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Comment by parfe | Hacker News Reader

NPR just ran the story "Study: Half Of Jailed NYC Youths Have Brain Injury"

The study found nearly 50 percent of both boys and girls reported traumatic brain injuries that resulted in a loss of consciousness, amnesia or both. And they said 55 percent of those injuries were caused by assaults.

An estimated 60 percent of adult prisoners have a brain injury, according to a study of prisoners in South Carolina.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3045728...

The US justice system has become extreme in the pursuit of punishment vs treatment and rehabilitation.

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That is vs 30-40% of the general population.

There's nothing unexpected here. Youths mostly go to jail for violence. The more fights you get into, the more likely you are to be injured. I'd imagine that there's a far larger percentage of number of jailed youths with knife scars than those in school. That doesn't mean knife scars cause people to end up in prison.

I'm no neurologist, but i suspect that a brain injury might change your personality more than a scar from a knife fight, possibly making you more likely to engage in criminal behaviour.

I see no reason why a head injury shouldn't equally change a personality to become less criminal. Head injuries have completely unpredictable effects. My core point is that prisons are full of violent people, and violent people punch and receive more punches, therefore are more likely to have brain injuries.

Sometimes head injuries do make you less likely to become a criminal. Very few people in comas and vegetative states commit crimes.

It's not really in pursuit of punishment either. It's in pursuit of putting taxpayer money into people's pockets.

There is plenty of money to be made in curing mental illnesses. A prison is a lot less profitable than a drug.

All other things being equal, maybe. But:

1) A prison is far more easily sold to the population that hospitalization or cures ("what, you mean we're paying for those criminals welfare?!").

2) Imprisonment is "business as usual" -- so less friction and investment needed to move things there (they already are like that).

3) Lots of prisons also exploit inmates' labor.

4) Prison keeps the annoying (to those people) black minorities at bay.

Drug development is extremely risky. A privately run prison is pretty much a government money spigot.

Presumably there is little overlap between individuals or organizations that can provide mental care and those that can provide prisons.

"Become"? When was it not?

Prisons were initially invented as correction facilities, rather than instruments of punishment. Before this, crime was mostly dealt with by physical punishment.

This is completely wrong. You might benefit from reading Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

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