7 ms·

A few weeks ago, running the subway in a major North American city, I kept admiring how people were polite and waited for other people to leave the trains befor

A few weeks ago, running the subway in a major North American city, I kept admiring how people were polite and waited for other people to leave the trains before entering, how many times I saw someone give up their seats for the elderly (not that they really needed, there were a lot of empty seats elsewhere). That got me thinking if those same people would be as polite if they were in the same train but with 20x more people around. I think extreme situations are a great equalizer in crowded situations and it's my feeling they would behave the same: not wait for anyone, not give up seats, etc. My point is, what works for Norway (population: 5.2m, prison population: 3874 or 0.0745% [0]) is never going to work for Brazil (population: 207m, prison population: 659020 or 0.31% [1]). I like the idea of these idyllic prisons but inmates that will fit those are the exception here. Nevertheless, the system should offer them and help good inmates to be removed from the terrible traditional prisons so they don't become worse. It's often said that prisons are like college for criminals. I don't know if this system could handle things like this: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/60-killed-beheaded-grisly-brazil-prison-riot-170102185216472.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/60-killed-beheaded-gri... In summary, I love the idea but let's not pretend that by just having those prisons that things will change drastically. It's a complex situation and there are problems everywhere (bad laws, slow courts, poverty, etc). 0 - http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/norway http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/norway 1 - http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/brazil http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/brazil

matt4077 9y ago
"You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners", was actually said by a Russian–he knew what he was talking about. The US could start by no longer jailing drug consumers or first-time low-level street dealers. It just really really doesn't work anyway. That would reduce the prison population by what? 2/3? Suddenly you have 3x the budget and space, which should allow for quite a few improvements. But what really needs to be done with it the basic idea of prison as some sort of moral retribution. Come up with a formula to quantify and compare the outcomes of the criminal justice system, then start maximising. The US could easily study the effects of prison and other punishments (as well as social programs, medial intervention etc) in every detail imaginary. (Also I don't quite get your analogy. Are you saying Americans tend to be violent because there are too many of them for one country? FWIW the US is No 182 in terms of population density, barely ahead of Norway at No. 202. Far far ahead are Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and most of Europe, all of which have only a fraction of the violent crime of the US)
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Probably not 2/3. The BJS collects information about the US prison population: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/p15.txt https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/p15.txt Out of 1.5 million in federal and state prisons, about 700,000 were convicted of violent crimes. And of course the remainder are not exclusively low level drug crimes. (the population in jails is usually less than 100,000 so it won't tip the balance) Better drug policy could well impact the levels of violent crime and so impact the future prison population, but forgiving sentences for drug related violent crime is a step further than forgiving sentences for petty drug crimes.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    I used to go to a boxing gym near Baltimore where a lot of people came from "bad" neighborhoods. A lot of the young guys had experienced a life where a lot of friends and neighbors had been in jail for drugs. Once you have been in jail its really hard to find a decent job so a lot of them go into drug dealing which often leads to violence. Jailing people for drugs destroys the whole social fabric of a community. I don't think you can separate low-level drug offenses from violent crime. One leads to the other.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      I thought my last paragraph there addressed this fairly well. If you are talking about reducing the prison population that exists right now, they sort of have to be separate. A murder that is the end result of a chain of events containing a lot of difficult choices is still a murder.
      - maxxxxx 9y ago
        My point is that the murder may not have happened if the perpetrator had grown up in a better neighborhood.
        maxerickson 9y ago
Retric 9y ago
It's prison population / N prisons. So, each prison could have equivalent populations. Further, the costs don't drop with overcrowding etc, your just taking out a loan with interest. Underpay now, and you will overpay in the future.
- gtirloni 9y ago
  That's a good point and I failed to match my argument with more information about the context. Brazil is a failed state (both politically and financially), so with more inmates and less money (for more prisons and rehabilitation projects), that creates quite the situation.
sampo 9y ago
> My point is, what works for Norway (population: 5.2m, prison population: 3874 or 0.0745% [0]) is never going to work for Brazil (population: 207m, prison population: 659020 or 0.31% [1]). Actually the population density of Brazil is just 1.5 times that of Norway. Not a great difference.
- cam_l 9y ago
  Yeah, I have come to understand the whole population scale argument is just an example of American (or in this case Brazilian) exceptionalism. Basically just a right wing taking point that denied the reasons in favour of a blanket 'this well not work here' fallacious argument.
- joshjje 9y ago
  While I dont really agree with the original argument, while what you say is true, I dont think population density was the point. Prison population as a percentage of the total was. Brazil has ~4.2 times higher prison population compared to total. You could argue that compounds with the 1.5 times population density though which would come out to ~6.4 times prison population density. Though 659k vs 3.9k prisoners is a pretty significant difference if you look at it that way.
- cgriswald 9y ago
  If you were to place New York City on Mars, you could have its population density be any value you want simply by expanding its political borders. When comparing countries, it's the distribution that matters. If I have 50 people spread throughout my house, or 50 people shoved into a single room in my house, my house will have the same population density, but in the latter case I'll have 50 pretty irritable people. The same is true for a country. Take Canada: It's population density is quite low, but that doesn't paint a very accurate picture of living conditions, since the vast majority of the population lives within a much smaller region along the US border. In any case, I agree with the sibling that population density is not the statistic the GP is using in support of his position. He is using prisoner per capita, which is 3x higher for Brazil than Norway and surely has at least some effect on the ability of Brazil to treat its prisoners in the same way.
tormeh 9y ago
> I don't know if this system could handle things like this: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/60-killed-beheaded-gri.. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/60-killed-beheaded-gri.... The simple answer is that it's not a relevant question. It doesn't happen in Norway because there's no reason for anyone to join a drug gang the like of which there are in Brazil. If you were to be cynical about it, you could say that the Norwegian welfare state is so generous it will pay people to sit on their ass and do no harm. Anyone who joins a drug gang in Norway does so out of lifestyle problems, not economic problems. The gangs are correspondingly small. All that said, Norway has very unenlightened drug policies, and drug related deaths are very common compared to other European countries. There's a small but nasty subculture of bad criminals and bad police that will make life hard for you if you enter it. But at least money doesn't force you to.
vivekd 9y ago
Well even in Norway, the prison in the article is not the norm, it is the exception. >Inmates do not start their sentences at Bastoy. They must do time in a conventional lockup and apply to be transferred, having convinced the authorities that they wish to reform. I work with a lot of criminals. In my experience, many times, the ones that go to jail go there because they really are bad people and have no wish to reform. It would be very difficult to change and reform these people just with outside intervention. However, for the ones with a genuine wish to reform, it would be nice to get them into a facility like this. I guess the real problem is there is no real easy solution for how to deal with bad people. I think there needs to be a mixed solution that takes into account the individual and their wish to reform. And really from that perspective, we do have many similar institutions in the West, like half way houses and various criminal rehabilitation programs.
jackmott 9y ago
I wonder if the "but that would.never work in america" people ever think about the old head and shoulders commercials ...they probably didn't get the joke.
ajmurmann 9y ago
I'm not sure if size is an excuse. Isn't density a much larger problem. The US certainly had the space to properly house it's inmates. Is it larger proportion of the population that's in prison that's the problem? Why is that the case? The US being large doesn't seem like it should cause that.
sumedh 9y ago
> I kept admiring how people were polite and waited for other people to leave the trains before entering Well that happens in Mumbai local trains as well during peak hours, it has nothing to do with politeness.

matt4077 9y ago

"You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners", was actually said by a Russian–he knew what he was talking about. The US could start by no longer jailing drug consumers or first-time low-level street dealers. It just really really doesn't work anyway. That would reduce the prison population by what? 2/3? Suddenly you have 3x the budget and space, which should allow for quite a few improvements. But what really needs to be done with it the basic idea of prison as some sort of moral retribution. Come up with a formula to quantify and compare the outcomes of the criminal justice system, then start maximising. The US could easily study the effects of prison and other punishments (as well as social programs, medial intervention etc) in every detail imaginary. (Also I don't quite get your analogy. Are you saying Americans tend to be violent because there are too many of them for one country? FWIW the US is No 182 in terms of population density, barely ahead of Norway at No. 202. Far far ahead are Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and most of Europe, all of which have only a fraction of the violent crime of the US)

maxerickson 9y ago
Probably not 2/3. The BJS collects information about the US prison population: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/p15.txt https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/p15.txt Out of 1.5 million in federal and state prisons, about 700,000 were convicted of violent crimes. And of course the remainder are not exclusively low level drug crimes. (the population in jails is usually less than 100,000 so it won't tip the balance) Better drug policy could well impact the levels of violent crime and so impact the future prison population, but forgiving sentences for drug related violent crime is a step further than forgiving sentences for petty drug crimes.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I used to go to a boxing gym near Baltimore where a lot of people came from "bad" neighborhoods. A lot of the young guys had experienced a life where a lot of friends and neighbors had been in jail for drugs. Once you have been in jail its really hard to find a decent job so a lot of them go into drug dealing which often leads to violence. Jailing people for drugs destroys the whole social fabric of a community. I don't think you can separate low-level drug offenses from violent crime. One leads to the other.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    I thought my last paragraph there addressed this fairly well. If you are talking about reducing the prison population that exists right now, they sort of have to be separate. A murder that is the end result of a chain of events containing a lot of difficult choices is still a murder.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      My point is that the murder may not have happened if the perpetrator had grown up in a better neighborhood.
      - maxerickson 9y ago

Retric 9y ago

It's prison population / N prisons. So, each prison could have equivalent populations. Further, the costs don't drop with overcrowding etc, your just taking out a loan with interest. Underpay now, and you will overpay in the future.

gtirloni 9y ago
That's a good point and I failed to match my argument with more information about the context. Brazil is a failed state (both politically and financially), so with more inmates and less money (for more prisons and rehabilitation projects), that creates quite the situation.

sampo 9y ago

> My point is, what works for Norway (population: 5.2m, prison population: 3874 or 0.0745% [0]) is never going to work for Brazil (population: 207m, prison population: 659020 or 0.31% [1]). Actually the population density of Brazil is just 1.5 times that of Norway. Not a great difference.

cam_l 9y ago
Yeah, I have come to understand the whole population scale argument is just an example of American (or in this case Brazilian) exceptionalism. Basically just a right wing taking point that denied the reasons in favour of a blanket 'this well not work here' fallacious argument.
joshjje 9y ago
While I dont really agree with the original argument, while what you say is true, I dont think population density was the point. Prison population as a percentage of the total was. Brazil has ~4.2 times higher prison population compared to total. You could argue that compounds with the 1.5 times population density though which would come out to ~6.4 times prison population density. Though 659k vs 3.9k prisoners is a pretty significant difference if you look at it that way.
cgriswald 9y ago
If you were to place New York City on Mars, you could have its population density be any value you want simply by expanding its political borders. When comparing countries, it's the distribution that matters. If I have 50 people spread throughout my house, or 50 people shoved into a single room in my house, my house will have the same population density, but in the latter case I'll have 50 pretty irritable people. The same is true for a country. Take Canada: It's population density is quite low, but that doesn't paint a very accurate picture of living conditions, since the vast majority of the population lives within a much smaller region along the US border. In any case, I agree with the sibling that population density is not the statistic the GP is using in support of his position. He is using prisoner per capita, which is 3x higher for Brazil than Norway and surely has at least some effect on the ability of Brazil to treat its prisoners in the same way.

tormeh 9y ago

> I don't know if this system could handle things like this: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/60-killed-beheaded-gri.. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/60-killed-beheaded-gri.... The simple answer is that it's not a relevant question. It doesn't happen in Norway because there's no reason for anyone to join a drug gang the like of which there are in Brazil. If you were to be cynical about it, you could say that the Norwegian welfare state is so generous it will pay people to sit on their ass and do no harm. Anyone who joins a drug gang in Norway does so out of lifestyle problems, not economic problems. The gangs are correspondingly small. All that said, Norway has very unenlightened drug policies, and drug related deaths are very common compared to other European countries. There's a small but nasty subculture of bad criminals and bad police that will make life hard for you if you enter it. But at least money doesn't force you to.

vivekd 9y ago

Well even in Norway, the prison in the article is not the norm, it is the exception. >Inmates do not start their sentences at Bastoy. They must do time in a conventional lockup and apply to be transferred, having convinced the authorities that they wish to reform. I work with a lot of criminals. In my experience, many times, the ones that go to jail go there because they really are bad people and have no wish to reform. It would be very difficult to change and reform these people just with outside intervention. However, for the ones with a genuine wish to reform, it would be nice to get them into a facility like this. I guess the real problem is there is no real easy solution for how to deal with bad people. I think there needs to be a mixed solution that takes into account the individual and their wish to reform. And really from that perspective, we do have many similar institutions in the West, like half way houses and various criminal rehabilitation programs.

jackmott 9y ago

I wonder if the "but that would.never work in america" people ever think about the old head and shoulders commercials ...they probably didn't get the joke.

ajmurmann 9y ago

I'm not sure if size is an excuse. Isn't density a much larger problem. The US certainly had the space to properly house it's inmates. Is it larger proportion of the population that's in prison that's the problem? Why is that the case? The US being large doesn't seem like it should cause that.

sumedh 9y ago

> I kept admiring how people were polite and waited for other people to leave the trains before entering Well that happens in Mumbai local trains as well during peak hours, it has nothing to do with politeness.