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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

> If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do.

You're never going to stop many of them from reoffending. Even the "best" rehabilitation programs have crime rates far above the general population.

The additional 10 years is 10 more years where they can't hurt innocent people. The justice system exists for the benefit of society and innocent citizens, not criminals.

> assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place

Why would you ever assume that? Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.

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If locking large numbers of people up for inordinately long times prevented crime, the United States would be the safest place in the world. We have 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prison population. We are one of a dwindling number of countries that will lock up a child for life (there was a SCOTUS case baring automatic life sentences for minors, but it leaves a loophole wide enough for a semi to allow judges to still impose life without parole to children). We've doubled down on it again and again. Looking at the results, this approach obviously doesn't work.

Given our status as a massive outlier, could it be that our current system of mass incarceration is a driver of crime? I see signs that point to yes. Many people I have talked to have said the main thing being locked up taught them was how to be a better criminal. Prisons break families. Children grow up without parents. At one of the conferences for the heads of the Departments of Corrections for US states, a question was asked of all 50 heads: are prisons effective at making society safer? About 8 said yes. About 7 said they were unsure. The remaining 35 said no.

We've tried highly punitive mass incarceration for decades and it's failing horribly. I'm not smart enough to know the correct answer, but I can say that it seems obvious that the answer is not to lock more people up for longer.

> If locking large numbers of people up for inordinately long times prevented crime, the United States would be the safest place in the world.

Comparing between countries with massively different demographics is pointless. The US simply has far more criminality than other wealthy nations.

> We've tried highly punitive mass incarceration for decades and it's failing horribly.

That's not my take-away. We had a massive and growing crime problem in the US in the 60s and 70s and pursued a policy of mass incarceration as a solution.

It worked. Crime went down a lot since we started mass incarceration.

Over the last decade, and particularly since 2020, we've been reversing that policy and seeing the impact: spiking violent crime and unsafe cities.

I don't know how you can possibly look at this and think it "doesn't work." I'm sure criminals prefer a policy of catch and release, but I'd rather bring back mass incarceration.

>Comparing between countries with massively different demographics is pointless. The US simply has far more criminality than other wealthy nations.

Yes, that is exactly related to the point OP was trying to make? Where does this crime come from? Maybe instead of useless, if not counter-productive mass incarceration, we should focus on rehabilitation and more importantly improving social injustices that are the causes of the higher crime rate sin the US.

The US imposes life sentences on minors? Do I read that right or am I misreading this comment?

Yes. And not only life sentences, but life sentences without the possibility of parole. For minors.

We are literally the only country that does it. It is a heinous and barbaric practice. And, like all of our mass incarceration system, is it vastly disproportionatly applied to Black children. We are a backwards country in many, many ways.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/policy-brief/juvenile-life...

We also executed juvenile offenders until 2005.

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

You read it right, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_the_Unite...

> The additional 10 years is 10 more years where they can't hurt innocent people. The justice system exists for the benefit of society and innocent citizens, not criminals.

By this logic we should just never release them. Should we keep the 80% that would not reoffend locked up to prevent the 20% that would from doing so?

Should we increase the sentence from 10 to 20 years to make that ratio 60% to 40%? Then we prevent more crime, and the would be criminals are off the street longer.

Maybe if we decrease the comfort of the cells and general state of the prisons, we can get the rate to 20% to 80%? Then we can practically say we’re justified to keep those 80% off the street.

> Why would you ever assume that? Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.

Because most people aren’t stopped by the deterrent effect. It’s perfectly possible the net negative effect of locking people up for a longer time is larger than the extra deterrent effect [1].

[1]: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...

> By this logic we should just never release them.

The problem with that is it removes the deterrence effect—if you're going to get the same punishment for murder as for shoplifting, criminals will exercise no restraint.

> Should we keep the 80% that would not reoffend locked up to prevent the 20% that would from doing so?

Why are you just making up numbers? The majority of violent criminals reoffend after release, often very soon after. [0]

> Because most people aren’t stopped by the deterrent effect.

Sure, most people don't commit crime because they're not morally bankrupt criminals. The point of policies is not to prevent normal people from committing crime.

Deterrence absolutely has an impact on criminal behavior. Why do criminals brazenly rob and openly deal drugs in San Francisco, but not in Miami? They know they won't be published in SF.

[0] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

> Why are you just making up numbers?

I’m making a point. But numbers are more often around 20-40% in Europe.

> Deterrence absolutely has an impact on criminal behavior.

You just completely walked over the source I sent from the department of justice that said differently. Sentence length has no or minimal influence on criminal behavior.

> Why do criminals brazenly rob and openly deal drugs in San Francisco, but not in Miami?

You may notice that the same source indicates that the important factor is instead how likely you are to get caught, presumably SF police sucks at that?

> You're never going to stop many of them from reoffending.

would seem to contradict:

> Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.

Both can be true. Most violent criminals will commit another crime after release, but the severity and swiftness of that crime will depend on how likely they are to be punished for it.

Even if punishment had no deterrent effect on recidivism it could still be effective at deterring youths from going down a criminal path.

No, they can't.

> _Most_ violent criminals will commit another crime after release

But are _most_ criminals violent? I would guess not. We were talking about "many of them from reoffending" not a small subsection. If it is the case that "many of them from reoffending" then this condtrdicts the other premis.

> Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.

There is also no eveidence that "it could still be effective at deterring youths" which seems to be socio-political and not based on age bracket.

You're replying to a six day old comment about the entire US prison system which is flawed on many many levels.

For future reference a good line of exploration is:

    Denmark's recidivism rate is about 27 percent, roughly half the rate of the U.S., which ranges from 49 percent to 80 percent depending on the crime.

which raises many questions; how does this vary by country and what are the reasons?

The US prison system has a big issue with not being a simple punishment for a crime, it's very much a destruction of a persons life for the accusation of crime, once marked as a "former convict" a person in the US has difficulty regaining employment which leads to few options otherthan more crime.

Yeah the punishments for the war on drugs has worked SO WELL. /s

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