4 ms·

The saddest part is that, if presented with this information (cost), a substantial portion of the U.S. populace would declare that we are treating prisoners too

by jzb 5y ago

The saddest part is that, if presented with this information (cost), a substantial portion of the U.S. populace would declare that we are treating prisoners too well and that we need to find new ways to charge people for being incarcerated. What it won't do: Convince people that we need to reform prisons and jail fewer people.

newbamboo 5y ago
In all fairness homicide is increasing at a pretty good clip. Now is not the time to decrease incarceration. We should get serious in preventing crime, but the current administration is going in the opposite direction hence the trend in homicide.
- chirau 5y ago
  Do you seriously think that most people in jail are there for homicide?
  - newbamboo 5y ago
    Most that are locked up for homicide have prior convictions for non-homicide. Keeping them in prison prevents homicide from happening in the first place. Better for them, better for society to keep them out of harms way.
    - csh0 5y ago
      Just to clarify, are you suggesting that if you commit some crime, any crime, then you should be locked up for good on the basis that you might become a murderer at some undetermined point in the future. Seems like an error in reasoning here: If you are a murderer, then you have priors. You have a prior, therefore you are/will become a murderer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent aka the converse error.
      - kadoban 5y ago
        Prison itself is certainly the cause of several murders as well. Prison ruins lives (that often weren't going optimally, to be fair), and people in bad situations do bad things.
        hiyer 5y ago
        "The vilest deeds, like poison weeds, bloom well in prison air. It is only what is good in man that wastes and withers there" - Oscar Wilde
- sbelskie 5y ago
  The spike in homicide rates 100% began during the previous administration. I think that’s more happenstance than due to any particular policy decisions, but murder rates starting spiking in the summer of 2020.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Yeah, I don't think much matters or can be done at the federal level. One can be tough on crime, another lenient on crime, but it doesn't make a ton of difference because cities and states tend to do what they want. There was a definitive villainization and backing off of police nationwide that corresponds with the rise in crime. A lack of police action, coupled with COVID stressors, is a recipe for rising crime.
    - kennywinker 5y ago
      Three big things happened last year: covid 19, the defund the police movement that came as a result of the murder of george floyd, and a rise in murders. But you're arbitrarily linking those events. My belief is that the murder spike has nothing to do with the police, and everything to do with covid and the economy. Violent crime was already spiking before the george floyd murder, for one thing. Cops do very little that prevents murder, they mostly just arrest people after them, for another. But that's just as arbitrary as your interpretation. Without data, we're just making up stories.
  - newbamboo 5y ago
    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/76-000-california-inmates-be-eligible-earlier-release-n1266044 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/76-000-california-inmat...
    - geofft 5y ago
      Can you explain, in your own words, how that responds to the point above? The post above claims that homicide rates started to go up "during the previous administration" (i.e., before January 2021) / "in the summer of 2020." The article you're linking is from May 2021, and talking about decarceration, not homicide rates. That seems like it cannot possibly be evidence for the claim that decarceration causes increased homicide rates.
- joombaga 5y ago
  Is there evidence that avoiding a decrease in incarceration reduces homicide rates?
- burkaman 5y ago
  Rikers is mostly pretrial defendants. There are no convicted murderers there.
- jzb 5y ago
  This may shock you, but a lot of people aren't in jail for violent crimes - much less homicide. Drug offenses account for nearly half, according to <a href="https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp>this</a> https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen.... By all means, let's keep putting convicted murderers in prison. Arsonists, kidnappers, and a bunch of others. But we can probably forego a lot of drug offenses entirely.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    This is really, really misleading because you are looking only at Federal prisoners which is only ~10% of inmates (most being in state prisons). In the US, each state has its own penal code and things like murder or rape are generally not investigated or prosecuted by the Feds, so these prisoners do not end up in Federal prison. But drug trafficking that crosses state lines is, which is why drug traffickers (the vast majority of federal drug inmates are traffickers, not users) account for ~47% of Federal inmates. However just because they were convicted of drug trafficking doesn't mean they are non-violent offenders or did not commit any other crime. Moreover be aware that when you say "non-violent" crime, this includes things like breaking and entering, fraud, grand theft auto, bribery, witness tampering, etc. Very few people truly support not incarcerating a person because they only stole someone's life savings but didn't assault them. So what is the real data? It's tough to say because again each state has their own penal code and own statistics, but let's look at Texas: https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/documents/Statistical_Report_FY2019.pdf https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/documents/Statistical_Report_FY20... About 25% of those entering the correctional system Texas ("intakes") were convicted of a drug offense (see page 2 of the report), but because these offenders serve shorter sentences or are diverted out of prison, on average only 15% of the prison population at any point in time is there because of a drug offense (see page 10). Now I have no idea whether Texas is representative, perhaps other states are harsher on drug offenses, but I think it's safe to say that 15% is a reasonable upper bound.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  The increase looks to me like a very small bump in comparison to the whole decade: https://dataunodc.un.org/content/data/homicide/homicide-rate https://dataunodc.un.org/content/data/homicide/homicide-rate During that time incarceration rate was mostly flat or slightly rising, so no.
- geofft 5y ago
  That would be a reasonable argument if decreasing incarceration increased homicides. But, first, as you point out, homicides are already increasing despite our current strategy. That's enough reason to ask whether it's working. Second, when you leave prison, you don't have many good options. You haven't been working, and you will have trouble finding a job. You might have joined a gang while inside to keep yourself safe. If you didn't, you at least know people who did, who can offer you ways to meet your basic needs (food and shelter) and you might get involved with them. Or you might simply turn to crimes like armed robbery where your specific goal isn't killing someone - and then you do. Especially in reply to your comment downthread that it's worth locking people up for lesser crimes because some of them go on to commit homicide - that seems like a good demonstration that locking them up now doesn't prevent them from committing homicide later, and I would wager that a good fraction of them wouldn't commit homicide if they hadn't been locked up. Think about people who make $438K/year or even a bit less. Some of them are cool; many of them are terrible people - greedy, lazy (they might support themselves from investments or inheritances), rude and manipulative, entitled. Very few of them have any particular desire, motivation, or so much as occasion to commit homicide.
gruez 5y ago
>The saddest part is that, if presented with this information (cost), a substantial portion of the U.S. populace would declare that we are treating prisoners too well Do people actually believe this? AFAIK most of the cost isn't because of amnesties (ie. "treating prisoners too well"), it's because of the various staff/services/equipment to deal with the prisoners.
- kadoban 5y ago
  I would be _shocked_ if less than 30% believe that or worse.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- goldcd 5y ago
  That cost is quite incredible - that's $36.5k a month. So maybe each month: $5k for the cell $5k for facilities $5k for dine dining $10k each for 2 personal guards @$5k $5k for healthcare costs $5k car and driver on standby for potential court appearances and maybe a $50 per diem for discretionary spending. If the above isn't the case, does make you wonder where it is going.
  - gruez 5y ago
    from TFA: >It costs $438,000 to jail one person there for one year. Of this $379,216 goes to personnel costs
spectramax 5y ago
Lot of discussion around here is knee jerk and not nuanced. Criminal law is complex and there are areas where it should be reformed and other areas where we need better enforcement. We've seen the criminal justice reform as they have instituted in San Francisco city: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343
- crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
  Punishment has been shown to be ineffective and ignorant of ancestral/intergenerational trauma being passed epigenetically. This is a way we're societally creating trauma and poisoning our gene pool. It's literally suicidal, from a long-term perspective.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    > ancestral/intergenerational trauma being passed epigenetically Can you cite any sources for this?
    - crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
      https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.0080... This was the first thing that came up when I searched google for "epigenetic markers of trauma." It highlights childhood trauma. I'll go ahead and note that one aspect of incarceration culture is numerous children losing the presence of a caregiver. This is for sure a traumatic experience for many and a singular way the government is suicidal.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    You understand that you are literally pushing a form of Lysenkoism, right? There is no such thing as trauma being passed down epigenetically.
    - colinb 5y ago
      I think that this is less clear-cut than you might expect. [0] talks about "Dutch Hunger Winter Syndrome" as a heavily studied counterexample. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_inheritance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_i...
rsj_hn 5y ago
> Convince people that we need to reform prisons and jail fewer people. Well, why should it convince people of that? Perhaps people are in fact being rational. When a necessary social role becomes expensive, it makes sense to make it cheaper, not to stop doing it. Are you going to get rid of courts because it costs so much to bring someone to trial? We have a large prison population because we have a large criminal class in this country. 5 homicides per 100K, 370 violet assaults per 100K. Those are committed every year. With these statistics, having ~400 prisoners per 100K is what you would expect, if not on the low side, since we haven't even started talking about non-violent crime. If you disagree, which of these do you think should not get jail time? Alternately, find a way to prevent crime.
- jzb 5y ago
  "Alternately, find a way to prevent crime." Easy. Stop criminalizing use of drugs and sex work. End the bullshit "war on drugs." We have a huge criminal class in this country. Wage theft[1], for example, is a huge criminal enterprise but almost nothing is done to stop that. We could also start working on real gun control like other countries that don't have a huge firearm homicide problem. That won't mean we end homicides, of course, but it would reduce the problem. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/ https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    The problem with always thinking there are easy solutions is that you never solve anything. OK, we release all the drug traffickers who are only guilty of that and no other crimes. Congratulations, you've reduced the jail population by 5%. Oh wait, an even bigger group of people now fill the prisons, but for theft. Oops. But if we free all those millions of imprisoned sex workers, that will solve the problem, right? Lol. Now that you've done all the performative ineffectual stuff, you still have the expensive prisons to worry about and no fix. So what do you - change the subject and move on to provide a facile solution for some other problem? I thought so.

by jzb 5y ago

newbamboo 5y ago

In all fairness homicide is increasing at a pretty good clip. Now is not the time to decrease incarceration. We should get serious in preventing crime, but the current administration is going in the opposite direction hence the trend in homicide.

chirau 5y ago
Do you seriously think that most people in jail are there for homicide?
- newbamboo 5y ago
  Most that are locked up for homicide have prior convictions for non-homicide. Keeping them in prison prevents homicide from happening in the first place. Better for them, better for society to keep them out of harms way.
  - csh0 5y ago
    Just to clarify, are you suggesting that if you commit some crime, any crime, then you should be locked up for good on the basis that you might become a murderer at some undetermined point in the future. Seems like an error in reasoning here: If you are a murderer, then you have priors. You have a prior, therefore you are/will become a murderer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent aka the converse error.
    - kadoban 5y ago
      Prison itself is certainly the cause of several murders as well. Prison ruins lives (that often weren't going optimally, to be fair), and people in bad situations do bad things.
      - hiyer 5y ago
        "The vilest deeds, like poison weeds, bloom well in prison air. It is only what is good in man that wastes and withers there" - Oscar Wilde
sbelskie 5y ago
The spike in homicide rates 100% began during the previous administration. I think that’s more happenstance than due to any particular policy decisions, but murder rates starting spiking in the summer of 2020.
- silisili 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't think much matters or can be done at the federal level. One can be tough on crime, another lenient on crime, but it doesn't make a ton of difference because cities and states tend to do what they want. There was a definitive villainization and backing off of police nationwide that corresponds with the rise in crime. A lack of police action, coupled with COVID stressors, is a recipe for rising crime.
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    Three big things happened last year: covid 19, the defund the police movement that came as a result of the murder of george floyd, and a rise in murders. But you're arbitrarily linking those events. My belief is that the murder spike has nothing to do with the police, and everything to do with covid and the economy. Violent crime was already spiking before the george floyd murder, for one thing. Cops do very little that prevents murder, they mostly just arrest people after them, for another. But that's just as arbitrary as your interpretation. Without data, we're just making up stories.
- newbamboo 5y ago
  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/76-000-california-inmates-be-eligible-earlier-release-n1266044 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/76-000-california-inmat...
  - geofft 5y ago
    Can you explain, in your own words, how that responds to the point above? The post above claims that homicide rates started to go up "during the previous administration" (i.e., before January 2021) / "in the summer of 2020." The article you're linking is from May 2021, and talking about decarceration, not homicide rates. That seems like it cannot possibly be evidence for the claim that decarceration causes increased homicide rates.
joombaga 5y ago
Is there evidence that avoiding a decrease in incarceration reduces homicide rates?
burkaman 5y ago
Rikers is mostly pretrial defendants. There are no convicted murderers there.
jzb 5y ago
This may shock you, but a lot of people aren't in jail for violent crimes - much less homicide. Drug offenses account for nearly half, according to <a href="https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp>this</a> https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen.... By all means, let's keep putting convicted murderers in prison. Arsonists, kidnappers, and a bunch of others. But we can probably forego a lot of drug offenses entirely.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  This is really, really misleading because you are looking only at Federal prisoners which is only ~10% of inmates (most being in state prisons). In the US, each state has its own penal code and things like murder or rape are generally not investigated or prosecuted by the Feds, so these prisoners do not end up in Federal prison. But drug trafficking that crosses state lines is, which is why drug traffickers (the vast majority of federal drug inmates are traffickers, not users) account for ~47% of Federal inmates. However just because they were convicted of drug trafficking doesn't mean they are non-violent offenders or did not commit any other crime. Moreover be aware that when you say "non-violent" crime, this includes things like breaking and entering, fraud, grand theft auto, bribery, witness tampering, etc. Very few people truly support not incarcerating a person because they only stole someone's life savings but didn't assault them. So what is the real data? It's tough to say because again each state has their own penal code and own statistics, but let's look at Texas: https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/documents/Statistical_Report_FY2019.pdf https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/documents/Statistical_Report_FY20... About 25% of those entering the correctional system Texas ("intakes") were convicted of a drug offense (see page 2 of the report), but because these offenders serve shorter sentences or are diverted out of prison, on average only 15% of the prison population at any point in time is there because of a drug offense (see page 10). Now I have no idea whether Texas is representative, perhaps other states are harsher on drug offenses, but I think it's safe to say that 15% is a reasonable upper bound.
makeitdouble 5y ago
The increase looks to me like a very small bump in comparison to the whole decade: https://dataunodc.un.org/content/data/homicide/homicide-rate https://dataunodc.un.org/content/data/homicide/homicide-rate During that time incarceration rate was mostly flat or slightly rising, so no.
geofft 5y ago
That would be a reasonable argument if decreasing incarceration increased homicides. But, first, as you point out, homicides are already increasing despite our current strategy. That's enough reason to ask whether it's working. Second, when you leave prison, you don't have many good options. You haven't been working, and you will have trouble finding a job. You might have joined a gang while inside to keep yourself safe. If you didn't, you at least know people who did, who can offer you ways to meet your basic needs (food and shelter) and you might get involved with them. Or you might simply turn to crimes like armed robbery where your specific goal isn't killing someone - and then you do. Especially in reply to your comment downthread that it's worth locking people up for lesser crimes because some of them go on to commit homicide - that seems like a good demonstration that locking them up now doesn't prevent them from committing homicide later, and I would wager that a good fraction of them wouldn't commit homicide if they hadn't been locked up. Think about people who make $438K/year or even a bit less. Some of them are cool; many of them are terrible people - greedy, lazy (they might support themselves from investments or inheritances), rude and manipulative, entitled. Very few of them have any particular desire, motivation, or so much as occasion to commit homicide.

gruez 5y ago

>The saddest part is that, if presented with this information (cost), a substantial portion of the U.S. populace would declare that we are treating prisoners too well Do people actually believe this? AFAIK most of the cost isn't because of amnesties (ie. "treating prisoners too well"), it's because of the various staff/services/equipment to deal with the prisoners.

kadoban 5y ago
I would be _shocked_ if less than 30% believe that or worse.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
goldcd 5y ago
That cost is quite incredible - that's $36.5k a month. So maybe each month: $5k for the cell $5k for facilities $5k for dine dining $10k each for 2 personal guards @$5k $5k for healthcare costs $5k car and driver on standby for potential court appearances and maybe a $50 per diem for discretionary spending. If the above isn't the case, does make you wonder where it is going.
- gruez 5y ago
  from TFA: >It costs $438,000 to jail one person there for one year. Of this $379,216 goes to personnel costs

spectramax 5y ago

Lot of discussion around here is knee jerk and not nuanced. Criminal law is complex and there are areas where it should be reformed and other areas where we need better enforcement. We've seen the criminal justice reform as they have instituted in San Francisco city: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343

crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
Punishment has been shown to be ineffective and ignorant of ancestral/intergenerational trauma being passed epigenetically. This is a way we're societally creating trauma and poisoning our gene pool. It's literally suicidal, from a long-term perspective.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > ancestral/intergenerational trauma being passed epigenetically Can you cite any sources for this?
  - crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
    https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00808/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.0080... This was the first thing that came up when I searched google for "epigenetic markers of trauma." It highlights childhood trauma. I'll go ahead and note that one aspect of incarceration culture is numerous children losing the presence of a caregiver. This is for sure a traumatic experience for many and a singular way the government is suicidal.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  You understand that you are literally pushing a form of Lysenkoism, right? There is no such thing as trauma being passed down epigenetically.
  - colinb 5y ago
    I think that this is less clear-cut than you might expect. [0] talks about "Dutch Hunger Winter Syndrome" as a heavily studied counterexample. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_inheritance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_i...

rsj_hn 5y ago

> Convince people that we need to reform prisons and jail fewer people. Well, why should it convince people of that? Perhaps people are in fact being rational. When a necessary social role becomes expensive, it makes sense to make it cheaper, not to stop doing it. Are you going to get rid of courts because it costs so much to bring someone to trial? We have a large prison population because we have a large criminal class in this country. 5 homicides per 100K, 370 violet assaults per 100K. Those are committed every year. With these statistics, having ~400 prisoners per 100K is what you would expect, if not on the low side, since we haven't even started talking about non-violent crime. If you disagree, which of these do you think should not get jail time? Alternately, find a way to prevent crime.

jzb 5y ago
"Alternately, find a way to prevent crime." Easy. Stop criminalizing use of drugs and sex work. End the bullshit "war on drugs." We have a huge criminal class in this country. Wage theft[1], for example, is a huge criminal enterprise but almost nothing is done to stop that. We could also start working on real gun control like other countries that don't have a huge firearm homicide problem. That won't mean we end homicides, of course, but it would reduce the problem. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/ https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  The problem with always thinking there are easy solutions is that you never solve anything. OK, we release all the drug traffickers who are only guilty of that and no other crimes. Congratulations, you've reduced the jail population by 5%. Oh wait, an even bigger group of people now fill the prisons, but for theft. Oops. But if we free all those millions of imprisoned sex workers, that will solve the problem, right? Lol. Now that you've done all the performative ineffectual stuff, you still have the expensive prisons to worry about and no fix. So what do you - change the subject and move on to provide a facile solution for some other problem? I thought so.