I think I pooped my pants.
My life after 44 years in prison
91–100 of 130 posts
Re: My life after 44 years in prison
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you suggest then as a punishment?
Just a thought, but picking up trash along the highway is one option.
I used to believe that we should put people to useful work instead of warehousing them in jails to rot. Then people on HN explained to me how it was tried in the US and it created perverse incentives, giving jail wardens tremendous powers of blackmailing locals into doing their bidding at the threat of deploying free work force in their industry (e.g. cutting down trees) and driving the locals out of business.
This stuff is hard to get right.
Re: My life after 44 years in prison
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't "8 years in Siberia" likely a death sentence?
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.
Re: My life after 44 years in prison
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a tremendous body of evidence suggesting the opposite. Maybe not so much for first time offenders, but people with some experience in the criminal justice system are remarkably knowledgeable about the law, sentences, and exactly what consequences will ensue for particular behavior.
How do you reconcile that with a very high recidivism rate?[0] If anything, you're disproving your own argument. [0] http://www.bjs.gov/content/reentry/recidivism.cfm
> 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 look at a Porsche and a Camry very differently than a person with $5k in the bank.
A person with a criminal record who understands how stacked against him/her society is, is going to look at crime from a much more calculating position than a person with a spotless one. A person with a spotless record has something to lose by committing a crime; the possibility of losing the spotless record. The person who already has a criminal record has very little to lose at least from a reputational perspective.
Re: My life after 44 years in prison
#95Earlier 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". 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…
Your cost benefit analysis there is some mighty cold calculus. While I agree there's utility in protecting society from violent offenders, your equation doesn't consider the ethical costs of locking people away for long periods of time. If you believe the criminal justice system to be about reform rather than punishment, then the first question to ask is "Is this person reformed, or should they remain in prison?". If…
your equation doesn't consider the ethical costs of locking people away for long periods of time.
This is just my kind of off-the-cuff theorizing, but I had that factored in to the cost column as well. I wasn't speaking about a purely monetary cost. Things like the cost to society of having the person locked away, the cost or not of a society looking at itself and knowing it is a society that locks people away for offense X for Y years.
Another cost to consider outside the above cost column is that crimes of many sorts incur huge costs, both monetarily and through things like social cohesion to a society. And it is in mitigating these potential costs that the benefits come from in the above cost-benefit analysis.
I don't particularly think of myself as an über-rationalist, but ethics more or less comes down to cost-benefit as well. How do you arrive at your ethics, by weighing certain things against other things[1], or do you just go with your gut?
The question of reform is surely one that pulls at the heartstrings if your prone to having your emotions played on.
How can reform be adequately determined? I have no answers for that.
Do you believe that sentences are levied with the expectation that minimal reform will occur or do you think that judges take that into consideration? I'm going to leave this one to the people that devote their lives to it, judges.
I have heard of people released early for 'good behavior,' so this is not an unheard of thing. It's understandable that as you move up the offence ladder, the possibility of a commuted sentence on the grounds of 'good behavior' or 'reform' would become more and more remote.
[1]here is something of an ethical brain teaser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
Re: My life after 44 years in prison
#96Earlier 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". 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…
I agree with you, but once a person is in the prison system, the goal should be rehabilitation because almost all prisoners will re enter society at some point. The problem is that the prison system isn't very good at rehabilitation as evidenced by the high rates of recidivism. Ask yourself this: does prison, as it exists today, make convicts better people?
And I here agree with you. Reduced crime including from ex-cons would obviously be the preferred situation.
Do you know if prison systems that have more of a reform focus have reduced recidivism rates? If so, what can be learned from these systems?
If it has been shown, that certain methods lead to better outcomes, what are the obstacles to implementing these changes in the US, or other countries?
Re: My life after 44 years in prison
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I shoot you purely by accident most people will agree that I shouldn't go to prison. It was an accident, I'm not a danger to society. That probably depends on how reckless you were. Stupidity combined with fondness for dangerous objects can be dangerous to society. Jail-time might be good idea. > If I mean to murder you but my aim is off, or modern medical science manages to keep you from death, how is society b…
> That probably depends on how reckless you were. Let's assume the most generous interpretation possible. I.e. one where I'm at no fault whatsoever by any reasonable definition and pose no future risk to society. My point is that most people do recognize the importance of intent and future outcomes. > Results surely must play some role. The more I think about it I don't think they should. Why do we put people in pris…
> The more I think about it I don't think they should.
And I agree. In a perfect world, justice would be only about intent. But we can't read people's hearts, and we can't explore all circumstances that would lead one to a punishable act. Worse, imperfect attempts at this can easily be abused by evil people to harm innocents. Therefore our legal system sticks to the only thing it can reliably measure - outcomes, sprinkling in some consideration for intent when the latter is obvious.
In a perfect world, we could probably also separate compensating victims from punishing the perpetrators. If I steal and wreck your car to save my wife who needs to get to the hospital ASAP, then in a perfect world I should go free and pay exactly nothing, but you should get a new car (or monetary equivalent) plus some reasonable opportunity costs compensation. Who would pay? The society, out of "shit happens" fund. But to work, this again would require probing intent, in order to avoid turning stealing cars into a replacement for taxi service. Since we can't reliably probe intent, we're stuck with punishing outcomes and creating incentive structures preventing such perversions from developing.
Re: My life after 44 years in prison
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
No jail time for non violent crime? I presume you've never been defrauded, burgled, etc.
Look at it from the other way around - if you were to enter someone else's property and steal, would you expect to be sent to prison for being caught? If yes, would that seem fair? I would say yes. Would you expect to serve time for being caught riding a bicycle on a pavement? No. Otherwise would not seem fair, particularly if there were no warning signs... The law is a system with predictable penalties if you a) don…
For anything more than traffic tickets, predictable is not what I'd call it.
I've seen someone charged with kidnapping get it lowered to a misdemeanor (in that particular case it was appropriate).
Re: My life after 44 years in prison
#9944 years for attempted murder of a police officer, I guess with such a benchmark the next police officer murdering a civilian will be sentenced to at least double that given that they're supposed to set an example. Incredible. What standard of sentencing would essentially take someone's life away for an attempt . Makes you wonder how big a sentence you'd get if you succeeded, more than a lifetime?
In most states, the criminal laws are influenced by the Model Penal Code (MPC). The MPC punishes attempts as severely as completed crimes. The MPC approach is logical. Criminal law punishes moral culpability, not bad outcomes. That's why the act of killing another human may be anything from murder to no crime at all depending on the killer's intent. A would-be murderer's moral culpability is not lessened by the fact…
> Criminal law punishes moral culpability, not bad
> outcomes
Re: My life after 44 years in prison
#100Earlier 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…
FYI, you've written "your" in recent comments when you meant to write "you're".
> I would think your not saying that [...] I get that your trying to use it to support the next sentence [...]
I offer this feedback in the spirit that writing well is important and valuable to practice.