Revenge is profitable. But, what about the meaning of human?

The nerd that I am, I scan the letters to the editor in the magazines that I value.  Thus, there I was reading the letters in the latest issue of the Scientific American, when I had to stop and start reading the letter from the beginning in order to make sure that the words were what I thought they were.  Here's how the letter begins:

Michael Shermer investigates the causes of death-row inmates' displays of positivity in “Death Wish” [Skeptic]. Although I am not on death row, I have served five years of a life sentence, so I may have some insight into this.

You see why I had to get to the beginning?  The letter writer is five years into his life sentence.  It is a letter in response to Shermer's column. In the Scientific American.

So, I did a Google search for the letter writer's name "Gordon Schumacher."   I pulled up another letter from him to the Denver Post, in which he is identified as "an inmate at Colorado’s Fremont Correctional Facility."   He writes in the letter, "As long as society is focused on revenge instead of healing, nothing will change."

In response to the letter in Scientific American, Shermer writes:

The problem that Schumacher identifies in the prison system is largely the result of the U.S. still mainly engaging in “retributive justice,” or the understandable desire for revenge and to give criminals their “just deserts,” instead of “restorative justice,” or the attempt to repair the damage done to the victim and to rehabilitate the perpetrator. Many countries are experimenting with complementing retribution with restoration, to great effect for victims, perpetrators and society.

Our system focuses so much on revenge.  There is an entire prison-industrial-complex that profits from this revenge.  Take the case of Canon City, in Colorado, where that letter-writer/inmate is.  I had no idea about the place until yesterday.  Wikipedia notes that the major employer includes the Colorado Department of Corrections.

Colorado Department of Corrections operates the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City.^[19] In addition to several correctional facilities near Cañon City in unincorporated areas in Fremont County, Colorado State Penitentiary, the location of the state death row and execution chamber^[20] is in Fremont County.^[21] Other state prisons in Fremont County include Arrowhead Correctional Center,^[22] Centennial Correctional Facility,^[23] Fremont Correctional Facility,^[24] Four Mile Correctional Center,^[25] and Skyline Correctional Center.^[26]

 Quite a few years ago, back in my California days, those of us interested in public policy issues started worrying about this dangerous prison-industrial-complex (the phrase being a takeoff on the famous military-industrial-complex that President Eisenhower worried/warned about.)  I lived in a county where cities competed against each other to be the location for a new prison.  It was bizarre.   And, politicians--locally and nationally--found that the public liked it if they seemed tough on crime, especially after how Bush exploited the Willie Horton incident in his campaign against Dukakis.  Incarcerating people for all kinds of crimes became a winning political strategy.  Just awful.

As the Economist noted a year ago in its commentary on America's disgraceful prison-industrial-complex,

Once we develop the mental habit of lumping together murderers and muggers as irredeemable monsters, it becomes possible to convince ourselves that it's okay to lock a man in a cage for most of his remaining years for having committed a relatively trivial "violent crime".
A reflexive dehumanisation of "criminals" and "felons" discourages the exercise of real judgment in sentencing and probation. It allows us to sleep well when judges commit injustice in the name of justice, consigning people to captivity long after they ought to be let free. And it helps us rationalise the disenfranchisement of those who are, eventually, released.

President Obama has set us (re)thinking about this awful mass incarceration.  We will hope that we will continue along this path and become civilized in the way we treat humans.

We pay taxes. So, ... where does that money go?

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (ht):
At the federal level:

And at the typical state:

Here in Oregon, where we pay "income taxes pay to educate, medicate and incarcerate Oregonians" the trend has been to pay more for incarceration than for education:

Chart of the day: Worse than Rwanda, .. or Cuba ...

ht

Crime and punishment ... is less of both possible?

The subheading to this piece in the Economist says it all, eh:

Spending more on education and private security are cost-effective ways of cutting crime

Of course, we want details:

Why is private security apparently so cost-effective? One reason, says Mr Cook, is simply that guards are paid less than police officers. Another is they are dedicated to a single district and are directly responsible for making it safe. Guards can specialise. They know which shifty characters to look out for and which policing works best in their area. Unlike policemen, they are not called away to supervise a parade or protect a dignitary.

How about the role of education?

Are there ways to prevent people from becoming criminals in the first place? In principle, a lengthier education ought to reduce crime by raising people’s future earning power from legitimate work, making a criminal career less attractive. School also keeps would-be criminals in touch with the right sort of peers and social attitudes. There is plenty of evidence that a lack of education goes hand in hand with criminal behaviour. Studies of America’s jail population in the 1990s showed that most inmates had not finished high school. But few studies have established that less education is actually a cause of crime.

Which is why I joke around that it is better to house people in institutions of higher education than in penal institutions :)  And if we didn't have faculty jobs, some of us would be in yet another type of institution--the mental institutions .... ha ha

But, wait, how my state spends on education versus on corrections is no joke :(

State per capita spending on the Oregon University System has declined 44 percent in the past 15 years while spending for prisons has climbed by 50 percent ...

Chart of the day: prisons v. universities

Isn't the "negative" bar almost the mirror image of the "positive" bar on the right?  Does this sufficiently explain the priorities in Oregon, and in the US too?  Which "institution" would you rather support?  Read the complete report here

Add prisoners to the unemployed? Higher unemployment!

Outsourced to one of my favorite bloggers, Megan McArdle:

John Quiggin has been arguing it is. That's why he wants to add America's higher incarceration rate to its unemployment statistics when comparing us to Europe.

To my surprise, when I proposed this theory to Mark Kleiman a while back, he disagreed. Crime is only very weakly correlated with changes in the labor market. It spiked during the golden age of unskilled employment in the 1950s and 1960s, and then fell for no particular reason during the poor labor market of the early 1990s. Crime is a labor market outcome in the sense that people with poor impulse control gravitate towards a "job" that requires little in the way of gratification delay, not in the sense that people who end up in jail literally had no alternatives, or even no better alternatives. In the normal operation of the American economy, most people who want a job can find something. Given the low probability-weighted returns to crime, often even something better than sticking up 7-11s.

There are other problems with the theory. Even if crime were a labor market outcome, incarceration is a policy outcome, not a labor market outcome, because incarceration has increased even as crime has fallen. Furthermore, what correlation there is between crime and the economy is to property crimes--burglary, etc. Violent crime, which accounts for more than half of America's incarceration rate, and virtually all of the change in our incarceration rate since 1980, isn't clearly related to the economy. In theory, being laid off might make you more prone to bar fights or beating on your girlfriend. In practice, it doesn't seem to show up in the numbers.

Now, one could argue that high incarceration rates are supressing the unemployment figures. But America's employment-to-population ratio is still higher than Europe's, though a number of individual European countries do better than we do.