There are many reform advocates that suggest things should shift more towards those latter two, but the current state is that the main point is to do something bad to someone who did something bad.
In a way I kind of agree. Because while yes the victims shouldn't have a say in what sentence or punishment a perpetrator gets, taking it to the extreme and just completely disregarding the other party's grievances is probably dangerous and undermines the justice system. If you get a lot of people feeling that there is no justice to be had from the system, you end up with a super dangerous situation & I know how deeply that feeling can erode the social fabric since it happened in my home country.
The idea that all prisoners can be compared to murderers is a major reinforcing myth that perpetuates the system of abuse and allows people to tell themselves it's okay. It's not okay.
The world looks at us in horror, rightly.
The duty of the state shouldn't be to exact revenge (which by the way, studies show, after a threshold incremental punishment does nothing) but rather to give folks the tools to escape their environments. That means showing them how to live in the real world.
At the end of the day the state should measure the efficacy of a prison system against recidivism and total population crime rate. The individual cases shouldn't really factor in.
> That violent people should be removed from society to prevent them from injuring other people?
No, I made it clear that I believe the efficacy of a prison system should be measured by total population crime rate and recidivism rates. The US prison system fails to achieve the goal you're implying it does. It has a very high recidivism and reconviction rate. In a sense, my point is more that "we've tried it your way and it's not working."
The goal should be to, as you say, "stop people from injuring other people" in the future. You can't un-injure someone in the past, and the constitution provides for proportional punishments in the 8th amendment if I'm not mistaken, so people will end up out of prison at some point. The question on my mind is how to make sure that when they do, they don't injure more people.
Recidivism rates are available for your review: [1]. My point is rather that the plan you're advocating for isn't achieving the result that you're telling me it is.
> Being in a constant state of understanding is not how you govern a country if you want it to be peaceful and cleaned up.
Being data-driven is how you achieve goals, and the data says this is the wrong approach.
That's not correct, and tells something about your preconception. I was told by someone who had been to prison that those doing time for murder or manslaughter are considered less dangerous, they killed their target and that was that. The ones in there for GBH, those are the ones you have to look out for, they have low impulse control and low intelligence and are basically incorrigible.
From a policy POV, the comment is entirely serious and rational, appropriate.
You’re stating a moral axiom, one that is widely and increasingly rejected in civilised countries.
Assuming you mean “capital punishment for intentional murderers” then how do you defend this? A murderer kills to satisfy some need, you appear to wish to death on someone to satisfy some need of your own ie “justice”, even presumably when you aren’t personally victimised by their crime.
It seems capital punishment creates at least two evils - an unnecessary taking of human life, and the encouragement of sadistic ideation in the general population.
Taking a life can be a necessary evil. In "civilized countries" as how you put it, the next of kin has the choice on whether to forgive the killer or take blood money, or have him executed by the court. This is for one on one incidents. For other cases, such as serial rapists or serial killers, the decision is 100% in the hands of the court, as it is way bigger than a single interaction.
Regarding civilised or not, perhaps this might be of interest:
https://goodessaysblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/capital-puni...
> but that isn’t the case in capital punishment as someone in custody is no longer a mortal threat to society.
It's not just about being a threat, it's about justice.
Laws from what I’ve seen are to codify expected behavior so it isn’t arbitrary. The tone and nature of them is up to the legislator.
One chapter covers the basic forces regulating behavior:
Physics - The world and our understanding of it place bounds on what can and cannot be done.
Money and Markets - The cost of things place bounds on what can and cannot be done.
Both of these prevent behavior, as in taking behavior off the table no matter how compelling it may otherwise be.
The other two, norms and laws lack this property, instead act post fact.
Laws - Describe acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and carry consequences, remedies for unacceptable behavior.
Physics takes driving above some speeds impossible. Speed bumps, etc...
Speed limits do not actually prevent anything, only impose costs, by way of example.
Norms - Work like laws, only are largely enforced socially.
There is a lot more in the book.
My point here is leaning on law to manage behavior is not particularly effective. Getting more of the better behavior more of the time is systemic. Requires action on all fronts.
You seem to be referring to ideal or better/more effective. I was referring to what is.
There is of course a gap there, and any changes to move ‘is’ to ‘better’ or ‘ideal’ requires a lot of buy in and messy negotiation from people who aren’t likely hanging out on Hackernews debating the topic.
Law does not operate in a vacuum.
And, I am saying it is more effective to give all the forces regulating behavior consideration.
Which is not to say that we do in fact write laws that codify those ideals, hence the words "supposed to" in my prior comment.
I can probably dig up a citation tomorrow when I hope have a little more free time, but not making any promises either, sorry
Additionally, the only places I see explicitly saying laws are coming from a place of moral authority are places with Sharia law (literally - sharia means ‘the clear well trodden path to water’ and it’s the codifying of traditions the population considers to work). Pretty much every law in the US that uses morals as it’s justification has been thrown out by the US Supreme Court.
If ‘we all’ are not actually in agreement (always the case) on what is morally right, then what happens?
Is executing a slightly underdeveloped person (80 iq) for murdering several people morally right? Is NOT executing that person morally right?
You could poll the population and get a large chunk of people agreeing with both of those stances very strongly.
Is asset forfeiture morally ok? What if the person is a certain color and speaks with the accent of a certain country to the south of the US?
You can get a large portion of the population to disagree with the first one, and strongly agree with the second.
A law is codifying a stance (writing it down in as unambiguous a way as possible) that can be passed by representatives without them all getting fired/hanged by angry constituents and enforced willingly by a large law enforcement group without getting overridden by a higher power.
Part of the whole not getting fired/hanged part is making sure it can’t be enforced arbitrarily against people their constituents wouldn’t like it being enforced against, and can be against people they do.
It’s a messy business with huge implications for everyone.
Escalation of what may be moderate violence to make the time worth it.
Disregard for the law due to perception of poor justice.
Failure to recognize all forces regulating behavior to focus on harsh law alone tends to amplify undesirable behavior.
There are more.
Is it true that people who are convicted of violent crimes more than once usually proceed to have very high recidivism rates until they get in for good ? And that those repeat offenders make up for a very disproportionately huge part of the total violent crimes? That's maybe due to how the prison system perpetuates the cycle and need for violence especially for gang members, but idk if that explains why other violent criminals such as rapists and domestic abusers also (supposedly) reoffend more and non violent criminals in the same prisons less.
Again, I'm probably wrong but the claim was that if we isolated those repeat violent offenders from society we'd basically not only see a massive drop in violent crimes but also almost certainly prevent crimes that they are almost guaranteed to commit due to their recidivism rates. Obviously that ignores the moral argument for aiming to rehabilitate and reintegrate (which are both goals that I fundamentally support, except in rare cases ) but It would confirm a personal biais because I also tend to think based on personal experiences that some people are just violent and have a lot more violent impulses/snaps than normal people do.
This could be warranted for light non-violent crime. Or murders who had a very very good case (like they were brutally bullied or threatened and there is clear proof). Then I believe in rehabilitation. So I guess it really depends on the case. Most probably wont pass that test though.
El Chapo is 64. I suspect much of the leadership of the mafia is aged. Or did you only mean front-line infantry when you said "gang bangers."
It's not portrayed as an unusual thing that the entire system seems to purely be designed for retribution and all the characters act as though that be obvious.
https://ipa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IPA-Report-Aus...
See page 5.
The US incarceration rate, though, is just nuts.
Interestingly, Norway which is famous for its rehabilitation focused prison system is cheaper than the one in Sweden, with around half the cost.
The goal of a functioning prison system is to manage itself out of existence.
Efficiencies of scale are profits, not cost savings
Private prisons in the US negotiate agreements with the states with minimum occupancy clauses. [1]
Speaking of an amoral dereliction of duty of care.
[1] http://www.aublr.org/2017/11/private-prison-contracts-minimu...
I think on a superficial level the whole system is not setup to deliver quality outcomes for anyone.
Now, do we need to rework how our prison and penal system work overall? For sure! Once you have a felony on your record, you are a pariah within society and it makes it much harder to start over. As well, how we deal with mental health issues still seems less-than-ideal.
But we still have yet to figure out how to differentiate between someone that tries to do better after 1 bad decision/mistake or someone that keeps being a drain on society (due to continued criminal activity). We tried the 3-strike model, that that doesn't seem to have worked out great. I honestly don't know of good approaches here.
Yeah there aren't many people like that and the people who are like that don't belong in a prison.
Anyways, one of the best ways to make someone "a continued drain on society due to continued criminal activity" is to put them in prison, give them a career-killing record that will follow them forever, and put them in contact with other criminals on a daily basis.
Prison is a self-reinforcing system that is itself the drain on society.
So where do they belong? If you say "mental hospital", what's to stop them from simply leaving? If the answer is anything other than "nothing" how is said mental hospital any different from a prison?
I guess the question is, if not prison, what do you do with the people that prove time and again to be incompatible with society?
Prisons are not places of rehabilitation in the US, and a person who is suffering from a severe mental illness is likely to suffer profound abuse in prison.
Anywhere you hold someone against their will eventually becomes fraught, no matter what the stated purpose of the facility is.
At any rate, it's not necessary to pick a specific answer from the massive pile of alternative approaches tried, theorized, and developed in modern history to say that this one thing that is done in the US right now is clearly not the right answer.
I read that some nordic countries have programs that are more focused on rehabilitation that seem to work relatively well for those who want to atone for their mistakes and be better. In terms of implementations, I believe solutions exist.
The problem IMHO is that there's a deep culture of polarization and punitiveness in the US. Consider for example someone who gets arrested for drug possession. In many parts of the country, it's not at all uncommon for people to think that junkies should rot in jail. Treating it as a public health issue doesn't even cross their minds. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that many people subconsciously think that once a person enters the prison system, they can be discriminated forever as if they were sub-human.
But if as a society, there's never a notion of change/forgiveness, how is one expected to leave the vicious cycle?
When it comes to child development, it's fairly well documented that chronically punitive interventions don't work. This same line of research needs to be more broadly publicized for adults as well. I don't believe there can be change in the penal system unless society can first get over the hollywood idea of "bad guy in jail == happy ending" and realize that in real life, things keep rolling after the movie credits.
> But if as a society, there's never a notion of change/forgiveness, how is one expected to leave the vicious cycle?
People still believe that certain things are irredeemable. As long as one person is allowed to sit around and tout that for one thing, then another person will do it for another thing, so on and so forth. Morals are hazy like that.
What you're asking for is a fundamental societal shift where pretty much everyone drops their baggage at the door. I'm hopeful, but I don't see that coming true.
How would it have worked? Prison isn't about reform in this country, it's about punishment. And there's basically no support once you're out, which just leads to criminals going back to what they were doing before going in because they don't have any other options.
For starters, how about a government infrastructure program that offers former convicts a reliable source of income? Society benefits from both their labor and in theory the fact they aren't committing crimes to feed themselves.
It’s even worse than that. If you weren’t a hardened criminal when you go in, chances are, you will have all the skills to be one when you get out. It’s like vocational training for your only option of criminality when you get out.
Someone who goes to prison for cheating on their taxes or having a baggie of coke comes out with the same scarlet letter of unemployability as someone who goes in for murder.
Prison is literally a factory that creates future crime.
There are some people who are born without empathy or morals, and they will do cruel and evil things just for kicks. I do think that prisons will exist in some capacity basically forever, but I would apply my philosophy as a software engineer to this problem as well:
- Look at other places that have a successful implementation, study how they do it.
- Copy it and adapt it to my use case.
There are prison systems that are more cruel, but there are also prison systems that are LESS cruel and get better results. Either way, we have some holes we need to plug in our own system which seems to be optimized to make the right people money while being as cruel as possible.
However, most prisoners are not psychopaths and our money would be better spent setting up programs to help people escape poverty and have a decent quality of life to make criminal behavior less attractive. A lot of criminal activity emerges as a by-product of poverty. Illegal drugs and all of the crime that goes along with that [0] would be remediated if people were not so desperate to escape poverty. Additionally crimes associated with vagrancy [1] would be remediated.
0: ( Such as territory conflicts leading to violence, selling the illegal drugs on the street, etc. )
1: ( bike theft, sleeping in illegal places, trespassing, drug possession )
This is definitely true. Prison is sometimes justified as "punishment" and sometimes justified as "protection"of the vulnerable. Both approaches have merit and society generally uses both.
However, if you look at the system as a whole, terrible prison conditions are an obstacle to protecting society. As we have seen fit to imprison some people for less than the entire term of their natural life, you will notice that this means we release people. When people who have been abused by a needlessly cruel prison system are released, it is harder for them to re-integrate into society, and much more likely that they will re-offend, perhaps with the assistance of people who they met in prison (often their only resource upon release.)
Unless you are prepared to argue here that substantially all sentences ought to be life sentences (or death sentences) it is thus critical for the project of protecting society that prison is not cruelly abusive. Rest assured that it is still punishment to be locked in a small room! It is altogether unnecessary and counterproductive for you to rot in the small room, to ruin your health with the food, to lose your teeth for lack of basic dental care, to be abused by guards for fun, to be abused by other inmates, or to be raped, but all of this is common. It is especially counterproductive for prisoners to be denied access to means of self-betterment such as reading material, or to have their reading material replaced with rent-a-book tablets charging exorbitant prices, but this too is a trend in some states.
And this is, of course, just a start; there are of course many other inhumane things in US prisons that harm society as a whole, so much so that it is hard to enumerate a meaningful inventory — perhaps you could start with the article linked?
Nor is it in the service of society that prison guards should put a man in a shower and turn on scalding hot water and leave it on until he dies, but it happened to Darren Rainey. Nor is it in the service of protecting society that prison cards should leave a man in a cell, naked, with the floor covered in sewage, but it happened to Trent Taylor, and the guards were afforded qualified immunity.
And most people who are not literally Nazis and have a shred of moral fiber would not say that involuntarily sterilizing women in prison, and lying to them about it and saying they have cancer, is something that protects society, but it was happening in California AS RECENTLY AS 2014 — yes, the year of our lord two thousand and fourteen, that is not a typo. And the next time you start hearing about "private prisons" remember that this was in a state run facility. (Documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoD7VgFl9EI )
Society has to address the topic somehow. For me, it’s not about saving money but there’s also obviously some limit to how much resources society will devote to the topic if an equally effective but much cheaper method is available.
“We’re going to raise your taxes so we can treat prisoners better!” has not been tried as a campaign slogan to my knowledge, but it would poll pretty poorly I’d think.
So I argue that it is a cost benefit analysis, you just have to look in the long term.
To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time taking anyone serious that still uses a euphemism for this.
And the mostly white communities that get to boost their representative power by counting prisoners in their census, while stripping them of their right to vote.
Or is your explanation for that „that males commit more crimes“?
You might want to be careful applying this logic to the black incarceration rates, then.
I can't tell if you're arguing in bad faith or if you think you're actually being profound here with these socratic challenges.
Men commit and are caught, charged, and imprisoned for many more crimes than women are.
Black men probably commit somewhat more crimes than white men— a fact which can largely be understood in context by examining structural inequalities like not having access to the same schools, community supports, family stability, plus adding in layers of racism and generational trauma, etc etc. But their representation in the corrections system is significantly out of proportion even to this ratio due to factors like racist policing and courts, and compounded by things like the bail system, which pressures the innocent to plead guilty.
These two situations are not really comparable.
Most white people don't get charged when they are caught commiting a crime, and the ones that do get light sentences that can keep them out of the correctional system
* Why is family stability a structural inequality? Families are a unit that largely makes up it's own structure, independent from society.
* What does generational trauma mean? Is this an epigenetic thing?
* "their representation in the corrections system is... compounded by things like the bail system, which pressures the innocent to plead guilty." - Why would black men be more affected by the the pressure to plead guilty when innocent than other races?
Bail system pressure disproportionately affects people without access to financial resources (and through them legal resources), which are not equally distributed.
Perhaps "structural" is sloppy here, but it is a way that past traumas echo forward across multiple generations. Like, look at the numbers— 64% of black kids in a single parent home in 2019 vs 24% for white kids:
https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...
Obviously many single-parent families are wonderful and may well be better than an abusive two-parent family, but at a population level, these are kids who are going to grow up to themselves have higher divorce rates and their own kids repeating the pattern.
Regarding the bail system and race, see: "The cash bail system disproportionately impacts people of color, fueling a pervasive problem of structural racism in our criminal justice system. The pretrial population is disproportionally Black and Hispanic and has more than doubled over the past 15 years.1 Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be stopped by the police and experience police violence at the time of arrest; they also are more likely to be poor and unable to raise bail funds. The cash bail system also compounds underlying health disparities in access to care that has led to worse outcomes for Blacks and Hispanics compared to white Americans."
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2020/how-cash-bail-sys...
While it can be epigenetic (e.g. descendents of Holocaust survivors having measurably different gene activations and responses to stress), typically it isn't referred to that way. Instead, it refers to social trauma that may be present, and social knowledge that may not be.
For the former, consider a family whose grandfather was unfairly beaten by the police. Furthermore, all of their friends and neighbors have similarly unpleasant stories about their grandparents. Even if the police had behaved absolutely saintly since then, those stories would influence whether somebody reports a theft to the police. Those stories would influence how uncomfortable somebody is when talking to the police, and whether they are viewed with suspicion as a result. And that is the best case scenario, when in reality the police have been far from saintly.
For the latter, consider a family in which not a single person has had college education in the past several generations. A high schooler looks in that family is looking at colleges, seeing how the subjects covered in college match their interests and would lead to a good long-term career. But, they also see the yearly price advertised by colleges, and decide not to go. Because nobody in their family has gone to college, they are unaware that the advertised prices are rarely ever the full price paid, that there are fellowships and scholarships set up for these cases. (Not as good of an example as this would have been 10-20 years ago due to continued increase in education costs, but the point still stands.)
In both cases, even if the original sources of inequality had been completely wiped away (which they haven't), the generational trauma is still there, by no fault of the individuals or the group.
Edit:spelling
Prisons are, however, disproportionately located in majority-white areas. Prison gerrymandering allows majority white communities to count Black prisoners from outside their community in their census while stripping them of their ability to vote. It gives the white community more power and resources, and takes not only from the prisoner their right to vote, but from the prisoner's community a census taker. The Census is literally how representatives in the House are allocated and per-capita funding is divided.
Those reasons seem a lot more convincing to me than a concerted effort to shave a few fractions of a percent off census data.
You have no idea the sheer magnitude of the problem we have here.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619...
2. https://apps.urban.org/features/long-prison-terms/demographi...
Also, pretty much all of the US is „majority female“, even if it‘s just by 1.6%.
- Males commit more crimes than females
- Males are more easily, and longer incarcerated than females on the same evidence.
- Blacks commit more crimes than whites
- Blacks are are more easily, and loner incarcerated than whites on the same evidence
“careful?”, I'll be frank that I smell the stench of U.S.A. culture war identity politics where facts that should obvious to everyone are not examined on their veracity, but on “What team might the messenger be playing for?”. — what is there to be “careful” about what seems to be the obvious?
So first, the 3/5 compromise:
When the constitution was being drafted, there was a disagreement between the free and slave states (actually, I'm not sure if there were any free states, or if at the time the North was just not reliant on slave labor and essentially winding it down).
The north wanted slaves to not count towards your state's population for the purposes of apportioning house representatives. Since slaves could not vote, they argued, they shouldn't count towards your representation in the federal government.
The south, on the other hand, wanted slaves to count towards the state's population for apportioning house representatives. Since slaves still required the same resources to survive as non-slaves, they argued, they should be counted.
This ultimately led to the "3/5 compromise": slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of apportioning house representatives.
Now, fast forward to the federal abolishment of slavery, the 13th amendment. It explicitly says "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." So it is very squarely placing prisoners in the same historical context as slaves, and they were thought of and reasoned about as such.
So in the end, it seems straightforward to me that the state of slavery and prisons in America deliberately reduces the representation of black people. This is by design. While it does effectively increase the representation of women, there's far less of an argument to be made that it's an intentional feature of the system.
NOTE: In checking these sources, I discovered that the 14th amendment (actually the 14th this time) says that voters who have become ineligible to vote shouldn't be counted towards your representation. Maybe it was superceded by a later amendment?
SECOND NOTE: Here's an NPR article mentioning the prisons-count-as-population-for-representation concept: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806...
The implication of your comment is that there is something inherent in males that makes them more likely to end up in prison. Are sure you want go down that road?
That‘s the point I‘m trying to make.
This is not simply a US thing, nor is it a racial thing. This discussion is far broader than that.
I know it's SOP to strip voting for felons. It's been enough of a challenge to restore voting rights in many areas, but there are other ways to address this problem and basically incentivize this.
https://www.congress.gov/amendment/116th-congress/house-amen...
We made sure black people were poor by enslaving them and then systematically discriminating.
We white people owe the descendants of slaves reparations. Inequality gets worse over generations, not better.
At some point people just have to fight for what's theirs in this world, not always gonna be someone to help us up.
Meanwhile basically all Black people in America were enslaved for the next 30 years, millions died under slavery and millions were suddenly freed and given nothing. "Separate but equal" wasn't even for another 30 years and segregation & Jim Crow were another 70 years after that!
By the time Black people were reasonably allowed to participate in US society, politics & business they had been forcibly held back in the only ways to get ahead (accumulating education, land and money) by hundreds of years.
The bombing of Black Wall Street (Greenwood-Tulsa) is the most infamous example: the only air bombings to be set upon the continental United States were a campaign of racial terror.
Numerous examples exist of freedman communities being completely eradicated using public works projects. Entire towns flooded when it came to decisions to create dams and neighborhoods bulldozed when the interstate expressways were run through cities.
https://twitter.com/ericabuddington/status/13752633634716549...
They weren't the only aerial bombings in the continental US.
> 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.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/
> For the purpose of this article the term "forced or compulsory labour" shall not include: (a) any work required to be done in the ordinary course of detention imposed according to the provisions of Article 5 of this Convention or during conditional release from such detention; (b) any service of a military character or, in case of conscientious objectors in countries where they are recognised, service exacted instead of compulsory military service; (c) any service exacted in case of an emergency or calamity threatening the life or well being of the community; (d) any work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations.
https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/5-prohibition-sl...
See earlier 1953 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) Article 4 at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Convention_for_the_P...
It's not exactly surprising to see an exemption carved out for it in European documents.
but where that goes wrong is when prisoners are working for private interests for slave wages (i.e., food and shelter) and the difference being pocketed by said private interest rather than going to pay for said incarceration.
now what we should be doing is removing any one not convicted of a violent crime from any prison. This means mostly drug offenses and this would mean we would have to stop putting people in jail for business activities.
see this is what I find interesting about HN. People will scream their lungs out that prisons are bad ignoring yet turn around and cheer on threads here wanting to put executives into them.
Sorry, make up your mind. Violent crimes deserve prison all others deserve probation and fines
It is a criminal waste of taxpayer capital, and it is a criminal waste of human life.
A complete fucking for everyone involved, other than the people at the capital getting kick-backs from industries profiting off of the prison industrial complex, and the owners of the prisons themselves.