Comment by LarsAlereon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LarsAlereon | Hacker News Reader

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Obviously nobody thinks once-in-a-generation exceptional monsters should be living among us, building straw men like that isn't helpful. I recommend reading the Scott Alexander blog post "Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know" here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...

To oversimplify, the only value that prison provably offers to society is the crimes prevented by keeping someone who would have done crimes locked up. Pretty much all of the other supposed benefits like deterrence (not doing a crime due to fear of punishment) or rehabilitation (becoming a better person in prison) don't actually exist in real life at meaningful rates. Because it costs so much to keep someone in prison, it's actually really hard to find cases where the harm to society for the crimes they would have done justifies the investment of resources to imprison them. That doesn't mean no such cases exist and we shouldn't have prisons, but they are clearly overused when they are almost the default method of crime consequence in Western society, especially for minor property crimes like retail shoplifting.

For most crimes at both the mild and severe ends of the spectrum, the reality is that imprisonment is the only effective way to reduce these crimes. Deterrence and rehabilitation are fiction: criminals are and will continue to be criminals.

What is your proposed method to prevent minor property crimes? A fine? Probation? An educational class on not stealing? When those inevitably fail, you need to remove the person from society to prevent them from continuing to commit the crime and impacting others.

There's certainly a discussion to be had about imprisoning people for victimless crimes, like drug possession by itself (my POV is overdose to your heart's content), but for crimes that result in victims, removal from society to reduce/prevent additional victims is a reasonable course of action.

I feel like you're asking two different questions: what do we do about average criminals, and what do we do when our normal strategies don't work?

Most shoplifters stop after they get caught the first time, even if they don't face any further consequences. Most people who keep shoplifting after that stop if they are caught and face consequences like community service. In general, the system of escalating punishments before prison actually works to keep problems from developing to that level.

If someone is doing serious violent crimes then it seems obvious that they need to be imprisoned until we can figure out how to make them stop. But what if someone is doing minor property crimes where the total value of those crimes does not exceed the cost to imprison them? In that case we are essentially offering an incredibly inefficient subsidy to property owners.

The real answer is to directly address the factors that lead to crime and disorder, such as cost of living exceeding prevailing wages, unemployment, drug addiction, and mental illness.

Most criminals do not stop after they get caught the first time.

I can't find shoplifting-specific statistics, but then again, essentially nobody is being jailed for only shoplifting anyways, so it's a moot point in a conversation about incarceration.

On a broader discussion of the importance of incarceration in reducing continued victimization of society:

"In many states, up to 80 percent of the youth who are incarcerated are rearrested within 3 years of release" - https://csgjusticecenter.org/publications/reducing-juvenile-...

"According to the National Institute of Justice, almost 44 percent of the recently released return before the end of their first year out. About 68 percent of 405,000 prisoners released in 30 states in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years of their release from prison, and 77 percent were arrested within five years, and by year nine that number reaches 83 percent.

The solution for your example of minor property crimes is reducing the cost of incarceration, not letting them continue commit property crimes and therefore offload the costs of society's failure to police criminals onto citizens.

To your point of "how do we make them stop", incarceration/forced hospitalization is ironically the answer to some of your supposed "causes" of crime, like mental illness and drug addiction. Look to a place like California or Seattle to see the impact of these approaches, where every imaginable alternative has been tried to control homelessness, drug addiction, and nuisance crime, far exceeding the cost of just locking them up.

Recidivism in the USA is higher than almost every other nation [0], at about 65-70%.

You're absolutely right that they don't stop, the first time, in the US. However, the cause of that same recidivism, is overwhelmingly correlated to a lack of support on leaving. Rehabilitation is in the name - habeo, to have or possess.

Why do people reoffend? Because currently, they're fucked. Background checks in everything, screw them over. They can't get work, they can't rent, and so, when all other options are off the table, is it actually a surprise, that they reoffend?

It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper, not to lock them up, and not expose a first-time offender to a black hole where everyone says the world would be better off with them dead.

See for example, Norway, with the lowest recidivism rate in the world [1], where it actually is true, that most do not reoffend.

[0] https://bjs.ojp.gov/topics/recidivism-and-reentry

[1] https://digitalcommons.coastal.edu/bridges/vol10/iss10/2/

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