I kind of understand it. From my experiences growing up around relatively hard stuff (first saw guns for sale in a backpack in 9th grade science class. This was my closest friend at the time, and didn't seem weird to me at all.)

Some of the people we knew, friends of friends, were cooking hard drugs, in their mid 30s etc. One of them, or many, "dating" my friends middle school sister.

It didn't take much to get a gun in your face just to emphasize the results of a debate. With this setting in mind my claim is that there are persons who are operating at their neutral/healthy. Not matter how many years of good behavior or words or programming or songs .. nothing per my experience removes the low bar option for gun in face.

So it's difficult for me. I know people turn things around. I have. I suppose it looks like a sort of spectrum with different gravities to good/bad behavior depending on so many factors.

I think this is what a lot of overly optimistic "rehabilitation" advocates miss. They seem to believe that if you provide just enough nurturing, opportunity, and understanding that people who act outside society's acceptable boundaries will be drawn back within them. They fail to recognize that you're not returning these people to something they deviated from, you have to create an entirely new worldview for them that they never had any experience with.

That's true for some of them. There's also a very large number of people in prison who are legitimately good people, but made a mistake at some point or got pushed into a situation where they didn't have many good options. There are plenty of people who have no desire to commit any crime and won't once they're let out. A big problem is that prison is a black hole that's hard to return from, part of which is due to society's perception of everyone who gets locked up and the mental wasting away and lack of development once you're in there.

On the other hand, if you make reintegration to society impossible, and eventually release prisoners... you know the outcome you're going to get.

Plenty of societies appear to do much better than the US at preventing recidivism and reforming criminals to productive members of society.

I remember a common saying that's bandied about Hacker News: a 10x quantitative difference is a qualitative difference.

Well, America's violent crime rate is 10 times higher than Europe's violent crime rate, so make of that what you will.

Parse attempt: there are too significant systemic, social differences to meaningfully compare process&results between countries.

Half the point is that systemic differences contribute to different outcomes, so lets change the system. What a sad rejoinder to argue that the system is a force of nature.

Some bits of the system we can change with effort. Urban poverty, etc, can improve. We can have a better criminal justice system.

Some are cultural bits in subpopulations that are resistant to change; we can work on it, but it's not clear how much of an effect any intervention will have.

There's some other structural ones that will be extremely difficult to change-- we have the some of the most dangerous places in the world next-door in Latin America.

There's a lot more evidence for rehabilitation than there is for mass incarceration with brutal staff.

There are of course some people who are so dangerous, so relentlessly violent, that they can never be released from prison. Does that mean we should be brutal to those people for all the years they're in prison? Why? What's that going to achieve? It doesn't stop them being violent, and it may well escalate their dangerous harmful behaviour in prison.

It seems likely enough that they believe that nurturing, opportunity and understanding are going to contribute to building a new worldview.

I mean, you aren't going to build trust by treating people poorly.

Not to be even more pessimistic but you will find this happen everywhere you give humans authority over each other without full oversight.

I have a friend who worked in a prison as a psychologist, somewhere with a generally liberal attitude toward prison, and guards would deny inmates medication, therapy, or (bizarrely) suggest that a diagnosis was incorrect (and often deny the first or second based on their own "diagnosis").

In my experience, some people are just born this way. Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. More oversight is needed. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc. (weirdly, you find this behaviour everywhere, even in high-skill professions).

> Stupid to the core, and cannot handle being in authority without doing weird stuff. This isn't just prisons: healthcare, police, law, etc.

And politics, most of all. Explains so much.

Where I am, there is a largely effective level of oversight within politics i.e. all lobbying/gifts disclosed, decent media coverage, public funding of political parties, etc. But yes, definitely an area where stuff can go very wrong.

Obviously, the corporate world is another important omission...most places in the world have good laws around protecting shareholders but do the boards of public companies really put the hammer down...almost never. Probably lots of other areas I missed.

Large corporations are ruled by internal politics anyway, not market mechanisms. It's a wonder that they manage to work as well as they do, despite that inherent source of dysfunction.

You could imagine circumstances where the officers outlook was justified or not justified. I think judging them based on only this off hand remark about someone's perception of them is not merited.

For example, suppose you knew that one inmate had repeatedly beaten his wife and child. While in prison he abused and threatened inmates and guards. You suspected he perpetrated the violent rape of multiple other inmates but can't prove it because the victims refuse to testify. You think he's in the class because he's bored.

In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?

The point is, the officers did not deserve to make such claims.

Not under the veil of ambiguity, nor pessimism.

Your strawman is a fallacy. Suppose an inmate had committed a logical fallacy. Should they thence be barred from reason (reasoning?)?

English isn't my first language, sorry.

PS: You might say the hypothetically notional inmate deserved the offer, but wasn't eligable to go, though one had to wonder why. You might also say it was morally imperative for the officer to bring up charges, if they were sufficiently convinced, to instate conditions that would isolate the culprit from maths education, social interactions in general, and probably any hope of correction.

I don't understand your comment. My point is, because you don't know the officers, inmates, or the broader situation, you shouldn't comment as to whether the officers are right or wrong - because you don't know.

There are possible worlds where the officers are justified or misunderstood and there are possible worlds where the officers hold incorrect beliefs. What evidence lets you know which possible world is more likely?

Being prejudiced against the officers strikes me as similar to the imagined (and possibly real) situation where the officers are prejudiced against the inmates. We, as readers, just don't know.

Your comment pretty much ignores the context of the statement about the correctional officers.

You are basically saying "we can't tell a thing about the officers, but we know the author is a jerk for castigating them".

Never mind that the author has all the things you want, the broader knowledge of the situation and so on.

>In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?

Frankly, yes, IMO. It isn't their job, and it generally really doesn't accomplish anything to induce avoidable suffering in another entity. You're painting a picture of a person unwilling to change. That's fine, there are plenty such people. But what does it accomplish to deny them some trivial pleasure when they have already been denied the great majority of their freedoms? To do so seems pretty childish to me.

read "deserve" in any sense that is active in more than the grammatic sense. Maybe they thought the inmates didn't want to, or weren't able to learn. More likely, we think the wardens thought the inmates were criminals.

I'm not sure I deserve to know the difference.

Yeah, well you're also not the one keeping people locked up in cages.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯