Inmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book reviews | Hacker News Reader

Inmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book reviews

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132 pointsthunderbong89 comments

Anecdotally, my brother in law was in US prison (federal) and we would send him books all the time and he would read them and trade them around for other books. It's hard to contextualize how much nothing they have to do in prison. Reading is literally one of the only things you could be guaranteed to be able to do on a day to day basis regardless of lock down status.

I have seen videos where they trained dogs or had adopted rescue cats. I think a lot of prisoners would do way better if they got a chance to feel like a productive member of society. Them being firefighters in California wildfires comes to mind too.

There is generally two types of prisons in the world, one is "Punish"/"Keep rest of the world safe" prisons, and the other is "Rehabilitation" prisons. The latter tries to make people be able to re-integrate after finishing the sentence, while the first doesn't care as long as they are imprisoned and kept away from the rest of "normal folks". Convincing people that rehabilitation is possible is a huge job, and I don't see that happening in the US anytime soon.

Rather than types, maybe those qualities are more like ends on a spectrum?

Maybe even axes on a graph, where prisons strive to be on the Pareto front at different points.

It's a very US thing to present issues as one side or the other, "Left or Right", "Capitalist or Socialist" with nothing between. In reality almost everything is on a (multi-dimensional) spectrum with a lot of nuance. This binary thinking is reinforced by TV and social media and is tearing the country apart.

"Rehabilitation" is in many cases a misnomer. There's a difference between Rehabilitating someone who developed a problem and Habilitating someone who was never taught to think with a moral compass. People in the US could be convinced to get behind major prison reform if the reformers weren't so insistent on representing every felon as Jean Valjean.

I was watching an interesting video of a young woman who had just gotten a DUI. She didn't understand why it was a "thing" because she hadn't hit anyone. She managed to argue herself into two months in the county jail because she didn't understand and did not want to understand. She also tried, briefly, to make a case that she was too attractive for prison. Upon questioning, it was fairly clear that she would go on to reoffend.

I saw another video of five teens who liked throwing heavy rocks over a busy overpass. They had done this more than once. Of course, they ended up killing someone, after which text messages were exchanged with much LOL and LFMOA and HAHAHA. Apparently, they had pre-planned some kind of defense where everyone would agree that the eldest of the bunch was the only one throwing the rocks, as well. The four youngest got a year of probation. The eldest got three and a quarter years in prison. He's out and the rest are long clear of their probation.

I am unsure what could be done to rehabilitate these individuals rather than merely coercing lip service from them.

I am equally unsure. But I believe we have a responsibility to try to help the weakest members of our society become better people, and if that means locking them up for a while and trying to teach them a moral compass that's what we should try even if it's doomed to failure. It can't be any worse than what we're currently doing.

"Two social workers walk past a man lying beaten and bloody on the ground, moaning for help. One turns to the other and says 'My God, whoever did this needs our help.'"

The weakest in society are those who are taken advantage of by the morally bankrupt, not the morally bankrupt themselves.

However, I agree that what we are currently doing is worse than almost every alternative.

Psychopathic individuals mainly use therapy as post-graduate training in how to simulate human emotion. Just ask some shrinks. They don't learn a moral compass; they learn how to pretend they have one.

Of course, not all inmates are psychopathic, but 15-25% manifest those traits, according to https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy.

I don't get it. Are you advocating throwing the baby out with the bath water? Just because the 15-25% exist doesn't mean we can't try to teach the 75% how to exist in society without breaking the rules. And it also doesn't preclude us from giving them something other than a swift kick in the ass. Kicking your ass seems to be the only thing the criminal justice system in the US does these days.

How meaningful is it to manifest psychopathic trait to a clinically significant degree? If you look at them, they include impulsivity, risk taking, and violence. Of course prisoners will be impulsive, take risks, and/or be violent! That's how a lot of them end up in prison! There is something of a jump from there to the pop science understanding of psychopathy.

It's not clear that everyone who displays some of those traits is going to display all the others, that a pattern of risky violence means someone is automatically beyond help, that the stats on psychopaths aren't including lots of people with other underlying problems that fully explain their behaviour, or that anyone else who goes to a therapist is doing anything radically different from simulating normal human behaviour.

> the pop science understanding of psychopathy

the reference I gave is not pop science.

Your debunking and pooh-pooh'ing is unpersuasive. This is a professional association publishing that, and they do have shrinks in prison.

"About 1.2% of U.S. adult men and 0.3% to 0.7% of U.S. adult women are considered to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. Those numbers rise exponentially in prison, where 15% to 25% of inmates show these characteristics (Burton, B., & Saleh, F. M., Psychiatric Times, Vol. 37, No. 10, 2020). "

I'm not debunking anything, I'm asking how meaningful manifesting traits to a "clinically significant" level actually is. If I shoot my neighbour's dog in broad daylight then show no remorse it's probably manifesting psychopathic traits to a clinically significant degree, but it doesn't mean it would be totally worthless to send me to a psychiatrist. It may not even mean that I meet the threshold to be diagnosed as an actual psychopath, under whatever contorted DSM-V diagnosis it currently sits.

Your reference has no bearing on the answer to that question and in fact notes that 30% of the population display some traits of psychopathy, which is the entire point here. If you squint hard enough, you can label 30% of the population as psychopaths; if you're also convinced it's useless to send them to therapy, you can use the label to deny them mental health care and stick them in prison.

I'm worried that a broad and underspecified definition of psychopathy combines with an overstated inability to treat them, in a way that is morally bankrupt and tantamount to just giving up.

General (not targeted) guidance counseling once they're out of prison probably would help here. Just help to get them back on their feet for the woman. Regular checkups, seeing how she's doing, giving the indication someone cares about her. This can do a lot to help someone understand what they did wrong and can help them understand that being a part of society means thinking about others as well. (Chiefly, don't do this in a way that's denigrating to her as a person.)

Involve CPS with all the teenagers.

The woman probably had other things in her life that caused her to end up with that remorseless of a personality - granted I suspect a part of this might also just be the American general tendency to take rights as "fuck you got mine", instead of "we have to share this place together", which might be hard to deal with (assuming this is US).

The teenagers probably had inattentive parents or a bad school life, which turned them to doing shit that is pretty much harassing people that eventually would get someone killed. It sounds almost certain like there's secondary circumstances involved - petty theft is usually scared out (since teenagers tend to do it because of the "taboo", the fact that most kids don't see real consequences of their actions until then and finally that it's seen as the least egregious crime that isn't like... a speeding violation or a parking ticket), but if that defense is as you say, it sounds more deliberate and more deeply rooted.

Crimes are sometimes a symptom of other things, not the cause.

You are clearly well-meaning, but your suggestions indicate a lack of familiarity with the mindset and behaviors of people that become chronically involved with the criminal justice system.

You are not going to teach a mindless drunk driver by indicating to them, via a state-employed official, that "someone cares about them". You're not going to convince a teenager that hurting people is wrong by having them speak to a social worker with a caseload. Children learn their moral systems from years of active and passive indoctrination into their parents' and peers' culture. If you want to reorient someone's moral compass by instilling values that no one ever taught them, and are not present in the culture in which they live outside of prison, you're going to need something a hell of a lot more potent than regular appointments with a therapist.

> Crimes are sometimes a symptom of other things, not the cause.

Chronic criminality is the result of moral systems that are calibrated and reinforced by violent and uncivilized cultures. This goes doubly for "rich" criminals, who display their immoral behavior through war and the stock market. Reforming a petty criminal or a serial abuser is as difficult as reforming a corporate executive taking kickbacks. They don't see a problem with it.

"People in the US could be convinced to get behind major prison reform if the reformers weren't so insistent on representing every felon as Jean Valjean."

It's pretty crazy to blame the current situation on reformers. In reality it's the war on drugs and "tough on crime". I know a lot of normally reasonable people who think prisoners deserve to be raped in prison and don't deserve health care.

Right. It's well known that Nixon started the "War on Drugs" as a way to target hippies and black people. And "tough on crime" has just led to people spending more time in prison in spite of falling crime rates: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2020/oct/1/new-study-sh...

Gotta keep those private prisons full. We need more cheap and free labor!

I did not say that the current situation was created by the reformers, merely that the existing US prison reform movements lack the support they need to move the needle because they are controlled by people who are far too broadly optimistic and sympathetic to prisoners.

I view prison reform as the most important--not among the most important, the most important--step in beginning to change modern US society for the better. I know many prison activists and was raised in a culture of people who volunteered in prisons and in legal efforts to reform prisons and assist prisoners. They are too sympathetic and the way they frame their cause reduces the amount of support they receive from the general public.

Rehabilitation requires education and social services and once you start providing those resources to prisoners people question the logic of giving prisoners something for free that everyone else has to pay for. Why should a prisoner get access to college classes while a law abiding citizen has to pay tens of thousands of dollars? Of course it winds up saving the state money by decreasing recidivism, but it raises inconvenient questions.

The correct answer, of course, is that everyone should have access to basic educational and social services. This is unpopular with many in the US.

It's a great way for capital owners to keep workers fighting amongst themselves

In law this is often couched as ‘retribution’ vs ‘rehabilitation’. I’ve been out of law school for over a decade, but about ten years ago pretty much all the evidence was the retributive prisons/legal systems were awful (created more recidivists, were more expensive, had more conflict between staff and inmates, etc…).

A solid 30% of the country doesn't even want people to have healthcare. There are fundamental issues that make the populace irredeemable ideologically. Of course if you could reprogram that 30% we'd be okay, but, like you said, good luck with that.

As one of the people in the camp that firmly rejects rehabilitation: if you think that it's hard to convince me that rehabilitation is possible, I have bad news for you. Most of us don't care if it's possible or not: to get us on board, you'd have to convince us that rehabilitation is _just_, which is a much harder task. I think a good argument could change my mind, but it has to be a moral argument, not an economic one. "We rehabilitated your rapist and integrated them into our society" is considered by many to be an affront to the victims, and the very opposite of justice.

If you were to convince me that it was 100% possible, and the rehabilitated criminals become productive members of our society, that would make me support it less, not more.

What if we reframe this from the extreme of a rapist, where I agree in many cases retribution needs to be an element of the sentence.

How about someone who’s been sentenced for stealing, which they did in order to feed their kids? They dropped out of high school, and have never held down a steady job. Do you genuinely believe it’s better to further smack them down with a criminal justice system that will prevent them getting a job in the future, rather than having them leave prison qualified to do something productive?

> How about someone who’s been sentenced for stealing, which they did in order to feed their kids?

Current valid defenses against a charge of larceny include amking an honest mistake, being mentally incapacitated, and having the intention to restore. If you believe that "immediate physical need even without an intention to restore" should be a valid defense against this criminal charge as well, I'm with you. I don't think we disagree on that. The law does, but it's much easier to convince people that certain specific acts should not be considered criminal than to convince them of the justness of rehabilitating actual criminals.

So, as far as I can tell, such examples have no bearing on the question of rehabilitation at all: why would we need to rehabilitate somebody who's not guilty in the first place?!

If somebody is guilty of a crime, however, how could eventually letting a perpetrator return to society, get a job and do something productive _not_ be a further unjust act against the victim?

Almost everybody agrees that the state helping perpetrators of a crime to get revenge on their victims would be twisted and heinous. I'm sure you agree too.

But living well is the best revenge, and that's exactly what rehabilitation is: preparing an incarcerated offender to live well (function as a law-abiding member of the society) after their release, and by that further torment their victims.

> Them being firefighters in California wildfires comes to mind too

Those are the ones that aren't allowed to work as firefighters once they're out of prison due to their criminal records, right?

Correct. It's not rehabilitation or job training, it's legal slave labor to do one of the most dangerous jobs we have, as explicitly allowed for by the 13th Amendment of the Constitution.

The United States still has legal slavery, just with extra steps.

> just with extra steps

I thought the whole thing here was that for inmates, there weren't any extra steps?

I'll confess to not knowing much about this though (I'm not American)

The extra steps are the ones between them being a free person and an inmate.

Like making loitering a crime and then using police and prosecutor discretion to selectively enforce said crime only against poor minorities.

And like magic! You can re-enslave the people who were 'freed'.

Except no one is forcing them, they choose to do it because it gives them purpose.

Yes, I've heard that these positions are highly sought after and gives the _volunteers_ a sense of purpose, but it gives some people living comfortably outside of prison icky feelings about consent. I have no doubt prisoners would have some choice words for people in this comment section who would choose to take the option away from them.

I highly doubt they "volunteer" for a sense of purpose. It's almost certainly paid labor (albeit very cheap compared to even minimum wage), but probably relatively well-paid for a prison job and offering opportunities to obtain outside food and contraband.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912193742/california-bill-cle...

I didn’t know that part. That’s pretty dumb. But in general I would like the idea if they could get that work after.

He had a job running the commissary but even that only filled so much time. He would have loved anything that allowed him to learn a skill he could have used on release.

> Reading is literally one of the only things you could be guaranteed to be able to do on a day to day basis regardless of lock down status.

Why did you bring my early 2000s suburban upbringing into this?

We (society) should get them access to Khan Academy plus a ChatGPT style interface for interactive tutoring. Imagine giving each prisoner a tablet, possibly wrapped in the kids edition foam so they couldn't hit each other with it, and letting them work through basic education in every field they're interested in.

I expect people who worked on it would come out of a substantial sentence better educated than most.

That would be nice, but first you have to get around the nightmarish world of for-profit corporations that control all prisoner access to information and communication in the US. The system is designed to bleed every penny possible from prisoners and their families, not to rehabilitate them.

I think for profit prisons are a small fraction of the carceral system. Most prisons are government run.

Even in the case of private prisons what we need is to align incentives. We shouldn't be mainly paying per inmate, but rather give the private prison X% of the inmate's taxes after release and nothing if the inmate offends again. The idea is, we don't want to incentivize prisons to just hold people - that actually incentivizes the prisons to promote recidivism. We do want the prisons to impart job and life skills that will make the prisoner a productive and law abiding member of society after release.

Looks like around 8.4% of prisons were private in the US in 2018.

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

let 90% people can learn something there is a good Idea.

Here's a list of books for review:

  * Shawshank Redemption
  * The Count of Monte Cristo
  * Papillon
  * How to Escape From Prison
  * The Great Escape

Actually, I wonder if prison libraries are allow to carry such books that might inspire prisoners to escape or otherwise give them ideas.

IIRC prison libraries do get screened for that sorta thing. Overly violent novels for example aren't allowed in prisons because of concerns that it might lead to criminals thinking violence is more acceptable. (So no Fight Club for example.)

Anything too ideologically or politically radical, sexual, or violent might be banned. Some bans just seem to be random, though.

https://www.bookstoprisoners.net/banned-book-lists/

Are you concerned that the prisoners would think of escape only after reading said book? I think you'd be able to spot the deception the first time an inmate asked for a poster of Rita Hayworth.

If I was ever stupid enough to commit a crime worthy of prison, I would want to have an active, outside job. Example: cleaning up old cemeteries, repairing park trails, working in a recycle facilities... I realize there's the possibility of liability, and yes, I have seen the movie "Cool Hand Luke", but non-activity is almost inhuman. Punishment is essential, but common sense must prevail.

> stupid enough to commit a crime worthy of prison

This is a terrible attitude. Go read some of the other comments, and maybe learn a bit about the prison-industrial complex and how it incentivizes to law-enforcement agencies to maximize the number of people in prison. Try arguing that this system would only target "stupid people", and not, say, communities that are easy targets, and historically over-policed.

Stupid as in breaking known laws. Before you judge me or anyone else, remember you don't know everything and never will. To presume you can read minds on this site is shortsighted and...stupid.

My point is that most people have probably broken a bunch of laws unknowingly, but only some get hit with jail time for it.

For example: ever jaywalked? you probably broke a law. Police have used jaywalking as an excuse to jail people.

I guessing we can't find any instance of a jaywalker ever going to prison. Remember, I said stupid enough to go to prison, not local jail. A big problem we have today in the social revolution we are going through is most readers don't thoroughly read posts before going off with their own biases.

Short documentary on the subject here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ5dM-uRPPo (english subtitles)

Initially I was reading "sentences" as a line of text and nothing made sense.

It made total sense to me. With increase in command over language inmates started using shorter sentences instead of long ones without break.

Yeah I was thinking this might be a trick. Prisoners who write book reviews are eligible to have their sentences shortened [during the editing process].

Shortening sentences using longer sentences

It's good to use a variety of sentence length, as the case requires.

It is as if "Crime and Punishment" were written for this exact purpose.

Noobs..

Argentinian condemned vice president got a sentence reduction doing some courses (short ones), some from prison, some from his home (he was at home confinament because he alleged he must care of their childs (?

DDBB programmer(? Electrician Another electrician one, but longer. Events organizer Philosophy

He got almost 1 year cut.

He was condemned because he bought the company that printed paper money :D

What a nice country!

Noobs? Our entire government is made up of corrupt officials. The lawyer of the biggest organized drug trafficking gang in the country is in the supreme court and electoral court and by now the nation has essentially turned into a judiciary monarchy of sorts. They basically erased our president's crimes, undid the entire investigation into him and his party and basically buried everything, and now this corrupt communist ex-con is in power. They're trying to ban Bolsonaro from politics right now for "abuse of political power" or some other equally vague made up crime. Biden actually backed this communist and then had to watch him strengthen ties with China. Our impeached former president is now chief of some BRICS bank thing and making like $100k+ a month to do fuck all. It's comical. This country ain't for amateurs.

In Romania writing books reduced the prison sentences by months, not days. Writing a book is not even hard because there was no problem to get "help" from outside with the content.

Homicides in Brazil lead to 6 years in prison. The system doesn't work, but we have these gems like "if inmates read books...", the cherry on top of shit.

It's 6 to 20 years. Not "only 6".

And that is, "simple" murder.

Is not only 6 (i never say "only"), but is not rare 6 years.

X years in prison in Brazil is bullshit. At 1/3 of x or 1/2 or .., the prisoner is free. Suzane von Richthofen cruelly killed her father and mother. She is 39 years old. After 20 years on prison, she is already free.

So, 20 years and not 6...

Two homicides, she could be half open at 14 (but she didn't want to), 7 years for each homicide, NOT 20. What is your point?

I just thought it was misleading as if any person that actually kill people would get only 6 years arrested in practice, which is not the case.

> any person that actually kill people would get only 6 years

I never say it.

6 years of prison in Brazil sounds like hell.

For a homicide the hell is nothing.

Make a racist joke or something though and you'll probably get 20+ years.

>Each well-written review would shave four days off an inmate's sentence.

What about lifers?

Wow. So you could write enough reviews in a month to shave off 10+ years.

Part of me wonders if some of the prisoners have others write book reports for them.

Kind of like an Con(vict)GPT of some sorts.

It's a very interesting idea - allows the prisoners that really want to improve and change their lives the opportunity to lower their sentence and get out quicker.

Also has the side effect of becoming more educated potentially.

> Part of me wonders if some of the prisoners have others write book reports for them.

Why would someone write a report for others if they could shorten their own sentence instead?

Also:

> Because the inmates were passionate readers, they were encouraged to write book reviews.

If it's the same program described here[1], there's a cap on how much credit a prisoner could get per year. Once they hit that point, many people would take the opportunity to make their life on the inside easier. However supposedly they were proctored while writing the book reports to avoid blatant cheating.

1: https://www.npr.org/2017/07/04/535530400/in-brazil-some-inma...

>Why would someone write a report for others if they could shorten their own sentence instead?

Isn't this like asking why economies exist?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's a fair point. The dollar someone else might pay for you to reduce their sentence might be higher than you would get outside. It's all about comparative advantage.

> Why would someone write a report for others if they could shorten their own sentence instead?

I think they mean sort of "ghost-reviewing", possibly under threats. Like I tell you to write a book review in my name, or I'd beat you up.

>Why would someone write a report for others if they could shorten their own sentence instead?

There are things people might prefer to a shortened sentence, such as money on the outside.

Good idea to learn useful skills. Just two caveats:

1) This can easily become cheap labor for outside companies, like book publishers, in this case. Books with many reviews sell better than books with none, I've been told. Any self-published author will receive unsolicited email offering to review their books.

2) With respect to "rehabilitation": a substantial number of prison inmates have psychopathic traits [1]. That's not to say they're unemployable; it may even be an asset in some professions [2] /s

[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/ce-corner-psychopathy

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work-eb...?

Amazon Meconical Turk

Bet this is gonna be true in less than 10 years. Train some AI to shorten your sentence.

Meconvictical ? (I like this one because it sounds really dumb)

Meconvictal ?

Get ChatGPT to do it, commit more crimes.

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