Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 99 posts

Re: Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#41

Post by comodore_ »

jpxw wrote: post #23
throwawaygimp wrote: post #9

UBI + health (and other calamity) insurance for all. A strong public mental health system. Prescription drugs of every kind, heroin, meth, whatever. With the right counselling and support attached. I might be an idiot but pretty sure most crime will just go away, then we can spend proper resources to help and support (and punish when needed) the few offenders who really struggle to stay within the rules of society. T…

Health insurance for all? Agree. I’m not sold on the economics of UBI. IMO something that I think would make a huge difference while also being realistically achievable is criminal justice reform. We cannot let prisons continue being factories for drug addicts and career criminals. There must surely be a better way than this.

> We cannot let prisons continue being factories for drug addicts and career criminals

or literal factories. prison labor is not always forced, but always cheap labor and some of it even dangerous. imagine getting paid 2$ a day to fight CA's wildfires

Re: Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#43

Post by Corinthian »

throwawaygimp wrote: post #24
jpxw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health insurance for all? Agree. I’m not sold on the economics of UBI. IMO something that I think would make a huge difference while also being realistically achievable is criminal justice reform. We cannot let prisons continue being factories for drug addicts and career criminals. There must surely be a better way than this.

UBI no one knows. Being sold or otherwise doesn't matter. Small trials here and there aren't much use. We need a country with balls to try it like Portugal did with drug policy. So yea, I'm not sold either. No one really is until we get the hard truth. Nothing more complex (and chaotic) than society and it's economy. Good luck modelling and predicting that reliably ha!

Is it possible that UBI is inevitable? Machine learning is just getting started at making many jobs redundant, sooner or later it will explode. Yes, new jobs will be created too, but it's hard to imagine they will be on par with the amount lost. Those new jobs will most likely require a high level of education.

A massive wage gap and extreme poverty seems inevitable without UBI. In my personal utopian vision, I see us transitioning from a working culture to a learning culture, where personal growth is the goal.

I'm with you all the way on drug policy and prison reform. Addiction is an illness, not a crime. There's no such thing as good and evil, just cause and effect.

Re: Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#44

Post by rkangel »

throwawaygimp wrote: post #9

UBI + health (and other calamity) insurance for all. A strong public mental health system. Prescription drugs of every kind, heroin, meth, whatever. With the right counselling and support attached. I might be an idiot but pretty sure most crime will just go away, then we can spend proper resources to help and support (and punish when needed) the few offenders who really struggle to stay within the rules of society. T…

I think we should absolutely do all of that, for more reasons than just reducing crime.

Specifically talking about crime though, I think it becomes diminishing returns. Some countries in Western Europe are not a million miles from that ideal and still have a non-negligible crime rate and homelessness rate.

Mental health support is probably the biggest thing missing, at least in part because we (as a planet) are quite bad at treating it. I expect (and hope) that that's the area that will have the biggest advances in medical treatment over the next couple of decades.

Re: Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#45

Post by SirHound »

kilroy123 wrote: post #39
throwawaygimp wrote: post #9

UBI + health (and other calamity) insurance for all. A strong public mental health system. Prescription drugs of every kind, heroin, meth, whatever. With the right counselling and support attached. I might be an idiot but pretty sure most crime will just go away, then we can spend proper resources to help and support (and punish when needed) the few offenders who really struggle to stay within the rules of society. T…

It's been my experience around the world that about 99% of people are honest for the most part and won't rob or harm you. But... that means there's that 1% who _will_. I think no matter what, that 1% will exist (this is just a gut feeling). That means in the US alone, there are ~3.3 million people roaming around that will rob, steal, murder, rape, and do other horrible things. At a peak, 2.3 million were in prison so…

That’d be “data” if the American prison system was just. But it isn’t.

Re: Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#46

Post by transitory_pce »

anovikov wrote: post #19
transitory_pce wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are a few genuinely 'bad people' out there Do you want to count the number of violent rapes by year? Violent premeditated murders? Lets add violent robbery and assault by people have food and a place to stay, but are looking to level up and buy shiny things? This is not a circumstance, and there are many 'bad people' out there.

Most of these are mental health issues. ESPECIALLY violent rape. Really every cop will tell you that vast majority of crime is not committed by some cold-blooded, well-planning, career criminals - but by mentally unstable or sick people and/or people suffering from addictions, that do ridiculous things being clearly out of sane mind. Sadly, psychiatry is really in its infancy and its success record at both diagnosis…

What about cold blooded well planning rapists who work as cops?

Re: Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#47

Post by skinkestek »

transitory_pce wrote: post #31
AussieWog93 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you want to count the number of violent rapes by year? Violent premeditated murders? People do keep count of this, and the (per-capita) rate of violent crime has been falling fairly monotonically since at least the end of WW2. Our genetics haven't changed in that time, but circumstances have.

So what do you do with the violently inclined people? Put them in therapy and hope they get better?

Some get better, some are disasters waiting to happen.

Source: Norwegians do this. It is not every day it seems but there absolutely are multiple cases each years of people with violent pasts who become violent again given the opportunity.

There are two types of prison sentences here: ordinary and "forvaring" (best translation I could come up with is "detainment") which practically means they get to serve a minimum sentence anyway but won't be released until the specialists consider them reasonably safe. Kind of close to life but with a chance of parole, only the parole is meant to be the rule, not the exception.

For now it seems to work well enough, but if the rate climbs I think they will have to make adjustments.

Re: Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#48

Post by luckylion »

certeoun wrote: post #38
jimnotgym wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst the detractors of UBI like to paint it as automatically impossible, like breaking some fundamental law of nature, I bet the same people would have said the same things about the Covid benefit schemes. In my country people could be furloughed by their employer on 80% of their salary... and somehow we paid for it ok.

The government needs to pay for this. The taxes collected come from people. So a fraction of the people have to pay for UBI. If we assume full automation and no private property, then the machines work for us now. They don't complain like Ben Shapiro that paying for the poor with your wealth/income is "stealing". Communism is a good idea on paper, but humans in general are greedy and envious. If we had unlimited reso…

> People don't want to put up with getting the same thing as everyone else.

I don't think that's true for most people. Rather, people don't want to expend energy when they can get away with not doing it. Working is hard, and if you're taken care off if you don't, then a sizable part of the population won't.

Re: Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#49

Post by certeoun »

luckylion wrote: post #48
certeoun wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government needs to pay for this. The taxes collected come from people. So a fraction of the people have to pay for UBI. If we assume full automation and no private property, then the machines work for us now. They don't complain like Ben Shapiro that paying for the poor with your wealth/income is "stealing". Communism is a good idea on paper, but humans in general are greedy and envious. If we had unlimited reso…

> People don't want to put up with getting the same thing as everyone else. I don't think that's true for most people. Rather, people don't want to expend energy when they can get away with not doing it. Working is hard, and if you're taken care off if you don't, then a sizable part of the population won't.

I hope so. Again, I wouldn't complain about it, but there are people like Ben Shapiro, you know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ People like Ben then perhaps need to put up with it if the majority decides so. I just don't want to imagine his rage and anger...

Re: Experience: I spent 29 years in solitary confinement (2010)

#50

Post by AussieWog93 »

kilroy123 wrote: post #39
throwawaygimp wrote: post #9

UBI + health (and other calamity) insurance for all. A strong public mental health system. Prescription drugs of every kind, heroin, meth, whatever. With the right counselling and support attached. I might be an idiot but pretty sure most crime will just go away, then we can spend proper resources to help and support (and punish when needed) the few offenders who really struggle to stay within the rules of society. T…

It's been my experience around the world that about 99% of people are honest for the most part and won't rob or harm you. But... that means there's that 1% who _will_. I think no matter what, that 1% will exist (this is just a gut feeling). That means in the US alone, there are ~3.3 million people roaming around that will rob, steal, murder, rape, and do other horrible things. At a peak, 2.3 million were in prison so…

>It's just to point out that, the 1% thing probably has some truth to it based on real data.

Quite the opposite.

Rates of violent crime vary by orders of magnitude from one society to the next, and have reduced dramatically over time within most societies in the developed world with no indication that we've reached the bottom.

Post reply on HN