But whenever I wait for the bus at 3rd and Pine (we did on Saturday), I don't see much hope like you do.
But is it a solution?
If Andre gets out of prison and goes back to stealing, then that process may well have wasted more money than many social programs for the exact same outcome. Imprisoning people is really expensive.
If Andre never gets out of prison at all, then we're committing to indefinitely spending a ton of money on him for the rest of his life, which also is not an amazing outcome. And that's only a theoretical possibility anyway, selling stolen goods (even habitually) is probably not going to get you a life-sentence in prison.
I think people have this perspective on incarceration that it's the final catch-all solution, and the reason we avoid it is purely compassion. And compassion is part of it, sure, but also if prison sentences don't reduce recidivism, then they're not a working solution. You should look at prison recidivism rates and apply the same level of skepticism and hold prison spending to the same standards that you apply to social programs and public housing. You should have the same expectations for both public housing and for what is essentially a much more expensive form of "coerced housing".
Asking how far we should go to reform someone before we give up and incarcerate is kind of begging the question -- it assumes that incarceration is always solution that just blanketly works and the only reason we avoid it is out of compassion and morality. In reality, incarceration is just another tool in the toolbox, and sometimes it might solve a problem, and sometimes it won't -- sometimes it's a complete waste of time and money.
What is the alternative? Just let them keep taking dumps on society until they finally go too far and bash someone's head in with a baseball bat (like that poor girl in Belltown a few months ago)? Incarceration shouldn't be the first answer, but it might very well be the tenth or eleventh...if only to actually protect everyone else.
If all your compassion does is allow for someone to destroy themselves (like decriminalize drugs and provide safe places for people to pursue their addictions), then is that the alternative?
Again, this assumes incarceration works, which you don't get to just assume.
If someone comes out of prison and then bashes someone's head in with a bat, then the incarceration didn't work. You're still looking at this from a perspective of, "we have an answer that will work, but we want to avoid it when possible." And that's not the reality, sometimes incarceration doesn't fix the problem.
> What is the alternative? [...] If all your compassion does is allow for someone to destroy themselves (like decriminalize drugs and provide safe places for people to pursue their addictions), then is that the alternative?
I think that part of looking for an alternative should be trying to find out if the alternative produces better results than what we're already doing. If prison doesn't produce lower recidivism rates than social programs, then yeah, obviously the social programs are the correct alternative even if some people take advantage of them -- because we're not looking at a scenario where either system (social programs or prison) has 100% effectiveness at preventing crime.
Let me flip your own question back: if all your cruelty does is drive people into harder crime and more desperate actions when they get out of prison, then is that the alternative? The alternative to social programs is something that is wildly expensive and that is often ineffective at reforming behavior?
You have to look this stuff more pragmatically and less emotionally. We can have a conversation about the ethics of prison, and that can be an important conversation, but it really has nothing to do with the separate question of whether or not prison is practical and cost effective at keeping down crime levels. Both ethics and practicality matter for policy, but they are not dependent variables with each other -- something feeling harsher or crueler to you does not magically mean it works better.
For petty crime like fencing stolen goods, they are looking at a few weeks in jail at most. Not going to change their outlook very much, but will probably discourage them from fencing goods out in the open (at least in Seattle). This focus on petty crime works well for Bellevue (but forces the problem on Seattle).
The current crackdown, the cops aren't arresting anyone for fencing goods even when it's obvious what they are doing. Instead they are just telling them to leave (this happened a few times while we were waiting for the bus at 3rd and Pine a couple of days ago)...not a solution, they will definitely be back.
And yes, if the problem can't be solved locally (too harsh, push the problem somewhere else; too soft, attract more of the problem), why should be in the latter category? Is Seattle just a convenient sacrifice?
Do you know beyond intuition what the stats are on that? If we take an average person and put them in prison for fencing goods, statistically what is the most likely outcome when they come out?
- What are the odds they stop doing this in the open?
- What are the odds they stop doing this entirely?
- What are the odds they move on to something worse? How much worse will it be and are there ways to mitigate that outcome?
- On average, what is the ratio of percent reduction in visible crime to the amount of money we would spend per-person? Are those numbers better/worse than other alternatives that we've looked at?
- Is this a constant across multiple types of crime? Do the numbers become different when we look at petty crime or violent crime?
Have you looked into that stuff, or are you just assuming on intuition that the numbers are good? We're all kind of talking past each other here; I suspect most people on HN know in theory why prisons should work, and I suspect most people know in theory why social programs should work. So explaining the theory is not particularly valuable at this point.
These numbers are really complicated, they're difficult to measure because of confounding variables and implementation details. There are ways of running prisons that make recidivism rates higher or lower, so it's not even an across-the-board single statistic. But that should be the baseline of where any conversation about this stuff starts.
Also, you used "begging the question" properly! I'm weirdly refreshed by that having just seen it misused in another comment.
I'd bet the percentage of people that would rather pay to imprison people, rather than deal with the treatment / relapse loop is at least 25%. Likely even higher if you take it as a percentage of the gainfully employed.
But that logic, anything society accepts is an answer. You could just as easily say that society accepting high crime rates is an answer.
You're right that policies often reflect public opinion, but when we're debating policy ideally the conversation would go deeper than that. Public discussions about policy in the open, on forums, etc, is a big part of how public opinion gets formed, and those discussions should probably dig into underlying goals and identify the costs and benefits of different approaches beyond just checking what the current majority preference is. Things can get a little circular when being popular is the justification for why something is popular.
I see a couple of problems:
- most prison terms are limited (any prison term for petty theft is going to be).
- prisons often release people into the same communities they came out of.
- it is tremendously expensive to even get someone into prison, you have to arrest them and either get them through a trial or at least pay for sentencing if they just plead guilty.
If the entire goal of prison is to separate offenders from society (which could be its own conversation, but whatever, we'll take it for granted that's the goal), we still kind of need to ask if prison is the best way of doing that.
Optimizing for cost is not what you want. The most cost effective way of separating people from society is a summary execution with no trial. Prisons aren't meant to be the cheapest solution, they're meant to be a more humane compromise.
Are jails a cost-effective way of separating people from society, even if we only look at solutions that are at least as humane as prison?
I'm sort of jumping around the main issue, which is that I don't think prisons only exist to separate people from society and I don't think most people think about them that way, not really. I think Camus up-thread is just wrong, prisons are about more than isolation. People think about prisons in terms of punishment/justice, and deterrence, and about organization/holding during trials, and yes, people also think about prisons as a rehabilitation effort.
If you look at prisons only through the lens of "this is where we put people we don't want to be around", then the system kind of stops making sense. It's not optimized for that.
I mean, if nothing else, you really have to grapple with the fact that most people don't get life sentences. If the person being discussed in this thread gets arrested and given 4 months in jail and then comes out back into the same community, then the public housing solution only really needs to keep him off the street for 5 months in order for it to be a cheaper and more effective solution -- unless prison is serving some other set of goals beyond just separating people from society temporarily, unless it's also trying to keep people outside of prison from committing crime, through both deterrence and rehabilitation.
But if you're just worried about removing people from society, prison is an awful way of doing that for low-level offenses; it's both incredibly stressful and cruel for the person being imprisoned, and incredibly expensive, and doesn't actually keep them separated from society for more than a few months to a year.
edit: To elaborate, the "at some point" is like... where a person has to be removed from society because they're an imminent danger to themselves or others.
We'd like our city back please.
The US has a higher incarceration rate than other developed countries, while also maintaining higher crime/violence rates. It doesn't seem to be a good solution to the crime problem. Does Andre get out of prison? What then?
It may be more accurate to say, "At some point incarceration has failed and compassion is the only solution."
Oh, we really suck at this, I admit! First, it should never have gotten to this point, and second, prisons should focus on fixing rather than punishing people. We are in agreement. But I don't think there are many options for Andre at this point (we should have done a better job 15 years ago). Washington state prisons are also a bit more on the reform side than other states in the country.
> It may be more accurate to say, "At some point incarceration has failed and compassion is the only solution."
Compassion should always come first, incarceration is a last ditch effort and means we have basically failed this person.
He either accepts the help again (housing, food, job, education, etc) and actually makes something of himself, or he commits more crimes and goes back to prison. Seems like a fairly straightforward deal to me.
Where is that missing? It is there today. The fact is that society bears the financial burden of someone spending a life in prison (and also the emotional/financial/physical burden of the person's actual crimes). You seem to be dismissing that to make an ideological stance.
That's because the problems are much more systematic and large parts of the population approach the solution with monkey patching. So of course you'd think we've run out of solutions.