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And I also think most people don't understand what prison populations look like. Federal prisons are dominated by non-violent crimes; this report states fewer t

And I also think most people don't understand what prison populations look like. Federal prisons are dominated by non-violent crimes; this report states fewer than 5% of federal inmates' most serious crimes were violent offenses. (1) The proportions are different in state prisons, but there non-violent offenders still make up about half of the population. People are also completely misinformed about recidivism. Not only does keeping someone in prison for longer increase their risk of reoffending, the sort of crimes people are most afraid of tend to have some of the lowest recidivism rates. For instance, murderers are the least likely to reoffend out of any criminal category (2). Of course, this does have to be balanced against the seriousness of the offense if they do reoffend. But unfortunately, solitary and isolated instances of the best approach failing are turned into big political talking points -- i.e., the murderer who is released on parole and kills someone else a day later. Things like this are extremely rare, but the risk they carry as political hand-grenades means that the worse approach gets enacted almost universally. And don't even get me started on the human rights disaster that is capital punishment. A barbaric punishment, outlawed by most developed nations; which unintentionally kills innocent people; which is more expensive than life imprisonment; and which does absolutely zero good in (a) preventing future crimes -- it has provably no power as a deterrent -- and (b) bringing back the victims who have died. We kill people because it's "what they deserve," as if the state has any right to decide whether its own citizens live or die. (1) http://apps.urban.org/features/reducing-federal-mass-incarceration/ http://apps.urban.org/features/reducing-federal-mass-incarce... (2) https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html

matheusmoreira 7y ago
> We kill people because it's "what they deserve," as if the state has any right to decide whether its own citizens live or die. Sounds about right. True justice is to undo the damage caused by the perpetrator. Unfortunately, it's impossible to do that. There's no way to restore a murdered person back to life or restore people's ability to feel safe in their own homes after it's been violated. Some damage always remains and it just can't be completely fixed. So it's all about revenge, making people pay for what they've done and causing just as much if not more damage in return. For some reason, people can't just accept that things happened and that there's no fix. There must be balance in the universe and they can't move on with their lives if something isn't done to the people who hurt them. So we have judges, people who literally count infractions and calculate punishment. People who perpetrate sanctioned violence.
- pabs3 7y ago
  You can even go further than undoing the damage by looking at transformative justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice/ https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice...
- krageon 7y ago
  > can't move on It's not a lack of ability, it's a lack of desire. The lack of desire is directly attributable to a toxic culture.
- dmix 7y ago
  > So it's all about revenge, It's not simply just about revenge, as I noted in my comment, about there's a hundred examples outside of jail including zoning laws where we're taking this same good-intentions approach to solving the problems we see and having either nothing happen to things leaving us worse off. The fundamental problem is fear-driven policy making by people who think they know what's best for a community and having zero tolerance for the natural chaos that is natural to society. The more we try to tamper that chaos and create an endless series of laws without thinking (or grasping) the unintended side-effects the more this will keep happening. I think plenty of the worst stuff in our societies results from our creations, often from idealistic attempts to make the world a better place, which in fact have had the opposite effect. Every time we create a new law or ban something or get vindictive we need to think back to all of the times that didn't work or had the complete opposite effect. Cities and life worked better in the post-war 1950s because we didn't have a thousand laws and projects running simultaneously trying to make the world a better place. It embraced the chaos naturally, before the NIBMY brigades and busy-bodies created a system where "they know what's best for other people" when they really didn't For example, when the "hippies" started smoking weed, people freaked out, but maybe it really wasn't the end of the world causing all of our problems. They were normal kids just like their parents going through a phase. Then the billions we put into stopping it has left us worse off. Likewise we need to at what other moral panics (and lesser pancis) resulted in systems that are hurting us. I don't know exactly what the solution is but I feel like as a society we need to take a good hard look at the various systems we put in place since the post-WW2 decades and ask if it's really made the world a better place. The highest priority of all in the US (IMO) is prison reform since that is the population numbers are the glaring massive difference that other western countries don't have. And they don't have super violent cities like the US does and maybe there's a cause and effect here, or at a minimum the vindictive nature of it all is doing nothing to actually help the problem. The second priority is the myriad of drug laws which have so obviously backfired, then our backwards approach to building/housing which has become a massive problem in every urban area in the country. We need to embrace the chaos again and stop trying to control every little detail like we know what's best for other people.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

> We kill people because it's "what they deserve," as if the state has any right to decide whether its own citizens live or die. Sounds about right. True justice is to undo the damage caused by the perpetrator. Unfortunately, it's impossible to do that. There's no way to restore a murdered person back to life or restore people's ability to feel safe in their own homes after it's been violated. Some damage always remains and it just can't be completely fixed. So it's all about revenge, making people pay for what they've done and causing just as much if not more damage in return. For some reason, people can't just accept that things happened and that there's no fix. There must be balance in the universe and they can't move on with their lives if something isn't done to the people who hurt them. So we have judges, people who literally count infractions and calculate punishment. People who perpetrate sanctioned violence.

pabs3 7y ago
You can even go further than undoing the damage by looking at transformative justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice/ https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice...
krageon 7y ago
> can't move on It's not a lack of ability, it's a lack of desire. The lack of desire is directly attributable to a toxic culture.
dmix 7y ago
> So it's all about revenge, It's not simply just about revenge, as I noted in my comment, about there's a hundred examples outside of jail including zoning laws where we're taking this same good-intentions approach to solving the problems we see and having either nothing happen to things leaving us worse off. The fundamental problem is fear-driven policy making by people who think they know what's best for a community and having zero tolerance for the natural chaos that is natural to society. The more we try to tamper that chaos and create an endless series of laws without thinking (or grasping) the unintended side-effects the more this will keep happening. I think plenty of the worst stuff in our societies results from our creations, often from idealistic attempts to make the world a better place, which in fact have had the opposite effect. Every time we create a new law or ban something or get vindictive we need to think back to all of the times that didn't work or had the complete opposite effect. Cities and life worked better in the post-war 1950s because we didn't have a thousand laws and projects running simultaneously trying to make the world a better place. It embraced the chaos naturally, before the NIBMY brigades and busy-bodies created a system where "they know what's best for other people" when they really didn't For example, when the "hippies" started smoking weed, people freaked out, but maybe it really wasn't the end of the world causing all of our problems. They were normal kids just like their parents going through a phase. Then the billions we put into stopping it has left us worse off. Likewise we need to at what other moral panics (and lesser pancis) resulted in systems that are hurting us. I don't know exactly what the solution is but I feel like as a society we need to take a good hard look at the various systems we put in place since the post-WW2 decades and ask if it's really made the world a better place. The highest priority of all in the US (IMO) is prison reform since that is the population numbers are the glaring massive difference that other western countries don't have. And they don't have super violent cities like the US does and maybe there's a cause and effect here, or at a minimum the vindictive nature of it all is doing nothing to actually help the problem. The second priority is the myriad of drug laws which have so obviously backfired, then our backwards approach to building/housing which has become a massive problem in every urban area in the country. We need to embrace the chaos again and stop trying to control every little detail like we know what's best for other people.