In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs

If we get serious about actual rehabilitation in prisons instead of punishment there’s never been a better time to be able to learn just about anything on your own time. But we’d have to stop dehumanizing criminals. Dehumanization seems to be the trend that the US is leading on right now.

We can also be concerned about the incentives for prison labor - for profit prisons and all the many service providers that get paid a mint. Phone calls in many prisons are like $10. Labor gangs and the such. It’s just horrible how badly we treat people in the US for some middleman to make money.

If you want rehabilitation then you should ensure that they're working for more than slave wages and that money is set aside to be available to them upon their release.

Ensuring they can communicate with their families at no charge would be a huge plus as well.

Do we have high-quality studies on what facilitates rehabilitation?

What we're currently doing is creating a permanent underclass of "criminals" who are viewed as subhuman and used as political fodder. The status quo benefits wealthy people by providing cheap labour and a convenient scapegoat. People who have been incarcerated are impoverished and cut off from careers and social lives, so they can't function outside of prison.

There's lots of evidence that maintaining connection to family, and providing skills training reduces recidivism. You should be asking for studies proving that what we're currently doing is effective or humane.

Do we have conclusive evidence that causality isn’t actually reversed here in a large percentage of cases?

As in, a certain % of the population is, very unfortunately and not of their own volition, born with innate antisocial traits. They just happened to roll a 1 at birth on many attributes at once, and are stuck with it for life. Assuming humans are not a blank slate, many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social. They will cause mayhem and misery to those around them unless isolated, humanely, with dignity and compassion, from the rest of society. Given a large enough of a denominator, that’s potentially millions of people.

And fair point around social ties being important here, I wonder what percentage of imprisonment that would prevent.