4 ms·

I think I see what you’re saying. We should send all criminals to Harvard. We’ll save money, and they’ll become productive members of society.

by freyir 8y ago

jordanbeiber 8y ago
In a way, yes, but society should be formed to proactively deal with this. After the fact, it’s a bit late.
- freyir 8y ago
  I see. So instead of the SATs, we could administer a psychological test to detect antisocial tendencies. We’ll send the worst of the bunch straight to the Ivey Leagues. That will teach them.
  - jordanbeiber 8y ago
    Well there seems to be a lot of anti-social tendencies in the US judging from the number of incarcerated individuals. Perhaps there are mechanics in place that goes a bit deeper? Are humans born stictly social or anti-social, and will anything accentuate these effects in the life of an individual? Research is quite clear on this matter I believe, but of course there will always be exceptions.
  - verytrivial 8y ago
    The comparison is of course only an illustration that suggests the question: It is the right allocation of resources to support incarceration and all that it entails, or should that resource be re-balanced to suffocate the causes of crime? Hint: It is nearly always poverty. That an Ivy league school is utterly out of reach for the average inmate throws in the stark contrast the fact that the State somehow manages to find the same amount of money per head for incarceration. The question is which cycle to you, as a society, want to feed? That is the one that will grow. Reference to the "Nordic" experience shows what a long-term shift in focus looks like.
coldtea 8y ago
More civilized countries (e.g. nordic ones) do something similar to that. They don't send "criminals to Harvard", but they have prisons close (if not more) habitable as a Harvard dorm, very humane treatment of prisoners, extensive educational programs, and so on. And they have less costs, less crime, and a healthier society doing so. So snark from a country with the largest prison population (by percentage) in the world, huge associated costs, rampant crime rates, and is so backwards as to still have the death penalty (in the 21st century!), is unwarranted.
- freyir 8y ago
  Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with, which allow them to build relatively spacious prisons and allocate more treatment resources per prisoner. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem we’ve got. We could just not prosecute many non-violent crimes, like our District Attorney chose to do in San Francisco. But that didn’t pan out well and we now have the highest non-violent crime rate of any major US city.
  - mcbits 8y ago
    > Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with Nature or nurture? If nurture, then it's at least highly plausible that their prison systems have something to do with it. Recidivism is also much lower.
benj111 8y ago
Maybe we already are? (I'm sure there's a joke about Harvard educated bankers in there somewhere.)
- freyir 8y ago
  Not to mention our Stanford-educated biomedical entrepreneurs. Or our USC athletes.

I think I see what you’re saying. We should send all criminals to Harvard. We’ll save money, and they’ll become productive members of society.

by freyir 8y ago

I think I see what you’re saying. We should send all criminals to Harvard. We’ll save money, and they’ll become productive members of society.

jordanbeiber 8y ago

In a way, yes, but society should be formed to proactively deal with this. After the fact, it’s a bit late.

freyir 8y ago
I see. So instead of the SATs, we could administer a psychological test to detect antisocial tendencies. We’ll send the worst of the bunch straight to the Ivey Leagues. That will teach them.
- jordanbeiber 8y ago
  Well there seems to be a lot of anti-social tendencies in the US judging from the number of incarcerated individuals. Perhaps there are mechanics in place that goes a bit deeper? Are humans born stictly social or anti-social, and will anything accentuate these effects in the life of an individual? Research is quite clear on this matter I believe, but of course there will always be exceptions.
- verytrivial 8y ago
  The comparison is of course only an illustration that suggests the question: It is the right allocation of resources to support incarceration and all that it entails, or should that resource be re-balanced to suffocate the causes of crime? Hint: It is nearly always poverty. That an Ivy league school is utterly out of reach for the average inmate throws in the stark contrast the fact that the State somehow manages to find the same amount of money per head for incarceration. The question is which cycle to you, as a society, want to feed? That is the one that will grow. Reference to the "Nordic" experience shows what a long-term shift in focus looks like.

coldtea 8y ago

More civilized countries (e.g. nordic ones) do something similar to that. They don't send "criminals to Harvard", but they have prisons close (if not more) habitable as a Harvard dorm, very humane treatment of prisoners, extensive educational programs, and so on. And they have less costs, less crime, and a healthier society doing so. So snark from a country with the largest prison population (by percentage) in the world, huge associated costs, rampant crime rates, and is so backwards as to still have the death penalty (in the 21st century!), is unwarranted.

freyir 8y ago
Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with, which allow them to build relatively spacious prisons and allocate more treatment resources per prisoner. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem we’ve got. We could just not prosecute many non-violent crimes, like our District Attorney chose to do in San Francisco. But that didn’t pan out well and we now have the highest non-violent crime rate of any major US city.
- mcbits 8y ago
  > Nordic countries have low crime rates to begin with Nature or nurture? If nurture, then it's at least highly plausible that their prison systems have something to do with it. Recidivism is also much lower.

benj111 8y ago

Maybe we already are? (I'm sure there's a joke about Harvard educated bankers in there somewhere.)

freyir 8y ago
Not to mention our Stanford-educated biomedical entrepreneurs. Or our USC athletes.