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griffin tucker

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jails should be more widely known as schools

some correctional facilities are becoming a business or already are a business, the future of these businesses depends on more people to commit crimes.

the idea here is to give incentives for correctional facility businesses to fully rehabilitate people into society by means of ensuring they don't re-offend.

one incentive in western society is money.

while giving money to one of these businesses from the tax-payer for each individual that doesn't re-offend may seem like a good idea, there are many problems with this idea. one of the problems with giving individualised incentives is that the future of the business would still depend on repeat or new offenders.

however, if the tax-payer were to give incentives to a correctional facility business based on how successful it was based on statistics, eventually the rehabilitation facility would effectively be a school.

this idea was inspired by a conversation i had with Colleen Steen.


EDIT: the main premise of the thread was intended to be an effective realistic way to utilise the commercialisation of prisons, and in the process improve society, but perhaps i didn't word the topic's title very well.

instead, i have changed the topic title to better suit the conversation, just as Salim Solaiman suggested.

Topics: courts and cases crime cultural evolution law law evolution moral psychology sociology
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    Loaay Ahmed

    • +3
    Oct 19 2011: Great topic. I don't know much about prisons but I know a thing or two about incentives vs. achievements. If prisons are commercialized they have an essential incentive of keeping crime alive so they can stay in business. I'm not suggesting that they will be devious and try to keep crime incidents well and kicking, however, by having an incentive to their business model that goes against the principle of reforming society it will be hard for the prisons management and unfair from Government to expect full cooperation because while the mission might look similar the vision is slightly different. A Vision is where an organization wants to be in the future. A mission is the things they'll do to get there. So, while societies, governments and commercialized prisons agree on the activities they need to do to reform prisoners (i.e. the mission) the visions are different. For society it's to have less crimes and a safer place; for commercialized prisons it's to have a lower ratio of returning criminals, while they sound both positive they're not the same thing.

    We need to take this a step back and look at a preventive approach. What's causing the crimes to take place? And how can we minimize these circumstances from existing? Governments need to focus on the preventive part by offering better opportunities for developing healthy minds from a young age. Prisons need to prepare prisoners on how to get back to society so they can contribute positively to their lives and to the communities. That means their KPIs should be purely on how well they prepared these prisoners for life after prison and the return to prison ratio. Society is also responsible for welcoming the newly rehabilitated fellow citizens so they can feel they have a chance of starting over. We can't punish people twice. If they did the crime and the time then they're back to a clean sheet. Otherwise, it is society that needs reform.
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      griffin tucker 10+

      • 0
      Oct 19 2011: i agree that the KPI score should be measured by how well the prison has prepared the prisoner for life after prison.

      perhaps if there were more contributing factors to the KPI, such as incentives for released prisoners to prevent crime itself and encourage good behaviour once they are released? i'm not sure how this could work in a proven measurable method, any ideas?
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        Loaay Ahmed

        • +2
        Oct 20 2011: Drivers for people are different. What might motivate one released prisoner might not work for another. So, measurability in this case will be quite complex because of the social and psychological factors involved in both the released prisoners and society around them.

        In order to set the KPIs we need to breakdown the types of crimes according to behavior. Character is influenced by two factors: nature (innate qualities that we are born with) and nurture (the environment we grow up in). Promoting and facilitating change will be relatively more successful among those who committed crimes mainly due to external elements like peer pressure, poor upbringing, and lack of education and vocational skills compared to those who committed crimes because they got a rush from breaking rules, causing pain to others, or simply out pure greed. Therefore, the rehabilitation process and KPIs for those two types of criminals need to be different. Such a deep structure is difficult to design in short conversations, but I guess that's why sharing ideas from everyone works wonders.

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