Hacker News Reader

Comment by argklm | Hacker News Reader

Facebook doesn't understand that humans who did errors are still humans and need to be treated as such. The goal of prison is to rehabilitate the person in order to make them come back to society. I wonder how eliminating their basic rights and cutting them completely out of the world will improve their situation. Maybe the desperate cases cannot be recovered but prisons are also full of people that can be reeducated and one way to do so is to let them be still a part of this world. Isolating them from Internet, stripping their rights and physical isolation will do only more harm in the long run.

View on HN

"The USA doesn't understand that humans who did errors are still humans and need to be treated as such."

Fixed it for you. The fact that the states strip prisoners (or even ex-prisoners) of the right to vote is just fucking astounding.

Care to elaborate? Seems like a legitimate deterrent for committing a crime. Especially since it is "fucking astounding" as you say.

Voting is the corner stone of democracy. How is it fair to stop someone from voting for a mistake they made that isn't necessarily violent or even have a victim? A mistake they may have made early on in their lives, the lessons of which they have learned.

And that's ignoring the disproportionately higher incarceration rate of black men in america.

It’s not supposed to be fair, or a crime deterrent, or even a punishment, really. The clear reason for disenfranchising felons is to tilt elections in the favor of the Republican party in a way that has some political cover. It’s part of a range of efforts both official and unofficial to suppress the vote among young people, poor people, and minority groups, including voter ID laws, restrictions on voting by mail, improperly purging people from registered voter rolls, intentional underfunding/understaffing of polling places so people will give up in the face of long lines, discouraging/threatening/misleading junk mail, etc., not to mention all the absurd redistricting schemes.

All the tiny efforts taken to suppress voting end up making quite a dramatic difference in close elections.

You got today's memo from the Clinton campaign?

Hm? This has been going on for decades, and isn’t about Clinton per se (personally I detest the Clintons), but affects every type of election from local races on up.

For Republican politicians and operatives, it’s smart political strategy (at least in a short-term zero-sum kind of way, assuming the only goal is to win the next election rather than to govern effectively or build a stable society). Likewise, it’s smart political strategy for Democratic party politicians and operatives to make voter registration and voting easy and convenient, because on the margins the additional votes tend to go to Democrats.

On the bright side, voting rights for ex-felons have actually been improving somewhat over the last 20 years, even if that improvement is patchy and has regressed in some places. Unfortunately, many other types of voter suppression have gotten worse.

How do you feel about paid firearm registration? Required, firearm-specific taxes?

Voting is a right, not a privilege. The right to self determination tempered by the rights of others.

The right to vote is taken away under the auspices of having broken a social contract by committing a crime. But taking away the right to vote is also tearing up that social contract. Is your response to someone breaking a contract to tear up the contract?

It is not a deterrent (the death penalty it seems, for some, is not even a deterrent). But even if it were, it would be a pretty fucking dumb deterrent, as deterrents go.

And surely someone under the direct control of the state should have more of a say, not less, in who runs that state. Voting in prison should be mandatory.

> Voting is a right

In the US

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting

not sure what you are getting at, being compulsory doesn't make it any less of a right.

anyway, I am Australian.

It's an interesting logical puzzle to see that, in the USA:

* Voting is a right

* not-voting is a right

Seems like a legitimate deterrent for committing a crime.

If that's the reason, then it's doing a piss-poor job at deterring crime - the US incarceration rate is around five times that of other western democracies (and 10 times that of places like Norway)

What if someone went to jail for civil disobedience, i.e. protesting against some injustice they see in our government?

Stripping them of the right to vote, along with all of the other privileges (mostly by convention, rather than by statute) one loses once convicted of a felony, would be a really convenient way for those in power to insure that their critics are powerless.

Several of my friends have faced felony charges for various protest activities (non-violent civil disobedience, mostly). It is not at all theoretical that our state would use the criminal justice system to effectively muzzle critics; a combination of jail time, plus the crippling effect a felony has on your ability to work and earn a living, plus the inability to vote, plus the ability of the justice system to suck you back in much more easily from the moment you've been convicted of a felony, adds up to a very powerful set of tools for silencing dissent.

Prison is supposed to be the deterrent. Taking away a person's rights, for life, because of a crime that they already served their time for is ridiculous.

Deterrents don't work. The US has the death penalty. You can literally lose your life if you commit certain crimes, yet people still do it.

The US has a fetish for punishing evildoers for their wickedness. Rehabilitation and crime prevention are secondary concerns at best. If you committed a crime, you're a criminal. If you have been convicted, you're a convict, forever.

The only way to understand how a country can be this fucked up is if you consider that it was founded by puritans. To this day, US politics are still more based on Christian extremist morals than basic human rights. Let's not forget that the Prohibition -- the banning of alcohol on purely "moral" grounds -- happened less than a hundred years ago.

Sure, the US is not as bad as Saudi Arabia -- it's not literally using religious scripture to derive its legal system -- but the mindset of a large portion of the population is dangerously close.

>You can literally lose your life if you commit certain crimes, yet people still do it. //

Your argument is poor - deterrents aren't 100% effective in eliminating crime but that doesn't mean they don't work.

I'm not saying they're the most effective answer in all cases.

From another angle "deterrent" literally means something that deters so it's truistic that they work, they're not deterrents otherwise. That's more semantics than anything though.

Is there any proof that higher punishment works as a deterrent for any crime? I would assume that some punishment works better than no punishment at all, but here's probably a point of dimishing returns.

Does anyone know of any studies on the subject?

I know there have been studies on the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring crimes where the death penalty is either the given punishment or a punishment option. All of the studies have found little to no effectiveness in the death penalty being a deterrent.

As for other crimes and punishments I am not aware of any specific studies. Although I would say that for the most part the threat of a jail sentence for any length of time is a deterrent in my opinion. If it were not a deterrent society would see much higher crime rates than we currently do as simply no one would be deterred by the threat of going to jail. That's just my opinion though.

Yeah, I've read the death penalties studies, but I was hoping for something more general. Instinctually, I agree with your opinion, but I think this is teh kind of thing that really needs to be verfied. We are basing a very important part of our society in this assumption, and it could just be wrong. Maybe people who don't do crimes do it simply because they believe it's wrong.

I asked someone I work with and they forwarded me this report. It brings up some interesting points regarding deterrence.

http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/deterrence%20briefing%2...

EDITED TO ADD: To note I do agree with you that what if jail/prison is not a deterrent then we are doing it wrong. To some extent this is a true statement. It has been shown that some collateral consequences of punishment can actually lead to increased crime. A collateral consequence being one that is not handed down by a judge but is the result of another law, policy, regulation, etc.. For example, if you are arrested for DWI the judge may sentence you to 30 days in jail. The collateral consequence is that your driver's license may be suspended by the Department of Motor Vehicles.

If you are arrested and convicted of a felony drug charge, serve your time, and get out a collateral consequence can be that no one will hire you because of your conviction. Many states, counties, and cities are starting to realize this actually creates more crime and are passing Ban the Box laws that prohibit asking about criminal convictions on job applications and delay background screening.

A good resource on collateral consequences is: http://www.abacollateralconsequences.org/

"the studies reviewed do not provide a basis for inferring that increasing the severity of sentences generally is capable of enhancing deterrent effects."

I find it very disturbing that this is not included the basis of legislation and investigated further.

I think the telling statement in the whole report is:

"Research to date generally indicates that increases in the certainty of punishment, as opposed to the severity of punishment, are more likely to produce deterrent benefits."

I am not saying that plea deals are all bad or that they should be eliminated. I think they serve a purpose with first time offenders or to secure testimony in cases where there are significantly bigger stakes. But some plea deals are just absolutely absurd and destroy the certainty of punishment. If people knew that there were guaranteed consequences I think we could reduce jail sentences to some extent. Instead we have increased jail sentences because we have increased the plea deals. What used to be a guaranteed 30-day sentence now has turned into 90-days because with the plea deal and good time the person will only serve the original 30 days.

I have no problem with stripping rights as part of the punishment, however, the problem arises when the term of the punishment is complete and those rights are still stripped. Take for example, voting rights. When an offender completes his/her sentence they are expected to become contributing members of society and not recommit crimes. As part of this, common sense would say the individual should get a job and work hard at that job. So you expect an offender to get up go to work and pay taxes, but you don't expect the offender to have a say in how those tax dollars are spent by being able to vote. There are also political motives for permanently stripping voting rights, but that is whole other conversation not suited for HN.

We live in a society where punishment for breaking the law becomes a moving goal post. Offenders are set up to fail in reentry in the US legal system, thus the high recidivism rates we experience. Fortunately there are many programs that are working to reverse this trend, but the fact of the matter is that until we stop moving the goal post on when the punishment ends the problem will never be 100% solved.

It's all about punishment. Sad too. Not only is it cruel policy in many scenarios, it's expensive.

Oregon does not strip the right to vote, thankfully.

Facebook? How about the entire country. When people laugh about being raped in prison it is because most people assume they deserve it. Not a very humane outlook.

> The goal of prison is to rehabilitate the person in order to make them come back to society.

That's how it should be, but is it in practice?

> That's how it should be, but is it in practice?

Regardless they end up back in society.

I don't feel like its fair to say "well sure, the stated goal of prisons is to rehabilitate, but they're not doing that now, so why would we even pretend like that is their mission anymore?"

It's completely fair.

It's like saying, "The war on drugs is to protect our children." Even if that's the official mission & goal statement, I would scoff at anyone who said that to my face and proceed to explain to them what a ridiculous farce it is.

So when someone makes the statement "USA's Prisons are for rehabilitation" to my face, they'll also get the same scoff from me followed swiftly by an explanation of the ridiculous ineffectiveness of it all.

Both of those mission statements are so far divorced from reality that I could not let them go unchallenged in any conversation within earshot. I'd have an overwhelming urge to verify that the person who made the statement understands how much of a failure those missions have been and I'd suggest that the real mission, for anyone actually paying attention, is that of oppression & profit.

____

preemptive: And please don't anyone reply with that tired rebuttal of "Only 8% of prisons are for profit", that's been covered several times ---https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562786

That's different.

1 is opposing the means because it fails at its stated goals

2 is opposing the goals (and alternate means), because one of the means is failing.

Whose to say that one of the (many) reasons it currently isn't successful is that by feeling disconnected from friends and family it further makes them feel separate from society?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com