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.

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.

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.

Evidence? Given the history of attempts at rehabilitation programs, this is a rather dubious statement.

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.

Police are also incentivised to not appear "racist", look what happened to Darren Wilson after he shot a black thug who was going for his gun. Thus it is in their interest to avoid patrolling high-crime ghettoes, e.g., what happened in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray.

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% difference is from high-cost measures like individual rooms. Heck, reducing post prison PTSD from reducing prison rapes would probably be enough to drop at least a couple percentage points, and also just be a generally good thing. But the thing is, this plan isn't designed to give specific policy recommendations. The bonus structure should favor innovation rather than one specific program. Basically, prisons should try all sorts of plans to see what works to reduce recidivism.

At some point, someone will need to crunch a lot of data in order to create some reliable heuristics by which a majority of virulent DNA could be flagged for further review or quarantine. Preferably the sequences could be uploaded and scanned automatically before they are synthesized. This would go a long way towards reducing a big extinction threat. The first true Virus Scanner?

To be effective, you might need to cooperate with someone who has more technical skills, but your partner would certainly need your assistance to interpret the DNA strands before they could be effective so it is a good match.

Kind of. Its possible to cultivate a large network of high quality friends but it requires sifting through a large number of low quality non-friends, sometimes people whose low quality is not apparent until a significant investment has been made or a significant amount of friend entanglement has occurred. And you can't alienate the people you aren't sure of or already decided you don't want to promote to good friend status, because then you lose access to their networks and network affects can no longer continually refresh your friend pool and increase your friend quality. Still, I can easily think of 15 high quality friends off the top of my head because I've been continually sifting, and that number continues to grow.

I think people are SEVERELY overestimating the utility of perfect memory (74% yes, 10% no), and underestimating the value of traumatic and unpleasant experiences fading over time. Some people currently have perfect memory, it is not a good experience.

A better selective memory is a good thing. Electing to remember where you placed your keys or the name of your mailman is a good idea. Having perfect memory of all the idiotic things you said or did during your first break up or that fight with your mom, or more importantly that time you were molested or almost died in combat is a recipe for emotional disaster and severe PTSD. Its very hard to control where your mind dwells and how memories are triggered, but slow fade and nostalgic filters protect us from the worst emotional damage of long-term rumination over negative events.

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. "I don't look back at the past with any distance. It's more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It's like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there's no stop button."

She's constantly bombarded with fragments of memories, exposed to an automatic and uncontrollable process that behaves like an infinite loop in a computer. Sometimes there are external triggers, like a certain smell, song or word. But often her memories return by themselves. Beautiful, horrific, important or banal scenes rush across her wildly chaotic "internal monitor," sometimes displacing the present. "All of this is incredibly exhausting," says Price.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-science-of-memory-an-infinite-loop-in-the-brain-a-591972.html

see my comment on shminux's post ^^

I've always wanted this, but in a magical genie kind of way! OK cupid tries to do something like this by matching people pre-meeting. At an IRL interaction I can't imagine how a computer would figure this out before I did unless it had a very accurate idea of every personality in the group. So every person would have to have personality tests on file. Which I guess isn't implausible in the future!

I also wonder if this would silo people even more among others similar to them. If anti-vaxers only talk to other anti-vaxers, and none of them have ever been friends or talked to a proponent of vaccination, they have no reason to ever change their mind. People who grew up poor only talk to other people who grew up poor, and the same for those who grew up rich, so fewer unexpected opportunities for social mobility/job offers/connections.