like Project Censored [0]. It's worth reading about their top 25 most censored/underreported stories [1]

[0] https://www.projectcensored.org/ [1] https://www.projectcensored.org/category/the-top-25-most-cen...

> Why have I never heard of this?

My hunch is because of some combo of

a) The attention economy. We're all overwhelmed. Filtering signal from noise is exhausting.

b) Manufacturing Consent's five filters of mass media. The economics of daily "news" determines what is covered. Yet another attention economy; and it's not clear to me that any other arrangement would be better.

c) Professional courtesy. Billionaire media moguls generally aren't going to narc on their billionaire hedge fund buddies.

Don't feel too bad about missing this outrage, or any other particular story. There's no shortage of outrageous stories. It's unending.

As a news junkie, from long before doom scrolling, I binge on this stuff. It's unhealthy.

Talking about it makes you sound like a lunatic to most people. Even worse, this stuff distracts you from living your best life and doing your own awesome thing.

The more effective policy people I know manage to somehow compartmentalize. Fighting the good fight is their day job, left at work. Off the clock, they do normal people stuff. The activists I know that don't do the work / life balance burn out. (Like I did.)

FWIW, outlets like Democracy Now!, Thom Hartmann, and Project Censored try to day light these memory hole stories.

Justice for Sale – Part 3: Greed Breeds Corruption [2015] https://www.projectcensored.org/justice-for-sale-part-3-gree...

Project Censored's Yearly Top 25 Most Censored Stories is a treasure. Allows me to binge less and periodically catch up on stuff I've missed.

https://www.projectcensored.org/top-25-censored-stories-of-a...

> How would a "important things in the world" algorithm work ?

I've tried to figure that out myself. The best I've come up with is Wikipedia's current events page. It's not ideal, but as a bone dry, non-sensationalized summary of things going on worldwide, it's pretty impressive. Sometimes it would be nice to have more context, but the linked articles usually help with that. It's biggest problem for me is it's a bit overwhelming realizing how often ferries sink and buses crash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

I’ve often thought I’d like to subscribe to the changelog of what’s taught in school, as the snapshot I received is increasingly dated by advances in science, refinements to social onboarding, and the continuation of human history.

Maybe historians would be better stewards of meaningful “news”.

I'm pretty sure this is the kind of thing maximized by current increase GRAAARGGH feeling in readers algorithms, there's just so much, you were probably getting your GRAAARGGH maximized by something else.

anyway look at it this way - if the algorithms were working at giving you this important stuff in a way you were aware of it, you might have chosen a different username.

on edit: sometimes we are unaware of things just by happenstance and no algorithm tweaking will fix it, consider it a version of the XKCD 10000, I was aware of this as it passed in my feed at some point, but really if I was unaware of it I would assume it as a likely consequence of for profit prisons anyway - if asked to consider the possibility that is.

Maximizing engagement is tangible and pays well.

You’re wanting to optimize for something intangible, philosophical and something most people would just prefer to ignore.

Technology can still help though… look, you learned about it from HN!

However, you cannot automate this process entirely because caring, compassion and looking into the dark corners of our socioeconomic system require human judgement at every step. This human decision making, consensus forming and problem solving process is also known as ‘politics’

Just follow what the proverbial social justice people care about, a lot of it has merit before going off the rails.

You'll get familiar with a lot of broken aspects of society, much of which could take a lot of time and adjustment to understand why its not as productive as seemed. And some might seem like farfetched things to change, but you'll be familiar, especially after its old news and has been changed.

I suggest that the reason you didn’t hear about it is that you didn’t care to be informed. I live in a backwaters Canadian town and I knew about this story years and years ago. And it’s not like I do anything special to be informed: I simply scan headlines on a daily basis. The news media didn’t repress the story, you just didn’t look.

Such an algorithm would need to have a deep understanding of the human condition and how the world works in order to provide such output. I think it would basically require a full-fledged AGI (artificial general intelligence).

When this happened, the nation went through a significant financial crisis consuming almost all media headlines. Injustice sucks, but potentially losing your home and retirement is probably a higher priority to most.

you look at 10,000 ads a day, how the heck are you supposed to remember anything of value?

I thought this was just a 'The Good Wife' episode. Didn't think people were this villainous in real life

For a few years we’ve had ripped from the headlines stories with bits cut out to make it believable. The tv writers say they can’t write realistic bad people who do all of the things real world bad people do. I think The Good Wife writers were one of the first to point this out.

People really are this villainous in real life, and a lot of them actively seek positions of power such as this to enact their moral crusades.

Pretty much every case on the good wife had real life basis.

Only if they are Russians?

I loved to throw around "What's next? Private prisons??" when speaking about some crazy privatization ideas. That, until I learned it's an actual thing in US. Who would have guessed. I think I was 32 at that time

The penal system in the US is perplexing. It's built on the premise that people should not only lose their freedom but also get subjected to the worst possible conditions and exploited as free labor. I honestly can't comprehend how a modern nation can get to this point.

We didn’t get here as a modern nation. We got there because the fight to end slavery resulted in a lot of white people giving up during the Reconstruction era and allowing the South to rebuild many of the same power structures through a campaign of terrorism and political disenfranchisement during the Jim Crow era, which was only partially halted during the civil rights era and even some of those wins were later reversed under Regan and later.

The major loophole here is in the 13th amendment:

> 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.

That doesn’t work if the judicial system is unfair. There are many, many examples showing that it too often isn’t with uncomfortably close relationships between the police, prosecutors, judges, and the prison industry. This is one of the more egregious cases in recent memory because it involved children but the cases involving adults tend to get far less media coverage:

https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania/pa-kids-for-cash-...

I think this had something to do with the base ethos of North American style crime & punishment.

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

Because they never lost the appetite for slaves.

It's basically slavery. Lose your freedom and be forced to work for basically free.

A lot of "businesses" would straight up collapse without this free labor

Worst possible conditions? Seriously? It’s the worst conditions that can possibly exist. Nothing could be worse than being in a prison in the United States?

On the labor issue I don’t see why prison populations shouldn’t get put to work on public works projects. It’s not a vacation, it’s jail.

I have an even "better" idea: private courts!

Imagine a corporation who's sole goal is to maximise it's profits based on judging if people/corporations have broke the law, or not! Surely they'll be more efficient than public courts. What could go wrong?

You mean like (quasi-)forced arbitration, as spear headed by the US.

Let's be honest the US has sold out the mental, physical and economic well being of most of it's populations for the benefit of a handful of especially wealthy citizens. Worse it wasn't even done with long term geo political benefits or anything like that in mind, actually the opposite if anything. I.e. just pure greed.

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

> I have an even "better" idea: private courts!

Oh, God. Don't tell Judge Judy. :)

The UK has private prisons: 14 out of a total of 117 are privately-run, apparently.

I have no idea of what influence the operators are able to bring to bear on the government; the government we have at the moment is shamelessly corrupt, so I assume it's widespread and invisible.

Interestingly, private prisons house a higher percentage of prisoners in the UK than in the US.

Private prison exist in many countries.

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

If you don't like private prisons, wait until you hear about the public ones.

Yea. What can possibly go wrong when outsourcing imprisonment to commercial parties in a hypercapitalist society, right?

Well, occasionally people who abuse people in private prisons get put to justice. This is generally made difficult by ... of course ... the public part of the system (here we have involved: judges, a supreme court justice, the public prosecutor and the governor. It's about as public as it gets, the private prison was just a way to get the money out. The corrupt parts were very thoroughly publicly funded. And of course the vast majority of the corruption (ie. the public prosecutor, who was the real central part of it) got of without any consequences)

The prison with the worst reputation (deserved or not) is still Riker's island. And it's very much public. It has had it's share of corruption cases, but nobody was ever punished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RQJq1ca7jM

And since people seem to really care about this part: Riker's island is very, very much violating the law constantly about the conditions. Everything from medical care, maximum occupancy, to temperatures (both in summer and in winter). The law is very clear: that means no more prisoners there until these issues are fixed. But that would cost money. So, of course, everybody in the justice system cooperates to violate the law. That, by itself, regardless of anything else, is a crime.

Can we take a moment from this depressing article to appreciate the strange almost oxymoronic irony in the term “public prison”

What's oxymoronic about it? Public prison is prison run by the government, as opposed to a private company, similar to public schools and public transportation systems.

No more ironic than a stationery jet, a loud pair of earmuffs, or even more apt, a secure, locked down public key.

I mean, you can go visit...

Re: privatization of public services, I would love to see writing up parking tickets outsourced to private companies. It's trivial to incentivise them to do a great job (just give them a fraction of money from tickets they write, and fine them for writing frivolous ones), yet no country I've heard of does that. It really shows that the world is completely dominated by car culture at the moment. Politicians are just affraid of having too good parking rules enforcement, as they suspect most of their electorate are drivers and would actually hate it. As a result, we have cities littered with cars parked at places where they cause problem for everyone (it's less of a problem in the US, because many US cities are basically parking lots with buildings in the middle - so there's no need to park illegally).

Trust me, you really wouldn't. This incentive structure has existed previously in the UK and it lead to precisely the degenerate outcomes you might imagine. What you want is fewer cars

Easily the most iconic privately funded organisation associated with parking tickets and enforcement would be the Queensland (Australia) Surfers Paradise Meter Maids :

> Unlike other meter maids, who issue parking tickets to motorists when they overstay, Gold Coast meter maids put money into parking meters which might otherwise expire, preventing vehicle owners from incurring a fine. After the introduction of pay-and-display parking meters they took on the task of explaining to motorists how the machines work.

Say what now??

> The Surfers Paradise meter maids were first instituted by entrepreneur Bernie Elsey in 1965, through the Surfers Paradise Progress Association, which was opposed to the introduction of parking meters by the Gold Coast City Council.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfers_Paradise_Meter_Maids

> parking tickets outsourced to private companies.

Chicago.

"Chicago's Parking Meter Deal a Lesson in 'Worst Practices" - https://www.bettergov.org/news/chicagos-parking-meter-deal-a...

] In 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City Council agreed to lease Chicago’s parking meter business for 75 years and in return received $1.15 billion from Chicago Parking Meters LLC, a venture that includes Wall Street investment house Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital Partners and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

It also mentions:

] Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are rethinking their parking meter deals because of Chicago’s difficulties, according to Bloomberg Business News. Unlike

The city of Chicago privatized parking tickets, but levies no fines (to my knowledge) on abuse of the system.

So abuse in the system is rampant by parking enforcement. Everyone I know who drives in the city has crazy stories of bullshit tickets or tows.

Chicago is also the city that got caught shortening yellow light duration after installing traffic cameras which wrote automated tickets.

Those private businesses are incentivized to make money by ticketing as many people as possible. As long as fighting a ticket is more expensive than paying a ticket there is no incentive for them to do "a great job". Because the model of all of these systems is that the private "efficient" entity gets a %age of the expenses that they inflict on people, but any cost from subsequent lawsuits are borne by the public.

> It's trivial to incentivise them to do a great job (just give them a fraction of money from tickets they write, and fine them for writing frivolous ones)

Congratulations; you've essentially re-invented tax farming, as was popular in the Roman Empire.

We know from _literally millennia_ of bitter experience that giving private companies a cut of whatever they manage to extract from the general public is a very bad idea. If you pay someone more the more they abuse the rules (these things are virtually impossible to police), then you can't be surprised when they break the rules.

This reminds me a bit of (privatised) tax collection in the Ancient Rome. Didn't go that well.

No country does it??

Portugal does it, with the associated nefarious effects.

So instead of having an entity to do the ticketing, you propose to have an entity to validate that the ticketing done by the 3rd party is valid? Does not seem to solve anything.

> yet no country I've heard of does that

You might have heard of France, I guess? The city where I live uses (Suresnes, just next to Paris) uses a private company to manage parking tickets in street parking; but I've got no idea how the incentives are structured and how well (or not) it works

In Finland, at least, this is a thing. Parking enforcement is partially given to private companies but I don't know how it works with the underlying mechanisms (i.e. whether they are getting a fixed sum, or whether they get a fraction of the fines they fine).

That would incentivise behaviour similar to police in the US using fines and civil forfeit to augment their budget. It's a perverse incentive that encourages lying to increase fines, and good luck challenging it.

Top 10 Countries with the highest rate of incarceration 2022

United States — 629

Rwanda — 580

Turkmenistan — 576

El Salvador — 564

Cuba — 510

Palau — 478

British Virgin Islands (U.K. territory) — 477

Thailand — 445

Panama — 423

Saint Kitts and Nevis — 423

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...

This is always stated as something bad, but perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars?

A similar argument can be made about health spending: if it's low then we are not doing enough, but if it's high then we are spending too much (i.e. we are inefficient), when in fact we might be allocating more capital to it because we value it more.

Glad to hear any thoughts about this.

> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars?

The real question should be *why is the US "a violent society"? I think your post is a good example of what I think the problem in the USA is: the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys. But it's not like that. Violence, including incarceration, brings other violence. Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence. The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence. But it doesn't do so for ideological reasons connected to this belief of good vs. bad.

Sorry if I used your comment as an example, I do not mean it as an attack. But do ask yourself, why is the US a violent society and not Switzerland?

> the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys.

Reminded me of this quote:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

> Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence.

This is certainly not generally true. There are many countries with much greater poverty, inequality, and ignorance (at least measured by education) than the US that have much less violent crime. I'd imagine having more drug users per capita has a significant effect on violent crime everywhere however.

Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos?

These are hard problems and can't be imagined away with "The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence".

We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA. If that's the world you want to live in, all the best (but it won't be long before you start running for the exit).

I think both points, while reasonable, are wrong.

If memory serves, the rise in incarceration rates can be traced back to the failed war on drugs, which incarcerated many non-violent (often black) offenders. There is also a tough-on-crime stance, in part due to the fact that US sheriffs and judges compete in local elections, leading to aberrations such as mandatory minimum sentencing.

As for health spending, a lot of the spending can be traced to inefficiencies, and predatory pricing by hospitals, drug companies, and medical device manufacturer. The lack of centralized information for insurance and payments (note that I don't blame insurers) also creates huge administrative costs.

Those are both complex topics, so I don't claim to have captured all aspects, and I may have some of the details wrong, but I would say it's a good first approximation.

The US is probably more violent than other western countries, but I think the real problem are the much harsher sentences for comparable crimes (citation needed).

There's much more of a focus on punishment instead of reintegration. The legality of the death sentence is a clear violation of human rights, for example.

I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others.

> There's much more of a focus on punishment instead of reintegration.

Yup, this is a cultural thing. In the US, people (in general) want criminals to be punished, they don't put too much value in rehabilitation. It's very different from many European countries which is visible in sentencing.

> I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others.

On the contrary, there's much more crime in the US than most western countries. Whether this has anything to do with punishment vs rehabilitation is impossible to say though. I personally think that lack of many social services is more to blame. Things like social security, public housing mixed with private, health care, workers rights, et cetera mean less people end up in criminality in the first place.

Recidivism rates unfortunately are extremely hard to compare due to the methods and sentencing being extremely different.

"There's more crime" is a meaingless claim unless you define what "crime" is and how you measure how much there is of it. Jaywalking is a crime in some countries. Does a country that criminalizes jaywalking have more crime than one that doesn't if it has any people jaywalking? How do you measure crime which is underreported or not enforced consistently?

If the US has a higher incarceration rate it's extremely likely that it has "more crime" because incarceration is supposed to be a punishment for doing crimes. The question is how the definition of those crimes compares to other countries. E.g. do you consider possession of cannabis a crime because it is illegal on a federal level? Former US President Bill Clinton used cannabis before it was legalized in any US state, so was that a crime?

For a real world case of this nebulous concept of "crime" as an opaque quantity consider immigration: even if they commit fewer violent crimes, it's still entirely possible for an immigrant to be more prone to crime simply because they are subject to additional legal requirements citizens aren't and failing to comply with any of them may qualify as a criminal offense. Just by their legal status they are able to commit an entire category of crimes others can't. Whether you think that is justified or not, they can literally be criminals for behaving exactly the same way as a non-criminal citizen would.

You might be interested in listening/reading a recent Planet Money episode (https://www.npr.org/2022/09/22/1124477182/federal-judges-eco...), which explains how for ~20 years or so, many US federal court justices went to an exclusive, all expense paid economics bootcamp, taught by some of the most well known economics thinkers of the time. That sure sounds great in theory - why wouldn't you want to have judges to have a deeper understanding of economics when they can have impact on financial matters?

Well, as it turns out, some of the key ideas taught focused on the rational economic theory, and extrapolated from there to crime and punishment - e.g.: a criminal makes a cold economic calculation before commit each crime, taking into account the expected gain from this crime, the likelihood of getting caught, the expected punishment if caught, etc. - and therefor, if we make the "cost" higher, by opting for harsher prison sentences - crime will become less attractive and therefore happen less.

When the data is analyzed, justices that went through this program appear to hand out harsher sentences to offenders, and often rule in favor of corporations and against government agencies when compared to the control group. The effect is most evident for judges that used to learn more to the liberal side, which is surprising to me, but it definitely is interesting.

Also, I think after jail, you are not allowed to vote in most us states. Also to get a job after jail seems almost impossible in the us.

Voting is conditioned on not being a convicted felon in some states.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-...

The US also doesn't have mandatory inpatient mental health care (or at least this has been severely downsized since the 1970s). How much of the numbers can be explained by other countries have higher rates mental health care institutionalization, while the US has shifted most of these people to prisons?

I found some numbers: according to Statistica, Europe has 275 mental health 'hospital admissions' per 100,000, whereas the Americas have 41.8. That could be entirely enough to explain the difference in prison populations, but of course one would need data on the length of the average mental health hospitalization. It also doesn't explain the comparison to other regions with lower incarceration and lower mental health treatment rates, which is pretty much the entire rest of the world.

Statistica: https://www.statista.com/statistics/452902/admission-rate-in...

The US also doesn’t have optional inpatient mental health care, for many people. There are simply no beds available, even for people who have been ordered there by a court.

> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars?

Most crime pays terribly, being a street drug dealer barely pays minimum wage and involves immense risk. Opportunities for some in the US are so bad that they choose terrible jobs (high risk, bad pay) at far higher rates than people do in other countries. Jobs that, in addition, come at a moral/reputational cost (your family is angry at you, other careers are closed off to you once you have a record.)

> perhaps the US is a violent society

What does this even mean? Of course it is a violent society. This is just a vague innuendo that this violence is impossible to fix and intrinsic to the US; it's just question-begging.

The US is perhaps a "violent society" but our crime rates have been trending down over the last few decades, while spending on prisons has not trended down accordingly. We could be spending that money on valuable social programs.

See https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ and https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-po... for some numbers - prison populations massively spiked over the course of a couple decades, but while crime rates have come down massively prison populations have not declined nearly as much.

Based on the number of people in US jails and prisons who are awaiting trial - not even convicted of a crime - or there for minor offenses due to policies like "three strikes", it's hard to argue that massive incarceration is actually what's making us safer.

For comparison, number #2 on the list (Rwanda) had a genocide involving tens of thousands of people hacking each other to death with machetes, and 26,000 of their 43,000 prisoners were convicted of various crimes related to this genocide. They also like to imprison anybody even vaguely suspected of opposing the current government. So you have the double combo of lots of genuine genocidaires plus a paranoid police state, and they still have less people in prison per capita than the US.

> 26,000 of their 43,000 prisoners were convicted of various crimes related to this genocide.

This is a general charge in Rwanda, which is a dictatorship still run by the commander of the ethnic army that sparked the genocide by killing the president and massing at the border to invade. They recently imprisoned the guy Hotel Rwanda was about as a terrorist. And like you say, they're still less of a police state than the US.

> but perhaps the US is a violent society

Perhaps it is a violent society because of a deeply-ingrained fear of violence. Frightened people are more likely to assume a situation is threatening, and respond with violence. And imprisonment is a form of violence; nobody voluntarily takes themselves off to prison on judge's orders. The more likely you are to be imprisoned, the more likely you will risk a shoot-out with cops.

There seem to be a lot of people in the USA that take a strongly retributive attitude to justice: e.g. "Close the prisons, criminals should just be shot like mad dogs".

The purpose of a criminal justice system is to protect the public by enforcing the law, not to embody some moral posturing about the fruits of wickedness.

I have always thought that the US should lock less people and start handing less harsh sentences, but having lived in the bay area for almost 6 months, I came to the conclusion that the US should lock up even more people.

I understand that prisons don't necessarily fix the crime problem, but the thing we probably all agree on is that fixing crime is not something trivial at all, and until we know the exact causes of crime, and start to tackle them one by one, we need to do something immediate about crime because life here is frankly unbearable. Random shootings, shoplifting, assault, hate crimes, and muggings are all too common here.

I'm unable to even think about starting a family in this environment.

> This is always stated as something bad, but perhaps the US is a violent society

Either they are overly violent or overly incarcerating people, both are "something bad"

We can compare spending to outcomes however. The US spends more money for worse overall outcomes than other countries.

Those rates are per 100,000.

That page also notes this shocker but it also quotes itself as a source at one point, so is it a decent source (?):

"The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide ... This number is equivalent to roughly 25% of the world's total prison population and leads to an incarceration rate of 629 people per 100,000"

> so is it a decent source (?):

It's just stating that the source said 2M, which combined with the total population yields 629. Nothing wrong with drawing a simple conclusion from two sources. The sources for the prisoner numbers are clearly labeled at the bottom of the page:

https://www.prisonstudies.org/research-publications?shs_term...

https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-popul...

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/appendix_countries_2021....

Good catch! According to the word prison brief the ranking actually looks like this (incarcerated per 100 000):

El Salvador 605 Rwanda 580 Turkmenistan 576 American Samoa (USA) 538 Cuba 510 United States of America 505

I'd still consider this horrible, but making a point is no reason to use dodgy sources.

From: https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...

Might be a difference in how people in jail (vs prison) get counted?

Not sure if other systems have a similar distinction?

For non US people: Jail is run by the local (usually county) government and is for minor(ish) crimes like writing bad checks, failing to appear in court, DUIs, reckless driving, things like that.

More importantly jail is where people are held before they are sentenced/found guilty. They are also yes used for shorter sentences. But you can still be jailed for years before you ever see the inside of a courtroom.

Thanks, didn't know (German), something new to learn each day. Would have used jail and prison interchangeably.

Wikipedia has slightly different numbers[0], with El Salvador instead of Rwanda at #2, but the fact remains that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Though it seems to have gone down slightly; I recall that a few years ago it was over 700/100,000.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

The crazy thing is that mass incarceration is relatively new in the US. Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis was a real eye-opener for me.

Not even Angela Davis was totally opposed to prisons. She just thought they were for counterrevolutionaries rather than ordinary criminals.

> The crazy thing is that mass incarceration is relatively new in the US.

Indeed. Before the massive explosion in violence and disorder the US pioneered in the 60s the First World was substantially more peaceful. Less need for incarceration with much lower rates of crime.

Here they quote U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2020 with around 1.7M of prisoners. That's about 15% lower than that number, but still quite high.

https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america

It's also worth noting that the rate per 100k people can artificially inflate the numbers for some of those on that list – e.g. the British Virgin Islands has a population of ~30k people and Saint Kitts ~47k, so both some degree of rounding and a large degree of Poissonian-like fluctuation are probably to be expected...

I see this cited very often, but what exactly should we take away from this? Just some general idea that "too many" people are in prison?

I think most people agree that low-level drug offenders shouldn't be filling our prisons.

But most people who live/work/frequent urban areas will have a steady stream of anecdotes about someone being mugged or otherwise experiencing violence, serious property crime, open drug, etc.

How can we reconcile the fact that we still encounter too many dangerous, antisocial people with the fact that we have high incarceration rates?

I've lived in an urban area for the last ~25 years and I certainly don't have a "steady stream" of anecdotes of the type of crime you're describing.

On the other hand, there is a steady stream of news articles about street crime, which often seems to portray the situation as worse than it is.

People that comment under news headlines on Twitter, for example, sometimes seem completely detached from reality, thinking they'll be murdered in a Mad Max hellscape if they cross some imagined urban boundary (but many of these people have an ideological agenda, so it's not clear whether they actually believe this).

Of course, there are issues in the city, just like there is everywhere, including distracted drivers (my worst fear), domestic abuse, and so on. Street crime certainly does exist, and is worse in some areas for sure, but is it really the biggest threat to our everyday safety?

It's kind of like how my mom gets caught up worrying about gangs, and I always ask her if she's ever had an interaction with a gang member (the answer is always no). Sure, gangs exist and sometimes do bad things to uninvolved people, but if you compare, for example, domestic abuse or negligent car crashes, those are far more of a threat to most of us commenting here than gangs ever will be.

EDIT: And to the extent that the U.S. does have more crime/incarceration than other countries, I'd ask what we're doing wrong, or more neutrally, what's different about our approach? One major issue is that our prison system seems particularly ineffective at rehabilitation and reintegrating people into society, so recidivism is high.

> what exactly should we take away from this? Just some general idea that "too many" people are in prison?

Yes. Same as when we compare what proportion of GDP we spend on health care and compare it to other countries with longer lifespans. We're supposed to take away the general idea that we are spending too much on too little healthcare. When we look at how much murder we have per capita and compare it to our number of prisoners per capita, we should take away the fact that we're getting too little murder reduction for too much imprisoning of people.

> How can we reconcile the fact that we still encounter too many dangerous, antisocial people with the fact that we have high incarceration rates?

We don't bother. If one's attempted solution of incarcerating poor people makes violence worse, the answer is obviously to incarcerate even more people.

It's also interesting to compare that with other countries.

United States - 629

Canada - 104

Greenland - 126

Mexico - 166

Germany - 69

Russia - 325

Iceland - 33

Japan - 38

Norway - 49

China - 121

Vietnam - 128

England and Wales - 130

Australia - 160

Hungary - 169

Iran - 228

Lithuania - 216 (= highest of all EU countries)

The rest of the world used to be behind by at least a factor of 2. Bad as it is, things are actually much better than in 2010, where just over 1% (1,000 per 100,000) of the total population (1.3% of adults) were in prison.

This number is likely to continue to decrease, as sentences have gotten shorter over time, and those have a huge, huge lag time. Your average prosecutor has, for better or worse, liberalized significantly from 1980 to now, even when compared to the general public.

I was surprised to see BVI & Saint Kitts on that list, although it seems like the figures are right, just a bit odd, with the way the rates are given as number of prisoners per 100k people. BVI - Prison population ~140-150, total population ~30k SK&N - Prison population ~200, total population ~50k

One of the reasons (there are many others) US unemployment rates can't be compared to Europe.

Why not? What's so special about US that you think it should be compared differently? In this case, I think numbers are numbers.

If you put millions of people (higher percentage than countries in Europe e.G) into prison there are less people unemployed. That doesn't say something about your economy though, for which, beside GDP, the unemployement rate very often is a proxy.

The biggest other reason:

Unemployement rate in Europe is mostly calculated by the number of people getting benefits and looking for a job (roughly) (+ in Germany if they work less than 15h/week). The US calls a sample of housholds (some 10k) and asks if the people in the household actively look for jobs but don't have one. In that case they are counted as jobless.

Russia doesn't publish its incarceration stats, apparently.

Also, would the millions of Uighurs in concentration camps in China be considered "incarcerated" or is this simply a definition left to non-autocratic democracies?

The Wagner PMC is recruiting cannon fodder for the war in Ukraine in Russian prisons. The Russian incarceration numbers may be improving drastically as we speak!

One would think think detaining a million Uyghurs would equate to incarceration. I certainly do think so.

But on the other hand, if you need to compare yourself to countries such as China and Russia and have your defense be "well at least we don't have concentration camps", you know you have work to do. Maybe the US doesn't have the highest incarceration rate, be it per capita or absolute, but it does have the highest rate of incarceration of any modern 'free' society. And that is a shame.

> be considered "incarcerated"

Even accepting grossly inflated propaganda figures, ~2M were detained over multiple years, with the vast majority on short sentences (months). We're talking stat shifts of low 100,000s locked up for months spread over 5 years. It wouldn't have shifted PRC per capita internment figures to be comparable with the US.

Or that by all accounts mass internment phase is over, majority have been released, extra problematic elements that couldn't be fixed in a few months/years are removed from society with lifetime sentences. The TLDR is "mass internment" is a temporary tool in PRC for deradicalization initiatives with deadlines in mind, not permanent conditions supported by prison industrial complexes like in the US. XJ securitization was expensive, not profitable.

'It's not as bad as genocide' is not a hugely convincing argument.

(I'm not pro genocide)

1M / 1.4B is increasing the incaceration rate by 70.

Even Zenz and associated media don’t claim there are millions. And yes, even if you add them it still looks much better than US.

[flagged]

There are a lot of benefits for both individuals affected and society at large when you have programs for housing the homeless:

https://believehousing.org.au/housing/how-housing-benefits-p...

You can think of housing for the homeless as prison for the homeless.. without the additional costs of guards, high walls, profits to private prison owners and kickbacks to politicians.

Also a better chance of better outcomes for many, raising taxes from those that pay taxes (over and above those who are homeless but also have jobs and pay taxes .. (yes, they're a thing)).

I cannot shake the feeling that the bulk of those social benefits could be captured by offering a very compact "cage-home" like storage closet, that can be locked and allows sleeping and storing one's valuables, with access to bathroom and a minimal food preparation areas.

Nobody should be forced to sleep rough, in the cold and dirt, where they are vulnerable to rapes, theft and beatings, such a life turns the kindest soul into an animal. 20 sq. feet of lockable closet with a mattress and shelves to store one's minimal belongings could mean maintaining their humanity and preventing turning them into dangerous criminals.

This would be so cheap to offer that it could be a basic human right, I would certainly pay taxes for it before other stupidities promoted as measures against crime. It's definitely not an incentive to be poor, those who can afford can rent a larger space, it would be a minimal guaranteed, free baseline: no matter how bad you fail in life, you will still get to be treated like a human being.

That would be effective and cheap, but also illegal in most places because of building codes. Eg https://reason.com/video/2016/12/09/los-angeles-homeless-tin...

> The city owns thousands of vacant lots, many of which have been abandoned for decades, that could provide sites for tiny house villages or other innovative housing concepts that can have an immediate impact.

Sad and deliberate. We have more than enough to expansively build houses for everyone, but we don't simply to make a few richer.

Cage homes are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse#Cage_homes_in_Hong_K...

So are/were cage hotels; further in that page,

> A 1958 survey by Christopher Jencks found that homeless men preferred cage hotels over shelters for reasons of privacy and security

and more at http://historyapolis.com/blog/tag/cage-hotel/ ).

> Cage hotels emerged in Minneapolis in the late 19th century, as a way to house the migrant laborers who came to the city to find work and then to stay while they spent their earnings from the railroads, the farms and the logging camps. By 1895, there were 50 cage hotels in Minneapolis. While these hotels provided a cheap place to stay, the rest of Minneapolis found them increasingly distasteful. The city outlawed new cage hotels in 1918, but they were such an established institution that some of them lasted for four more decades.

The flophouse WP entry points out: "gentrification and higher real-estate value has further eroded the ability of flophouses and inexpensive boarding-style hotels to make a profit"

However, that skips over how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago.

Yes, that's exactly the model I'm referencing.

> how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago

That's easy to explain: exclusionary zoning, maximum density requirements, aesthetic rules etc are all forms of selection based on social status. Class and racial lines are strong and people strongly want to keep the "character" of their area, i.e to live near people of comparable social status.

It’s so weird to me that this is a near-universal definition of “character” because every neighborhood I’ve ever been in that’s segregated by class has been absolutely miserable and boring.

exactly. I'd be willing to contribute to humane encouragement into such a scheme. I would no doubt also include free health care and a robust detox and addiction and psyche programs.

i believe that, ironically, the less progressive jurisdictions already provide this service while the more "progressive" districts have not yet made it mandatory.

We have an excess of seacans (ocean shipping containers) in America. Slip a molded, insulated, stainless steel shell into it, designed for wash-out. Provide community kitchen/toilet facilities, and community storage facilities. Make it easy to move to a different cluster of seacan shelter, so that people can find their community. Provide a lot of social services to these communities, help people get over their addictions and traumas.

Speaking of trauma, we’ve had quite a few global-scale mass human death events this past few generations. Every family has experienced a hugely traumatizing society-destroying event within the past four generations. World wars. Genocides. Civil war. Social revolutions.

These are experiences that fundamentally wreck a lot of people. They come back or live through it, and end up broken. Maybe they withdraw, maybe they get angry or violent, maybe they let their kids run wild, maybe they are too restrictive — in the end the family suffers trauma and society suffers from their trauma.

Little wonder, then, that we have addiction and behavioural problems up the wazoo.

If you look at actual programs to house homeless people in practice, prison is a bargain. In Portland a charitable estimate to house 1/3 of the homeless is 320k/unit to build + 20k/year/unit to maintain.

Shack-based safe rest villages (temporary transitional housing) are $30+k/unit. https://www.portland.gov/ryan/funding-safe-rest-villages but it is taboo to have barriers, so sometimes they have to be shut down because they are too dangerous. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2022/05/28/old-town-homeless...

Do not underestimate the homeless industrial complex.

https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2018/09/07/one-cost-estimate...

The cost of living is, indeed, incredibly high. It's no wonder there are so many homeless.

What would our society look like if we didn't allow the greed of property owners to displace people from the opportunity to sleep indoors?

No matter what, there is a cost to homelessness. Most people expect that cost to be paid by the homeless themselves; after all, that's the status quo.

Those who can't afford a home, by definition, can't pay for homelessness. That's literally the problem. The only possible solution is someone else paying. Anything else is just ignorance.

The quoted costs are much higher than the cost of market rate rent. There is a reason for that.

Homelessness, at least the kind that is highly visible, has relatively little to do with the cost of housing, and a lot to do with lack of mental health care, including addiction care. There are a lot of options for people before they end up on the street (including moving to lower cost of living areas, which is what most people do rather than become homeless), and there are a lot of supportive options for people where the primary barrier is income, rather than inability to manage one’s own affairs.

The status quo is that blue cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year encouraging homelessness while blocking the development of new housing, while people who have their shit together need to deal with random violence, open drug abuse, lack of access to parks and sidewalks, and all of the other problems that come with running an open-air asylum for years without respite.

This morning on my way to work I had to walk in the middle of the road (sidewalk was covered by tents - the city is being sued because it is a real ADA issue), try to avoid second-hand smoke of what appeared to be meth but maybe was fentanyl, and step over human feces, all while watching out for needles. The sidewalks are soaked with urine which unfortunately isn’t washed away in the relatively dry summers. I have to keep my head on a swivel because people randomly test you; last week I saw someone being chased by a crazed person through downtown, a week before that someone tried but failed to suckerpunch a passer by, and earlier this summer we had a cherished member of the community randomly killed while waiting for the bus (https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2022/07/murder-charge-now-f...). There are several similar stories this year. I’ve lived in Portland coming on two years, and even as a tall man, I have been chased, followed, lunged at, called expletives, witnessed several crimes, and had a mentally I’ll person try to run me down with their car, running until I eventually found a police officer to intervene.

Homelessness is not just a cost of living issue. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/terri-zinze...

> The quoted costs are much higher than the cost of market rate rent. There is a reason for that.

> Homelessness, at least the kind that is highly visible, has relatively little to do with the cost of housing, and a lot to do with lack of mental health care...

Hence the increased cost of housing such a person.

Is there waste in these programs from greed and politics? Definitely. Would a perfect implementation that completely avoids that greed match the market rate? I doubt it.

When you buy or rent a home, you generally must provide evidence that you are a stable reliable person; both to illustrate your ability to make regular payments, and to prove you won't become a nuisance to your neighbors, which would ultimately introduce its own cost.

Mental health is core to the issue of homelessness. Not having a stable home is core to the issue of mental health. Do you see the race condition? This is the part of the algorithm that requires intervention.

We can and should do more to help with mental health, especially in the US. Housing is an integral part of that. It's going to cost a lot. We should definitely do whatever we can to mitigate the greed that inflates that cost, but cost itself isn't enough of Ann excuse to give up on humanity.

How do we prevent these houses from turning into slums?

If you treat the homeless as lepers and stick them at the edge of town - you will get exactly what you said. If however, you create one home for the homeless on every street/block/floor - you'll find out that they are people, just like you and me, and with a little bit of support many of them will even thrive. The US is just so big on NIMBY that there is zero chance of that happening :-(

Distribute them across cities in mixed income neighbourhoods rather than the US model of post red lining NIMBY isolationism.

Homeless people have a wide demographic, a large number have had employment and professions and seek the stability to re-engage with the workforce.

The notion that all homeless are on a one way spiral into a slum and should be keep out of sight and out of mind is a great part of the underlying issues.

I doubt it, but would be happy to see the data proving the opposite.

Just for comparison, in top-of-the-shelf socialist Sweden there are 30k homeless people per 10 million population. It matches pretty well to 500k of homeless people in the USA.

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

> Distribute them across cities in mixed income neighbourhoods

How is this actually done in practice?

Something like X units per new development are "reserved" for people under certain income limits. It distributes income ranges across geographic regions, rather than concentrating them by unit rental prices.

Here's one example from my neighborhood:

"On Sept. 19, contractors with the Anderson Companies were issued an $8 million construction permit for the foundation and footings of what will be a two-year building project at 411 Lexington Parkway — the 304-unit Lexington Station apartment building, half of which will be designated affordable housing."

https://www.twincities.com/2022/10/10/after-st-pauls-concess...

Build them in wealthy hoods.

How is it going to help?

Slums are a result of factors such as emargination, lack of services, crime and poverty. All factors that are lacking in wealthy hoods. Police actually cares about safety and order when wealthy citizens are at stake.

>end slums

>end homelessness

Unless you can end poverty, pick one.

The thing is, we easily could end poverty. The economic productivity is there. We just don't want to.

Who's we?

Slum would still be better to homeless compared to being without roof. First we need to ensure everyone has somewhere to live.

Where shall you house these homeless people? During the pandemic NYC tried using vacant hotels to house homeless people. Surprise surprise the areas immediately surrounding the hotels turned into a drug and needle playground, and people evacuated. It was an epic disaster.

People with this idea are almost always from the suburbs. Plenty of homeless people are merely down on their luck, but many (most?) others have mental issues or have crippling drug addiction. No one wants that shit near their home or children.

You can certainly try and force it, but you can’t force people to tolerate it. People will just leave, and the nearby areas will turn into a slum.

> People with this idea are almost always from the suburbs.

Or from countries that aren't the US.

If your problem is concentration, then you have to start your solution at scale. It's no wonder that starting small leads to consolidation.

No one wants the obvious solution, so the victims must bear responsibility.

Open drug scenes[0] are behind the push to end open drug scenes.

9% of prisons are private, which is 9% too many, but it's the citizens who have to endure open drug scenes who are behind the push to end them.

[0]: https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/259053

This problem is described, wrongly, as homelessness, by both advocates for ending open drug scenes, and by activists who view themselves as working on behalf of the unhoused.

That's not the effect of their activism. The effect of their advocacy is to increase misery. Open drug scenes make the city unsafe. Open drug scenes draw the temporarily homeless into a shadow market of addictions and prostitution.

Open drug scenes are bad for everyone who has to be near them, but they are particularly destructive to the mentally ill addicts who constitute them.

I'm sure private prisons would love to turn all of us into literal slaves, but if we reduced the number of them down to the correct 0%, urban residents would still be demanding the end of open drug scenes.

They are right to do so. Supporting open drug scenes is supporting misery, harm, assault, theft, overdose, rape.

Don't support open drug scenes. Make sure your donations to help the unhoused don't support open drug scenes (this is difficult).

Also, let's end private prisons. It was never a good idea and it won't get better with time.

Reminds me of needle exchanges, and the harm they brought to neighborhoods that opened them out of the 'goodness' of their hearts, only to end up turning their neighborhood into the newest drug slum.

Or at least that's been my experience so far in any city I have lived in that has one near my current location. One place I even moved to and from again twice, and got to see the before and after through the decade essentially. It's like night and day. Absolutely no one will ever be able to convince me otherwise that these programs are a good idea, especially when the best idea is to just remove these people from urban centers by tossing them into rehab out in the country side where they can't get these drugs easily.

I've seen that work wonders by comparison; and it doesn't ruin neighborhoods which gives NIMBY's a legitimate excuse to do things like round up the homeless and put them in jails. Which I do not agree with, but understand their grief. The very act is a breach of their natural rights as a human being, and let's not get me started on my opinions about how housing should be a natural human right irrevocable by anyone or anything.

The yellow brick road is paved not by the demons among us, but those who think themselves angels.

Edit: I'm going to sleep now folks, so if I don't respond to anyone after this point of 7:15am CST-6, that's why. You all have a nice day, and/or a nice night.

> [1] NIDA-funded research has found that syringe services programs do not increase drug use. In fact, program participants in these studies were significantly more likely to enter substance use treatment and reduce or stop drug use.

As an aside, this is the second time on this site in a couple days I've seen someone post something along the lines of "Absolutely no one will be able to convince me otherwise no matter what."

So why are you posting here at all? You've already proudly announced that your opinions are impervious to any new information. That is the exact opposite purpose of this site.

https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/syringe-services-progra...

The end there reminds me of the CS Lewis quote:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Which cities? What city did you live in twice? What time period are you talking about?

It's been the opposite experience for me, but where I lived doctors just give the addicts drugs that are similar to their drugs of choice. Man has to eat, addicts has to use. When you ruin the market economy around drugs by making them essentially free the criminal aspects seem to disappear.

> needle exchanges... end up turning their neighborhood into the newest drug slum.

How do you suppose that happened? Do you think there was a severely addicted population that could not get their fix due to concerns of transmittable diseases? So were forced to quit cold turkey, at the height of their despair, for lack of sanitary injection paraphernalia? You surely realize how absurd that sounds, right?

Since you seem to be a well reasoned and articulate person, I'm genuinely curious how could a needle exchange program cause neighborhoods to turn into "drug slums"? Perhaps you are seeing a correlation with drug use that does not reveal any causality? Perhaps needle exchange programs induce normalization of drug use in a certain area, making addicts fell less rejected and thus attracting them there? But surely such a visible concentration of addicts in a certain area is just a symptom a much larger invisible problem and condemning those those affected to AIDS or Hep-C does nothing to solve the root cause?

Want's to move drug users to "the country side". Doesn't like NIMBYs.

Not sure where you are located but one thing I’ve found is that people from the Bay Area are much more concerned about drugs amongst the homeless than in other locations. And rightly! It’s shocking as a visitor to encounter San Francisco’s version of homelessness.

As a Chicagoan though I’m much more concerned about mental health and access to short term housing. We’ve eliminated almost all of the short term housing that helps people move off the streets with the obvious side effect of homeless encampments. But you very rarely hear any talk of easing the restrictions on short term housing.

Any attempt to establish a short term housing prompts multiple questions. For example, do you allow drunk people in? If you don't, you leave a lot of people on the shore. If you do, you end up with drunk fights and vomit on the stairs.

Go figure.

> I’m much more concerned about mental health and access to short term housing

You should be more concerned about general restrictions on housing construction. Mental health is not magically better in Japan and yet we don't see this kind of vagrancy there. But they also don't have the kind of nimbyism that plagues American cities with "intractable" homelessness problems.

I grew up in the Bay Area. It's always been about mental health and housing from my perspective. Pushing symptoms like "drug use" out of public view has nothing to do with solving the causes like "economic precarity", "systematic discrimination", and "lack of affordable housing".

Drug problems are always symptoms of bigger problems. There's nothing wrong with drug use as long as it's properly regulated.

There are many harm reduction measures that are better than criminalization. If you don't want people using drugs on the sidewalk, give them a better place to do it. Countries like Denmark and Switzerland have had enormous success with government run heroin clinics. Supplying free, clean drugs in a safe environment reduces overdoses, prevents drug users from going into debt and almost completely eliminates drug related crime.

In general, the solution to problems like homelessness and drug addiction is to give people the support they need. Direct cash transfers are by far the most effective way of supporting people, but this is unpopular because the public doesn't trust the poor. People tend to think homeless people are irrational and will waste any money they are given on drugs, even though that's been proven false. The biggest challenge is combating prejudice and changing public opinion.

Saying "end" here acts like the current system ends the misery of the homeless people who are subjected to it. But the position they end up inside of a US prison is equally miserable. The only difference is that it is invisible to those in the outside world.

That's not the only difference, of course, given that the prisons get more money. Really, this is a call to privatize the misery. Still, it could be a net gain if it costs less than subsidizing emergency services and reclaims the streets.

The best way to solve the drug problem is legalizing all drugs (or at least decriminalizing them) so let's do that too.

There's high-quality precedent, and Portugal is the classic example. They decriminalized all drugs back in 2001 and went from one of the worst in the EU to one of the best in the EU along basically every major measure of drug harm. [1]

[edit] > The opioid crisis soon stabilised, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates. HIV infection plummeted from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015.

This was achieved in conjunction with some rehab social programs. The article is worth a read.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...

The paper I linked to had several case studies, I think the Zurich and Portugal model both have a lot to teach the USA.

But step one is to stop pretending that open drugs scenes are caused by homelessness. They're caused by open-air markets for drugs, and the US in fact does a fairly good job of caring for the unhoused except for the open drug scene problem. End those, the rest of the unhoused have enough available solutions, and it's easier to do more when more is needed.

There's no ending them without a health care policy for addiction, either. Treating drug addiction as a criminal matter just leads back to open drug scenes. Keeping them gone requires a different approach.

In response to the edit I must have missed.

1. Crime rates reduced: I mean, of course they did. It was not longer a crime to be using those drugs, so there was no reason to be arresting people for possessing them. I don't know about you, but that seems pretty simple to me.

2. HIV rates reduced: I remember reading something once upon a time ago that made mention about how HIV rates plummeted all around the world (except in Africa) during that same time frame. Yet the rest of the world definitely hasn't decrimed/legalized all drugs. Might be worth looking into that more and see if maybe Portugal just had a happy coincidence.

>> Link: Not what I read, but shows some of the same or similar data I remember. https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-glob....

3. Overdose deaths: Strangely enough with humans, once something is no longer illicit, they want it less. They are also less likely to overdose on said drugs because they aren't having to risk a bad batch from a bad dealer as much, that sort of thing. So this is a win for legalization, I must admit; but it's a pretty loose one, since the whole "can't have it, thus want it" effect is pretty strong with humanity. Not having it anymore cause they can have it could be part of this reduction. Needs more looking into. (I would hope that before downvoting, people would look into things like the reduction of marijuana use among some people because it was no longer against the law, thus 'cool' to be a user of marijuana here in Canada and I think some American states as well. This applies to basically any drug due to how human psychology operates.)

4. I think most of those reductions are going to have more to do with happy coincidences, and the conjunction of rehab use, since the use of said drugs isn't as socially stigmatized anymore, thus neither is rehab.

(Edit: Look, folks. I get it, some of you really don't like what I have to say here. That's fine. But please, give me a break. I'm a new person here, and I'm just trying to add context to the conversation. Thanks for understanding, hopefully.)

Edit: I'm not entirely sure anymore, but I think my comment was made before the edit was made by arcticbull. Just saying so that if anyone wonders why it looks like I am disagreeing with someone who is making part of my own argument (now) ... that's why. I only remember there being legalization brought up.

-------Original Comment Below------

Sorry, but I cannot agree. Legalization just gives government reason to profit off the harm of the individual.

If you really want to remove the crime from drug use, go with decriminalization only. Just make it not a crime, that's all. I know this seems like its the same thing called a different thing to some, but after marijuana legalization and how that went in Canada, I think you all should really take note of why "legalization" is just a ploy by governments to get more tax dollars.

I have no issue with people doing what they want with their own body freely of their own choice; but I have much issue with giving government any form of power and/or profit over that choice.

So you won't be budging me on this.

Besides, there's really only like 3 or 4 drugs that deserve to be removed from criminality; the rest are so damn harmful to a person that if they are taking those drugs... they're already pretty much at the bottom of the pit of hell they dug for themselves. There won't be any helping them unless you are willing to ignore their rights as a human being and force them into some sort of rehab system that is removed from urban centers entirely; so they can't get easy access to those drugs anymore.

Might even have to swallow the bill as tax payers to have them housed for a few years as well afterwards, still outside of urban centers, so they can pick their life back up and stand on their own two feet again.

But that's just my opinion on the matter. It's a real shame none of you will actually listen to it.

I would say that we could go one step further. The government can issue drug tests. If someone demonstrates addiction through these tests, they get a tapering supply of their drug in pharmaceutical grade at zero cost.

Drug dealers can't compete with free, and the government's supply tapers to zero, so street supply and addiction should plummet.

You can prevent diversion of the government supply to the street by tagging it. Test positive on the government supply and you get nothing. Tighten or loosen policy as needed if street dealing returns.

What is an “open drug scene”?

This is a long documentary so I am sure there are better videos that get right to the point but this street is one of the more famous examples in America that you will hear brought up repeatedly in places like reddit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXyXYJg9SyY

You get a good sense at 21:00 in the video.

It's when people who don't have a house to live in gather to do drugs.

When people who do have a house to live in gather to do drugs, we call it the suburbs.

"Open drug scenes are gatherings of drug users who publicly consume and deal drugs."

I hadn't heard it either, and the PDF didn't load for me.

it's defined in the paper but of course that's behind a paywall. Considering how many times the OP used the term, it would have been helpful for it to be defined.

Here is the full paper: https://sci-hub.se/10.1159/000259053

It’s the new “you’re siding with the terrorists”

I don't know what this "Open Drug Scene"

What is it ? What is the best way to describe it ?

Can it be summarized as Hamsterdam (from HBOs' The Wire) ?

I think he's thinking of East Hastings in Vancouver or Kensington in Philadelphia. YouTube will likely shock you if you're not familiar with this subculture.

I'm a bit confused what point your are trying to make. You don't ever define open drug scenes and the you link to an abstract for a paywalled article is similarly lacking. Based on some searching I found a paper that provides the following definition: "Open drug scenes are gatherings of drug users who publicly consume and deal drugs." But also acknowledges it is generally a fairly loosely defined term.

You repeatedly say "don't support open drug scenes" but never explain what you mean beyond a vague assertion that advocates for the unhoused support open drug scenes. You make absolutely no concrete comments on specific policy approaches, you just dismiss an entire group in a very general fashion.

Homelessness and open drug scenes are entwined, but different issues. Not all people at an open drug scene are unhoused. Many unhoused people are not drug addicts, though they tend to be less noticeable than the ones who are.

All of this seems to be a red herring since the article we are discussing brings up specific laws. Those are not laws focused in any way on addressing open drug scenes, but rather laws that target vagrancy in general. These laws are being pushed forward by groups funded by private prison owners.

Thus your assertion that this is somehow not true with a deflection onto "open drug scenes" is not convincing.

Article and definition of open drug scenes is paywalled

Don't bury the lede. "Open Drug Scenes" (never heard this phrase before) are merely a symptom of homelessness, a problem that has proven to be simple, if not easy, to solve.

So you're saying that people are addicted drugs because they are homeless, they are not homeless because they are addicted to drugs?

In what way are open drug scenes simple to solve? The research I've scene on cities that have had large ones is that "simple" draconian and "abstinence based" policies rarely have a positive effect and most places saw the best results from complex, multiprong approaches that are implemented with an understanding that it will take years to see results.

While open drug scenes are comorbid with housing crises, they are not the same thing. There is also overlap between the strategies for addressing them, but that overlap is not complete.

I'm not burying the lede, I am vigorously disagreeing with the point of view, and providing a citation.

As always happens in HN when you post the legal source of a paper, a helpful commenter has posted a link to a grey-market copy. I suggest you read it, then we can have an informed conversation about what you're claiming here, presuming it doesn't change your mind.

I wonder if all countries are this ideologically dogmatic. On one hand, you have PragerU. On the other hand, you have organizations like this that insist we need to give severe drug addicts private hotel rooms that they can trash.

You hear a lot about Finland's success with homelessness being credited to housing first. However, they also are very aggressive with compulsory psychiatric treatment, which this author would consider unethical.

There’s nothing contradictory with compulsory psychiatry, providing housing, and ending the war on drugs. The US’ hardcore line on drugs has clearly been an abject failure and its time to reverse the damage we’ve done before its too late.

Compulsory psychiatry is controversial, though. While "Housing First" (and potentially with some unconditionality attached) is controversial on the right, compulsory psychiatry is controversial on the left (and I think more so than Housing First on the right).

It's gotten a whole lot better since the 90's, but still a long way to go.

People who are arguing that drug addicts be given hotel rooms are not on the other end of the spectrum. That's a center-left policy at most.

It's a massively inefficient "solution" that does nothing to address the issue. Provide housing, don't give a ton of money to hotel chains.

Arguments for hotel rooms right now are often referring to purchasing actual hotel buildings and running them as shelters with private rooms - California and Washington have both done this on occasion.

>”That's a center-left policy at most.”

I don’t like this kind of thinking. We should be evaluating the idea on its own merit, not tying to frame it as something acceptable because it is centrist - a word which is rapidly loosing any distinction.

Finland definitely does not have aggressive compulsory psychiatric treatment. About the only case where you can get involuntarily admitted is if you actively try or threaten to harm yourself or others.

Oh, we've got plenty of that, but still can't do much if anything about it. Lots of talk from both sides on how to handle it, but no real action because none of the "solutions" address the problem.

> However, they also are very aggressive with compulsory psychiatric treatment, which this author would consider unethical.

Based on what?

You think the author would be against additional mental health resources for homeless people? I highly doubt it.

Workhouses used to be a thing until the mid 19 hundreds.

Apart from the obvious human rights issues it did not work very well.

Because the homeless are usually homeless for a reason and that does not go away if you put them in a prison and force them to do some mindless menial task.

But there has to be a humane inbetween. Why is it so horrible to try provide them a padded version of the real world? So they can get help and have a meaningful existence at the same time. Not a labor camp of course, but a place where they can have meaning instead of being kept alive on "life support".

If imprisonment and force is used which the article implies there is no "in between".

There is nothing wrong with programs helping people out of homelessness (exploitative forced labor is no such thing).

Keep in mind that a lot of people getting out of homelessness can be really hard to achieve. Usually because of the involvement of multiple problems like drug abuse (alcohol whatever...) and psychological or other health issues.

These are individual, need proper treatment and sometimes there is nothing one can do about it.

For example in France and Germany there are institutions for long term alcoholics who have given up and are basically allowed to drink under supervision until they die.

They are provided housing, food, health care and (regulated) alcohol.

It sounds weird but is way more humane than having them living on the streets with all the issues this entails.

Is your private for-profit workhouse willing and able to properly provide for those people too?

So what do we do with the person who urinates in his own piece of housing?

He's certainly mentally ill, but urinating in private place does not usually qualify as direct danger to the society, so no forced treatment can be applied.

What's next?

The article points out how homeless people aren't popular or often defended. This reality is probably the biggest force against homeless people. Most people don't even want to consider their existence at all, especially if you see them daily. I don't see how trying to divert attention from this harsh reality that exposes weakness in our ability to collectively solve problems actually helps anything. If private prisons we're outlawed would all of even most of homeless issues eventually just go away? Is that something people really believe?

The article makes it out to be some us VS them conspiracy. Where there's only a single black and white reason for the problem and can be resolved so easily...

Now, it is sus that some billionaire is bankrolling huge influence campaigns. But to believe housing will solve everything about homelessness is foolish.

Homelessness criminalisation push is because people just don't want to deal with all the shit homeless groups bring. Smelling like piss, hordes of beggers, make shift housing everything, the feeling of being unsafe and crime. Surprised?

I'm currently reading American Prison by Shane Bauer and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38561954-american-prison

The author works as a prison guard at a private prison in Louisiana and the book is interlaced with his experiences as a prison guard and the history of prisons in America.

Blatant corruption and removal of freedom aside, it's one way to get the state to provide welfare.

I wonder if the shoe will ever drop and they figure out that preventative welfare is cheaper and better for everyone (except private prisons).

Probably around the same time they figure out that preventative medicine is cheaper and better for everyone (except health insurance companies).

The criminalization of the unhoused, as well as the policies that create unhoused people go far beyond private prisons.

As Ruth Gilmore and other abolitionists have meticulously detailed over decades, governments on all levels have helped build a system in which enormous flows of money exist to unhouse, cage and ultimately diminish the lives of thousands of people in the united states.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag

Incentives matter. On the other hand, the link here seems tenuous. Is 8VC so tied to private prisons that they run an astroturf campaign to lock up people without housing? Or does a significantly wealthy person have enough money spread around that a motivated reasoner can find just about any link they'd like?

The real voice behind these voices is The Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank founded by billionaire Joe Lonsdale. He is significantly invested in the private prison industry through his venture capital firm, 8VC.

Lobbyists from The Cicero Institute are currently pressuring lawmakers in states around the country to adopt laws . . .

Lobbyists from Cicero call their proposal the “Reducing Street Homelessness Act” . . . . It includes specific language designed to turn anyone sleeping in public into a criminal – at law enforcement’s discretion, which means enforcement will be uneven. It also proposes that states divert funding for permanent housing solutions into temporary encampment projects

https://www.8vc.com/companies

https://ciceroinstitute.org/issues/homelessness/

The key to reaching a real solution is to build _consensus_ behind an _accounting_ solution that traces tax dollars all the way through to economic outcomes for these people. Otherwise any discussion about this is just people getting into the favorite parts of their feelings. e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU1V2GM1oTI&t=801s

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

― Milton Friedman

well, I can tell you that "private prisons" are not the only cause for this push.

it's also that the other victims of the homeless don't particularly care for the needles, petty-thefts, fires, trash, vandalism, muggings, squatting, drugs, and rampant crime that goes hand-in-hand with the homeless encampments. sorry, i lost all sympathy out of personal experience with the 90 - 99% bad apples.

i don't dispute that private prisons might also see it in their best interests to push for this, but that's not the only reason. there's a hypothetical ideal, and there's probably plenty of real examples of sober, blameless, victimized houseless folks that just need help. but then there's the stark reality that 90-99% of the time is really not pretty.

Best thing, for the bad apples included, is to sober up in lockdown, not release back on the street.

This push is coming from Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir guy? He's Jewish[1], and he wants to build concentration camps? WTF?

[1] https://joelonsdale.com/philanthropy/

"Prisoner #582954, your one year sentence has been completed. Do you currently have confirmed evidence of housing that is available to you immediately?"

"...No?"

"Prisoner #582954, you are under arrest for the crime of homelessness. You have the right to remain silent..."

I think private prisons and criminalization of homelessness are crimes on their own. How on Earth having such system lets the US call itself civilized country is beyond my understanding. Acts like this belong in my view to some barbaric societies.

Homeless people in US, in particular in cities like SF, are a perfect tool to raise money. SF's budget of >1bn USD means a ton of grift.

NGOs of all sorts descend on this money pile, with zero incentive to actually reduce homelessness - if they did, the money tap would dry up.

It is a self-reinforcing loop until the actual government steps in and resolves the matter. Very "unpopular" in this weirdly lefties/libertarian society.

SF's city budget is 14 billion USD?.

Private citizens are behind the push for homeless criminalization, too. Enabling homelessness results in more of it, either by attracting the homeless from less friendly communities or by making it safer for people to make decisions that put them over the edge into or allow them to remain in the homeless lifestyle.

Does it still need to be said that the homeless aren’t a monolith of the victimized?

If you live in a community where the parks and trails have become unusable, where walking sidewalks has become unsafe, it’s a very different community experience that hasn’t fostered faith in the development of homeless policy in last twenty years.

Meanwhile, mental health institutions were closed enmasse due to Mental Health Systems Act of 1980[1][2] leaving the homeless folks largely … untreated, by force or not.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/96th-congress/senate-bill/1177

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...

Private prisons are behind the criminalization of everything that in a civilized planet wouldn't be considered a criminal offense, like weed possession. They're just like hotels, with huge investments involved, and like hotels they need a constant influx of "customers" to keep the system working. The last thing a private prison system wants, along with everyone supporting them, is a reduction of crime rate.

Do you consider Japan to be a civilized country?

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

They have death penalty, so no.

Edit: At least not their government and those among ordinary people pushing for such measures, just like in any other country, including mine.

Is this the cobra effect? If so, why is this lesson so difficult?

Criminalization also allows the police to take action in situations where they are currently powerless, where it is for the public good.

It is also effectively a life sentence

Can't find a good job to afford a place to live? Good luck finding a good job once you have a criminal record.

The only thing the police can do is put them in jail. There are cheaper approaches to housing the homeless.

Not true, it gives them the ability to remove them from a situation and deposit them somewhere more appropriate for their needs.

Is it for the public good when it only benefits one group, namely the non-homeless? Because if police could arrest them, it would benefit you, but the homeless is getting a criminal record which would not only not benefit them, it would make their case even worse.

8VC investing in private prisons is something I was unaware of. They sponsor quite a few gen Z / crypto related events. Not sure I can comfortably support them anymore.

It’s just really confusing overall, given they brand themselves as a forward looking technology and life sciences investment firm. Private prisons seem like the antithesis of that.

You're just going to take something seemingly implausible at face value such as that without verifying it yourself?

I looked it up. They do in fact invest in private prisons: https://www.8vc.com/resources/align-incentives-to-solve-reci...

It’s a very utilitarian perspective I guess? Really lacking in heart or soul though.

I have absolutely no connection with private prisons. I do believe prison or labor camps are the best place for most true bums (drug addicts, criminals, mentally ill, etc). Obviously not for temporary homeless without drug or criminal record problems. Homeless bums are dangerous and a drain on society.

The fundamental reason for this is that the 13th amendment provided a convenient escape hatch to allow the continuation of slavery: just charge people with crimes - constitutionality of the law is not relevant, nor is the problem of finding someone guilty. Just send people to prison and suddenly you get free labor.

Here's the solution: require that _all_ revenue from prison labor go to the relevant state or federal government. The money received for labour by a given slave can only be passed on to the victim of a crime, capped to the financial loss caused by the crime in the case of financial crimes. For non-financial crimes with actual victims, all income from the slave for the entire period of incarceration must be provided to the victims. After that disbursement, the state or federal government (as appropriate) can take no more of the money than they are charged for housing the slave. every cent left over after that point must be put aside for when the slave is released, at which point they are provided their net earnings. Similarly prisons do not get to charge any kind of premium or markup on goods in their "stores", they also aren't allowed to charge for basic necessities or hygiene.

There are a few other requirements of course: any person incarcerated during trial ("bail") and subsequently release without jail time shall be compensated for the entire period of their incarceration at the rate of, say, the higher compensation of the prosecutor, judge, chief of police, or governor/president (as appropriate), multiplied by two in addition to any losses such incarceration has caused - again multiplied by two. If the person is found not guilty then rather than scaling by two, it should be scaled by four. If there were any illegal or unconstitutional acts by any agent of the government, then when can multiply that again by two - without preventing or impacting their right to file suit against the relevant agencies and individuals.

To me the first part of this is required to stop criminalizing people as being a trivial path to profit through "legal" slavery.

The latter is more generally needed in the US at least due to the abusive, unconstitutional, and generally illegal behavior of law enforcement. I'd say those fines should come out of the bonus, promotion, and pension funds of the relevant law enforcement agencies. Let's see how long police officers ignore illegal behaviour from the "bad apples" when the resultant lawsuits come out of the "good apple"'s wallets.

I'm sure private prisons have an obvious profit motive and pointing that out is very important.

But the question remains, what the hell do you do when there's literal zombies roaming the streets in America? That is not hyperbole.

> KENSINGTON AVE PHILADELPHIA AT NIGHT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOBoDT-3oM0

> Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Avenue, What happened today, Aug, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1Kf-1qd6Y&t=57s

>The Oakland, California Homeless Problem is Beyond Belief https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRWmKh13b50

> WALKING THROUGH LOS ANGELES UNBELIEVABLE OUT OF CONTROL HOMELESS SLUM | HOMELESS CRISIS IN AMERICA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WVDieQ8MsI&t=9s

> ZOMBIELAND TENT CITY METHADONE MILE BOSTON MASS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCgNaITiCXY

There's hundreds of videos like that on YouTube from many areas. It's easy to ignore when it's not near you.

Would you feel safe having this in your neighborhood? Would you be ok with your loved one taking a wrong turn somewhere and being stuck alone in any of these places? I'm not saying I love cops hassling homeless people for bullshit reasons, but there are some really out of control areas. How do you even start to deal with this?

Seems like a massive mental health and substance abuse issue combined with a cut-throat economy and lacking social safety net.

Public funding for healthcare, including mental health and rehab, would be a good start. Where do these people go even if they want help for their issues? Therapy and rehab cost tens of thousands of dollars. And throwing them in prison is just an “out of sight, out of mind” solution. Good luck getting a job and straightening your life out with prison time on your record.

You shouldn’t criminalize homelessness unless you’re also offering an alternative that actually helps people. But America will never do that, instead we just punch down and make an example out of the lowest among us instead of trying large scale solutions. There are localized nonprofits to help with this sort of thing, but they’re underfunded and limited in scope.

> Where do these people go even if they want help for their issues?

The crux of the problem, as I see it, is that in many cases the mental-illness/addiction is too strong and these people vehemently reject actual help even when freely offered.

I'm not advocating "criminalizing homelessness", but am simply pointing out that in practice, "criminalizing homelessness" might be the only workable solution to starting to get these people actual help. Many of these people will reject all actual help unless forced to go through some kind of drug treatment or mental health program.

>How do you even start to deal with this?

You propose imprisoning them? I'd legalize drugs, the prohibition is just contributing to the conditions you're complaining about.

> literal zombies

Probably the first step is not dehumanizing them into monsters. They are literally not "literal zombies."

The core problem is that we care more about not seeing or knowing about the problem than we do actually solving the problem.

It feels like a "Peak Reddit" moment when somebody cares more about the label used than the actual problem.

The point of that harsh label isn't to mock anybody, but to try and get normal people aware of this problem. Most average people are not aware of shocking scenes like that existing in America.

(Very un)friendly reminder that state prison systems are just as complicit in this. Those beurocrats want to enlarge their fiefdoms just as bad as the private prison companies want to make a buck.

The US prison system has many issues, but the attention given to private prisons is extremely myopic and scapegoaty given that they account for less than 10% of the US prison population.

Alternatively, one could consider "private prisons" to be a symptom or symbol of a problem that is well understood to go beyond prisons that are 100% private. What about contractors, either for construction or operations? What about the people and companies who benefit from prison labor? What about the lawyers and others who make their money by helping to move people in and out of a too-large prison system? They're all part of an overly privatized prison system, even if they're not "private prisons" in the strictest sense. "Private prisons" is often intentional shorthand for the broader problem of imprisonment for profit, because it's easier to say. I doubt you'd find many people who are bothered by private prisons who are totally indifferent to all the rest. "Less than 10%" seems a bit myopic to me, in the sense of representing too narrow a focus on one factoid.

Yet account for a disproportionate amount of lobbying, which is what this article and discussion is about. They're literally helping to write laws to increase the overall prison population (public and private), which is a problem for a society with an already very dysfunctional criminal justice system.

When they account for less than .01%, I will say we are almost there.

Wait what?

So you're telling me that a private corporation are attempting to maximize profits ?

Now I've never!

In related news, maybe things of interest to the public should be owned by the public.

interesting fact 25% of prisoners in the US have ADHD:

https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/508829#:~:text=ADHD%....

I wonder if the homeless population might have the same percentage of people with ADHD

I wonder how it compares to prisoners of other countries.

Comparable. According to this report[1], 25% of offenders in the UK are estimated to have ADHD.

According to [2] the figures are roughly around 32.1% in Central and Northern Europe, 26.9% in North America, and 17.6% in "other" countries. The lowest prevalence being in Brazil with 6% of the prison population estimated to have ADHD. I'm wondering if the difference has to do with lack of data or with the nature of the crimes committed.

ADHD hasn't been recognized that long and there's significant overlap of symptoms between ADHD, PTSD and BPD. Both of which also can be reactions to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)[3], which have also been shown to link to criminality.

One study has also shown a correlation between ACEs and ADHD [4].

Sources: 1. https://www.adhdfoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/06...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4301200/

3. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html

4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28477799/

Do we have any modern-day data on how imprisonment affects homeless people? The people I see on the street who would probably get arrested if homelessness was criminalized are almost all in a very bad physical, mental, and emotional state. How are prisons expected to accommodate this group? Locking up mentally unstable and substance addicted people is not going to benefit private prisons (assuming that they are motivated purely by greed).

I have not been in any prisons, but State prisons look awful on YouTube. Are private ones worse?

Which private prison (or adjacent) company has 8vc invested in?

Since capitalism is strongly opposed to just giving money to people so they can sustain themselves actual real world needs to make up excuses to provide for people.

One method is criminalizing behaviors of the poor so you can lock them up to have an excuse to provide them with food and shelter for free.

It has additional benefit that you have excuse to give additional money to law enforcement, justice system and prison system for their economically unproductive activity.

US prison system is just effed up welfare system for a country that hates welfare but needs welfare.

This keep silent the issue and derives of "for profit prisons", which is ultimately a more appropriate name that "private prisons".

Let's follow the money.

The "thinktank" pushing criminalizing homelessness (from the article) is the Cicero Institute [1]. Here is their July 2022 update gloating about their anti-homelessness lobbying [2]. The Cicero Institute is the pet project for the predictably awful politics of billionaire Joe Lonsdale (eg [3][4][5]), co-founder of Palantir and General Partner and presumptive owner of 8VC who funds many companies [6].

My point is it's not quite accurate to say private prisons are lobbying for this. Their owners are.

For those unfamiliar, lobbying firms often write the legislation they push [7][8][9]. At the Federal level, lobbyists are often former Senators and Congressmen. Why? Part of this racket is that by tradition they retain "floor privileges" to their former body (as well as their relationships with sitting members). Yes, a lobbyist former Senator is allowed on the Senate floor.

It's worth noting that only about 6.5% of the US prison population [10] are in private prisons. Private prisons are still awful but they're symptomatic of a larger problem. Politicians love prisons for their districts not only because of jobs but because prisoners count for population for apportionment and redistricting but cannot vote. As an example, Alabama used $400m in Covid relief funds to build prisons [11].

The US loves to incarcerate people for long periods for minor offenses. A big part of this is creating a pool of forced labor (eg [12][13]). This is slavery economics.

This is capitalism.

[1]: https://ciceroinstitute.org/

[2]: https://ciceroinstitute.org/july2022update/

[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/03/vc-joe-lonsdales-tweets-ab...

[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/oct/28/us-tech-invest...

[5]: https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=joe+lo...

[6]: https://www.8vc.com/companies

[7]: https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/24397...

[8]: https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/asbestos-sharia-...

[9]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk

[10]: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-...

[11]: https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/07/01/alabama-diverts-40...

[12]: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-03-29/Slavery-is-alive-and-k...

[13]:https://innocenceproject.org/13th-amendment-slavery-prison-l...

This is the exactly the kind of analysis that's sorely needed in journalism. And "racket" is the appropriate term - it may be technically legal, but Americans are cursed by rackets of all kinds, often with the willing participation of those in government. It's sick and immoral - these people must be called out publicly by individual names.

Co-founder of Palantir huh. That explains a lot

slavery

A common argument is that, because only a small fraction of US prisons are private [1], it means private prison lobbying is a negligible problem. But this is a fallacy! The fraction doesn't matter, only the absolute amount of funds flowing through private prisons, that are available for lobbying. That, and the political connections of prison owners that make lobbying more effective.

[1] Twenty-six states and the federal government incarcerated 99,754 people in private prisons in 2020, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population. - https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

True in the absolute, but you would expect that if those flows and influence would be so large, that fraction would increase too.

What's stopping a large scale privatization of the penal system? Could it be that there are incumbent interests too that compete with the private prisons, such as party appointees and horse trading in local politics which see that flow of public money as a vital resource? Could it be - since they seem to be winning the competition - that those interests in the public system have an even larger lobby power on crime prevention policies?

Not trying to take the side of the godawful private prison industry here, just tired of this simplistic leftist dichotomy: capital bad, state good. Policies are decided with political influence and power, and money is one of the many forms political power can take. A bad political system, set up to ignore the interests of society, will be gamed by both private interests and political insiders; the west tends to suffer from the first problem, but for most of the rest of the world it would be "a nice problem to have".

I wonder what prison unions are doing. They normally support anything that keeps their members in work.

It's similar to the coal industry. We know that the coal lobby has an outsized influence despite the industry itself being tiny and shrinking.

Private juvenile facilities have the exact same problem because they encourage things like kickbacks for sending innocent kids into the system for funding. Neither should exist and should be fully abolished because the incentives for the companies in question go against behaving in a way that benefits society.

the sentencing project is a fantastic resource, indeed.

that said, I don't think 8% is small, and the relative growth, the shift from public to private prisons is remarkable:

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-...

and also, as a European I was shocked to learn about voter disenfranchisement in the US as a regular common part of many convictions.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/felony-disenf...

voting right is a human right.

It's a lot more comforting to think that the Bloody Late Capitalism is responsible for this, rather than well off people in nice neighbourhoods who are just like your parents.

There wouldn't be a supply side for incarceration of homeless without mass demand.

I think most of the faults atributed to Capitalism are really Democracy not working properly. For profit prisons wouldn't even be a thing if corporate interests didn't have so much power over elected officials.

> I think most of the faults atributed to Capitalism are really Democracy not working properly.

Democracy in capitalism will always be biased to the interests of the capitalist class thanks to a lot of issues:

- Mass media that is under the editorial control of the super rich (Sinclair, Murdoch, German Axel Springer, Berlusconi, Bezos, ...)

- financial contributions towards political campaigns, including indirect contributions such as dirt-digging smear campaigns

- financial contributions in the form of party sponsoring (e.g. sponsoring rallies and conventions)

- higher-up party cadres and elected government officials being promised high-paying jobs in the private sector after leaving office (e.g. here in Germany, Gerhard Schröder who sold us out to Russia)

- most higher-up party cadres come from privileged families - someone who has to exit school at 16 to help make rent doesn't have the time to involve themselves in politics, nor do they have the network that people have whose parents already have been in politics. That's the reason why so many politicians are so detached from the realities of the working classes - and additionally, their "connections" that help them rise usually want their returns when the cadre reaches influential circles.

Corporate interests control policy through money. How is that not directly related to capitalism?

This is a direct, and expected, result of capitalism.

Good. It should be illegal to have poor hygiene in public. Go to jail and take a shower.

Add prisons to the list of things that should not be allowed to be privatized or for profit. I also include health care and weapons manufacturing. Those two industries have a much more massive influence on our political system and result in far more suffering. If health care was not for profit, practitioners would be more focused on preventing and healing rather than medicating and prescribing. If weapons manufacturing were not for profit, we would be avoiding wars and any use of weapons and killing.

This is a terrible business plan; the homeless don't have any money. They should criminalize exorbitant wealth instead. The richest 30% control 97% of total wealth.[1] Poverty is a virtue, wealth itself is strong circumstantial evidence of exploitation, theft and civil rights violations. Start with the 3300 or so billionaires, and incarcerate them until their wealth falls below 30%, then, if ever necessary, move down the pyramid in 2% increments. I'd invest in this type of venture, at least a little while, and dump it before my personal wealth breached the criminal threshold. But I don't see how there is any money in criminalizing poverty. It would not be sustainable.

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

The homeless don't have money but they have value in a system that allows using homeless as cheap/free labour, and when you receive state funding proportional to the number of people you're hosting. Incarcerating millionaires on the other hand is hard (they are less likely to commit obvious crimes), time consuming (long time in court), costly (they can pay armies of lawyers), and more likely to fail if they have the right connections. The homeless don't have family, friends or business partners to help bail them out.

The cost of incarcerating the homeless is never ending and must be paid for by everyone else, whereas the rich can afford their incarceration without cost to taxpayers. If the crime is wealth, all the money in the world can't defend against it.

Well the companies behind homeless shelters have an opportunity to do the same, yet are not.

Companies? They're usually scrappy nonprofits that don't have much in the way of funds, compared to the prison-industrial complex bankrolled by state governments.

In cities like New York and San Fran the homeless non-profit sector is a billion dollar industry, bankrolled by city and state governments, with many shady characters pulling in millions of dollars a year.

>This year, the city has directed $2.6 billion to nonprofits to operate homeless shelters, and officials already know they have a problem with some of them. Nine of the 62 groups that run shelters are on an internal city watch list for issues that include conflicts of interest and financial problems, according to records reviewed by The Times. All of them continue to receive city funding.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/nyregion/jack-brown-homel...

The state of California funnels more than $3 billion dollars a year into these homeless non-profits while cities like San Fran funnel hundreds of millions more - without doing much of anything to mitigate, much less solve, the homeless crisis there.

https://sfstandard.com/public-health/the-standard-top-25-san...

If consider multiple billions as 'don't have much in the way of funds'...

Private Prisons make this to increase their "customers", or the funds the receive. Do you believe that homeless shelters would like to increase homelessness, or are in competition with private prisons for persons ending up in their facility?

It's weird people aren't talking about this. CA alone spends multiple billions every year on homelessness, bans private prisons, and has the worst homelessness situation. Yet we're supposed to believe that the dominant force behind homeless policy is private prisons?

This is an absolutely hilarious comment.

Why don't the homeless people lobby? They have every right to too!

> They have every right to

  "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to                                
  sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their                                    
  bread." -- Anatole France

More on-topic, I think Afghanistan, with its factions of warlords would be a good model to look forward to for any nation that erodes the foundation of the Rule of Law by privatising institutions of criminal justice and so regressing State monopoly on violence to whichever thugs with the most guns and manpower are willing to take someone's buck.

Homeless shelters count on the invisible hand of free market.

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