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849 points dvektor | 13 comments | | HN request time: 0.888s | source | bottom
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mlissner ◴[] No.44289885[source]
Maine's remote work program is an incredibly promising development to prevent recidivism. The amazing thing about it is that it gives real jobs to prisoners that they can seamlessly continue after they get out of prison. Normally when you get out, it's impossible to get a job, and the clock is ticking. This leads to desperation, which leads to bad behavior.

There is a real risk of exploitation, but if it's properly managed, remote work for prisoners is one of the most hopeful things I've heard about the prison system. It gives people purpose while there and an avenue to success once they're out.

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philjohn ◴[] No.44293353[source]
Yep - turns out the Nordic countries had it right all along. When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment you get lower redicivism rates. Who would have thought it?
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1. gabeio ◴[] No.44293404[source]
> When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment

From a book I recently read on the subject they seem not just to focus on rehab and lack of punishment. If there are disputes with others within the facilities the ones in the dispute must sit down and talk through their issues and find a resolution. This helps ingrain proper anger management & helps re-acclimate them to normal society where violence is rarely the best option. And it makes a ton of sense, if they never are taught how to talk out their issues they will go back to how they have handled those issues all along.

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2. philjohn ◴[] No.44293540[source]
To be honest, that could certainly be filed under "rehabilitation". Giving people the skills they need to be productive members of society is definitely in that wheelhouse.
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3. kurikuri ◴[] No.44294146[source]
They were likely in a homogeneous population when they committed the crime that got them there in the first place, so that confounder might not matter much at all.
4. gabeio ◴[] No.44294212[source]
Fair I was thinking of the substance abuse definition, and hadn’t included enough into that word.
5. wizzwizz4 ◴[] No.44294256[source]
There's no such thing as a "homogeneous population". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb...

> From the study, they determined that because the groups were created to be approximately equal, individual differences are not necessary or responsible for intergroup conflict to occur.

> Lutfy Diab repeated the experiment with 18 boys from Beirut. The 'Blue Ghost' and 'Red Genies' groups each contained 5 Christians and 4 Muslims. Fighting soon broke out, not between the Christians and Muslims but between the Red and Blue groups.

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6. exoverito ◴[] No.44295661{3}[source]
Continuum fallacy. Might as well claim that there's no such thing as blue or violet, since there's a gradient between them.

Also you can establish homogeneity using genetic analysis such as the fixation index. Unsurprisingly, Swedes and Finns are extremely closely related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index#Autosomal_genet...

There are many possible metrics to measure heterogeneity, such as linguistic and religious diversity, variations in value systems, etc.

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7. shrubble ◴[] No.44295877[source]
Yes, in the sense that higher social trust, enabled by homogeneity is helpful in many ways. Robert Putnam among others wrote about it; Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone”.
8. vasco ◴[] No.44296123{4}[source]
As another point to your argument, if there's no homogeneity then there's also no diversity, which would be the minimization of homogeneity.
9. const_cast ◴[] No.44296211[source]
Ugh, homogeneous population is overrated. When you remove axis of discrimination from humans they just go down a level or too and use that as the basis for prejudice.
10. presentation ◴[] No.44296999[source]
I don't have evidence to say that it is irrelevant, but people love using homogeneity as a cope for being unwilling to try things to improve the status quo. Hate this argument.
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11. wizzwizz4 ◴[] No.44297011{4}[source]
… No, it's not the continuum fallacy: I'm saying that "the fixation index", and other such metrics, are irrelevant, except as far as people are racist. The sociological theory of "homogeneous population" is false, to the extent it was ever even meaningful.

More broadly, scientific racism is bunk. (This is a generalisation: I didn't establish it in my previous comment, but it's true nonetheless.)

12. wizzwizz4 ◴[] No.44297409{3}[source]
I've mostly seem them use it as an excuse to try to make ethnostates.
13. pastage ◴[] No.44297578{4}[source]
Then again if you look at the continium as something multidimensional. It is easy to make everything either a very specific hetrogenity or a big homogenic pile. The greatest fallacy is the group think, you can always create groups of people and that was the point. Given a bit of encourgement the dividing lines will shift. I have personal experience from work about this and I think some of these meaningless work things we do are there for a reason.

Understanding that we are hetreogenic is hard.