Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Incarceration equals the period of contagion, Lum explains. "The longer you're imprisoned, the higher the toll your incarceration takes on your family and friends, and the more likely they are to ‘catch’ your incarceration from you.....The disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks emerged as the single factor making the disease of incarceration a true epidemic among blacks..."

This study seems to completely ignore the socioeconomic factors that often lead to the more serious crimes and resulting longer sentences in the first place. It isn't the longer sentences that are causing incarceration to "spread" to friends and family, it's the fact that the friends and family tend to be in the same socioeconomic position as the person that received the sentence, and thus are just as likely to display similar conduct.

The flawed conclusion in this study is like saying that a whole family is more likely to get wet because one family member gets rained on. While statistically accurate, the fact that one person gets wet doesn't cause the others to get wet; the cause is that they all live in the same environment and are thus far more likely to get wet than those that live in areas where it isn't raining.

Those other factors that increase incarceration rates may be true (and many of them probably are)... however, what they were showing is that EVEN IF everything else was equal, longer sentences for one group over another will have a major effect on incarceration rates for those two groups.

This doesn't mean that what they were testing is the ONLY factor (or even the only major factor) in determining incarceration rates. By using a computer simulation where they could keep everything else EXACTLY the same, they demonstrated that a small change in sentence length can cause a large change in incarceration rate.

Do you really think that the authors missed such a completely obvious flaw, something so simple that a random internet commenter could use it to invalidate the entire work in one sentence? It's hard to take this type of criticism seriously without any specific references to their methodology.

I read the article, and yes, their conclusions point to the fact that they did indeed miss such a completely obvious flaw. This sentence, their conclusion, was in bold:

The disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks emerged as the single factor making the disease of incarceration a true epidemic among blacks. Not the socioeconomic disparity, mind you, but the actual sentences. This conclusion is so obviously wrong it's absurd on its face.

Black people with similar economic backgrounds get longer sentences. The longer your in prison the more likely you are to go back AND the more likely close relatives will end up in prison.

I think researchers do ignore obvious flaws, but I don't think it happened here. It's easiest to ignore obvious flaws when you are testing something that almost no one would challenge, like "eating vegetables is good for you."

I think that is the base assumption the authors believe their readers already hold. It's something that doesn't surprise anyone- there is no novelty in it, and it's so matter of fact that we've been trying to address it for years.

This article was worth writing because of the idea "going to prison causes so much trouble around you, it makes it more likely for people you know or your family to go to prison, too."

That's a novel idea, not just because it may explain the reasons people go to jail, but because it indicates we might need to reanalyze our whole approach to criminal justice— ostensibly, we jail people not only as a punishment to them, but also as a way to protect or improve society at large. If sending people to jail causes more criminal behavior, our actions may be undermining our goals.

Perhaps read the article again; the second paragraph in particular gives some reasons why it's more than just 'being poor'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com