If Prison Were a Disease, How Bad Would It Be?

sarahconstantin

I didn't get that impression. Sarah wasn't stating: Here is a cost vs. benefit of Prisons. She was instead writing about how we could measure the costs of prison. If she doesn't write at all about benefits, there is no reason to infer that she is deliberately leaving them out to be misleading. Actually, I think this sort of inference towards what she is actually trying to say based on what you think she left out is misleading.

Gwern doesn't say anything interesting. He points out that you do, in fact, need to measure benefit for cost vs. benefit. I guess th... (read more)

0sarahconstantin9y

"Prisons are supposed to be terrible" just sounds like a cartoon villain statement when you think about the actual ways in which prisons are terrible, though, tbh. I'm inclined to trust my instinct to just go NOPE YOUR OPINION IS NOT MY PROBLEM when I see someone who responds that way.

4sarahconstantin9y

This wasn't intentionally misleading -- I deliberately just wanted to look at costs and not benefits, and it didn't occur to me that people would interpret that as a claim that prisons only had costs and no benefits. In retrospect, I've noticed that some people are reading this as a way stronger claim of the terribleness of prisons than I meant it (including quoting the numbers that I myself don't believe because the study is super dodgy.)

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If Prison Were a Disease, How Bad Would It Be?

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If Prison Were a Disease, How Bad Would It Be?

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