My theory is that prison is only effective on people that are already fairly morally grounded and with pretty healthy social and mental dynamics. So those folks can and do bounce back.
But prison does nothing to help with mental illness or help give folks a sense of community once they're out.
As someone who has never been to prison and not worked in any part of the legal system, my opinion holds limited weight.
But I believe prisons were originally designed to act as dissuasion against bad behavior from regular folk, and a form of quarantine for more violent or harmful people. I think they've since turned into some horrible form of daycare for adults who don't know how to be adults, and which makes no effort to improve the lives of inmates because it has no incentive to.
Meaningful jobs have diminished to the point that someone who didn't make it through high school will have an extremely difficult time finding success in life (and those who did will boast so loudly about it that you'd think anyone could do it). Entire communities in low-income neighborhoods have developed where people have no idea what to do with their lives. I think a lot of other-wise decent and well-meaning individuals get arrested for stealing or public intoxication or whatnot because they have no idea what they should be doing with their time.
One story that has stuck out to me over the years is that of a kid who was a hero in 2013 for rescuing a young girl, and by 2016 he was sentenced to prison for armed robbery [1].
Prisons themselves don't get any funding if nobody's going to prison, so they have a perverse incentive where they want people to go to jail.
Only... other countries have different systems with different outcomes. They treat mental illness, have safety nets, and don't push folks out of prison as ill-equipped to deal with the world.
We (Americans) can do better. Fewer people in prison, focusing on reintegration into society, proper facilities and health care (including mental health). And so on.
But we (Americans) aren't willing to do these things, even if it is cheaper overall and has better outcomes for both the inmates and their families. A politician will claim these policies are "soft on crime" and putting rapists on the streets and that these people should pay dearly for whatever crimes they've done and they get votes.
I question whether we can do better. I don’t think pointing to other countries is helpful. The murder rate in the US was 10x higher than in the U.K. even at the turn of the 20th century. Long before ideas of prison as a place for rehabilitation, which came about in the 1950s and 1960s.
It’s important to remember that American incarceration is a lagging trend, not a leading trend. Incarceration rates were flat for a long time before trending up in the 1970s. That followed about a decade behind a long period of increase in crime that started in the 1960s and lasted through the 1990s.
In 1900 the northern USA states had a murder rate that was the same as most European countries. The elevated murder rate in the USA came entirely from the sky high murder rates in the ex slave states.
It's a big order: We'd honestly have to put an actual safety net in for everyone for it to work well, but we can start by treating people like humans, having safe prison environments, and making sure folks have a chance. Change laws so the stupid thing one did at 19 doesn't have lasting effects at 24. Make sure parole officers have flexible hours that allow folks to have jobs.
No one should have to commit crimes to pay their fees.
It isn't worth looking at the crime rates, as we've never tried. Crime rates are more than just prison, but the right prison system is one avenue to reduce repeat crimes.
I think culturally (western, not explicitly American, unsure about elsewhere) there is a bias toward people being incapable of change, that their actions in the past define who they are, and this probably results in people just continuing to do more of the same if they are unable to escape it.
Consider when children make a mistake or do something silly - often they are chastised or punished rather than educated and forgiven. Because of this we learn to lie about, hide, or pretend to misremember mistakes in a bid to mitigate the punishment we know we're about to receive. Later in life we're remembered by the things we've done in the past, and if you've done something bad enough (or even just silly or ignorant) it'll hang over you like a shadow for the rest of your life. Even if you personally feel like you've grown and moved on, there is always the risk that someone will dig up your past and throw it at you. In the end we live in fear of our past and feel controlled by it and that makes it harder to look into the future to become the person we might like to be. Those with sufficiently unfortunate pasts are increasingly rejected by society so they have no alternative but to continue adding to their unfortunate past because the communities that contributed to their past are the only ones that accept them.
Personally accepting that the mistakes you make don't define you as a person can go a long way to freeing yourself from some of the burden, but culturally it still lingers. Ultimately though there is a huge difference between shoplifting when you were a dumb kid, and becoming a serial killer. The threshold for redemption clearly varies with the severity of the crime, however it seems to me that in many cases we simply reject any chance of redemption outright and this probably hurts us more in the long run than it needs to.
So what you're basically saying is that some people should simply rot in prison because they're too dangerous to society? Well, I agree with you. Just not politically correct these days...
They may have a sense of community, it just might be one that is harmful to your own.
My own theory is that prison has been set up to remove potential criminals from the street, chosen via a demographic of education/ethnicity/wealth/gender/aggressiveness, during their prime years of being a nuisance. The results don't have to be particularly fair.
There's no real intention of transformation or revenge, just a form of quarantine.
Looking at a chart of incarceration rate over time and murder rate over time, this last a better indicator of crime than most, you can make a case that the big ramp up in jailing somewhat matches the peak and fall of murders. It's tough to find causalities in anything, but I rather like that one.
They may have a sense of community, it just might be one that is harmful to your own.
By some accounts, prison is an opportunity to network and gain mentors and knowledge towards furthering a career as a criminal.
There's no real intention of transformation or revenge, just a form of quarantine.
If considered as a criminal networking opportunity, it's likely to transform people into those who would seek revenge, and it would have the opposite effect intended by quarantine.
EDIT: I'm reminded of a folk dance group I was once a part of. Usually, we were obscure, and the one or two new people who might show up would become immersed in what we did, and would quickly learn to dance. Once, there was a local newspaper article about us, and 16 newcomers showed up all at once. It was very difficult that evening, and I think a lot of the newcomers didn't learn much.
If we want incarceration to make people less criminal, not more criminal, then the prisoners should not be spending their time with criminals. The prisoners should be spending their time with mentors, teachers, and counselors.
> If we want incarceration to make people less criminal, not more criminal, then the prisoners should not be spending their time with criminals. The prisoners should be spending their time with mentors, teachers, and counselors.
I immediately think of Nordic prison systems, where even the highest-security prisons are usually set up as an idealized microcosm of the outside world, with real living spaces, personal prisoner responsibility for preparing meals and cleaning up, grocery shopping and money management, workshops and classes, jobs that are designed for real vocational training, etc [1]. The recidivism rates are around 20% (some of the lowest in the world), with specific prisons approaching 15%.
By 'revenge' I'm referring to revenge by society by putting people in an unpleasant situation for a term.
Sure, but revenge tends to beget revenge in a vicious circle. This is why forgiveness is key to robust societal systems, when imperfect communication is taken into account.
"Potential criminal" is a term so vague as to be useless, because its boundaries are overwhelming shaped to oppress minorities and the poor.
Consider criminalization of loitering and its effects on poor people, criminalization of "gang association" (even when in practice it can mean "cousin of a gang member" or "babysat the child of a gang member's sister"), and the soft-touch handling of Oxycontin addicts while crack cocaine users get life in prison.
We could just start by addressing the elephant in the room which is that black people are disproportionately arrested for marijuana despite using drugs at the same rate as white people [1].
Which, naturally, can cripple families for incredibly small amounts of possession.
>despite using drugs at the same rate as white people
This statistic does not accommodate for cultural differences in use. It's quite possible that black people are more likely to carry and/or use marijuana in public or while driving.
I thought that I sort of implied that in the root post, although I expect that there's more to it than your example.
It's easy these days to get arrested for minor deviltries (way easier than when I was a lad) so the police have that in their pocket.
So, you pick out the groups who are statistically most likely to commit real crimes, pick them up for any old thing, and warehouse them until they are more old and tired.
Like I said, it's not fair, but it appears to work to some extent.
Wouldn't surprise me if law abiding black people are the biggest beneficiaries of the way the system works. Imagine living in the ghetto if there was no policing.
> Imagine living in the ghetto if there was no policing.
There would be plenty of problems, but not being stopped and frisked constantly because of skin tone even though white people are more likely per capita to actually be a valid target of the frisking[1] would probably be nice.
Prisoners by and large do not become productive members of society, nor do they fear prison enough to avoid recidivism. But they almost never escape, and the handful of escapes this century were all captured or killed within weeks. Quarantine is, if not what it’s it aimed at, what it accomplishes in practice.
What universe do you live in? 96% of all prisoners are released. Less than 4% serve life sentences. The reason why rehabilitation needs to be emphasized is because we live with large numbers of ex-criminals. They serve their time and they are released and now they are part of our society again.
>Being sentenced to prison had no significant effects on arrests or convictions for violent crimes after release from prison, but imprisonment modestly reduced the probability of violence if comparisons included the effects of incapacitation during imprisonment.
So in the final accounting, probation increases the probability of violence while imprisonment reduces it. Imprisonment reduces violence while the offender is in prison, and it doesn't seem like it increases arrests or convictions afterward.
> imprisonment modestly reduced the probability of violence if comparisons included the effects of incapacitation during imprisonment.
I'd have to read the article to confirm, but at first glance that reads like it might be "Prison damages people so much that that are physically incapable of violence." That's... not exactly a stunning endorsement of the system.
I believe the reading of “incorporating incapacitation” means that jail makes people physically sicker and injured. The act of jailing someone is commuting violence to them, in the same way that reoffense rates go to zero for all criminals who are punished via death penalty.
In academic literature about criminal law, "incapacitation" has the very specific meaning that somebody who is in jail is not able to commit crimes on the street. It has nothing to do with their health (even if they may suffer a health impact).
These results suggest that for individuals on the current policy margin between prison and probation, imprisonment is an ineffective long-term intervention for violence prevention, as it has, on balance, no rehabilitative or deterrent effects after release.
Yes, the words of the authors. But the final accounting according to the data of the authors: during incarceration they commit no crimes against society and after incarceration they resume committing crime at the same rate as if they had not been locked up. So, longer incarceration reduces crime.
I don't know if that conclusion is actually true or not. It seems as though it would be as long as criminality didn't increase after incarceration to an extent that more than canceled the reduction during incarceration, but they claim that doesn't happen. Well, okay then, longer sentences reduce crime by, as they say, "incapacitating" the criminal during his incarceration.
Killing them would also reduce crime (https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/cells.png) but I don't think that this is enough of a metric to judge something as good for society
These studies are always done on people who were undeterred by the possibility of incarceration in the first place.
It’s hard to imagine a bigger selection bias. It’d be like testing the efficacy of a drug, but only on patients for whom it didn’t work the first time.
What if we had prison cities where prisoners can live "freely" and have their own economies and stuff? Let's see how they like trying to live normal lives with other people who have no qualms about stealing and killing to get what they want, just like they may have done themselves to innocent people before they were imprisoned. Will the criminals learn to get along or will they end up killing each other? I wouldn't care because they're in the prison city and not anywhere near me and other normal people, which is what prison is for right? Maybe we can even free those who prove themselves to be outstanding citizens in those prison cities.
> What if we had prison cities where prisoners can live "freely" and have their own economies and stuff? Let's see how they like trying to live normal lives with other people who have no qualms about stealing and killing to get what they want, just like they may have done themselves to innocent people before they were imprisoned. Will the criminals learn to get along or will they end up killing each other?
But prison does nothing to help with mental illness or help give folks a sense of community once they're out.