Hacker News Reader

> This all costs money that they presumably will need to raise taxes for.

I don't inherently disagree, but proponents would point out that the alternative also costs money and has other costs (especially for victims where a person turns back to crime after being released from prison).

It's unfortunate I don't think there's any source of data I can trust on the costs in either direction. So to me, it ultimately comes down to what value I'd prefer to see in society. I stand somewhere along the lines of: (1) these men did their time and deserve a second chance and (2) one of the worst things you can do with a violent criminal is release them early, before they're rehabilitated, to see them go on to hurt another victim.

One of the things that get trotted out a lot when talking about the higher-than-the-general-population incarceration rate of black men is that a higher-than-the-general-population rate of single-parent black families. Which, in turn, drives a higher-than-the-general-population number of black teens into risky/illegal behaviors. And the cycle continues. Its not even controversial: children of two-parent homes tend to be more successful and spend less time in the judicial system*. So in a very real sense, fighting to keep these kids' fathers out of jail in the first place helps kids.

*. There are also a host of other issues that contribute to the incarceration rate, and the non-legal issues that cause one parent to leave are also (arguably) a driver of criminal activity. But in general, the less time a kid's parent spends in prison and the more rehabilitated that parent is upon release, the less likely that parent is to re-offend and the better off that kid is going to be.

Murderers and rapists are convenient boogeymen when arguing against prison reform, but the reality is that the vast majority of first-time offenders are in there for relatively minor crimes (mostly drug related), and simply being in the system is what propels them deeper into that life because of how limited their options become.

> …will need to raise taxes for… I’d rather spend it on…

Politicians love to present initiatives like this as a zero sum game, and they rarely are. You’re assuming future crimes and reincarnation have no cost, and having fewer criminals in our communities doesn’t benefit children. It’s so much more complex than a line item on a balance sheet.

> This all costs money that they presumably will need to raise taxes for.

If it works, maybe not. Keeping all those people in prison for years costs; if we can keep them for less time, we can save money on the per-year costs even if the program to get them out itself costs money.

If it works.

Most people in prison have not killed another person, or even committed physical violence against another person. Many used to be those kids who grew up without a good safety net or family life, or adults who became homeless or addicted to drugs.

Here are the stats for federal prisoners: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

I mean not to argue against your point, but Federal prisoners are generally not going to have committed violent crimes as those kind of crimes are the purview of the state and lead to state incarceration not federal.

Ah, good point! Indeed, when I pull up state-level prison data, it appears that closer to 2/3rds of current prisoners in state prison were convicted of violent felonies.

> I'd much rather spend that on kids growing up.

I think you're right that this would have a larger impact in the long run (and be more humane, to boot - avoid the trauma in the first place), but it's a long-term investment, and it needs to also be combined with policies that lower crime in the short term as well. Voters (hell, people) feel crime as a safety threat and don't tend to respond to feeling unsafe by supporting plans with 20-year payoffs, so if you want your 20 year plan to stay in effect, you need to show shorter-term benefits, too.

Here's something else to try imagining: your brother falls on hard times, starts taking meth and ends up violently robbing someone to support his habit. Would you want him to be left to rot in prison for 10 years or would you want him to be part of a program that both holds him accountable and tries to help him rehabilitate and make amends?

Both approaches will have costs but for me the choice is clear.

For a violent crime, he can serve the time. Especially being a brother on meth-- he's as much a risk to family as he is anyone else.

Write bad checks or panhandle or steal bikes or rip copper out of walls or something for fuck's sake. The line is crossed by going straight to infliction of violence on the community.

Better question: would you rather let him rot in prison or be his next victim? Because in all these discussions about rehabilitation somehow we never talk about victims of the re-offenders

Spending that money on kids growing up instead won't necessarily deliver better results https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-char...

I think the point is that most people in prison didn't kill someone and most people come out. We would never choose for them to "just not come out" so the question is "How do you want them to act when they come out?"

Does it lead to better outcomes to rehabilitate the person who is in there for 5 years because they stole TVs from Best Buy, or does it lead to better outcomes for us to do nothing and then release them.

Genuine question. We've done the latter, let's try something different.

When they say the prison cells would ideally be eliminated, they're not talking about a magical society in which rape and murderer no longer happen. They're talking about releasing rapists and murderers without locking them up. That's the ideal they're striving for.

> When they say the prison cells would ideally be eliminated, they're not talking about a magical society in which rape and murderer no longer happen. They're talking about releasing rapists and murderers without locking them up. That's the ideal they're striving for.

In general, when you're presenting your opponent's ideas as this level of two-dimensional magical thinking, you probably haven't engaged with the ideas enough to have this strong of an opinion about it. The prison abolition movement has been around for a long time, and has indeed grappled with the idea of "but what if someone murders someone?", which is indeed the absolute first question someone arrives at when considering prison abolition.

If you don't have prison cells, then you don't have incarceration of murderers. If that isn't what they intend then they should say so upfront. Instead they prefer to avoid the issue and whine about people bringing it up (what you're doing.)

There's an entire philosophical, legal, and structural framework the prison abolition movement is working in that you've got absolutely no basis in. This is like asking whether drug legalization advocates are advocating that drug dealers get off scot-free - the premise of the question is silly within the frame of the discussion. You're trying to position this like a "gotcha" question, which is why nobody's bothering to engage with you - because you haven't bothered to engage with the issue in any serious way yourself.

Again, you whine about me bringing it up without bothering to explain why I'm wrong.

Even if you give murderers the Anders Breivek treatment with a cushy apartment style prison cell complete with gaming consoles and arts and crafts sessions, that's still a prison cell. You can dress it up to make it pretty, but he's still locked up, taken out of society, which is what both he and society deserves. If that is what is meant by the abolition of prisons, then it should be called prison reform instead. Prison reform I can get behind, but that's not what is actually being proposed. That's the motte the prison abolition radicals fall back on when challenged, not what they're actually calling for.

Stop with this strawman argument. They're not saying criminals should just be released immediately and forgotten about until they commit their next crime. If you sincerely believe that this is the position of criminal justice reform advocates, you have been misled.

They're talking about criminals being housed in something other than a tiny cage with other criminals 23/7, who are all treated like they are irredeemable criminals who should never be allowed to re-enter society, even though most of them don't have life sentences. Turns out if you do that, the micro-society that results among prisoners is a warped society where criminality is rampant and normal. The strategies you learn to live in the prison society will cause you to become more of a criminal once you are released into the larger society, not less of one. In other words, prisons as they are currently run in the US are effectively a crime training program.

In what world is that logical? In what world would we not ask ourselves, "Is this really working? Should we at least try something else?"

A prison cell by another name is still a prison cell. Unless we go back to executing murderers the day of their conviction, we will always need prison cells.

> I'm not sure I can look favorably at a murderer, or even someone that commits manslaughter or negligent homicide while drunk driving.

You simply choose to. It’s not easy, just like it’s not easy to “choose” to study or go to the gym, or do anything, but you just choose to.

It’s hard, but you can choose a tit-for-tat mindset, it’s a proven strategy in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, which is very similar to life.

> You simply choose to. It’s not easy

I choose not to, not because doing otherwise would be difficult but because doing otherwise would violate my personal code. Why should I violate my personal code, because it's cheaper for the state if I do? I'm happy with my tax dollars being used to incarcerate rapists and murderers, that's money well spent. Lock these people up so they can't hurt people anymore and throw away the key. Damn the expense, give them what they deserve.

What you’ve described isn’t a “personal code” it’s a desire for vengeance. I mean? You do you, but I reckon that seeking to hurt over seeking to rehabilitate hurts us more than it hurts the offender.

I’m not a big fan acquiesce whenever the state says “bend over” but that’s not what choosing to view them as people is doing. The state wants us to fear and loathe our fellow man. When you talk about “giving them what they deserve” you play right into their hands.

Hurt people hurt people, or something like that, so I don’t think hurting them harder is going to make them hurt less hard.

I'm happy with my tax dollars being used to incarcerate rapists and murderers, that's money well spent

So in your opinion 85% of the money spent on the prison system is wasted, since only 15% of the prison population consists of rapists and murderers?

I am open to the premise of not using incarceration for most nonviolent offenders. I don't support that in all cases (we're better off with Maddoff and Bankman-Fried in prison for life), but at least it's not an insane proposition.

The total elimination of prison cells is insane though. Such a proposal does not deserve to be humored.