I'm not sure that the "under vs. overincarceration" debate is correctly reading the facts on the ground within the court and corrections systems. Generally, courts aim to minimize the use of incarceration in large part because the "carrot" for many offenders is more attractive than the stick. This is also not well reflected by the statistics that pundits use, in part because one of the major carrots is the expungement of criminal records, the dropping of charges, and negotiating a lower set of charges in return for good behavior. It'll undercount the reform success stories because their records get wiped and they will be under-charged anyway at the outset of their short and truncated criminal careers. It'll overcount the recidivists because their records will not get wiped and courts will lard on all the charges that they are likely to be eligible for rather than allowing the defendants to plead out of the worst charges.
Judges want to suspend sentences in return for good behavior, and if the offender screws up, the stick comes out. For reasonable offenders, this works fine -- the results can be close to the ideal. However, when this system is taken to the extreme and many of the offenders are not reasonable but are habitual criminal degenerates, the rational approach doesn't work, and no amount of reform will transmute the hardened criminal or lunatic into a reasonable person.
I think it's also wrong to think that the system "invests in rehabilitation" or that it really could do much along those lines. There's not really any rehabilitating going on that does not come from the offender themselves. There are serious limitations to what the state can do on this point; it does a disservice to pretend like the state can do it rather than focusing on what civil society can do to give reasonable convicts a better pathway to productive lives. The whole theory that social workers do anything positive at all doesn't seem well supported by the evidence of the 20-21st centuries.
Further, Bazelon's comparison to other countries that aren't the US makes no sense whatsoever from a legal policy perspective. It's worse than comparing oranges to starfruits. There is almost nothing useful that you can garner from such comparisons because everything about those foreign countries from how the legal systems work at a basic level to demographics to geography etc. are all totally alien. The studies she cites suffers from the same data pollution problem that I mentioned earlier. You can throw 'em all out.
You don't need a complex AI to identify a great many people who are at low risk of reoffending. Some are in prison for purely victimless crimes; some - especially men - are much older than when they committed the crime, and crime is strongly correlated with testosterone levels in men. I wouldn't be too surprised if it were found that you could release almost any male criminal at 30 who committed a crime before 20 with very little recidivism. My cutoffs are fairly arbitrary, of course.
And incarceration rate is almost certainly the wrong variable to look at. Becker's model of criminality has been empirically challenged. Probability of getting caught is generally more important than magnitude of punishment. You could probably clean up the streets a lot just by ensuring that people committing low level offenses - burglary, theft, less severe assaults - get caught, even if they only spend a few months in jail or community service. One underrated explanation for the 90s crime drop is the security hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop#Security_hypothesis) which more or less implies that serious crimes like murder are much less likely to happen in a society where you can't even get away with robbery or stealing a car, since many killings happen in conjunction with such crimes, though also because fewer people will get on the first ladder of the cascade toward becoming a hardened criminal.
Yglesias has the better take. We need to have a higher percentage of people who commit crimes appended, convicted, and incarcerated, probably, given the costs of incarceration, for less time per conviction. This kind of more efficient outcome will probably cost taxpayers more.
The tools to assess risk of reoffense already exist. The problem is that the average black person scores worse than the average white person on them. The best place for the use of these tools is in nail decisions. Give someone bail (or own-recognizance release) and they can probably keep their job. Stay in jail and they get fired for job abandonment. So it’s an area with big social payoffs. But bail risk assessments have been abandoned across the country because the supposedly perpetuate racial injustice. Google “bail risk assessment” for a selection of articles. It’s depressing because, to the extent that it is true that blacks are arrested more that whites, they will disproportionately benefit from any system that lets them bail out, even if that system helps the average white more than the average black.
I must admit Saul's piece doesn't do much to make me more sympathetic to Borderer culture or more appreciative of its strengths. The bits he excerpts describe behavior that is pretty plainly bad for human flourishing and unhealthy to revel in or celebrate. Maybe there's more in the book that better exemplifies what's good about Borderers, or maybe other books do that better-- I didn't get much positive appreciation out of the discussion of Borderers in _Albion's Seed_ either, frankly, despite Hackett Fischer clearly doing his best to be charitable and fair-minded. Yes, the daring feats of gratuitous violence make for good, gripping stories; but there's plenty of human drama that makes for good stories but that we'd nonetheless all be better off if it never happened. What am I missing?
A 40% release with no effect on "public safety"? What does the author mean by public safety--no increase in murders, violent crime, property crime or all of the foregoing plus DUI and other 'minor' crimes?
Also, where is the evidence that AI can make a better prediction about recividity rates than, say, econometrics? AI is just math and code.
Yes, fewer of the one type error almost certainly means more of the other.
Yes, AI would do better than almost any judge, parole board, district, or state at determining who to release when.
But I think those truths miss more important issues which commenters have mostly covered:
We mostly know who is a high risk to repeat.
I don't have the data but I'd bet that some jurisdictions do a good job of releasing the right people, even if not quite as many as they could at similar risk, and other jurisdictions do a horrible job, releasing for a variety of other reasons beyond risk to public safety.
Whether the right people are released or not, I agree that a low conviction rate makes everything worse.
Regarding AI, I expect that if an AI were properly trained, it would give results that were unacceptably politically incorrect. It would probably be retrained in such a way as to make it PC, and then it wouldn't provide very good results. So, basically the same as what's happening now without AI.
On atheism, Harris makes many good points, and even addresses the comfort felt by believers. Yet he doesn't answer, and Mounk doesn't ask: "Why am I here?" Inevitably weak on this key question, its absence weakens a fine ideal:
>>what you want are people whose convictions scale with good reasons and good evidence and good arguments, and intuitions that are tutored by intellectual honesty and honest collisions with the opinions, so that there's a certain kind of humility and circumspection and discomfort with illogic, and a desire for consistency. <<
Harris is correct that this is what we want - but he shows little humility himself, and a HUGE inconsistency when he talks about "democracy" and the extreme left Woke problems. Just before getting to his defense of gay marriage, he claims "we should all be increasingly allergic to dogmatism." Yet he offers no steelman, nor even a strawman on his example of religious harm: “homosexuality is immoral.” Maybe it shouldn't be illegal, as it was in Oscar Wilde's time, but maybe uninhibited irresponsible promiscuity among young men is actually a net negative if it leads to rampant spreads of STDs and objectification of others with a pure utilitarianist view of using them for your own pleasure, including any "games" so as to manipulate them into giving in to your sexual gratification?
Homosexuality is less sinful than adultery, which itself was illegal until, sort of, no-fault divorce. [Much lower class crime and drug problems are connected to sexual promiscuity.]
Harris and Mounk both have far too much TDS bullshit. They're dogmatic about it, just as we don't want. As usual, insults of Trump without any specifics. Mounk: "Donald Trump is just a fundamentally bigger threat to American democracy and to decency. "
Harris agrees and claims if Trump OR anyone Trumpist runs in 2024, the woke problem won't go away:
"the craziness of Trumpistan is so provocative, and so seemingly justifying of the craziness of the woke. They mutually create one another at this point. "
--The DEVIL (made me buy this dress), Trump made us Left folk crazy - it's Trump's fault!!!
Intellectually flabby.
Total Bullshit. (Is there any good intellectual critique of Trump, his policies, and his results? Arnold Kling claims Trump's personnel picks were lousy - but hasn't shown Biden to be better in any pick.)
Mounk on the hegemony of woke ideas: "it both seemed to justify the most extreme claims, and it made it very toxic to argue against any left position, because you would be seen as running interference for Trump."
Cowards.
Intellectual cowards, both of them, unwilling to give reasons instead of insults without evidence, and such lousy arguments that only true-believers would believe in either of them. Yes, with some fine half-truth intuitions, but their lack of humility blinds them to their own lack of logic.
Some months ago Harris was essentially claiming that stealing the election away from Trump would have been good, if it was done. Total violation of "democracy". In a real democracy with free and fair elections, Hitler or the Devil or Trump or Biden can honestly be elected by a majority of valid voters voting, after uncensored media coverage of the good and bad points of both candidates. (Censorship of H. Biden's laptop means NOT 100% free & fair, therefore "stolen" is a reasonable, tho still unproven, claim. How much censorship is needed before a close election can be called stolen? -- not discussed.)
Harris states the big conclusion: "what's happening on the left is that you have a generation of activists determined to lie about all of that,"
Democrats lie. They choose to lie, for power, and blame Trump, or MAGA Republicans. And, after dogmatic demonization of Republicans, they justify their lies "for the greater good".
Because they suffer from Democrat Derangement Syndrome.
I think it is overly optimistic to an almost ridiculous degree to believe that we could release 40% of the incarcerated and not see an explosion of violent criminal behavior.
It isn't even enough to just release those incarcerated for non-violent crimes like burglary or drug dealing/possession since many of those are violent criminals who were simply pleaded down to non-violent charges to avoid more serious jail time. One would have to carefully discriminate among those, letting go those who truly were non-violent criminals versus those who pled down from such violent crime charges, and such a policy would almost certainly be challenged in court.
If one has been convicted 2nd degree murder or worse, we probably do best to keep such people in prison until they die. Violent robbers are also probably best kept in prison until they die, and the same applies to rapists/ pedophiles. Such people are probably not amenable to any rehabilitation as practiced today.
I read "Greenlights" this week based on the review someone linked here last week. I was raised in Appalachia by parents who were born and raised there by parents who were born and raised there etc. etc. etc. It reads as deeply authentic to me, though none of it really applied to my family at all, though it did so to many of the boys I grew up with. My suspicion is that McConaughey's success in life is probably in spite of upbringing, not as a result. For every McConaughey-like success from such a family, I can point to 20 who failed and ended up in a life of petty crime and prison.
Harris is correct- the Left is lying about racial discrimination today- and lying about the lying, too (read one example right here in the comments). The Left literally cannot help themselves.
Harris is of course 100% correct and I doubt many people would disagree. if we look at this penultimate rung on the ladder. A generation on the Left is not lying about this.
I'm not sure that the "under vs. overincarceration" debate is correctly reading the facts on the ground within the court and corrections systems. Generally, courts aim to minimize the use of incarceration in large part because the "carrot" for many offenders is more attractive than the stick. This is also not well reflected by the statistics that pundits use, in part because one of the major carrots is the expungement of criminal records, the dropping of charges, and negotiating a lower set of charges in return for good behavior. It'll undercount the reform success stories because their records get wiped and they will be under-charged anyway at the outset of their short and truncated criminal careers. It'll overcount the recidivists because their records will not get wiped and courts will lard on all the charges that they are likely to be eligible for rather than allowing the defendants to plead out of the worst charges.
Judges want to suspend sentences in return for good behavior, and if the offender screws up, the stick comes out. For reasonable offenders, this works fine -- the results can be close to the ideal. However, when this system is taken to the extreme and many of the offenders are not reasonable but are habitual criminal degenerates, the rational approach doesn't work, and no amount of reform will transmute the hardened criminal or lunatic into a reasonable person.
I think it's also wrong to think that the system "invests in rehabilitation" or that it really could do much along those lines. There's not really any rehabilitating going on that does not come from the offender themselves. There are serious limitations to what the state can do on this point; it does a disservice to pretend like the state can do it rather than focusing on what civil society can do to give reasonable convicts a better pathway to productive lives. The whole theory that social workers do anything positive at all doesn't seem well supported by the evidence of the 20-21st centuries.
Further, Bazelon's comparison to other countries that aren't the US makes no sense whatsoever from a legal policy perspective. It's worse than comparing oranges to starfruits. There is almost nothing useful that you can garner from such comparisons because everything about those foreign countries from how the legal systems work at a basic level to demographics to geography etc. are all totally alien. The studies she cites suffers from the same data pollution problem that I mentioned earlier. You can throw 'em all out.
You don't need a complex AI to identify a great many people who are at low risk of reoffending. Some are in prison for purely victimless crimes; some - especially men - are much older than when they committed the crime, and crime is strongly correlated with testosterone levels in men. I wouldn't be too surprised if it were found that you could release almost any male criminal at 30 who committed a crime before 20 with very little recidivism. My cutoffs are fairly arbitrary, of course.
And incarceration rate is almost certainly the wrong variable to look at. Becker's model of criminality has been empirically challenged. Probability of getting caught is generally more important than magnitude of punishment. You could probably clean up the streets a lot just by ensuring that people committing low level offenses - burglary, theft, less severe assaults - get caught, even if they only spend a few months in jail or community service. One underrated explanation for the 90s crime drop is the security hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop#Security_hypothesis) which more or less implies that serious crimes like murder are much less likely to happen in a society where you can't even get away with robbery or stealing a car, since many killings happen in conjunction with such crimes, though also because fewer people will get on the first ladder of the cascade toward becoming a hardened criminal.
Yglesias has the better take. We need to have a higher percentage of people who commit crimes appended, convicted, and incarcerated, probably, given the costs of incarceration, for less time per conviction. This kind of more efficient outcome will probably cost taxpayers more.
The tools to assess risk of reoffense already exist. The problem is that the average black person scores worse than the average white person on them. The best place for the use of these tools is in nail decisions. Give someone bail (or own-recognizance release) and they can probably keep their job. Stay in jail and they get fired for job abandonment. So it’s an area with big social payoffs. But bail risk assessments have been abandoned across the country because the supposedly perpetuate racial injustice. Google “bail risk assessment” for a selection of articles. It’s depressing because, to the extent that it is true that blacks are arrested more that whites, they will disproportionately benefit from any system that lets them bail out, even if that system helps the average white more than the average black.
I must admit Saul's piece doesn't do much to make me more sympathetic to Borderer culture or more appreciative of its strengths. The bits he excerpts describe behavior that is pretty plainly bad for human flourishing and unhealthy to revel in or celebrate. Maybe there's more in the book that better exemplifies what's good about Borderers, or maybe other books do that better-- I didn't get much positive appreciation out of the discussion of Borderers in _Albion's Seed_ either, frankly, despite Hackett Fischer clearly doing his best to be charitable and fair-minded. Yes, the daring feats of gratuitous violence make for good, gripping stories; but there's plenty of human drama that makes for good stories but that we'd nonetheless all be better off if it never happened. What am I missing?
we have so many types of incercerated.
some of those should - by simple criteria - stay locked for longer. others can be released faster. again by simple criteria.
we have lots of reoffending risk data already.
the current system is very far from optimizing for public safety and reoffending risk
A 40% release with no effect on "public safety"? What does the author mean by public safety--no increase in murders, violent crime, property crime or all of the foregoing plus DUI and other 'minor' crimes?
Also, where is the evidence that AI can make a better prediction about recividity rates than, say, econometrics? AI is just math and code.
Yes, fewer of the one type error almost certainly means more of the other.
Yes, AI would do better than almost any judge, parole board, district, or state at determining who to release when.
But I think those truths miss more important issues which commenters have mostly covered:
We mostly know who is a high risk to repeat.
I don't have the data but I'd bet that some jurisdictions do a good job of releasing the right people, even if not quite as many as they could at similar risk, and other jurisdictions do a horrible job, releasing for a variety of other reasons beyond risk to public safety.
Whether the right people are released or not, I agree that a low conviction rate makes everything worse.
Regarding AI, I expect that if an AI were properly trained, it would give results that were unacceptably politically incorrect. It would probably be retrained in such a way as to make it PC, and then it wouldn't provide very good results. So, basically the same as what's happening now without AI.
On atheism, Harris makes many good points, and even addresses the comfort felt by believers. Yet he doesn't answer, and Mounk doesn't ask: "Why am I here?" Inevitably weak on this key question, its absence weakens a fine ideal:
>>what you want are people whose convictions scale with good reasons and good evidence and good arguments, and intuitions that are tutored by intellectual honesty and honest collisions with the opinions, so that there's a certain kind of humility and circumspection and discomfort with illogic, and a desire for consistency. <<
Harris is correct that this is what we want - but he shows little humility himself, and a HUGE inconsistency when he talks about "democracy" and the extreme left Woke problems. Just before getting to his defense of gay marriage, he claims "we should all be increasingly allergic to dogmatism." Yet he offers no steelman, nor even a strawman on his example of religious harm: “homosexuality is immoral.” Maybe it shouldn't be illegal, as it was in Oscar Wilde's time, but maybe uninhibited irresponsible promiscuity among young men is actually a net negative if it leads to rampant spreads of STDs and objectification of others with a pure utilitarianist view of using them for your own pleasure, including any "games" so as to manipulate them into giving in to your sexual gratification?
Homosexuality is less sinful than adultery, which itself was illegal until, sort of, no-fault divorce. [Much lower class crime and drug problems are connected to sexual promiscuity.]
Harris and Mounk both have far too much TDS bullshit. They're dogmatic about it, just as we don't want. As usual, insults of Trump without any specifics. Mounk: "Donald Trump is just a fundamentally bigger threat to American democracy and to decency. "
Harris agrees and claims if Trump OR anyone Trumpist runs in 2024, the woke problem won't go away:
"the craziness of Trumpistan is so provocative, and so seemingly justifying of the craziness of the woke. They mutually create one another at this point. "
--The DEVIL (made me buy this dress), Trump made us Left folk crazy - it's Trump's fault!!!
Intellectually flabby.
Total Bullshit. (Is there any good intellectual critique of Trump, his policies, and his results? Arnold Kling claims Trump's personnel picks were lousy - but hasn't shown Biden to be better in any pick.)
Mounk on the hegemony of woke ideas: "it both seemed to justify the most extreme claims, and it made it very toxic to argue against any left position, because you would be seen as running interference for Trump."
Cowards.
Intellectual cowards, both of them, unwilling to give reasons instead of insults without evidence, and such lousy arguments that only true-believers would believe in either of them. Yes, with some fine half-truth intuitions, but their lack of humility blinds them to their own lack of logic.
Some months ago Harris was essentially claiming that stealing the election away from Trump would have been good, if it was done. Total violation of "democracy". In a real democracy with free and fair elections, Hitler or the Devil or Trump or Biden can honestly be elected by a majority of valid voters voting, after uncensored media coverage of the good and bad points of both candidates. (Censorship of H. Biden's laptop means NOT 100% free & fair, therefore "stolen" is a reasonable, tho still unproven, claim. How much censorship is needed before a close election can be called stolen? -- not discussed.)
Harris states the big conclusion: "what's happening on the left is that you have a generation of activists determined to lie about all of that,"
Democrats lie. They choose to lie, for power, and blame Trump, or MAGA Republicans. And, after dogmatic demonization of Republicans, they justify their lies "for the greater good".
Because they suffer from Democrat Derangement Syndrome.
I think it is overly optimistic to an almost ridiculous degree to believe that we could release 40% of the incarcerated and not see an explosion of violent criminal behavior.
It isn't even enough to just release those incarcerated for non-violent crimes like burglary or drug dealing/possession since many of those are violent criminals who were simply pleaded down to non-violent charges to avoid more serious jail time. One would have to carefully discriminate among those, letting go those who truly were non-violent criminals versus those who pled down from such violent crime charges, and such a policy would almost certainly be challenged in court.
If one has been convicted 2nd degree murder or worse, we probably do best to keep such people in prison until they die. Violent robbers are also probably best kept in prison until they die, and the same applies to rapists/ pedophiles. Such people are probably not amenable to any rehabilitation as practiced today.
I read "Greenlights" this week based on the review someone linked here last week. I was raised in Appalachia by parents who were born and raised there by parents who were born and raised there etc. etc. etc. It reads as deeply authentic to me, though none of it really applied to my family at all, though it did so to many of the boys I grew up with. My suspicion is that McConaughey's success in life is probably in spite of upbringing, not as a result. For every McConaughey-like success from such a family, I can point to 20 who failed and ended up in a life of petty crime and prison.
Harris is correct- the Left is lying about racial discrimination today- and lying about the lying, too (read one example right here in the comments). The Left literally cannot help themselves.
Harris is of course 100% correct and I doubt many people would disagree. if we look at this penultimate rung on the ladder. A generation on the Left is not lying about this.