4 ms·

Every day I find new reason to believe the American penal system unconscionable. Not only is slavery permitted, the US is the subject of the ire of the United

Every day I find new reason to believe the American penal system unconscionable. Not only is slavery permitted, the US is the subject of the ire of the United Nations over it (the ILO, specifically). For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. Charging prisoners for their time there. And one of the highest incarceration levels and worst recidivism rates in the world. What exactly is the point of any of this?

ryan93 4y ago
- arcticbull 4y ago
  The reality is that there are so many crimes in the United States that the set itself is uncountable. There have been a number of attempts to count. I guarantee you that you have, today alone, accrued enough legal liability to put you away for the rest of your life. Part of what makes this difficult to even count in the first place are bills like the Lacey act which makes it a felony for you to violate any other countries fish and wildlife laws - if you ever came into possession of a dead lobster less than 6 inches long for any reason - felony. What happens is the folks who end up in prison haven't accrued any more of less liability - instead they drew attention. If you'd like to learn more I recommend Three Felonies a Day. [1] I guess the question I have for you is why aren't you in prison now? Why did you choose to commit all those crimes, and what makes you exempt? Further if your argument is then 'well I shouldn't be in prison because I didn't get caught' - now you're no longer arguing that these people shouldn't have 'done crimes' your argument is they should have been better at it? [1] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
  - ryan93 4y ago
    I haven't committed any violent crimes nor have most people. A substantial number of prisoners have. In fact countless murderous and rapist criminals go free.
    - greedo 4y ago
      Countless murderous(sic)...go free. Of course that's just your opinion, with no link to back it up. I tend to follow the information where I see police abuse, the abuse of rights by the courts/prosecutors, etc etc. You want to blow your mind? Follow a guy named Greg Doucette on the bird app. He routinely lists the violations of civil rights by authorities. It might open your mind.
      - ryan93 4y ago
        Well with murders there are bodies. It’s the easiest crime to see the gap between incarceration and the injustice of freely roaming murderers. Much harder to convict on rape so you can imagine how many more are out there free!
  - gruez 4y ago
    >What happens is the folks who end up in prison haven't accrued any more of less liability - instead they drew attention. >If you'd like to learn more I recommend Three Felonies a Day. [1] It's hard to take that book seriously when the book fails to state how the average person actually commits felonies a day. According to the top critical review[1], it doesn't seem like most of the people in prisons are because of the reasons listed in the book. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R29XT1DSN5VBWK https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R29XT1DSN5VBWK
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      I'm sorry but I'm not going to take the word of one randomly-selected Amazon reviewer at face value just because they're a verified purchaser.
      - gruez 4y ago
        Fair point, but I'm also not going to read a 392 page book just because a hacker news commenter recommended it. The title of "three felonies a day" certainly seems provocative and unexpected. It seems at least somewhat fair for someone making such an outrageous claim to be responsible for substantiating it. Why don't you furnish some sort of review/summary that lists what the three felonies are?
- standardUser 4y ago
  First of all, conceding that 5% of people in jail could be wrongfully imprisoned should be MORE than enough reason to want to tear the entire system down. Second, many of these "crimes" had no victim, so maybe it's not the people living their lives who are at fault, but rather an overzealous government who imprisons otherwise free people for doing no harm other than some abstract "moral" rule-breaking.
  - ryan93 4y ago
    Thats one of the worst things about these criminals. If there were dramatically fewer crimes it'd be easier to find out who is innocent. Or devote more resources to it.
    - standardUser 4y ago
      Imagine if we decriminalized every "crime" that didn't have a victim. We might actually be able to prevent more real crime, like violent crime and sexual assault and large-scale theft and fraud!
      - ryan93 4y ago
        A majority of prisoners are in for violent crime; or committed a violent crime and pled down. IF more resources were devoted to fighting heinous crimes prison populations would increase since many murders and to a much larger extent rape go unsolved. Not to mention fraud and child abuse.
        standardUser 4y ago
        A lot of that violence is the obvious and inevitable side effect of the government pretending it can ban certain marketplaces. Much of that violence disappears if you stop forcing people to conduct business as outlaws.
- hollywood_court 4y ago
  I believe it’s reasonable to assume that far more than 5% of people behind bars are actually innocent. I was raised by two career long LEOs and if even a small fraction of other LEOs were as bad as my folks, it would be safe to assume that there are a lot of innocent people behind bars.
  - sh4rks 4y ago
    I'd be surprised if it was more than 1%. But getting actual data is impossible of course.
    - hollywood_court 4y ago
      You’d be surprised if more than 1% of the US’s prison population is innocent?
      - ben_w 4y ago
        Given what I keep hearing about laws in general, I assume almost everyone is guilty of enough stuff that if you could prove it and the sentences were consecutive, they'd die in prison. But at the same time, I'd be surprised if less than 5% of convicts had done the specific crime they were sentenced for even under the assumption of the entire law and justice system being fair, impartial, and skilled. (I don't have a word for what I am: I don't believe in anarchy, but I would radically liberalise as much as possible. I would also wildly reduce the punishments for most of the remaining laws are enforced so that perfect enforcement wasn't completely bonkers, and then make enforcement perfect. Normally I see people aiming for one or the other, perfect enforcement or liberalisation, not both).
- everfree 4y ago
  Hmm... The USA has a six times higher incarceration rate than Canada or the UK. Are violent crime rates really six times higher there?
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Probably yes.
  - yywwbbn 4y ago
    Actually almost... E.g. the murder rate in the US is about 5x higher than in the UK, in Canada it’s “only” 2.5x lower, though.
barkingcat 4y ago
Making money of course! Once you realise that the idea of jail is to make money for the people who run the jails it makes sense. It's not about public safety or rehab or reintegration into society. It was always about making money. Jail operators have every incentive to keep inmates "dangerous" and encourage them to rescind once they get out, because then the prison gets a new customer. The only group who can "directly compete" with the prison industry is the death penalty industry. Because when an inmate is sent to death sentence, they can no longer be a customer for the prison industry.
gruez 4y ago
>[...] For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. [...] >What exactly is the point of any of this? At least for that there's a pretty simple non-nefarious explanation. The state wants to outsource their prisons/jails to some private entity. They agree to pay the private entity per prisoner housed. However, since the private entity needs to invest upfront cash to build the facility, they want some sort of assurance that the demand will materialize and they won't be left with a facility that's only 50% used, hence the minimum occupancy clause. I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations. I agree this causes skewed incentives (ie. the marginal cost of imprisoning someone can potentially be zero), but if you're deciding to lock someone up or not hinges on whether it costs $30k or $0, you probably have other issues. If a convict is dangerous then he should be locked up, if he's not he shouldn't be. Money shouldn't play a factor in this.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > At least for that there's a pretty simple non-nefarious explanation. The state wants to outsource their prisons/jails to some private entity. They agree to pay the private entity per prisoner housed. That sounds pretty nefarious to me because the state has a duty of care for its citizens - of which this is a clear and flagrant abdication. > I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations. Probably worth not speculating. [1] At the end of the day this is the same thing - the state should be paying less when there's less crime. It should be incentivized to stop crime from happening in the first place. It should be spending that money not on guaranteeing profits for corporations but instead on programs that reduce criminality. The state should feel the burden of higher criminality and reap the reward of lowering it. [1] http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/Criminal-Lockup-Quota,-In-the-Public-Interest,-9.13.pdf http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/Criminal-Lockup-...
unstatusthequo 4y ago
Oh come on now. There are MUCH worse prison and criminal justice systems. Let me name a few where I’d not want to be: 1) all of Russia; 2) Sabaneta Prison, Maracaibo, Venezuela; 3) North Korean Camp 22; 4) Diyarbakir Prison, Turkey; 5) Gitarama Prison, Rwanda; 6) Gldani Prison, Georgia; 7) Ciudad Barrios Prison, El Salvador There are many more. These above make the pay to stay seem tame in terms of impact.
- superchroma 4y ago
  It's not a race to the bottom. There are MUCH better ones as well, and maybe we should be striving to be enlightened instead of being better than a couple of shitholes.
- otikik 4y ago
  It sounds like you are saying that since the US system is not worse than Rwanda, it doesn’t need to change.
superchroma 4y ago
Appeasing greed and a notion of vengeance. The Americans I personally know are quite punitive, and do believe in an eye for an eye, which is odd because they are also Christians (it's honestly unsurprising, they're just out of practice, I guess). Generally I wonder if people comprehend that prisons should be (for the majority of inmates) intended to reform people; that is, to make them better and show them a better path. I'm not clear how people think throwing a bunch of criminals together in a featureless pen to lift weights, fight and fraternize is going to achieve anything. If anything, these people warrant more social investment than the average person, with the intent of educating them and building honest skills in them, so that they have new opportunities that they didn't have previously, when they made their mistakes the first time around. I guess this sentiment is seen as sappy, unrealistic and saccharine, and of course socialist. Of course it has to be paired with having decent socialized healthcare and education, but I think we have seen in practice how the contemporary American school of thought for prisons does not work, and we have seen in other countries what is possible, and how reformist and sympathetic attitudes to incarceration, combined with strong social support generally can produce better outcomes in regards to crime.
- DavidPeiffer 4y ago
  > Generally I wonder if people comprehend that prisons should be (for the majority of inmates) intended to reform people; that is, to make them better and show them a better path. I tried bringing up this line of reasoning one time with two coworkers I was close with. Both had the attitude of "why should I be paying for these criminals to be comfortable and get an education and stuff while I'm working and supporting a family and not committing crimes". A roof over their head and 3 really basic meals per day was all they really wanted to provide. "Sit in the corner and think about what you did" is a method for punishing little kids, but my coworkers couldn't be convinced we probably need to adapt our strategies for adults.
- greedo 4y ago
  One of the ideals and goals of the Progressive Movement in the early 20th Century was prisoner rehabilitation. But the US is just too punitive in nature to ever want to rehabilitate prisoners. We don't want to help non-criminals, so why on Earth would we want to help those who have made mistakes? As Articbull mentioned, slavery is permitted in the Constitution for prisons. So even our noble eradication of slavery after the Civil War was incomplete. And surprise, surprise, what population group is over-represented in prison? I sent a friend a link to a YT video showing the prison conditions in Norway. He thought that was nuts. How will they learn the error of their ways if they don't suffer? Even trying to appeal to practical concerns like recidivism rates doesn't work. To the cold-hearted, that just proves that these felons are incorrigible and deserve to be locked away forever.
superchroma 4y ago
Also, don't forget that in Alabama, there's no air conditioning in the prison, and prisoners are left to swelter.
bdowling 4y ago
> For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. That kind of clause is common for a supply contract (e.g., Buyer promises to purchase goods/services from supplier, minimum order of X units per year.). If a state purchased more units from a prison service provider than it needed, then I can imagine that state trying to re-sell the services to a neighboring state, but I can’t imagine them locking up more people so that they don’t have to pay for unused services. If that happens then a state should just negotiate its contracts differently in the future. The other stuff I agree with you on.
erdos4d 4y ago

ryan93 4y ago

arcticbull 4y ago
The reality is that there are so many crimes in the United States that the set itself is uncountable. There have been a number of attempts to count. I guarantee you that you have, today alone, accrued enough legal liability to put you away for the rest of your life. Part of what makes this difficult to even count in the first place are bills like the Lacey act which makes it a felony for you to violate any other countries fish and wildlife laws - if you ever came into possession of a dead lobster less than 6 inches long for any reason - felony. What happens is the folks who end up in prison haven't accrued any more of less liability - instead they drew attention. If you'd like to learn more I recommend Three Felonies a Day. [1] I guess the question I have for you is why aren't you in prison now? Why did you choose to commit all those crimes, and what makes you exempt? Further if your argument is then 'well I shouldn't be in prison because I didn't get caught' - now you're no longer arguing that these people shouldn't have 'done crimes' your argument is they should have been better at it? [1] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
- ryan93 4y ago
  I haven't committed any violent crimes nor have most people. A substantial number of prisoners have. In fact countless murderous and rapist criminals go free.
  - greedo 4y ago
    Countless murderous(sic)...go free. Of course that's just your opinion, with no link to back it up. I tend to follow the information where I see police abuse, the abuse of rights by the courts/prosecutors, etc etc. You want to blow your mind? Follow a guy named Greg Doucette on the bird app. He routinely lists the violations of civil rights by authorities. It might open your mind.
    - ryan93 4y ago
      Well with murders there are bodies. It’s the easiest crime to see the gap between incarceration and the injustice of freely roaming murderers. Much harder to convict on rape so you can imagine how many more are out there free!
- gruez 4y ago
  >What happens is the folks who end up in prison haven't accrued any more of less liability - instead they drew attention. >If you'd like to learn more I recommend Three Felonies a Day. [1] It's hard to take that book seriously when the book fails to state how the average person actually commits felonies a day. According to the top critical review[1], it doesn't seem like most of the people in prisons are because of the reasons listed in the book. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R29XT1DSN5VBWK https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R29XT1DSN5VBWK
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    I'm sorry but I'm not going to take the word of one randomly-selected Amazon reviewer at face value just because they're a verified purchaser.
    - gruez 4y ago
      Fair point, but I'm also not going to read a 392 page book just because a hacker news commenter recommended it. The title of "three felonies a day" certainly seems provocative and unexpected. It seems at least somewhat fair for someone making such an outrageous claim to be responsible for substantiating it. Why don't you furnish some sort of review/summary that lists what the three felonies are?
standardUser 4y ago
First of all, conceding that 5% of people in jail could be wrongfully imprisoned should be MORE than enough reason to want to tear the entire system down. Second, many of these "crimes" had no victim, so maybe it's not the people living their lives who are at fault, but rather an overzealous government who imprisons otherwise free people for doing no harm other than some abstract "moral" rule-breaking.
- ryan93 4y ago
  Thats one of the worst things about these criminals. If there were dramatically fewer crimes it'd be easier to find out who is innocent. Or devote more resources to it.
  - standardUser 4y ago
    Imagine if we decriminalized every "crime" that didn't have a victim. We might actually be able to prevent more real crime, like violent crime and sexual assault and large-scale theft and fraud!
    - ryan93 4y ago
      A majority of prisoners are in for violent crime; or committed a violent crime and pled down. IF more resources were devoted to fighting heinous crimes prison populations would increase since many murders and to a much larger extent rape go unsolved. Not to mention fraud and child abuse.
      - standardUser 4y ago
        A lot of that violence is the obvious and inevitable side effect of the government pretending it can ban certain marketplaces. Much of that violence disappears if you stop forcing people to conduct business as outlaws.
hollywood_court 4y ago
I believe it’s reasonable to assume that far more than 5% of people behind bars are actually innocent. I was raised by two career long LEOs and if even a small fraction of other LEOs were as bad as my folks, it would be safe to assume that there are a lot of innocent people behind bars.
- sh4rks 4y ago
  I'd be surprised if it was more than 1%. But getting actual data is impossible of course.
  - hollywood_court 4y ago
    You’d be surprised if more than 1% of the US’s prison population is innocent?
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Given what I keep hearing about laws in general, I assume almost everyone is guilty of enough stuff that if you could prove it and the sentences were consecutive, they'd die in prison. But at the same time, I'd be surprised if less than 5% of convicts had done the specific crime they were sentenced for even under the assumption of the entire law and justice system being fair, impartial, and skilled. (I don't have a word for what I am: I don't believe in anarchy, but I would radically liberalise as much as possible. I would also wildly reduce the punishments for most of the remaining laws are enforced so that perfect enforcement wasn't completely bonkers, and then make enforcement perfect. Normally I see people aiming for one or the other, perfect enforcement or liberalisation, not both).
everfree 4y ago
Hmm... The USA has a six times higher incarceration rate than Canada or the UK. Are violent crime rates really six times higher there?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Probably yes.
- yywwbbn 4y ago
  Actually almost... E.g. the murder rate in the US is about 5x higher than in the UK, in Canada it’s “only” 2.5x lower, though.

barkingcat 4y ago

Making money of course! Once you realise that the idea of jail is to make money for the people who run the jails it makes sense. It's not about public safety or rehab or reintegration into society. It was always about making money. Jail operators have every incentive to keep inmates "dangerous" and encourage them to rescind once they get out, because then the prison gets a new customer. The only group who can "directly compete" with the prison industry is the death penalty industry. Because when an inmate is sent to death sentence, they can no longer be a customer for the prison industry.

gruez 4y ago

>[...] For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. [...] >What exactly is the point of any of this? At least for that there's a pretty simple non-nefarious explanation. The state wants to outsource their prisons/jails to some private entity. They agree to pay the private entity per prisoner housed. However, since the private entity needs to invest upfront cash to build the facility, they want some sort of assurance that the demand will materialize and they won't be left with a facility that's only 50% used, hence the minimum occupancy clause. I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations. I agree this causes skewed incentives (ie. the marginal cost of imprisoning someone can potentially be zero), but if you're deciding to lock someone up or not hinges on whether it costs $30k or $0, you probably have other issues. If a convict is dangerous then he should be locked up, if he's not he shouldn't be. Money shouldn't play a factor in this.

arcticbull 4y ago
> At least for that there's a pretty simple non-nefarious explanation. The state wants to outsource their prisons/jails to some private entity. They agree to pay the private entity per prisoner housed. That sounds pretty nefarious to me because the state has a duty of care for its citizens - of which this is a clear and flagrant abdication. > I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations. Probably worth not speculating. [1] At the end of the day this is the same thing - the state should be paying less when there's less crime. It should be incentivized to stop crime from happening in the first place. It should be spending that money not on guaranteeing profits for corporations but instead on programs that reduce criminality. The state should feel the burden of higher criminality and reap the reward of lowering it. [1] http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/Criminal-Lockup-Quota,-In-the-Public-Interest,-9.13.pdf http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/Criminal-Lockup-...

unstatusthequo 4y ago

Oh come on now. There are MUCH worse prison and criminal justice systems. Let me name a few where I’d not want to be: 1) all of Russia; 2) Sabaneta Prison, Maracaibo, Venezuela; 3) North Korean Camp 22; 4) Diyarbakir Prison, Turkey; 5) Gitarama Prison, Rwanda; 6) Gldani Prison, Georgia; 7) Ciudad Barrios Prison, El Salvador There are many more. These above make the pay to stay seem tame in terms of impact.

superchroma 4y ago
It's not a race to the bottom. There are MUCH better ones as well, and maybe we should be striving to be enlightened instead of being better than a couple of shitholes.
otikik 4y ago
It sounds like you are saying that since the US system is not worse than Rwanda, it doesn’t need to change.

superchroma 4y ago

Appeasing greed and a notion of vengeance. The Americans I personally know are quite punitive, and do believe in an eye for an eye, which is odd because they are also Christians (it's honestly unsurprising, they're just out of practice, I guess). Generally I wonder if people comprehend that prisons should be (for the majority of inmates) intended to reform people; that is, to make them better and show them a better path. I'm not clear how people think throwing a bunch of criminals together in a featureless pen to lift weights, fight and fraternize is going to achieve anything. If anything, these people warrant more social investment than the average person, with the intent of educating them and building honest skills in them, so that they have new opportunities that they didn't have previously, when they made their mistakes the first time around. I guess this sentiment is seen as sappy, unrealistic and saccharine, and of course socialist. Of course it has to be paired with having decent socialized healthcare and education, but I think we have seen in practice how the contemporary American school of thought for prisons does not work, and we have seen in other countries what is possible, and how reformist and sympathetic attitudes to incarceration, combined with strong social support generally can produce better outcomes in regards to crime.

DavidPeiffer 4y ago
> Generally I wonder if people comprehend that prisons should be (for the majority of inmates) intended to reform people; that is, to make them better and show them a better path. I tried bringing up this line of reasoning one time with two coworkers I was close with. Both had the attitude of "why should I be paying for these criminals to be comfortable and get an education and stuff while I'm working and supporting a family and not committing crimes". A roof over their head and 3 really basic meals per day was all they really wanted to provide. "Sit in the corner and think about what you did" is a method for punishing little kids, but my coworkers couldn't be convinced we probably need to adapt our strategies for adults.
greedo 4y ago
One of the ideals and goals of the Progressive Movement in the early 20th Century was prisoner rehabilitation. But the US is just too punitive in nature to ever want to rehabilitate prisoners. We don't want to help non-criminals, so why on Earth would we want to help those who have made mistakes? As Articbull mentioned, slavery is permitted in the Constitution for prisons. So even our noble eradication of slavery after the Civil War was incomplete. And surprise, surprise, what population group is over-represented in prison? I sent a friend a link to a YT video showing the prison conditions in Norway. He thought that was nuts. How will they learn the error of their ways if they don't suffer? Even trying to appeal to practical concerns like recidivism rates doesn't work. To the cold-hearted, that just proves that these felons are incorrigible and deserve to be locked away forever.

superchroma 4y ago

Also, don't forget that in Alabama, there's no air conditioning in the prison, and prisoners are left to swelter.

bdowling 4y ago

> For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. That kind of clause is common for a supply contract (e.g., Buyer promises to purchase goods/services from supplier, minimum order of X units per year.). If a state purchased more units from a prison service provider than it needed, then I can imagine that state trying to re-sell the services to a neighboring state, but I can’t imagine them locking up more people so that they don’t have to pay for unused services. If that happens then a state should just negotiate its contracts differently in the future. The other stuff I agree with you on.

erdos4d 4y ago