Comment by codingrightnow
3 years ago
As a former software engineer for over a decade and current corrections officer in a max level state facility, this is a very interesting topic. My facility has a large college presence within it. While there are problems with it, I think overall it is probably a net positive for the staff and inmates. At the same time, I don't believe that we have more than maybe a small handful of nonviolent/drug offenders; anybody on the outside advocating for murderers, rapists, and those in for armed robbery to have access to more of the normal comforts of the outside world is going to have a hard time and not much support. Even the medium level prisons have those types of people in them. So what facilities would wider access to remote learning and work become available? There would need to be honor facilities inmates must work towards proving they're responsible enough to be transferred to. Right now budgets are being slashed, we're at 60% staffing as it is, and the whole state is in the shit. And this is a "progressive liberal" state. It would probably take the federal government to start throwing money around for pilot programs, no state is going to increase their prison budget to accommodate this.
I think for all the criminals that are going to be released back into society at some point, recidivism should be at the top of our mind, not punishment.
If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do (assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place).
> If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do.
You're never going to stop many of them from reoffending. Even the "best" rehabilitation programs have crime rates far above the general population.
The additional 10 years is 10 more years where they can't hurt innocent people. The justice system exists for the benefit of society and innocent citizens, not criminals.
> assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place
Why would you ever assume that? Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
If locking large numbers of people up for inordinately long times prevented crime, the United States would be the safest place in the world. We have 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prison population. We are one of a dwindling number of countries that will lock up a child for life (there was a SCOTUS case baring automatic life sentences for minors, but it leaves a loophole wide enough for a semi to allow judges to still impose life without parole to children). We've doubled down on it again and again. Looking at the results, this approach obviously doesn't work.
Given our status as a massive outlier, could it be that our current system of mass incarceration is a driver of crime? I see signs that point to yes. Many people I have talked to have said the main thing being locked up taught them was how to be a better criminal. Prisons break families. Children grow up without parents. At one of the conferences for the heads of the Departments of Corrections for US states, a question was asked of all 50 heads: are prisons effective at making society safer? About 8 said yes. About 7 said they were unsure. The remaining 35 said no.
We've tried highly punitive mass incarceration for decades and it's failing horribly. I'm not smart enough to know the correct answer, but I can say that it seems obvious that the answer is not to lock more people up for longer.
7 replies →
> The additional 10 years is 10 more years where they can't hurt innocent people. The justice system exists for the benefit of society and innocent citizens, not criminals.
By this logic we should just never release them. Should we keep the 80% that would not reoffend locked up to prevent the 20% that would from doing so?
Should we increase the sentence from 10 to 20 years to make that ratio 60% to 40%? Then we prevent more crime, and the would be criminals are off the street longer.
Maybe if we decrease the comfort of the cells and general state of the prisons, we can get the rate to 20% to 80%? Then we can practically say we’re justified to keep those 80% off the street.
> Why would you ever assume that? Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
Because most people aren’t stopped by the deterrent effect. It’s perfectly possible the net negative effect of locking people up for a longer time is larger than the extra deterrent effect [1].
[1]: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...
2 replies →
> You're never going to stop many of them from reoffending.
would seem to contradict:
> Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
?
3 replies →
Yeah the punishments for the war on drugs has worked SO WELL. /s
Thanks for more first hand insight, from a related but different perspective.
I'm curious: what led you to leave software engineering? SWE to corrections officer sounds like a rare journey.
I was going to make a joke like "He probably wanted to do less stressful work."
Then I read that it's not far from the truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32554517
Correctional Officer is the job that requires the least amount of work of any job I have ever encountered. You literally do nothing the entire day. If your facility is cool you can just play Angry Birds on your phone or desktop all day, or read a book if they're not that cool. You can get infinity overtime at double or triple pay.
Plus, you get the added bonus of making the lives of everyone around you as miserable as you desire.
1 reply →
My life circumstances were such that I needed a job in a new area where that's all I was qualified to do (meaning I can breathe) while earning enough to live on. Software engineering is not an option within 90 minutes of here. Even if I could get a job in software here and it paid the same, software is significantly more stressful than my current job, the future is unsure as tech is always changing, the people I work with are closer and more friendly/outgoing, and the time off is amazing. When I leave work I'm done, there's no reading up on/practicing the latest stack without any guarantees it's going to increase my employability. When I walk out of the prison, my own personal life is all need to think about. I'd probably not take the job for less than a 50% increase in what I make now. And wages here are so low it just wouldn't happen. I do still enjoy coding but I like it as a hobby. And honestly, I was probably never very good at it.
That’s it folks, corrections officers and prisoners are more friendly/outgoing than most of us tech workers. Fuck every single one of us
1 reply →
Some statistics here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
~60% of the state prison population (~600k of ~1m) are imprisoned for a violent crime. Much higher than I would have guessed.
One of the article's key points is that violent crime does not mean "caused physical harm" and that entire categories of crime are considered violent by law, whether or not any violence was perpetrated during the commission.
"The fourth myth: By definition, “violent crime” involves physical harm
The distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” crime means less than you might think; in fact, these terms are so widely misused that they are generally unhelpful in a policy context. In the public discourse about crime, people typically use “violent” and “nonviolent” as substitutes for serious versus nonserious criminal acts. That alone is a fallacy, but worse, these terms are also used as coded (often racialized) language to label individuals as inherently dangerous versus non-dangerous."
I agree that all sides in every argument tend to twist language, statistics, the truth to their own ends. Nevertheless is there not a meaningful distinction between crime that involved physical violence to a person and crime that did not? And could we not endeavor to identify that distinction and use it to improve policy?
In case anyone was curious, the following text is from the section of the article discussing "violent crime":
> Burglary is generally considered a property crime, but an array of state and federal laws classify burglary as a violent crime in certain situations, such as when it occurs at night, in a residence, or with a weapon present. So even if the building was unoccupied, someone convicted of burglary could be punished for a violent crime and end up with a long prison sentence and “violent” record.
The article does not state this explicitly, but it suggests that someone who burgles a residence at night with a weapon should not have a long prison sentence, if the residence turned out to be unoccupied. (Perhaps even if it was occupied but the occupants were not "physically harmed"?)