It's interesting, I often wonder where people who share your mindset get their philosophies and worldview, as if the world were black and white, good and evil, fair and meritocratic. I thought we knew better than that now?

The reality is that other systems in the world have much, much lower recidivism rates (20% in Norway, where they actually treat people humanely [1] the trope goes). The incarceration rates in the US are off the charts [2] and the recidivism rates are too. So either the people born in the US are overwhelmingly more likely to "just be scum who belong in prison for some reason" or there's more at play here, institutionally speaking. And furthermore, what happened in 1980 [3] that made huge portions of the population (3X more) suddenly "become scum"?

You absolutely can change peoples behavior. People don't want to be bad people. Some don't know how, and the evidence shows if you show them a better way, they grow and respond. Giving people room to live up to your expectations works, whether in your day job in management or in prisoner rehabilitation. The data bears that out. Yeah, definitely not everyone, but it's fair to say that we can do better.

On a joking note, I do wish you luck in your testing career ;)

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is...

[2] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_r...

>So either the people born in the US are overwhelmingly more likely to "just be scum who belong in prison for some reason"

There's a lot of people who literally believe this, and most of their reasoning boils down to "Norway is all white". Have you ever heard "America is different, X can't work here because America is so diverse"?

Thing is, I totally randomly met a British criminologist while visiting Svalbard a few years ago and I spent a while talking to him. He generally agrees that homogeneity reduces problems in a society. If everyone's the same, everyone kind of gets along. There is merit to that argument for better or worse, although I believe we can also move past that in time.

Regarding incarceration rates specifically, the next 3 leading jailers behind the US (Russia, the Ukraine and Poland) are unbelievably homogeneous. I believe Poland is almost 97% white [1]. They're my people, so I think I can safely say, they consider a mild tan to represent diversity. There are homogenous countries that lock people up, and there are homogenous countries that don't. There are also diverse countries that lock people up, and diverse countries that don't.

I was trying to be very careful in not comparing Norway's incarceration rate (which is, itself, 1/10th of the US) but rather their substantially lower recidivism rate which I think one can more easily treat as an apples-to-apples comparison, meaning that there is room to improve on the process.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-10-16-051015...

Have you ever met these people? How do you know they can’t function in society?