

Is prison contagious? - KLdiv
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/06/prison-contagious

======
bane
I probably wouldn't classify it as "contagious", it just stops being a
deterrent. My parent's business when I grew up needed lots of reasonably
skilled, but cheap labor. Turns out you can hire from two possible pools of
labor for this: recent immigrants and ex-cons. If you just want cheap labor
you hire young people.

For a while, in the early 80s, my parents hired young people, until the work
they took on required people with more skill. Then they hired immigrants from
South East Asia under some kind of asylum/placement program. I don't remember
the details, but their shop was pretty multicultural for a long time.
Eventually that program ended and they started mining the pool of ex-cons.
Mostly guys with minor drug offenses and non-violent offenses.

They kept putting that pool of people to work for probably a good 15 years and
I grew up working in the family business, side-by-side with them. One thing I
learned is that you start to not think of prison as the end of the world.

It's supposed to be a BFD to go to prison, a life breaker. But here was a
bunch of guys who did their time, and all had jobs and did well enough for
themselves and their family. So it just seemed like virtually the same to
young me as when people I knew in the military were shipped off for a tour or
a long deployment somewhere. Granted, I wasn't entirely aware of the social
stigmas attached to their incarceration at the time. But you can imagine being
their friends or kids or what have you growing up with a father having served
time.

Every once in a while, one of the guys would slip up and get caught doing
cocaine or something and do a year in prison. After he got out, if my parents
had an opening, they'd hire them back. From my pre-teen perspective it seemed
virtually the same as being a soldier, bad pay included.

Once I got older and stopped working in the family business, the social stigma
attached to incarceration was kind of a shock to me. It took me a long time to
realize why these guys were working at my parent's place instead of the same
kind of shop down the street for more money. It's that the other shop simply
wouldn't hire ex-cons and my parents didn't mind/thought they could save the
company some money hiring these guys at $.50 less per hour than a stand-up
citizen (while also helping them get reintegrated back into society).

~~~
jqm
Well, based on the premise of the article, you and your parents are very lucky
you didn't get infected and wind up in prison yourselves!

But then again, the idea that prison is "contagious" may not really be valid,
as other posters are pointing out.

Edit: since I'm getting the down-votes anyway I may as well come right out and
say it. The premise is absurd and the article not worth reading. Your lack of
"infection" demonstrates such. As does the presumed lack of infection of
visiting prison priests and prison guards. Similar groups behave similarly and
have higher probabilities of similar outcomes and someone claims it resembles
a contagion. No, no it doesn't. At all.

------
downandout
_Incarceration equals the period of contagion, Lum explains. "The longer
you're imprisoned, the higher the toll your incarceration takes on your family
and friends, and the more likely they are to ‘catch’ your incarceration from
you.....The disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks emerged as the
single factor making the disease of incarceration a true epidemic among
blacks..."_

This study seems to completely ignore the socioeconomic factors that often
lead to the more serious crimes and resulting longer sentences in the first
place. It isn't the longer sentences that are causing incarceration to
"spread" to friends and family, it's the fact that the friends and family tend
to be in the same socioeconomic position as the person that received the
sentence, and thus are just as likely to display similar conduct.

The flawed conclusion in this study is like saying that a whole family is more
likely to get wet because one family member gets rained on. While
statistically accurate, the fact that one person gets wet doesn't cause the
others to get wet; the cause is that they all live in the same environment and
are thus far more likely to get wet than those that live in areas where it
isn't raining.

~~~
thenmar
Do you really think that the authors missed such a completely obvious flaw,
something so simple that a random internet commenter could use it to
invalidate the entire work in one sentence? It's hard to take this type of
criticism seriously without any specific references to their methodology.

~~~
downandout
I read the article, and yes, their conclusions point to the fact that they did
indeed miss such a completely obvious flaw. This sentence, their conclusion,
was in bold:

 _The disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks emerged as the single
factor making the disease of incarceration a true epidemic among blacks._ Not
the socioeconomic disparity, mind you, but the actual sentences. This
conclusion is so obviously wrong it's absurd on its face.

~~~
Retric
Black people with similar economic backgrounds get longer sentences. The
longer your in prison the more likely you are to go back AND the more likely
close relatives will end up in prison.

------
growlix
I think the real kicker here is that they're able to reproduce racial
incarceration disparities ONLY by manipulating sentence durations, a known
trend in the justice system[0].
[0][http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_sentenc...](http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_sentencing_review.pdf)

------
_delirium
> Incarceration is literally an epidemic, says Science

While the philosophy-of-science aspect of what it would mean to declare
incarceration to be an epidemic in some strict, non-metaphorical sense is
interesting, what the study is really aiming to show is slightly more
empirical: that modeling incarceration rates using computational models
developed to model epidemics can produce results consistent with real-world
data. (Which is still interesting and potentially useful.)

~~~
SandersAK
exactly.

they kinda buried the lede...

------
dredwerker
This is the takeaway for the TL;DR crowd :) ""Under this model, small
increases in sentence length led to large differences in the rate of
incarceration regardless of race. That means harsher sentencing policy may
have the unintended consequence of increasing crime, rather than reducing
it.”"

------
interg12
Because someone needs to say it: We should all be highly skeptical of a single
model's results.

------
rusabd
it is as "contagious" as education. Seriously, according "Discipline and
Punishment" that was known since the first prison systems

------
trhway
poverty complicated by lack of education is a hereditary disease.

------
jqm
I read the first two paragraphs and unless something changed later in the
article, I find this an extremely silly premise.

Very obviously a persons family and peer group is quite likely to behave
somewhat like the person. If this is behavior that leads to prison, then the
family and peer group is likely to wind up there as well.

The idea that prison is "contagious" is on par with referring to computers as
sentient because they are "not acting right".

------
hawkice
The use of "literally" in a title about using a new metaphor to understand
something is... regrettable.

~~~
dang
The word "literally" does not appear in the article. The submitted title
("Incarceration is literally an epidemic, says Science") was editorialized, so
we reverted it to the article title.

Submitters: please read the HN guidelines. They ask you not to change titles
unless they're linkbait or misleading.

~~~
slackware
Because... you're not a misleading person yourself, right?

~~~
dang
I try not to be. Did you have something specific in mind?

------
ars
How I hate simulations that pretend to be Science. You get out of a simulation
exactly what you put in, and no more.

"According to our model, the tipping point is somewhere between the 14- and
17-month sentences"

Surprise surprise! You put those numbers in and they came back out!

Or are we to believe that somehow society just randomly happened upon exactly
the correct number to tip one race one way and one the other?

Their error check to California later doesn't help because that's part of the
data they used to design their simulation in the first place!

And finding that sentence length alone explains everything is actually proof
that this simulation is useless!

In the real world there is a huge difference in the number of single parent
homes, and those without a good male role model between the races. Those are
well known factors for crime, and the fact that there is no excess difference
in the model that needs to be attributed to this shows that the model is just
parroting their preconceived explanation.

Summary: They carefully tuned their model so that 14 months causes the
incarceration seen by whites, and 17 months causes the rate seen by blacks.
They did that for a good reason: In order to match the real world. But it's no
surprise that those are exactly the numbers their model came back with.

~~~
rockpoodle
Your summary is completely false. Did you actually read the original paper or
just the article in the link? I know not everyone has journal subscriptions to
that might be too much to ask, but maybe you should not dismiss it entirely
having read only a summary. All of the parameters in the model are taken from
real data, there was no tuning. And there was no parameter in the model that
determined how sentence length would affect population-level incarceration
rates. The tipping point occurring between 14 and 17 months was an emergent
property, not an input. You clearly have no understanding of simulation
science in general or this study in particular.

