Hacker News Reader

Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

We (society) should get them access to Khan Academy plus a ChatGPT style interface for interactive tutoring. Imagine giving each prisoner a tablet, possibly wrapped in the kids edition foam so they couldn't hit each other with it, and letting them work through basic education in every field they're interested in.

I expect people who worked on it would come out of a substantial sentence better educated than most.

View on HN

That would be nice, but first you have to get around the nightmarish world of for-profit corporations that control all prisoner access to information and communication in the US. The system is designed to bleed every penny possible from prisoners and their families, not to rehabilitate them.

I think for profit prisons are a small fraction of the carceral system. Most prisons are government run.

Even in the case of private prisons what we need is to align incentives. We shouldn't be mainly paying per inmate, but rather give the private prison X% of the inmate's taxes after release and nothing if the inmate offends again. The idea is, we don't want to incentivize prisons to just hold people - that actually incentivizes the prisons to promote recidivism. We do want the prisons to impart job and life skills that will make the prisoner a productive and law abiding member of society after release.

Looks like around 8.4% of prisons were private in the US in 2018.

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

let 90% people can learn something there is a good Idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com