Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
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Re: Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
#2The first thing I think when reading the headline is that friends paradox on social networks. Feels like that. But I don't know if these paradoxes are interrelated.
Re: Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
#3A way of explaining it that (hopefully) makes it clearer:
Let's say you have just invented the concept of prison, and let's say 50% of people come back every year after going to prison for the first time, and 50% never come back again.
In year 2, you'd observe that of the year 1 population, 50% returned, and 50% didn't.
In year 2, you'd also add a new influx of prisoners.
Therefore, in year 3, you'd observe that of the year 2 population, 75% returned and 25% didn't.
But, the real underlying recidivism rate is still 50%, not 75%.
Re: Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
#4The article would have been better with actual data. Its unclear to me if the effect is large or small. Seems like it could be either depending on several factors.
Re: Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
#5There is a slight mistake in the article toward the end where the interviewer asks what good the BJS statistics are and the response is polite waffling and its wrong. What its actually extremely useful for is numerical prediction of how many beds you'll need in 10 years so build X prison beds per year etc, based on greater population growth and "repeat customer" rates. I'm not talking about conspiracy level stuff or isn't the prison industrial complex evil signalling, but just predictive numbers. The meta problem that the article does overall get correct is trying to apply "how many beds to build" statistics to "what fraction of prisoners turn their lives around" is totally useless as the interviewee properly states. In that way the BJS stats are awesome for construction budget projections while being simultaneously totally useless for pontificating on cultural problems. The dude interviewed basically gets this correct in long format, only screwing up this one question.
No one else has caught the obvious startup analogy of freemium model whales, AFAIK. Most people playing freemium games do not pay in. On the other hand a huge fraction of freemium revenue comes from whales. Therefore you can make all kinds of weird inaccurate statements about the revenue vs population distribution. Like if all your revenue comes from whales, all your customers must be whales, right? Or all your revenue comes from repeat customers therefore most customers are repeat customers. Strange logic like that.
Re: Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
#6A way of explaining it that (hopefully) makes it clearer: Let's say you have just invented the concept of prison, and let's say 50% of people come back every year after going to prison for the first time, and 50% never come back again. In year 2, you'd observe that of the year 1 population, 50% returned, and 50% didn't. In year 2, you'd also add a new influx of prisoners. Therefore, in year 3, you'd observe that of t…
To expand on their mall analogy: There is a big difference between asking "what percentage of this week's mall visitors will return next week", and asking "when people visit this mall for the first time, what percentage of them will return the following week".
Re: Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
#7A better source, with a previous HN discussion, that says much the same thing, is far better sourced, and makes a lot of other important points:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091586
HN readers will be unhappy to read that the war on drugs is not principally, directly responsible for US incarceration rates.
HN readers will probably thrilled to read that responsibility for over-incarceration is placed squarely on overzealous prosecutors; the rate at which arrestees are charged with felonies has climbed sharply, despite an overall drop in crime.
Re: Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
#8A better source, with a previous HN discussion, that says much the same thing, is far better sourced, and makes a lot of other important points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091586 HN readers will be unhappy to read that the war on drugs is not principally, directly responsible for US incarceration rates. HN readers will probably thrilled to read that responsibility for over-incarceration is placed squarely…
While it may not be the principal account for incarceration rates, the paper does note that 17% of the current prison population is in prison on drug-related charges. Additionally, it notes that 20% of the growth in prison populations can be attributed to drug-related charges, and that about 20% of the flow of prisoners can be attributed to drug-related charges.
That 20% number is still a massive number of people incarcerated on drug-related charges. It's still a massive problem and solving it will put a huge dent in the insane incarceration rate that we see.
Of course a problem as large as the over-incarceration of the US population is going to be complicated and is going to require many solutions rather than a single silver bullet. I'm all for prosecutorial reform as well as drug reform; I'm willing to bet I'll need to discover several other things that we need to reform in order to bring our incarceration rates down.
Put another way, if I'm optimizing some code and I see 20% of CPU-time is being spent on a trivial operation that is definitely a section of the code that I'm going to evaluate and attempt to readdress even if it doesn't fully resolve the performance issues.
Re: Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
#9A better source, with a previous HN discussion, that says much the same thing, is far better sourced, and makes a lot of other important points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091586 HN readers will be unhappy to read that the war on drugs is not principally, directly responsible for US incarceration rates. HN readers will probably thrilled to read that responsibility for over-incarceration is placed squarely…
> the rate at which arrestees are charged with felonies has climbed sharply, despite an overall drop in crime.
My gut reaction is that it's probably because of an overall drop in crime. Gotta keep putting up good numbers!
Re: Why do so many ex-offenders go back to prison? A new study suggests they don't
#10The academic discussion of prison sentences and recidivism must be completely dysfunctional if this sort of elementary mistake is derailing things. This is truly a Statistics 101 idea.