I think it's worth thinking about the history of incarceration, for context.
Until fairly recently, prison wasn't really the way most punishments worked. They did hangings, beatings, shaming, banishment...
Imprisoning people long term is expensive, and kings probably couldn't have afforded anything like a modern scale prison system. The closest thing was more slavery than imprisonment, and economically self-sufficient or better. Anything from the indentured servant transports to the Americas to "hard labour" in a gravel mine or somesuch. Cannon fodder, sometimes.
The way we got to here was largely moral reasoning. Those punishments are cruel and inhumane. Early versions of modern prison systems were often created with the idea they'd rehabilitate (reform) people.
I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.
We're stuck with different ideas of what prisons are even for? Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence?
Surely, with that sort of budget (not including courts/lawyers), we can do something more useful.
Rehabilitation IS societally useful. However, it does require that the prime focus is rehabilitation rather than punishment.
In my native Norway, rehabilitation has been the focus to such an extent that foreign media come to do stories on the 'holiday camps' prison time is served in.
It somehow works, though. Recidivism is very low. Here's a few examples on how inmates do their time
-Education is encouraged - whether it is to a learn a trade or getting a degree (presumably lectures are mostly followed via teleconference).
-Counselling is available to help you deal with whatever issues landed you in prison in the first place.
-As you near the end of your sentence, restrictions are gradually lifted to ease the transition back into society - lower-security units, daytime leave to report to work, halfway houses where inmates can live a normal-ish life in the daytime but need to observe a curfew in evenings/nights.
-After you get out, you have regular one on ones with the social services, helping you find a place to stay, work, family counselling if required etc.
-Companies are offered part of your pay refunded by the state for a limited time if they hire you.
All in all, I guess it can be argued that our pendulum has swung too far towards rehabilitation - but if the point of prison is to reduce the long-term risk and cost of crime, we're doing reasonably well.
I feel the difference is that Norway is far more homogeneous and the intent to rehabilitate is sincere. On the other hand I feel like a lot of the criminal justice system in the USA is segregationist under the covers. When you look at it this way then it's working as desired.
If I think "that guy/girl in prison could be my neighbour, cousin, god help me even my kid" I will care about them and want them to be rehabilitated. They're a relatable person to me.
If I think "it's one of those people from the other side of the tracks" it won't feel like a person with whom I could have a close connection. I might not care as much.
The unstated argument to all the homogeneity arguments I've come across (intended or not) is: "We are too bigoted for that to work here, we'd never allow the $OUTGROUP to have it that good", with a side-dish of "they'd be bigoted too, if they weren't homogeneous". When laid bare, it's an appeal to ignorance.
I can't speak for all those who've made homogeneity arguments, but I've made them before in the context of Norway and will say this:
Often, you'll hear people say something like, "Norway did X and it works, so we should do X in the U.S." These are typically fairly naive claims. Regardless of the normative dimension of the claim (whether X is worth doing in the U.S. in the first place), there is a non-trivial amount of complexity that is swept under the rug. For instance, NYC has twice the population of Norway. The U.S. really is significantly more demographically diverse than Norway (or, if this claim isn't good, then we can just say they are equally diverse, but at the scale of the U.S. this diversity increases complexity a non-trivial amount). The U.S. has a more fragmented legal system. Etc. Etc. Etc.
If a Martian were asked which nation would be easier to implement new policies in, maintain those policies, and have them bring about the desired end, which do you think they'd choose? I wager they would immediately choose Norway.
Western democracies love to talk about Norway, but in my native Singapore, which has a comparable population to Norway, crime rate is way lower than Norway. Yet we have some of the most draconian laws ever which run antithetical to the liberal ideals in Norway. Fact is, a country with a small population is much easier to control than a country the size of US or China.
We also have a much more diverse population than Norway, so if anything, US should be looking towards us for inspiration.
The replies I've seen to your question all seem to have a pretty negative framing. I'm going to try to give you an answer that isn't so negative.
Instead of using race as the example, let's use language.
You have three people. Two have spoken English their entire lives. The third grew up speaking French and learned English later.
They need to do something really hard to get right, something easy to mess up. Mistakes come at a high cost.
When the two English speakers work together, things work. They go smoothly. They can manage to overcome challenges and meet goals.
When they try to work with the French speaker, you see a lot more problems. It's frustrating. He does things they didn't expect. It is easy to feel like he's intentionally screwing things up.
Homogeneous demographic groups have an easier time all being on the same page. They spend less time and effort trying to bridge differences in experience, attitude, etc.
You get ugly terms like Mansplaining and Whitesplaining because "privileged" people -- people for whom life has tended to work -- often feel that their life works because they were taught the right information and if people who are having a hard time just had the same info, their life would also work. And then the person getting the info gets mad because they feel like they are being treated like they are stupid and not trying rather than like their life actually works differently because they are different and the world treats them differently.
> What does homogeneous have to do with prison rehabilitation?
It's all white people.
Sorry to be so glib, but I don't think I've ever seen "homogenous" used by someone who wasn't engaged in at least borderline racist dog whistling. The entire idea of it is based on the notion that people cannot successfully mix together, and therefore should not try.
Why do you think the intention to rehabilitate in the US isn’t sincere?
Frontline did a report on people on parole. It’s a punishing system, even when you’re out of the systems you’re usually one drink away from being thrown back in
It’s a very good example of something where all the individual players are trying, but so much of how the system works makes results be harsh and cruel
Much of the system (including punishing probation) is designed to give racists a lot of discretion to oppress ethnic groups they dislike. Intention of rank-and-file may be to rehabilitate, but that doesn't matter if the intention of the lawmakers and higher-ups is to keep certain ethnic groups in jail (while maintaining a pretense of impartiality.)
Nixon, the drug war, and lots of little laws that aim to harass and incarcerate blacks were enacted, and still exist, purely out of racism. There are audio recordings that prove the intention. Many more recent policies do the same as well, but less overtly.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
-former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman
As user GatorD42 pointed out when this was brought up before:
>...Baum claims Ehrlichman said that to him in 1994 while he was researching for a book he published in 1996 about the drug war. He didn't include the quote in that book, but instead published it in 2012 and again in 2016, after Ehrlichman had died (in 1999).
If the quote was said by Ehrlichman, it doesn't actually describe the drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs", the actual substance of his policies seem to be different than what people think it was:
>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).
> Why do you think the intention to rehabilitate in the US isn’t sincere?
High recidivism (shows it's at least a failure), focus on punishment (mandatory minimums, etc...) for things like drug possession, cruel bail system, "tough on crime" judges, legalized prison slavery, heavy use of solitary confinement, outright criminal levels of cruelty, normalized prison rape, stigmatization of felons, etc...
They had prisoners fight california wildfires for slave wages. They justified it as it was voluntary and they were learning a skill.
I feel like you just answered your own question. If it was sincere, it wouldn't be so easy to have the system reset you back to step 1 in the 'rehabilitation'.
Edit: actually, you've been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so consistently that I've banned this account until we get some indication that you sincerely want to use HN as intended.
haha, never thought about that, I actually read this somewhere(could be 7%, or 5% too), sorry for politically insensitive, I guess everyone has to watch their mouth in this country these days.
I think an even better argument (than 'culture') can be made for socio-economic factors (nutrition, environment, healthcare, etc). There's an "IQ gap" between poor and rich people.
If the cause is cultural, then it's not inherent and is tractable to change through education and is not an obstacle to rehabilitation. It's just a behaviour, not an innate trait.
Even if you take the rather extreme assumption of purely environmental factors, your conclusion does not hold. "Environmental" does not inherently mean "changeable" on already affected individuals. For instance developmental malnutrition is a purely environmental phenomena that leads to stunted growth, reduced IQ, and various other issues. It's completely environmental and completely irreversible upon already affected individuals.
And even if some revolutionary discovery was made to help treat stunted IQs, prisons are probably not the place one would want to start. The IQ gap holds between populations of all classes and socioeconomic condition. You open yourself to missing the true effectiveness of such a monumental discovery due to confounding biases within the prison population. The possibility, if not probability, of coercion upon experimental "treatment" towards prisoners is also probably something we ought probably prefer to avoid.
Low IQ doesn’t mean incapable of changing behaviour. You keep assuming this link but I don’t see any reason to assume low IQ prisoners are incapable of rehabilitation.
I made a reasonable argument and backed it with referenced facts. Besides the downvotes I received, my main posts were flagged and are now invisible. On top of that, I get low quality comments that add nothing but dilution to the discussion ("Hey did you know I am black?"). Those posts did not get flagged. It's quite clear that the thought police will not allow any discussion on these matters to take place here.
First of all, you are not a victim. Instead of blaming other people ("the thought police") or trying to call out fellow commenters, maybe try to assess why your post was received so negatively. Perhaps you could have presented it in a better way. It's possible that something you find reasonable, is not viewed that way by others.
I still can't see where you've presented evidence that IQ measures have an impact on a prisoners ability to be rehabilitated. This is the crux of your entire argument.
> I used the person's own source to display the cherry-picked nature of their data, try again.
Or you know, you could use a reliable source of information to counter their argument instead of using the same crap to try (and fail) to prove a point..
I empathize with being mad at this subthread, but, respectfully, I think you're aiming at the wrong guy. Because, rhetorically, "you aren't even supported by your own source" is pretty powerful.
Also keep in mind that troglodytes like the racist in the room exist to waste the time of decent people. Doing actual research to beat on them means that they win.
If this was a good faith argument, I would agree 100%. More likely, would be me finding a reliable source, then the original poster arguing about the reliability of that source and it going back and forth. This way, we can show them that their own (admittedly horrible) source disagrees with the assumption.
> such as lack of basic infrastructure related to health and education
Fight the welfare state and toss black moms into prison because they lied to send their kid to a better school (IIRC, 5 years. for lying about her address). Meanwhile rich white people are photoshopping their kids faces onto athletes.
Fund schools with property taxes. Oh look, those mcmansion filled suburbs have better schools.
Fight bussing (thanks Biden). Criticize the south for resisting integration while NY has the most segregated schools in the country.
Extol the virtues of the great charter schools and lottery systems, while the rest of the kids are stuck in shit.
==Criticize the south for resisting integration while NY has the most segregated schools in the country.==
Different actions can be criticized for different reasons. A quick google search shows that nobody is ignoring the segregation in NY schools [1]. In fact, how did you find out about it if it is being ignored?
So if rehabilitation is so effective maybe we can 'rehabilitate' people before they end up in prison in the first place :p. How do people end up deprived of education and counselling in the first place, and could that be remedied.
In many cases, the idea of rehabilitating people either before or after prison is nearly impossible. There are almost half a million people in the American prison system for drug offenses. If someone is released from prison for cannabis possession, they can likely drive a few hours to a place where it's perfectly legal (at the state level), and even encouraged by the culture. How could you possibly rehabilitate someone from something with those kinds of mixed messages?
The subject is analyzing prison's role in rehabilitation. If we consider prison a failure as a rehabilitation device, then maybe we should focus on rehabilitation before prison. This is a reasonable suggestion. However, if the reason they're in prison is for drug possession, which makes up a huge portion of the prison population, I'm suggesting that any kind of rehabilitation is nearly impossible. With cannabis legalization finished, many states actually are looking to legalize other substances, and even if they don't, there's strong social pressure in American culture to try other illegal substances, leading to a huge prison population.
So I'm saying that it in many cases, the problem isn't so much that prison is a failure as a rehabilitation center and we should focus on rehabilitation elsewhere, it's that people are in prison for things they simply don't want to be rehabilitated for and have strong influences to continue doing. The culture is inherently resistant to being rehabilitated from things that it doesn't consider harmful.
To use an example that might be more neutral, what if copyright enforcement was more severe and we had half a million people in prison for watching unlicensed YouTube videos? We might analyze the failure of the prison system in rehabilitating people from watching the wrong streams and focus more on education so that people could identify properly licened content before they watched it. But unless the people actually considered this behavior harmful, it would be an impossible task, and we would see ever increasing numbers of people in prison for watching the wrong videos.
But we also have very high recidivism rates for stuff like "armed robbery", independent of social-issue crimes like marijuana possession. And society generally has an Opinion about armed robbery. (It's bad!)
It occurs to me that when your program results in a situation where recidivism is "very low", it might become much easier to distinguish those who fell upon bad circumstances from the ones with more deep-rooted mental issues-- like treatment resistant compulsive behavior, or perhaps even more importantly, psychopathic traits.
In my view, these are the real dynamos of the 'criminal world', where predatory traits are baked into their behavior patterns at a lower level. There are compelling opportunities for more research here (https://modlab.yale.edu/news/can-psychopaths-be-cured) and isolating variables is a good way to help move things forward.
There is an inherent racism to a lot of US sentencing and prison policies, as well as an assumption that those who commit crimes are irrevocably criminal. It's a very dated view of why people become criminals.
He very likely won't ever get out. He is allowed to have his case reviewed after 21 years (as it's how life in prison works in some European countries such as Norway, Sweden and Germany, not sure about others) but realistically he will never be out even if he's reformed as it will be a danger for his own life if he is back into the general population.
Norwegian law opens for in essence indefinite terms for inmates deemed a lasting danger to society.
ABB was sentenced under this statute and may well be locked up for the rest of his days; he may, however, at regular intervals apply to a board for release. He must then convince this board that he is no longer a threat to society and good luck with that.
I remember there being some amount of objection to his freedom to communicate while in prison (sending letters espousing his ideology, and such). Although this evidence of his continued ideology will probably help ensure he isn't released.
Focusing on what (to you, as an outsider) seems to be outlandish is honoring the breach rather than the observance.
And unlike, say, the United States--there's only been one of him. This country has folks trying for high scores on a very regular basis. (Remember Las Vegas? That was 18 months ago. 59 deaths.)
Perhaps it is worth looking at trends and impacts rather than media splashes.
In Britain under the Bloody Code, you could (and would) be hanged, or deported for the most trivial offences. The prevailing view was very much of the pour encourager les autres mould.
Steal items worth 12 pence? Hanged. Lesser amount? Cut a hand off. If lucky, commuted and deported for indentured servitude in the colonies. Treason? Hanged, drawn and quartered.
As we remember from history classes, stealing, murder and other crime ceased to exist by the 17th century. Oh, hang on a minute. It was so ineffective that juries started nullifying and deliberately under-valuing property to avoid the incessant death penalties. It was just yet another means to oppress the lower orders. Unsurprisingly much of the 18th century consisted of successive legal reforms.
What works? Not prisons, not punishment, but rehabilitation. proven time and time and time again. Not very popular with the hang 'em and flog 'em types on the right though.
Punishment (discipline) works as long as their is a chance to reform. A child or anyone for that matter, will think twice before putting his hand to the flame, but only if they have the option not to. Society in the U.S. does not offer many options for the ex-criminal to live an honest life, which I suppose, is where your idea of rehabilitation fits. Let's not pretend that nature, the ultimate punisher, fails to teach. Sticks and carrots are both effective ways of driving a horse.
The US and the UK (or even Australia) are more appropriate comparisons of countries than the US and Norway as a result of legal systems based on common law.
Your “if lucky” was, iirc, the much more frequent outcome. Now in the US if you come to the attention of a prosecutor, you get threatened with decades of prison in order to be plea-bargained down to something less horrendous. Formally these codes are very different, but the substance in both is people kept in line by dire threats that are mostly just held in reserve.
Actually it mostly wasn't. It eventually became the more frequent outcome at the end of the 17th century, as the profession - like juries - signalled their dissatisfaction with the laws. There were something ridiculous like 200 capital offences.
It was laws falling into disrepute with both the profession and juries, and transportation becoming the majority that led to much of the 18th century legal reforms that removed nearly all the capital offences.
> At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.
WHAT!
> Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence?
WHAT! Mind sharing some sources?
IMHO you have it completely backwards.
I can point to plenty of European countries (Norway, Germany, Netherlands, etc.) that focus on rehabilitation, not punishment.
Their recidivism and overall crime-rates rates are significantly lower than in the US and their prisons don't look like 3rd world shitholes.
They blow the US out of the water on every metric. If anything has failed (and spectacularly so), it's the idea that focusing your prison system on punishment works.
I think you misinterpreted their point. They don't mean rehabilitation as an ideal doesn't work. They mean rehabilitation as the goal of modern American incarceration has failed. People don't get rehabilitated. They become institutional criminals.
> They mean rehabilitation as the goal of modern American incarcetation has failed.
It has not failed, because it is not, and has never been, in any meaningful sense, the goal of any of the American criminal justice systems.
Specifically, none of them have been in any substantive way been designed around any evidence of what does or does not work in terms of rehabilitation.
The US criminal justice systems focus on retribution and demonstration of moral outrage, not rehabilitation.
Totally comparable to the US, Norway being an exception (as usual).
> They blow the US out of the water on every metric.
The US is a very large and diverse country and it's not structurally comparable to Germany, Netherlands and much less Norway (with 22% of GDP being oil exports). That would be cherry-picking. To draw any conclusions on the effectiveness of incarceration would require more careful analysis.
> I can't fathom what gave you a different idea.
Crime statistics and crime aren't the same thing. The point of prison sentences is no just punishment, it's deterrence. If you rarely convict anybody, your prisoner's rate is low, but the criminals are out on the street knowing they have nothing to fear.
> Netherlands 48% (them) vs 27.6% (source): Fact Check Failed
They picked the number of "ex-prisoners" that become prisoners again (i.e. actual reconviction), you picked the number of "adult offenders" that become prisoners for the first time. You literally just picked the lowest number in the table without comprehending it. The correct number (48.5%) was right above.
> Germany 48% (them) vs 35% (source): Fact Check Failed
35% is the average including fines (recidivism: 29%) which make up for the vast majority of sentences. For adult prison sentences the recidivism rate is 45%/39% and for youth prison sentences it is 64%/62% (without/with parole).
Sorry. I found some mistakes in my reading of their article as well and excluded those Table 1 examples from my initial post.
Though I added something I previously excluded for Table 2, which I'm still unable to find in their sources.
About your reading of the sources though:
> They picked the number of "ex-prisoners" that become prisoners again (i.e. actual reconviction)
No that would be Table 2, not Table 1. Table 1 is about "ex-prisoners" that got convicted of any offense again, not necessarily a prison sentence.
> you picked the number of "adult offenders" that become prisoners for the first time.
That's not what Table 5.1 [1] is at all: "Reconvictions as a result of any crime, not disposed of through an acquittal, a dismissal by reason of unlikelihood of conviction, or any other technical decision."
> 35% is the average including fines (recidivism: 29%) which make up for the vast majority of sentences. For adult prison sentences the recidivism rate is 45%/39% and for youth prison sentences it is 64%/62% (without/with parole).
Yes. This is where I messed up. Though note that that recidivism rate (45%) is "ex-prisoner" -> any conviction (incl. fines). Which likely fits what they wanted to show in Table 1.
> Though I added something I previously excluded for Table 2, which I'm still unable to find in their sources.
The source given indeed seems to be incorrect.
> No that would be Table 2, not Table 1. Table 1 is about "ex-prisoners" that got convicted of any offense again, not necessarily a prison sentence.
Fair enough but that was my mistaken wording, the table in the source still correctly differentiates between conviction and re-imprisonment.
In any event, I remain unconvinced that these rates are substantially better compared to the rates in the US, especially considering how difficult these numbers are to compare.
IIRC incarceration was a method started by christian monks, and the intention was that the incarcerated would use the time to reflect and contemplate his crimes - a form of rehabilitation.
As you say, that certainly isn't what's happening today. Instead it gives criminals a broader network, and my impression is that it works sort of like a "crime school".
But the US method of privatizing and profiteering off of imprisonment surely must skew the incentives as well.
Prison in the past wasn't very long term without any slavery - with agricultural scale having people not doing any work wasn't affordable. Hold until the judge gets there or they decide what to do with them unless they are say nobility elite wealthy or otherwise able to justify the expense (ransom or a hostage).
Egypt would be in a good situation for that given seasonality and nile flooding giving better yields.
> The Bible records Joseph as being put in prison in Egypt c.1500 BCE.
Newer evidence strongly suggests the exodus took place during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (c. 1450), dating Joseph’s deportation and rise to power at roughly 1900 BCE.
I would much rather be beaten, banished, or shamed than go to prison. And honestly, I think I would rather die than be locked up for any amount of time. Yet all these punishments are seen as less humane than locking someone in a small room with scary people for years. It just shows how little people can really imagine what it is like.
A few of my friends have spent some time in jail / prison due to smoking pot and the "three strikes" rule along with it. They were in there ranging from overnight to a few weeks to months.
One developed PTSD from it and has had major issues since he was released 15 years ago. The other one hasn't quite came back mentally either, will not talk about it and is so much worse off now than ever. After he was released, but before his court date where he knew he wasn't going to have to go back, he was contemplating suicide.
They all said they would rather die than ever go back for any significant time. I'm not sure what significant means in that respect, but dying seems to be the general theme they share now.
After working at a jail for a bit, I'm not sure I blame them at all. I like to think I'm mentally strong, but I don't know how long I could do it. I am sure I would have the same mentality they do now after spending time in jail / prison.
Those sound like abnormally severe reactions, though in some locations life in jail or prison is much more severe - but in most of the U.S. it's not the violent, drug fueled rape-fest popular media might have you believe.
I spent 7 years in prison, most of it in a maximum security facility. I once spent 3 straight weeks on 23 hours cell confinement - no tv, no books, no other people aside from a guard walking by doing rounds. The other 1 hour was allowed in essentially just a larger cell.
I've known many other inmates - before, during, and after incarceration. No one was keen on going back, but I don't know anyone who developed any significant PTSD from their experiences, and no one who would choose literally death over re-incarceration.
I did know one guy who got PTSD after being shot 7 times by the police for trying to drive away from them. None from being in jail for a few months, though.
This is actually a missed point in modern times. If people could ask to get lashes or prison, I bet a very large number would choose lashes.
So which punishment is more humane? Turns out we are picking for the experience of "the innocent" not for the rights of the "guilty".
In these lines I have commented before: the main moral issue of modern prison systems is that they don't value liberty, so merely taking away someones liberty does not quench the thirst of revenge that pays off for the politician rhetoric.
I do find it interesting that probably many of these people would not commit crime if they were paid $50k per year to not commit crime (which would save money!). Unfortunately you could never do this as an actual policy because of the incentives, it's just interesting that they end up forcing us to spend so much money so unproductively.
I absolutely believe that there is room for something innovative to be done here, but I don't think it has anything to do with incarceration.
Yes, you cant pre-pay specific people not to commit a crime.
I do think a UBI (basic income) would reduce crime enormously, if it were confiscated when they are in prison. It would be a powerful economic incentive.
I have no doubt it would be used to "pay" for ones incarceration. Thus adding more fuel to the dumpster fire that is the for-profit prison system in the US.
Done properly, it could provide a strong incentive not to commit crimes. I have little faith that it would ever be done properly.
> Remember most petty criminals make less than minimum wage.
Which direction is the causation? Do they steal because they are poor? Are they poor because they have bad behavior, such as stealing? Or is both stealing and low wage caused by a common factor, such as mental illness?
If a court ordered that a convicted criminal get money for not committing crimes, the OP suggests that this would work better and cheaper than prison. The incentive problem is that people would commit crimes in order to get this deal.
Ironically enough, long term imprisonment is quite possibly the worst way of inflicting punishment, while simultaneously being more cruel and antithetical to rehabilitation. Whatever our goals, there are surely better ways of achieving them.
If you want to see how a justice system can work reasonably well, including when incarceration occurs, look to countries in western Europe.
America is pretty close to the bottom of the pile when it comes to their justice and incarceration system, to the point that their allies are actually refusing extradition requests on account that "US prisons are unconscionable and medieval." [1]
The very idea of locking someone up for more than 10-15 years is crazy enough. Add in the bail system, plea bargains, elected judges, understaffed public defenders, civil forfeiture, private prisons, prison labor, disenfranchisement, onerous and obtuse probation conditions, pre-trial incarceration (this is the absolute worst), and you have a system that actively causes injustice at every turn, and ensures high recidivism by producing a population with nothing to lose, nothing to live for, and the sword of Damocles ever hanging over them.
I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal.
I've heard over and over again, in the words of criminals themselves (on podcasts, in new stories), that they got into the career part of being a criminal while behind bars.
> I think it's debateable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.
From comments read on the Internet it seems there are plenty of differences between American and European prisons, even more to the Northen European countries.
There they seem to be able to rehabilitate the people (most of the time), unlike other places.
I think it doesn't help the depiction of prisons in fiction as a place where the strong thrive, full of contained violence, bribes and all the debauchery humanity is capable of.
I don't think American prisons rehabilitate. Insisting that they do even less is like the extreme capitalistic measures of cutting public funding for a function, and then demand that that function should be privatized because it doesn't work.
I think this is more romantic “grass is greener” thinking. It’s pretty hard to compare effectiveness of prisons for rehabilitations across countries. There is some research [0], and there is a lot of limitations in data, but it seems like Europe isn’t doing so well on recidivism. Or at least France and Germany seem to also struggle with people leaving and then reentering prison.
If I had to guess, I would say that prisons, in general, don’t rehabilitate. They just isolate for society’s protection because no one has a good idea of how to fix people that has effectiveness efficacy.
I tried to describe how this document has many limitations. I also don’t think 36% (if accurate), although better than the US, means Norway has figured it out.
My comment above did not intend to convey that the US has great prisons or that other countries have great prisons. I meant that recidivism is bad and too many criminals come back into the prison system.
Can the US improve? Of course. Can the US learn from other countries? Of course. Is rehabilitating criminals a solved problem that the US is ignoring? No.
Thanks for the link. There’s lots of limitations to this paper. I still think it’s useful in showing high recidivism, especially with your fact checking.
I think 20% is too high, even though it’s better than 30%.
> At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.
Citation please? For serial murderers or serial rapists - OK. Probably a screw loose. For drug abusers and the associated foibles that go with it (theft, prostitution, etc) - why would you suggest rehabilitation can't work?
That's ignoring the societal pressures of kids who have no means to sustain themselves beyond illegal activities - just assuming that they wouldn't act different if given the choice is... quite pessimistic.
> I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well
I agree until this point you made.
We know the "modern prison system" is a very loose term dictated by "where" much more than just an abstract idea. In places like the Netherlands they have so few prisoners they had to close down prisons.
There are certainly a group of people who cannot be easily re-introduced to society: People who commit premeditated murder, rapists, pedophiles, serial killers, mass-murderers, terrorists. But this accounts for a fairly small percent of the prison population.
Most prisoners can fall into a few categories: Stupid, No other means of decent survival, Drugs.
I'll tackle these in order of ease:
- Drugs - This has been shown to be the easiest to solve. Giving prisoners the option of avoiding their entire sentence in exchange for rehab and support group attendance has been INCREDIBLY effective.
- No other means of decent survival - A.k.a. poverty. This feeds the drug problem too. People need: Food, Shelter, Entertainment. Boredom is the cause of too many kids, drug use, and theft of goods. Giving these people a decent base education and job placement programs can be orders of magnitude more efficient.
- Stupid - This can cause the other problems too, but I include in here a lack of self control. Many times this can be solved with education, job placement, emotional control education, etc. There are ways to rehabilitate these people into society.
Instead of everything I said, we treat marijuana arrests in the USA worse than many cases of murder, rape, fraud. We need sane laws here.
Furthermore the real criminals that cause a ton of subsequent crime is financial fraudsters. We call it "white collar criminals" who get at best a slap on the wrists -- Steal 20 mil? Go to jail for a few years. Have a bag of weed? Go to jail for 10 years. These white collar criminals are the ones that need punishment the most. They cause so much subsequent crime, and they always believe they both deserve what they do and can get away with it. These are the ones we need to lock away for the longest of times.
And finally the privatization of prisons. So much on that. But basically, if you run a prison as a business, it is 100% not in your interest to prevent future crime, but rather to ensure the prisoners (your cash cows) never leave.
I think I may have worded that poorly. I'd didn't mean to imply rehabilitation is impossible. I meant that, in broad strokes, taking the last 200 years of experience on earth, successes have been few an far between. On average, prison time may have even increased future criminality.
Even the best examples aren't great. From random study I just googled:
The 2-year re-arrest rates ranged from 26% (Singapore) to 60% (USA), two-year reconviction rates ranged from 20% (Norway) to 63% (Denmark), and two-year reimprisonment rates ranged from 14% (USA – Oregon) to 43% (Canada – Quebec, New Zealand)
Interesting things to read about (i'd need to do some research to find this research paper again, i think it was on hacker news 6 months ago or so):
most people committing murder fall in the following categories:
- they premeditated and thought they were NOT going to be caught, so prison isn't a deterrent. They thought they were smarter than forensics.
- they were in a situation and had to kill someone due to circumstances of the other crime. Such as robbing a store, the clerk pulls a gun, now you gotta shoot them before you die. This was a massive lack of foresight and thus again punishment isn't a deterrent because they don't think things though.
- they were angry and it got out of hand. No foresight, they acted on pure emotion. This may be anger issues or other reasons. There is no deterrent here, only rehabilitation.
- political / hate-based killings. These people feel they are doing society a favor, they feel RIGHT to do this killing. Deterrent doesn't help if the political climate is empowering them and making their message amplified.
Now just imagine how much crime is in similar categories as above. The same logic applies.
So basically we need to focus entirely on prison time being a rehabilitation to: make the person understand and accept what they have done. make the person feel genuine remorse. make sure the person has alternatives in life to doing what caused the problem to begin with. Most places in the world focus more on "remove the undesireables" and "punishment is future deterrent". So really we're doing literally the opposite.
We also want to be careful not to make rehabilitation available only to prisoners, so that nobody is tempted to commit crime to get help.
My ideal solution would be something like this: end the war on drugs, make community service a part of as many sentences as at all possible (and certainly all white collar crimes), then separate the component that are dangerous in such a way that they will have no contact with any other prisoner, so that they don't learn to be better criminals. These are the people which we will have to give up on.
Of course this proposal is politically impossible, as it pisses of all sides, but it should be possible to at least increase the number of community service sentences.
If I were in charge of creating a new prison system, I'd do mandatory schooling and psychological counseling. I know that's very very expensive, the thinking being here that you'd get recidivism so low that you'd really only have to have small prisons. I'm talking placement tests and actual schooling. Can't read, teach him to read. Community labor, get them attached to people. Get a job placement program.
We could actually work towards reducing crime, but we as a society want punishment too much to allow it.
I totally think banishment should be an option for your first order semi-serious offenses. If you disagree with the laws of a place enough to get into that level of trouble, they should give you at the very least the "consent to be governed" somewhere else. That's assuming that you committed a crime which is not universally punishable everywhere.
What's also funny about this is that it used to be that the colleges that cost the most money were the most prestigious. Now an inmate can claim that same level of prestige tongue in cheek.
I think it is more that we believe prisoners life has any value at this time. Previously (100s of yeras ago) they were just tossed down a trapdoor together with other people. Perhaps every now and then there would be some food thrown down later on.
One thing that may be politically feasible would be to replace the prison system for non violent offenders with military boot camp. That way, you can get an education, discipline, and a sense of patriotism.
We don't have rehabilitation, we have punishment. It doesn't matter if we call it rehabilitation, if it is only punitive, it's still not rehabilitation.
Other places have rehabilitation, and it appears to work.
Prison startup: you pay the government, not the government you. You then force the people to CREATE VALUE and work for other labor-intensive work (e.g. cleaning, construction, ...)
Seems a non starter. If your costs are $75K per inmate you'll never make that up in prisoner labor productivity. Even if your costs are half that. And if you do get profitable labor, regular citizens will rightly complain that good paying jobs are being taken by criminals.
Calling servitude as punishment "actual slavery" is disingenuous to the point that I'm willing to call it a lie. You can't buy and sell them. You don't have them indefinitely. When they reproduce your don't own their offspring. They get sentenced to this servitude by society's justice system, not captured through conquest or purchased from foreign lands.
Calling labor as punishment "actual slavery" is incredibly dismissive of actual slaves.
> You can't buy and sell them. You don't have them indefinitely. When they reproduce your don't own their offspring. They get sentenced to this servitude by society's justice system, not captured through conquest or purchased from foreign lands.
All of these individually are features of historical systems uncontroversially identified as slavery. The particular form of penal slavery at issue may be unique in combining all of them, but I don't see any coherent argument why that would make it into not-slavery.
Historically slavery has certainly been term-limited in numerous jurisdictions. And private prisons certainly can, and do, trade away problem inmates.
You are dimly correct in that it is not identical to every other form of slavery practiced historically. But it's close enough for me--and I can only speculate as to your motives for splitting this hair.
most people rightly oppose slavery. but confining people to cages for years at a time is pretty bad too. if it's possible to justify imprisonment in the first place, are all forms of forced labor significantly worse? what if the prisoners get training as webdevs and have to spend 6-8 hours on weekdays improving the UI of government websites. they get an aeron chair, free coffee, ping pong, etc., and when they get released they have some experience to list on their resume. kind of an absurd proposal, but hopefully it illustrates the point of my question: is it immoral to have them do literally anything to defray the cost of their imprisonment?
Did you edit your post? Im pretty sure I answered something that was above the first paragraph and isn't there anymore. Otherwise it was meant for some other post, disregard.
By "an activist group" I mean people who confuse work with slavery.
People in prison eat what they're given, sleep when they're told, have (almost) no personal property and are at mercy of the administration on many other issues.
Work is one of the greatest things a human being can do. Working doesn't make an otherwise free person a slave.
While the question of whether capitalism is slavery is perhaps interesting (and quite a large number of people have answered that question in the affirmative), the system where you are committed, without free consent even as that is constructed within a capitalist framework, to an arrangement where a private party rents out exclusive control of you and your labor for a period of time from the government, and compels you to labor for the benefit of that private party is very different from the “you must find a willing party to give you food, and most of them are only willing to do so for money, and most people are not willing to give you money without some exchange of value” feature of capitalism, in ways which make it fit a much less controversial understanding of slavery than any that include capitalism as a whole.
I personally find the idea of basic income very interesting (I'm not yet confident it will work in real life though), but that's probably an off-topic for this thread.
Back to your point though: isn't it ironical then that pretty much the only place where a person is not "forced" to work is prison? How's that ever fair?
> If I stop working, I'll get kicked out of my house and will probably die of hunger. Does it mean I am forced to work?
This is such a bad argument in my opinion...living is working...it might not be at a job in an office, but if you want to eat/drink/shelter, you're going to have to work one way or the other...your question kinda seems like complaining about the fact that consuming calories and water and making shelter to live is not forced already, when it is by nature...
The legality of forced work of prisoners is due to an exemption in the 13th amendment.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Most people wouldn't consider someone to suggest slavery as the solution this early in the discussion either. Godwin's law doesn't work when you are suggesting the same actions Nazis actually took.
You are like the bad guy from Thor Ragnarok. "I don't like to call them slaves, they're prisoners with jobs"
I have a cousin 2 years younger than me who's getting out of prison today.
He just finished a 2 year stint for violating probation. When you get caught drunk driving with a gun in the car, then tend to send you back behind bars. In reality, he had two other offenses in the time before that, which should have been enough.
His first sentence was 7 years for theft. He was part of a group of ~ 20 year olds that were breaking into garages and stealing tools, etc to sell for money.
He got in trouble as a teen and went to one of those youth harbor camps, that didnt' seem to help him. When he was released from prison the first time, he got a decent paying job at the local auto plant (we're a blue collar town) and he threw that all away. He would rather do whatever the heck he wants which usually means hanging out at the bars and drinking and selling a little bit of drugs and getting into fights.
The system can't fix him until he wants to be fixed. If he's out here he's just breaking laws and fathering more children (that the state gets to support as well). I'm perfectly okay with him being locked up until he decides he's had enough and wants to straighten out.
I just hope if he ever decides that, he's not doing 10-20 years at that time. Once you're in, you're in.
> I'm perfectly okay with him being locked up until he decides he's had enough and wants to straighten out.
The problem is that prison does an awful job of causing people to figure out that they've had enough and preparing them for walking the straight and narrow. Instead, it indoctrinates them in a culture which is harmful to that reform. The results prove that fighting that peer pressure, while literally locked in it for 2 years, is really hard. And that produces a vicious feedback loop where, after you're out, people think should be back in and segregate you socially, educationally, and financially.
7 years for something that would have probably gotten him 6-12 months in Europe/Canada.
When are the Americans going to realise you can't punitively punish someone and not reap of profound negative consequences (re-offending, home-breaking etc.).
Most crime is likely related to being poor, but this case shows someone who chronically chooses crime, even when they had a job. How do you "fix" that? There are people who will work hard to avoid being good. There are people who enjoy being bad, who enjoy hurting others, who enjoy screwing over others. How do you fix that? I'd contend that the best thing to do is remove those people from society. The American system is broken, but these kind of people can't be rehabilitated. You could "fix" them as much as you could "fix" someone's sexuality.
Possibly don't think about being poor in the context of just "needing more resources".
Think about it in the context of having much different risk/reward calculations for all activities, much higher stress levels, much worse access to health care, much higher levels of self-medication, higher sense of futility and unfairness in the world, possibly cognitive/emotional impairments due to unaddressed physical health issues, etc.
Unless you've been poor yourself, especially poor in a rich country, or unless you've worked directly with poor people and learned from them what it is like to live their lives, assume that it's far more difficult to simply /exist/ than you can imagine.
This is true. Being poor for prolonged time fuck with your mindset and rationality, their basic rationale of what's good is cloudy at best. Adult education of rationality for prisoners and underprivileged is where these resources should go.
While it sounds bad when you put it that way, the psychiatric infrastructure that existed before was evil. As bad as things are for those who need help, they are probably better living on the streets than in those institutions.
I knew someone who was in an orphanage (not the same as psychiatric, but similar problems existed there I just don't have anecdotes to share) in the 1920s. They would beat him with a chimney brush if he slept on his pillow. They got awards for how nice their beds looked (since the pillows were unused they always looked new). They used a chimney brush because the metal bristles would hurt without leaving large marks on the body.
While you could argue (and I would agree) that we can do better today I'm not convinced we actually would in practice.
The rise in American incarceration coincides with the de-institutionalization of psychiatric patients and subsequent defunding of community mental health programs. Perhaps they are linked, and prisons have now taken on the previous role of psychiatric institutions.
The fact is, I used to see mentally ill patients all the time and have no where to send them. Often, they would turn to crime just to survive or get off the streets.
While I agree there were abuses in the past, wholesale destruction of the old system is a very American response without any real thought to its replacement.
What you are stating is 100% morally wrong - that it’s better for a mentally ill individual to be left to starve on the streets rather than a society that can afford to care for these individuals in a controlled environment? Anecdotal support of your argument is a logical fallacy, and can’t be the basis of policy selection.
Things are more subtle than that. There are a few who starve to death, but the vast majority do find support in the current system and their lives are better than it would be. As always it is complex.
The infrastructure we had was partially disbanded/defunded because asylums frequently subjected patients to inhumane conditions and outright abuse. There were movements in the 70s by ex-patients and their families trying to get people out of the system and living in programs that try to help patients live more independently, because of this.
So let's shut it down too then. Maybe when we have literally nothing left, America can finally realize that people committing crimes need help, not vindictive punishment.
But this is the same America that regularly jokes about men getting raped in prison, and gleefully discuss how convicted pedophiles will likely die if they end up in general population
That the American prison system is worse at the job doesn't really excuse the behavior of the old asylum system. We shouldn't fall into the same traps. There needs to be significant reform of both. What mechanisms and techniques need to be in place, however, I am not in any way qualified to say.
I agree, but at the moment, our psychiatric ability isn't at the level to be able to do that. We have less trouble building tunnels than reforming prisoners.
And likely not his first offense. GP mentions he was already in the juvenile system. Chances are he had a few other adult minor offenses already also, and when he got caught again, this time in a clearly planned and deliberate ongoing burglary ring, he got the book thrown at him.
His own brother thinks that it's good that he's in prison because he wreaks havoc and fathers multiple (state supported) children when out of prison. From this perspective, 6-12 months would be the option that reaps "profound negative consequences".
Canada is very light on it's criminals. Child Molesters, Rapists and even murderers tend to spend little time behind bars with little consequence for their actions.
Here is another article about how broken Canadian Law is.
Just recently a young boy was beaten to death by a repeat offender in Winnipeg. The animal broke into the boys home and beat him to death while the child tried to protect his Grandmother. The media won't even tell you the animals name or anything about him. I will be surprised if he gets any jail time.
I wouldn't be proud of Canada's punishment of criminals.
>Nguyen, 55, pleaded guilty at Old City Hall court to beating three baby raccoons with a shovel, probably killing one and breaking another’s foreleg, because they were destroying his garden in 2011.
He beat the living tar out of living creatures instead of dealing with them humanely - yeah, that should be punished.
> The media won't even tell you the animals name or anything about him.
Why would you need his name? Has he even been found guilty yet?
So, not a fan of animal cruelty, but I can go to a store and purchase meat from animals raised in horrific conditions (including veal, foie gras, etc.) so if nothing else the law here seems... inconsistent.
The conceit here is much the same as the fact that a surgeon can legally cut you open and remove your appendix, but your neighbour who is really into medicine and knives can't. Veal and Foie Gras don't seem right either, but they have the veneer of legitimacy.
Also, in this case there was the options to use traps or other methods to shoo them away - beating with a shovel doesn't seem humane, it just seems like it would have been convenient.
> When police arrived minutes later, they found a man, 29, attacking 17-year-old Jaime Adao with a weapon. In order to stop the attack, police had to shoot the man.
Not commenting on the specific numbers, but maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that a year of college costs less than food, housing, healthcare, security, and programs combined?
As a non-American, what I find mostly surprising are these two things:
1) that a society that mostly believes that a system of private businesses competing in a free market is the be all and end all of optimal resource allocation end up having the most expensive health care, higher education and apparently, prison system in the world; that this fact does not trigger more thought and discussion;
2) that despite incarcerating people being more expensive than sending them to Harvard, you still favor punishment over prevention and rehabilitation, having the highest incarceration ratio in the world.
1. None of the things you listed are anywhere near a free market in the US.
You've created a compelling argument against government intervention, actually.
2. I agree with the second point. The US government officially does, too. Prison should be about rehabilitation and not retribution. It's just that the government doesn't act like it agrees.
So why isn't it a free market in the USA when free markets is clearly seen as the way things should be?
Why doesn't lack of free market trigger a demand for reform of the sectors but only hand-waving excuses/acceptance?
When credit card companies in Europe started to price gouge with high fees the EU responded by putting a cap on fees. Why does the US government not respond by putting a cap on prices for hospital treatments?
In Denmark when the doctor sends you to the drug store with a prescription for e.g. pain medication, the drug store is required by law to tell you about cheaper alternatives (with the same active ingredient) even if they do not stock the cheap alternative. We simply do not accept being locked into a corner by medical companies.
https://min.medicin.dk/Generelt/Nyheder/50
What Americans call 'the free market' is a system where there are few restrictions on what a person can buy or sell. It extends to their political system, where politicans sell policies in return for campaign contributions.
Most of these sectors are dominated by public spending (see my comment above).
Because prices aren't arbitrary numbers slapped on to products and services that can be managed by diktat. It's like trying to control the temperature by limiting how high thermostats can go.
> In Denmark when the doctor sends you to the drug store with a prescription for e.g. pain medication, the drug store is required by law to tell you about cheaper alternatives (with the same active ingredient) even if they do not stock the cheap alternative.
All 50 US states have generic substitution laws, and 89% of all prescriptions are of generics.
But he gave concrete examples other countries have done to achieve the very things he mentioned. Why would you dismiss those obviously working solutions by hand-waving about world peace?
Your first point is sort of debatable. The U.S. is diverse and there's a wide variety of viewpoints. It's hard to fight against political inertia at the Federal level. Policies in motion tend to stay in motion.
There is demand for reform but there's almost an equal demand for status quo.
Cutting financial fees is one thing. Healthcare is a capital AND labor intensive industry. Cutting fees carelessly could cause massive layoffs, disrupted services and a lot of trickle down effects. The system has evolved to this point and while it's certainly due for disruption, it's not as simple as capping prices.
There's no equal demand for status quo in the US. There is a political system that lets voices be amplified enough for those with vested interests to pretend they have an equal demand.
The "hang 'em high" crowd is not a tiny minority. They're the supermajority voice on the conservative side of the aisle and you'll even see them represented elsewhere in this comments section.
To give a more nuanced prospective, I'm an American that has lived in Denmark for 3 years.
Definitely, the American system is a dumpster fire.
Denmark's isn't terrific, either, though. I remember having to call in a favor of my girlfriend's uncle (a doctor) to get a simple doctor appointment that wasn't 4 months out.
Certainly the government does have the people more in mind when making laws - that's not the case in the US. Our government cannot be trusted to have our interests at heart, unfortunately. Pushing for more regulation usually means helping the businesses and not the citizens.
Private health care is cheap and great throughout Europe. You can get an appointment quickly, have doctors that spend time with you, and spend a lot less than you would in the US. The private doctors here in Europe also tend to be better at their job - they've self selected.
The best medical care I've experienced, though, was in south east asia. Most of those countries have a pretty free market. You can even see ads in Bangkok for the price of a baby delivery - front and center on billboards even! Truly a capitalistic health care system.
I've described my own experience with SEA care here:
I want to see how the SEA model works when your condition requires an expensive and complex treatment (chemo/radiation for cancer, a transplant etc.). Here in Poland, private hospitals generally focus on the easier and more profitable diseases and treatments, and the serious stuff is pretty much only treated by the the (tax funded) public system.
If this is a compelling argument against gouvernment intervention, then why does it work so much better in europe where all three sectors are state-owned? The best example is switzerland, where the costs are a fraction of the costs in the U.S ( and which is not a "socialist" country at all).
Healthcare isn’t state owned, or even single payer in Switzerland. Everyone pays for their own insurance.
The rate they pay is fixed by the state but all the assets — the insurance companies, the hospitals, the insurance policies — are in private hands.
In Germany none of that stuff is state owned, either.
This is one of the strangest things about the healthcare debate in the United States: we frequently contrast our system with “public” systems that are actually well regulated private systems.
Thank you for the reference. The insurance companies — die Krankenkassen — are indeed state controlled and there are careful and very specific regulations regarding their funding and expenditures. Everyone is obliged to be in one and they are all expected to provide certain basic services.
That’s not the same thing as being state owned. Everyone has to be in one but there isn’t only one. Some are connected to regions and some to major industrial consortiums, like Audi.
It’s a small distinction, perhaps — but falsity proves anything. If it’s not state owned, it’s not, and we might as well not obscure debate about the US healthcare system with untruth.
it is not 100% state-controlled. A lot of the fees and cost are indeed state-controlled as in set by the state, but the actual insurance companies, clinics, etc are private.
It is a little bit more complicated:
The budget of the "gesetzliche Krankenkasse" is set by the gouvernment. So yes, it is not owned by the state, but in reality it is completely controlled by the state. There are, however, private insurance companies in germany which are free to do what they want. Everybody under a certain salary limit has to be insured by the "gesetzliche" and only if they earn more than a certain amount they can leave it and have a private insurance or none at all. There are many discussions whether this system should be changed to a state onwed only system, because it would be more efficient.
A lot of J&J's revenue comes from non-pharmaceutical businesses. If you rank by pharmaceutical R&D spending instead Roche comes out ahead of J&J. If you rank by revenue from pharmaceutical sales Pfizer is nr 1 with Novartis and Roche 2 & 3
When someone complains that a free market does not work because it's not truly free, I always remind them that communism failed because it wasn't true communism. /s
Please do not take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. The resulting threads are all the same: predictable, boring, and nasty. Not what we want here at all.
If there is a real free market where consumers have a real choice, it can be argued that the system works, even if it's a race to the bottom. Even you indirectly admitted that most markets aren't free.
There are numerous cases where "socialism" (as laissez-faire Americans like to define it) achieves its goals better and cheaper, like healthcare and pretty much all natural monopolies such as infrastructure. Need any hard evidence with A/B tests? Look at the results of the privatization of European national railways.
It's not obvious to me how subsidized healthcare is both better and cheaper in all cases. It certainly makes it more accessible for everybody, but that also has many downsides here in Quebec, including a very long wait-list for many types of surgeries, long wait-time for urgent care, many doctors/hospital staff are overburdened, or so I hear through the news.
I've also been meaning to read more on how the pharmaceutic industry works in the states, if the high prices on drugs are fair or not. Because even though prices may be high, it doesn't necessarily follow that the companies setting those prices are gouging people/being greedy, as many people claim.
>Look at the results of the privatization of European national railways.
I don't know enough about (Western) European railways but I have data about American and Russian railways. Russian railways are controlled by a single government entity and they are a corrupted disaster. Americans tried to nationalize their railways in 1800s and all it led to was higher costs and worse quality.
My observation is that everywhere where markets are let free people get better results. It's true that most markets aren't free but it's not because of the markets themselves but rather because of the government staying on the way.
So, just like you could point to cases where socialism did work?
(E.g. changing the equality laws for men and women, rapidly industrializing an agrarian Russia, leading China to top global economy from a century plus slump, letting Cuba have a top notch and cost effective hospital system, and so on)
As a sibling comment has pointed out, infrastructure is a good example. UK train networks are a superb example of something that did work great until privatised.
The NHS is a good example too, but it requires one to look under the hood and see how many functions have been outsourced to private companies over the last ~20 years.
Whoa. Personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Maybe you don't owe them any better, but you owe the community here much better.
Every single one of what you listed is either FUD or not an accomplishment of socialism.
Specifically:
- Cuba's hospitals are not top notch, to say the least.
- Russia did the rapid industrializing but it already was on this way before the revolution and would be much better off should the socialist revolution never occurred.
- The equality laws for men and women are not due to socialism.
- China enjoyed the economic rise because they freed the marked not because they tied it, it's the opposite of socialism.
>- Cuba's hospitals are not top notch, to say the least
Cuba's doctors are excellent. And their healthcare is a marvel compared to their Latin American "free market" equivalents. And let's not even compare cost/benefit ratio to the US one (I obviously don't care if a millionaire can get better high end machines in a US hospital -- for the price of a Central Park overlooking condo or two). They key healthcare indicators are telling:
>- Russia did the rapid industrializing but it already was on this way before the revolution and would be much better off should the socialist revolution never occurred.
If the "socialist revolution never occurred" the push to industrialization would be many times slower, and in all probability Russia would have been defeated and thus a German territory after WWII -- along with all of Eastern Europe if not more. So there's that.
>- The equality laws for men and women are not due to socialism.
"Beginning in October 1918, the Soviet Union liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality, permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms that theoretically made women more equal to men." -- Stalin took some of those back, but it took a lot of time for the US to even reach that level (assuming they even have).
>- China enjoyed the economic rise because they freed the marked not because they tied it, it's the opposite of socialism.
China remains a single-party state, with mass government intervention in the economy, and centrally planned activities. Besides, combining an open market with a socialist state is as old as Lenin's NEP.
Switzerland doesn't lead the world in pharmaceutical development. Our health system has been captured by special interests specifically because we have let it grow so big.
Whenever I bring up this point I see downvotes. What I would love instead is a counter example of a country whose largest economic sectors do not capture the government and then have a huge hand in dictating policy in those sectors.
Our government intervention in the education market with student loans is just an awful system that encourages prices to continue to rise.
>1. None of the things you listed are anywhere near a free market in the US.
A, the "no true Scotsman".
The main thing (except insistence on dogma) free market adherents have with leftists (and their similar: "Stalinism/Maoism/Pol-Potism/Tsaucescuism/Titoism/DDR-ism/etc wasn't real socialism" defense).
In regards to health care, US public spending on health care is similar to that of other western countries, although it does spend more on private. Make of that what you will but saying that the US doesn't spend on public healthcare is just incorrect.
> While the U.S. has similar public spending, its private sector spending is triple that of comparable countries [0]
Same is true about public eduction
> In 2014, the United States spent $12,300 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 29 percent higher than the OECD average of $9,600. At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $29,700 per FTE student, which was 81 percent higher than the OECD average of $16,400. [1]
Private prisons house a small portion of California inmates:
> The California State Prison System is administered by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Division of Adult Institutions, which had 136,000 inmates as of 2014. The state of California also relies on private and leased prisons. The number of California prisoners in private out of state facilities is around 8,763 and 4,170 are housed in leased facilities within the state. [2]
Re: Healthcare, that’s not true. The US spends more on health care per capita than many systems with free healthcare (Australia, UK, Canada). You pay the most and receive the least. Like the previous commenter, I am increasingly surprised that this system is still supported, instead of one that costs less and provides more (e.g. the fact that states bargain with drug companies individually, rather than federally, means you pay much more for drugs).
"I am increasingly surprised that this system is still supported"
It is NOT supported, at least not by the citizens of the United States.
It is supported by the corporations, lobbyists, and outright purchased politicians of the United States.
The simple answer to most of these questions about "why doesn't the United States..." is because we no longer have a functioning democracy.
See Citizens United, electoral college, gerrymandering, 2 Senators for states with populations smaller than an average city, social media engineering by foreign actors, Mitch McConnell blatantly ignoring the Constitution with no repercussions...
The point is the correlation between spend and value to the citizenry has become detached in the US. The market is working great if you consider the value produced and extracted in dollar terms because that's what markets are good at. But is this what the citizenry want or deserve?
Making healthcare more expensive doesn't make it better.
As an example, the price of Clopidogrel (Plavix), developped in France is sold 5x more expensive in the US than in France. Do patients in the US experience better outcomes by paying more? No, it's the same drug.
"Providing more" for healthcare, means better overall health, fewer avoidable deaths and longer life expectancy.
Presumably, the makers of Plavix had an estimate of what they could sell the drug for in the US. It's possible it would not have been a viable investment if they weren't able to sell it for 5x in the US. This never bringing it to market.
No because in order to be reimbursed by the French insurance, they must argue their development costs in order to make their case for pricing at which the government will reimburse the drug. Otherwise it is not covered by insurance (which is rare).
So anything sold oversees is pure profit (minus marketing / lobbying).
Read my comment again. I didn't say anything about the overall prison population, just that private prisons have a very small share of overall US prisoners (especially in California, the state mentioned in the article). So I'm skeptical that privatization is somehow driving the prison policy.
I think the problem is that all three sectors that you cite, health care, higher education and prison system, there is no free market but they are oligopols where only a small number of big players can lever their weight and keep others out.
Why are there private prison companies to begin with?
There are, in my opinion, certain aspects of government, which never should be outsourced for private gain. A prison company being one of the most extreme examples.
If other companies can satisfy the needs of the state, why not prisons? You wouldn't mandate that governments should build their own cars, for example?
Monopoly on violence [1] is held by the state as it should be, otherwise we have vigilante justice and I think we can all agree that's bad.
In my opinion (and we can certainly debate this point) this should never be outsourced to third party entities. A rent-a-cop in a mall should not have the power to arrest customers (or even search their belongings) without calling the cops.
Outsourcing such functions have the inherent risk that the privat company cuts costs and corners and moreover hires unqualified and cheap staff, which makes a bad situation even worse.
Incarceration of a human being should never, ever be a license to aply additional torture in any way, shape or form. Private law enforcment with minimal oversight is a direct route to such excesses, which should not be tolerated by a civilized society.
You wouldn't mandate that governments should build their own cars, for example?
That's a rather silly analogy, don't you think? Consumer products usually don't violently intrude into the freedom and bodily integrity of other people.
The incentives are all wrong. For profit prisons "growth" model relies on growing the prisoner population. If they manage costs better and, more importantly, produce better outcomes, then we should look to shifting more of our prisoners there. To date, I haven't seen any such data.
The incentives should be "landing a government contract", though? So if government makes "landing a contract" dependent on rehabilitation rates, it could work?
Even in free markets, Oligarchies and Monopolies are a thing. No system is perfect - potential lack of competition in niche areas is one of the weaknesses of a free market system.
But we choose a free market or whatever because we believe it will produce the best outcome. If it doesn't work as envisioned then we can either tweak it until it does work, or throw it out and start again, the worst option is to leave it alone, especially as we know it works elsewhere.
There seems to be a view that free market v socialism is a binary choice. Its a continuum, and both pure socialism and pure free market are equally bad. No country follows either path 100%.
The problem is private prisons openly lobby, and secretly collude, with the government to increase their profits.
This is also why insulin is expensive (the discoverers and patent holders made their patents freely available long ago). It's regulations which keep insulin, and other drugs, protected from competition and therefore can be expensive... Really, there are endless stories about this.
The gov vs private debate is kind of academic when the reality is a lot of the problem comes down to collusion and cheating from both of them.
Usually competition is the way to insure fair prices.
The collusion then might be to not allow competition. In the case of pharmacy, for example, I would guess there are many regulations that make it very expensive or infeasible to start a competing firm.
The problem with private prisons is they have a conflict of interest. Do they work to improve the lives of the incarcerated and lower recidivism? No! That would lower their bottom line as they get paid per person.
> end up having the most expensive health care, higher education and apparently, prison system in the world; that this fact does not trigger more thought and discussion;
I'm thinking that a defining quality of Americans is their propension to spending. Saving money is just not something they seem to think about- it's not what you save that is important, but the total amount of money circulating in the economy. There are little incentives to make things less expensive, there are more incentives to consume as much as possible, both for privates and for businesses. It's wasteful, but contributes to make the economy stronger (even if the resulting society is more unequal and harder for those who earn less).
Healthcare, higher education, and corrections have the strongest public policy involvement and are also the most dysfunctional; that is not incompatible with the ideology at all. You could say it’s a self fulfilling prophecy or a deliberate conspiracy to undermine trust in public institutions (this is more or less openly acknowledged in “starve the beast”) but it’s not a contradiction.
I agree with the other comment - all of those have extensive government interference. The tax deductibility of employer health plans is at the root of a lot of problems with the cost of healthcare in the US.
It's also worth noting that despite the tremendous waste, at the very high end the US has no equal in healthcare or universities. That might not matter to the average customer though.
You have to think the scale though. US is not the same as e.g Sweden and can't be the same. The amount of benefits you get in Scandi countries or Europe in general against the US are massive. At the same time you have to think that the US is a country of 330m people compared to an average EU country of 10-20m people.
In the UK whilst there is free healthcare etc and its a country of 66m, the healthcare has been getting worse and worse. The appointment queues go up to years for a simple thing in London. (I had a meniscus tear and they appointed me to see an orthopaedic in a year after I was diagnosed. Just to see him. While its understandable that emergency issues are getting bumped up the ladder, mine which was a non-emergency felt like a bummer when I heard the orthopaedic wont see me for a whole year just to see at which stage I am at. That includes doing some scans to see my stage which the GP won't know unless he is some kind of magician. Yes again he can check if the leg is hammered around the knee to bump up how of an emergency it is.)
Generally speaking I think the main issue is that the US is such a large country that can't work the same as EU countries. That goes for everything, from benefits, to working schedules to prison systems etc.
> In the UK whilst there is free healthcare etc and its a country of 66m, the healthcare has been getting worse and worse. The appointment queues go up to years for a simple thing in London.
Agreed. In addition to that, private health insurance is extremely cheap in London compared to the USA, and you can see a GP or specialist the same day if you have this.
That doesn't mean it's not extremely unfair to those that can't afford private health insurance, as treatment should be needs based, not finance based, but it's also difficult to campaign against when you're a beneficiary of a broken system.
is it possible to define "underfunded" in an objective way? people inevitably die, and an individual's life can usually be extended at least a little by a marginal increase in spending. what would it take for you to not consider the system "underfunded"?
> health care, higher education and apparently, prison system
These things are generally not considered to be operating in a free market. All are highly regulated and receive massive government funding or subsidies.
You're missing the point. Prison, in the U.S., is a place to keep people that a certain segment of society doesn't like and would prefer to keep oppressed.
More civilized countries (e.g. nordic ones) do something similar to that.
They don't send "criminals to Harvard", but they have prisons close (if not more) habitable as a Harvard dorm, very humane treatment of prisoners, extensive educational programs, and so on.
And they have less costs, less crime, and a healthier society doing so.
So snark from a country with the largest prison population (by percentage) in the world, huge associated costs, rampant crime rates, and is so backwards as to still have the death penalty (in the 21st century!), is unwarranted.
Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with, which allow them to build relatively spacious prisons and allocate more treatment resources per prisoner.
It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem we’ve got. We could just not prosecute many non-violent crimes, like our District Attorney chose to do in San Francisco. But that didn’t pan out well and we now have the highest non-violent crime rate of any major US city.
> Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with
Nature or nurture? If nurture, then it's at least highly plausible that their prison systems have something to do with it. Recidivism is also much lower.
I see. So instead of the SATs, we could administer a psychological test to detect antisocial tendencies. We’ll send the worst of the bunch straight to the Ivey Leagues. That will teach them.
The comparison is of course only an illustration that suggests the question: It is the right allocation of resources to support incarceration and all that it entails, or should that resource be re-balanced to suffocate the causes of crime? Hint: It is nearly always poverty. That an Ivy league school is utterly out of reach for the average inmate throws in the stark contrast the fact that the State somehow manages to find the same amount of money per head for incarceration.
The question is which cycle to you, as a society, want to feed? That is the one that will grow. Reference to the "Nordic" experience shows what a long-term shift in focus looks like.
This is a strange assumption. As a free market proponent and almost a libertarian, I don't base my argument on "optimal resource allocation", neither care that much for it; I assume that most economically right-wing people don't pursue this as a main goal either, and rather see it as a nice side effect.
When it comes to privatizing stuff that really should be handled by a welfare state the “optimal resource allocation” argument comes up frequently though.
And it completely misses the point of supporting a welfare state.
It’s of course not about being optimal with resources, it’s about providing the best standard of life to as many individuals as possible.
Do this and the number of incarcerated will most likely drop.
It’s all a big game of balance, the way I see things.
> it’s about providing the best standard of life to as many individuals as possible
Which is also a nice thing to have but definitely not the main objective for people on "my" political side. Main argument for privatising stuff is not being optimal or not: it's the principle of making the government, which is the only entity with monopoly on violence, as weak and as small as possible.
Think about it as a microkernel (I must admit that I don't know enough about kernel development, so this analogy is very crude). Even if moving different services from the kernel to user-space would hurt perfomance, it's still a good security practice: this lost efficiency is worth, even if the advantages are "abstract" and not clear from the get-go.
In the end it’s all down to people.
Elected people in government or not so elected entrepreneurs.
Pick you poison. :)
Violence is a consequence of many factors, and in a decent democracy having it monopolized with the governement we have elected is probably a good thing.
The great thing is that we have history as a reference and I think we should use it.
I’m not aiming for the extremes here, but rather life and living standard in the world and perhaps west specifically, post WW2.
The numbers are there, we can see the trajectories.
The numbers seem to say, pretty clearly — having a great standard of life seems to gain everyone (except for perhaps the ultra wealthy).
Think about this, and give me you view:
Why is the worlds most happy nations also the ones taxed the highest, and as such have the biggest government influences?
> Elected people in government or not so elected entrepreneurs.
I'll pick different entities competing with one another over a monolith.
> Violence is a consequence of many factors, and in a decent democracy having it monopolized with the governement we have elected is probably a good thing.
Never said it wasn't. But the entity that monopolizes it should be as small as possible.
> Why is the worlds most happy nations also the ones taxed the highest, and as such have the biggest government influences?
Same reason you would probably find the biggest tumors in people with the healthiest lifestyles: they would kill others at much earlier stages.
I find the ”competition” argument quite interesting.
From what I have experienced so far through life it looks like this supposedly healthy competition leads to variants of VW & co behaviour down the line.
I see very few exceptions from my northern europe socialist bubble.
When it comes to:
- School
- Health
- Police
- fire & rescue services
- etc, whatever you would consider part of welfare
I want the best, not a choice.
”Sir, you’re having a heart attack. Would you like the best treatment, or can we offer you this more competetive offering at a discount?”.
It’s just, to me, a really odd way of viewing a society.
I don't know enough about american prison system to have an informed opinion. My argument was about the principle and objectives I (or, generally speaking, a fiscal conservative) base my opinions on, not prisons in particular.
Universities have all of those things. 75k would easily cover tuition, meal plan, dorms/off campus living, university insurance policies, campus security, extracurricular programs, etc.
Universities also don't require the same level of 24 hour surveillance, and have a more cooperative crowd that can look after themselves. It seems reasonable to a first approximation that they would have similar costs.
In my opinion you have used a convenient generalization for prison populations which helps justify their treatment by dehumanising them. An alternative view.
Universities: 18 year olds moving out of home for the first time.
Prison Population: Many from unfortunate circumstances and have been fending for themselves long before 18.
> Comparing college with prison is patently ridiculeous.
The point is that they are different possible futures for a given individual. The matter of which of these two possibilities comes to fruition depends on policy and on that individual's conduct. To the degree that it's determined by policy, it makes sense to restrict incarceration such that it is used at most in the limited situations in which there is societal benefit.
Drug prohibition, for example, does not achieve this, but as a policy is responsible for a huge portion of the costs of incarceration.
I would also add that if you actually took the kind of person who's in a CA prison, and asked Harvard how much you'd have to pay for them to accept such a student, it would probably require a bigger donation on top of the $75k/year.
It's an apples and oranges comparison in the first place. There are security expenses related to prison populations. You need staff, facilities, equipment, etc. to manage prisoners behavior (prevent fights, etc.) and keep them from escaping. The two things have a different mission, so of course they're going to have different costs.
It's like saying a refrigerator is more expensive than a microwave. It doesn't mean anything because they do different things.
Prop 47 reduced incarceration for small crimes. There are less prisoners than earlier. The cost comes from unfunded pension liabilities for prison guards. Most of whom retire by 50-55. And can draw their last salary as pension until they die. Because. Unions. This is for the state of CA. Don’t know about other states.
What is the alternative? Having 65 year old prison guards probably isn't the best idea from a security perspective. Prison guard median salary is only about $40k, especially in California that is not a lot, can't exactly live of your savings until death and it's not like people are lining up to employ 55 year old ex prison guards.
Retirement at 55 and drawing a full salary until death is more than fair for the level of stress being a prison guard involves.
It's dangerous work.
Thank goodness for unions!
Even if I agree that a public sector union has zero obligation to the public good - and I don't - I still don't think you can "thank goodness" for an organization that advocates for its financial interest of its members if that interest is bad for everyone else.
> I still don't think you can "thank goodness" for an organization that advocates for its financial interest of its members if that interest is bad for everyone else.
But it's ok for every single for-profit private company to do the same thing in the interest of its shareholders? Even when the company's aims are to the detriment of society as a whole?
> But it's ok for every single for-profit private company to do the same thing in the interest of its shareholders? Even when the company's aims are to the detriment of society as a whole?
> So you think Californians at large get to dictate terms to security guards? They shouldn’t get to negotiate their own terms?
Did I say any of those things?
No no, I think that there need to be dramatically fewer prisons, and dramatically fewer prison guards, and the union advocates exactly the opposite of that. That's not OK.
If you work 30 years in the industry and live for another 30 after that you are basically getting paid double per year worked without interest.
Getting the money upfront and investing it could be substantial, but thats still a much better negotiation than most Americans get for their jobs which are usually at most 40k without full pensions or almost any other benefit.
My grandmother is 86 and is infinitely grateful for her 25 years worked at a public university as a secretary. Those kinds of "obligations" are not large up front numbers but some people like the guaranteed security, at least up until austerity starts taking away the pay they were promised half a century ago.
More than fair? Fair is what the free market decides someone should be paid. And according to google, for private prisons “fair” is a median salary of $32,000/year.
Unions have special protection under the law, which means they are more of a regulated market than a "free market". It's government (or corrupted politics, depending on your viewpoint) all the way down, man.
To put this in perspective, the US has the highest incarceration rate of any country. I have trouble finding good numbers on recidivism, but anecdotally (based on sparse evidence) it seems like the US approach to incarceration is not working.
Another fact supporting this is that the racial distribution in US prisons is uncorrelated with that of the general population. Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American, suggesting they may be incarcerated for lesser cause than those of other backgrounds.
One example of this is stop and frisk policies, which are applied unequally to people of different racial makeup, directly contributing to the racial disparity in the prison population assuming equal distribution of contraband.
I agree with most of your points, but I'm not sure about the validity of the following:
> the racial distribution in US prisons is uncorrelated with that of the general population. Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American, suggesting they may be incarcerated for lesser cause than those of other backgrounds
This statistic could suggest lots of things, I'm not sure why being incarcerated for lesser cause would be the number one. Incarceration is strongly correlated with crime, which itself is strongly correlated with other factors that are also correlated with being African American, e.g. wealth, location
The charts in here [0] should alleviate any doubts you had: when it comes to marijuana possession, blacks are indeed arrested at massively higher rates.
Please also consider the rates at which different population groups commit serious crimes, such as murder and rape. We are talking about prison populations after all - people convicted of minor drug offenses like possession are a small percent of the prison population.
The publication "Homicide Trends in the United States" by the US Department of Justice has crime data broken down by race, for example. See pages 11 and 12: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
The data shows that people of different races commit serious crimes such as murder at considerably different rates.
>In 2008, the [homicide] offending rate for blacks (24.7 offenders per 100,000) was 7 times higher than the rate for whites (3.4 offenders per 100,000)
It's complex, and defies simplistic explanations (so don't believe simplistic explanations if you see/hear them).
An attempt at a nuanced explanation (which undoubtedly misses a ton of factors):
Huge disparities in overall wealth and income, coupled with geographic segregation and isolation of a lot of the black population in areas of concentrated poverty, and the associated lack of access to social goods, such as public safety and good schools. The combined effects of poverty/segregation/isolation are specifically reflected in the fact that 78% of homicides involve people who know each other [1]. People who know each other killing each other is a result of the breakdown of community structures that would disincentivize that behavior. There have to be powerful incentives for someone to kill someone that they know, considering that the potential consequences are so severe (incarceration, violent retribution, etc). Often the perpetrators have very little (in wealth, community, etc) to lose, which also increases the incentive.
Another group that are similarly economically poor, Latinos, but due to a different history, have more intact community structures, don't have as high a rate of violent crime.
There are many possible reasons for that besides racism. Blacks are probably more likely to be smoking on the street, carrying weed with them, etc. Also black neighborhoods are policed more heavily due to crime rates so blacks are more likely to be stopped in the first place.
In all likelihood, higher arrests for marijuana of blacks are more due to the above factors than racism, though I’m sure that’s a non-zero factor as well.
To what extent is "marijuana posession" just a proxy for more serious crimes that are harder to prove? Just like Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion...
The statistic by itself might not signal it, but this is definitely part of what's going on, and I don't think anyone seriously questions this.
A good place to start is the Fair Sentencing Act which tried to address the problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act (but, this just address the mandatory minimum triggers, not the fact that African Americans are disproportionately jailed)
>After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted." This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity
I'd argue that the privatization of the prison system is a gigantic driver behind increased cost and recidivism. For the same reason as I don't trust dating-services: the product makes less money if it succeeds in it's original purpose. So there will always be the conflict of interest between having a product that works as advertised, and a product that makes more money.
This focuses on comparing data from 2000 and 2016. From the article:
> Since 2000, the number of people in private prisons has increased 47%, compared to an overall rise in the prison population of 9%.
2016 things changed a bit:
> At the federal level, a 2016 Obama Administration policy shift to reduce reliance and ultimately phase out private prison contracts was reversed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in February 2017.
The article also answers whether this has any impact on the justice system:
> Changes in policy at the Department of Justice in 2017 that are likely to increase sentence length and expand prosecutions for drug and immigration offenses may contribute to the expansion of private facility contracting.
I picked that particular article because it wasn't especially kind to my point of view. Nevertheless, the last statement you quoted is speculation and we don't have any data to back it up.
To add perspective, in New Zealand, 50% of prisoners are Maori who make up 15% of the population. Another 11% are Pacific Islander almost double their percentage of the population.
The numbers are so out of whack that it points to some serious systematic issues, even in a country generally assumed to be quite attentive to their indigenous population.
Not quite: have a look at these charts [0]. I believe that such a massive disparity in arrest rates between blacks and whites cannot be explained just by economic factors.
[..]California is unusual from a national perspective, per the report. Thirteen states have reduced prison populations since 2010, but they've also cut their prison spending by $1.6 billion. Seven states have increased their populations, but have managed to decrease their prison spending, (by $254 million). Fifteen states have increased their prison populations and also increased their total prison spending by a half-billion dollars.
California is in an ignominious group of 10 states that saw declines in the prison population since 2010, but which increased spending by $1.1 billion. Furthermore, California's spending increase accounts for more than half of that number. California has by far the costliest system of incarceration in the nation at more than $75,000 per inmate per year—more than triple the average cost of the 18 states with the least-costly rates.[..]
[..]The study focuses on the 2010 to 2015 period, and some major prison-related laws—e.g., 2014's Proposition 47, which reduced many felonies to misdemeanors and resulted in further reductions of prison populations—got started toward the end of the study period. Yet, if anything, these disturbing spending trends only accelerated in the ensuing years.
"Gov. Jerry Brown's spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates," wrote Don Thompson for The Associated Press. "Since 2015, California's per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13 percent." That's a whopping increase in a short period of time, and even more amazing given that state just raised gas taxes because it claims to be out of cash.[..]
What's wrong with the numbers of recidivism? A criminal is a criminal, he can't help it; I don't know why people think that keeping them locked up could ever fix that. Probably nothing can, maybe medication.
Other countries have proven that this is wrong.
The US prison system does not aim for resettlement. It wants revenge. It's left with too many prisoners and abysmal conditions in prisons.
Add privatization of prisons to the mix and the situation gets so much worse due to wrong incentives and corruption.
"Sweden rape: Most convicted attackers foreign-born, says TV" ... " he SVT programme revealed that in cases where the victim did not know the attacker, the proportion of foreign-born offenders was more than 80%. " https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45269764
you get the picture...
I hope this is not too sensitive to post here on HN, as I know these facts goes against many of the beliefs many of you hold. But why be afraid of facts? They may tell you something you didn't knew before.
Do you really think that urban hipsters from Stockholm are culturally similar to rural Swedes? This sounds more like a dog whistle for "non-white". In any case it is a deeply racist view.
As much as I disagree with mass incarceration, I don't like these "it costs $nK to house a prisoner", since usually it's not quite true - costs are amortised over many thousands of prisoners and the state wouldn't actually regain $75k by releasing one prisoner.
That being said, I am sure they would regain enough money to seriously help that person, which is more likely what they need than to be locked in a cage to get some kind if societal retribution.
I'm not sure about how the contracts are but some contracts (I've heard of UK ones) it's a cost per prisoner. So if the prison holds 300 prisoners the company is owed money for 300 prisoners. I've heard of some that are run a prison for a certain amount of time for x amount of money.
So depending on what the contract is for a private prison, it could actually be a case of it costs x for a prisoner.
> I don't like these "it costs $nK to house a prisoner", since usually it's not quite true - costs are amortised over many thousands of prisoners and the state wouldn't actually regain $75k by releasing one prisoner.
given the structure of the costs https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost there is not much amortization going on, at least not at the scale "over many thousands", more like "over tens and hundreds".
It's not cost but profit. The prison business is a huge business in the US and there are lots of people profiting from it. Some prison companies are on the New York stock exchange even. We are talking billion $ companies backed by institutional investors.
It's a great business because your primary customers are clueless politicians trying to look tough on crime paying whatever they are being told to pay.
Prisoners are also laborers, slave laborers that is because they don't actually earn a lot. Somebody profits from that as well. The reason so many people are in prisons in the US is that it is good business for a lot of people.
So, to spell this out, US prisons are funneling tax money straight to institutional investors. Cost has nothing to do with it. Meanwhile they are cutting corners left right and center on cost and exploiting the prison population via lucrative corporate contracts.
>More than 800,000 prisoners are daily put to work, in some states compulsorily, in roles such as cleaning, cooking and lawn mowing.
>The remuneration can be as woeful in states such as Louisiana as 4 cents an hour.
>The idea that such lowly-paid work in a $2bn industry is equivalent to slavery is leant weight by the 13th amendment of the US constitution. It banned slavery and involuntary servitude, with one vital exception: “as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”.
>Prisoners, in other words, have no constitutional rights and can be blatantly exploited.
It costs $1240 per year in Ukraine. Why not make a deal with Ukraine and house them there? (Assuming we at the same time stop jailing people for drug related crimes which should require medical rehab instead)
"Due to lack of space, more than 1,000 inmates in Norway are waiting to be placed in prisons, where they are often assigned to individual cells. To solve the problem, Norway has leased Norgerhaven prison from the Netherlands."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/norwegian-inma...
The California problems really are:
1. Volume - too many people doing time for non-violent crimes
2. Healthcare costs for prisoners and employees (also seems like a root cause of every major problem in the US)
3. General inefficiency / Unions etc.
Honestly I think the rational approach for the US would be to forget every single issue and focus entirely the healthcare costs. Nuke the problem with either complete government control of the prices in the system or liberalizing supply side thru abolishing of licensing requirements / AMA / FDA / CLIA / etc.
That motivates people to commit one and only one crime. Books get popular describing how to choose the best crime to commit, to maximize the expected value of the crime _plus_ the subsequent dividends.
No, it's only going to happen for all the people who would become criminals. Would you become a criminal if I paid you $75k for life afterwards, assuming the court found you were in poverty and needed the money (probably most criminals). I for one know I absolutely would not commit crimes no matter how much money you paid me.
I’m struggling to see how your argument isn’t that people are born criminals.
If you pay people to commit crime, you get more crime. That’s irrespective of any bizarre immunity you personally think you have to the incentives.
Imagine being poor and having a child. You are such a law-abiding fellow that you are going to watch your child struggle every day and maybe go hungry some nights when you could do one simple crime to end that struggle forever and whose only negative consequence is having a black mark on an abstract “criminal record”? And you’re going to do this despite massive pressure from family, culture, any woman in your life, and the normalization of such actions?
I think I could make a strong argument that in the case being discussed not committing a crime is at best foolish and at worst deeply immoral.
It’s never been tried paying people to not commit crime has it so both of our theories need some testing to proves who is correct. I personally think it would be very effective; it’s not as if there would be no consequences for repeat offenders or people who took the money and carried on breaking the law. I don’t think you’re thinking clearly about what I’m suggesting at all.
One thing we 100% do know is that jail is not working to stop reoffending in the vast majority of cases, and as the article suggests this is at great expense to the tax payer.
> It’s never been tried paying people to not commit crime...
Your suggestion was to pay convicted criminals not to repeat offend. That is not quite the same thing.
> ... it’s not as if there would be no consequences for repeat offenders or people who took the money and carried on breaking the law.
There would be only positive consequences for first time offenders so people who might not otherwise commit a crime would be highly incentivized to do so.
You're assuming the worst in people; let's give a counter example - in Portugal where they have decriminalised drugs, according to your theory not punishing people leads to worse outcomes, but decriminalisation reduced the country's drug problems.
Just because you believe one way of thinking about things does not mean that it will automatically be true. These things need to be tested to see if they help and I'm happy to be wrong.
No. I'm using a pretty basic economic principle to show why your idea is a terrible one. People respond to incentives. If you incentivize crime, you get crime.
> let's give a counter example - in Portugal where they have decriminalised drugs
Terrible example. Get back to me when Portugal pays people the first time they do drugs.
> These things need to be tested to see if they help
No, they don't. You are under the illusion that all hypotheses are equal. There is absolutely nothing controversial about the idea that incentivizing behaviors leads to more of those behaviors.
The irony is your argument doesn't work without this principle. You are arguing that by incentivizing going on the straight-and-narrow, there will be a reduction in recidivism. I agree! That would work!
The flipside is that you're also incentivizing people to commit their first crime. You say that's not true. This leads to a contradiction in your argument. Therefore your argument is invalid. QED.
> ...and I'm happy to be wrong.
You're not happy, though. You keep coming back to this ridiculous idea, even though it is obviously wrong on its face.
Not sure whether to take that suggestion seriously, but it seems like it would amount to an agreement to behave a certain way in exchange for compensation.
But the reason most of these people are in prison in the first place is they don't have a good track record of controlling their behavior. So this idea seems predicated on their doing something that we already have good reason to believe they won't.
I'm not suggesting people always get the money, I'm suggesting that where the cause seems to be poverty and bad background it should be tried to see if it works out cheaper. Murder and rape should probably have a penalty based approach, yes.
Can we skip the "crime" part here? Perhaps just give money to people in poverty? Wouldn't it be better to prevent them from committing a crime to begin with?
I feel like there's a drama novel just waiting to be written there. Even if you don't mean to give every American citizen $75k in a lump sum, that kind of cash infusion would make so many things go bonkers. I'd kind of like to read that novel now.
One may interpret this as one nations view that punishing those who fail is more important than helping them not to fail, since as if they deserve to fail if they can't make it on their own.
While this view may or may not be justified, I believe it is to the detriment of all.
Prison is a huge problem. I'm not a criminologist or a psychologist, but there is a lot of truth to the fact that most people think and behave like the people that surround them. Our solution to crime is to surround you with exclusively convicted criminals for a few years.
Worse, going to prison or even jail just wrecks your life. You lose your job, most likely your house, your family suffers hugely, and you have a black mark if you do try to get any legitimate job in the future. It requires a lot of resilience and ability to delay gratification to bounce back from that. Of course the lack of those characteristics is probably a big part of what landed the person in prison in the first place.
Prison seems pretty bad. On the other hand, there has to be some sort of deterrent to committing crime, and for the worst cases, the public simply needs to be protected from some people. You see the lack of this in SF now. The police don't act in cases of smaller misdemeanors like shoplifting or car breakins, and so they're rampant.
For people that have poor future orientation, prison isn't that great of a deterrent. If you're going to use punishment as a deterrent, it works much better if it's consistent and quickly follows the behavior to be extinguished. Being arrested and sentenced only with some probability, and perhaps days or months later just doesn't work all that well. If we take, for example, shoplifting, if potential shoplifters knew that the second they walked out the door of the store, with 100% probability, that they were going to get punched in the face and the stuff taken away from them, no one would ever do it.
I think we need to come up with punishments that are less severe, more immediate, and more certain.
Like what exactly? You accurately describe the cause-and-effect of not prosecuting petty crime whatsoever and that prison is not a sufficient deterrent, so what would be “less severe, more immediate, and more ‘certain’” that would impel a miscreant to not commit a crime? Please provide a specific example.
I don't know. That's why I say we need to come up with them. It's not easy to reconcile our values with the obvious ones. It's not easy to reconcile our values with the current criminal justice/prison system either though. My point is simply abolishing or greatly scaling back the current criminal justice/prison system without a replacement doesn't address the needs of society that the current system (poorly) serves. Without some mechanism to dissuade antisocial behavior, you get anarchy for a brief period, and then people start organizing vigilante groups, and then the vigilante group becomes the government.
I know a few people who work in prison education programs and the prisons themselves are the biggest barrier to education. There are so many restrictions on the activities and resources available to prisoners that it's difficult conduct any educational activity.
Why not house these criminals in a cheaper cost of living area? Lower cost, provide jobs & services to other states, win-win?
I get the visiting hours being harder on families. But look at mississipi which costs 49.79/day or 18k/year [1]. With a 57k/year savings you could buy air travel for up to 50 visits per year.
But in a weird sort of way, it's cheaper for the inmates who, upon possible release some day, will be at the very bottom of a very, very steep housing pyramid.
Cost is not always the first/most important consideration for incarceration. Britain shipped convicts to the other side of the world (Australia) at one time.
Are travel costs more expensive and/or imprisonment costs cheaper back then? I'd think that a one time boat ride was cheaper than holding someone for a decade or more.
Why can't you just _force_ them to work and pay for their own meals in the prison? I'm not saying to make profit out of them, but at least they should work to survive, like the rest of us.
They committed a crime, and then losing their freedom(got locked up), but that does not mean the rest law-abiding citizens shall provide all free lodging for them! This is ridiculous.
So often the human rights group care more about criminals' rights while ignoring the ordinary Joe that is working hard to make ends meet by following all the rules.
[..]The higher costs are driven by escalating pay and benefit packages negotiated by unions that represent prison guards and other staff. It's an example of how powerful public-sector unions keep the state from getting spending under control, even when the need for such spending plummets.
That example comes from a new report by the Vera Institute for Justice. "Despite a decline in both its prison population and the number of prison staff, California's prison spending rose $560 million between 2010 and 2015, primarily because salary, pension and other employee and retiree benefits continued to increase, also a result of union-negotiated increases," explained the New York-based think tank that promotes criminal-justice reform.[..]
[..]California is unusual from a national perspective, per the report. Thirteen states have reduced prison populations since 2010, but they've also cut their prison spending by $1.6 billion. Seven states have increased their populations, but have managed to decrease their prison spending, (by $254 million). Fifteen states have increased their prison populations and also increased their total prison spending by a half-billion dollars.
California is in an ignominious group of 10 states that saw declines in the prison population since 2010, but which increased spending by $1.1 billion. Furthermore, California's spending increase accounts for more than half of that number. California has by far the costliest system of incarceration in the nation at more than $75,000 per inmate per year—more than triple the average cost of the 18 states with the least-costly rates.[..]
[..]The study focuses on the 2010 to 2015 period, and some major prison-related laws—e.g., 2014's Proposition 47, which reduced many felonies to misdemeanors and resulted in further reductions of prison populations—got started toward the end of the study period. Yet, if anything, these disturbing spending trends only accelerated in the ensuing years.
"Gov. Jerry Brown's spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates," wrote Don Thompson for The Associated Press. "Since 2015, California's per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13 percent." That's a whopping increase in a short period of time, and even more amazing given that state just raised gas taxes because it claims to be out of cash.[..]
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Until fairly recently, prison wasn't really the way most punishments worked. They did hangings, beatings, shaming, banishment...
Imprisoning people long term is expensive, and kings probably couldn't have afforded anything like a modern scale prison system. The closest thing was more slavery than imprisonment, and economically self-sufficient or better. Anything from the indentured servant transports to the Americas to "hard labour" in a gravel mine or somesuch. Cannon fodder, sometimes.
The way we got to here was largely moral reasoning. Those punishments are cruel and inhumane. Early versions of modern prison systems were often created with the idea they'd rehabilitate (reform) people.
I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.
We're stuck with different ideas of what prisons are even for? Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence?
Surely, with that sort of budget (not including courts/lawyers), we can do something more useful.
Prison startup?