The Caging of America

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all

by davux • 14 years ago

279 219 14 years ago

jacquesm• 14 years 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_PR...

jerf• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

I wonder how many non-violent criminals are arrested for every 'truly dangerous' menace to society.

_delirium• 14 years ago

The truly minimum rate is really low, though, at least for some societies. For example, if the U.S. imprisoned at the same rates as Norway (0.07%), it would have around 250,000 total prisoners. And even there the number is arguably higher than the absolutely necessary minimum. If you dig into who's imprisoned in Norway and why: 1) a full 20% of the prison population are there for administrative offenses like nonpayment of fines; and 2) most of the rest are there for nonviolent drug offenses.

sliverstorm5• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Sure, education is a great indicator for incarceration. But "fixing" education is neither simple nor straightforward.

sliverstorm5• 14 years 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?

cullenking3• 14 years ago

Fixing education will take twenty years, whereas fixing 90% the prison problem could be as simple as pardoning all non-violent drug offenses. Of course, you have to do that across 50 states plus the federal level, however it's a single concept. If we are going to start somewhere, that's easily the most appropriate place.

disc• 14 years ago

Your first step is simple and straightforward just like saying "go fly to the moon" is simple and straightforward. Above and beyond the limited resource distribution we struggle with today (where does increased educational spending come from? Medicare? Defense Spending? Police?) there's an anti-education attitude that has worked it's way into lower socio-economic culture. I think combating this culture component is just as large (if not larger) a job as providing the educational resources.

crusso3• 14 years ago

I'm not googling for them just now, but I know I've seen graphs that show that as we've spent more and more money on education, we've seen no affect on educational metrics (test scores, basic competencies, etc.)

I don't think it's a money problem. It's a problem with an intractable public education system in this country that's only really concerned with its own power and growth. We could solve that problem with the stroke of a pen by eliminating the monopoly that the current public education system has upon our educational tax dollars.

rsheridan6• 14 years ago

If it's so simple and straightforward, why hasn't it been done after decades of effort and countless failed or marginally successful programs?

It's probably somewhere between difficult and impossible, not simple and straightforward.

unicron• 14 years ago

Perhaps they do not wish to be educated? That is my impression.

Don't sort out education, sort out the social stereotypes and cultural issues that turn people into pieces of shit. Education will fix itself then.

ars• 14 years ago

> Fix education

Lack of education is not the cause, it's a symptom of the same thing that causes the incarceration, i.e. it's a confounding variable not an independent cause.

tokenadult3• 14 years ago

The first step is simple & straightforward. Fix education (or what is preventing them from getting an education) first

That is not simple and straightforward because powerful interest groups don't want education to be reformed along those lines. "The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985)

It would be a distinctly good idea, and would surely reduce crime rates, to reform education along the lines of ensuring that all pupils in schools in the United States learn fundamental literacy and numeracy. According to the PISA international education studies, some countries do much better than the United States in this regard.

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/9/49685503.pdf

twoodfin2• 14 years ago

We tried requiring schools to ensure each and every student achieved literacy and numeracy, under penalty of having the school labeled as "failing" and potentially being forced to allow its students other options.

It was called "No Child Left Behind", and sadly is now overwhelmingly unpopular. The kind of disciplined (and occasionally rote) learning that leads to success in some of our peer nations is called "teaching to the test". Well-to-do parents don't like hearing that their children's school is "failing" just because poor children are being shuffled from grade to grade without learning much.

I really don't know what can be done. Money isn't the answer: Look at the DC public schools.

yummyfajitas3• 14 years ago

The problem doesn't seem to be in the school system. The US education system is #1 in terms of teaching literacy to people of Asian descent and #2 in teaching literacy to people of European descent. There is insufficient data to compare to other groups.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004_1.pdf (See tables R1 and R3, which give breakdowns of the PISA data you are citing.)

However, you might be right that knowledge of literacy is a problem - crime in the US does tend to be disproportionately committed by groups of people who have low averages on PISA literacy tests.

diogenescynic• 14 years ago

I think the problem is systemic in nature “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began”

"Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system": http://www.laprogressive.com/black-men-prison-system/

"As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities."

I read this and think there must be something more complex going on than just graduation rates. Too many interest groups are getting rich trying to fix a perpetually broken education system and the same goes for prisons.

cturner2• 14 years ago

How would a hacker deal with solitary?

sliverstorm5• 14 years 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.

cturner2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

rdl2• 14 years 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.

msrpotus2• 14 years 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.

mindslight2• 14 years ago

Under humane incarceration, by programming on their computer and communicating over the internet. There's absolutely no reason these should be denied by default.

msrpotus2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, as the article demonstrates, our prisons are anything but humane.

crusso3• 14 years ago

I don't understand why we should make prison suck less.

You do realize that if you make prison overly "humane", it eliminates prison as a form of deterrence.

andrewtbham• 14 years ago

On Alcatraz Audio tour they interview an inmate who said he would tear a button off his clothes and try to find it.

Tsagadai• 14 years ago

I've heard some bleak prison stories over the years. One guy I met was an avid reader (and I guess you could say a bit of a hacker). This was in the 80s, so things have changed. Once he would get into a book, the guards would come in and confiscate it. He would try to find a way to piece together the story before the guards would take the book (3 hours to a couple of days from getting it). That went on for 3 months, he said. Imagine spending every waking hour thinking up, trying and evaluating methods for the fastest way to consume a book.

Another guy I met once who is still in prison said that he spent 6 months in solitary. He spent his entire time strengthening his fingers so he could climb brick walls with just his fingertips. An odd thing to do but when you have nothing but your body in a cell you can only spend time getting fit or wasting away.

Most prisons have outreach programs. You can go and teach someone to read (or program). It is a very interesting experience and you may even get someone interested in a topic enough to save them from the system (or themselves).

cgrubb• 14 years ago

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

m0th873• 14 years ago

The entire article is rendered horrible for overlooking one gruesome statistic among many?

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

The caption at the top of the article compares this 6M figure to the number in Stalin's gulag system - that's shocking. You didn't get to go home on probation after being sentenced to the gulag.

It doesn't render the article useless, but it does mean that it no longer commands authority.

sliverstorm5• 14 years ago

Your parent is objecting to what would appear to be intentional manipulation & misrepresentation of numbers, not accidental overlooking.

Most people reading the article will assume the 6M people are in a prison. Odds are this misconception is intended by the author.

cullenking3• 14 years ago

Yeah, but you are still unemployable for at least 10 years if you are in a state with a system to expunge felonies. There is another prison outside of the actual institutions waiting for every released inmate.

laurentoget• 14 years ago

probation and parole are better than being locked up but having 4 million people deprived of most of their rights, unable to get most jobs. and at the mercy of the benevolence of an overworked an under-trained PO is not exactly a good news for a country which thinks of itself as a beacon of freedom.

calibraxis• 14 years 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_Sta..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Brief_history)

yummyfajitas3• 14 years ago

1.7m in Gulag / 108m in Russia = 1.6% incarceration rate

Pop # taken from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia

2.3m in prison / 312m in USA = 0.74% incarceration rate in the US

bobwaycott2• 14 years ago

Then those people must not read the text closely. The author pointed out quite clearly that correctional supervision did not mean incarceration. Horrible readers.

cullenking3• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

rbanffy2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

rickmb• 14 years ago

> Try finding yourself a job with a felony record.

This in itself may serve to worsen America's problem. I don't know of any other country where employers bother to check such things (not to mention actually having access to such privacy sensitive information), unless it is with very, very good reasons.

tomp2• 14 years ago

I've heard that you can't get a job in an UK bank having a criminal record.

Driving without insurance is a criminal offense (and insurance is person-based, not car based).

chefsurfing• 14 years 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-s...

idea: millions of sensors / millions of surveys [2] http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-millions-of-sensors-mil...

icebraining3• 14 years 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

This is without mentioning the privacy aspects; I find it rather worrying how people seem to accept constant surveillance so easily.

rogerbinns2• 14 years 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_Kingdo...

Sensationalist article by the Daily Mail:

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-CC...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/6083476/CC...

http://www.library.ca.gov/CRB/97/05/crb97-005.pdf (Warning: PDF)

ig12• 14 years ago

News paper reports aren't peer reviewed scientific research.

How many journalists do you think even have a rigorous enough understanding of statistics to even begin to be able to answer these sort of questions ?

Do you think before this data came out that the Telegraph or Daily Mail were pro-CCTV ? - or do you think that they'd already decided their position long before and were just looking for whatever data would back them up ?

ktizo3• 14 years ago

puts on hippy hat

Perhaps helping to create a society that is more personally fulfilling and with a greater degree of social equality and fairness might be a good place to focus.

So everything from free local arts/education/tech facilities through to high quality affordable group legal insurance.

m0th873• 14 years 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 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/obama-...

zanny• 14 years ago

Increasing the age required for education doesn't really accomplish anything except put more hopeless souls behind bars. People either drop out of school because they must to survive or because they have lost all faith in the system. Forcing them to stay until they are 18 does nothing to further their ambitions and only tries to solve a broken system built on abuse with more abuse.

protomyth3• 14 years 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

duncanj2• 14 years 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)

davidhollander2• 14 years ago

> increase the age of required education to 18 [2]. This sounds like a good idea on paper

I would recommend reading Cevin Soling's "Why Public Schools Must be Abolished" for the opposite viewpoint:

While it is possible for a North Korean POW to learn calculus under duress from their prison guard, it is reasonable to assume they will: A) associate math with incarceration; B) despise the inmates who learn for appearing readily complicit with their captors; and C. try to forget the information the moment they are free.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/02/27/w...

dantheman2• 14 years ago

I think that removing the power of prison guard unions is something that will need to be addressed first.

Fore example:

Correction officers’ unions are powerful forces in states like California and New York; they push for the construction of more prisons and for longer sentences for criminals (so that there are more people for correction officers to guard). Their activities in California are a case in point. In the last eight years they have spent $10 million on state politics — either in direct contributions to politicians or in spending on ballot initiatives relating to crime and punishment. They have mounted full-scale political campaigns. For instance, the California corrections union has attacked public officials, such as the Los Angeles district attorney, who supported an alternative to the union-favored “three-strikes law.” Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in February of this year noted that “the three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers’ union and that is sick!” In 1999 the union even successfully opposed a proposal to permit the California attorney general to prosecute brutality in prisons.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/432...

3am• 14 years ago

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CXW

barry-cotter• 14 years ago

Education reform is important too. Obama is pushing reform to get states to increase the age of required education to 18 [2].

Imagine if you had spent 6 hours a day 5 days a week for 12 years being forced to play sports. If the idea provokes violent horror in you you now have some idea how the people you would be forcing to stay in school would feel about it. And make no mistake; compulsory attendance at allegedly educational institutions is forced. Whether the superior outcomes for those thus compelled outweighs the poorer outcomes and massively less pleasant experience of those forced to share classrooms and teacher attention with sullen youth there under pain of imprisonment is aquestion to be dealt with in ones own head.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

Actually, I think that's a great example--on the one hand, I would probably find that annoying and unpleasant. On the other hand, had I done more sports earlier in my life, I would be better off now. (I am currently not nearly as fit as I should be.)

That said, I don't think raising the required education age is the right move either. In a perfect world, we would concentrate on improving the quality of education instead, both imparting more knowledge in the time people are at school and getting them to like school more. However, I do not have the slightest clue of how to accomplish this.

archangel_one• 14 years ago

Increasing the age of required education to 18 doesn't sound like a good idea to me at all. I knew several people who left school early (aged 16 or so) who wouldn't have gotten anywhere staying at school longer - they were much happier getting started on "real" work. All it will achieve is massaging some unemployment statistics to make it look like some problems aren't so bad.

dmg8• 14 years 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_PR...

ReadEvalPost• 14 years 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.

tlb2• 14 years 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.

joshfraser• 14 years ago

Or perhaps Steve Levitt is right that the drop in crime was due to the legalization of abortion (as laid out in the book Freakanomics). I personally don't like either explanation, but it just goes to point out the challenges in getting from correlation to causation.

wmeredith2• 14 years ago

He explorers and debunks that very idea in the article.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

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

rhizome3• 14 years ago

To be sure, there are multiple problems.

samstave3• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Ironically, shooting people is one of the activities that freedom is taken away for.

eliam• 14 years 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_abo...

pshc• 14 years 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.

foxylad• 14 years 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• 14 years 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=1223225...

crusso3• 14 years ago

Why would we want to take the perceptions of the criminal into account when sentencing?

berntb2• 14 years 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."

tokenadult3• 14 years 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-minnesot...

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.

moldbug11• 14 years 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...). 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-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.)

moldbug11• 14 years ago

Sometimes I think the way HN should work is not that you can't both downvote and comment, but that you can't downvote and not comment.

JamesNelson• 14 years ago

> 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.

It is possible that the fact that Japan is the least Americanized of First World countries is the reason behind it's low crime rates. I wonder if it is their culture, not their government, which keeps the crime low.

phillmv11• 14 years ago

This is why you are being downvoted:

You ask two unrelated question to which you provide no proof.

>But what if our system is actually erring in the other direction?

Okay. How? Every other nation on earth has lower incarceration rates, and a fair number of them are safer than the US.

So given that that are still criminals on the outside, the answer is that you need to become more efficient at apprehending the right people - not increase incarceration rates.

>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?

Criminals break laws; laws are often injust. The War on Drugs, and mandatory sentencing.

>If what we need isn't more social justice, what is it?

This is entirely unsubstantiated by anything you wrote preceding this sentence. Frankly, it's kind of confused.

nitrogen2• 14 years ago

But what is it an index of? What hidden variable influences robbery numbers? Our understanding of crime is incomplete without considering the reasons why crimes are committed (without resorting to the fundamental attribution error by branding those who commit crimes as "criminals" by nature). Some questions to ask about the given example of robbery:

Why do the people committing robberies feel the need to commit them?

What makes robbery more rewarding than other potential sources of money or thrills?

Have robberies increased because the average person now has a lot more of value to take?

How many robberies are indirectly caused by the criminalization of lesser offenses? (e.g. criminalization of drug M -> price of drug goes up + M user loses job -> M user has to resort to robbery to survive)

shasta• 14 years ago

Well, according to Chris Rock, the only black people in Minnesota are Prince and Kirby Puckett. What percentage of the white population is in prison there compared to other states?

BudVVeezer• 14 years ago

I wonder if he knows Kirby Puckett died in 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirby_Puckett

wmil• 14 years ago

State by state stats are available here...

http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_statera...

Table 4. Minnesota has the 6th lowest white incarceration rate, 0.212%

danssig6• 14 years ago

Yes, it's always seemed really bizarre to me that anyone would be locked in a cage unless they were a physical danger.

Now there's talk of locking up people for sharing files! Insane. If you believe that file sharing harms the economy (I'm pro-copyright to an extent) then fine the people, garnish their wages, watever. Locked in prison and chance of having a normal career ruined forever? What could be more cruel and unusual?

thinkcomp• 14 years ago

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

twoodfin2• 14 years 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.

wmeredith2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately for most nowadays a conservative and a dogmatic neo-con are the same thing. Only two parties, remember?

steve19• 14 years ago

Not the same. Look at Tea Party vs. Neo-Cons, same party, very different agenda.

pyre• 14 years 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• 14 years 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-dement...)

I submitted it to HN here: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649276)

Archio• 14 years 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....

Nate75Sanders3• 14 years 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-th...

The phrase "prison-industrial complex" leads to some interesting reading, as well.

dantheman2• 14 years ago

I mentioned it a comment with a great analysis of public unions by the hoover institute - I highly recommend checking it out.

scrod4• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

mseebach• 14 years ago

From the linked article:

many of [CCPOA’s] contributions are directly pro-incarceration. It gave over $100,000 to California’s Three Strikes initiative, Proposition 184 in 1994, making it the second-largest contributor. It gave at least $75,000 to the opponents of Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that replaced incarceration with substance abuse treatment for certain nonviolent offenders. From 1998 to 2000 it gave over $120,000 to crime victims’ groups, who present a more sympathetic face to the public in their pro-incarceration advocacy. It spent over $1 million to help defeat Proposition 66, the 2004 initiative that would have limited the crimes that triggered a life sentence under the Three Strikes law. And in 2005, it killed Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan to “reduce the prison population by as much as 20,000, mainly through a program that diverted parole violators into rehabilitation efforts: drug programs, halfway houses and home detention.”

Nate75Sanders3• 14 years ago

I do not have any sort of anti-worker agenda. I was simply pointing out a special interest group that I found out about in the past 1-2 years that I'm guessing most people here are not aware of. I believe I was correct.

Never, anywhere, do I imply (it's clearly your assumption) that CCOPA or other unions benefit the most.

Look back at the structure of what I said and then reconcile that against what you're accusing me of. You had an emotional reaction to what I said and jumped to conclusions.

ruckusing• 14 years ago

In 1998 "The Atlantic" magazine wrote a great article about the relationship of Big Business and Prisons, known as the "Prison-Industrial Complex"[1].

Its a sobering read and really brings home the fact that incarceration is indeed big business and there is a lot of entrenched interests in maintaining the status quo. And large rates of incarceration.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-pris...

MarkMc• 14 years ago

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

gwern2• 14 years 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.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

I would file on civil rights grounds, that incarceration where rape is known to be highly likely amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

gwern2• 14 years ago

* for private prisons

samstave3• 14 years ago

Seriously, there is no accountability ZERO. If there is any industry, aside from government, that need disruption, it is prison.

godDLL2• 14 years ago

Let's take that.

What a prison startup would look like?

allochthon• 14 years ago

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

scrod4• 14 years 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_...

ineedtosleep• 14 years 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

rayiner• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

goggles992• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

nsns• 14 years 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)

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• 14 years 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."

The Caging of America

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