Is prison contagious?
news.sciencemag.org
news.sciencemag.org
For a while, in the early 80s, my parents hired young people, until the work they took on required people with more skill. Then they hired immigrants from South East Asia under some kind of asylum/placement program. I don't remember the details, but their shop was pretty multicultural for a long time. Eventually that program ended and they started mining the pool of ex-cons. Mostly guys with minor drug offenses and non-violent offenses.
They kept putting that pool of people to work for probably a good 15 years and I grew up working in the family business, side-by-side with them. One thing I learned is that you start to not think of prison as the end of the world.
It's supposed to be a BFD to go to prison, a life breaker. But here was a bunch of guys who did their time, and all had jobs and did well enough for themselves and their family. So it just seemed like virtually the same to young me as when people I knew in the military were shipped off for a tour or a long deployment somewhere. Granted, I wasn't entirely aware of the social stigmas attached to their incarceration at the time. But you can imagine being their friends or kids or what have you growing up with a father having served time.
Every once in a while, one of the guys would slip up and get caught doing cocaine or something and do a year in prison. After he got out, if my parents had an opening, they'd hire them back. From my pre-teen perspective it seemed virtually the same as being a soldier, bad pay included.
Once I got older and stopped working in the family business, the social stigma attached to incarceration was kind of a shock to me. It took me a long time to realize why these guys were working at my parent's place instead of the same kind of shop down the street for more money. It's that the other shop simply wouldn't hire ex-cons and my parents didn't mind/thought they could save the company some money hiring these guys at $.50 less per hour than a stand-up citizen (while also helping them get reintegrated back into society).
But then again, the idea that prison is "contagious" may not really be valid, as other posters are pointing out.
Edit: since I'm getting the down-votes anyway I may as well come right out and say it. The premise is absurd and the article not worth reading. Your lack of "infection" demonstrates such. As does the presumed lack of infection of visiting prison priests and prison guards. Similar groups behave similarly and have higher probabilities of similar outcomes and someone claims it resembles a contagion. No, no it doesn't. At all.
This study seems to completely ignore the socioeconomic factors that often lead to the more serious crimes and resulting longer sentences in the first place. It isn't the longer sentences that are causing incarceration to "spread" to friends and family, it's the fact that the friends and family tend to be in the same socioeconomic position as the person that received the sentence, and thus are just as likely to display similar conduct.
The flawed conclusion in this study is like saying that a whole family is more likely to get wet because one family member gets rained on. While statistically accurate, the fact that one person gets wet doesn't cause the others to get wet; the cause is that they all live in the same environment and are thus far more likely to get wet than those that live in areas where it isn't raining.
This article was worth writing because of the idea "going to prison causes so much trouble around you, it makes it more likely for people you know or your family to go to prison, too."
That's a novel idea, not just because it may explain the reasons people go to jail, but because it indicates we might need to reanalyze our whole approach to criminal justice— ostensibly, we jail people not only as a punishment to them, but also as a way to protect or improve society at large. If sending people to jail causes more criminal behavior, our actions may be undermining our goals.
This doesn't mean that what they were testing is the ONLY factor (or even the only major factor) in determining incarceration rates. By using a computer simulation where they could keep everything else EXACTLY the same, they demonstrated that a small change in sentence length can cause a large change in incarceration rate.
The disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks emerged as the single factor making the disease of incarceration a true epidemic among blacks. Not the socioeconomic disparity, mind you, but the actual sentences. This conclusion is so obviously wrong it's absurd on its face.
While the philosophy-of-science aspect of what it would mean to declare incarceration to be an epidemic in some strict, non-metaphorical sense is interesting, what the study is really aiming to show is slightly more empirical: that modeling incarceration rates using computational models developed to model epidemics can produce results consistent with real-world data. (Which is still interesting and potentially useful.)
they kinda buried the lede...
Very obviously a persons family and peer group is quite likely to behave somewhat like the person. If this is behavior that leads to prison, then the family and peer group is likely to wind up there as well.
The idea that prison is "contagious" is on par with referring to computers as sentient because they are "not acting right".
Submitters: please read the HN guidelines. They ask you not to change titles unless they're linkbait or misleading.
English is a living language, that's why we don't still speak in Chaucer's Middle English [1]. If you want a perfectly static language, learn Latin.
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/canterbury-tales-wife-bat...
"According to our model, the tipping point is somewhere between the 14- and 17-month sentences"
Surprise surprise! You put those numbers in and they came back out!
Or are we to believe that somehow society just randomly happened upon exactly the correct number to tip one race one way and one the other?
Their error check to California later doesn't help because that's part of the data they used to design their simulation in the first place!
And finding that sentence length alone explains everything is actually proof that this simulation is useless!
In the real world there is a huge difference in the number of single parent homes, and those without a good male role model between the races. Those are well known factors for crime, and the fact that there is no excess difference in the model that needs to be attributed to this shows that the model is just parroting their preconceived explanation.
Summary: They carefully tuned their model so that 14 months causes the incarceration seen by whites, and 17 months causes the rate seen by blacks. They did that for a good reason: In order to match the real world. But it's no surprise that those are exactly the numbers their model came back with.
If a %age of your time is spent on each person you know then there will obviously be a maximum point for the likelihood of infection.
Then the modellers have to choose an infection rate, this they took from the data.
The whole model is begging the question.