I'm not suggesting closing prisons tomorrow, but if we do, I just wonder how many violent sociopaths will actually be released. Is it 1% of the prison population? A tenth of a percent? I don't think it's a substantial portion.

Countries like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, have a prison population per capita which is about a 1/10 of the US [1]. And these countries are not generally associated with an overabundance of violent sociopaths in the community at large. So, sticking a finger in the air, I'd say it is a number less than 10%. And if it is higher my guess is that you have some kind of structural problem in that society.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

A majority of prison inmates are incarcerated either for violent crimes or property crimes. The statistics in IL showed (last time I checked) a plurality of inmates convicted of domestic violence. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands have a fraction of the inmates the US does, but they also have a fraction of the crime.

There are a lot of reasons for that, and discussing them is a politically volatile rabbithole of a discussion to start. But we should at least begin by understanding the right premise. We can and should reduce sentences, particularly for low-level property crimes. But if we did most everything in our penal system "right", we'd still have integer multiples of Scandinavia's incarceration share of population.

I've been to state prison, not county jail, in Florida, for 13 months.

They are loaded with people with whom you would want to keep away from your loved ones. Way more than 1%.

I could tell stories, but what's the point?

Just FYI.

Are a large portion of them inherently violent sociopaths? Or do they seem like people I want to keep away from my loved ones because they've been caged animals for a while?

Well, put it this way..I was a "caged animal" for 13 months, and you would have no issues whatsoever with me around your loved ones, so the logic that the environment is making convicts (the preferred way to label "prisoners" who make it to the state prison level) into monsters is flawed, at least in my case and experience.

I specifically did not say a "large portion", but a significant one, much larger than 1%.

If I remember correctly, approx. 12% of the convicts in the institution I was in (Gulf Correctional Institution[1] in the Florida panhandle) were serving life sentences for murder related convictions.

Does society really want convicted murders roaming freely through it?

[1] http://www.dc.state.fl.us/facilities/region1/150.html

Since most separate state-run institutions for the housing and treatment of mentally ill people were defunded and dismantled, those people are now either left untreated among the public, or forcibly confined (and possibly still untreated) within the jails and prisons system.

So within a typical jail or prison, you will have mentally ill people whose illnesses have caused them to commit crimes, career criminals who have become dangerous and threatening as a competitive advantage, institutional employees who have become domineering, corrupt, and sadistic due to the need to control the previous two groups, and ordinary people who have become stressed and hyper-vigilant due to forced contact with the previous three groups.

Policy in many institutions is also to expressly reinforce racism, creedism, and other natural divisions among the prisoner population as a means of divide-and-conquer control.

As a result, any person spending a significant amount of time in jails or prisons may have problems readjusting to normal society, similar to soldiers returning from a war zone. They are not inherently violent, but the environment is designed to be hostile and stressful for them, and it does influence subsequent behavior in ways that may be unpredictable.

The at-large population of Florida is also loaded with people I would want to keep away from my loved ones.

A huge percentage of the prison population (at least half, in New York) is kids who started out on minor drug charges but then couldn't get out of the system. It's a self-perpetuating problem. You can't get hired for a normal job with a record, but you know all these big-time connects now, so it just grows out of control.

Can you cite credible statistics? Even among drug reformers, the current narrative seems to be that drug enforcement's impact on the prison population is overblown (which is important for legalization advocates --- myself included --- to acknowledge, lest the argument for legalization be upended simply by citation to statistics contradicting it).

Sorry, this is coming purely from personal experience.

Edit: found a source citing Federal Bureau of Prisons: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/10/war-on-drugs-prison...

That's federal prison, which houses a small fraction of inmates, and for more serious offenses. You need to look at the state stats. In California, for instance, drug inmates make up about 14% of the prison population. Violent crime makes up 44% (actually, it's probably quite a bit higher than that, because "burglary" is counted as a property crime).

To see why the federal statistics are misleading, consider how someone ends up in federal prison for burglary.

Having experienced it firsthand, I wonder if those numbers don't tell the full story. There are whole families basically going in and out of jail running the drug trade. I never got the sense that violent criminals had quite the "revolving door" effect.

Edit: then again, it's likely that drug offenders would be much more open about what they're doing time for. Now that I think about it there could definitely be positive selection bias (or whatever) affecting my perception.

Their door revolves too, but because their sentences are longer and parole harder to achieve, it revolves more slowly.

There are violent sociopaths, and then there's most of the prison population. Most of them are just people who made a mistake and didn't have any guard rails in their life to keep them on the straight and narrow before they became adults. Most of them would be very possible to rehabilitate but that's just not how the US looks at crime. Our approach, no matter what we call it, is "lock them up and throw away the key".

One could say (with the reduction in violent crime since the 70's) that this works. If that's true and it isn't the result of abortion being legalized (not my theory, don't hate me) then we could keep doing it. Could we as a society do better? I think the answer is yes. I think there's a moral imperative to.

So the question is, how might we reduce violent crime and increase the acceptance of social norms within high risk groups?

> this works. If that's true and it isn't the result of abortion being legalized

Both these theories are based entirely on correlation with no good casual mechanism to explain them. The first is particularly impugned - in fact it's reasonable to say disproven outright - by the very high recidivism rate. The second is outlandish on its face.

At least the lead exposure theory passes the straight face test.

It's hard to be subtly tongue in cheek on HN.

Well, the statistics I've seen say violent criminals make up less than half of the prison population.

How would you feel about closing the factories that produce those sociopaths?

Educate yourself. Most people in American prisons aren't violent sociopaths, they're nonviolent drug offenders. This is not a new phenomenon, news outlets have been talking about this for a couple of years now.