Hacker News Reader

Comment by icehawk219 | Hacker News Reader

The US system is about punishing people as harshly as possible, not rehabilitating them. It's all about fear. And it's allowed to happen because if you polled the population you'd find that an uncomfortably high number of people view prisoners as less than human. They're viewed as not deserving of any rights so they usually don't have many, if any, people fighting on their behalf which causes them to be swept under the rug and largely ignored.

Also keep in mind that many prisons in the US are run by for-profit corporations. They clearly don't want people to reintegrate. They want people recommitting at as high of a rate as possible.

View on HN

There's limited political incentive to improve the lives of a non-voting group. Legally, a large amount of prisoners or former convicts can't vote since they're disenfranchised (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disfranchisement#United_States_...).

>Also keep in mind that many prisons in the US are run by for-profit corporations. They clearly don't want people to reintegrate. They want people recommitting at as high of a rate as possible.

This is over blown. It's like 3% of prisoners are in for private prisons. We treat them shit in our government prisons too.

They don't have to be in a private prison to warrant private sector interests. I don't think we can afford to underestimate the economic impact on companies that provide food, security, building services, apparently social network investigation services, etc.. If non violent offenders were suddenly released tomorrow it would have a very negative effect on companies that have based their whole business model on catering to prisons, both public and private. Not to mention the impact on local jobs (e.g. guards, staff, administration) if we were suddenly able to close a significant number of prisons.

I really do believe that there is a political will in this country to not upset the economic status quo that having a large prison population has created, especially at the local and state level.

I would have thought that voters would generally be pretty furious about the massive economic cost of running these prisons.

Reports like this should wake people up to the over-obsession with incarceration as a punishment: http://cacs.org/research/winners-and-losers-corrections-and-.... Just need to keep banging the drum, and pushing anecdotes on how the cost to incarcerate is often ridiculous compared to the cost of the crime.

Obviously for violent offenders it's a completely different discussion. There are still very serious structural problems, but you certainly can't win that argument on economics alone.

You are right, but I still don't think that is the major cause of all the mistreatment and high incarceration.

Voters love "tough on crime" politicians. At a local level, being weak on crime is a death sentence.

Until you convince the voters that throwing people in jail is a mistake, you'll get this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com