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I found the tipping point part interesting. Where up to a particular point, incarceration is good for a community, but past that point, it hurts the community.
by tunesmith 14y ago
I found the tipping point part interesting. Where up to a particular point, incarceration is good for a community, but past that point, it hurts the community. It made me wonder if it were possible to identify where that tipping point is, perhaps as a function of incarcerated criminals per capita for a geographic region or something. And then relaxing sentences according to that function.
- screature2 14y agoHmm... I think that a per capita view of the tipping point misses too many key conditions underlying a true tipping point. My instinct is that the tipping point would differ wildly based on the community characteristics i.e. availability of jobs, quality of schools, racial tensions, prevalence of drug or alcohol availability and/or abuse I think the tipping point is more a factor of figuring out at what point the incentives for behavior that puts you at risk for incarceration enough to counter the risk of the incarceration given your current state/status/level of resources. Additionally, I think in many circumstances the threat of imprisonment is dulled both because as serving prison time gets more prevalent in a community it becomes more normal/acceptable as a risk (prison inflation if you will) and because as serving prison time reduces alternative options for earning a decent livelihood for the re-entry community it may ends up paradoxically more worth it to risk future prison time.
- Fargren 14y agoWe could do a binary search.