Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Here's the comment by the judge's former convict:

http://herculesandtheumpire.com/2013/08/08/shon-hopwood-and-...

I feel like I'm in some fantasy alternate reality, where prison rehabilitation really works, and where the Internet is used for polite, intelligent, and uplifting discussion.

View on HN

Shon Hopwood is a unicorn. He committed five armed bank robberies in Nebraska in the late 1990's (though he didn't shoot anyone). When he was sentenced to prison, he spent his time writing cert petitions (briefs arguing to the Supreme Court for why an appeal should be accepted for their review). A couple of them were granted, which is extremely rare (most lawyers who had a case accepted to be argued in front of the Supreme Court would crow about it at every cocktail party for the rest of their lives). After he got out, he went to law school and accepted a position clerking on the D.C. Circuit (one of the most sought-after positions you can get out of law school).

So basically, yeah, it's a fantasy alternate reality. A guy like him is extremely rare. The recidivism rate for robbers is 70%.

I wonder if you have your cause and effect reversed. Maybe the recidivism rate is 70% because prisons are focused more on punishment and vengeance than on rehabilitation and reintegration into society?

I agree with your implication.

In my opinion, education for prisoners not serving life terms... PARTICULARLY for those with property offenses... should be mandatory. It's a no brainer. I don't understand why we don't mandate that? We should mandate work AND education for prisoners.

If I had my way... your release would be predicated on the achievement educational goals set for you by a warden.

I've seen a lot about the rise in private prisons and it got me thinking. Private prisons have a profit motive to actually increase recidivism (more repeat "customers",) I wonder what would happen if we instead financially punished/rewarded for-profit prisons based on their recidivism rates?

One of the Peelian principles for the police force is: "The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it." Incentives matter, and in the same way we shouldn't establish incentives for treating prisoners as resources to be exploited for profit.

I'm not sure if the police quote makes a ton of sense. While police presence and efficiency does discourage crime to some extent, many crimes are committed in the heat of the moment and/or despite the risk of being caught.

This is a fantastically interesting idea. For me, the idea itself is pleasant enough to make your comment the high point of this thread. :)

I immediately tried to think of how the incentives could be set up this way and unfortunately couldn't come up with anything that didn't seem susceptible to gaming.

Ie, offer prisons a tasty carrot -- if it's tasty enough to be attractive, you get the same link between sentencing-happy judges and prisons. Sentence people who don't deserve it for a couple of months, they get out and don't reoffend.

I haven't given it much thought, just a idle idea really.

In my ideal world the prisons would offer job training/therapy/etc.. and generally just start treating prisons like people, but it probably would be too easy to game. Prisons would probably try to game transfers to move high-risk to re-offend prisoners to other prisons. Sentencing gaming like you mentioned, probably lots of other odd and interesting unethical hacks that I can't even think of.

Just re-enforces my personal belief that for-profit persons are not a good idea at best, and immoral at worst.

This was California's prison system in the 70s, when we reached a recidivism rate of 15%. Then it was overhauled. My other comment has some more details.

Not only is it not mandatory, it's often not even available or very hard to access, today in reality.

>> I don't understand why we don't mandate that?

Because prisoners being rehabilitated and rejoining society is contrary to the interests of the prison industry.

Can you clarify this point? Do you mean from a monetary perspective, private interests, public prisons, etc?

It is in the prison industry's best interest to have as many people in prison as possible. The longer a prisoner stays in prison, the more money the prison makes. If they get out of prison, commit a crime and are thrown back in, that's great from the prison's perspective.

Recidivism has a lot to do with "hardening" in penal-oriented prisons. It also has a lot to do with how we treat former convicts when they get out.

Mr. Hopwood's story is an extreme anomaly. Many ex-cons have a hard time finding anything more than menial work, carrying the stigma of their prison records with them through background checks, parole requirements, etc., for the rest of their lives. In fact, I'm surprised Mr. Hopwood's tale didn't take a tragic turn for the worse when his state Bar Association rejected him on the grounds of "moral character."

This is a very uplifting story, but it's also a huge exception to a general rule. Many (most?) convicts and ex-convicts are never given a serious second chance, on the inside or on the outside.

3/10 may not be "extremely rare".

7/10 is too many.

He went a little bit further than not recidivate.

> some fantasy alternate reality, where prison rehabilitation really works

Hopwood specifically notes — in his second paragraph — that in his experience prison (in the US where he was) does not rehabilitate and that the longer the sentence the lower the chances:

> And to answer Russ’s question, as far as the length of sentencing, I think it had little effect on my rehabilitation. Prison is not the place for personal growth. Very few people come out of it for the better. From my experience, sentences over 5 years do little to help society or the prisoner. Five years is about the maximum amount of time for someone to “get it” and change and create a different life. More than that, and prisoners feel hopelessness and they think “why bother, I just need to get through this and go home.” It’s very difficult to “seize the day” in prison and use every day to prepare for release when you staring at a 10- or 20-year sentence in the face. And like I said, prisons are not designed with rehabilitation in mind. It’s almost solely about incapacitation, which is why the national recidivism rate hovers at 66%.

(emphasis mine)

As far as he's concerned, his rehabilitation are thanks to personal maturation/growth and an excellent support network (family and now-wife), which he was able to use thanks to a "fairly short" sentence. He also links to an article putting his sentence in perspective: he got 12 years (which I don't find short) but notes an other guy sentenced for similar crimes at a similar age got 213 years (the main difference being the other guy was armed, and got hit by the related minimum sentences).

I was soooo tempted to troll that comment :-)

I am struck however by the agreement by the judge and the ex-robber that 5 years is about the max you should give if hoping to reform someone.

> In the “for what it is worth” category, I have thought > for a long time that 60 months was about the maximum > sentence one should impose if you were were solely hoping > to make a positive impact on the prisoner.

It would be interesting if we genuinely tried prison as a reform institution. Stop the violence, stop the drugs, provide real meaningful work, and ... err.

It was intellectually in vogue in the 1960's to treat prison as a reform institution. Then the 1970's and 1980's happened, and the great cities of the U.S. dissolved in crime and violence, and those ideas went very much out of style.

I think it's an unfortunate accident of history more than anything else. When I was growing up in the 1990's, us suburbanites from Northern Virginia would never dream of going to D.C. at night. What took the capital of the country and dragged it down into that sorry state was a combination of economic issues, the drug war, deteriorating race relations, political conflict, etc. But whatever the cause was, it happened, and the end result was that we had an entire generation of people (the boomer generation), that saw the purpose of the criminal law as keeping the criminal element from spilling out into civilized society. Hence, the focus was, through the 1990's, "victims rights" and "tough on crime" not rehabilitation.

whatever the cause was, it happened

The incarceration rate since the 1960s has remained virtually static; but the incarcerees are in prison, where previously they would have been detained in mental asylums:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/saving-normal/201303/pri...

Also note the strong correlation between falling crime rates since 1970 and the removal of tetraethyl lead as an additive in gasoline:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/theworldin2013/2013/01/lead-a...

A punitive prison regime isn't going to cure the sick. What we need is to swing the focus onto mental health issues -- and yes, this may mean building new asylums, to replace the punishment regime of prisons with a medical/treatment oriented system -- and shrink the prison system and re-focus it on actual criminals rather than unfortunates who hear voices in their heads.

Huh? Lead causes crime?

Uh, yeah. It's pretty widely accepted that lead-induced brain damage from tetraethyl lead fuel additives was a contributor to crime in the mid to late 20th century.

It's a very decent theory, but don't confuse someone agreeing that spending money to reduce environmental lead is a good bet (where the standard of proof is not extremely strict, and that's a good thing) with someone saying that "lead causes crime."

Just because Kevin Drum likes it doesn't make it "widely accepted." You oversell his theory. It's proven about as well as abortion reducing crime, which has good evidence behind it but is hardly a slam-dunk case.

Correlates with, does not necessarily cause.

Agreed, but correlation across multiple countries across multiple time windows, indicate that we should pay attention to it.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935107...

But it is difficult to imagine a mechanism where the lead could be caused by the crime and easy to imagine one where the crime is caused by the lead. A separate independent cause that affects crime and lead is easy to imagine, but if you control for location where people live, or lived when young (which is largely a measure of poverty) and still saw the correlation between lead and crime, then I would say that was quite strong evidence that lead poisoning (which is known to have mental effects) causes behavior patterns that lead to crime.

One causing the other is not the only possibility.

Maybe it's a complete coincidence.

Or maybe (keeping in mind that somoene above suggested the correlation has been shown in different countries at different times) -- societies that work to reduce lead also tend to be societies that work on other social issues, and those other social issues reduce crime. So the lead is correlated to crime historically, even though neither causes the other directly.

Now, i think the study showing lead/crime correlation is _awfully_ interesting, and I don't dismiss it.

But "correlation does not prove causation" does not just mean "B could have caused A instead of A causing B." And this is important to understand in order to evaluate statistical findings properly. There are all sorts of things that can cause correlation rather than either A or B causing the other -- including things nobody's actually even thought of yet, but may still be what happened. And complete coincidence is always possible as well.

> Maybe it's a complete coincidence.

The word "correlated" means that it is NOT just a complete coincidence. One might not cause the other, they might be correlated because of a separate factor that interacts with both, but if they are "correlated" then complete coincidence can be ruled out.

> [...] So the lead is correlated to crime historically, even though neither causes the other directly.

Yes, this is what I mean by a third factor affecting both. But lead is a physical effect -- there are only certain sorts of things that can cause it. Things like eating lead, breathing lead, or having a diet that causes one to incorporate less lead into neurons. Thinking happy thoughts cannot change your lead levels (directly). So there are only certain categories of separate factors, C, that could be the cause of both A (lead) and B (crime). Where your name comes in the alphabet might conceivably cause crime, but it simply cannot cause lead. C, if it exists, must be a physical effect.

That's why I mentioned controlling for location where people live. That is a likely candidate for C: it is plausible to correlate with crime and it is possible to correlate with lead. If you control for it and still find an effect, then either A causes B, B causes A (not reasonable), or there is a different C'. Perhaps a genetic mutation that increases lead absorption and also alters brain chemistry to increase propensity to crime? That one is already a bit of a stretch.

I guess what I am saying is that it is true that correlation does not imply causation, but that there are reasonableness constraints on the kinds of interactions one can hypothesize, and after a certain point Occam's razor implores us to consider causation.

The word "correlated" means that it is NOT just a complete coincidence.

How do you figure? The word 'correlated' means that a relationship has been shown to be statistically _unlikely_ to have happened purely by chance. It can never be shown to be impossible however. And there can (and often are) subtle mistakes in the calculations that mean even the correlation isn't what one first thought.

And obviously statistics alone can never prove (or rule out)_ a causation, I think we agree there.

I haven't examined the research under discussion in detail enough to know if they controlled for all the things you suggest would be good to control for, etc., I have no idea.

But yeah, in the end we use our judgement as to what statistical correlations actually mean (such as a causation, and what sort through what mechanism). We can also do experiments or analysis to try and rule out (or confirm) other plausible alternate explanations. That's science, yep.

I think we mostly agree. I still object to what I think was an overly facile implication on your part that a few minutes of thinking of alternate explanations and deciding they are implausible -- on your own without seeing what other people's responses to the study in the literature have been, without an in depth analysis and consideration of the original research -- is sufficient to determine that there's "quite strong evidence" for correlation. That's not science.

See: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li....

Also, lead lowers IQ. Various estimates have been in the several point range, but at least one researcher has estimated an increase of 6 IQ points as a result of the lead ban: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/opinion/kristof-its-a-smar....

Do you have any sources that can quantify what 6 IQ points is for the average person? Is it a percent benefit (does it benefit someone who would have had a 90 IQ more than someone who would have had a 130 anyway) or absolute benefit (you can quantify an IQ point the same for everyone).

I imagine it's the former, but I'm wondering if you have any other IQ-related sources.

From the reading I have done about it, in the 70s-80s or so, there was a huge crime wave that was expected to grow even worse in the 90s. Instead, crime rates fell off a cliff. I might have timeframe wrong, but that's the basic facts.

Everybody involved has been trying to figure out why crime rates dropped so hard when they were expected to grow. There's a ton of proposed reasons, and not much in the way of solid proof behind any of them. Lead in the water is one of them, also legal abortion, drug market changes, gun law changes, and many others. Maybe it was really all one of them, maybe all of them played a part, maybe just a few. We'll probably never know for sure - it's not like you can perform experiments to really isolate one of those variables properly.

Putting people with mental problems in prison is shameful and a serious problem. But certainly you aren't claiming that black and brown people have more mental problems than white people?

That's a very interesting question, maybe better phrased as "why would a white-dominated psychiatric profession diagnose more mental problems among underprivileged non-white people than among white people?"

(Also worth noting: there's a strong correlation between cannabis (marijuana) use and schizophrenia. The drug warriors tend to get alarmed that this means cannabis use causes schizophrenia. But schizophrenics also tend to smoke tobacco, drink, and use other drugs. What if they're really self-medicating, and the cannabis correlation is there because smoking a joint makes the voices go away for a bit? I suspect the answer to this question is again down to cultural norms: privileged white folks determine the norms and set the laws, and this works against underprivileged/minority folks. Oh, and privileged white folks get to pay lawyers to either get them off drugs charges, or get them a lighter sentence. Hence their under-representation in prisons. Full disclosure: I am a privileged white person.)

This is something I'd be comfortable defending.

Mental problems do not need to be inherent from birth; whereas minority groups are highly correlated with crime and low income as a result of American class divisions, at a glance, I can see several ways to argue that minorities are at least more susceptible to mental illness. This isn't ethnic so much as it is environmental living conditions in poverty. For one, you have malnutrition, which is an entire precursor to mental illness in of itself.

Of course you can't reasonably argue that minorities have an inherent predisposition to mental illness (it'd be frankly racist, and without much evidence I believe), but in practice, they probably do have a predisposition to it over the course of their lifetimes from a statistical standpoint.

> The incarceration rate since the 1960s has remained virtually static; but the incarcerees are in prison, where previously they would have been detained in mental asylums:

Wait, you are telling me that in 1960s we had 1-2% of the population in prison or a mental asylum? Why do no other countries have near that rate?

When Tocqueville (Democracy in America) came to the US in the 1830's it was to study prison reform for the French government. He wrote about an experiment at a youth reformatory that was run democratically by the inmates. No one ever lost their right to vote no matter what they did, but if you behaved you got two votes and could affect the outcome of decisions more. Apparently this worked very well.

One wonders how much of that was a function of more draconian drug laws, both in directly creating offenders and in indirectly creating markets which incentivized criminal behavior.

> It would be interesting if we genuinely tried prison as a reform institution. Stop the violence, stop the drugs, provide real meaningful work, and ... err.

Where is the money in that? Your "clientele" numbers might actually go down - less prisoners == less money.

And then you'd have to import prisoners, like the Netherlands...

The money explanation is phat, but there isn't much to it. The vast, vast majority of prisoners in the U.S. are housed in public prisons, which cost taxpayers tons of money. Moreover, the explosion in incarceration rate predates the use of private, for-profit prisons.

It's always convenient to lay the blame on some corporation, but the fact is that voters wanted long sentences and got them. They would rather spend large amounts of money keeping convicts locked up than have those people walking around in public.

Note the political change that happened in the 1990's. Prior to the 1990's, democrats talked a lot about prisoners rights. Republicans crucified them as "soft on crime" and countered with "victims rights" which was much more popular. As a result, today there is almost no difference between the two parties when it comes to the criminal justice system, except maybe when it comes to the death penalty. Being "soft on crime" is a political non-starter in the U.S.

> It would be interesting if we genuinely tried prison as a reform institution.

Yes, until the 70s. People came from all over the world to see the californian prison system.

What was unique about California?

It was in a sunny, rich state, next to Hollywood, and you could get there with the expenses account on the prison budget.

The Cuban medical system is considered world-class for very similar reasons.

:-)

It used to be the model for reform, with many education and work skills programs so leaving inmates would have a career to enter upon leaving.

I believe it had one of (if the the) lowest recidivism rates in the country. Here's some relevant quotes from an article I found[1], I've heard a few programs about the prison system during that period on the radio:

    Before 1977, all California prisoners had an indeterminate
    sentence. They were given a range of time in which they 
    would be imprisoned, with five years to life being a 
    common sentence. To be freed, inmates had to prove to 
    the parole board that they deserved it, which could mean 
    enrolling in reform-oriented programs, learning a trade, 
    or taking classes. The aim of indeterminate sentencing 
    was to rehabilitate prisoners and, when they were ready 
    to reenter society, free them.
    
    Although the system had its flaws, it also had its 
    successes. According to state statistics, just 15 
    percent of inmates released in 1977 returned to 
    California prisons — an extraordinarily low recidivism 
    rate in comparison to today. Nonetheless, in 1977, then-
    Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that completely 
    overhauled the state's sentencing system, switching the 
    focus from rehabilitation to punishment.

  [1]: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/how-the-prison-population-exploded/Content?oid=3172693

The problem is that in a prison most of the people there are going to be criminals, and will end up socializing each other in ways that act against reform.

Though another part of the problem is that whenever you have a justice system anyone singled out by it as a criminal is going to have an easier time being trusted by criminals and a harder time being trusted by non-criminals in the future.

>>>and will end up socializing each other in ways that act against reform.

There's no incentive for people to reform which is a huge issue with the current prison culture. You're just trying to survive 24/7, align yourself with a gang for protection and hope you can make it without getting caught or extending your sentence.

The whole system is set up for people to go to jail and get better at committing crimes.

The prison gang system is also supported by (some of) the warders, because it makes their job easier. Not just because some of them may receive bribes, but also because they come to rely on gang authority to keep any kind of order.

There's another judge whose thoughts on sentencing are summed up as: there are two classes of people whom I sentence; the ones I'm mad at, and the ones I'm afraid of. I save long sentences for the second class.

To be fair, even the comment by Hopwood reenforces the point (...which is why the national recidivism rate hovers at 66%....It’s very difficult to “seize the day” in prison and use every day to prepare for release when you staring at a 10- or 20-year sentence in the face) that prison rehab doesnt really work.

The internet is more likely to be used for polite, intelligent, and uplifting discussion than for the American prison systems to be used justly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com