The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

https://obviatethestate.substack.com/p/the-us-over-reliance-on-incarceration

by henryreynolds • 2 years ago

48 62 2 years ago

obviatethestate.substack.com

Like all high morality, more advanced rehabilitation methods and/or more pleasant segregation of criminals from law abiding members of society, is a privilege of wealth. The richer we collectively are, the more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely.

The poorer we are, the more likely we have to resort to more barbaric methods of order maintenance, like execution.

Therefore, if you have a desire for a society that doesn't imprison people (or effectively psyops them into believing they're free when they're not), your primary obligation should be towards growing civilizational real wealth.

edit; wealth is not just resource wealth as the US has in abundance, but also cultural wealth, like raising children that know how to solve their problems with words instead of violence and put their shopping cart back despite any reward or punishment.

jkubicek• 2 years ago

Alternately: The more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely, the richer we collectively become.

anonporridge4• 2 years ago

Only if those resources give a return on investment.

If managed counter productive individuals remain a perpetual parasitic cost on society, then it's not obvious that just executing them and being done with it isn't the greatest wealth generative action.

Someone• 2 years ago

Yes, clearly, the US prison system is the way it is is because of lack of wealth /s

anonporridge4• 2 years ago

The US prison system is the way it is because we have a lot of culture poverty, despite a lot of resource wealth.

zabzonk3• 2 years ago

or higher taxes on the rich?

anonporridge4• 2 years ago

The combined total net worth of all US billionaires would pay for about 8 months of US federal spending...once.

Also, wealth isn't just in the form of money.

A culture that produces few criminals is a form of wealth that can't be captured by taxes.

andyjohnson0• 2 years ago

The US already has more than enough wealth - but it needs to deploy it more responsibly. "Wealth first, morality later" is at best a lazy abdication of moral responsibility, and at worst a deliberate misdirection to maintain the personal advantage of a small part of US society.

wongarsu3• 2 years ago

The US has the 8th highest GPD per capita in the world (PPP, place 7 if you use nominal numbers). About the same as Denmark, yet the US has nearly ten times as many prisoners per capita.

Clearly there are more differences between Denmark and the US. But I don't think that only countries wealthier than the US (the likes of Quatar, the UAE or Luxembourg) can afford to handle crime in a more humane way.

w______roy4• 2 years ago

And this illustrates why GDP is a terrible metric for measuring the kind of collective/civilizational wealth that they are talking about.

kelseyfrog• 2 years ago

Not untrue, but it's important to also point out the prison labor system as an economic factor that incentivizes maintaining or expanding itself. Independent from our collective riches, if the marginal return on leveraging prison labor is greater than that of non-prison labor, then the finance argument makes itself.

The reason that it's important to point this out, is that prison labor is an element of growing civilizational real wealth and this nuance is important.

wongarsu3• 2 years ago

At the same time, a criminal system that doesn't try to rehabilitate and reintegrate deprives society of skilled workers, at best delegating them to slave labor in the prison system. It gets even worse if you add unpaid work that prisoners would perform if they weren't imprisoned, like raising their children.

I suspect on a societal level the US justice system costs more than a system without prison labor and a focus on rehabilitation (Sweden gets mentioned frequently, but most of Western Europe qualifies). The US system self-perpetuates because of the profit it brings individuals, not because it's beneficial to society.

breather• 2 years ago

Really makes you wonder why courts don't push for poverty reduction in the name of crime reduction.

giantg22• 2 years ago

"The richer we collectively are, the more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely."

Just because richer societies can devote more resources doesn't mean they want to, or will.

henryreynolds5• 2 years ago

Great summary! While I couldn't agree more about your abstract claim, I don't think it fits the specifics of this case.

The US GDP Per Capita for 2022 was $76,399. For Norway, $106,149. That's a significant difference, but we'd need to compare a far larger set of nations to determine correlation.

I suspect that there are thresholds of wealth where restorative justice becomes more or less viable. In an isolated and preindustrial village of 100 people, confining or killing a problematic citizen may prove more costly if they provide an essential service. For post-industrial societies, there's likely a cliff after which restorative justice is consistently less costly. IIRC, Norway spends far less per capita on criminal justice than the US.

Actually, should that be my next article? Analyzing the trends of wealth, criminality, and incarceration?

Ajedi32• 2 years ago

I agree with what you said in regards to the higher cost of lax punishments to crime, but:

Like all high morality

Is wrong. Being poor might make it harder to avoid certain moral failings (e.g. if you're literally starving you might be forced to beak all sorts of moral principles to avoid death), but certainly not all. Not cheating on your spouse isn't a "privilege of wealth", nor is not abusing your children, and a huge number of other morals. And even in those moral situations where wealth is a factor (at least in that its correlated with "high morals") its certainly not the only one, and I think reducing things to an income level is likely to be detrimental to your desired outcomes. (Not saying you were doing that, this is just a word of caution.)

slt20212• 2 years ago

typical champagne socialist post.

just look at Oakland and see if lax on crime policies work.

bryanlarsen3• 2 years ago

Penalty length has very little effect on crime motivation. The most important factor is the likelihood of getting caught. You want to see crime rates drop? Shift a large percentage of the prison budget to the police.

actionfromafar2• 2 years ago

Aren't some prisons for-profit?

w______roy4• 2 years ago

It's not "likelihood of getting caught" because even if you have a 1 in 5 shot at getting away with a crime, desperate folks (or folks with a shaky understanding of probability) will still take the risk. It has to be "certainty of getting caught" which requires more than just more police, but also public messaging, education, etc. See: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf

renewiltord2• 2 years ago

I think if you take a guy making $200k and offer to pay him $1m for the same job, you’ll find that he’ll often accept.

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

More police doesn’t change what crimes the county prosecutor decides to pursue and enforce. Unfortunately what should be an unbiased role has been politicized in recent years. Its not a great idea to have someone involved in the justice system running overtly on party line politics but thats our political environment today.

slt20212• 2 years ago

wrong! if criminals are released the same day without bail, if they get small punishment - they keep scaling up their crime because they effectively cap their downside - so the correct math is try to maximize upside while downside is limited

jwagenet• 2 years ago

The Bay Area problem is not putting any effort into mitigating the causes for crime.

birdofhermes• 2 years ago

Author is a libertarian, not a socialist.

narrator• 2 years ago

Over-reliance on prison seems to have worked astonishingly well for El Salvador. If your metric is murder rates then it's probably a world record in terms of change in murder rate from the highest in the world (106 per 100k in 2015) to one of the lowest (2.4 per 100k in 2023).

happytiger• 2 years ago

Those statistics are disturbing precisely because it’s been just so profoundly effective. I was blown away. The whole country has reversed course in just 3 years.

zabzonk3• 2 years ago

link?

V__• 2 years ago

Since then, more than 72,000 people have been arrested for being alleged gang members or affiliates.
thousands have been unjustly detained without due process and dozens have died in prisons.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-prison-gangs-bukele-4...

wongarsu3• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to have a lot of negative ripple effects in a couple of years. Think of all the children now growing up as parents: how many of those are going to become criminals.

Not saying El Salvador went the wrong path. Sometimes you need extreme measures to get out of extreme problems, and at least in the near-term it obviously created great results. But I would withhold judgements on the applicability to healthier states until we had a chance to observe any long-term effects.

dfedbeef3• 2 years ago

I think the US figured out that imprisoning gang members reduces the murder rate a while ago, not to rain on your parade.

dfedbeef3• 2 years ago

Wait until all the innocent people who got swept up in those crackdowns end up hanging out with gang members for 5 years, then get released :)

tqi• 2 years ago

Mr. Cassidy could face $250,000 worth of penalty (excluding fines) for $1,500 worth of crime.

To state that the reason the maximum is 5 years is because the item was religious in nature, then ignore that fact when calculating the cost of the offense tells me this person is starting from a conclusion and working backwards. By this methodology, conspiracy to commit murder should get no jail time since the "cost" is $0.

I'm not saying 5 years would be fair in this instance, just that obviously this is about more than the raw monetary cost...

henryreynolds5• 2 years ago

You're absolutely right that the sum harm inflicted is greater than the cost to repair the altar. There's a certain point where trying to calculate ephemerals loses the thread.

For the inconvenience, missed opportunity, and emotional damage, I'd look to tort law. The entire matter could be resolved through civil suit without incarceration, and I'd rather see the victim whole than the criminal suffer.

lolyyy22• 2 years ago

For the inconvenience, missed opportunity, and emotional damage, I'd look to tort law.

How would that work in this case? The Catholic church should sue the guy on behalf of their members?

giantg22• 2 years ago

The other important thing is that the maximums are there to cover the whole possibility of the crimes covered under that law (eg a rich guy burns down a church, etc). It doesn't mean that the maximum should be leveled in this specific case. It's a possibility, but it should be something sized more appropriately. Stating the possible maximums is a usual tactic to evoke empathy for someone charged, or for law enforcement to talk up in efforts to deter possible offenders. Either way, the probabilities tend to be exaggerated.

renewiltord2• 2 years ago

Interesting. A homeless man’s tent is maybe $100 to replace. Every person here then has a free 450 homeless tents they can destroy until society stops replacing them.

Alternatively, a market opportunity. I ensure that $45k/y of damage is done to my friend’s property. The state, eschewing incarceration, merely makes my friend whole. A new Tesla every year for him at no cost to either of us locally. He could then likewise do the $45k to me, or if that’s too close, we could form a large enough ring of people, each of which does the $45k of damage onwards so that we get a free amount of money at no personal risk.

dcist• 2 years ago

We have an under-incarceration problem. See the recent results from El Salvador. I don't lose a second of sleep over the cruel treatment of murderers and violent criminals.

w______roy4• 2 years ago

Only ~47% of incarcerated people in US prisons and jails are in for violent crime.

eynsham• 2 years ago

recent results from El Salvador

I don't think that generalising from one example is a good basis for public policy.

cruel treatment of murderers and violent criminals

The whole point of Bukele’s approach is that it does away with due process to lock up actual criminals faster; but it is hard to see how that wouldn’t also involve locking up more innocent people than would be locked up otherwise. It’s very easy to make any policy look good by focusing on its least sympathetic victims, but that doesn’t really address the tradeoffs in question.

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

I saw the police cuff someone who was walking on the shoulder of the highway. They probably went to jail for the night and were released before long to continue walking out of their mind into roadways until something tragic puts a stop to that. The cruelty of the process comes from how procedural it is. No one kicked this person back into certain harm directly, but thats basically what the procedural implementation we have amounted to, and sadly there is no mechanism built in that would have lead to this person getting the help they need instead of being put right back into the same harm they were in previously.

vondur• 2 years ago

It's very difficult in the US to have someone declared unable to care for themselves. The may get held on a temporary psychiatric detention in a hospital, but most likely we be released afterwards.

lolyyy22• 2 years ago

"Would deterrence justify the maximum sentence? Not hardly." You can't just hand-wave things like that by saying "Not hardly." The counterexample is very clear when the author mentions China as a place with a smaller prisoner population. Deterrence is very effective in China...

And, just because the religious altar cost $X to physically replace doesn't mean desecration only caused $X of damage. The reduction of the act of desecration of a symbol people care deeply about to just the replacement cost is absurd.

swader999• 2 years ago

From my understanding a lot of incarceration in the US is profit driven.

mycologos2• 2 years ago

Prison labor is indeed a multi-billion dollar industry, but I question the idea that it drives "a lot of incarceration". For better or for worse, Americans seem to be pretty OK with how incarceration currently works: across almost every political or racial group, most people think the current amount of incarceration is either "too little" or "about right". In total, less than 1/3 of Americans think it's "too much" [1].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/12/06/u-s-publi...

ta2112• 2 years ago

The title is compelling, and I was interested to read a take on the over-incarceration of our citizens, and maybe something about how we could focus our effort in that regard. It's a complex subject, and there are lots of angles. Unfortunately, the post is mainly focuses on the potential sentencing guidelines of a single case with provocative religious undertones. At least it was short.

xyzelement• 2 years ago

The op is lazy. Comparing the US incarceration rate to Norway's is pointless w/o adjusting for a ton of other demographic factors. There are parts of the US that have rates significantly lower than Norway, and then there are parts that have a higher rate - and these parts are very different.

50208• 2 years ago

Somewhat simplistic sub with bad example. Our country is large, not homogeneous, has lots of guns, and lots of addiction issues ... so we're going to have more crime than many other countries. We need to separate the criminal types (drug criminals, violent criminals, "other" criminals) and house / rehabilitate them separately. Law abiding citizens deserve protections and non-law abiding citizens deserve consequences commensurate with their crimes ... but they should not suffer undue punishment in incarceration (eg; drug addict vs. violent criminal). I live in Oregon and drug decriminalization (I supported) and lax law enforcement (less jailing) has led to a general lawlessness that is getting out of control. Folks are booked / released and committing crime after crime. Folks might be arrested for 6 or 8 real crimes before they even spend a night in jail. It's not working. Oregon is a good example of the pendulum swinging too far, and it's swinging back ... hopefully to a better position.

mycologos2• 2 years ago

I sometimes wonder whether sentencing people to time in prison is the right equilibrium. My understanding is that doing the stuff associated with long prison terms is also associated with not having the longest or most carefully considered time horizon. In that sense, long prison terms are a bad punishment because they're an insufficient deterrent that is very expensive, in terms of both state resources and the prisoners' time.

Unfortunately, any deterrent has to by its nature be unpleasant, so if prison terms are off the table, you end up with instinctively gross and backwards-seeming things like inflicting physical violence on prisoners. That, uh, doesn't seem good either.

For the sake of brevity, at the risk of glibness: it seems like a system created with little consideration for its users, who are very different people from its designers.

henryreynolds5• 2 years ago

Per the National Institute of Justice, "The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment."

As a dramatic overgeneralization of the principle, you'll have fewer thefts if every thief is forced to pay for their stolen goods than if 1% of thieves are tortured to death on live television.

It suggests that lowering expenditures on prisons, by reducing sentences, and retargeting that money toward enforcement would yield positive effects.

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...

snapplebobapple• 2 years ago

why don't we compromise and torture every thief to death on live television? Both morals and effectiveness can take a win here.

OkayPhysicist• 2 years ago

I tend to agree with the conclusion in general, but this blog post is egregious. This math is bogus. The "do X damage pay X penalty" framework is a poor one, for several reasons:

1. At a bare minimum, you have to scale the penalty with the probability of getting caught. If you can do $1500 worth of damage with only a 10% chance of being caught, the criminal has the advantage, because they can expect to do $15,000 worth of damage before being forced to pay the $1500 penalty.

2. On top of that, you need to scale up your punishment to allow for a safety margin, to avoid actively incentivizing your criminal act as long as the criminal believes they have a slight edge over your expected efficacy at enforcement.

3. On top of that, the direct damages to a victim from a crime are not the only damages that are created by criminality. Criminality undermines trust, social cohesion, and general societal good will, carrying both hard to quantify, soft costs, (how do you put a price value on the marginal effect of people feeling less secure in their protected speech) and hard costs (if we didn't have criminals, we wouldn't need a justice system, or large parts of the legal system. Those costs can be amortized over every criminal convicted).

4. Worst of all, with ideologically motivated crimes (like the one the blogger brought up), the act is propaganda in of itself, promoting not only the ideology in question, but also the concept of committing criminal acts in the name of the ideology. The shameful excuse for a man who vandalized this religious display effectively told everyone receptive to it that "This activity is okay, there are others out there that support you". There is a cost to civilization writ large, that scales based on the publicity of the crime.

Personally, I think we underestimate the damaging effect of incarceration. There are far more humane, less damaging approaches to justice that still maintain good social order. But trying to justify a hate crime as "only doing a couple thousand dollars worth of damage, thus demands only a couple thousand dollars in punishment" is over correction.

Give the guy a couple lashes and send him on his way.

henryreynolds5• 2 years ago

I almost completely agree with everything you said. A few things:

The "do X damage pay X penalty" framework is a simplification for the purpose of convenience. To try calculating all the ephemerals would be tedious, provide little additional illumination, and lose the thread. It's meant to illustrate, NOT be writ into law.

The propaganda element is particularly interesting in light of the effect on mass shooters. It's been established that sensationalizing mass shooters encourages new ones, hence why some media outlets have stopped. I'd question the reach and efficacy of the propaganda, in this case.

You could surely find another person who would spend the proposed 11 days in prison to make the statement, "I also hate satanists enough to break their stuff." Hence, and as you said, we would need to fine tune the punishment to maximize deterrence while minimizing cruelty.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the responsibility of media and society as a whole. If you can punish an offender for propagandizing criminality, as you propose, could we not also punish a news organization for broadcasting their act nationally? Purely hypothetical and ignores all the obvious reasons you can't (e.g. freedom of speech). I'd really like to understand your mental model for the "cost to civilization writ large" and how you determine responsibility.

The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

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