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Intentions aside, the 67% recidivism rate in the US shows that it is more focused on recurring punishment than rehabilitation.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Intentions aside, the 67% recidivism rate in the US shows that it is more focused on recurring punishment than rehabilitation.
- wrsh07 10y agoIf you believe both statements, that simply implies the US judiciary system is broken. [which I think is true...]
- Retric 10y agoThe rate of people who go back to prison is far less than 67%. The odds that someone goes back is 67% when looking at people who have already gone back and counting them once for each trip. AKA (A, B, C, A, D, A, E) = 1 person out of 4 went back (25%). But, A went back 3 times so out of 7 stays 3 of them repeated (43%). Yet another way of counting is to look at people at one point in time (C, A, D, A,). But, someone in prison regularly is much more likely to be in prison while your studying. This is mitigated by very long studies, but 10 or even 20 years is not enough. PS: When you consider some homeless people use prison as a way to get free medical care it's easy for someone to be in and out a lot for minor reasons. Another group that's likely to come back are people who go to prison for failure to pay fines because prison tends to make you even more poor.
- mikeash 10y agoIncidentally, the same problematic interpretation of numbers shows up when looking at divorce rates. If you just look at the number of marriages which end in divorce (which is the commonly quoted statistic) then you'll assign too much weight to people who get married and divorced many times.