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Comment by felistoria | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it has to do with defunding the police at all. I do think is has to do with removing the ability of the police to make arrests or when they do the person is just released. In Portland, when they arrest someone, the DA just releases them. About a month ago the female owner of a coffee shop was blasted out of no where with an uppercut by a homeless guy. The dude was arrested and let out in less than 24 hours. How do you let someone violent like that just roam the streets? The only way the actually put someone away anymore is for murder. Stuff like this is definitely one factor as to why murder rates are up.

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The dominant mindset these days is that prison should be about rehabilitation, not punishment. It sounds wonderful and unobjectionable on its surface. But it is wrong. Not entirely wrong, but wrong nonetheless.

Because prison also serves as a risk reduction measure for the general public. While I do want our justice system to try its hardest to rehabilitate people, I hold the abhorrently unpopular opinion that some portion of the population just needs to be kept away from the rest. I hear plenty of local news stories about a suspect who has 20+ prior offenses being let go from custody awaiting trial. Why in the world do we let people with such a track record out of jail, much less with no cash bail?

The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the highest incarceration rate. Every time there is a crime thread on HN it is full of anecdotal stories about how we can be tougher on crime. It boggles my mind that this is the accepted framing.

You're not going to "see" the lives that wasted in prisons that would have been reasonably rehabilitated in other countries.

You would have to think the criminal justice system in the united states is extremely fair and that we have a dramatically different population to place such a high priority on the people that are possibly victims of crimes over people that are inappropriately incarcerated.

It's almost as though the framing of "tougher" vs "softer" is a ridiculous over-simplification of the matter.

We should be tougher on violent crime and softer on non-violent crime.

EDIT: I want to amend this to say that even the increase in nuance that I just suggested is probably not nuanced enough. Some kinds of violent crime we are probably too harsh on, and some kinds of non-violent crime (e.g. serious white collar financial crime, or certain types of safety/environmental violations at scale) we could probably stand to be a bit harsher on.

Over half of all individuals in prison in the US are serving for violent offenses. Even if we released every non-violent offender currently incarcerated, the US would still be in the top 15 countries in the world for prisoners per capita.

Everyone railing against the prison system in America seems to have bought into a myth that our prison system is out of control because of harsh sentences for “minor” infractions like drug offenses and theft. The reality is that American society, for whatever reason, is more violent than most other societies in the world. You can try and make the argument that the prison system is at fault, but I think it’s more likely that other more fundamental aspects of America are larger factors contributing to it, and attempting to abolish the police or overhaul the prison system are unlikely to do much, as that’s simply treating symptoms and not the disease.

Guns.

I'd also like to point out that enforcement also has a disproportionate effect on skilled crime vs. unskilled crime. Pickpocketing is one example; in areas that enforcement against pickpocketing goes up, the crime nearly disappears, because it becomes not worth it to learn the skill (and it's more likely that those who could teach you the skill are in prison).

Severity of punishment isn't the best way to disincentivize crime. If you have two justice regimes, one where 50% is caught and punished and the other where 25% is but punishment is twice as harsh, the former will be far more effective at decreasing crime.

(Mostly) abolish prisons, and put tons of police officers into the community.

You're absolutely right. But deterrence isn't the only issue of importance. We do want to select punishments that deter. But we also simply want to separate incorrigible offenders from society. Every year a murderer is locked up is a year they aren't killing anyone (except maybe other prisoners).

I agree that increasing the probability of getting caught is good too, though.

I disagree. Straight from the wikipedia intro:

> According to a 2014 Human Rights Watch report, "tough-on-crime" laws adopted since the 1980s have filled U.S. prisons with mostly nonviolent offenders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

It doesn't seem like you read what I said. I'm not defending "tough on crime laws". And I specifically said we should be softer on non-violent crime. So i'm not sure what it is you're responding to.

> The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the highest incarceration rate. Every time there is a crime thread on HN it is full of anecdotal stories about how we can be tougher on crime. It boggles my mind that this is the accepted framing.

One possible explication is that the people put into prison are the wrong people. That would explain how many people on Hacker News say we can be tougher on crimes, while also recognizing that many people are in prison for no good reasons. How much people we put into prisons is a variable, but who we put in is another one, and I would argue that it's more important. Focusing simply on the number is partially missing the point.

> You would have to think the criminal justice system in the united states is extremely fair and that we have a dramatically different population to place such a high priority on the people that are possibly victims of crimes over people that are inappropriately incarcerated.

I think what most people mean by that is "Instead of putting into prison someone for smoking weed once, put into prison the guy that stabbed one of my neighbors, because I don't mind people smoking weed but I do mind getting stabbed and people around me getting stabbed". This is of course an oversimplification and in some cases people stab people for good reasons and they shouldn't end up in prison for that, but that's besides the point for this example here.

UK here. We rehabilitate criminals. What ends up happening is reading the following in the media; "Raped again...", "Stabbed again...", "Previously had a suspended sentence for child abuse...". It's not the kind of society I want to live in, none of the extremes are good. Neither sending people to prison for every little thing but also suspending sentences for rapists, child groomers and murderers because you believe not punishing them will somehow magically alter their consciousness and change their behaviour.

EDIT: Typo

It boggles the mind, but it does at least explain why we got the prison state we have.

1. The US has the most incarcerated people per capita in OECD

2. US prisons seem to be awful. They should be about rehabilitation, but they are focused on punishment.

3. Because of point 2, we are reluctant to imprison some offenders, in fear of destroying their lives and chances of rehabilitation.

4. The cash bail system is not the norm across the world. It is weird to only jail people who can't afford to pay.

Are there any attempts to copy Norway's Halden prison in the US?

> 2. US prisons seem to be awful. They should be about rehabilitation, but they are focused on punishment.

Just the other day I watched a video of an interview of an American person who spent time in a prison here in Mexico. He described American prison as "a hotel" when compared to Mexican prisons. There is a really good documentary about a prison in Tijuana [1] showing an example of that.

My point being that prisons in the USA are actually quite good, compared to most prisons in the world. That doesn't make them acceptable. The problem is that the general idea of the prison system in the world just doesn't seem to be working.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqi4ZpR2OWI

> 1. The US has the most incarcerated people per capita in OECD

But Russia (a suspended OECD member) beats it for a total number of people who been through the prison system.

10%+ of men to be exact.

Prisons serve 4 roles; rehabilitation, punishment, deterrent and public safety. How you balance these is done differently in many countries.

The US seems to historically have focused on the punishment aspect most of all.

I'd say deterrent and then rehabilitation are the main ones in the UK.

In Scandinavia it's mostly about rehabilitation and public safety, with punishment being almost non-existent.

Do they have any kind of therapeutic role for the victims of violent crime? I know revenge is petty but if someone hurt me badly or killed a member of my family it would be a bit of a kick in the teeth for our societies main concern to be how best to rehabilitate them.

You're simplifying the opposing position in a way that isn't fully honest. There are at least four purposes incarceration can serve: rehabilitation, retribution, dissuasion, and separation.

Rehabilitation meaning, giving people the tools and resources to avoid recidivism. Retribution being, punishment or justice for the benefit of the victim. Separation being physical removal of people incompatible or dangerous to society. Dissuasion being what you describe, punishment that rational actors will take into account when deciding to take an action.

Pro-rehabilitation people argue that rehabilitation should be the first priority, and retribution the last, with separation there when necessary (think: life sentences for people who murder without remorse) and dissuasion somewhere in the middle. Compare prison to something like an inpatient addiction recovery center, which aims to rehabilitate and separate (although sort of in the reverse way) and how much more constructive that is.

I don't think there's very many people at all (even among like hardcore prison abolitionists) who believe that it's possible to entirely do away with some form of separation of people who are dangerously incompatible with the norms of society. If nothing else, mentally ill people who can exhibit violent behaviors will continue to exist.

All that said, your comment also has very little to do with murder rates. Those don't really correlate a lot with petty crime or even petty violent crime. Someone who makes a living breaking into cars doesn't suddenly jump to murder.

I’ll back up your unpopular opinion and say we should have a new Australia. Some people are never going to rehabilitate, keeping them in prison costs a ton of money, and they’d probably enjoy being on an island somewhere better anyways…even if it would be a ridiculously lawless place.

The only problem is I think we’re all out of inhabitable places.

Problem is the same with the death penalty, sentencing some innocent people, because that's essentially what you'd be sentencing them to. Some innocent people (tried guilty) will be sent there and immediately become slaves or killed.

Have a minimal force to enforce basic rights? Well to actually configure that safely, you're back at a prison.

>prison should be about rehabilitation, not punishment

It should. But simply letting people out is neither.

It's wrong when you focus ONLY on prisons.

That's the thing people miss from the conversations. Those who want to abolish police and prisons aren't just saying shut them down and we're all good. They're saying shut them down and spend money in directly increasing the quality of life for people.

Crimes increase as poverty and class divide increases. Decrease those and you've actually managed to solve the source of the problem, rather than trying to find a solution for the consequence (increase in violent crimes).

Alternatively, people that aren’t intelligent and/or have impulsivity issues have a hard time holding down jobs - and those people very well might still commit crimes even after throwing money at them.

A classmate of mine had a successful tile laying business. He got on meth. He put cameras in people’s homes. He stole things. He then tied up a girl and raped her all night.

"people that aren’t intelligent and/or have impulsivity issues have a hard time holding down jobs"

So why does the US have more of this? All of these descriptions ignore that America is seemingly the worst place out of everywhere for this? Why?

Poor broken families & communities with low education and few options generate large numbers of such people.

A simple look at the background of violent offenders shows this.

This is partially an economic problem, but also has social roots with multigenerational feedback loops. >50% of violent offenders were physically abused, raped, or neglected by parents. Many were unwanted or abandoned by one or more parents.

I would guess it's the long-term consequences of the slave trade/labor and the inequalities that stems from it. America isn't the worst place, but it's the worst "first world country", and first world countries usually don't have that history.

What you replied to was describing a failure of the jail system, not prison system.

> I don't think it has to do with defunding the police at all.

That seems like a reasonable on conclusion given that the totals for May 1 & Jun 1 were already record setting...

But what else could have happened in 2020 that could have caused such a dramatic spike?

Maybe a worldwide global pandemic that caused many business to shutdown or go remote and a spike in domestic violence because a good chunk of the population is stuck in abusive/dysfunctional families?

That seems like a stretch, but worth investigating. ;-)

> I don't think it has to do with defunding the police at all. I do think is has to do with removing the ability of the police to make arrests

Or a mixture of the two.

True

Isn't it a little presumptuous of you to think that you know what caused the spike when criminologists who study all kinds of crime rates for a living does not know?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to come to the logical conclusion that catch and release of criminals will lead to more crime.

Then perhaps you can cite some research that provides evidence for the claim that changed catch and release policies caused the uptick in murders?

The observant will note that you also cite no evidence, not even for your claim that criminologists don't know what causes the spike. felistoria at least makes a plausible cause-and-effect argument, which is more than you have done.

I don't claim to know what caused the spike. You'll find it implied in the NYT article that the cause for the spike is unknown. You'll find it more explicitly stated in this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/upshot/murders-rising-cri...

Same story in Chicago. Not sure if it's because holding them would cause overcrowding or what but it's a huge problem

Illinois had, at one point, the most crowded prisons in the nation. They're still technically over capacity, but it's no longer that extreme.

In my opinion, if you want to throw more people in prison, you need to invest in the infrastructure to house them. Voters quickly lose their appetite for "Law and Order"/"Throw away the key" when the tax man comes by asking to build a new prison and hire more prison guards. I don't see many people advocating for more IDOC funding although I'm sure they exist.

Should we be locking more people up? Maybe, but how are we going to pay for it? And is that really the correct answer when the United States incarceration rate is already several times higher than the OECD average? I would say the smarter course of action is to address root causes of these problems - building more prisons and trying to incarcerate our way out of the problem is just creating our own gulag archipelago.

Maybe our for-profit private prisons are far too expensive to operate. Maybe we're also too skittish about exercising the death penalty for obviously hopeless cases.

The taxman has cried wolf multiple times, that's why people don't like it.

I agree. It's not as if police actively go searching for murderers to catch. They respond to issues that have already happened.

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