Comment by gridlockd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gridlockd | Hacker News Reader

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> Their recidivism and overall crime-rates rates are significantly lower than in the US...

Not really true:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/

Totally comparable to the US, Norway being an exception (as usual).

> They blow the US out of the water on every metric.

The US is a very large and diverse country and it's not structurally comparable to Germany, Netherlands and much less Norway (with 22% of GDP being oil exports). That would be cherry-picking. To draw any conclusions on the effectiveness of incarceration would require more careful analysis.

> I can't fathom what gave you a different idea.

Crime statistics and crime aren't the same thing. The point of prison sentences is no just punishment, it's deterrence. If you rarely convict anybody, your prisoner's rate is low, but the criminals are out on the street knowing they have nothing to fear.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/16...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-traffickin...

https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/finance/gangsters-paradis...

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4472929/

Let's fact-check some of their numbers.

Spoiler Alert: Their cited sources have completely different numbers.

EDIT: I removed some examples that are probably correct according to their definition of recidivism (they only looked at prisoners -> offenders).

Table 2.

Germany 35% (them) vs 23% (source)

They may have linked the wrong source here, since the source they provided is specific to people with psychotic disorders.

So let's assume this is their source (the one they linked for Germany in Table 1): https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Publikationen/DE/Legalbewaehr...

According to them the re-imprisonment rate is 35%, though the source says it's 23% (page 9, first paragraph).

The re-imprisonment rate for juvenile offenders is 35% though and mentioned in the same paragraph. It's likely they just confused that.

Your fact check fails a sanity check.

> Netherlands 48% (them) vs 27.6% (source): Fact Check Failed

They picked the number of "ex-prisoners" that become prisoners again (i.e. actual reconviction), you picked the number of "adult offenders" that become prisoners for the first time. You literally just picked the lowest number in the table without comprehending it. The correct number (48.5%) was right above.

> Germany 48% (them) vs 35% (source): Fact Check Failed

35% is the average including fines (recidivism: 29%) which make up for the vast majority of sentences. For adult prison sentences the recidivism rate is 45%/39% and for youth prison sentences it is 64%/62% (without/with parole).

Sorry. I found some mistakes in my reading of their article as well and excluded those Table 1 examples from my initial post.

Though I added something I previously excluded for Table 2, which I'm still unable to find in their sources.

About your reading of the sources though:

> They picked the number of "ex-prisoners" that become prisoners again (i.e. actual reconviction)

No that would be Table 2, not Table 1. Table 1 is about "ex-prisoners" that got convicted of any offense again, not necessarily a prison sentence.

> you picked the number of "adult offenders" that become prisoners for the first time.

That's not what Table 5.1 [1] is at all: "Reconvictions as a result of any crime, not disposed of through an acquittal, a dismissal by reason of unlikelihood of conviction, or any other technical decision."

> 35% is the average including fines (recidivism: 29%) which make up for the vast majority of sentences. For adult prison sentences the recidivism rate is 45%/39% and for youth prison sentences it is 64%/62% (without/with parole).

Yes. This is where I messed up. Though note that that recidivism rate (45%) is "ex-prisoner" -> any conviction (incl. fines). Which likely fits what they wanted to show in Table 1.

[1]: https://www.wodc.nl/binaries/factsheet-2011-5a-def-4apr2012-...

> Though I added something I previously excluded for Table 2, which I'm still unable to find in their sources.

The source given indeed seems to be incorrect.

> No that would be Table 2, not Table 1. Table 1 is about "ex-prisoners" that got convicted of any offense again, not necessarily a prison sentence.

Fair enough but that was my mistaken wording, the table in the source still correctly differentiates between conviction and re-imprisonment.

In any event, I remain unconvinced that these rates are substantially better compared to the rates in the US, especially considering how difficult these numbers are to compare.

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