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Comment by Overtonwindow | Hacker News Reader

"The prison system we have is in dire need of reformation in general..."

The last line I found to be the most important. I taught reading and writing in both a state, and federal prison. The problem we have in America is not a rehabilitation issue, but a retribution issue.

In my opinion, the perception of prison for the fast majority of Americans is a place for retribution, not rehabilitation.

Until we change the mindset of prison as a place where someone goes to be rehabilitated, and not just punished, then maybe we can start thinking of more proactive, long-term strategies to reduce recidivism.

Until then, we are just warehousing inmates until their next recycle through society, and back to prison.

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I agree with you, and to my mind the only way to change that thinking is to abolish the death penalty and life imprisonment, and to make the maximum prison sentence 25 years.

Then the incentives change really quickly. But until then… most of the industry will see the ability to lock someone up forever as more money guaranteed to the small towns gutted by globalization

Are we optimizing for the law-abiding or the law-breaking?

If someone does <insert pre-medidated, heinous thing>, do/should I support letting them automatically rejoin society in a maximum of 25 years?

I’m not saying there aren’t problems with our current system, but I do believe that some tiny slice of humans have unfortunately proven themselves, via their own actions, to be completely incapable of living among free society and society is right to forcibly exclude them from doing so until/unless that situation changes. This might be only 1 in 100K, but that’s still thousands of people in the US alone and society has to do something with them.

> If someone does <insert pre-medidated, heinous thing>, do/should I support letting them automatically rejoin society in a maximum of 25 years?

My understanding of places that don’t do life sentences is that at the end of the term the prisoner is re-evaluated to determine if it’s still in the best of interest of the society to keep them incarcerated or not.

For example, in Norway I believe that the maximum sentence is 21 years with the possibility for extensions if they are still deemed a threat.

While there are certainly people who likely do need to be separated from society forever, I don’t think everyone currently serving a life sentence necessarily falls into that category.

My spouse has a relative serving a life sentence for a double murder when he was young, nearly 30 years ago. By all accounts he’s a very different person now and has been rehabilitated. But he’ll never get out, despite that and despite having a support network were he ever released. Does he, in particular, deserve freedom? I don’t actually know him well enough nor the details of his crime to say for myself, but it certainly seems like the US is keeping a lot of people locked up even when it might be better for society as a whole to reintegrate them as productive members.

Again, other countries have already came up with solutions to this - in Norway maximum sentence is 25 years, but if you are given it, it's subject to automatic review at the end - if you still aren't rehabilitated, it just gets extended. For instance Anders Breivik was sentenced as such - and the chances of him actually ever leaving prison are close to zero, despite Norway having a maximum time limit on sentencing.

(I can also see the argument as to why this is unusually cruel punishment - you are never sure how long your imprisonment will last, but I think it's the best compromise if you don't want to have a life sentence as a thing.)

Also if someone asks - how is that different than life sentence with possible parole after 25 years - because in this setup, the state has to argue why someone needs to be imprisoned for longer, instead of the prisoner arguing why they should be released. I believe this is much healthier for the whole system.

The caveat is that many criminals in those countries don’t have the capacity for violence that American criminals have.

Also, it’s useless the balk at long sentences because often American prisoners do not end up serving the full sentence for various reasons.

And as you mentioned, those “maximums” aren’t true maximums anyway, so what’s the point? Better to be upfront.

>>The caveat is that many criminals in those countries don’t have the capacity for violence that American criminals have.

I literally mentioned Breivik in my example though? He is probably the worst of the worst and the system knows how to deal with him in a way that makes sense, without having to create special arrangements or exceptions for him. Can you name any American criminal for whom this kind of setup wouldn't be sufficient for?

You start with “again”; where was the previous?

There wasn't, sorry - it's a weird habit I have when arguing online.

>Are we optimizing for the law-abiding or the law-breaking?

The entire paradigm shift for retribution -> rehabilitation is that the law-abider and the law-breaker are (or can be) the SAME people. The distinction you are making falls away.

We are all born of the same nature, capable of doing evil. Does that make us all evil people? Separate the sin from the sinner, and create space for repentance

I’m not interested in retribution, but I am highly interested in reducing future crimes against members of society.

If rehabilitation fosters that more effectively than exclusion after an episode of law-breaking, I’m interested.

Data that I’ve seen so far does not suggest that, but showing “released prisoners have a lower or equal rate of subsequent law-breaking than the average member of society” would be extremely compelling.

Crime happens inside of prison just as is happens outside of prison. If you affirm the innate and equal dignity of every human life (assuming here), why optimize for law-abiding outside a prison to the detriment of law-abiding inside prison?

I support enforcing laws both inside and outside prison, but would not be at all surprised to find the base rate of law-breaking inside a prison was higher, giving that the reason prison exists is to segregate proven past committers-of-crime away from free society under a premise that they are likely to do so again.

We should work to reduce that in-prison crime, but not at the crime-risk expense of the never-convicted. Perhaps stricter law enforcement inside prisons is needed if you’re saying that the reforming-to-ongoing-law-abiding within are being victimized by on-going criminal activity.

What GP is saying is that death penalty and life sentences don't incentivize society for rehabilitation. The implications here is that if society was faced with the fact that they have 25 years to fix the person, that's a much greater incentive for rehabilitation than death or life.

I won't argue that the existing system isn't broken. But elimination of life imprisonment and capped sentences of 25 years for all crimes is just absurd.

What about Dennis Rader? He murdered numerous people throughout the 70s and 80s. The details of the Otero family are the kind of thing they don't even write about in fiction. Should he be allowed freedom before he dies? Should he be free today because of how old his crimes were?

What about Jeffrey Dahmer? (I realize he's dead, but that was at the hand of another inmate, and he'd still be alive and well if not for that.) He would be walking free today as a 62 year old if there was a 25 year maximum.

Furthermore, who's going to assume responsibility when people like this are released and then kill again to satisfy the urge within them?

Like I said, I won't argue that what he have needs correction, and I agree with the focus on rehabilitation, but there ARE other things that matter - such as appropriate punishment and protection of society - that still need to be factored in.

It works really well in norway, at the end of the sentence if they are an extreme public risk, such as in those cases, it's extended. But it's very important to have the automatic "we need to extend this" rather than the expectation it's a life sentence built in from the start of serving it.

Fundamentally, prison is about preventing prisoners from committing additional crimes against the populace. We can talk about retribution and rehabilitation but those are justifications for why we used x method instead of y method. Prior to the 20th century we couldn't afford to keep people in prison for a long time so criminals were simply executed. Now that we can afford to keep them alive in prison we lean towards life sentences for heinous crimes.

Choosing long prison sentences instead of executions has externalities. One of which is that now street gangs owe fealty to prison gangs.

People don't go to prison to be rehabilitated and never will. Prison is solely to keep convicted criminals far away from normal people. If rehabilitation is going to happen it not going to be at prisons.

In every counrty, exept the US, criminals mostly come out of a prison as a better person. In no other country a prison is just to lock people away. In the US a prisoner is just a kind of perpetum mobile, a unlimited money machine.

"Every country except the US" is a weird way of saying "a handful of rich countries". The US prison system is exceptional for its size, but not for its low quality.

>>People don't go to prison to be rehabilitated and never will

Yeah that's complete nonsense and we have lots of data that proves otherwise. US is really a massive outlier there amongst developed countries.

Maybe you should read about the penal system in Nordic countries

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