16 ms·

The Caging of America

279 points by davux 15y ago

foxylad 15y ago
As I age, I realise that time speeds by faster. A year in prison now would a much smaller punishment than when I was in my teens, when a year seemed like forever. Perhaps we need an age-related transform to prison sentences.
- hvass 15y ago
  Engage in novel activities - time "speeding up" is pretty common as you age. Read about it here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122322542 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1223225...
- crusso 15y ago
  Why would we want to take the perceptions of the criminal into account when sentencing?
- berntb 15y ago
  It is totally opposite, a year is much more precious to me now. Count the number of good years you have left, with the health+energy to do what you want. I heard this week that the knees are failing on a relative of a friend, which is my age. When you were young, the years stretched in front of you, endlessly. These days I think things like "Japan is so fascinating that I would love to live there a while, but I just can't use a work year to learn the language and the writing system. I need that time for other things."
jacquesm 15y ago
6 million people is roughly the working age population of some of the smaller countries in Western Europe. Thinking about the massive waste of resources and the cost in terms of human lives extinguished (6 million people in prison translates to ~85,000 peoples lives wiped out every year, and that's only the inmates not the guards and whoever else is involved in the system) is instantly depressing. Gruesome. Here is a good graphic to illustrate how bad it really is: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PRISON_GRAPHIC.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...
- jerf 15y ago
  One should probably subtract off a more average incarceration rate first. There is, alas, a subset of people who are behind bars because if they aren't, they truly will net an even larger loss to society.
  - smokeyj 15y ago
    I wonder how many non-violent criminals are arrested for every 'truly dangerous' menace to society.
    - jonnathanson 15y ago
      From what I've read and heard, one of the biggest contributions to prison population growth has been the advent of the predicate felony ("three-strikes") laws in recent decades. These days, incarceration is like compounding interest. Get locked up once, and the next time you so much as look the wrong way at the wrong time, you're back in prison serving an even more severe sentence. In this way, someone with a string of nonviolent offenses does the same time as a violent criminal. Prisons also serve to harden the imprisoned -- helping to ensure our country's record-high recidivism rates. Prison conditions are brutal. Gangs run daily life, and failure to join a gang can mean rape, severe injury, or even death. Of course, joining a prison gang means an indoctrination into the world of hard-core violence and reprisal. It's pretty hard to go to prison a relatively nonviolent person and emerge the same way. Another big trend over the last 30-odd years has been a marked shift in society's -- and our justice system's -- philosophical view of the prison itself. Many years ago, prisons were seen as places to reform criminals -- not just to lock them away for a certain number of years, but to adapt them to a successful return to society upon completion of those years. These days, reform and adaptation aren't on the agenda. (Hell, good luck trying to find a stable job in post-release society with a conviction on your record). Modern prison is purely about locking people away and treating them as hopeless causes. More often than not, that hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be fair, some people in our society really are lost causes. There are violent psychopaths rotting in prison who should probably stay there and rot. But today's criminal justice system paints all offenders with that brush. Perhaps I'm a softie, but I choose to believe that a significant fraction of the 6 million is not beyond redemption.
sliverstorm 15y ago
I can't help but think that, given this quote: More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. The first step is simple & straightforward. Fix education (or what is preventing them from getting an education) first, then tackle other problems with prisons.
- hariananth 15y ago
  Sure, education is a great indicator for incarceration. But "fixing" education is neither simple nor straightforward.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    Certainly education is not a simple problem, but if it is the root cause of incarceration then the simple answer for incarceration is fix education, no?
    - anigbrowl 15y ago
      Yes, but it's not the root cause. it's a factor in criminality, but criminality and incarceration are imperfectly correlated.
      - sliverstorm 15y ago
        Imperfectly correlated is somewhat of a misnomer, IMO. Nearly every observed correlation is "imperfect". Hell, that's basically what "correlation" implies.
        anigbrowl 15y ago
        Poorly correlated then. Lots of people are incarcerated for things most people consider inappropriate because the criminal justice system is so awash in perverse incentives.
    - tsotha 15y ago
cturner 15y ago
How would a hacker deal with solitary?
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Poorly, I imagine. Hackers like to think of themselves as loners who don't need anybody, but they still interact with many people day in and day out via the internet.
  - cturner 15y ago
    I sometimes think about the games that I'd play, the structures I'd create, exercises. I'd suck at it. I do wonder about it though, not irregularly.
- unimpressive 15y ago
  My guess is by going insane. Once your perception of the state of reality lets you do the things you want to do you'll likely stop noticing the padded walls.
- rdl 15y ago
  I've spent 3-6 months in places where I didn't see another person, but I always had the option of leaving, and I had the Internet, which makes it entirely different from prison. I've done 2-3 weeks with no Internet and no other people who spoke English (and who I didn't really interact with beyond them bringing me food/water), and it wasn't too bad -- I read books and I'm confident I could do a month alone in a reasonable room with just books and paper and enjoy it (the only cost being the forgone opportunity to do other stuff, but it would be overall enjoyable) -- catching up on a lot of fiction, history/biography, and tech reading. 6-12 months with a computer, preloaded with development tools and books, but no live Internet access, would be fine too. I really don't understand the people who think a 3-5 year mars mission with only a few other people would be that psychologically difficult.
  - msrpotus 15y ago
    But prison wardens don't let inmates read whatever they want. Do you think you could survive reading only what the warden would let you read (and doing only what they permit you to)? I don't know about you but I think I'd struggle to survive more than a day or two.
cgrubb 15y ago
Many people reading this will fail to realize that "correctional supervision" includes about 4M who are on probation or parole. Horrible article.
- calibraxis 15y ago
  US prisons/jails: 2,266,800 adults in 2010 Stalin gulags: 1,727,970 people in 1953 (I am no expert on the Gulag system. Whatever the case is, it's uncontroversial that the US is the world's leading jailer of its own populace.) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Brief_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Brief_history)
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    1.7m in Gulag / 108m in Russia = 1.6% incarceration rate Pop # taken from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia 2.3m in prison / 312m in USA = 0.74% incarceration rate in the US
    - ssp 15y ago
      The Soviet Union had a population of 189 million people in 1953 according to Wolfram Alpha.
      - yummyfajitas 15y ago
        For an incarceration rate of 0.9%. This also assumes the Soviet Union sent everyone to the Gulag, and had no local jails, etc. I don't know if this is actually true, can anyone comment?
        arethuza 15y ago
        I believe that during the height of the Gulag, local jails were mainly used as interrogation and storage facilities for people who would eventually end up in the camps. Certainly the camps held both those convicted of political and criminal offences. I can recommend both Anne Applebaum's excellent "Gulag - A History" and, of course, Solzhenitsyn's incredible "Gulag Archipelago": http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a-history/ http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a-history/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago
cullenking 15y ago
A close family member of mine was just arrested for possession of marijuana. They allegedly had a sizable amount, more than your normal 1/8th of an ounce, but nothing obscene. Due to a felony 10 years ago when they were a teen, they are looking at 5-10 years. Granted, Oregon is known to go easy on pot offenses, however even 6 months in jail is ridiculous. The real cost however, is not having their prior felony expunged - it will be another 10 years before that is a possibility, well into middle age for this person :( Try finding yourself a job with a felony record. If you can, it is probably paying a wage that will doubtless encourage the same illegal behavior that landed you a felony in the first place. When your only hope the rest of your life won't be utter shit is getting off on a technicality, something is messed up.
- thematt 15y ago
  How will his wage doubtlessly encourage him to engage in illegal behavior? I've worked plenty of overtime and minimum wage jobs and at no point did that ever cause me to consider committing a felony or engaging in illegal behavior. Your friend sounds like he's in the situation he's in because of choices he made, not because society did something wrong.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    It's a bit more complicated than that - when someone works under unjust conditions to make ends meet because of a law perceived to be unjust, the commitment towards respecting other laws is lessened.
  - lemmsjid 15y ago
    As someone who has a wrongfully convicted, non-violent felon in the family, I can tell you it's easy to underestimate how difficult life becomes when you have a felony record. Landlords won't let you rent from them. Most employers won't hire you. Other employers will hire you, and then fire you later because the boss decided he wants to be tougher on crime. If suspected of anything else (or associated with anyone else suspected of anything), you are harassed by the cops in ways that I would have heretofore thought illegal (and that I since discovered are generally accepted, even though a lot of people personally thinks they're wrong). And this is when you go for the bottom-rung jobs, and the crappy apartments--forget about aspiring for more. All of this hardens and solidifies one's identity as a criminal--if you don't have a particular fortitude of character (many people claim they have this fortitude in spite of it not having been tested, and who knows, maybe certain ones do, but it is clear to me that most people don't), being treated in a particular way by society--especially a supremely negative way--makes you feel that way. When enough people treat you like scum, you feel like scum. Seeking out people who understand where you're coming from and won't judge you, you gravitate towards people with similar pasts. Seeking prosperity in a society that treats you as a second class (more like last-class) citizen, the opportunities in front of you range from dismal, cheap but legal to risky, remunerative but illegal. So no--the minimum wage itself doesn't encourage crime--it's the treatment that comes with it. It's like the "college freshman poverty" meme, where college students talk about how poor they were because they can't afford anything but Ramen. While true in the literal sense (they don't have any money in the bank), it's patently false in a real sense--when they hold a minimum wage job, they're at the bottom of their almost inevitable rise towards middle class. When a convicted felon holds a minimum wage job, he's hanging on to it by a thread, simultaneously reminded of how lucky he is to be flipping burgers and how he's scum of the earth. Now, stack this treatment up against the actual offense. You're walking down the street, carrying a few ounces of weed--you know, the stuff that pop stars openly discuss smoking, and that politicians now openly admit to smoking (in the past). You know you're being stupid--but hey, caution to the wind--maybe your father just died and you aren't caring much about your own future right now. Maybe you just lost your job and everything seems horrible. Maybe you're just another dumb young adult who thinks they're invincible. Regardless, you aren't hurting anyone. Heck, you're less dangerous than the timid but excited driver who guns his motor on the highway and breaks the speed limit after he's checked that there's no other cars in sight (after all, maybe he doesn't see the guy who's about to run across the street). You've known dozens and dozens of pot smokers and never seen one get arrested (the chances are quite small). You've smoked pot with dozens of people and never seen one overdose or have adverse affects. Regardless, you drew the short draw, and suddenly you're arrested and railroaded through a court system designed to efficiently process and incarcerate offenders--suddenly you realize that the arresting cop isn't Andy Griffith, ready to say, "Aww, Billy, I know you're a good kid, run along now and don't do it again."--instead there's a steady march of public defenders, prosecutors, judges, etc., who won't look you in the eye, whose main interest is in extracting a plea bargain so they don't have to waste time on a court date. This is the narrative that goes through my mind when people prat about people making bad choices. There's bad choices (smoking pot, breaking the speed limit, creative tax deductions) and then there's BAD choices (rape, murder). So yes--society did something wrong--society KNOWS that people make bad choices in the first category (limited harm), and such choices are imminently forgivable, but due to a toxic mixture of lobbying, inertia, corruption, and ignorance, throws the book at those people, ignoring the torturous harm we're inflicting.
chefsurfing 15y ago
Reading this reminds me of this quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller and another darker vision: "For if you [the rulers] suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves [outlaws] and then punish them." Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia, Book 1 Here's an idea for a frighteningly ambitions startup: Kill the prison-industrial complex! How? Fight crime! It costs a lot of taxpayer money and social wealth to keep things the way they are. Ostensibly the goal is to keep people safe from criminals and reduce crime opportunities. A friend of mine was mugged on the street for his iPhone last night. He was stabbed in the leg when he fought back (mistake but he's ok thankfully). I wonder if a few high-res web-cams on the street would have kept the attackers at bay? How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state? Found these startup ideas tonight: idea: turn my webcam into a security cam [1] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-turn-my-webcam-into-a-security-cam http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-turn-my-webcam-into-a-s... idea: millions of sensors / millions of surveys [2] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors-millions-of-surveys http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors-mil...
- icebraining 15y ago
  If London is any example, cameras don't actually work that well: a study of London's widespread use of CCTV cameras, found that for every 1,000 cameras installed, only one crime has been solved. On top of that, when faced with a crime, the CCTV cameras are rarely that useful. The report found that CCTV cameras were used to catch just 8 out of 269 suspected robbers. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090827/0410406023.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090827/0410406023.shtml This is without mentioning the privacy aspects; I find it rather worrying how people seem to accept constant surveillance so easily.
- rogerbinns 15y ago
  > How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state? Britain has been doing the experiment for you and is generally regarded as the most surveilled western society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingdo... Sensationalist article by the Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock-figures-reveal-Britain-CCTV-camera-14-people--China.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock-figure... Some articles on the resulting (in)effectiveness of having the cameras: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CCTV-cameras-to-solve-just-one-crime-Met-Police-admits.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CC... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/6083476/CCTV-cameras-If-they-do-not-stop-crime-or-catch-criminals-what-are-they-for.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/6083476/CC... http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/crb97-005.pdf http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/crb97-005.pdf (Warning: PDF)
m0th87 15y ago
The article makes the good point that reform won't happen with one piece of sweeping legislation, but rather with patchwork improvements to the system. What would you do to reduce incarceration rates? I would start with a reform of drug laws inspired by Portugal [1]. We're not sure if the same solution can scale to the size of the US, but we can introduce reform incrementally, starting with the decriminalization of Marijuana. (Which I think most would find agreeable.) Education reform is important too. Obama is pushing reform to get states to increase the age of required education to 18 [2]. This sounds like a good idea on paper...we'll have to see how it pans out. His push for increase utilization of community colleges also makes sense, since they provide a decent education for the increasing number of Americans who can't afford college. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/obama-states-should-require-kids-stay-in-school-until-18-or-graduation/2012/01/24/gIQAPg63OQ_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/obama-...
- protomyth 15y ago
  Technically, the President can move Marijuna off the schedule 1 list with a signature. That itself would change a lot of things. // for the truly weird look at the Cotton Lobby's effect on mj laws
  - duncanj 15y ago
    IANAL, but I think marijuana is specifically mentioned in the U.S. Code and it would take more than an executive order to change the law. While it might be removed from "Schedule I", that would just make Schedule I incomplete. (21 USC 841)
    - protomyth 15y ago
      Last time I checked, it was an executive order to move a drug from schedule 1 to 2 (has medical use).
      - 15y ago
dmg8 15y ago
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. If the New York Times is to be believed, the crime rate has nearly halved since 1980 [1]. Obviously it needn't follow that the increase in the prison population caused this, but the author's unwillingness to even explore the idea seems awfully incurious. [1] See the "In the U.S." tab on this graphic http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PRISON_GRAPHIC.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...
- ReadEvalPost 15y ago
  It's addressed on the second paragraph of page 5. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison.
  - tlb 15y ago
    NYC is not insulated from the rest of the country, which did lock up dramatically more people. As neighboring cities and states imprisoned large numbers of people, it would have an effect on NYC street crime.
    - rhizome 15y ago
      That's the kind of Derridean approach to Criminal Justice that got us to where we are now. You're saying the same thing, though: a cities crime rate is entirely dependent on the policies of surrounding cities and not on itself. Think about what you're suggesting: even if NYC experienced a crime drop while also housing fewer inmates, it's only because their own policy was ineffectual and the surrounding cities picked up the slack (or something).
mcantelon 15y ago
The fundamental problem is that there is a whole industry, and corresponding political lobby, built on incarcerating people.
- rhizome 15y ago
  To be sure, there are multiple problems.
- samstave 15y ago
  I nthe land of the free, there is an entire industry built around destroying freedom. Fuck the prison industry. Every single politician who cohorts with the prison lobby should be called out and shot. Yes. Shot.
  - nodemaker 15y ago
    Ironically, shooting people is one of the activities that freedom is taken away for.
  - nodemaker 15y ago
    Ironically, shooting people is one of the activities that freedom is taken away for.
eliam 15y ago
Awesome TED talk touching on similar topics. I would recommend if you haven't watched/heard it yet. http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice.html http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_abo...
pshc 15y ago
Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” [...] Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry. Funny how this comes up again and again in so many different contexts. Minor bottom-up tweaks are more effective than top-down policies. In one of Joel's classic articles he talks about how small UI tweaks to forum software completely change the course of a community. Tiny changes in economic incentives have massive effects. It's a great lesson to be applied in so many fields.
tokenadult 15y ago
Other comments asked how incarceration rates could be reduced in the United States. One way would be for many of the forty-some other states to follow the example of the few states, including Minnesota, which have set up determinate sentencing based on severity of the offense of conviction and the criminal history of the convicted defendant. http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesotas-determinate-sentencing-guidelines http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesot... http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm I toured a prison in Minnesota in the mid-1980s, as an interpreter for an official visitor from another country. The visitor was amazed to learn that Minnesota then (and now) spends LESS per taxpayer on putting convicted criminals into prison, while spending substantially MORE per prisoner. Only the most serious criminals with long histories of offenses are imprisoned. Most convicted criminals receive sentences that involve community corrections but not imprisonment. Minnesota's maximum-security prison, the one I toured, had a population of inmates 97 percent of whom had killed at least one other human being before being put in that prison. The foreign visitor was a human rights lawyer, and he was actually amazed at how humanely the prisoners were housed and treated in that prison. (He had visited many prisons in his own country, and none were as well funded as the prison in Minnesota.) A prison can be properly staffed and funded, and not too crowded, if a whole state's criminal justice system is geared toward imprisoning only persons who must be kept out of general society, responding to most forms of criminal behavior with sentences that don't include prison time.
- moldbug 15y ago
  But what if our system is actually erring in the other direction? There are undoubtedly quite a few Americans who are in correctional supervision but shouldn't be. There are also quite a few Americans who should be in correctional supervision, but aren't. (For a bare start, suppose we believe the commonly quoted meme that there are 1 million gang members in America.) In either case, I think the most basic question is: why are there so many criminals? What about the present-day American system of government is so amazingly criminogenic? For instance, one commonly quoted "root cause" is our proverbial callousness to important issues of social justice. Is an absence of social justice the problem? Let's consider some evidence. Robbery is a pretty good "index crime." For instance, in 1900, there was about 1 robbery per day in all of England (source: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99...). This is roughly a factor of 35 lower than current reported crime rates (same source) in the ol' Sceptered Island - assuming you trust HMG's statistics. And all crime statistics in all countries everywhere are generally admitted by all informed observers to be utterly buggered to hell. (example: http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-inside-bed-stuy-s-81st-precinct/ http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-i...) In any case, you may compare the public concern for social justice in England, in 1900 and 2000, and note precisely the reverse of the correlation predicted by the hypothesis. Japan has extremely low crime as well, and is probably the least Americanized of all First World nations today. Clearly, it is physically possible for the State to eradicate crime. Clearly, the American system of government, at home or abroad, seems to carry with it unusually high levels of crime and disorder, at least by historical First World standards. But why? If what we need isn't more social justice, what is it? (edit: I just checked and this parliament.co.uk link isn't the right one for my robbery numbers - I'll have to look. Still, money graf - "The number of indictable offences per thousand population in 1900 was 2.4 and in 1997 the figure was 89.1." Two orders of magnitude any way you slice it.)
thinkcomp 15y ago
Corrections Corporation of America = http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/index.html?id=47162 http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/index.html?id=47162
twoodfin 15y ago
By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. Very odd to describe this as a "conservative" idea. Most conservatives I know object to this sort of sociological determinism, instead embracing the idea of individual responsibility. If anything, they believe in the power of (slowly) malleable culture and institutions to shape outcomes, rather than accepting bad outcomes as inevitable.
- wmeredith 15y ago
  Unfortunately for most nowadays a conservative and a dogmatic neo-con are the same thing. Only two parties, remember?
  - steve19 15y ago
    Not the same. Look at Tea Party vs. Neo-Cons, same party, very different agenda.
  - pyre 15y ago
    The 'con' in neo-con stands for 'conservative' (unless I'm horribly misinformed). I'd say that it's less of a matter of 'there can be only two parties,' then it is of them being associated with each other by trying to use such a generic term to describe themselves.
DanBC 15y ago
One problem with putting so many people in prison, and keeping them there for so long, is that you end up with a large number of prisoners with dementia like illnesses. The routines of prison help to mask some symptoms of those illnesses. And because some of these prisoners are in for serious, violent, crimes it's hard to release them to nursing homes. Here's one prison's response: (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia-among-aging-criminals.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...) I submitted it to HN here: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649276 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649276)
Archio 15y ago
This reminds me of an article Time Magazine did on Norway's Halden Prison. Essentially, when the Norwegian justice system treated their inmates more humanely, their recidivism (crime after prison) rate became 40% less than the US and the UK. Similarly, in Norway, there are only 69 inmates per 100,000 people, compared to 753/100,000 in the United States. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00....
Nate75Sanders 15y ago
I admit I've only skimmed the article and the comments on HN, but I don't think that either have mentioned the CCPOA (California Correctional Peace Officers Association). It's basically a union of prison guards who are heavily pro-incarceration. The quick version is that stricter laws produce more prisoners which leads to more money for prison guards and their organization. The story is better told here: http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/06/05/the-role-of-the-prison-guards-union-in-californias-troubled-prison-system/ http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/06/05/the-role-of-th... The phrase "prison-industrial complex" leads to some interesting reading, as well.
- dantheman 15y ago
  I mentioned it a comment with a great analysis of public unions by the hoover institute - I highly recommend checking it out.
- scrod 15y ago
  Private prison companies such as Wackenhut stand to profit in the billions from increased rates of incarceration. There is absolutely no question about who benefits the most. Please take your blatant anti-worker agenda and shove it.
  - jvm 15y ago
    How does that fact make parent's point untrue? He never said the workers stood to benefit 'more' than Wackenhut; it's not clear what that would even mean. Clearly both the unions and the contractors both are in favor of increased incarceration, that's not very surprising.
    - scrod 15y ago
      It makes his point irrelevant; those workers' interests pale in comparison to that of the owning interests of those corporations. He presents unions as the sole cause of the problem, which is not only intellectually deceitful, but quite incorrect. More importantly, it reveals an underlying agenda that needs to be challenged as strongly as possible in civic discourse. In fact, private prisons and unionized guards aren't even on the same side, due to the former hiring largely non-union labor. And the private prison industry has been growing and lobbying faster than ever: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/26/328486/us-private-prison-population-lobbying/?mobile=nc http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/26/328486/us-privat...
MarkMc 15y ago
Why don't prisons get their asses sued off for allowing inmates to be raped?
- gwern 15y ago
  'Sovereign immunity' (states are liable only for what they choose to allow themselves to be liable for), waivers for private prisoners, and probably some sort of 'reasonable precaution' clause in liability legislation would be where I would start looking for the reason why not.
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    I would file on civil rights grounds, that incarceration where rape is known to be highly likely amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
    - scott_w 15y ago
      However, that would fall into the trap mentioned in the article: that it's not unusual.
      - InclinedPlane 15y ago
        Unusual doesn't mean "uncommon" in the context of the constitution.
      - vacri 15y ago
        Rape is an unusual form of punishment in that the courts never ask for it to be applied.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      If life in prison for a first-time nonviolent drug offense was not considered cruel and unusual, what luck would you have?
  - gwern 15y ago
    * for private prisons
allochthon 15y ago
My own preferred solution: ankle bracelets with GPS for felons convicted of non-violent crimes.
scrod 15y ago
This article should be accompanied by another New Yorker piece from a couple of years ago: Hellhole: Is long-term solitary confinement torture? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...
ineedtosleep 15y ago
Reminds me of an Econmist article from a while back [1]. The theme being shared with the two being: systems we set up to punish _criminals_ rarely do just that. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/14165460?story_id=14165460 http://www.economist.com/node/14165460?story_id=14165460
rayiner 15y ago
Before I went to law school, I had a somewhat conservative view of the justice system (they deserve to be in there!) But the more you learn about the prison system in the U.S. the harder it is to see it as anything other than a crime in and of itself. D.A.'s being elected officials, try to railroad people accused of crimes to get them in jail. Legislatures looking to be "tough on crime" have jacked up the penalties for offenses to ridiculous levels, so much so that most people would be foolish to take their chances at trial instead of pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence. Forensic "science" is anything but, with error rates in finger printing being in the 7-8% neighborhood and rising from there. Handwriting, hair samples, and bite mark analysis have error rates in the 40-60% range. As the article mentions, the system elevates procedure above everything else. If you have a busy, poorly-paid public defender who doesn't present any evidence in your case and actually argues in favor of the death penalty in the sentencing hearing (a real example) the Supreme Court has no sympathy for you if that attorney also forfeits an avenue for post-conviction relief by failing to make a particular argument at the right time.
RLG_RLG 15y ago
As a voting American let me say this is a disgrace. human rights are inalienable -- and we are close to the line in the USA. We can do better.
goggles99 15y ago
First we should only be comparing the statistics of large countries when counting prisoners per 100k. Small and third world countries have an entirely different culture and/or little law enforcement. (Yes I know that we would still be at the top of the list). Race (and all the complexities it encompasses) is at the center of this whole issue. I am black so don't start calling me a racist OK. Remove blacks from all prison and population statistics when comparing the USA to other countries' people in prison per 100,000 and we will fall to the middle of the pack of countries. I am not suggesting in any way that we deport all of us. All I am saying is that we need to find a way to teach the black population how to make better choices in life and give them the opportunity to be rewarded for those choices. Throwing more public assistance at them is certainly not the answer, it has only made the problem worse. We can still do better even then middle of the pack though and this article brought up some through provoking things.
andyjenn 15y ago
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." - Dostoyevsky.
nsns 15y ago
Something's really wrong with this article - lack of an economic angle. Prisons in the US are an enormous private business, with free labor. (i.e. http://www.unicor.gov/about/faqs/top_ten/index.cfm http://www.unicor.gov/about/faqs/top_ten/index.cfm) Another problem is the silly/cruel "three strikes" laws, which might put someone in jail for life for stealing a loaf of bread out of hunger.
feralchimp 15y ago
The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. "Surely"? Let's start with "hopefully" and rigorously work our way up to "probably."

279 points by davux 15y ago

As I age, I realise that time speeds by faster. A year in prison now would a much smaller punishment than when I was in my teens, when a year seemed like forever. Perhaps we need an age-related transform to prison sentences.

hvass 15y ago
Engage in novel activities - time "speeding up" is pretty common as you age. Read about it here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122322542 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1223225...
crusso 15y ago
Why would we want to take the perceptions of the criminal into account when sentencing?
berntb 15y ago
It is totally opposite, a year is much more precious to me now. Count the number of good years you have left, with the health+energy to do what you want. I heard this week that the knees are failing on a relative of a friend, which is my age. When you were young, the years stretched in front of you, endlessly. These days I think things like "Japan is so fascinating that I would love to live there a while, but I just can't use a work year to learn the language and the writing system. I need that time for other things."

jacquesm 15y ago

6 million people is roughly the working age population of some of the smaller countries in Western Europe. Thinking about the massive waste of resources and the cost in terms of human lives extinguished (6 million people in prison translates to ~85,000 peoples lives wiped out every year, and that's only the inmates not the guards and whoever else is involved in the system) is instantly depressing. Gruesome. Here is a good graphic to illustrate how bad it really is: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PRISON_GRAPHIC.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...

jerf 15y ago
One should probably subtract off a more average incarceration rate first. There is, alas, a subset of people who are behind bars because if they aren't, they truly will net an even larger loss to society.
- smokeyj 15y ago
  I wonder how many non-violent criminals are arrested for every 'truly dangerous' menace to society.
  - jonnathanson 15y ago
    From what I've read and heard, one of the biggest contributions to prison population growth has been the advent of the predicate felony ("three-strikes") laws in recent decades. These days, incarceration is like compounding interest. Get locked up once, and the next time you so much as look the wrong way at the wrong time, you're back in prison serving an even more severe sentence. In this way, someone with a string of nonviolent offenses does the same time as a violent criminal. Prisons also serve to harden the imprisoned -- helping to ensure our country's record-high recidivism rates. Prison conditions are brutal. Gangs run daily life, and failure to join a gang can mean rape, severe injury, or even death. Of course, joining a prison gang means an indoctrination into the world of hard-core violence and reprisal. It's pretty hard to go to prison a relatively nonviolent person and emerge the same way. Another big trend over the last 30-odd years has been a marked shift in society's -- and our justice system's -- philosophical view of the prison itself. Many years ago, prisons were seen as places to reform criminals -- not just to lock them away for a certain number of years, but to adapt them to a successful return to society upon completion of those years. These days, reform and adaptation aren't on the agenda. (Hell, good luck trying to find a stable job in post-release society with a conviction on your record). Modern prison is purely about locking people away and treating them as hopeless causes. More often than not, that hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be fair, some people in our society really are lost causes. There are violent psychopaths rotting in prison who should probably stay there and rot. But today's criminal justice system paints all offenders with that brush. Perhaps I'm a softie, but I choose to believe that a significant fraction of the 6 million is not beyond redemption.

sliverstorm 15y ago

I can't help but think that, given this quote: More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. The first step is simple & straightforward. Fix education (or what is preventing them from getting an education) first, then tackle other problems with prisons.

hariananth 15y ago
Sure, education is a great indicator for incarceration. But "fixing" education is neither simple nor straightforward.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Certainly education is not a simple problem, but if it is the root cause of incarceration then the simple answer for incarceration is fix education, no?
  - anigbrowl 15y ago
    Yes, but it's not the root cause. it's a factor in criminality, but criminality and incarceration are imperfectly correlated.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      Imperfectly correlated is somewhat of a misnomer, IMO. Nearly every observed correlation is "imperfect". Hell, that's basically what "correlation" implies.
      - anigbrowl 15y ago
        Poorly correlated then. Lots of people are incarcerated for things most people consider inappropriate because the criminal justice system is so awash in perverse incentives.
  - tsotha 15y ago

cturner 15y ago

How would a hacker deal with solitary?

sliverstorm 15y ago
Poorly, I imagine. Hackers like to think of themselves as loners who don't need anybody, but they still interact with many people day in and day out via the internet.
- cturner 15y ago
  I sometimes think about the games that I'd play, the structures I'd create, exercises. I'd suck at it. I do wonder about it though, not irregularly.
unimpressive 15y ago
My guess is by going insane. Once your perception of the state of reality lets you do the things you want to do you'll likely stop noticing the padded walls.
rdl 15y ago
I've spent 3-6 months in places where I didn't see another person, but I always had the option of leaving, and I had the Internet, which makes it entirely different from prison. I've done 2-3 weeks with no Internet and no other people who spoke English (and who I didn't really interact with beyond them bringing me food/water), and it wasn't too bad -- I read books and I'm confident I could do a month alone in a reasonable room with just books and paper and enjoy it (the only cost being the forgone opportunity to do other stuff, but it would be overall enjoyable) -- catching up on a lot of fiction, history/biography, and tech reading. 6-12 months with a computer, preloaded with development tools and books, but no live Internet access, would be fine too. I really don't understand the people who think a 3-5 year mars mission with only a few other people would be that psychologically difficult.
- msrpotus 15y ago
  But prison wardens don't let inmates read whatever they want. Do you think you could survive reading only what the warden would let you read (and doing only what they permit you to)? I don't know about you but I think I'd struggle to survive more than a day or two.

cgrubb 15y ago

Many people reading this will fail to realize that "correctional supervision" includes about 4M who are on probation or parole. Horrible article.

calibraxis 15y ago
US prisons/jails: 2,266,800 adults in 2010 Stalin gulags: 1,727,970 people in 1953 (I am no expert on the Gulag system. Whatever the case is, it's uncontroversial that the US is the world's leading jailer of its own populace.) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Brief_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Brief_history)
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  1.7m in Gulag / 108m in Russia = 1.6% incarceration rate Pop # taken from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia 2.3m in prison / 312m in USA = 0.74% incarceration rate in the US
  - ssp 15y ago
    The Soviet Union had a population of 189 million people in 1953 according to Wolfram Alpha.
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      For an incarceration rate of 0.9%. This also assumes the Soviet Union sent everyone to the Gulag, and had no local jails, etc. I don't know if this is actually true, can anyone comment?
      - arethuza 15y ago
        I believe that during the height of the Gulag, local jails were mainly used as interrogation and storage facilities for people who would eventually end up in the camps. Certainly the camps held both those convicted of political and criminal offences. I can recommend both Anne Applebaum's excellent "Gulag - A History" and, of course, Solzhenitsyn's incredible "Gulag Archipelago": http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a-history/ http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a-history/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

cullenking 15y ago

A close family member of mine was just arrested for possession of marijuana. They allegedly had a sizable amount, more than your normal 1/8th of an ounce, but nothing obscene. Due to a felony 10 years ago when they were a teen, they are looking at 5-10 years. Granted, Oregon is known to go easy on pot offenses, however even 6 months in jail is ridiculous. The real cost however, is not having their prior felony expunged - it will be another 10 years before that is a possibility, well into middle age for this person :( Try finding yourself a job with a felony record. If you can, it is probably paying a wage that will doubtless encourage the same illegal behavior that landed you a felony in the first place. When your only hope the rest of your life won't be utter shit is getting off on a technicality, something is messed up.

thematt 15y ago
How will his wage doubtlessly encourage him to engage in illegal behavior? I've worked plenty of overtime and minimum wage jobs and at no point did that ever cause me to consider committing a felony or engaging in illegal behavior. Your friend sounds like he's in the situation he's in because of choices he made, not because society did something wrong.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  It's a bit more complicated than that - when someone works under unjust conditions to make ends meet because of a law perceived to be unjust, the commitment towards respecting other laws is lessened.
- lemmsjid 15y ago
  As someone who has a wrongfully convicted, non-violent felon in the family, I can tell you it's easy to underestimate how difficult life becomes when you have a felony record. Landlords won't let you rent from them. Most employers won't hire you. Other employers will hire you, and then fire you later because the boss decided he wants to be tougher on crime. If suspected of anything else (or associated with anyone else suspected of anything), you are harassed by the cops in ways that I would have heretofore thought illegal (and that I since discovered are generally accepted, even though a lot of people personally thinks they're wrong). And this is when you go for the bottom-rung jobs, and the crappy apartments--forget about aspiring for more. All of this hardens and solidifies one's identity as a criminal--if you don't have a particular fortitude of character (many people claim they have this fortitude in spite of it not having been tested, and who knows, maybe certain ones do, but it is clear to me that most people don't), being treated in a particular way by society--especially a supremely negative way--makes you feel that way. When enough people treat you like scum, you feel like scum. Seeking out people who understand where you're coming from and won't judge you, you gravitate towards people with similar pasts. Seeking prosperity in a society that treats you as a second class (more like last-class) citizen, the opportunities in front of you range from dismal, cheap but legal to risky, remunerative but illegal. So no--the minimum wage itself doesn't encourage crime--it's the treatment that comes with it. It's like the "college freshman poverty" meme, where college students talk about how poor they were because they can't afford anything but Ramen. While true in the literal sense (they don't have any money in the bank), it's patently false in a real sense--when they hold a minimum wage job, they're at the bottom of their almost inevitable rise towards middle class. When a convicted felon holds a minimum wage job, he's hanging on to it by a thread, simultaneously reminded of how lucky he is to be flipping burgers and how he's scum of the earth. Now, stack this treatment up against the actual offense. You're walking down the street, carrying a few ounces of weed--you know, the stuff that pop stars openly discuss smoking, and that politicians now openly admit to smoking (in the past). You know you're being stupid--but hey, caution to the wind--maybe your father just died and you aren't caring much about your own future right now. Maybe you just lost your job and everything seems horrible. Maybe you're just another dumb young adult who thinks they're invincible. Regardless, you aren't hurting anyone. Heck, you're less dangerous than the timid but excited driver who guns his motor on the highway and breaks the speed limit after he's checked that there's no other cars in sight (after all, maybe he doesn't see the guy who's about to run across the street). You've known dozens and dozens of pot smokers and never seen one get arrested (the chances are quite small). You've smoked pot with dozens of people and never seen one overdose or have adverse affects. Regardless, you drew the short draw, and suddenly you're arrested and railroaded through a court system designed to efficiently process and incarcerate offenders--suddenly you realize that the arresting cop isn't Andy Griffith, ready to say, "Aww, Billy, I know you're a good kid, run along now and don't do it again."--instead there's a steady march of public defenders, prosecutors, judges, etc., who won't look you in the eye, whose main interest is in extracting a plea bargain so they don't have to waste time on a court date. This is the narrative that goes through my mind when people prat about people making bad choices. There's bad choices (smoking pot, breaking the speed limit, creative tax deductions) and then there's BAD choices (rape, murder). So yes--society did something wrong--society KNOWS that people make bad choices in the first category (limited harm), and such choices are imminently forgivable, but due to a toxic mixture of lobbying, inertia, corruption, and ignorance, throws the book at those people, ignoring the torturous harm we're inflicting.

chefsurfing 15y ago

Reading this reminds me of this quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller and another darker vision: "For if you [the rulers] suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves [outlaws] and then punish them." Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia, Book 1 Here's an idea for a frighteningly ambitions startup: Kill the prison-industrial complex! How? Fight crime! It costs a lot of taxpayer money and social wealth to keep things the way they are. Ostensibly the goal is to keep people safe from criminals and reduce crime opportunities. A friend of mine was mugged on the street for his iPhone last night. He was stabbed in the leg when he fought back (mistake but he's ok thankfully). I wonder if a few high-res web-cams on the street would have kept the attackers at bay? How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state? Found these startup ideas tonight: idea: turn my webcam into a security cam [1] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-turn-my-webcam-into-a-security-cam http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-turn-my-webcam-into-a-s... idea: millions of sensors / millions of surveys [2] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors-millions-of-surveys http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors-mil...

icebraining 15y ago
If London is any example, cameras don't actually work that well: a study of London's widespread use of CCTV cameras, found that for every 1,000 cameras installed, only one crime has been solved. On top of that, when faced with a crime, the CCTV cameras are rarely that useful. The report found that CCTV cameras were used to catch just 8 out of 269 suspected robbers. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090827/0410406023.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090827/0410406023.shtml This is without mentioning the privacy aspects; I find it rather worrying how people seem to accept constant surveillance so easily.
rogerbinns 15y ago
> How about a Peer-to-Peer police/surveillance state? Britain has been doing the experiment for you and is generally regarded as the most surveilled western society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#United_Kingdo... Sensationalist article by the Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock-figures-reveal-Britain-CCTV-camera-14-people--China.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205607/Shock-figure... Some articles on the resulting (in)effectiveness of having the cameras: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CCTV-cameras-to-solve-just-one-crime-Met-Police-admits.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CC... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/6083476/CCTV-cameras-If-they-do-not-stop-crime-or-catch-criminals-what-are-they-for.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/6083476/CC... http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/crb97-005.pdf http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/crb97-005.pdf (Warning: PDF)

m0th87 15y ago

The article makes the good point that reform won't happen with one piece of sweeping legislation, but rather with patchwork improvements to the system. What would you do to reduce incarceration rates? I would start with a reform of drug laws inspired by Portugal [1]. We're not sure if the same solution can scale to the size of the US, but we can introduce reform incrementally, starting with the decriminalization of Marijuana. (Which I think most would find agreeable.) Education reform is important too. Obama is pushing reform to get states to increase the age of required education to 18 [2]. This sounds like a good idea on paper...we'll have to see how it pans out. His push for increase utilization of community colleges also makes sense, since they provide a decent education for the increasing number of Americans who can't afford college. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/obama-states-should-require-kids-stay-in-school-until-18-or-graduation/2012/01/24/gIQAPg63OQ_blog.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/obama-...

protomyth 15y ago
Technically, the President can move Marijuna off the schedule 1 list with a signature. That itself would change a lot of things. // for the truly weird look at the Cotton Lobby's effect on mj laws
- duncanj 15y ago
  IANAL, but I think marijuana is specifically mentioned in the U.S. Code and it would take more than an executive order to change the law. While it might be removed from "Schedule I", that would just make Schedule I incomplete. (21 USC 841)
  - protomyth 15y ago
    Last time I checked, it was an executive order to move a drug from schedule 1 to 2 (has medical use).
    - 15y ago

dmg8 15y ago

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. If the New York Times is to be believed, the crime rate has nearly halved since 1980 [1]. Obviously it needn't follow that the increase in the prison population caused this, but the author's unwillingness to even explore the idea seems awfully incurious. [1] See the "In the U.S." tab on this graphic http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PRISON_GRAPHIC.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PR...

ReadEvalPost 15y ago
It's addressed on the second paragraph of page 5. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison.
- tlb 15y ago
  NYC is not insulated from the rest of the country, which did lock up dramatically more people. As neighboring cities and states imprisoned large numbers of people, it would have an effect on NYC street crime.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    That's the kind of Derridean approach to Criminal Justice that got us to where we are now. You're saying the same thing, though: a cities crime rate is entirely dependent on the policies of surrounding cities and not on itself. Think about what you're suggesting: even if NYC experienced a crime drop while also housing fewer inmates, it's only because their own policy was ineffectual and the surrounding cities picked up the slack (or something).

mcantelon 15y ago

The fundamental problem is that there is a whole industry, and corresponding political lobby, built on incarcerating people.

rhizome 15y ago
To be sure, there are multiple problems.
samstave 15y ago
I nthe land of the free, there is an entire industry built around destroying freedom. Fuck the prison industry. Every single politician who cohorts with the prison lobby should be called out and shot. Yes. Shot.
- nodemaker 15y ago
  Ironically, shooting people is one of the activities that freedom is taken away for.
- nodemaker 15y ago
  Ironically, shooting people is one of the activities that freedom is taken away for.

eliam 15y ago

Awesome TED talk touching on similar topics. I would recommend if you haven't watched/heard it yet. http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice.html http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_abo...

pshc 15y ago

Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” [...] Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry. Funny how this comes up again and again in so many different contexts. Minor bottom-up tweaks are more effective than top-down policies. In one of Joel's classic articles he talks about how small UI tweaks to forum software completely change the course of a community. Tiny changes in economic incentives have massive effects. It's a great lesson to be applied in so many fields.

tokenadult 15y ago

Other comments asked how incarceration rates could be reduced in the United States. One way would be for many of the forty-some other states to follow the example of the few states, including Minnesota, which have set up determinate sentencing based on severity of the offense of conviction and the criminal history of the convicted defendant. http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesotas-determinate-sentencing-guidelines http://www.northfieldnews.com/content/understanding-minnesot... http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm http://www.doc.state.mn.us/crimevictim/terms.htm I toured a prison in Minnesota in the mid-1980s, as an interpreter for an official visitor from another country. The visitor was amazed to learn that Minnesota then (and now) spends LESS per taxpayer on putting convicted criminals into prison, while spending substantially MORE per prisoner. Only the most serious criminals with long histories of offenses are imprisoned. Most convicted criminals receive sentences that involve community corrections but not imprisonment. Minnesota's maximum-security prison, the one I toured, had a population of inmates 97 percent of whom had killed at least one other human being before being put in that prison. The foreign visitor was a human rights lawyer, and he was actually amazed at how humanely the prisoners were housed and treated in that prison. (He had visited many prisons in his own country, and none were as well funded as the prison in Minnesota.) A prison can be properly staffed and funded, and not too crowded, if a whole state's criminal justice system is geared toward imprisoning only persons who must be kept out of general society, responding to most forms of criminal behavior with sentences that don't include prison time.

moldbug 15y ago
But what if our system is actually erring in the other direction? There are undoubtedly quite a few Americans who are in correctional supervision but shouldn't be. There are also quite a few Americans who should be in correctional supervision, but aren't. (For a bare start, suppose we believe the commonly quoted meme that there are 1 million gang members in America.) In either case, I think the most basic question is: why are there so many criminals? What about the present-day American system of government is so amazingly criminogenic? For instance, one commonly quoted "root cause" is our proverbial callousness to important issues of social justice. Is an absence of social justice the problem? Let's consider some evidence. Robbery is a pretty good "index crime." For instance, in 1900, there was about 1 robbery per day in all of England (source: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99...). This is roughly a factor of 35 lower than current reported crime rates (same source) in the ol' Sceptered Island - assuming you trust HMG's statistics. And all crime statistics in all countries everywhere are generally admitted by all informed observers to be utterly buggered to hell. (example: http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-inside-bed-stuy-s-81st-precinct/ http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/news/the-nypd-tapes-i...) In any case, you may compare the public concern for social justice in England, in 1900 and 2000, and note precisely the reverse of the correlation predicted by the hypothesis. Japan has extremely low crime as well, and is probably the least Americanized of all First World nations today. Clearly, it is physically possible for the State to eradicate crime. Clearly, the American system of government, at home or abroad, seems to carry with it unusually high levels of crime and disorder, at least by historical First World standards. But why? If what we need isn't more social justice, what is it? (edit: I just checked and this parliament.co.uk link isn't the right one for my robbery numbers - I'll have to look. Still, money graf - "The number of indictable offences per thousand population in 1900 was 2.4 and in 1997 the figure was 89.1." Two orders of magnitude any way you slice it.)

thinkcomp 15y ago

Corrections Corporation of America = http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/index.html?id=47162 http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/index.html?id=47162

twoodfin 15y ago

By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. Very odd to describe this as a "conservative" idea. Most conservatives I know object to this sort of sociological determinism, instead embracing the idea of individual responsibility. If anything, they believe in the power of (slowly) malleable culture and institutions to shape outcomes, rather than accepting bad outcomes as inevitable.

wmeredith 15y ago
Unfortunately for most nowadays a conservative and a dogmatic neo-con are the same thing. Only two parties, remember?
- steve19 15y ago
  Not the same. Look at Tea Party vs. Neo-Cons, same party, very different agenda.
- pyre 15y ago
  The 'con' in neo-con stands for 'conservative' (unless I'm horribly misinformed). I'd say that it's less of a matter of 'there can be only two parties,' then it is of them being associated with each other by trying to use such a generic term to describe themselves.

DanBC 15y ago

One problem with putting so many people in prison, and keeping them there for so long, is that you end up with a large number of prisoners with dementia like illnesses. The routines of prison help to mask some symptoms of those illnesses. And because some of these prisoners are in for serious, violent, crimes it's hard to release them to nursing homes. Here's one prison's response: (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia-among-aging-criminals.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...) I submitted it to HN here: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649276 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649276)

Archio 15y ago

This reminds me of an article Time Magazine did on Norway's Halden Prison. Essentially, when the Norwegian justice system treated their inmates more humanely, their recidivism (crime after prison) rate became 40% less than the US and the UK. Similarly, in Norway, there are only 69 inmates per 100,000 people, compared to 753/100,000 in the United States. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00....

Nate75Sanders 15y ago

I admit I've only skimmed the article and the comments on HN, but I don't think that either have mentioned the CCPOA (California Correctional Peace Officers Association). It's basically a union of prison guards who are heavily pro-incarceration. The quick version is that stricter laws produce more prisoners which leads to more money for prison guards and their organization. The story is better told here: http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/06/05/the-role-of-the-prison-guards-union-in-californias-troubled-prison-system/ http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/06/05/the-role-of-th... The phrase "prison-industrial complex" leads to some interesting reading, as well.

dantheman 15y ago
I mentioned it a comment with a great analysis of public unions by the hoover institute - I highly recommend checking it out.
scrod 15y ago
Private prison companies such as Wackenhut stand to profit in the billions from increased rates of incarceration. There is absolutely no question about who benefits the most. Please take your blatant anti-worker agenda and shove it.
- jvm 15y ago
  How does that fact make parent's point untrue? He never said the workers stood to benefit 'more' than Wackenhut; it's not clear what that would even mean. Clearly both the unions and the contractors both are in favor of increased incarceration, that's not very surprising.
  - scrod 15y ago
    It makes his point irrelevant; those workers' interests pale in comparison to that of the owning interests of those corporations. He presents unions as the sole cause of the problem, which is not only intellectually deceitful, but quite incorrect. More importantly, it reveals an underlying agenda that needs to be challenged as strongly as possible in civic discourse. In fact, private prisons and unionized guards aren't even on the same side, due to the former hiring largely non-union labor. And the private prison industry has been growing and lobbying faster than ever: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/26/328486/us-private-prison-population-lobbying/?mobile=nc http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/26/328486/us-privat...

MarkMc 15y ago

Why don't prisons get their asses sued off for allowing inmates to be raped?

gwern 15y ago
'Sovereign immunity' (states are liable only for what they choose to allow themselves to be liable for), waivers for private prisoners, and probably some sort of 'reasonable precaution' clause in liability legislation would be where I would start looking for the reason why not.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  I would file on civil rights grounds, that incarceration where rape is known to be highly likely amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
  - scott_w 15y ago
    However, that would fall into the trap mentioned in the article: that it's not unusual.
    - InclinedPlane 15y ago
      Unusual doesn't mean "uncommon" in the context of the constitution.
    - vacri 15y ago
      Rape is an unusual form of punishment in that the courts never ask for it to be applied.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    If life in prison for a first-time nonviolent drug offense was not considered cruel and unusual, what luck would you have?
- gwern 15y ago
  * for private prisons

allochthon 15y ago

My own preferred solution: ankle bracelets with GPS for felons convicted of non-violent crimes.

scrod 15y ago

This article should be accompanied by another New Yorker piece from a couple of years ago: Hellhole: Is long-term solitary confinement torture? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...

ineedtosleep 15y ago

Reminds me of an Econmist article from a while back [1]. The theme being shared with the two being: systems we set up to punish _criminals_ rarely do just that. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/14165460?story_id=14165460 http://www.economist.com/node/14165460?story_id=14165460

rayiner 15y ago

Before I went to law school, I had a somewhat conservative view of the justice system (they deserve to be in there!) But the more you learn about the prison system in the U.S. the harder it is to see it as anything other than a crime in and of itself. D.A.'s being elected officials, try to railroad people accused of crimes to get them in jail. Legislatures looking to be "tough on crime" have jacked up the penalties for offenses to ridiculous levels, so much so that most people would be foolish to take their chances at trial instead of pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence. Forensic "science" is anything but, with error rates in finger printing being in the 7-8% neighborhood and rising from there. Handwriting, hair samples, and bite mark analysis have error rates in the 40-60% range. As the article mentions, the system elevates procedure above everything else. If you have a busy, poorly-paid public defender who doesn't present any evidence in your case and actually argues in favor of the death penalty in the sentencing hearing (a real example) the Supreme Court has no sympathy for you if that attorney also forfeits an avenue for post-conviction relief by failing to make a particular argument at the right time.

RLG_RLG 15y ago

As a voting American let me say this is a disgrace. human rights are inalienable -- and we are close to the line in the USA. We can do better.

goggles99 15y ago

First we should only be comparing the statistics of large countries when counting prisoners per 100k. Small and third world countries have an entirely different culture and/or little law enforcement. (Yes I know that we would still be at the top of the list). Race (and all the complexities it encompasses) is at the center of this whole issue. I am black so don't start calling me a racist OK. Remove blacks from all prison and population statistics when comparing the USA to other countries' people in prison per 100,000 and we will fall to the middle of the pack of countries. I am not suggesting in any way that we deport all of us. All I am saying is that we need to find a way to teach the black population how to make better choices in life and give them the opportunity to be rewarded for those choices. Throwing more public assistance at them is certainly not the answer, it has only made the problem worse. We can still do better even then middle of the pack though and this article brought up some through provoking things.

andyjenn 15y ago

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." - Dostoyevsky.

nsns 15y ago

Something's really wrong with this article - lack of an economic angle. Prisons in the US are an enormous private business, with free labor. (i.e. http://www.unicor.gov/about/faqs/top_ten/index.cfm http://www.unicor.gov/about/faqs/top_ten/index.cfm) Another problem is the silly/cruel "three strikes" laws, which might put someone in jail for life for stealing a loaf of bread out of hunger.

feralchimp 15y ago

The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. "Surely"? Let's start with "hopefully" and rigorously work our way up to "probably."