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The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

obviatethestate.substack.com

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Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#41

Post by V__ »

narrator wrote: post #4

Over-reliance on prison seems to have worked astonishingly well for El Salvador. If your metric is murder rates then it's probably a world record in terms of change in murder rate from the highest in the world (106 per 100k in 2015) to one of the lowest (2.4 per 100k in 2023).

> Since then, more than 72,000 people have been arrested for being alleged gang members or affiliates.

> thousands have been unjustly detained without due process and dozens have died in prisons.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-prison-gangs-bukele-4...

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#42

Post by eynsham »

dcist wrote: post #20

We have an under-incarceration problem. See the recent results from El Salvador. I don't lose a second of sleep over the cruel treatment of murderers and violent criminals.

> recent results from El Salvador

I don't think that generalising from one example is a good basis for public policy.

> cruel treatment of murderers and violent criminals

The whole point of Bukele’s approach is that it does away with due process to lock up actual criminals faster; but it is hard to see how that wouldn’t also involve locking up more innocent people than would be locked up otherwise. It’s very easy to make any policy look good by focusing on its least sympathetic victims, but that doesn’t really address the tradeoffs in question.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#43

Post by w______roy »

wongarsu wrote: post #28
anonporridge wrote: post #2

Like all high morality, more advanced rehabilitation methods and/or more pleasant segregation of criminals from law abiding members of society, is a privilege of wealth. The richer we collectively are, the more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely. The poorer we are, the more likely we have to resort to more barbaric methods of order maintenance, like execution. Therefore, i…

The US has the 8th highest GPD per capita in the world (PPP, place 7 if you use nominal numbers). About the same as Denmark, yet the US has nearly ten times as many prisoners per capita. Clearly there are more differences between Denmark and the US. But I don't think that only countries wealthier than the US (the likes of Quatar, the UAE or Luxembourg) can afford to handle crime in a more humane way.

And this illustrates why GDP is a terrible metric for measuring the kind of collective/civilizational wealth that they are talking about.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#44

Post by ta2112 »

The title is compelling, and I was interested to read a take on the over-incarceration of our citizens, and maybe something about how we could focus our effort in that regard. It's a complex subject, and there are lots of angles. Unfortunately, the post is mainly focuses on the potential sentencing guidelines of a single case with provocative religious undertones. At least it was short.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#46

Post by wongarsu »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #29
anonporridge wrote: post #2

Like all high morality, more advanced rehabilitation methods and/or more pleasant segregation of criminals from law abiding members of society, is a privilege of wealth. The richer we collectively are, the more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely. The poorer we are, the more likely we have to resort to more barbaric methods of order maintenance, like execution. Therefore, i…

Not untrue, but it's important to also point out the prison labor system as an economic factor that incentivizes maintaining or expanding itself. Independent from our collective riches, if the marginal return on leveraging prison labor is greater than that of non-prison labor, then the finance argument makes itself. The reason that it's important to point this out, is that prison labor is an element of growing civili…

At the same time, a criminal system that doesn't try to rehabilitate and reintegrate deprives society of skilled workers, at best delegating them to slave labor in the prison system. It gets even worse if you add unpaid work that prisoners would perform if they weren't imprisoned, like raising their children.

I suspect on a societal level the US justice system costs more than a system without prison labor and a focus on rehabilitation (Sweden gets mentioned frequently, but most of Western Europe qualifies). The US system self-perpetuates because of the profit it brings individuals, not because it's beneficial to society.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#47

Post by giantg2 »

tqi wrote: post #13

> Mr. Cassidy could face $250,000 worth of penalty (excluding fines) for $1,500 worth of crime. To state that the reason the maximum is 5 years is because the item was religious in nature, then ignore that fact when calculating the cost of the offense tells me this person is starting from a conclusion and working backwards. By this methodology, conspiracy to commit murder should get no jail time since the "cost" is $…

The other important thing is that the maximums are there to cover the whole possibility of the crimes covered under that law (eg a rich guy burns down a church, etc). It doesn't mean that the maximum should be leveled in this specific case. It's a possibility, but it should be something sized more appropriately. Stating the possible maximums is a usual tactic to evoke empathy for someone charged, or for law enforcement to talk up in efforts to deter possible offenders. Either way, the probabilities tend to be exaggerated.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#48

Post by xyzelement »

The op is lazy. Comparing the US incarceration rate to Norway's is pointless w/o adjusting for a ton of other demographic factors. There are parts of the US that have rates significantly lower than Norway, and then there are parts that have a higher rate - and these parts are very different.

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#49

Post by henryreynolds »

anonporridge wrote: post #2

Like all high morality, more advanced rehabilitation methods and/or more pleasant segregation of criminals from law abiding members of society, is a privilege of wealth. The richer we collectively are, the more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely. The poorer we are, the more likely we have to resort to more barbaric methods of order maintenance, like execution. Therefore, i…

Great summary! While I couldn't agree more about your abstract claim, I don't think it fits the specifics of this case.

The US GDP Per Capita for 2022 was $76,399. For Norway, $106,149. That's a significant difference, but we'd need to compare a far larger set of nations to determine correlation.

I suspect that there are thresholds of wealth where restorative justice becomes more or less viable. In an isolated and preindustrial village of 100 people, confining or killing a problematic citizen may prove more costly if they provide an essential service. For post-industrial societies, there's likely a cliff after which restorative justice is consistently less costly. IIRC, Norway spends far less per capita on criminal justice than the US.

Actually, should that be my next article? Analyzing the trends of wealth, criminality, and incarceration?

Re: The US over-reliance on incarceration is lazy and cruel

#50

Post by 50208 »

Somewhat simplistic sub with bad example. Our country is large, not homogeneous, has lots of guns, and lots of addiction issues ... so we're going to have more crime than many other countries. We need to separate the criminal types (drug criminals, violent criminals, "other" criminals) and house / rehabilitate them separately. Law abiding citizens deserve protections and non-law abiding citizens deserve consequences commensurate with their crimes ... but they should not suffer undue punishment in incarceration (eg; drug addict vs. violent criminal). I live in Oregon and drug decriminalization (I supported) and lax law enforcement (less jailing) has led to a general lawlessness that is getting out of control. Folks are booked / released and committing crime after crime. Folks might be arrested for 6 or 8 real crimes before they even spend a night in jail. It's not working. Oregon is a good example of the pendulum swinging too far, and it's swinging back ... hopefully to a better position.
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