The Caging of America
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
So no--the minimum wage itself doesn't encourage crime--it's the treatment that comes with it. It's like the "college freshman poverty" meme, where college students talk about how poor they were because they can't afford anything but Ramen. While true in the literal sense (they don't have any money in the bank), it's patently false in a real sense--when they hold a minimum wage job, they're at the bottom of their almost inevitable rise towards middle class. When a convicted felon holds a minimum wage job, he's hanging on to it by a thread, simultaneously reminded of how lucky he is to be flipping burgers and how he's scum of the earth.
Now, stack this treatment up against the actual offense. You're walking down the street, carrying a few ounces of weed--you know, the stuff that pop stars openly discuss smoking, and that politicians now openly admit to smoking (in the past). You know you're being stupid--but hey, caution to the wind--maybe your father just died and you aren't caring much about your own future right now. Maybe you just lost your job and everything seems horrible. Maybe you're just another dumb young adult who thinks they're invincible. Regardless, you aren't hurting anyone. Heck, you're less dangerous than the timid but excited driver who guns his motor on the highway and breaks the speed limit after he's checked that there's no other cars in sight (after all, maybe he doesn't see the guy who's about to run across the street). You've known dozens and dozens of pot smokers and never seen one get arrested (the chances are quite small). You've smoked pot with dozens of people and never seen one overdose or have adverse affects. Regardless, you drew the short draw, and suddenly you're arrested and railroaded through a court system designed to efficiently process and incarcerate offenders--suddenly you realize that the arresting cop isn't Andy Griffith, ready to say, "Aww, Billy, I know you're a good kid, run along now and don't do it again."--instead there's a steady march of public defenders, prosecutors, judges, etc., who won't look you in the eye, whose main interest is in extracting a plea bargain so they don't have to waste time on a court date.
This is the narrative that goes through my mind when people prat about people making bad choices. There's bad choices (smoking pot, breaking the speed limit, creative tax deductions) and then there's BAD choices (rape, murder). So yes--society did something wrong--society KNOWS that people make bad choices in the first category (limited harm), and such choices are imminently forgivable, but due to a toxic mixture of lobbying, inertia, corruption, and ignorance, throws the book at those people, ignoring the torturous harm we're inflicting.
This in itself may serve to worsen America's problem. I don't know of any other country where employers bother to check such things (not to mention actually having access to such privacy sensitive information), unless it is with very, very good reasons.
Driving without insurance is a criminal offense (and insurance is person-based, not car based).
http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesot...
http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm
I toured a prison in Minnesota in the mid-1980s, as an interpreter for an official visitor from another country. The visitor was amazed to learn that Minnesota then (and now) spends LESS per taxpayer on putting convicted criminals into prison, while spending substantially MORE per prisoner. Only the most serious criminals with long histories of offenses are imprisoned. Most convicted criminals receive sentences that involve community corrections but not imprisonment. Minnesota's maximum-security prison, the one I toured, had a population of inmates 97 percent of whom had killed at least one other human being before being put in that prison. The foreign visitor was a human rights lawyer, and he was actually amazed at how humanely the prisoners were housed and treated in that prison. (He had visited many prisons in his own country, and none were as well funded as the prison in Minnesota.) A prison can be properly staffed and funded, and not too crowded, if a whole state's criminal justice system is geared toward imprisoning only persons who must be kept out of general society, responding to most forms of criminal behavior with sentences that don't include prison time.
There are undoubtedly quite a few Americans who are in correctional supervision but shouldn't be. There are also quite a few Americans who should be in correctional supervision, but aren't. (For a bare start, suppose we believe the commonly quoted meme that there are 1 million gang members in America.)
In either case, I think the most basic question is: why are there so many criminals? What about the present-day American system of government is so amazingly criminogenic?
For instance, one commonly quoted "root cause" is our proverbial callousness to important issues of social justice. Is an absence of social justice the problem? Let's consider some evidence.
Robbery is a pretty good "index crime." For instance, in 1900, there was about 1 robbery per day in all of England (source: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99...). This is roughly a factor of 35 lower than current reported crime rates (same source) in the ol' Sceptered Island - assuming you trust HMG's statistics. And all crime statistics in all countries everywhere are generally admitted by all informed observers to be utterly buggered to hell. (example: http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-i...)
In any case, you may compare the public concern for social justice in England, in 1900 and 2000, and note precisely the reverse of the correlation predicted by the hypothesis.
Japan has extremely low crime as well, and is probably the least Americanized of all First World nations today. Clearly, it is physically possible for the State to eradicate crime. Clearly, the American system of government, at home or abroad, seems to carry with it unusually high levels of crime and disorder, at least by historical First World standards.
But why? If what we need isn't more social justice, what is it?
(edit: I just checked and this parliament.co.uk link isn't the right one for my robbery numbers - I'll have to look. Still, money graf - "The number of indictable offences per thousand population in 1900 was 2.4 and in 1997 the figure was 89.1." Two orders of magnitude any way you slice it.)
PS: There are far more laws to break now than in the past which again shifts the picture greatly. Also, Island nations have less drug crime because it's harder to bring the stuff in.
Actually, law enforcement in the Edwardian period was much more strict. At that point in history the "broken windows" theory of crime is not a theory - it is a piece of everyday common sense which it has never occurred to anyone to question.
Juridical punishment in the Anglo-American era decreases more or less monotonically since (at least) the Elizabethan age. America is in all eras notorious for endemic crime. In general, by the end of the 19th century there is no significant criminal underclass in Protestant Europe. Of course, in Naples you can get knifed in an alley at any time since the 5th century BC, so everything is relative.
This book (1921) is a pretty good look at American and European police systems in the prewar era: http://books.google.com/books?id=Q90qAAAAMAAJ. Fosdick was later head of the Rockefeller Foundation so you know he's legit. (Edit: book link was wrong.)
"The chief constable for Edinburgh in his annual report for 1915 wrote as follows: 'I regret to state that while crimes against the person have considerably decreased, a number of serious crimes under the heading of homicide were reported during the year, namely one murder, one attempted murder, and five cases of culpable homicide. The one murder was an abortion case; two of the culpable homicides were cases in which infants had died from neglect; a third was a vehicular accident case; and two others, after full investigation by the Crown Authorities, were not proceeded with.' Edinburgh is a city in excess of 300,000 population. Surely a chief of police in an American city of equal size would have reasons for pride rather than regret if he could point to such a record."
In 2012, said American chief of police wouldn't have reasons for pride - he'd probably be committed to an insane asylum. But even a century ago, American crime is an order of magnitude above British crime.
Yes. New York 30 years ago was insane. Giuliani cleaned it up. This is a case of mistaking the exception for the trend. Moreover, all chic New Yorker-reading New Yorkers are now free to think like Gopnik, as they stroll around Central Park at midnight or whatever - a blatant invitation for the trend to resume.
Remember, it took the Dinkins era to get these people to elect a Republican in the first place. But if you asked their great-grandfathers of Fosdick's era, they'd have been quite astonished to learn that Central Park could ever become a predator's den, day or night - and would associate such an outcome with the complete collapse of American civilization. Which obviously hasn't happened, so nobody's perfect.
In 1894 Philadelphia, a city of a million people at the time (2/3rds the current population) recorded 22 murders. By 1990 the murder count peaked at 535 before falling a bit back to around ~300 the past few years. Overall that's a 1000%+ increase between 1894 and now. So even by historical American standards, crime now is much worse. Part of the change in Philadelphia is due to the great migration and the changing composition of the population rather than change in law enforcement. But even adjusting for demographics the crime rate is 2-4X that of the 1890's http://books.google.com/books?id=8CVNAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA13...
I'm still trying to figure out what precisely changed about law enforcement between the 1890's and the 1980's. Many books mention in passing that the Warren court and more liberal policing policy in the 1960's played a role (the books "Slaughter of the Cities" and "Unheavenly City" mention this a bit, among others). But I still haven't found a good treatment that details how these policies made their way from the courts and the mayors to the beat cops on the ground, and how the day to day job of policing and sentencing actually changed.
BTW, mencius, do you ever worry that policing in Europe or Japan is too stringent? That it will lead over time to a domestication of the population, a winnowing out of the masculine and risk taking character in the population?
-devin f
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/09/091...
Philadelphia is one of many city's in the US, but looking at the overall trend and including things like duels shows a different picture. Consider, some gang violence would not have counted as murder 100 years ago.
It's also undeniable that until the Victorian period, Europe was generally becoming more orderly. (You'd probably see a drop in testosterone levels if you could measure this.) The trouble is that we live on the other side of that curve. See under: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_urban_zone. ("ZUS" is French for "no-go zone.") But fudge and blur enough and you can hide the peak.
I'd love to see Professor Spierenburg take a walk in Les Musiciens someday. His name sounds Jewish. Perhaps he'd be kidnapped, tortured and burned alive, like Ilan Halimi. But before he died, would he change his mind? Statistics suggest the contrary.
And what about Union busting. 50 people died from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Creek-Cabin_Creek_strike_... can you imagine what would happen today if the same level of violence became national news? Yet, for the time while it was larger average such things where not all that uncommon.
Looking at http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-... you can see a 11x difference in 2010 murders between Louisiana 11.2 and New Hampshire 1.0. But, considering the amount of migration within the country I think a national perspective is necessarily. And nationally, 200 years ago things where a lot more violent.
PS: Granted, it's not hard to twist these statistics if you include vehicle accidents the numbers start to change dramatically.
It is possible that the fact that Japan is the least Americanized of First World countries is the reason behind it's low crime rates. I wonder if it is their culture, not their government, which keeps the crime low.
From the first page: "In 1989 Japan experienced 1.3 robberies per 100,000 population, compared with 48.6 for West Germany, 65.8 for Great Britain, and 233.0 for the United States." There's that two orders of magnitude again.
Suppose crime in America has halved since 1989. (It hasn't.) From the Japanese perspective, wouldn't a writer still seem a little odd in exulting over the conquest of crime? When there are still two orders of magnitude more robberies?
Read this article about the police and law enforcement in Japan: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2011/0... Notice how very, very different it is than the policing of say, Baltimore.
You ask two unrelated question to which you provide no proof.
>But what if our system is actually erring in the other direction?
Okay. How? Every other nation on earth has lower incarceration rates, and a fair number of them are safer than the US.
So given that that are still criminals on the outside, the answer is that you need to become more efficient at apprehending the right people - not increase incarceration rates.
>I think the most basic question is: why are there so many criminals? What about the present-day American system of government is so amazingly criminogenic?
Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing.
>If what we need isn't more social justice, what is it?
This is entirely unsubstantiated by anything you wrote preceding this sentence. Frankly, it's kind of confused.
I can make sense of one of these lines: "Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing." I think behind this line is lurking the belief that America's prisons are full of Humboldt County potheads, or something like that.
The typical American in jail for drug offenses isn't a system administrator who made the mistake of toking up one night. It's a gang member whose real offense is being a worthless thug. The prosecutors and LEOs who busted him are experts in the technical details of putting worthless thugs in jail, to the extent that this remains possible.
Nonetheless, all major American cities retain a very substantial population of worthless thugs. If you're unaware of this reality, I strongly recommend this Chicago cop blog: http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/. Or you could watch "The Wire" - I hear it's available on DVD.
Last month, my wife and daughter were leaving a child's birthday party in the outer Mission, SF, when bullets flew down the street past them, followed by a worthless thug who ran past them gun in hand. You can argue that Bayshore Blvd. is a lousy place to put a space that hosts children's birthday parties, and I'd agree. Still, it's my country - why shouldn't I feel safe in it, anywhere, day or night?
Do you mean racist by reference to the etymology of the word 'thug' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee)?
That's a pretty obscure use of the 'race card'...
You can dispute whether that's racist, maybe, but being shocked at the suggestion? It quite clearly has a racial element.
And the interesting thing is, all of that violence is directly related to overly harsh laws relating to narcotics. The problem comes down to economics:
There is an immense demand for narcotics. Since narcotics are illegal, they are risky to trade, which pushes up prices. Through a combination of the preceding two points, trading in narcotics is extremely profitable. Since the different trade groups engaging in the trade of narcotics have no legal means through which they can resolve their differences, they will instead turn to violence.
The gang member's real offense is being born in a crappy part of town lacking in institutions and resources, and where engaging in the drug trade is a normative experience and one of the few sources of jobs. That at least The Wire really goes on about.
By eliminating mandatory sentencing, you will significantly reduce the amount of years people serve in prisons because the mandatory sentence lengths were established capriciously in an attempt to out grandstand political opponents (see http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/s... ).
The world isn't quite as black and white. Eliminate the War on Drugs and overnight all of these problems will disappear as the underlying incentives vanish.
Do you think that there would be more prisoners in Africa if all of the rapists and murderers were somehow instantly apprehended tried and convicted? This article making the USA look like it has the most criminals is a bit misleading.
And no one is talking about giving dangerous people a free pass. Prohibition never works. How can something that grows in the ground naturally be illegal?
I loved your comment at the end that seems to hint that it's not that the US has too many people locked up but rather that everyone else isn't strict enough!
Your argument is that of a designer of a nuclear missile control panel who puts the "disarm" and the "launch" buttons both side by side with the same size and color and without labels and then excuses himself that it's the operator's responsibility to learn which is which. And the really stupid part, is that in this case the designer is in the missile's impact zone.
Anyway, what's missing from your self-righteous spiel is that not everyone has access to a mentor who can show them the way out of poverty - and the first part of the battle is even knowing it's possible. Overall, it's a far more complex issue than you paint it to be.
Do you think that there would be more prisoners in Africa if all of the rapists and murderers were somehow instantly apprehended tried and convicted? This article making the USA look like it has the most criminals is a bit misleading.
Africa is a big place, much, much bigger than the US and with far more people and varied cultures. But it doesn't really matter, because you're bottom-feeding. The US should be compared to its contemporaries, rather than the worst possible example that can be found.
HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633985
The social structure of gangs is such that, when you grow up in a tough neighbourhood and you have crappy parents it's safer to join a gang.
When everyone around you considers the drug trade to be normative behaviour, you don't really see the downside.
It's not that we can't make choices for ourselves. It's that what we consider to be a good choice changes with our environments (and, frankly, our cognitive ability to make good choices also varies given your parent's income at birth - here's another TAL for a source on that last statement http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/364/g... )
> This article making the USA look like it has the most criminals is a bit misleading.
Well… a criminal is an invented category. A criminal is someone who broke a law, and we write new laws every day. The US just has more laws that put you in jail than any other country.
If this is true, for only 62 cents you can get a copy of this book (http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Slum-Salford-Quarter-Century/d...), which describes a (low-crime) Edwardian slum from the perspective of someone who grew up there and later became a sociologist (author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Roberts_(author)). You'll have to shell out $5 for prison psychologist Theodore Dalrymple's view (http://www.amazon.com/Life-Bottom-Worldview-Makes-Underclass...) of their great-grandchildren.
If you think the difference between these societies can be reduced to the availability and/or legality of intoxicants, you have a very one-track mind. Take another hit on the bong and perhaps your perspective will expand. Oh, and the subjects of both studies are predominantly white. So in case you're a racist, that's not an option.
I'll take a gander at your books.
I offer in return http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational . I haven't finished http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature but it's somewhat related. I'm not a huge fan of Freakonomics but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio... is an interesting one. Finally, the TAL episodes I've linked elsewhere in this thread:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/s... and http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/364/g...
If you look at any of the above, the TAL episodes are probably the most easy to consume.
That's not to say there aren't good or interesting writers in the present era. The range of discourse is much narrower, however. You won't find a lot of present-day perspectives that did not exist before 1923, but you will find an enormous quantity of pre-1923 perspectives which are completely alien to you - and in many cases quite distasteful. Also, the price is right!
As for Pinker, though, _The Blank Slate_ is pretty good...
It's jading, and it really detracts from the rest of your argument.
I also like how you judge people you don't know to be "worthless".
I'm sorry to hear what happened to your family, that's really awful. Still, I wonder what your reaction would have been if that "worthless thug" had been wearing a police uniform.
Here's another movie you might enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRsj-RPoFaI. Try to make it through all 5 minutes without thinking the phrase "worthless thug."
Cops, you'll be surprised to know, generally know how to use their weapons. Still, shit happens. For every innocent American whacked by a cop, there are probably a hundred whacked by a "worthless thug." What kind of defender of the innocent worries more about the former than the latter?
>For every innocent American whacked by a cop, there are probably a hundred whacked by a "worthless thug." What kind of defender of the innocent worries more about the former than the latter?
You do realize that cops have no obligation to protect you right? That was a supreme court ruling. Being between a cop trying to shoot someone is exactly as dangerous as being between a "worthless thug" trying to shoot someone.
"The Wire" is as much a commentary about the social conditions leading to crime (broken education system, blighted cities, etc.) as it is a commentary about criminals and law enforcement.
David Simon, the show's creator, has gone on record as stating that the show is really about three things: 1) the pointlessness of the drug war; 2) the social conditions of the underclass in America; 3) society's misguided obsession with simple, reductionist statistics (i.e., judging police effectiveness by "clearance rates," judging teachers by student test scores, etc.) at the expense of more complex and nuanced systems analysis.
Look up the statistics. Even if every person in the U.S. incarcerated for drug possession was released tomorrow, the U.S. would still have the highest incareration rate in the world. If every drug trafficker was released, the U.S. would still have an incarceration rate triple that of every Western European country. If every non-violent offender was released, the inceration rate would stll be double that of every western European country.
Also, note that many drug offenders have a violent history, but the police were only able to make the drug charges stick. Also note that in many cases the drug offenders were selling on street corners, playgrounds, and such, and residents were begging the police to move in and arrest the gang members.
America first and foremost has a crime problem. And it has a crime problem due to terrible law enforcement. The incarceration rate is actually at a point that is analogous to the famous Laffer curve in tax policy. If you have really good law enforcement, and predictably catch and punish felons, you have very low incarceration rates because so few people commit crime (see for instance Japan and Singapore). If your country catches nobody, obviously its incarceration rate is 0%. But if law enforcement is mostly lax, but is inconsistently and randomly harsh, then you get high crime and a very high total incarcerated population.
"In many cases" is disingenuously broad. That's not the case at all. Here is a great primer on the topic - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/s...
When we talk about the War on Drugs driving incarceration rates, we do not speak solely of drug possession. It's economics.
There is immense demand for narcotics because people love to get high. Since narcotics are illegal, engaging in their trade becomes a risky proposition, which in turn drives up prices. Since narcotics are such a lucrative endeavour, there is a lot of competition. Since competing groups lack the capacity to settle their differences through the judicial system, violence is often the answer they resort to.
By making the trade legal you will remove all of these problems overnight.
>America first and foremost has a crime problem. And it has a crime problem due to terrible law enforcement.
Convicting and incarcerating people has little to do with law enforcement and more to do with the laws they were accused of breaking and the judicial system at large. Police officers round people up; they have no responsibility in determining whether they get locked up.
> But if law enforcement is mostly lax, but is inconsistently and randomly harsh, then you get high crime and a very high total incarcerated population.
So, you agree with me then: large amounts of people who are correctly locked up shouldn't be locked up.
This seems like a refutation of your comment.
The counterpoint offered by phillmv was that just because, on paper, the crime has nothing to do with drugs, doesn't mean that it wasn't motivated by the drug trade.
(2) It's likely that many crimes are caused by the black market for drugs; the black market for drugs can be suppressed by legalizing them. It's also likely that many crimes are caused by drugs; these crimes can't be suppressed by legalizing, and in fact may be exacerbated by them. Drug dependency is devastating to economic well-being and to family systems and both those failures also give rise to criminality.
I'm pro-legalization, and if you read his blog Devin seems to be too, but if legalizing is a pipe-dream solution to the "incarceration problem", then pointing wildly to it during discussions of the incarceration problem does everyone a disservice.
Intensive addiction to heroin is virtually guaranteed to destroy both your family and your career, leaving you and your dependents with neither an income nor a support system.
However, the idea behind legalization is that it would reduce the incentive to commit other crimes, and that in the long-term, fewer people would be incarcerated, and so the incarceration rates would drop over time.
I agree though that it is both a pipe-dream (unlike alcohol prohibition, drug prohibition is pretty popular) and a "magic bullet" (in that it sounds too good to be true, and thus probably is).
There are many other causes of our high incarceration rates, but legalization is an important step in the right direction (in recognizing that we have created the wrong legal incentives).
Since we're all pro-legalization, then this is a little funny thing to be arguing about but I have a straight forward counter argument to the above.
There is a certain percentage of people who are straight up ruined by addiction. But they're a) a very small percentage of the population and b) since almost everyone has access to drugs (and at least in some of my social circles consuming drugs is totally normative) almost everyone who can be ruined by addiction already is.
This is bourne out by the experience of Portugal, which has decriminalized all drugs, etc etc yadda yadda.
My blog post on the topic is here: http://intellectual-detox.com/the-case-for-legalizing-drugs/
That said, I think legalization is much less of a pipe dream than any of the solutions I'm proposing. Which is unfortunate, because I don't think legalization alone will do much of anything about crime, I think most of the major cities need a period of fairly draconian and strict law enforcement to bring back from essentially a state of civil war back to civilization.
If we release all drug possession, what ratio would it be compared to W. Europe? Would the highest still be orders of magnitude higher?
--
I'm saying ending the War on Drugs would release drug possession AND traffickers AND a large percentage of violent crime would just not happen.
This is just one example. Criminal justice isn't my thing, but then there are a myriad things you can do to prevent recidivism. For instance, the barrier to participate in the regular economy as a convicted felon is absurdly high and, although I haven't statistics to quote for you, I would bet is a huge part of the reason so many people revert to crime (like, oh I don't know, dealing drugs again).
It's about the economics! Incentives matter! Etc.
And yet, even if you release all those people, along with (obviously) all the drug offenders --- every drug offense is statutorily a non-violent crime --- you still have an incarceration problem.
You see his point, right? I'm confused about why you're trying to avoid engaging with it. He's not saying we don't have an incarceration problem; he's saying, "the drug war isn't the problem, because even after you factor it out, we still have an incarceration problem". According to Devin, this is apparent in plain, simple numbers. If I was making an argument that contradicted the basic statistics of the problem, I'd want to know.
I ignored his statistics because he was using an appeal to emotion with "residents were begging the police". I have now looked them up; he's not wrong - you could halve the incarceration rate and still put twice as many people in jail as in England.
I don't have an answer for that!
I suspect it has to do with a lack of leniency and a prison system set up for punishment and not rehabilitation - the problem behind that incarceration statistic are repeat offenders and long sentences. The TAL episode I linked above really digs into it. Incarceration rates have skyrocketed since 1980.
That said, reducing the prison population by half doesn't strike me as a half measure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...
Finally, his end conclusion is still spurious - if you lock up more people than everyone else clearly law enforcement isn't the problem.
If you release all the nonviolent offenders, what you're left with are the violent offenders, which is a convenient shorthand for "people who clearly should be in prison".
Conclusion: how ever much we may be over-incarcerating drug offenders, it is also the case that too many people are committing violent crimes.
Devin's hypothesis is that this is a result of half-hearted law enforcement: we have enough enforcement to lock up huge numbers of people, but not enough to make the risk of committing any one violent crime high enough to deter crime.
I wish we could stop discussing this from the premise of "it's controversial whether we should stop locking people up for drug possession". Nobody in this discussion appears to believe that at all. We should get past that point.
I haven't been arguing about that all.
At the root of it, I have a hypothesis that a majority of violent crime in our present society stems from some kind of inter-institutional fracas, i.e. people committing violence do so, for the most part, as an attempt to further the goals of the social hierarchy to which they belong.
On a parallel level, I also believe that barring some seriously draconian shit, ala Singaporean death penalties, in a lot if not most communities we have basically reached peak law enforcement. (It's worth debating just what is "seriously draconian", though). We basically can't stop people from engaging in ludicrously profitable or enjoyable illegal activities, and at a micro level we can't stop dedicated individuals who want to hurt other individuals.
Given these two beliefs, I think your best bet is to shrink the organizations involved by drastically eliminating their profit margins on their most lucrative trade. (As a side tangent, also engage in more expensive deep independent investigations as done in the Wire, but as the Wire shows there are many institutional challenges with that approach also).
As it turns out, it's a complex question. What might be true for inner cities might not apply for port cities where you can make a dime doing something else illegal.
Not true at all. The way to measure how lax law enforcement is is by what percent of crimes result in punishment. The U.S. has a very low clearance rate compared to other countries ( http://sowf.moi.gov.tw/stat/english/enational/j54.xls ). I don't have the stats on hand, but the conviction rate is also much lower. In many cities have about a 60% clearance rate (meaning an arrest with a warrant) and then about a 30% conviction rate for homicide (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-08-30/news/bs-ed-berns... ). In other words, in only 20% of murders is the perpetrator found and convicted for murder. In Japan and Singapore, the rate is in the 90%'s (arguably this rate is suspiciously too high). The U.S. has much less effective law enforcement. Not surprisingly, Japan and Singapore have very, very few murders, so their overall incarceration rate is much lower.
When you look at other crimes it's the same deal. When you talk to people in who live in urban neighborhoods in the U.S. the default expectation is that burglaries, armed robberies, car break ins, etc, etc will not get solved.
As hard as it is to believe, even drug enforcement is quite lax in the U.S. cities. The first dozen times someone is caught on the street corner dealing drugs, they get a day in jail and they are right back out there. And most of the time the police just drive by without doing anything. Think that happens in Singapore? In Sweden? In anywhere in the developed world outside of certain urban cores? Drug policing is incredibly lax. So the problem grows, turf wars break out, fighting breaks out, the population calls for the police to do something, there is a crack down, and all the drug dealers who were suckered into thinking the police didn't care get caught up and end up in prison for a long time.
The problem is that American policing is both too lax and too harsh. The best way to prevent crime is too have predictable, high probability consequences for crime. Harsh but low probability punishment is much less effective.
The type of policing in the Wire (which matches most of what I have read in real life about the problem) is the worst possible way to prevent crime. Remember how the police wait for months and months, watching the gangs, knowing everyone who is committing crimes, without doing a thing about it? That is what I mean by incredibly lax policing. In the 1860's Philadelphia had a gang problem. A certain gang notoriously controlled an area of town and was causing the people all sort of trouble. So the police chief sent in a force billy clubs and beat the gang down. The gang problem disappeared, the gang members did not have some permanent criminal record that prevented employment, it was quick and effective action.
Notice how in the Wire and in real life the police arrest someone for drug dealing, and then are back out on the street with no consequences a few days later. The police shrug it off, as if nothing can be done about it. But why not put every person who has been arrested for drug dealing under anti-loitering probation for the rest of the year. If you're caught loitering at that same corner again, you're told once to move along. Second offence you get 10 hours of community labor, and caught again you get ten lashes with the billy club. Baltimore has no shortage of community labor to be done, lots of trash to pick up and lots to clear out. I guarantee you'll have the streets clear of street dealing in no time. Youth won't fall in the drug gang trap as much and violent turf wars over corners will cease.
And then there is that whole issue of the schools. Again, school discipline is ridiculously lax. The default punishment is sending the kid to the principal's office, the harshest punishment is suspension or expulsion. None of these are even punishments to the types of kids committing the offense! See for example: http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/02/tfa-alumnus-... and http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_i_joined.html neither of these situations is that abnormal.
America is like the abusive parent who mostly let's the kids do whatever they want, and then everyone once in a while gets drunk and beats the kid silly. Naturally the kids grow up to be criminals. What is needed is strict, firm, predictable law enforcement.
There is another side to that.
Yes, people will commit crimes if the probability of punishment (which is correlated with the probability of getting caught) is too low.
However, people will also commit crimes if the expected loss from getting caught is too little. I believe social inequality is to blame here. People in poor neighborhoods know that basically whatever they do, legally, they will never live a good life - have a place to live, have a car, eat good food, live in a safe neighborhood, maybe travel once or twice per year. They have poor access to schooling, which leads to poor access to jobs, which leads to poor access to money, ... unless they do crimes (e.g. rob a bank, sell drugs, steal cars, kidnap people and demand ransom). I cannot speak from experience, because I was born rather privileged, but I imagine they don't even see this as unfair/immoral - there is nothing moral in one baby being born into a rich family and having all the options, and another being born to poor parents and thus having none. When you think of it, it might actually be immoral. Some criminals simply seek to correct this imbalance, to award themselves, and their kids, the opportunities that the society denied them.
Note that I am in no way trying to justify their behaviour, I'm just trying to understand it. Only understanding can lead to an effective cure.
But what is it an index of? What hidden variable influences robbery numbers? Our understanding of crime is incomplete without considering the reasons why crimes are committed (without resorting to the fundamental attribution error by branding those who commit crimes as "criminals" by nature). Some questions to ask about the given example of robbery:
Why do the people committing robberies feel the need to commit them?
What makes robbery more rewarding than other potential sources of money or thrills?
Have robberies increased because the average person now has a lot more of value to take?
How many robberies are indirectly caused by the criminalization of lesser offenses? (e.g. criminalization of drug M -> price of drug goes up + M user loses job -> M user has to resort to robbery to survive)
I don't care to be able to say that England has a worse crime rate than the U.S. I think given the sociological makeup, [lack of] urban planning, poorly run social services, and an overarching cultural dislike of some forms of authority, it would be surprising if any developed country had crime rates as bad as we do.
While not ultimate causes, there are some not so hidden variables:
Population density. There's some idea that it increases stress, which increases propensity to commit crimes.
Sale of contraband, particularly drugs, fuels competition for territory and customers which, in an illegal market, is primarily dealt with through violence.
Brainstorming about gang violence, it seems to me to be mostly about a culture that demands unrealistic levels of respect, and demands taking advantage of any perceived weakness. If someone disrespects a gang member, it's my understanding that they have to retaliate with violence. If they don't, or if they're seen as weak for some other reason, that's an invitation for an opposing gang to put the weak out of their misery. You can't have a stable crime-free area with factions like that running around.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_statera...
Table 4. Minnesota has the 6th lowest white incarceration rate, 0.212%
Now there's talk of locking up people for sharing files! Insane. If you believe that file sharing harms the economy (I'm pro-copyright to an extent) then fine the people, garnish their wages, watever. Locked in prison and chance of having a normal career ruined forever? What could be more cruel and unusual?
http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/06/05/the-role-of-th...
The phrase "prison-industrial complex" leads to some interesting reading, as well.
In fact, private prisons and unionized guards aren't even on the same side, due to the former hiring largely non-union labor. And the private prison industry has been growing and lobbying faster than ever:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/26/328486/us-privat...
The point should be clear as day by now; if you can't extract the basic message and argument from his comment then you have no basis for inserting yourself into the debate. Please don't waste any more of my time.
I'm here telling you this right now.
They are a special interest group that promotes incarceration. There are others, as well.
People are far more aware of private prisons than they are prison guard unions. I've known nasty things about private prisons for 10+ years. I found out about CCOPA and other similar entities in the past 1-2.
As stated earlier, I was simply presenting something that I figured people here likely hadn't seen.
You're too emotional to reason with, I'm afraid.
I'm done.
many of [CCPOA’s] contributions are directly pro-incarceration. It gave over $100,000 to California’s Three Strikes initiative, Proposition 184 in 1994, making it the second-largest contributor. It gave at least $75,000 to the opponents of Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that replaced incarceration with substance abuse treatment for certain nonviolent offenders. From 1998 to 2000 it gave over $120,000 to crime victims’ groups, who present a more sympathetic face to the public in their pro-incarceration advocacy. It spent over $1 million to help defeat Proposition 66, the 2004 initiative that would have limited the crimes that triggered a life sentence under the Three Strikes law. And in 2005, it killed Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan to “reduce the prison population by as much as 20,000, mainly through a program that diverted parole violators into rehabilitation efforts: drug programs, halfway houses and home detention.”
Never, anywhere, do I imply (it's clearly your assumption) that CCOPA or other unions benefit the most.
Look back at the structure of what I said and then reconcile that against what you're accusing me of. You had an emotional reaction to what I said and jumped to conclusions.
Its a sobering read and really brings home the fact that incarceration is indeed big business and there is a lot of entrenched interests in maintaining the status quo. And large rates of incarceration.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-pris...
Gruesome.
Here is a good graphic to illustrate how bad it really is:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...
Prisons also serve to harden the imprisoned -- helping to ensure our country's record-high recidivism rates. Prison conditions are brutal. Gangs run daily life, and failure to join a gang can mean rape, severe injury, or even death. Of course, joining a prison gang means an indoctrination into the world of hard-core violence and reprisal. It's pretty hard to go to prison a relatively nonviolent person and emerge the same way.
Another big trend over the last 30-odd years has been a marked shift in society's -- and our justice system's -- philosophical view of the prison itself. Many years ago, prisons were seen as places to reform criminals -- not just to lock them away for a certain number of years, but to adapt them to a successful return to society upon completion of those years. These days, reform and adaptation aren't on the agenda. (Hell, good luck trying to find a stable job in post-release society with a conviction on your record). Modern prison is purely about locking people away and treating them as hopeless causes. More often than not, that hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To be fair, some people in our society really are lost causes. There are violent psychopaths rotting in prison who should probably stay there and rot. But today's criminal justice system paints all offenders with that brush. Perhaps I'm a softie, but I choose to believe that a significant fraction of the 6 million is not beyond redemption.
Actually, three-strikes laws and the like aren't new, they're returning. They were abolished in the 60s.
D.A.'s being elected officials, try to railroad people accused of crimes to get them in jail. Legislatures looking to be "tough on crime" have jacked up the penalties for offenses to ridiculous levels, so much so that most people would be foolish to take their chances at trial instead of pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence. Forensic "science" is anything but, with error rates in finger printing being in the 7-8% neighborhood and rising from there. Handwriting, hair samples, and bite mark analysis have error rates in the 40-60% range.
As the article mentions, the system elevates procedure above everything else. If you have a busy, poorly-paid public defender who doesn't present any evidence in your case and actually argues in favor of the death penalty in the sentencing hearing (a real example) the Supreme Court has no sympathy for you if that attorney also forfeits an avenue for post-conviction relief by failing to make a particular argument at the right time.
What would you do to reduce incarceration rates?
I would start with a reform of drug laws inspired by Portugal [1]. We're not sure if the same solution can scale to the size of the US, but we can introduce reform incrementally, starting with the decriminalization of Marijuana. (Which I think most would find agreeable.)
Education reform is important too. Obama is pushing reform to get states to increase the age of required education to 18 [2]. This sounds like a good idea on paper...we'll have to see how it pans out. His push for increase utilization of community colleges also makes sense, since they provide a decent education for the increasing number of Americans who can't afford college.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/obama-...
// for the truly weird look at the Cotton Lobby's effect on mj laws
(21 USC 841)
Opium poppies are also listed by name, but while you can grow them in your flower garden (but putting one in a vase on your dining table is a crime!), you can't even grow cannabis.
I would recommend reading Cevin Soling's "Why Public Schools Must be Abolished" for the opposite viewpoint:
While it is possible for a North Korean POW to learn calculus under duress from their prison guard, it is reasonable to assume they will: A) associate math with incarceration; B) despise the inmates who learn for appearing readily complicit with their captors; and C. try to forget the information the moment they are free.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/02/27/w...
Fore example:
Correction officers’ unions are powerful forces in states like California and New York; they push for the construction of more prisons and for longer sentences for criminals (so that there are more people for correction officers to guard). Their activities in California are a case in point. In the last eight years they have spent $10 million on state politics — either in direct contributions to politicians or in spending on ballot initiatives relating to crime and punishment. They have mounted full-scale political campaigns. For instance, the California corrections union has attacked public officials, such as the Los Angeles district attorney, who supported an alternative to the union-favored “three-strikes law.” Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in February of this year noted that “the three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers’ union and that is sick!” In 1999 the union even successfully opposed a proposal to permit the California attorney general to prosecute brutality in prisons.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/432...
Imagine if you had spent 6 hours a day 5 days a week for 12 years being forced to play sports. If the idea provokes violent horror in you you now have some idea how the people you would be forcing to stay in school would feel about it. And make no mistake; compulsory attendance at allegedly educational institutions is forced. Whether the superior outcomes for those thus compelled outweighs the poorer outcomes and massively less pleasant experience of those forced to share classrooms and teacher attention with sullen youth there under pain of imprisonment is aquestion to be dealt with in ones own head.
That said, I don't think raising the required education age is the right move either. In a perfect world, we would concentrate on improving the quality of education instead, both imparting more knowledge in the time people are at school and getting them to like school more. However, I do not have the slightest clue of how to accomplish this.
Fuck the prison industry. Every single politician who cohorts with the prison lobby should be called out and shot.
Yes. Shot.
Funny how this comes up again and again in so many different contexts. Minor bottom-up tweaks are more effective than top-down policies. In one of Joel's classic articles he talks about how small UI tweaks to forum software completely change the course of a community. Tiny changes in economic incentives have massive effects. It's a great lesson to be applied in so many fields.
The routines of prison help to mask some symptoms of those illnesses. And because some of these prisoners are in for serious, violent, crimes it's hard to release them to nursing homes.
Here's one prison's response:
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...)
I submitted it to HN here: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649276)
Very odd to describe this as a "conservative" idea. Most conservatives I know object to this sort of sociological determinism, instead embracing the idea of individual responsibility. If anything, they believe in the power of (slowly) malleable culture and institutions to shape outcomes, rather than accepting bad outcomes as inevitable.
What a prison startup would look like?
What if you could make inmates on the outside somehow useful? That would reduce prison population, &c
Take a look http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3696940
If the New York Times is to be believed, the crime rate has nearly halved since 1980 [1]. Obviously it needn't follow that the increase in the prison population caused this, but the author's unwillingness to even explore the idea seems awfully incurious.
[1] See the "In the U.S." tab on this graphic http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...
While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison.
Anyway, the story seems to say that since there was a period of time in which NYC crime decreased while NYC incarcerations also decreased, the theory that incarceration reduces crime is refuted. Hardly.
I am told that they are international in scope and go under the gang-sign of 'Bankers'.
Essentially, when the Norwegian justice system treated their inmates more humanely, their recidivism (crime after prison) rate became 40% less than the US and the UK.
Similarly, in Norway, there are only 69 inmates per 100,000 people, compared to 753/100,000 in the United States.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00....
"Surely"? Let's start with "hopefully" and rigorously work our way up to "probably."
[1] http://www.economist.com/node/14165460?story_id=14165460
and another darker vision: "For if you [the rulers] suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves [outlaws] and then punish them." Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia, Book 1
Here's an idea for a frighteningly ambitions startup: Kill the prison-industrial complex! How? Fight crime! It costs a lot of taxpayer money and social wealth to keep things the way they are. Ostensibly the goal is to keep people safe from criminals and reduce crime opportunities.
A friend of mine was mugged on the street for his iPhone last night. He was stabbed in the leg when he fought back (mistake but he's ok thankfully). I wonder if a few high-res web-cams on the street would have kept the attackers at bay?
How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state? Found these startup ideas tonight:
idea: turn my webcam into a security cam [1] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-turn-my-webcam-into-a-s...
idea: millions of sensors / millions of surveys [2] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors-mil...
a study of London's widespread use of CCTV cameras, found that for every
1,000 cameras installed, only one crime has been solved. On top of that,
when faced with a crime, the CCTV cameras are rarely that useful. The report
found that CCTV cameras were used to catch just 8 out of 269 suspected
robbers.
This is without mentioning the privacy aspects; I find it rather worrying how people seem to accept constant surveillance so easily.
Britain has been doing the experiment for you and is generally regarded as the most surveilled western society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingdo...
Sensationalist article by the Daily Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock-figure...
Some articles on the resulting (in)effectiveness of having the cameras:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CC...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/6083476/CC...
http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/crb97-005.pdf (Warning: PDF)
How many journalists do you think even have a rigorous enough understanding of statistics to even begin to be able to answer these sort of questions ?
Do you think before this data came out that the Telegraph or Daily Mail were pro-CCTV ? - or do you think that they'd already decided their position long before and were just looking for whatever data would back them up ?
The wikipedia page sites sources. The Daily Mail article I described as a "sensationalist article". The first Telegraph article cites its source of data. The second Telegraph is a commentary piece with 106 comments from people giving a sampling of opinion with "comment" in the URL. And the final report is from the California State Library and shows its working.
Better more rigourous sources would be nicer but we at least already have some that aren't particularly promising which seems counter intuitive. CCTV also comes at a huge cost, paid for by tax payers and hence determined by voters.
Clearly this didn't happen in this case. Why did Telegraph chose to use this particular metric ("crimes solved using CCTV") rather than for instance "crime rate change as a result of CCTV" (which would take into account deterrence). Why did they choose to use total number of CCTV cameras rather than the number of active CCTV cameras ?
One of the points of peer review is spot biases like this.
I'm not saying that CCTV works (or that it doesn't) but newspapers or non-peer reviewed research often falls far below an acceptable standard for evidence.
Perhaps helping to create a society that is more personally fulfilling and with a greater degree of social equality and fairness might be a good place to focus.
So everything from free local arts/education/tech facilities through to high quality affordable group legal insurance.
More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives.
The first step is simple & straightforward. Fix education (or what is preventing them from getting an education) first, then tackle other problems with prisons.
I don't think it's a money problem. It's a problem with an intractable public education system in this country that's only really concerned with its own power and growth. We could solve that problem with the stroke of a pen by eliminating the monopoly that the current public education system has upon our educational tax dollars.
It's probably somewhere between difficult and impossible, not simple and straightforward.
Don't sort out education, sort out the social stereotypes and cultural issues that turn people into pieces of shit. Education will fix itself then.
Lack of education is not the cause, it's a symptom of the same thing that causes the incarceration, i.e. it's a confounding variable not an independent cause.
That is not simple and straightforward because powerful interest groups don't want education to be reformed along those lines. "The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985)
It would be a distinctly good idea, and would surely reduce crime rates, to reform education along the lines of ensuring that all pupils in schools in the United States learn fundamental literacy and numeracy. According to the PISA international education studies, some countries do much better than the United States in this regard.
It was called "No Child Left Behind", and sadly is now overwhelmingly unpopular. The kind of disciplined (and occasionally rote) learning that leads to success in some of our peer nations is called "teaching to the test". Well-to-do parents don't like hearing that their children's school is "failing" just because poor children are being shuffled from grade to grade without learning much.
I really don't know what can be done. Money isn't the answer: Look at the DC public schools.
NCLB is set up to punish schools that don't meet their improvement goals. The schools, wary of being punished themselves, punish teachers whose students aren't meeting the goals.
While teachers are busy trying to teach basic math and language literacy to the bottom rung of the class, the students who could excel if they were challenged end up left behind.
For reasons beyond a teacher's control, a class may not meet the requirements, and the teacher is punished. You can look at a teacher's career and determine with reasonable accuracy whether the teacher is good, but looking at one or two year samples does not give the same accuracy. Yet that is exactly what NCLB encourages schools to do.
There was plenty I learned in grade school that standardized tests never tested. The optimal school and teacher strategy under NCLB is to strip out all that excess baggage and spend every waking moment figuring out how to get students to perform better only on what is tested.
I disagree with your notion that other countries are doing things right. They are doing things better, perhaps, or maybe the parents in other countries encourage students more not to give up when they're struggling with homework; the opposite of which is a major failing that seems to be common in America. An educational paradigm can be garbage but students will still learn more if it has support from parents.
Khan Academy's model or something even more radical is the direction all basic skills education needs to move toward. Teaching basic skills is critical, but they need to be taught in a way that both encourages under-performing students and that doesn't hold back better performing students. That's the only way to leave no child behind.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004_1.pdf (See tables R1 and R3, which give breakdowns of the PISA data you are citing.)
However, you might be right that knowledge of literacy is a problem - crime in the US does tend to be disproportionately committed by groups of people who have low averages on PISA literacy tests.
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf
After edit: I just saw this possibly relevant link in the local newspaper:
"Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system": http://www.laprogressive.com/black-men-prison-system/
"As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities."
I read this and think there must be something more complex going on than just graduation rates. Too many interest groups are getting rich trying to fix a perpetually broken education system and the same goes for prisons.
It doesn't render the article useless, but it does mean that it no longer commands authority.
Most people reading the article will assume the 6M people are in a prison. Odds are this misconception is intended by the author.
Correctional supervision stood out as not meaning incarceration.
Stalin gulags: 1,727,970 people in 1953
(I am no expert on the Gulag system. Whatever the case is, it's uncontroversial that the US is the world's leading jailer of its own populace.)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Brief_history)
Pop # taken from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
2.3m in prison / 312m in USA = 0.74% incarceration rate in the US
This also assumes the Soviet Union sent everyone to the Gulag, and had no local jails, etc. I don't know if this is actually true, can anyone comment?
I can recommend both Anne Applebaum's excellent "Gulag - A History" and, of course, Solzhenitsyn's incredible "Gulag Archipelago":
Another problem is the silly/cruel "three strikes" laws, which might put someone in jail for life for stealing a loaf of bread out of hunger.
I'm confident I could do a month alone in a reasonable room with just books and paper and enjoy it (the only cost being the forgone opportunity to do other stuff, but it would be overall enjoyable) -- catching up on a lot of fiction, history/biography, and tech reading. 6-12 months with a computer, preloaded with development tools and books, but no live Internet access, would be fine too. I really don't understand the people who think a 3-5 year mars mission with only a few other people would be that psychologically difficult.
I don't know about you but I think I'd struggle to survive more than a day or two.
(I'm 99.9% certain you could get a bible, if nothing else -- while I'm an atheist, it would be interesting reading, if only to understand cultural references, and is quite long. Law books would be great, and there are legal arguments ensuring access to those, too.)
But not even the US prison system should want to limit prisoner's intellectual development! To help prisoners grow will make a subset of them productive members of society instead of parasites. Win-win.
Edit: I'm a European, but not dogmatic. My native Sweden should imho use harsher sentencing in some areas. But this was just ridiculously contra productive.
You do realize that if you make prison overly "humane", it eliminates prison as a form of deterrence.
Making prison "suck less" might even give inmates a shot at a life after they are released. But given that you see prison "suckage" as a feature (especially given the generally accepted ideas of what goes on in prison), I can only conclude that you've ruled out any possibility of yourself ever ending up there, and thus don't really care.
And conversely, there is plenty of evidence that severity of punishment does not have a significant impact on crime rates.
The simple "heavier punishment -> less crime" appeals only to simplistic logic, but in general is not observed in reality, either in the US or abroad.
The odd thing about many people in the "deterrence" crowd is that so many don't seem to actually be concerned about lowering crime rates, and are concerned moreso with exacting their pound of flesh for the injustice committed by criminals.
Another guy I met once who is still in prison said that he spent 6 months in solitary. He spent his entire time strengthening his fingers so he could climb brick walls with just his fingertips. An odd thing to do but when you have nothing but your body in a cell you can only spend time getting fit or wasting away.
Most prisons have outreach programs. You can go and teach someone to read (or program). It is a very interesting experience and you may even get someone interested in a topic enough to save them from the system (or themselves).
Perhaps we need an age-related transform to prison sentences.
Count the number of good years you have left, with the health+energy to do what you want. I heard this week that the knees are failing on a relative of a friend, which is my age.
When you were young, the years stretched in front of you, endlessly.
These days I think things like "Japan is so fascinating that I would love to live there a while, but I just can't use a work year to learn the language and the writing system. I need that time for other things."
Hellhole: Is long-term solitary confinement torture?
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...
Race (and all the complexities it encompasses) is at the center of this whole issue. I am black so don't start calling me a racist OK.
Remove blacks from all prison and population statistics when comparing the USA to other countries' people in prison per 100,000 and we will fall to the middle of the pack of countries.
I am not suggesting in any way that we deport all of us. All I am saying is that we need to find a way to teach the black population how to make better choices in life and give them the opportunity to be rewarded for those choices. Throwing more public assistance at them is certainly not the answer, it has only made the problem worse.
We can still do better even then middle of the pack though and this article brought up some through provoking things.