This article has a strange tone. It fails to prove anything by the end other than that X amount of people graduate the program without stating what amount of people enter. What the program is doing sounds like it has helped, but the article's argument leaves itself wide (Wide!) open to anyone wanting to say that it doesn't actually work.
What's missing is an interview with someone who has graduated the program and the long-term statistics for all people who enter the program.
> “When they get a job, we ask them simple questions. ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ And they’re just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, do we actually care?’ They are so surprised that we’re asking,” she said.
> But it has to be authentic. If Mrs. C and her partner, Michael Contreras, were just playing a role, he said, the incarcerated men would “read right through everything.”
> “They’re going pick out who really wants them to change and who’s just here for a paycheck,” he said.
There's no substitute for someone genuinely caring, or genuinely trying to care, for someone else. :)
Based on the evidence I've seen and my own lived experience I believe that rehabbing criminals works better than punishing them. To me, that seems pretty straight forward.
Where I disagree is how much it costs. There are some criminals I don't want to pay for rehab for. Addicts who don't want to be sober, petty theft with short sentences, and heinous psycho criminals are all groups I do not want my taxes helping.
That's okay because it's cheaper to lock them up, at least in the short term. Long term it's definitely more complicated but the punishment aspect that's associated with the more heinous crimes is a feature, not a bug.
I suspect if you consider even just one several-year jail term, it ends up a lot more expensive, to say nothing of recidivism rates turning them into multiple
terms. You might not like "coddling" criminals with rehabilitation, but bottom line is it's cheaper and more effective.
The Delancey Street Project in San Francisco has an outstanding record on preventing recidivism. Their secret, though, is inducting only ex-felons who genuinely want to turn their life around. As you point out, without this motivation, falure is near guaranteed.
> Gone would be death row, with its tiny, moldering cells. Gone, ideally, would be cells at all, though that may take some time. But most of all, gone would be the attitude that incarcerated people belong in cages.
> Instead, following the lead of places including Norway and Finland, California would change what prison is for. The focus would be on giving incarcerated people a more normalized experienced that offered the skills, training and personal growth to be good citizens — because most people who go into prison come out again.
This all costs money that they presumably will need to raise taxes for. I'd much rather spend that on kids growing up. Providing those that don't have a good safety net or family life with more structure and activities. Or on the homeless and the drug addicted who are true victims and haven't shown a propensity to hurt anybody.
I'm not sure I can look favorably at a murderer, or even someone that commits manslaughter or negligent homicide while drunk driving. I probably need to become a better person and be more forgiving, but that's a really hard ask to make of people. I regularly imagine myself in the shoes of victims (over exposure to crime drama?) and know I couldn't bear having my loved ones taken from me.
> This all costs money that they presumably will need to raise taxes for.
I don't inherently disagree, but proponents would point out that the alternative also costs money and has other costs (especially for victims where a person turns back to crime after being released from prison).
It's unfortunate I don't think there's any source of data I can trust on the costs in either direction. So to me, it ultimately comes down to what value I'd prefer to see in society. I stand somewhere along the lines of: (1) these men did their time and deserve a second chance and (2) one of the worst things you can do with a violent criminal is release them early, before they're rehabilitated, to see them go on to hurt another victim.
> This all costs money that they presumably will need to raise taxes for.
If it works, maybe not. Keeping all those people in prison for years costs; if we can keep them for less time, we can save money on the per-year costs even if the program to get them out itself costs money.
I think the point is that most people in prison didn't kill someone and most people come out. We would never choose for them to "just not come out" so the question is "How do you want them to act when they come out?"
Does it lead to better outcomes to rehabilitate the person who is in there for 5 years because they stole TVs from Best Buy, or does it lead to better outcomes for us to do nothing and then release them.
Genuine question. We've done the latter, let's try something different.
When they say the prison cells would ideally be eliminated, they're not talking about a magical society in which rape and murderer no longer happen. They're talking about releasing rapists and murderers without locking them up. That's the ideal they're striving for.
> When they say the prison cells would ideally be eliminated, they're not talking about a magical society in which rape and murderer no longer happen. They're talking about releasing rapists and murderers without locking them up. That's the ideal they're striving for.
In general, when you're presenting your opponent's ideas as this level of two-dimensional magical thinking, you probably haven't engaged with the ideas enough to have this strong of an opinion about it. The prison abolition movement has been around for a long time, and has indeed grappled with the idea of "but what if someone murders someone?", which is indeed the absolute first question someone arrives at when considering prison abolition.
If you don't have prison cells, then you don't have incarceration of murderers. If that isn't what they intend then they should say so upfront. Instead they prefer to avoid the issue and whine about people bringing it up (what you're doing.)
There's an entire philosophical, legal, and structural framework the prison abolition movement is working in that you've got absolutely no basis in. This is like asking whether drug legalization advocates are advocating that drug dealers get off scot-free - the premise of the question is silly within the frame of the discussion. You're trying to position this like a "gotcha" question, which is why nobody's bothering to engage with you - because you haven't bothered to engage with the issue in any serious way yourself.
Again, you whine about me bringing it up without bothering to explain why I'm wrong.
Even if you give murderers the Anders Breivek treatment with a cushy apartment style prison cell complete with gaming consoles and arts and crafts sessions, that's still a prison cell. You can dress it up to make it pretty, but he's still locked up, taken out of society, which is what both he and society deserves. If that is what is meant by the abolition of prisons, then it should be called prison reform instead. Prison reform I can get behind, but that's not what is actually being proposed. That's the motte the prison abolition radicals fall back on when challenged, not what they're actually calling for.
Stop with this strawman argument. They're not saying criminals should just be released immediately and forgotten about until they commit their next crime. If you sincerely believe that this is the position of criminal justice reform advocates, you have been misled.
They're talking about criminals being housed in something other than a tiny cage with other criminals 23/7, who are all treated like they are irredeemable criminals who should never be allowed to re-enter society, even though most of them don't have life sentences. Turns out if you do that, the micro-society that results among prisoners is a warped society where criminality is rampant and normal. The strategies you learn to live in the prison society will cause you to become more of a criminal once you are released into the larger society, not less of one. In other words, prisons as they are currently run in the US are effectively a crime training program.
In what world is that logical? In what world would we not ask ourselves, "Is this really working? Should we at least try something else?"
A prison cell by another name is still a prison cell. Unless we go back to executing murderers the day of their conviction, we will always need prison cells.
I choose not to, not because doing otherwise would be difficult but because doing otherwise would violate my personal code. Why should I violate my personal code, because it's cheaper for the state if I do? I'm happy with my tax dollars being used to incarcerate rapists and murderers, that's money well spent. Lock these people up so they can't hurt people anymore and throw away the key. Damn the expense, give them what they deserve.
What you’ve described isn’t a “personal code” it’s a desire for vengeance. I mean? You do you, but I reckon that seeking to hurt over seeking to rehabilitate hurts us more than it hurts the offender.
I’m not a big fan acquiesce whenever the state says “bend over” but that’s not what choosing to view them as people is doing. The state wants us to fear and loathe our fellow man. When you talk about “giving them what they deserve” you play right into their hands.
Hurt people hurt people, or something like that, so I don’t think hurting them harder is going to make them hurt less hard.
I am open to the premise of not using incarceration for most nonviolent offenders. I don't support that in all cases (we're better off with Maddoff and Bankman-Fried in prison for life), but at least it's not an insane proposition.
The total elimination of prison cells is insane though. Such a proposal does not deserve to be humored.
> …will need to raise taxes for… I’d rather spend it on…
Politicians love to present initiatives like this as a zero sum game, and they rarely are. You’re assuming future crimes and reincarnation have no cost, and having fewer criminals in our communities doesn’t benefit children. It’s so much more complex than a line item on a balance sheet.
Most people in prison have not killed another person, or even committed physical violence against another person. Many used to be those kids who grew up without a good safety net or family life, or adults who became homeless or addicted to drugs.
I mean not to argue against your point, but Federal prisoners are generally not going to have committed violent crimes as those kind of crimes are the purview of the state and lead to state incarceration not federal.
Ah, good point! Indeed, when I pull up state-level prison data, it appears that closer to 2/3rds of current prisoners in state prison were convicted of violent felonies.
Murderers and rapists are convenient boogeymen when arguing against prison reform, but the reality is that the vast majority of first-time offenders are in there for relatively minor crimes (mostly drug related), and simply being in the system is what propels them deeper into that life because of how limited their options become.
I think you're right that this would have a larger impact in the long run (and be more humane, to boot - avoid the trauma in the first place), but it's a long-term investment, and it needs to also be combined with policies that lower crime in the short term as well. Voters (hell, people) feel crime as a safety threat and don't tend to respond to feeling unsafe by supporting plans with 20-year payoffs, so if you want your 20 year plan to stay in effect, you need to show shorter-term benefits, too.
Here's something else to try imagining: your brother falls on hard times, starts taking meth and ends up violently robbing someone to support his habit. Would you want him to be left to rot in prison for 10 years or would you want him to be part of a program that both holds him accountable and tries to help him rehabilitate and make amends?
Both approaches will have costs but for me the choice is clear.
For a violent crime, he can serve the time. Especially being a brother on meth-- he's as much a risk to family as he is anyone else.
Write bad checks or panhandle or steal bikes or rip copper out of walls or something for fuck's sake. The line is crossed by going straight to infliction of violence on the community.
Better question: would you rather let him rot in prison or be his next victim? Because in all these discussions about rehabilitation somehow we never talk about victims of the re-offenders
One of the things that get trotted out a lot when talking about the higher-than-the-general-population incarceration rate of black men is that a higher-than-the-general-population rate of single-parent black families. Which, in turn, drives a higher-than-the-general-population number of black teens into risky/illegal behaviors. And the cycle continues. Its not even controversial: children of two-parent homes tend to be more successful and spend less time in the judicial system*. So in a very real sense, fighting to keep these kids' fathers out of jail in the first place helps kids.
*. There are also a host of other issues that contribute to the incarceration rate, and the non-legal issues that cause one parent to leave are also (arguably) a driver of criminal activity. But in general, the less time a kid's parent spends in prison and the more rehabilitated that parent is upon release, the less likely that parent is to re-offend and the better off that kid is going to be.
Good eye. Missed that. I immediately want to question why it mentions the first year only when, I believe, that it's been running for at least over six years.
Even if all the statistics are put in front of us, interpreting them might require understanding the distribution of the types of crime they were imprisoned for or other factors local to that city, county, or state.
Perhaps after the first year there are other factors that the graduates struggle with that push them towards prison again? Could be as simple as losing hope. I'd expect it to be bad influences in their daily lives or becoming homeless after failing without a safety net.
Also, it may take time for programs like this to be effective too? This sort of thing is just generally “challenging to assess” because people have these really strong emotional responses that aren’t really based on anything but their own life experience. “Why can’t these idiots figure this stuff out? I overcame challenge X without robbing 7-11s why can’t they?”
What we really need to do is look at these sorts of problems from a “does this solve the problem or not?” Then actually commit to running a few different programs side-by side for long enough to get real results… but that’s not really what anybody is proposing.
My personal belief and intuition is that the carceral system is broken, unjust, and deeply flawed - but I am not in the position to propose alternatives. It’s quite possible that I’m wrong and ignorant of the reality of the topic. That said, there are people who study this sort of thing professionally.
We should connect those folks with the stats and mathy folks and get out of their way to engineer a better world, not just see what gets spelled out when we throw spaghetti against the wall.
I would personally look into whether there is any confounding factors, the one I'm thinking of is whether some prisoners are not eligible for the program due to the nature of their crime or recidivism.
> ...long on punishment and short on compassion...
matter of perspective, friend. short consequences for the guilty party may mean long consequences for the innocent.
moreover - and i don't think you meant it this way, but - "punishment" is a different word than "rehabilitation". the confusion between the two is a symptom of the bigger confusion over what law, order, justice, etc mean at a social level... and now we are back at the "ideologue" level, where statistically meaningful datapoints may indicate any number of different things. in other words, ideas have consequences. i don't trust anyone who isn't at the "ideologue" level in these sorts of conversations.
You may not be the right person to ask this, but I'm curious: among ideologues for punishment, what are their thoughts on the efficacy (or lack thereof) of drug laws in the United States? Because while the US never went as far as some countries, it went much farther than others and did not see promising results.
I mean, I fully acknowledge that I have a “bias” in what I believe here, but practically, I want us to make decisions based on the evidence and numbers as a society, not on how it makes us feel? I don’t know if I’m articulating that right, but I want policies that reduce the rate of recidivism more than I want to make the things right by the victims of crime. I can’t change the fact that someone was harmed, but I can support policies that make people less likely to be harmed in the future.
This sucks if you’re a victim - I fully acknowledge that. But I want to prevent the next 4 victims, not punish 1 offender. Am I right? I think I might be on the right track, but I don’t know. I think we need to do some real science to find out, and that’s time consuming and expensive.
To be honest, racial equity movements, poverty reduction, and unleaded gasoline has probably done more to prevent crime than any punitive tools of the state. But I’m not qualified to really assert that… so even for me it’s “feels all the way down.”
Lot of ideologues who are long on punishment and short on compassion in this thread.
There were only a couple of toplevel comments when you wrote this and none of them can be accurately described this way. Plus you can just reply to them rather than grumping at the whole thread that has barely even developed.
Your first read was wrong then (there weren’t even lots of comments) and is even more wrong now. More importantly, meta of this sort gets comments moderated so it’s mostly a way to ruin a potentially fine comment.
Incarceration is a western phenomenon, it wasn’t really used in traditional cultures, who usually had systems based on family honour. I think we are overly punitive and it’s not effective.
That's actually used to be the norm in Europe, too. Various forms of corporal punishment for smaller offences and death for major ones. Prisons where people would be kept for years at a time are a fairly recent development of XIX century
Yeah, they just either killed or tortured you (or a family member in retribution) or booted you from the tribe- sounds like a death sentence in a lot of cases to me …
Here's something I've noticed recently is that people on different sides of the issue usually end up talking past each other.
I'll start by pointing out I feel that the prison system is incredibly in humane and we need serious prison reform to a large degree. But I think there needs to be some understanding that there isn't a one size fits all solution, on one end you have a kid of a crack addict who gets in with the wrong crowd and ends up getting busted for being involved in an armed robbery because his buddy asked for "help" with something. Is the proper solution to throw the book at this kid and put him away for 20-30 years? Probably not.
On the flip side you have serial killers like Ted Bundy or the BTK killer, those people don't need rehabilitation they're simply monsters and deviants that need to be removed from society forever.
Any discussion that fails to acknowledge both of these groups exist is probabaly fallacious.
IMO what is disingenuous is that the vast majority of prisoners belong in the first category, but when discussing any kind of reform the standard argument used is "but we can't let the Ted Bundys out!" and that kills all further progress.
> IMO what is disingenuous is that the vast majority of prisoners belong in the first category
I'm not sure evidence bares that out. I always like to reference this great project when discussing this topic[1]. Some 63% of people in state prison in the US are there for some violent crime, which is an unfortunately muddy category. I don't have the exact stat at hand but something like 70% of people incarcerated for the first time have 5 or more priors.
My point is there is a vast middle where most prisoners have some kind of violent conviction and half a dozen or more priors. It's a thorny problem to think about how to best keep communities safe, and to best serve these people who are falling through the cracks. However I think its fair to say that some of them probably need a few years to cool off where they can't be a danger to others. And I say this as someone who is highly critical of the carceral state and generally doesn't want to see any person lose their freedom.
It's going to be a lot more meaningful to look at the reasons for peoples' first incarceration, because that's where the problem needs to be addressed. Because of the way the legal system works it is all but guaranteed that successive instances will be more and more severe (the primary one being that no one is going to employ you once you get a record).
Aggravated assault is the most common violent that turns up in the stats, with a rate of ~250 per 100k, and about half of those result in convictions. So that's pretty common among first incarcerations. I don't have the stat at hand, but most people entering prison have multiple priors before the thing that lands them in jail.
If you're angry at someone for using/possessing IV drugs, why lock them up in prison with the violent offenders, e.g, the people we're scared of?
If you inject people with non-violent crime histories into a violent prison, what do you think the outcome is going to be? More people we're scared of.
I noticed that too. In Canada they've introduced sweeping rules that have increased time for pardon eligibility to be 10 years instead of 5. All because of a one fucking case of Homolka. If it was up to me I'd rather see politicians responsible for these changes to be in jail. Why is this imbecilic tendency to keep punishing people long after they've paid for their crimes?
Its especially frustrating, given that Ted Bundy was seemingly lab-grown as an argument for the death penalty. And he was executed.
What are we even doing comparing how the system effects him and some kid who didn't find out he was an accessory to an armed robbery until after his friends got back in the car? Like one is clearly the premeditated threat to society, the other found out the hard way that he had rotten taste in friends.
Isn't that already handled by juries recommending, and judges proclaiming, different sentences depending on the crimes committed, circumstances around the crime, and the person that committed them? There isn't a strict rule of "found guilty of X crime = Y years in jail sentence". It's all circumstantial.
You are correct to an extant although there are mandatory sentencing guidelines, and plea bargains play into this.
But at the end of the day my point is to help introduce nuance to the discussion which often seems to be an argument between a loud group that advocates that everyone in prison is just a misunderstood jan valjean that was a victim of circumstance and should be helped instead of punished, and those who feel that criminals are need to be punished for violating the social contract and are sociopath threats to an orderly and just society. The first group likes to point to young people who had incredibly difficult environments as justification for their point whereas the latter group points to child molesters and cold blooded gang members for their point.
Both exist, both should be taken into account, and trying to depict all criminals as one or the other leads to nonsensical, impracticable ignorant solutions that come more from a desire to feel right than actually doing good.
> Any discussion that fails to acknowledge both of these groups exist is probabaly fallacious.
I'm pretty sure basically every debate about incarceration has considered all these factors. They are the some of the most obvious factors to consider after all.
The data presented in the article are unconvincing. Of course people that enter a voluntary program to reduce crime will commit less crime. They're self-selecting and indicating that they want to be reformed just by attending the program.
Meanwhile California homicide rates increased 40% from 2019 to 2021. Aggravated assault with a firearm increased over 60%. The article says these programs were started in 2015. If they think what they're doing is working I'd like to see what they think failure looks like.
This is one city in California (a large one, but still just one) with one small new pilot program. I'm not sure why you'd expect this to be reflected in state-wide statistics from 2019-2021.
The article discusses one prison, not statewide changes. Additionally, this program was introduced in 2023, after the period of time you're quoting.
Violent crimes are up across the nation; it isn't limited to California.
Those stats underscore the opposite of the argument you're making: if traditional incarceration and punishment isn't getting the job done, then maybe it's time to try something entirely new, regardless of how it affects people's sense of retribution and punishment.
Yes but only in the last year has California began implementing it in earnest. It says 9000 men have gone through such programs since 2015, which overall, reflects about 1% of the prison population in California. Given the success quoted in the next paragraph, it seems like California should be ramping up this number.
> Since reentry programs such as this began in 2015, about 9,000 men have graduated from them. California, even after an enormous push to lower prison populations during the pandemic, still has about 94,000 people behind bars and 35,000 on parole. Each week, hundreds are released, most with $200 and little support.
> But of those who participated for at least nine months in programs such as Amistad, 92% are not reconvicted of a new crime in their first year of release. By contrast, the latest figures for the general population released from California prison show that nearly 22% return to prison within 12 months.
> Meanwhile California homicide rates increased 40% from 2019 to 2021. Aggravated assault with a firearm increased over 60%. The article says these programs were started in 2015. If they think what they're doing is working I'd like to see what they think failure looks like.
Hmmm I wonder if there might have been some sort of confounding variable affecting all this between 2019 and 2021...
Yes, but not what you're hinting at. The confounding variable is that California decided to let a bunch of violent criminals out of jail early in 2020 because of Covid first, then because of equity concerns.
It's unsurprising that letting murderers out of jail early increases the murder rate.
1. If mass incarceration worked, the US would be the safest country in the world. The US has 5% of the world population but 25% of the world's prisoners [1]. The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world [2];
3. Executing prisoners is really expensive. There have been a ton of studies on this. For example, Maryland estimates that each executed prisoners has a total cost of $3 million [3] once you factor in higher security incarceration and legal defense in appeals;
4. Since 1973, at least 195 people sentenced to die have been exonerated [4];
5. Death sentences are significantly more likely when the allegend offender is black and the victim is white [5]. The point is that this has almost nothing to do with "justice" and everything to do with anger and vengeance.
6. Of the people xonerated, 25% had confessed and 11% had plead guilty [6], both of which show massive problems with police practices and the difficulty, costs and risks in defending one's innocence.
Restorative justice is both cheaper and more effective at reducing crime. The biggest problem to solve is income inequality.
Unfrotunately, locking people up is big business. It creates jobs. Voncict labor is an unfortunate loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment otherwise banning slavery (eg [7]). Prisoners increase population without increasing the number of voters (sort of; it's a little complex). Prisoners are further milked through outrageous commissary fees, communication fees (leters and phone), medical co-pays and the failure to provide basic living conditions like sufficient food and medical care.
Mass incarceration and retributive justice have been an abject failure in the US. Spend a few minutes looking at Riker's Island. You may be tempted to call it an exception. You shouldn't. It's systemic. Retributive justice simply does not work so we need actual reform of this system.
> The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world.
Among those other lower-incarceration countries are Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China, which moderate their incarceration rate by means of considerably easier standards for execution than the US.
I assume that's not the solution you have in mind.
I’d assume people would compare what they think is the greatest civilisation of the world with civilisation of compatible systems, but yeah if you want to race with Iran, SA and China and just be better than them, go ahead, be better than Iran, it will be great for Americans, there is also Afghanistan if you want to go a level further
> Iran carried out at least 977 executions in 2015, at least 567 executions in 2016,[7] and at least 507 executions in 2017.[8] In 2018 there were at least 249 executions, at least 273 in 2019, at least 246 in 2020, at least 290 in 2021, at least 553 in 2022, and at least 309 so far in 2023.
There is no public information on China. This doesn't significantly change the prison population. Estimates are roughly 2400 annually [2].
Saudi Arabia executed 172 people in 2023 [3]. Again, this is statistically insignificant compared to prison population.
> 1. If mass incarceration worked, the US would be the safest country in the world. The US has 5% of the world population but 25% of the world's prisoners [1]. The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world [2];
I keep hearing this and I just have a hard time believing it. Like okay maybe technically Saudi Arabia does have fewer people in prison than the US but that's because the punishment for theft is having your hand removed rather than going to jail, I guess yes technically that isn't prison, but generally in an elightened society we moved away from those methods of punishment for the most part. Then of course China, I mean China also consistently reported the lowest COVID numbers, and are their numbers including people all those Uighyr's that are undergoing "reeducation"?
Honestly every time I hear this I get the same feeling as when the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women condemns the US treatment of women's rights despite having on it's board such well known champions of Women's rights as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Suadi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Turkey. Something just seems to not smell quite right.
> ... Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Suadi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Turkey
A key issue in women's rights is reproductive freedom. To varying degrees, abortion is legal in every country you just mentioned. Abortion is generally allowed under Islam. Afghanistan and Pakistan have stricter laws than, say, Turkey but they have usable exceptions (life of th emother, life of the fetus) where the states in the US that have enacted abortion bans generally have the patina of exceptions. These are exceptions so vague and so strict that they're intended never to be used (eg [1]).
Russia has started limiting abortion access. India allows abortion.
So yes, by some measures, the countries you mentioned do, to varying degrees, have more freedom for women.
The issue I think is that many in the US have very skewed views of both how draconian and restrictive some US laws are and a warped view of life in Islamic and other non-Western countries.
Back to prisons, the US has roughly 2 million inmates [2], roughly 1% of the adult population and by every metric this makes the US the most carceral state on Earth. So why aren't we the safest?
It's easy to believe because the US is very good at commercializing and entrenching perverse profit motives, i.e. prison industrial complex and the US health sector knows how to extract more from bodies. The US was also rich/socially broken enough where locking up more people made political and economical sense (for some) and had decades of head start refining the process. Take PRC, Western estimates of Uyghur internment at 1/12 of population, or about lifetime internment of US blacks. Vast majority of mass internment was measured in months because they had to process prisoners through limited new facilities over a short period of time - the point was to filter problematic populations and find edge cases who were slapped with 10-20 year sentences. Majority was was released after a short stint. There's limit on how much country that intern on politics can extract value from industrializing prison, because they prefer not to have # dissidents get out of hand in the first place. Even coerced labour or organ harvesting is lame profit driver compared to the service jobs as a result of the US prison sector that benefits from countries having too much money. Most countries, especially developing countries, diverting people to lockup people is not productive use of resources, at least not for assembling widgets. PRC doesn't have the incentives to spend resources to lock up as large % of the population as the US in both scale and timelines involved. They spent trillions upfront to process the region so long term securitization doesn't involve expensive internment. Meanwhile, in the US, mass internment has become profitable, so it should not be surprising that US ends up imprisoning disproportionately more.
> Rearrest rates for felony offenses increased toward the end of the period. When we examine the last several months for which we have data, we see that 50 percent of individuals released in June 2015 were rearrested for felonies within two years, compared with 53 percent for those released in October 2015.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadWhat's missing is an interview with someone who has graduated the program and the long-term statistics for all people who enter the program.
> “When they get a job, we ask them simple questions. ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ And they’re just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, do we actually care?’ They are so surprised that we’re asking,” she said.
> But it has to be authentic. If Mrs. C and her partner, Michael Contreras, were just playing a role, he said, the incarcerated men would “read right through everything.”
> “They’re going pick out who really wants them to change and who’s just here for a paycheck,” he said.
There's no substitute for someone genuinely caring, or genuinely trying to care, for someone else. :)
That's a great question. How do you operationalize success?
And this is one of the things government programs are really bad at, at least at any kind of scale.
Where I disagree is how much it costs. There are some criminals I don't want to pay for rehab for. Addicts who don't want to be sober, petty theft with short sentences, and heinous psycho criminals are all groups I do not want my taxes helping.
> Instead, following the lead of places including Norway and Finland, California would change what prison is for. The focus would be on giving incarcerated people a more normalized experienced that offered the skills, training and personal growth to be good citizens — because most people who go into prison come out again.
This all costs money that they presumably will need to raise taxes for. I'd much rather spend that on kids growing up. Providing those that don't have a good safety net or family life with more structure and activities. Or on the homeless and the drug addicted who are true victims and haven't shown a propensity to hurt anybody.
I'm not sure I can look favorably at a murderer, or even someone that commits manslaughter or negligent homicide while drunk driving. I probably need to become a better person and be more forgiving, but that's a really hard ask to make of people. I regularly imagine myself in the shoes of victims (over exposure to crime drama?) and know I couldn't bear having my loved ones taken from me.
This is a tough topic.
I don't inherently disagree, but proponents would point out that the alternative also costs money and has other costs (especially for victims where a person turns back to crime after being released from prison).
It's unfortunate I don't think there's any source of data I can trust on the costs in either direction. So to me, it ultimately comes down to what value I'd prefer to see in society. I stand somewhere along the lines of: (1) these men did their time and deserve a second chance and (2) one of the worst things you can do with a violent criminal is release them early, before they're rehabilitated, to see them go on to hurt another victim.
If it works, maybe not. Keeping all those people in prison for years costs; if we can keep them for less time, we can save money on the per-year costs even if the program to get them out itself costs money.
If it works.
Does it lead to better outcomes to rehabilitate the person who is in there for 5 years because they stole TVs from Best Buy, or does it lead to better outcomes for us to do nothing and then release them.
Genuine question. We've done the latter, let's try something different.
In general, when you're presenting your opponent's ideas as this level of two-dimensional magical thinking, you probably haven't engaged with the ideas enough to have this strong of an opinion about it. The prison abolition movement has been around for a long time, and has indeed grappled with the idea of "but what if someone murders someone?", which is indeed the absolute first question someone arrives at when considering prison abolition.
Even if you give murderers the Anders Breivek treatment with a cushy apartment style prison cell complete with gaming consoles and arts and crafts sessions, that's still a prison cell. You can dress it up to make it pretty, but he's still locked up, taken out of society, which is what both he and society deserves. If that is what is meant by the abolition of prisons, then it should be called prison reform instead. Prison reform I can get behind, but that's not what is actually being proposed. That's the motte the prison abolition radicals fall back on when challenged, not what they're actually calling for.
They're talking about criminals being housed in something other than a tiny cage with other criminals 23/7, who are all treated like they are irredeemable criminals who should never be allowed to re-enter society, even though most of them don't have life sentences. Turns out if you do that, the micro-society that results among prisoners is a warped society where criminality is rampant and normal. The strategies you learn to live in the prison society will cause you to become more of a criminal once you are released into the larger society, not less of one. In other words, prisons as they are currently run in the US are effectively a crime training program.
In what world is that logical? In what world would we not ask ourselves, "Is this really working? Should we at least try something else?"
You simply choose to. It’s not easy, just like it’s not easy to “choose” to study or go to the gym, or do anything, but you just choose to.
It’s hard, but you can choose a tit-for-tat mindset, it’s a proven strategy in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, which is very similar to life.
I choose not to, not because doing otherwise would be difficult but because doing otherwise would violate my personal code. Why should I violate my personal code, because it's cheaper for the state if I do? I'm happy with my tax dollars being used to incarcerate rapists and murderers, that's money well spent. Lock these people up so they can't hurt people anymore and throw away the key. Damn the expense, give them what they deserve.
I’m not a big fan acquiesce whenever the state says “bend over” but that’s not what choosing to view them as people is doing. The state wants us to fear and loathe our fellow man. When you talk about “giving them what they deserve” you play right into their hands.
Hurt people hurt people, or something like that, so I don’t think hurting them harder is going to make them hurt less hard.
So in your opinion 85% of the money spent on the prison system is wasted, since only 15% of the prison population consists of rapists and murderers?
The total elimination of prison cells is insane though. Such a proposal does not deserve to be humored.
Politicians love to present initiatives like this as a zero sum game, and they rarely are. You’re assuming future crimes and reincarnation have no cost, and having fewer criminals in our communities doesn’t benefit children. It’s so much more complex than a line item on a balance sheet.
Here are the stats for federal prisoners: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
I think you're right that this would have a larger impact in the long run (and be more humane, to boot - avoid the trauma in the first place), but it's a long-term investment, and it needs to also be combined with policies that lower crime in the short term as well. Voters (hell, people) feel crime as a safety threat and don't tend to respond to feeling unsafe by supporting plans with 20-year payoffs, so if you want your 20 year plan to stay in effect, you need to show shorter-term benefits, too.
Both approaches will have costs but for me the choice is clear.
Write bad checks or panhandle or steal bikes or rip copper out of walls or something for fuck's sake. The line is crossed by going straight to infliction of violence on the community.
*. There are also a host of other issues that contribute to the incarceration rate, and the non-legal issues that cause one parent to leave are also (arguably) a driver of criminal activity. But in general, the less time a kid's parent spends in prison and the more rehabilitated that parent is upon release, the less likely that parent is to re-offend and the better off that kid is going to be.
Even if all the statistics are put in front of us, interpreting them might require understanding the distribution of the types of crime they were imprisoned for or other factors local to that city, county, or state.
Perhaps after the first year there are other factors that the graduates struggle with that push them towards prison again? Could be as simple as losing hope. I'd expect it to be bad influences in their daily lives or becoming homeless after failing without a safety net.
What we really need to do is look at these sorts of problems from a “does this solve the problem or not?” Then actually commit to running a few different programs side-by side for long enough to get real results… but that’s not really what anybody is proposing.
My personal belief and intuition is that the carceral system is broken, unjust, and deeply flawed - but I am not in the position to propose alternatives. It’s quite possible that I’m wrong and ignorant of the reality of the topic. That said, there are people who study this sort of thing professionally.
We should connect those folks with the stats and mathy folks and get out of their way to engineer a better world, not just see what gets spelled out when we throw spaghetti against the wall.
matter of perspective, friend. short consequences for the guilty party may mean long consequences for the innocent.
moreover - and i don't think you meant it this way, but - "punishment" is a different word than "rehabilitation". the confusion between the two is a symptom of the bigger confusion over what law, order, justice, etc mean at a social level... and now we are back at the "ideologue" level, where statistically meaningful datapoints may indicate any number of different things. in other words, ideas have consequences. i don't trust anyone who isn't at the "ideologue" level in these sorts of conversations.
This sucks if you’re a victim - I fully acknowledge that. But I want to prevent the next 4 victims, not punish 1 offender. Am I right? I think I might be on the right track, but I don’t know. I think we need to do some real science to find out, and that’s time consuming and expensive.
To be honest, racial equity movements, poverty reduction, and unleaded gasoline has probably done more to prevent crime than any punitive tools of the state. But I’m not qualified to really assert that… so even for me it’s “feels all the way down.”
There were only a couple of toplevel comments when you wrote this and none of them can be accurately described this way. Plus you can just reply to them rather than grumping at the whole thread that has barely even developed.
Doesn’t really seem that Nordic to me.
I'll start by pointing out I feel that the prison system is incredibly in humane and we need serious prison reform to a large degree. But I think there needs to be some understanding that there isn't a one size fits all solution, on one end you have a kid of a crack addict who gets in with the wrong crowd and ends up getting busted for being involved in an armed robbery because his buddy asked for "help" with something. Is the proper solution to throw the book at this kid and put him away for 20-30 years? Probably not.
On the flip side you have serial killers like Ted Bundy or the BTK killer, those people don't need rehabilitation they're simply monsters and deviants that need to be removed from society forever.
Any discussion that fails to acknowledge both of these groups exist is probabaly fallacious.
I'm not sure evidence bares that out. I always like to reference this great project when discussing this topic[1]. Some 63% of people in state prison in the US are there for some violent crime, which is an unfortunately muddy category. I don't have the exact stat at hand but something like 70% of people incarcerated for the first time have 5 or more priors.
My point is there is a vast middle where most prisoners have some kind of violent conviction and half a dozen or more priors. It's a thorny problem to think about how to best keep communities safe, and to best serve these people who are falling through the cracks. However I think its fair to say that some of them probably need a few years to cool off where they can't be a danger to others. And I say this as someone who is highly critical of the carceral state and generally doesn't want to see any person lose their freedom.
[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
If you're angry at someone for using/possessing IV drugs, why lock them up in prison with the violent offenders, e.g, the people we're scared of?
If you inject people with non-violent crime histories into a violent prison, what do you think the outcome is going to be? More people we're scared of.
What are we even doing comparing how the system effects him and some kid who didn't find out he was an accessory to an armed robbery until after his friends got back in the car? Like one is clearly the premeditated threat to society, the other found out the hard way that he had rotten taste in friends.
But at the end of the day my point is to help introduce nuance to the discussion which often seems to be an argument between a loud group that advocates that everyone in prison is just a misunderstood jan valjean that was a victim of circumstance and should be helped instead of punished, and those who feel that criminals are need to be punished for violating the social contract and are sociopath threats to an orderly and just society. The first group likes to point to young people who had incredibly difficult environments as justification for their point whereas the latter group points to child molesters and cold blooded gang members for their point.
Both exist, both should be taken into account, and trying to depict all criminals as one or the other leads to nonsensical, impracticable ignorant solutions that come more from a desire to feel right than actually doing good.
I'm pretty sure basically every debate about incarceration has considered all these factors. They are the some of the most obvious factors to consider after all.
Meanwhile California homicide rates increased 40% from 2019 to 2021. Aggravated assault with a firearm increased over 60%. The article says these programs were started in 2015. If they think what they're doing is working I'd like to see what they think failure looks like.
https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics/...
Violent crimes are up across the nation; it isn't limited to California.
Those stats underscore the opposite of the argument you're making: if traditional incarceration and punishment isn't getting the job done, then maybe it's time to try something entirely new, regardless of how it affects people's sense of retribution and punishment.
> Since reentry programs such as this began in 2015, about 9,000 men have graduated from them. California, even after an enormous push to lower prison populations during the pandemic, still has about 94,000 people behind bars and 35,000 on parole. Each week, hundreds are released, most with $200 and little support.
> But of those who participated for at least nine months in programs such as Amistad, 92% are not reconvicted of a new crime in their first year of release. By contrast, the latest figures for the general population released from California prison show that nearly 22% return to prison within 12 months.
Hmmm I wonder if there might have been some sort of confounding variable affecting all this between 2019 and 2021...
It's unsurprising that letting murderers out of jail early increases the murder rate.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-09/covid-19...
https://trends.vera.org/state/CA
1. If mass incarceration worked, the US would be the safest country in the world. The US has 5% of the world population but 25% of the world's prisoners [1]. The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world [2];
3. Executing prisoners is really expensive. There have been a ton of studies on this. For example, Maryland estimates that each executed prisoners has a total cost of $3 million [3] once you factor in higher security incarceration and legal defense in appeals;
4. Since 1973, at least 195 people sentenced to die have been exonerated [4];
5. Death sentences are significantly more likely when the allegend offender is black and the victim is white [5]. The point is that this has almost nothing to do with "justice" and everything to do with anger and vengeance.
6. Of the people xonerated, 25% had confessed and 11% had plead guilty [6], both of which show massive problems with police practices and the difficulty, costs and risks in defending one's innocence.
Restorative justice is both cheaper and more effective at reducing crime. The biggest problem to solve is income inequality.
Unfrotunately, locking people up is big business. It creates jobs. Voncict labor is an unfortunate loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment otherwise banning slavery (eg [7]). Prisoners increase population without increasing the number of voters (sort of; it's a little complex). Prisoners are further milked through outrageous commissary fees, communication fees (leters and phone), medical co-pays and the failure to provide basic living conditions like sufficient food and medical care.
Mass incarceration and retributive justice have been an abject failure in the US. Spend a few minutes looking at Riker's Island. You may be tempted to call it an exception. You shouldn't. It's systemic. Retributive justice simply does not work so we need actual reform of this system.
[1]: https://www.aclu-wa.org/story/keys-our-mass-incarceration-cr...
[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/US.html
[3]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/urls_cited/ot2016/16-5...
[4]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence
[5]: https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-and-the-death-penalty...
[6]: https://innocenceproject.org/research-resources/
[7]: https://thecrimereport.org/2022/11/23/angola-will-remain-a-s...
Among those other lower-incarceration countries are Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China, which moderate their incarceration rate by means of considerably easier standards for execution than the US.
I assume that's not the solution you have in mind.
> Iran carried out at least 977 executions in 2015, at least 567 executions in 2016,[7] and at least 507 executions in 2017.[8] In 2018 there were at least 249 executions, at least 273 in 2019, at least 246 in 2020, at least 290 in 2021, at least 553 in 2022, and at least 309 so far in 2023.
There is no public information on China. This doesn't significantly change the prison population. Estimates are roughly 2400 annually [2].
Saudi Arabia executed 172 people in 2023 [3]. Again, this is statistically insignificant compared to prison population.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Iran
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China
[3]: https://reprieve.org/uk/2024/01/02/saudi-arabia-executed-at-...
I keep hearing this and I just have a hard time believing it. Like okay maybe technically Saudi Arabia does have fewer people in prison than the US but that's because the punishment for theft is having your hand removed rather than going to jail, I guess yes technically that isn't prison, but generally in an elightened society we moved away from those methods of punishment for the most part. Then of course China, I mean China also consistently reported the lowest COVID numbers, and are their numbers including people all those Uighyr's that are undergoing "reeducation"?
Honestly every time I hear this I get the same feeling as when the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women condemns the US treatment of women's rights despite having on it's board such well known champions of Women's rights as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Suadi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Turkey. Something just seems to not smell quite right.
A key issue in women's rights is reproductive freedom. To varying degrees, abortion is legal in every country you just mentioned. Abortion is generally allowed under Islam. Afghanistan and Pakistan have stricter laws than, say, Turkey but they have usable exceptions (life of th emother, life of the fetus) where the states in the US that have enacted abortion bans generally have the patina of exceptions. These are exceptions so vague and so strict that they're intended never to be used (eg [1]).
Russia has started limiting abortion access. India allows abortion.
So yes, by some measures, the countries you mentioned do, to varying degrees, have more freedom for women.
The issue I think is that many in the US have very skewed views of both how draconian and restrictive some US laws are and a warped view of life in Islamic and other non-Western countries.
Back to prisons, the US has roughly 2 million inmates [2], roughly 1% of the adult population and by every metric this makes the US the most carceral state on Earth. So why aren't we the safest?
[1]: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/11/texas-abortion-lawsu...
[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
> Rearrest rates for felony offenses increased toward the end of the period. When we examine the last several months for which we have data, we see that 50 percent of individuals released in June 2015 were rearrested for felonies within two years, compared with 53 percent for those released in October 2015.
Those are unimpressive numbers.