for someone to just 'sit' and think about their thoughts for 10 days straight without talking, is HELL for a criminal. they are forced to confront reality, or at least their subjective version of it.
I don't think we have a shortage of ideas for accomplishing this. What we have is a shortage of willpower.
All it takes is one asshole being put into a rehabilitation program[1], or one sufficiently high-profile crime committed by someone in a program/on parole, for half the country to sour about prison reform.
It's easier to send the bad people to the gulag, and forget about them. Treating crime in a constructive way is expensive, and doesn't work 100% of the time, so why bother?
People that kill people or commit violent, life-changing assaults such as rape ought not be rehabilitated, but permanently caged. Nobody accidentally rapes and kills a child. There isn't an argument that a killer/rapist was doing it because they were in poverty and needed money -- instead it's just pure evil. Those types of people should be sent away forever.
For non-violent crimes, especially victimless crimes like drug possession, reforms are definitely warranted, but anyone advocating on behalf of convicted, violent criminals gets no respect from me. To get most of the country on board with prison reform, it's not particularly hard: simply exclude anyone who has committed a violent crime from being a part of those reforms. I don't think there are too many rational people out there that want someone to get locked up for 25 years for possessing marijuana or stealing a car.
So, prison reform starts with life sentences, without parole, for all violent offenders? For juvenile offenders, too? (The United States is, afaik, the only country in the world that imposes this punishment on juveniles - of which ~2,500 are currently serving it)
That's certainly a consistent approach, but not a particularly popular one the world over. If the only thing you're doing is trying to minimize harm to non-convicts, that's one way to go about it, though. According to the stats for recidivism among persons convicted of homicide, though, you may be over-optimizing. [1] Or not. [2]
[1] http://www.newjersey.gov/corrections/pdf/REU/Recidivism_Amon... - In conclusion, none of the 336 homicide offenders committed another
murder. However, we found that the highest risk of recidivism for new violent or drug crimes were the felony homicide
group (slightly over one-third), followed by the altercation precipitated homicide offenders (27%), which was in sharp
contrast to the domestic violence homicide offenders with less than 10% recidivism due to a new violent or drug
offense, and the accidental homicides with 17% recidivism due to a new violent or drug offense.
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8689372 - A similar study in Finland had a higher recidivism rate for homicide - where people released after serving ~5 years of a homicide sentence were ~14 times more likely then the general population to commit another homicide. The difference could be explained by shorter sentencing. Someone convicted of a homicide at 21, released at 26, is far more likely to be a recidivist then someone convicted at 21, and released at 52.
Murderers should be in prison for as long as their victims are dead. If you intentionally kill someone, you clearly don't belong in society ever again.
Have you considered the fact that practically everyone who commits these kinds of crimes had similar things done to them; often as children, often by relatives?
Everyone is responsible for their actions. And some people have a long way to go to before they've healed their traumas. But pretending that some are evil and others are not isn't solving the problem.
It would be more constructive to ask what can be done to prevent people from becoming this messed up, children from being treated so horribly etc. And how to best help people heal and take back control over their lives.
> Have you considered the fact that practically everyone who commits these kinds of crimes had similar things done to them
No excuse. Defending child-killers because they themselves were (potentially) abused as children? That's nonsense. They still killed someone; their past traumas don't give them a free pass to inflict horror and pain on others. The past traumas of the killers doesn't matter to the child they murdered. If you have a past trauma -- go see a doctor. It was in Canada, medical and psychiatric care is supposed to be free right? That they didn't avail themselves to that resource and instead chose to rape and kill a little girl -- that's on them.
Rationalizing the actions of child-killers is disgusting.
You're not being charitable with your interpretation of parent's comment. You quoted the first line, then ignored this:
> Everyone is responsible for their actions. And some people have a long way to go to before they've healed their traumas. But pretending that some are evil and others are not isn't solving the problem.
It's not a rationalization of child-killing. It's a partial explanation as to why some people do that. There's no value judgement being made, just a clinical evaluation of causes and effects.
People who commit terrible crimes are responsible for their actions. But it's far too convenient to just label them as evil and move on. Something made them evil. Something wired their brain that way. We are not the authors of our own personalities.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not claiming that all people are redeemable. Some aren't. There are cases where the only rational (and ethical!) thing to do is separate the perpetrator from the rest of civil society, for our own protection.
But we do ourselves a big favor if we allow ourselves to question and study the origin of these behaviors. And if we allow ourselves to advance the study of rehabilitation and reform.
Just as it is morally correct to protect the society at-large from predators, it is also, I think, a moral requirement to find better ways at fixing broken people. Just like we do with cancer, AIDS, or any other ailment. Expand that to include mental disorders. The brain is another organ.
Right now we suck at verifiably correcting for psychological disorders. (Hell, we can't even agree on what constitutes one). Because we're bad at it, we take the safe approach of caging dangerous people. That's fine. It's the best we can do with our current state of knowledge. But we should strive to learn more, so that we can make more accurate decisions on who should remain caged and who is eligible for reform.
> Have you considered the fact that practically everyone who commits these kinds of crimes had similar things done to them; often as children, often by relatives?
The connection between child abuse and adult criminality has been studied with twin studies. Genetic confounding plays the starring role.
> But pretending that some are evil
Try again. You're pretending there aren't evil, broken people out there.
You can't separate human behavior from environment, period.
They've found genes that sort of predict violent behavior, but only if the person carrying the gene is subjected to abuse; which means that the gene probably predicts higher sensitivity to abuse rather than a violent nature.
You're pretending that labeling some people evil because they have the wrong genetics is a solution, it isn't.
As someone who has taught voluntarily in prisons, I agree fully that non-violent crimes (especially marijuana related offenses) benefit from educational programs with regards to recidivism rates.
I used to be of the mind that violent criminals were beyond "saving" but that mentality began to wane the more I taught in the prison system. This was partly due to the fact that I never looked into my students' histories so that I couldn't be biased by my predilections on the severity of their crimes. By being blind to their crimes, it made me reevaluate my stance as some of my students probably had committed violent crimes but they were all great students.
Now, my moral stance is that everyone deserves access to an education, no matter the circumstances. If one starts to restrict access due to severity of crimes committed, then we get ourselves into using education as a reward/punishment which should make everyone's ethical spidey senses stand on edge. Notice that this doesn't get into the nuanced discussion about the types of education or accommodations required for individuals who are considered dangerous to other students.
Finally, for those who think murderers cannot change, I suggest watching the Mexico episode of "Inside the Real Narcos" on Netflix where they interview a Mexican Cartel hitman who truly seems regretful of his crimes.
I think the biggest thing we can do is to target individuals in social situations that are more likely to turn to a criminal life and intervene early on. People without parents present, people from places of poverty or crime, etc. Take them in and provide developmental assistance. Maybe that means a mentor, maybe it means giving them respectable clothes or other little items so they can fit into a healthy citizen.
People aren’t born criminals. We make them as a society (for the most part). The problems with this of course come down to paying now for a better tomorrow and being able to accurately identify these individuals. Other than that it’s like the problem in health care - we’re trying to treat symptoms that needed to be avoided yesterday.
Of course, you have to get past the political demand that there should be marginalised people, and the institutions determined to make some regardless of whether or not they "deserve" it.
> another piece of evidence that "3 strikes" rules have no benefit to society.
First, I'm glad Woods is out. It's clear he is a changed man. His release was a fair decision by Gov Brown.
Would he have been equally as changed if he had only served 3 years? Doubtful, if recidivism statistics are accurate.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics report in April 2014. It studied recidivism patterns of 404,638 prisoners released from 2005-2010, from state prisons. Within three years, they were re-arrested at 67.8%, and 76.6% were re-arrested within five-years. 28.6% of inmates were arrested for a violent offense within five-years; 1.7% were for rape or sexual assault and 23.0% for assault.
Since a prior criminal record is a good predictor of future offending, the odds are that Woods would have committed another crime had he not been three-striked. As it is, society had 21 years of no further crimes from Mr. Woods as he was incarcerated. Remember, we aren't talking about a petty drug user or shoplifter -- we're talking about a man willing to put a gun in another person's face -- a violent act.
I'm happy that Mr. Woods has gotten his life together, but his third "strike" was attempted armed robbery. He wasn't shoplifting a candy bar. We have to ask ourselves, if Woods had gotten 3 years for the armed robbery, wouldn't statistics suggest that he would have committed more crimes, probably violent, such as another armed robbery?
3-strikes rules have no benefit to society? Sure they do -- we had 21 years without another violent crime from Mr. Woods.
Doesn’t your argument also suggest using a 1-strike rule?
I think it also calls for looking at why recidivism rates are so high, and what can be done to lower them. If we can lower recidivism rates after the first crime then the benefits would be much greater than using 3-strikes to lower them after the third crime after which two more crimes have already occured.
Statistics are bullshit. God help us when we replace judges with ML-powered blackboxes.
Previous history is only a good indicator of future performance because we wrote the rules that way.
When you're taken out of society for a few years and the world moves on without you, the only connections you've made upon release are with other criminals.
And when your record is made public and discreetly used to discriminate against you as a job candidate, is it any wonder so many criminals reoffend? It's all too easy to be tempted back into easy (or illegitimate) money when you're surrounded by people playing that game.
Funny thing is, it's acknowledged to be a real problem-- the parole system tries to discourage you from maintaining associations with criminals as a condition of release-- but it isn't realistic depending on where you're from or what support you have.
If statistics are bullshit I’m sure you’ll never refer to the below evidence. If you refuse to look at or listen to evidence unless it’s ideologically congenial you’re not a thinker, you’re a hack.
> I estimate, that at typical policy margins in the United States today, decarceration has zero net impact on crime outside of prison. That estimate is uncertain, but at least as much evidence suggests that decarceration reduces crime as increases it. The crux of the matter is that tougher sentences hardly deter crime, and that while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase their criminality after release. As a result, “tough-on-crime” initiatives can reduce crime in the short run but cause offsetting harm in the long run.
3 strikes and death sentences don't pass the smell test with it comes to "reforming" people, so we need to be honest about what we really want - is it to reform people or just exile them? Everyone is being disingenuous here.
The idea behind three strikes and death sentences, as I understand it, is that some people have proven unreformable, and therefore must be removed from society for the sake of everyone else. Of course death and permanent incarceration isn't the point, but what do you do if you run across someone who genuinely seems unable to reform and function safely?
I'm not writing this intending to endorse three strikes laws or death sentences, but you're arguing against a point that I don't think is being made.
(Now, my own personal opinion is that we ought to be taking a closer look at why the penal system is doing such a poor job reforming criminals, and that "3 strikes laws" feel a lot like "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".)
Sure. But with regards to people throwing around statistics of who is likely to re-offend etc I'm pointing out that when it got started it wasn't only for violent crime and given people got 25 years there ought to be two kinds of prisoners represented in that population. Those in for violent crime and those in for non-violent crime. So it's not so black and white. Only that after a while people figured out it was a terrible idea for non-violent crime which I'm assuming no one disagrees with.
For violent crime I don't have a very informed opinion. I'd need a few hundred hours research to get better resolution models than I currently have in my head. Suffice to say jurisprudence is a rather thorny problem with no nice answer as you only have so many levers you can push/pull to change the economics and it's well established that for a certain segment of the population even the pain of death isn't enough to deter them, so they are better off just off the street.
Penal theory is such a conundrum in that regard. It's like oh, there are people for which nothing works. Well can we just destroy them? The public says no. Right. So... Back in they go with the public? Well, no the public doesn't want that either. Ok, so we'll just hold on to them for a really long time? Yes, but the public is not happy about paying for that. Ok, but hey wouldn't it be better if violent people spent less time with other violent people than more time? It would but where else can we put them? So, we just leave them here in the same cage together for a really long time? I guess so? That seems just like a really, shitty, fucked situation for which there is no good answer. Hmm... seems that way.
At least thats my analysis. It's an interesting topic. More study required.
The only connection recidivism has with prison time is that the longer you are in prison, the more likely you are to be institutionalized and thus comfortable with prison.
You are completely misinterpreting those statistics.
34 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 80.6 ms ] threadThis wouldn't work so well for the large proportion of prisoners who only committed victimless crimes.
On second thoughts, maybe it would work even better for those prisoners.
for someone to just 'sit' and think about their thoughts for 10 days straight without talking, is HELL for a criminal. they are forced to confront reality, or at least their subjective version of it.
All it takes is one asshole being put into a rehabilitation program[1], or one sufficiently high-profile crime committed by someone in a program/on parole, for half the country to sour about prison reform.
It's easier to send the bad people to the gulag, and forget about them. Treating crime in a constructive way is expensive, and doesn't work 100% of the time, so why bother?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Tori_Stafford#Afterm...
For non-violent crimes, especially victimless crimes like drug possession, reforms are definitely warranted, but anyone advocating on behalf of convicted, violent criminals gets no respect from me. To get most of the country on board with prison reform, it's not particularly hard: simply exclude anyone who has committed a violent crime from being a part of those reforms. I don't think there are too many rational people out there that want someone to get locked up for 25 years for possessing marijuana or stealing a car.
That's certainly a consistent approach, but not a particularly popular one the world over. If the only thing you're doing is trying to minimize harm to non-convicts, that's one way to go about it, though. According to the stats for recidivism among persons convicted of homicide, though, you may be over-optimizing. [1] Or not. [2]
[1] http://www.newjersey.gov/corrections/pdf/REU/Recidivism_Amon... - In conclusion, none of the 336 homicide offenders committed another murder. However, we found that the highest risk of recidivism for new violent or drug crimes were the felony homicide group (slightly over one-third), followed by the altercation precipitated homicide offenders (27%), which was in sharp contrast to the domestic violence homicide offenders with less than 10% recidivism due to a new violent or drug offense, and the accidental homicides with 17% recidivism due to a new violent or drug offense.
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8689372 - A similar study in Finland had a higher recidivism rate for homicide - where people released after serving ~5 years of a homicide sentence were ~14 times more likely then the general population to commit another homicide. The difference could be explained by shorter sentencing. Someone convicted of a homicide at 21, released at 26, is far more likely to be a recidivist then someone convicted at 21, and released at 52.
Everyone is responsible for their actions. And some people have a long way to go to before they've healed their traumas. But pretending that some are evil and others are not isn't solving the problem.
It would be more constructive to ask what can be done to prevent people from becoming this messed up, children from being treated so horribly etc. And how to best help people heal and take back control over their lives.
No excuse. Defending child-killers because they themselves were (potentially) abused as children? That's nonsense. They still killed someone; their past traumas don't give them a free pass to inflict horror and pain on others. The past traumas of the killers doesn't matter to the child they murdered. If you have a past trauma -- go see a doctor. It was in Canada, medical and psychiatric care is supposed to be free right? That they didn't avail themselves to that resource and instead chose to rape and kill a little girl -- that's on them.
Rationalizing the actions of child-killers is disgusting.
> Everyone is responsible for their actions. And some people have a long way to go to before they've healed their traumas. But pretending that some are evil and others are not isn't solving the problem.
It's not a rationalization of child-killing. It's a partial explanation as to why some people do that. There's no value judgement being made, just a clinical evaluation of causes and effects.
People who commit terrible crimes are responsible for their actions. But it's far too convenient to just label them as evil and move on. Something made them evil. Something wired their brain that way. We are not the authors of our own personalities.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not claiming that all people are redeemable. Some aren't. There are cases where the only rational (and ethical!) thing to do is separate the perpetrator from the rest of civil society, for our own protection.
But we do ourselves a big favor if we allow ourselves to question and study the origin of these behaviors. And if we allow ourselves to advance the study of rehabilitation and reform.
Just as it is morally correct to protect the society at-large from predators, it is also, I think, a moral requirement to find better ways at fixing broken people. Just like we do with cancer, AIDS, or any other ailment. Expand that to include mental disorders. The brain is another organ.
Right now we suck at verifiably correcting for psychological disorders. (Hell, we can't even agree on what constitutes one). Because we're bad at it, we take the safe approach of caging dangerous people. That's fine. It's the best we can do with our current state of knowledge. But we should strive to learn more, so that we can make more accurate decisions on who should remain caged and who is eligible for reform.
The connection between child abuse and adult criminality has been studied with twin studies. Genetic confounding plays the starring role.
> But pretending that some are evil
Try again. You're pretending there aren't evil, broken people out there.
They've found genes that sort of predict violent behavior, but only if the person carrying the gene is subjected to abuse; which means that the gene probably predicts higher sensitivity to abuse rather than a violent nature.
You're pretending that labeling some people evil because they have the wrong genetics is a solution, it isn't.
I used to be of the mind that violent criminals were beyond "saving" but that mentality began to wane the more I taught in the prison system. This was partly due to the fact that I never looked into my students' histories so that I couldn't be biased by my predilections on the severity of their crimes. By being blind to their crimes, it made me reevaluate my stance as some of my students probably had committed violent crimes but they were all great students.
Now, my moral stance is that everyone deserves access to an education, no matter the circumstances. If one starts to restrict access due to severity of crimes committed, then we get ourselves into using education as a reward/punishment which should make everyone's ethical spidey senses stand on edge. Notice that this doesn't get into the nuanced discussion about the types of education or accommodations required for individuals who are considered dangerous to other students.
Finally, for those who think murderers cannot change, I suggest watching the Mexico episode of "Inside the Real Narcos" on Netflix where they interview a Mexican Cartel hitman who truly seems regretful of his crimes.
People aren’t born criminals. We make them as a society (for the most part). The problems with this of course come down to paying now for a better tomorrow and being able to accurately identify these individuals. Other than that it’s like the problem in health care - we’re trying to treat symptoms that needed to be avoided yesterday.
Of course, you have to get past the political demand that there should be marginalised people, and the institutions determined to make some regardless of whether or not they "deserve" it.
Woods' story is just another piece of evidence that "3 strikes" rules have no benefit to society.
First, I'm glad Woods is out. It's clear he is a changed man. His release was a fair decision by Gov Brown.
Would he have been equally as changed if he had only served 3 years? Doubtful, if recidivism statistics are accurate.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics report in April 2014. It studied recidivism patterns of 404,638 prisoners released from 2005-2010, from state prisons. Within three years, they were re-arrested at 67.8%, and 76.6% were re-arrested within five-years. 28.6% of inmates were arrested for a violent offense within five-years; 1.7% were for rape or sexual assault and 23.0% for assault.
Since a prior criminal record is a good predictor of future offending, the odds are that Woods would have committed another crime had he not been three-striked. As it is, society had 21 years of no further crimes from Mr. Woods as he was incarcerated. Remember, we aren't talking about a petty drug user or shoplifter -- we're talking about a man willing to put a gun in another person's face -- a violent act.
I'm happy that Mr. Woods has gotten his life together, but his third "strike" was attempted armed robbery. He wasn't shoplifting a candy bar. We have to ask ourselves, if Woods had gotten 3 years for the armed robbery, wouldn't statistics suggest that he would have committed more crimes, probably violent, such as another armed robbery?
3-strikes rules have no benefit to society? Sure they do -- we had 21 years without another violent crime from Mr. Woods.
I think it also calls for looking at why recidivism rates are so high, and what can be done to lower them. If we can lower recidivism rates after the first crime then the benefits would be much greater than using 3-strikes to lower them after the third crime after which two more crimes have already occured.
Previous history is only a good indicator of future performance because we wrote the rules that way.
When you're taken out of society for a few years and the world moves on without you, the only connections you've made upon release are with other criminals.
And when your record is made public and discreetly used to discriminate against you as a job candidate, is it any wonder so many criminals reoffend? It's all too easy to be tempted back into easy (or illegitimate) money when you're surrounded by people playing that game.
Funny thing is, it's acknowledged to be a real problem-- the parole system tries to discourage you from maintaining associations with criminals as a condition of release-- but it isn't realistic depending on where you're from or what support you have.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/reasonable-doubt-new-l...
> I estimate, that at typical policy margins in the United States today, decarceration has zero net impact on crime outside of prison. That estimate is uncertain, but at least as much evidence suggests that decarceration reduces crime as increases it. The crux of the matter is that tougher sentences hardly deter crime, and that while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase their criminality after release. As a result, “tough-on-crime” initiatives can reduce crime in the short run but cause offsetting harm in the long run.
I'm not writing this intending to endorse three strikes laws or death sentences, but you're arguing against a point that I don't think is being made.
(Now, my own personal opinion is that we ought to be taking a closer look at why the penal system is doing such a poor job reforming criminals, and that "3 strikes laws" feel a lot like "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".)
Including this guy for stealing a slice of pizza
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/05/us/25-years-for-a-slice-o...
For violent crime I don't have a very informed opinion. I'd need a few hundred hours research to get better resolution models than I currently have in my head. Suffice to say jurisprudence is a rather thorny problem with no nice answer as you only have so many levers you can push/pull to change the economics and it's well established that for a certain segment of the population even the pain of death isn't enough to deter them, so they are better off just off the street.
Penal theory is such a conundrum in that regard. It's like oh, there are people for which nothing works. Well can we just destroy them? The public says no. Right. So... Back in they go with the public? Well, no the public doesn't want that either. Ok, so we'll just hold on to them for a really long time? Yes, but the public is not happy about paying for that. Ok, but hey wouldn't it be better if violent people spent less time with other violent people than more time? It would but where else can we put them? So, we just leave them here in the same cage together for a really long time? I guess so? That seems just like a really, shitty, fucked situation for which there is no good answer. Hmm... seems that way.
At least thats my analysis. It's an interesting topic. More study required.
You are completely misinterpreting those statistics.