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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

#51

Post by mycologos »

I sometimes wonder whether sentencing people to time in prison is the right equilibrium. My understanding is that doing the stuff associated with long prison terms is also associated with not having the longest or most carefully considered time horizon. In that sense, long prison terms are a bad punishment because they're an insufficient deterrent that is very expensive, in terms of both state resources and the prisoners' time.

Unfortunately, any deterrent has to by its nature be unpleasant, so if prison terms are off the table, you end up with instinctively gross and backwards-seeming things like inflicting physical violence on prisoners. That, uh, doesn't seem good either.

For the sake of brevity, at the risk of glibness: it seems like a system created with little consideration for its users, who are very different people from its designers.

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

#52

Post by wongarsu »

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).

I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to have a lot of negative ripple effects in a couple of years. Think of all the children now growing up as parents: how many of those are going to become criminals.

Not saying El Salvador went the wrong path. Sometimes you need extreme measures to get out of extreme problems, and at least in the near-term it obviously created great results. But I would withhold judgements on the applicability to healthier states until we had a chance to observe any long-term effects.

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

#53

Post by dfedbeef »

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).

I think the US figured out that imprisoning gang members reduces the murder rate a while ago, not to rain on your parade.

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

#54

Post by henryreynolds »

lolyyy2 wrote: post #37
henryreynolds wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right that the sum harm inflicted is greater than the cost to repair the altar. There's a certain point where trying to calculate ephemerals loses the thread. For the inconvenience, missed opportunity, and emotional damage, I'd look to tort law. The entire matter could be resolved through civil suit without incarceration, and I'd rather see the victim whole than the criminal suffer.

> For the inconvenience, missed opportunity, and emotional damage, I'd look to tort law. How would that work in this case? The Catholic church should sue the guy on behalf of their members?

Church of Satan, in this case. Didn't think anyone would read "Baphomet Statue" and assume it was owned by Christians.

That said, yes. Assuming the Church of Satan retains ownership, or at least responsibility for restoration, they are the injured party and owed restitution.

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

#55

Post by dfedbeef »

dfedbeef wrote: post #53
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).

I think the US figured out that imprisoning gang members reduces the murder rate a while ago, not to rain on your parade.

Wait until all the innocent people who got swept up in those crackdowns end up hanging out with gang members for 5 years, then get released :)

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

#56

Post by nobody9999 »

anonporridge wrote: post #18
Someone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, clearly, the US prison system is the way it is is because of lack of wealth /s

The US prison system is the way it is because we have a lot of culture poverty, despite a lot of resource wealth.

>The US prison system is the way it is because we have a lot of culture poverty, despite a lot of resource wealth.

First off, there is no single "US prison system." There are 50+ distinct prison systems in the US (one for each state/territory, plus a federal prison system) as well as hundreds of "jail" systems which are distinct from (and run by different folks) the prison systems. And that doesn't take into account the private prisons or the immigration detention facilities.

Secondly, there's wide variety in how these disparate systems are run, funded and used. As such, it's not really useful to talk about the "US prison system" as a monolithic institution.

However, one current runs through most prison systems in the US -- cruelty and a lack of interest in rehabilitation.

What's more, those who have been incarcerated are generally discriminated against (lack of access to jobs, housing and reintegration back into their communities) by society once they've served their time.

And that's the biggest cruelty of US society against those who have been imprisoned. And it negatively affects the economic potential of those folks, as well as the economic well-being of their communities. Which may lead to recidivism.

By focusing on rehabilitation and not continuing to punish those who have been incarcerated after their release by discriminating against them in a whole host of ways.

That's not to say there aren't folks who are too dangerous to be allowed to live in society. There certainly are. But those are a tiny fraction of those who pass through the various carceral systems in the US.

We're doing it wrong and have been for a long time. We can, and should, do better.

Edit: Fixed prose.

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

#57

Post by mycologos »

swader999 wrote: post #36

From my understanding a lot of incarceration in the US is profit driven.

Prison labor is indeed a multi-billion dollar industry, but I question the idea that it drives "a lot of incarceration". For better or for worse, Americans seem to be pretty OK with how incarceration currently works: across almost every political or racial group, most people think the current amount of incarceration is either "too little" or "about right". In total, less than 1/3 of Americans think it's "too much" [1].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/12/06/u-s-publi...

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

#58

Post by henryreynolds »

mycologos wrote: post #51

I sometimes wonder whether sentencing people to time in prison is the right equilibrium. My understanding is that doing the stuff associated with long prison terms is also associated with not having the longest or most carefully considered time horizon. In that sense, long prison terms are a bad punishment because they're an insufficient deterrent that is very expensive, in terms of both state resources and the priso…

Per the National Institute of Justice, "The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment."

As a dramatic overgeneralization of the principle, you'll have fewer thefts if every thief is forced to pay for their stolen goods than if 1% of thieves are tortured to death on live television.

It suggests that lowering expenditures on prisons, by reducing sentences, and retargeting that money toward enforcement would yield positive effects.

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...

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

#59

Post by OkayPhysicist »

I tend to agree with the conclusion in general, but this blog post is egregious. This math is bogus. The "do X damage pay X penalty" framework is a poor one, for several reasons:

1. At a bare minimum, you have to scale the penalty with the probability of getting caught. If you can do $1500 worth of damage with only a 10% chance of being caught, the criminal has the advantage, because they can expect to do $15,000 worth of damage before being forced to pay the $1500 penalty.

2. On top of that, you need to scale up your punishment to allow for a safety margin, to avoid actively incentivizing your criminal act as long as the criminal believes they have a slight edge over your expected efficacy at enforcement.

3. On top of that, the direct damages to a victim from a crime are not the only damages that are created by criminality. Criminality undermines trust, social cohesion, and general societal good will, carrying both hard to quantify, soft costs, (how do you put a price value on the marginal effect of people feeling less secure in their protected speech) and hard costs (if we didn't have criminals, we wouldn't need a justice system, or large parts of the legal system. Those costs can be amortized over every criminal convicted).

4. Worst of all, with ideologically motivated crimes (like the one the blogger brought up), the act is propaganda in of itself, promoting not only the ideology in question, but also the concept of committing criminal acts in the name of the ideology. The shameful excuse for a man who vandalized this religious display effectively told everyone receptive to it that "This activity is okay, there are others out there that support you". There is a cost to civilization writ large, that scales based on the publicity of the crime.

Personally, I think we underestimate the damaging effect of incarceration. There are far more humane, less damaging approaches to justice that still maintain good social order. But trying to justify a hate crime as "only doing a couple thousand dollars worth of damage, thus demands only a couple thousand dollars in punishment" is over correction.

Give the guy a couple lashes and send him on his way.

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

#60

Post by vondur »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #24

I saw the police cuff someone who was walking on the shoulder of the highway. They probably went to jail for the night and were released before long to continue walking out of their mind into roadways until something tragic puts a stop to that. The cruelty of the process comes from how procedural it is. No one kicked this person back into certain harm directly, but thats basically what the procedural implementation w…

It's very difficult in the US to have someone declared unable to care for themselves. The may get held on a temporary psychiatric detention in a hospital, but most likely we be released afterwards.
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