Is prison contagious?

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/06/prison-contagious

by KLdiv • 12 years ago

52 31 12 years ago

news.sciencemag.org

hawkice• 12 years ago

The use of "literally" in a title about using a new metaphor to understand something is... regrettable.

Its not a metaphor. "Epidemic" is a description of how something behaves, not the mechanism by which it acheives that effect.

dang2• 12 years ago

The word "literally" does not appear in the article. The submitted title ("Incarceration is literally an epidemic, says Science") was editorialized, so we reverted it to the article title.

Submitters: please read the HN guidelines. They ask you not to change titles unless they're linkbait or misleading.

slackware• 12 years ago

Because... you're not a misleading person yourself, right?

sebular• 12 years ago

If this is your main takeaway, it's your values and priorities that are regrettable. Could you be any less constructive?

steveklabnik• 12 years ago

Literally also means figuratively (in effect, virtually) now, see definition two: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

sosborn• 12 years ago

Can we please all get together and stop this? The only reason that this was allowed to happen is that a bunch of idiots used the world "literally" incorrectly. It won't be long before "must of" gets into the dictionary along with "prolly".

_delirium• 12 years ago

Incarceration is literally an epidemic, says Science

While the philosophy-of-science aspect of what it would mean to declare incarceration to be an epidemic in some strict, non-metaphorical sense is interesting, what the study is really aiming to show is slightly more empirical: that modeling incarceration rates using computational models developed to model epidemics can produce results consistent with real-world data. (Which is still interesting and potentially useful.)

SandersAK• 12 years ago

exactly.

they kinda buried the lede...

growlix• 12 years ago

I think the real kicker here is that they're able to reproduce racial incarceration disparities ONLY by manipulating sentence durations, a known trend in the justice system[0]. [0]http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_sentenc...

trhway• 12 years ago

poverty complicated by lack of education is a hereditary disease.

interg12• 12 years ago

Because someone needs to say it: We should all be highly skeptical of a single model's results.

ars• 12 years ago

How I hate simulations that pretend to be Science. You get out of a simulation exactly what you put in, and no more.

"According to our model, the tipping point is somewhere between the 14- and 17-month sentences"

Surprise surprise! You put those numbers in and they came back out!

Or are we to believe that somehow society just randomly happened upon exactly the correct number to tip one race one way and one the other?

Their error check to California later doesn't help because that's part of the data they used to design their simulation in the first place!

And finding that sentence length alone explains everything is actually proof that this simulation is useless!

In the real world there is a huge difference in the number of single parent homes, and those without a good male role model between the races. Those are well known factors for crime, and the fact that there is no excess difference in the model that needs to be attributed to this shows that the model is just parroting their preconceived explanation.

Summary: They carefully tuned their model so that 14 months causes the incarceration seen by whites, and 17 months causes the rate seen by blacks. They did that for a good reason: In order to match the real world. But it's no surprise that those are exactly the numbers their model came back with.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

I don't really disagree with you, but think about it in reverse. If those responsible for sentencing are in a sense racist, wouldn't we expect them to eventually tune their actions to obtain racist outcomes?

rockpoodle• 12 years ago

Your summary is completely false. Did you actually read the original paper or just the article in the link? I know not everyone has journal subscriptions to that might be too much to ask, but maybe you should not dismiss it entirely having read only a summary. All of the parameters in the model are taken from real data, there was no tuning. And there was no parameter in the model that determined how sentence length would affect population-level incarceration rates. The tipping point occurring between 14 and 17 months was an emergent property, not an input. You clearly have no understanding of simulation science in general or this study in particular.

SixSigma• 12 years ago

Agreed, it looks flawed to me. The assumption being that the transmission rate is constant this will obviously lead to longer sentences = more transmission.

If a %age of your time is spent on each person you know then there will obviously be a maximum point for the likelihood of infection.

Then the modellers have to choose an infection rate, this they took from the data.

The whole model is begging the question.

downandout2• 12 years ago

Incarceration equals the period of contagion, Lum explains. "The longer you're imprisoned, the higher the toll your incarceration takes on your family and friends, and the more likely they are to ‘catch’ your incarceration from you.....The disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks emerged as the single factor making the disease of incarceration a true epidemic among blacks..."

This study seems to completely ignore the socioeconomic factors that often lead to the more serious crimes and resulting longer sentences in the first place. It isn't the longer sentences that are causing incarceration to "spread" to friends and family, it's the fact that the friends and family tend to be in the same socioeconomic position as the person that received the sentence, and thus are just as likely to display similar conduct.

The flawed conclusion in this study is like saying that a whole family is more likely to get wet because one family member gets rained on. While statistically accurate, the fact that one person gets wet doesn't cause the others to get wet; the cause is that they all live in the same environment and are thus far more likely to get wet than those that live in areas where it isn't raining.

vacri• 12 years ago

Perhaps read the article again; the second paragraph in particular gives some reasons why it's more than just 'being poor'.

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

I think that is the base assumption the authors believe their readers already hold. It's something that doesn't surprise anyone- there is no novelty in it, and it's so matter of fact that we've been trying to address it for years.

This article was worth writing because of the idea "going to prison causes so much trouble around you, it makes it more likely for people you know or your family to go to prison, too."

That's a novel idea, not just because it may explain the reasons people go to jail, but because it indicates we might need to reanalyze our whole approach to criminal justice— ostensibly, we jail people not only as a punishment to them, but also as a way to protect or improve society at large. If sending people to jail causes more criminal behavior, our actions may be undermining our goals.

cortesoft• 12 years ago

Those other factors that increase incarceration rates may be true (and many of them probably are)... however, what they were showing is that EVEN IF everything else was equal, longer sentences for one group over another will have a major effect on incarceration rates for those two groups.

This doesn't mean that what they were testing is the ONLY factor (or even the only major factor) in determining incarceration rates. By using a computer simulation where they could keep everything else EXACTLY the same, they demonstrated that a small change in sentence length can cause a large change in incarceration rate.

thenmar• 12 years ago

Do you really think that the authors missed such a completely obvious flaw, something so simple that a random internet commenter could use it to invalidate the entire work in one sentence? It's hard to take this type of criticism seriously without any specific references to their methodology.

downandout2• 12 years ago

I read the article, and yes, their conclusions point to the fact that they did indeed miss such a completely obvious flaw. This sentence, their conclusion, was in bold:

The disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks emerged as the single factor making the disease of incarceration a true epidemic among blacks. Not the socioeconomic disparity, mind you, but the actual sentences. This conclusion is so obviously wrong it's absurd on its face.

mtdewcmu• 12 years ago

I think researchers do ignore obvious flaws, but I don't think it happened here. It's easiest to ignore obvious flaws when you are testing something that almost no one would challenge, like "eating vegetables is good for you."

dredwerker• 12 years ago

This is the takeaway for the TL;DR crowd :) ""Under this model, small increases in sentence length led to large differences in the rate of incarceration regardless of race. That means harsher sentencing policy may have the unintended consequence of increasing crime, rather than reducing it.”"

rusabd• 12 years ago

it is as "contagious" as education. Seriously, according "Discipline and Punishment" that was known since the first prison systems

bane• 12 years ago

I probably wouldn't classify it as "contagious", it just stops being a deterrent. My parent's business when I grew up needed lots of reasonably skilled, but cheap labor. Turns out you can hire from two possible pools of labor for this: recent immigrants and ex-cons. If you just want cheap labor you hire young people.

For a while, in the early 80s, my parents hired young people, until the work they took on required people with more skill. Then they hired immigrants from South East Asia under some kind of asylum/placement program. I don't remember the details, but their shop was pretty multicultural for a long time. Eventually that program ended and they started mining the pool of ex-cons. Mostly guys with minor drug offenses and non-violent offenses.

They kept putting that pool of people to work for probably a good 15 years and I grew up working in the family business, side-by-side with them. One thing I learned is that you start to not think of prison as the end of the world.

It's supposed to be a BFD to go to prison, a life breaker. But here was a bunch of guys who did their time, and all had jobs and did well enough for themselves and their family. So it just seemed like virtually the same to young me as when people I knew in the military were shipped off for a tour or a long deployment somewhere. Granted, I wasn't entirely aware of the social stigmas attached to their incarceration at the time. But you can imagine being their friends or kids or what have you growing up with a father having served time.

Every once in a while, one of the guys would slip up and get caught doing cocaine or something and do a year in prison. After he got out, if my parents had an opening, they'd hire them back. From my pre-teen perspective it seemed virtually the same as being a soldier, bad pay included.

Once I got older and stopped working in the family business, the social stigma attached to incarceration was kind of a shock to me. It took me a long time to realize why these guys were working at my parent's place instead of the same kind of shop down the street for more money. It's that the other shop simply wouldn't hire ex-cons and my parents didn't mind/thought they could save the company some money hiring these guys at $.50 less per hour than a stand-up citizen (while also helping them get reintegrated back into society).

jqm2• 12 years ago

Well, based on the premise of the article, you and your parents are very lucky you didn't get infected and wind up in prison yourselves!

But then again, the idea that prison is "contagious" may not really be valid, as other posters are pointing out.

Edit: since I'm getting the down-votes anyway I may as well come right out and say it. The premise is absurd and the article not worth reading. Your lack of "infection" demonstrates such. As does the presumed lack of infection of visiting prison priests and prison guards. Similar groups behave similarly and have higher probabilities of similar outcomes and someone claims it resembles a contagion. No, no it doesn't. At all.

jqm2• 12 years ago

I read the first two paragraphs and unless something changed later in the article, I find this an extremely silly premise.

Very obviously a persons family and peer group is quite likely to behave somewhat like the person. If this is behavior that leads to prison, then the family and peer group is likely to wind up there as well.

The idea that prison is "contagious" is on par with referring to computers as sentient because they are "not acting right".

Is prison contagious?

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