My brilliant plan to create prison reform: Every time the state wants to force a human being into a locked cage, they need to find a volunteer to be locked in a cage for the same amount of time as the person being involuntarily locked away. The forcibly imprisoned and voluntarily imprisoned must be imprisoned in the same facility, but are not informed who their imprisoned partner is. The volunteer cannot be paid for…
So if your mom got raped you want her to be imprisoned with the rapist in order to make sure he has a nice time?
It's unreal how much money prisons make off of Prisoners' families. Selling items for 2-4x as much as retail, selling them items and not allowing them to give them away when they leave, making phone calls super expensive, etc. A large majority of this money comes from the Prisoner's family. And because they're prisoners most people will never really care until it happens to them. And this isn't really just a US thing…
The justice system in general is a huge financial drag on anyone connected to someone accused of a crime. Unless they just cut them loose completely. Court fees. Fees for all kinds of stuff in jail or prison. Lawyer costs. Rehab instead of prison? Pay that (huge, inflated) bill or off to prison they go. Hell I think there are even parole fees, at least some places. It seemingly never ends (I've been lucky not to be c…
One previous job I had a part where our application was being used to track court fees and restitution. The anonymized (names & addresses were, the rest was not) data used in the development environment was heartbreaking.
Many of the fees are set by state legislators. If you got a $50 fine for "whatever", there would be close to $1,000 added in fees for misdemeanors (things you cannot be imprisoned for more than 365 days). Felonies (things that you can get more than 1 year in prison for) were not handled by this level of court.
I feel like the prison system is the victim of perverse incentives. The goal given to them is "house this person securely for a specific length of time at the lowest cost possible ". They are rewarded for cutting costs. But the total cost we pay is the cost to imprison this person the second and third time when they re-offend. It's the policing costs when they're homeless because they can't find housing or get a job.…
Do we have any programs that have good, replicated evidence they reduce recidivism?
According to federal data the average annual cost per prisoner in federal prisons is about $115,000. Thought experiment: Imagine that instead of that, we identified people likely to become criminals, using all that new fangled crime prediction AI that police forces are so excited about. Then just given them say half that amount as UBI, so $50,000/year and say you can have this as long as you don't do crime. Peoples l…
Are you using metrics that are gameable? For instance some predictors of future criminality are past criminality, and education level. This heavily incentivizes people to commit crimes and drop out of school. So you are forced to only use metrics that are outside their control such as parent's previous income level. And you'll get nowhere near a 50% false positive rate using only these metrics. Not to mention all of…
The AI is very smart and can't be gamed. It's a thought experiment, the AI is amazingly accurate. That neighbor earning $25k a year would rightfully be upset, minimum wage is a joke.
I feel like the prison system is the victim of perverse incentives. The goal given to them is "house this person securely for a specific length of time at the lowest cost possible ". They are rewarded for cutting costs. But the total cost we pay is the cost to imprison this person the second and third time when they re-offend. It's the policing costs when they're homeless because they can't find housing or get a job.…
Going a step further, we can reduce costs by funding social services that help prevent people from ending up in prison in the first place. I agree with your assessment of our Calvinist thinking.
Do we have any silver bullets? My understanding is most social services show very small effects once replicated.
This seems like a made up number. This article here states that it is at most 10% of all people even in that category of crime in Bavaria https://netzpolitik.org/2022/datenluecke-wie-viele-menschen-... The category being "Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe" (imprisonment for failure to pay a fine) Do you have a source for your claim?
If your numbers are true, and 10% of the prison population consists of people who didn't pay their bus fare, that is egregious
You don't get it. The fines are HUGE and the prison sentences really short.
So what do you choose? Pay x000 euro? Or go to prison for 1 day, a week at most? There are a substantial number of people picking the second option. Hell, people joke it's about the experience.
(Also this is in fact mostly about speeding tickets, not public transport fares)
Prison guards smuggle drugs. Then they invent all these weird policies to avoid admitting that. Until the pandemic they claimed it was visitors, but when shutting down visits didn't change the rate of drug detection they invented this drug impregnated paper crap.
But why privatize it? If the goal is to reduce contraband digitizing makes sense. This just seems like a new way to for prisons to make money. Digitizing is cheap, certainly no more expensive than hand delivering mail. Privatized prisons should be arguably be abolished. Granting them new sources of revenue is appalling.
I think there's a meaningful distinction between "privatized prison" and "service provided to prison by private company." The trouble with privatized prisons is that the incentives are all wrong. (Those incentives being: cut costs, cut corners, minimize oversight/hide failures, increase number of inmates.) On the other hand, privatizing some services makes sense, depending on how you structure the deal. Same reason y…
In most states, private prisons get guaranteed minimum occupancy rates in their contracts with the states. If, for some miracle, people stopped committing crimes, and no more got incarcerated, these prisons were guaranteed a minimum profit level.
According to federal data the average annual cost per prisoner in federal prisons is about $115,000. Thought experiment: Imagine that instead of that, we identified people likely to become criminals, using all that new fangled crime prediction AI that police forces are so excited about. Then just given them say half that amount as UBI, so $50,000/year and say you can have this as long as you don't do crime. Peoples l…
The perverse incentives to try and behave like a potential criminal would be hilarious! Also, I think you might be missing how impulsive criminals can be... murder is often a crime of passion.
Even so extreme poverty is a contributing factor to how some end up in situations where the impulse is to commit a crime, even murder.
I feel like the prison system is the victim of perverse incentives. The goal given to them is "house this person securely for a specific length of time at the lowest cost possible ". They are rewarded for cutting costs. But the total cost we pay is the cost to imprison this person the second and third time when they re-offend. It's the policing costs when they're homeless because they can't find housing or get a job.…
Prison creates absolute animals. We shouldn't put people in prison unless they're going to be there for their entire lives. Singapore-style caning is probably much better for both the convict and the broader society -- take the incorrigible violent criminals and lock them up for life without parole, and cane the rest.
Starting by bringing back caning in elementary school would pay substantial dividends in about 10 years.