A Proposal for Defeating Moloch in the Prison Industrial Complex
31ChaosMote
12Davidmanheim
0benkuhn
0Davidmanheim
4ChristianKl
3Houshalter
3benkuhn
2ThisSpaceAvailable
2lululu
0ChaosMote
0benkuhn
18polymathwannabe
1lululu
10TsviBT
3lululu
-9VoiceOfRa
6ChristianKl
3Zubon
0ChristianKl
4Shmi
0VoiceOfRa
5Shmi
0VoiceOfRa
4RobertM
0lululu
3Adam Zerner
3knb
-2Jiro
9knb
5Nornagest
2torekp
0[anonymous]
-1Epictetus
0knb
1Squark
1Lumifer
0[anonymous]
0TheAncientGeek
0OrphanWilde
-1bortels
6ChristianKl
2gjm
0bortels
0lululu
-2VoiceOfRa
2lululu
0VoiceOfRa
-2VoiceOfRa
11jimrandomh
12Shmi
6anon85
0Unnamed
0anon85
2Unnamed
0anon85
0Unnamed
0OrphanWilde
2anon85
0Unnamed
6knb
0jimrandomh
5lululu
9Lumifer
0lululu
-4ChristianKl
-7Lumifer
6fubarobfusco
-5Lumifer
2Vaniver
-2Lumifer
4SilentCal
0Lumifer
1SilentCal
0Lumifer
1SilentCal
0Lumifer
1knb
New Comment
Great suggestion! That said, in light of your first paragraph, I'd like to point out a couple of issues. I came up with most of these by asking the questions "What exactly are you trying to encourage? What exactly are you incentivising? What differences are there between the two, and what would make those difference significant?"
You are trying to encourage prisons to rehabilitate their inmates. If, for a given prisoner, we use p to represent their propensity towards recidivism and a to represent their actual recidivism, rehabilitation is represented by p-a. Of course, we can't actually measure these values, so we use proxies; anticipated recidivism according to your algorithm and re-conviction rate (we'll call these p' and a', respectively).
With this incentive scheme, our prisons have three incentives: increasing p'-p, increasing p-a, and increasing a-a'. The first and last can lead to some problematic incentives.
To increase p'-p, prisons need to incarcerate prisoners which are less prone to recidivism than predicted. Given that past criminality is an excellent predictor of future criminality, this leads to a perverse incentive towards incarcerating those who were unfair...
The incentive to try "high volatility" methods seems like an advantage; if many prisons try them, 20% of them would succeed, and we'd learn how to rehabilitate better.
0
Yep. Concretely, if you take one year to decide that each negative reform has been negative, the 20-80 trade that the OP posts is a net positive to society if you expect the improvement to stay around for 4 years.
0
Or if they will be replicated by another 20 prisons if they work...
4
I don't think that would be a problem. If more people get a good legal defense the system becomes more fair.
But even if you don't like that, you can set up the rule that the prison doesn't get the bonus if the prisoner is charged with a crime. You don't need to tie the bonus to conviction.
3
I really, really wish policy makers considered possible perverse incentive exploits in this much detail. Though I'm not convinced there is any perfect policy that has zero exploits.
3
If past criminality is a predictor of future criminality, then it should be included in the state's predictive model of recidivism, which would fix the predictions. The actual perverse incentive here is for the prisons to reverse-engineer the predicted model, figure out where it's consistently wrong, and then lobby to incarcerate (relatively) more of those people. Given that (a) data science is not the core competency of prison operators; (b) prisons will make it obvious when they find vulnerabilities in the model; and (c) the model can be re-trained faster than the prison lobbying cycle, it doesn't seem like this perverse incentive is actually that bad.
2
(a) Prison operators are not currently incentivized to be experts in data science (b) Why? And will that fix things? There are plenty of examples of industries taking advantage of vulnerabilities, without those vulnerabilities being fixed. (c) How will it be retrained? Will there be a "We should retrain the model" lobby group, and will it act faster than the prison lobby?
Perhaps we should have a futures market in recidivism. When a prison gets a new prisoner, they buy the associated future at the market rate, and once the prisoner has been out of prison sufficiently long without committing further crimes, the prison can redeem the future. And, of course, there would be laws against prisons shorting their own prisoners.
2
re: futures market in recidivism - http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/reducing-recidivism-through-incentives/
0
Your argument assumes that the algorithm and the prisons have access to the same data. This need not be the case - in particular, if a prison bribes a judge to over-convict, the algorithm will be (incorrectly) relying on said conviction as data, skewing the predicted recidivism measure.
That said, the perverse incentive you mentioned is absolutely in play as well.
0
Yes, I glossed over the possibility of prisons bribing judges to screw up the data set. That's because the extremely small influence of marginal data points and the cost of bribing judges would make such a strategy incredibly expensive.
Obvious, but worth mentioning: the recidivism index should not count the prisoners who didn't commit any more crimes because they died after they were released; otherwise it would appear lower than its actual value (and would create a hideous incentive).
I can see this system creating pressure to relax parole standards; if a minor deviance from the rules is not counted as recidivism, both the prison and the prisoner benefit.
1
A very good point! If someone dies, I guess their expected recidivism rate should drop to zero so as not to affect the rate that the prison is targeting.
And I wonder what the incentives are for parole boards and officers? Who controls regulations, bonuses, and promotions for this group? This is definitely something worth researching.
This still incentivizes prisons to help along the death of prisoners that they predict are more likely then the prison-wide average to repeat-offend, in the same way average utilitarianism recommends killing everyone but the happiest person (so to speak).
3
Hmmm, yes. Yikes. Additional thought needed.
-9
The elephant in the room is that the US has radically higher incarnation rates than every other country. If you want to reform the systems it's worth paying attention to how the US system differs and what it does to get higher incarnation rates.
Jails compete for money: the more prisoners they house, the more they are paid and the longer they can continue to exist.
That sounds plausible at first glance but it might be more complicated. Have you looked in more detail about how prisons are currently payed?
...Prisons love getting more money for doing the sa
3
An incomplete accounting suggests that prison guard unions outspend private prisons, which could reverse "This incentive is strong for public prisons and doubly strong for private prisons." So whatever negative effects one expected from private prison political advocacy, at least double that. (The important part isn't "sides" on that but rather the magnitude of political lobbying.)
(I feel I should note that public unions will spend effort lobbying to increase workers' share of the prison costs, not just to increase the number of prisoners or guard jobs. I could not tell you the breakdown between advocacy for "tough on crime" and for more pension protection.)
0
Workers that are union members. I don't know whether a CBT therapist would be included. If a prison suddenly starts hiring all sorts of specialists that aren't prison guards and pays it's money to them, the prison guard union might not like that.
To make the whole proposal more target, we might switch from paying the full bonus to the prison and pay half of it to the prison and the other half to the employees directly.
The first thing you suggest, creating a quality model of recidivism, would be eminently worthwhile. So much so, it has probably been done already a few times. Google "model of recidivism" and see how much stuff is out there. Read it.
0
Yes, there probably exist tons of models, the question is are they any good.
5
What are the odds that what OP proposes will be any better?
0
Rather low.
Missing actor/incentive structure:
Our current justice system is largely based on the idea of retribution, not rehabilitation. This is a trade-off where the State delivers vengeance for victims/families of victims to prevent vigilante justice. It may not make much sense in terms of impact today, but as a cultural norm it still exists and this idea does nothing to address that.
Other thoughts:
Does not really address "recidivism" of victimless crimes, including most drug crimes, except in the most general sense. Convincing people that smoking weed is morally wrong is much harder than convincing them that murder is morally wrong.
0
I'm not sure I'm convinced that it would interact with the idea of retribution. I'm personally not behind the idea of retribution as the final goal of our justice system, but of this proposal would be adding rehabilitation as an explicit end goal without making any statement for or against retribution as a possible concurrent end goal. This isn't a proposal to reduce or alter sentences in any way, in other words, in the mind of people who demand retributive justice, justice will continue to be served.
In an ideal world, I would rather that the US moved away from retribution, but changing cultural norms that are as established as that one is much more difficult than changing payment structures, I imagine. And very few people, including those who prefer retributive justice, would argue that recidivism rates should be increased or stay the same if decrease is possible.
I'm also not really on board with imprisoning people who commit victimless crimes. But that is well outside the scope for this. Again, this proposal specifically makes no value judgments on other policies (in hopes that it could actually be passed without partisan bickering). So pot is an issue for another day. And if recidivism of weed smokers isn't reduced at the rate of victim crimes or even at all that will be reflected in the statistics so that someone was a weed smoker, they would add more to the prison's expected recidivism rate. There are some very effective CBT based strategies, though (namely CRA and CRAFT) which can be very effective in reducing addiction, so I don't think drug crimes would be as difficult as you think to reduce. And I still think it would still be better to reduce some recidivism than reduce no recidivism, especially if the recidivism you're reducing is crimes with victims.
The core idea of incentivizing prisons to reduce recidivism seems very reasonable. If it's not currently being done, it definitely seems worth trying. At least for the experimental data of whether or not it's a good idea (although politicians wouldn't be able to admit to that reasoning).
Do you know if this is currently being done in any form? Are there other industries/contexts where similar things are being done? Successes? Failures?
This is really complex issue. What "should" be done depends on a lot of factors. You don't seem to have addresse...
To cut back on prison rape, some people have proposed segregating prisons by weight class. Using lean body mass would seem like a better idea. (To prevent short fat guys from being abused.) It would be easy to implement as well.
Letting prisoners choose which prison they will be housed in, and then paying prisons based on head count seems like an interesting idea to me. (The prisons could be privatized, or a bonus could be paid to wardens/staff/guards for each increase in enrollment. If a prison has a reputation for being dangerous or violent, just opt int...
-2
-- Prisoners are generally poor, so the biggest thing that would affect the prisoner's choice would probably be physical distance to family. This factor may be big enough that the system wouldn't optimize anything else.
-- Prisoners probably aren't going to get very accurate information about which prison is preferable.
-- Even ignoring this, it fails to consider that prisoners may prefer certain prisons for reasons that are harmful to the rest of us; for instance, because the prison has a lot of members of his own gang in it
9
Given that the stakes involve being murdered, raped, assaulted by guards, etc. I think many prisoners would accept fewer family visits in exchange for more safety.
This is definitely wrong, prisons already have strong reputations among criminals, defense attorneys already know a great deal about prison environments from having so many encounters with repeat criminals with inside experience. Given prison choice, defense attorneys would certainly make it their business to know prison reputations to advise their clients.
If true, this would not be different from the current status quo. In California prisons are already basically segregated by gang, and each gang is given yard time separately. This is done to prevent violence.
Prison gangs formed from a kind of arms race of mutual self-defense. Take away the need for self-defense in prison, and people will stop joining them. More to the point, there is really no reason to allow criminals to associate with each other in prison at all. Let them talk to non-prisoners via Skype calls for socialization and send them out on supervised work details if their behavior is good.
5
Lots of gangs form that way -- it's one of the two main pathways to organized crime, the other one being economies of scale in selling illegal goods and services. The Bloods, for example, started out as a sort of anti-Crips self-defense force, and many yakuza organizations are generally thought to have their roots in mutual-protection societies among small commercial enterprises.
2
But even if they didn't, the family visits are a valuable result of the proposed incentive program.
0[anonymous]
Yes, because human nature is not wired for tribalism...
Sarcasm aside, in a bleak and boring environment gangs provide readily available emotional nutritition. Belonging, symbols, inititation, the usual package. Freemasonry for the less intelligent, kind of.
-1
People will still join for social reasons. They do it outside of prison, so there isn't much reason to discontinue the practice inside of prison.
Solitary confinement has long been associated with negative psychological outcomes. Some would call it torture.
I'm not convinced that limiting social contact to the occasional Skype call is going to solve these problems. Not all prisoners have outside contacts with ready access to Skype. And what of prisoners who are out of touch with non-criminal acquaintances?
0
Actually self-defense is one of the main reasons people join street gangs too; they live in violent neighborhoods, go to dangerous schools, etc. You obviously don't need a criminal enterprise to get social interaction. Even if some people join gangs just because they like being in a gang, it is a well-established fact that most of the people who join prison gangs do so because they feel it is necessary to protect themselves.
And I suppose being raped, terrorized, beaten, etc. are not forms of torture? Of course, the modern practice of solitary confinement is designed as a punishment, including not being given visitation, yard time, television, etc. That is nothing like what I propose, which would involve using visitation and work-details so prisoners get to socialize with non-criminals.
Nice post! A related idea: instead of incentivizing only reduced recidivism, we can incentivize things like former prisoners finding decent jobs.
What are the incentives for the powers-that-be to adopt your scheme?
Where will the "bonus" money come from? If from reduced expenses on dealing with crime, this is a direct threat to the jobs of cops, judges, prison guards, etc. etc. Crime is highly useful and profitable to many people. They will not want to reduce crime (or "crime") rates.
There's an incentive you didn't mention, towards smallest prison populations, which is lowering costs and taxes.
You seem to take it for granted that the prison system will be largely private, but in many countries they are directly run by the state, which removes the profit and campaign donation incentives at a stroke.
0
Except by prison workers' unions.
Perhaps instead of the prison, the ex-prisoner should be given the financial incentive to avoid recidivism. Reward good behavior, rather than punish bad.
We could do this by providing training, and given them reasonable jobs. HA HA! I make myself laugh. Sigh.
It seems to me the issue is less one of recidivism, and more one of the prison-for-profit machine. Rather than address it by trying to make them profit either way (they get paid if the prisoner returns already - this is proposing they get paid if they stay out) - it seems simpler to remove profit as a...
6
Given people who commit crimes money that you don't give the rest of the population seems like a bad idea for all sorts of reasons.
Lack of getting caught for a crime also isn't proof of good behavior.
2
If giving them money goes along with putting them in prison for a substantial term, then I'm not sure there are severe bad incentives here. In any case, what bortels mostly has in mind is indirect financial incentives: trying to ensure that ex-convicts are able to get decent jobs. (Which should go along with trying to ensure that other people are able to get decent jobs, too.)
0
Exactly. Having a guaranteed low-but-livable-income job as a reward for serving time and not going back is hardly a career path people will aim for - but might be attractive to someone who is out but sees little alternatives but to go back to a life of crime.
I actually think training and new-deal type employment guarantees for those in poverty is a good idea aside from the whole prison thing - in that attempts to raise people from poverty would likely reduce crime to begin with.
The real issue here - running a prison being a profit-making business - has already been pointed out.
0
Fully agreed that this incentive would also be well spent on programs directly for the prisoner. Unfortunately, there is no way that you could convince law makers to consider this. Imagine the headlines: "My Rapist Is Payed More than Me," "Go Directly to Jail, Collect $200", "Pennsylvania Begins New Steal to Earn Program," "Don't Qualify for Student Loans? Steal a Car!"
People are more comfortable if the money goes to some intermediary. I would expect prisons are the best group to insensitivize because they have the captive audience. If job training works, prisons can earn money by providing job training. If they need reasonable jobs, it would be in the prison's interest to make ties with recruiters or hire a full time job seeker on the prisoner's behalf.
For the record, also agreed that education and health care are great preventative expenditures but that is a different system for reforming and one with a lot of partisan lines in the sand. I think it would be disproportionately difficult to use incentives to reform those areas because facts don't matter when partisanism starts happening.
I predict that some amount of book-cooking will happen, but that the gains possible with book cooking are small compared to gains from actual improvements in their prison program.
Evidence? Given the history of attempts at rehabilitation programs, this is a rather dubious statement.
...Police and judges retain the same incentives as before, for bonuses, prestige, and promotions. This is good for the system, because if their incentives were not running counter to the prisons and jails, then there would be a lot of pressure to cook the books by looking the
2
Mostly just because of the coordination problems necessary to cook the books in a statistically meaningful way. Individual teachers cheat standardized tests all the time by staying late and correcting student's answers, but cooking the books to reduce the appearance of recidivism would involve a top-to-bottom conspiracy involving police precincts, parole boards and officers, and judges. And even then, the top-to-bottom conspiracy would benefit one prisons at the expense of other prisons so other prisons have incentive to call out the offenders among them. Rather than facing a coordination problem of that magnitude, with the concomitant risks of discovery and punishment which grow with every person in on the conspiracy, it seems a lot simpler and more effective to hire some good psychologists and job skill trainers. Its not so much that I have confidence in the prison system acting morally, its more that I have less confidence in prison system being able to manage a complicated scheme. Certainly there will be successful smaller-scale cheating and skimming off the top, as often is when state money is on the line, but not at the magnitude I would expect to see actual improvements in treatment.
Not sure what you're getting at here. Certainly there are a lot of perverse incentives in the whole system, I wouldn't disagree with that. And the perverse incentives come from many directions with a lot of institutional force. I'm just not sure how this relates to my specific proposal. What are you expecting will happen on the police side if this change occurred?
Edit: Sorry, I just realized I might have misunderstood you. In your first comment, were you asking for evidence that small changes could lead to large gains? I was mostly basing that on the difference between US prison recidivism vs. Scandinavian countries. The US recidivism rate is 76%, Norway's is 20%. Their prisons are far more expensive than ours to run, but I doubt that every single percentage point of that 54%
0
The problem is that the only way your proposal could get implemented is if a politician campaigns on being more humane without increasing crime, which means he'll have an incentive to show the system works by execrating the rehabilitation statistics.
Not much, simply they avoid patrolling ghettos (as tends to happen unless there is a "tough on crime" mayor in office) and thus the correctional institutions can declare people "reformed" who aren't.
Failure to control for population. I don't have the statistics in front of me, but the recidivism rate among people in the US with Scandinavian ancestry is probably similar to the Scandinavian one.
Politicians compete for electability. Convicts can’t vote, prisons make campaign contributions and jobs, and appearing “tough on crime” appeals to a large portion of the voter base.
You seem to have forgotten why appearing "tough on crime" appeals to current voters.
Breif history lesson: During the 1960's and early 1970's politicans competed for electability by appearing compasionate to criminals, who were after all only "victims of society". The result was the massive crime wave of the 1970's. As a result the generation which grew ...
"Our opinion-makers have gone too far in promoting the doctrine that when a law is broken, society, not the criminal is to blame." -- Richard Nixon, 1967 (about a year before he became President)
The data does not support the claim that "tough on crime" strategy was effective.
The data does not support the claim that "tough on crime" strategy was effective.
But the "tough on lead" strategy likely was.
6
Meh, probably not:
http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_removal_and_declining_crime.pdf
...
0
It sounds like Pinker is unfamiliar with most of the research on the topic. He refers to this graph, but not any of the research on the various other predictions that you could derive from the hypothesis that lead caused much of the hump in crime over the past 60 years.
The things that he says about priors, and about the sorts of research that he'd like to see, sound plausible, but I wouldn't put much stock in what he says about the state of the research.
0
Can you name some of these predictions? Can you link to some of the research? What exactly are you referring to?
2
3 predictions that I came up with, when I heard about the hypothesis:
1. The lead hypothesis predicts a cohort effect: the crime rate for 35-year-olds should drop 10 years after the crime rate drops for 25-year-olds. Many competing hypotheses (like new policing tactics) predict a cross-sectional effect: the crime rate for 35-year-olds drops at the same time that the crime rate drops for 25-year-olds. (Although there may be feedback effects which cause some smudging of this sharp distinction, e.g. more crime among a subgroup means that police are spread thinner which makes crime more attractive for everyone.)
2. The lead hypothesis makes pretty specific predictions about differences in the timing of the crime drop across different regions. If one jurisdiction removes lead 8 years after another jurisdiction, then their crime rate should drop 8 years later.
3. The lead hypothesis predicts differences in the size of the crime increase & drop across different regions. If one region had more environmental lead than another, then it should have both a larger increase in crime during the "increasing crime rates" time period and a larger drop in crime during the "declining crime rates" time period.
I looked at one of Nevin's papers shortly after the Drum piece originally came out and it had some evidence for all 3 predictions, though not with as much rigor/precision/detail as I would've liked. For example, on prediction #3 it compared larger cities (which had more driving per unit area, and thus more environmental lead due to gasoline) to smaller cities and showed that their crime rates matched this pattern.
There is also research on other steps in the long chain (e.g., measuring blood levels of lead), and on other outcomes attributed to lead (e.g., teen pregnancy rates), some of which is mentioned in Drum's original piece. I haven't looked into that research beyond what I've seen in the popular press articles.
0
Do you think you could link to that paper?
A Larger vs. smaller cities comparison sounds like it has ample room for confounding factors, no?
The other outcomes attributed to lead sound like they correlate with crime rates, so this isn't independent evidence for the lead hypothesis.
0
I think the paper that I looked at was The Answer is Lead Poisoning. Mainly just looking at the graphs & tables.
The city size pattern is not a unique prediction of the lead hypothesis (there are various other differences between large & small cities which could account for it, though nothing that strikes me as overwhelmingly obvious), but it is a relatively unambiguous prediction (especially if there's high quality data on city size vs. environmental lead levels - I'm not sure how good those data are). If large vs. small cities turned out not to have this difference in crime trends then that would be pretty strong evidence against the lead hypothesis, so the fact that the comparison did come out this way must be at least some evidence in favor of the lead hypothesis.
0
Am I misreading this, or is this suggesting that the fact that the time-shifted correlation is unusually strong should be taken as evidence -against- the correlation?
2
Suppose you're Bayesian, and you're calculating
P(lead causes crime | data) = P(data | lead causes crime) * P(lead causes crime) / P(data).
What Pinker is saying is that P(data | lead causes crime) is not as high as you'd think, because if lead really does cause crime, we should not expect the crime curve to be a time-shifted version of the lead curve. It's probably still true that P(data | lead causes crime) > P(data), so that you should update in the direction of lead causes crime, but this update should probably be smaller than you thought before reading that paragraph.
0
Has anyone figured out what crime curve you would expect based on the lead curve (presumably a version that is shifted & smeared out based on the age distribution of criminals), and checked how well it fits the actual crime data? It's not obvious to me, from looking at the pictures that I've seen with the shifted curves, that adding the smearing would make the fit worse. For instance, the graph I linked earlier shows that the recent drop in crime is more gradual than the drop in lead that happened 20-30 years ago, which seems to fit the more rigorous "time-shifted and smeared out" prediction better than it fits the simplistic time-shifted curve approach that Nevin used.
6
Misleading. You cited a single quote from 1967 from a politician who held no elected office to try to imply that is when tough-on-crime legislation was adopted. To actually make the case, you would have to actually cite when actual tough-on-crime legislation was passed and implemented. Of course, harsher penalties were not implemented all at once, it happened over the course of decades, lasting into the 1980s and 1990s.
0
True; I quoted Nixon instead of pointing at legislation because checking the positions of presidents was easier than finding relevant legislation.
5
Reduced recidivism bonuses don't say how to achieve reduced recidivism. This policy change would arguably be neither tougher nor softer on crime because it doesn't change the length of the sentences or make any value judgement on which treatment methods should be used.
In other words, if being soft on crime isn't working, then prisons don't get a bonus for being soft on crime. Everything we know about human psychology, though, says traumatic experiences make someone more likely to commit crime or suffer mental problems that contribute to increased crime risk, so I don't expect that harsher prisons are the answer. But who am I to know, let the data show what works.
9
The incentive would be to charge random "normal" people with some crime because they're likely to not re-offend. Professional criminals, on the other hand, would be a drag and better avoided.
0
People's past experience with the justice system would no doubt be part of the model, as well as factors possibly including: Career area, Dependents/spouse, Time in current job, Past (unconvicted) run ins with cops, Known drug addictions, Track record of arresting cop and sentencing judge, ect.
With a good model, it would be hard to charge "normal" people in a way that actually gamed the statistics, because their probability to re-offend is very low to begin with. When they don't re-offend it would be expected behavior and not represent in drop in observed recidivism vs expected recidivism. So no bonus.
I would expect the lowest hanging fruit to be in drug addicts and thieves, there is a very large body of knowledge about rehabilitating those two groups.These would be the two groups where I expect to see the largest difference between expected recidivism in the current system vs. a treatment group with psych professionals and job training provided.
-4
Basically the way the SEC works ;)