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My life after 44 years in prison

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Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#121

Post by msandford »

rl3 wrote: post #106
msandford wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you reconcile that with a very high recidivism rate?[0] The upsides to crime for some people are very high, and the downsides of going to prison are again for those people, not all that high. I think that's pretty obvious. The problem is that you're taking the beliefs about prison that you hold and applying them universally. That's not the correct way to look at it. A person with $1mm in the bank is going to…

I understand your point that a portion of the recidivism is attributable to calculated risk on behalf of career criminals, but I think that in and of itself is a pretty sad state of affairs. > A person with a criminal record who understands how stacked against him/her society is I would argue that society being stacked against convicts is not congruent with the goal of reform. At the risk of "taking the beliefs I hol…

Yeah I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of tough sentencing, just trying to explain that criminals are still people and still think very, very logically. They just operate from a fact-base that's unfathomable to people who have it pretty good. Very few people wake up and say "How can I totally screw up my life today?" and think of a way, and then execute those plans to knowingly cause themselves harm.

Most of the time they just have a very different set of assumptions and givens about life.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#122

Post by mapt »

cb18 wrote: post #84
vacri wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that criminals for the most part don't think "ah, I can commit this crime, I will 'only' get 5-10 years" and "oh, this crime would be 50 years - in that case I won't do it". Extremely long sentences just don't add much to the mix.

The issue is that criminals for the most part don't think "ah, I can commit this crime, I will 'only' get 5-10 years" and "oh, this crime would be 50 years - in that case I won't do it". With all respect, I don't see how this sentence is relevant to what I wrote. I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence, but I don't see how it does that either. Extremely long sentences just don't add much to the…

You can look at the length of a sentence as corresponding roughly to a cost benefit analysis pertaining to the given crime.

_You_ may be able to. But most people who commit crimes, don't. They're experiencing brief or not-so-brief lapses in their planning capability, and they're not looking more than five minutes into the future; Extra sentencing is useless as a deterrent to these people, because they're resistant to any consideration of sentencing. They're just not looking that far ahead. Organized crime is the exception to this rule.

Notably, they're not immune to the effects of a high arrest rate. If someone has a 90% chance of 1 year in jail, it is an inordinately more powerful deterrent than a 10% chance of 10 years in jail.

The cost being the cost to incarcerate the person, and the benefit being the person's inability to commit a similar crime for X number of years. So for really bad crimes that carry a really long sentence, the benefit to society of there not being a potential recurrence of the criminal's acts outweighs the cost of the incarceration.

This is a different consideration. This is "incapacitation" rather than "deterrence". It's explicitly giving up on the ability of a prisoner to make decisions, either before the crime or after the sentence; A criminal is thus destined to commit crimes, and 'taking them off the street' is the goal. That's basically how we've approached this for the last ~40 years of progressively expanding incarceration rates, unlike most of the other countries around the world. And that's a fairly inhumane, morally questionable view to take, not least the end of the racial persecution of minorities for being minorities dovetails precisely with the racial persecution of minorities for being criminal in some way, living in a place with high criminality or being tangentially involved in the drug war. Broken windows policing, where crimes may be invented, or activities criminalized, in order to get "at-risk" individuals into the system, where they are never permitted to fully leave.

We talk about lynching as some sort of widespread historical horror, but it only happened to 5000 or so individuals. There are over a million black men in prison, and a lot more than 5000 dead as a result of things like the drug war and racialized pushes for ever-expanding sentencing.

Why do I bring race into it? Because repeated waves of contentious race relations are the big sociological delta between our country, and most of the rest of the developed world. And overt or not, it's been central to how we've done any number of things differently, from the suburbs to the prisons to welfare to the healthcare system to our present political dysfunction.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#123

Post by duncan_bayne »

newjersey wrote: post #119
duncan_bayne wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it makes it worse , because of the physical endangerment involved. But in both cases the theft of property is morally equivalent to the thief enslaving me to produce the stolen items for him. If it took me a day to work to earn the money to buy my phone, and you steal it, you've just stolen a day of my life.

How about we start with no jail time for victimless crimes? If you don't endanger anyone but yourself, we don't pursue criminal charges. I'm thinking drug users and people who drink unpasteurized milk.

I'm 100% in agreement with you there. The entire idea of a 'victimless crime' is without merit.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#124

Post by vacri »

saiya-jin wrote: post #117
vacri wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's highly doubtful that the longer sentence length(is the US's longer on average?) is somehow contributing to a higher murder rate. More men in prison -> more broken homes -> more people with more damage in their upbringing -> more crime ^^ that's just one potential mechanism for having demographic-sized populations of people locked up. About half a decade ago, it was estimated that one in nine black men in the U…

the last part about justice system is not entirely correct - private prisons are a lucrative business in US, and owners/shareholders have very good reasons to keep as many people jailed for as long as possible. Hence the stats of US leading stats globally. politically it's much safer to promote harsh sentencing rather than opposite, plus no Amnesty international is going to bribe (to call it correctly - hire lobbyist…

I should have been less declaritive - I mean that the point of a justice system is to keep society running smoothly. There are all sorts of ways for this to be derailed, for-profit prisons being one of them.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#125

Post by thelastguy »

pakled_engineer wrote: post #102
rtpg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a decent amount of experimental evidence to counter this realisation though. The yakuza basically never carry guns around anymore because the charges for carrying around a handgun are so high that it's just not worth it. We always say that "well if someone wants a gun they're gonna get it", which is pretty true. But some deterrents can slow down the transition from " I don't like that guy" to "I'm going to ki…

The made Yakuza guys have underlings who carry guns and do violence for them though with the understanding they are to do the time if caught, so in effect nothing has changed. The criminals shooting at each other weekly where I live are all 18-25yr old drug delivery drivers working for established bosses they clearly aren't rational or else they'd realize a few thousand a week isn't worth life in prison. Plenty of th…

>they clearly aren't rational or else they'd realize a few thousand a week isn't worth life in prison.

Actually, they are pretty rational. You can't say no to the boss. You say no to the boss, you die. So they either deliver that drug, or die. They choose to deliver the drug, even if it means getting caught and doing life in prison. That's better than the boss killing you for not delivering the drug.

>The criminals shooting at each other weekly...

Again, they're not being irrational here. If you don't shoot, the other guy will shoot you. You either shoot, or you die because the other guy shoots you.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#126

Post by thelastguy »

Asbostos wrote: post #56

What I've started to realize about people is that you can't influence them all with deterrents. No matter how long the sentence, or how permanent the memory of the justice system (8 months in prison for robbery, 50 years later), none of that is bad enough to actually stop people committing crimes in the first place. Essentially, people aren't rational. They don't act in their own self interests. I saw this also when…

>They don't act in their own self interests.

Actually, they do. For example, when a criminal steals, he's acting purely in his own interest. He doensn't care about anyone else's interests. He doesn't care about his victim's interest. He only care about his own interest. Which is why he steals. For his own self interest.

The problem is, society also has it's own interest. And it's in the best interest of society to jail the thief.

Anyway, I think you meant to say that criminal doesn't think about the consequences of their actions. Again, because everything criminals do are for their own self interest. Even doing something stupid like drugs, is for their own self interest (in this case, he does it because his interest is to feel high).

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#127

Post by thelastguy »

MrJagil wrote: post #47
parennoob wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good point. I thought of this by applying it to myself – if someone attempted to murder me, but did not succeed, would I want them to be put away for a very long time? You bet.

I get that you're trying to equate attempted and real murder but it sounds very short-sighted and it does not do any argument justice that you isolate such a serious incident from the countless factors that are surely involved (motive being prominent, but i feel a discussion of that would also turn simplistic). For the sake of future discussions, just remember that these people are real, and there's mostly likely tre…

>No one gains anything from these 44 year long sentences.

He attempted to murder a police officer, so why should benefit anything from it?

>He's been incapacitated for his entire life, and because of that, is seemingly going to be it for the rest of his life.

Of course. That's the point. That's the whole point of what a punishment is. You can't punish if you don't punish.

I understand. You don't want to punish criminals. You want to teach them how to become good. The thing about criminals is that they have no respect for nice people. So when nice peoples try to teach criminals to become good, the criminal feels like, "Why is this weak ass person trying to lecture me? I would break his neck if I am not in these chains. Talking as if he's holier than me."

Okay. You might say, "Well, if a criminal won't listen to a nice person, let's just have someone not nice teach a criminal how to become good."

Asshole: "Hey criminal, you need to be a good person." Criminal: "Fucking asshole, I'll break your neck."

Not gonna work either.

However, organized crime have found a way to do it (does not work guarantee to work 100% of the time).

The Boss: "Lowly criminal, I need you to be a good boy and not try to kill my family."

Lowly Criminal A: "No." The Boss's 30 henchmen kills him. Lowly Criminal B: "Okay. Fine. I will not try to kill your family."

Only death can deter a criminal, and that's not even guarantee to work 100% of the time (criminals back stabs their boss).

Anyway, as you can see, the above is even worst than our prison system.

However, if you feel you have a method of installing goodness into criminals, please feel free to share.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#128

Post by newjersey »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #123
newjersey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we start with no jail time for victimless crimes? If you don't endanger anyone but yourself, we don't pursue criminal charges. I'm thinking drug users and people who drink unpasteurized milk.

I'm 100% in agreement with you there. The entire idea of a 'victimless crime' is without merit.

We can then extend the logic to ridiculous cases where the law is clearly "wrong".

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/thanks-to-the-mus...

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#129

Post by conceit »

Asbostos wrote: post #56

What I've started to realize about people is that you can't influence them all with deterrents. No matter how long the sentence, or how permanent the memory of the justice system (8 months in prison for robbery, 50 years later), none of that is bad enough to actually stop people committing crimes in the first place. Essentially, people aren't rational. They don't act in their own self interests. I saw this also when…

The thing is sometimes you wouldn't want people influenced, you'd want them to be excluded and all this brings with it.

Re: My life after 44 years in prison

#130

Post by resc1440 »

jpatokal wrote: post #93
juhanima wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the imperial time, no. Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead is an interesting account of his time in Siberia, and it wasn't all that bad. It was different in Stalin's time, though. Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma tales tells a very different story. But even he survived after having served 15 years.

The mortality rate in the Kolyma gulags was estimated at 27%/year, meaning the odds of survival for 15 years were <1%, and virtually zero for general work (mining etc). Shalamov survived because he managed to land a position as a hospital attendant.

This assumes that random people die each year. However, if you survive for a year, you are probably very tough, and your life expectancy might actually go up.
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