U.S. Prison System a Costly Failure: report

The ability to reveal feedback loops and distant causes is not an academic exercise. It has very real implications for social policies based on what people "see" happening. An article by Reuters this morning on a new study of the U.S. Prison system shows the divide, of people who clearly see that harsh punishment is working, to people who clearly see that it's a disaster.

There are many other social policies, and social actions, such as the War in Iraq, that similarly divide people into "camps", which polarize and decide that the "other" groups are clearly idiots and out of touch with reality, or motivated by evil forces, or dupes of evil leaders, or something -- which leads to the conclusion that the "other" group needs to be "stopped" or "attacked" so that "we" can "win."

In a great many of these situations, the problems are less those of "bad people" and more those of feedback systems that take on a life of their own and cause events to transpire despite the best efforts of those caught up in the system to stop them.

John Gall, in his absolutely marvelous book on Systemantics, uses humor to make it easier to delve into these "system problems" comfortably and safely. The book is at first read just roll-on-the-floor-laughing funny, but after some reflection, it is profound and deserves rereading at least once a year.

(see also "Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject" )

I used to buy copies for all my staff. ("Systemantics - The underground Text of Systems Lore; How Systems Really Work, and How they Fail", (c) 1975, 77, 86, 88,90, ...) Gall is a doctor, now emeritus last time I checked, and was at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, where he observed the remarkable difficulties in getting computer systems, and for that matter most everything, to work in a sensible fashion.

Let me quote John Gall's book, then look at the morning's news on prisons in that frame of mind.

Gall says (and this is in 1975, mind you):

All around us we see a world of paradox: deep, ironic, and intractable. A world in which .. the richest nations slip into demoralizing economic recession; the strongest nations go to war against the smallest and weakest and are unable to win; a world in which revolution against tyrannical systems themselves become tyrannies....

Why is this? How does it come about that things turn out so differently from what common sense would expect?

... Reformers blame everything on "the system" and propose new systems that would -- they assert -- guarantee a brave new world of justice, peace, and abundance. Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point - that their own System would work very well if only it were universally adopted.

The point of view espoused in this essay is more radical and at the same time more pessimistic. Stated as succinctly as possible: the fundamental problem does not lie in any particular System, but rather in Systems As Such.

No one can afford not to understand the basic principles of How Systems Work. Ignorance of those basic laws is bound to lead to unrealistic expectations of the type that have plagued dreamers, schemers, and so called men of affairs from earliest times.

All over the world, in great metropolitan centers as well as in the remotest rural backwaters in sophisticated electrons laboratories and in dingy clerical offices, people everywhere are struggling with a Problem:

THING AREN'T WORKING VERY WELL.
...
This observation ha gradually come to be recognized as an on going fact of life, an inseparable component of the Human Condition. We give it here in full:

• THINGS ARE INDEED NOT WORKING VERY WELL,
• IN FACT THEY NEVER DID...
• REALITY IS MORE COMPLEX THAT IT SEEMS....
• THE OLD SYSTEM IS NOW THE NEW PROBLEM....

A short list of some of his other axioms are on Wikipedia here, but those lose the flavor of the book, which is a must-read item.

I could not agree more with Gall. The effects of feedback are just not obvious to untrained humans, and hard to see for those with extensive training, according to Professor John Sterman at MIT, in his 1000 page textbook "Business Dynamics." Not only does feedback make all kinds of problems that appear to be the "fault" of other "bad people" we love to blame, but first it distorts our perceptions, and then it alters our beliefs and convictions in order to support the first mistake.

The impact is amazingly strong, and the illusion that things are "clearly" and "obviously" the fault of some other person is powerful enough to lead entire societies to actual warfare.

Here's the report on the US Prison system that I promised, with a few key phrases bolded that relate to what Gall is talking about.

U.S. Prison System a CostlyFailure: report

Randall Mikkelsen

Nov 21, 2007

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of people in U.S. prisons has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul.

... the U.S. prison population of 2.2 million -- nearly one-fourth of the world's total.

It recommends shorter sentences and parole terms, alternative punishments, more help for released inmates and decriminalizing recreational drugs. ...

But the recommendations run counter to decades of broad U.S. public and political support for getting tough on criminals through longer, harsher prison terms and to the Bush administration's anti-drug and strict-sentencing policies...

"Our contemporary laws and justice system practices exacerbate the crime problem, unnecessarily damage the lives of millions of people (and) waste tens of billions of dollars each year," it said.

The report was produced by the JFA Institute, a Washington criminal-justice research group, and its authors included eight criminologists from major U.S. public universities. It was funded by the Rosenbaum Foundation and by financier and political activist George Soros' Open Society Institute.

The Justice Department dismissed the recommendations and cited findings that about 25 percent of the violent-crime drop in the 1990s can be attributed to increases in imprisonment....

More than 1.5 million people are now in U.S. state and federal prisons, up from 196,429 in 1970, the report said. Another 750,000 people are in local jails. The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest, followed by Russia, according to 2006 figures compiled by Kings College in London.

Although the U.S. crime rate began declining in the 1990s it is still about the same as in 1973, the JFA report said. But the prison population has s soared because sentences have gotten longer and people who violate parole or probation, even with minor lapses, are more likely to be imprisoned.

"The system is almost feeding on itself now. It takes years and years and years to get out of this system and we do not see any positive impact on the crime rates," JFA President James Austin, a co-author of the report, told a news conference.

The report said the prison population is projected to grow by another 192,000 in five years, at a cost of $27.5 billion to build and operate additional prisons.

At current rates, one-third of all black males, one-sixth of Latino males, and one in 17 white males will go to prison during their lives. Women represent the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, the report said.

"The massive incarceration of young males from mostly poor- and working-class neighborhoods, and the taking of women from their families and jobs, has crippled their potential for forming healthy families and achieving economic gains," it said.

We have here all the elements John Gall mentions. We have a system that seems to have a life of its own, and is tending to expand to fill the known universe, despite no change in the crime rates in 34 years. We have a country that proclaims itself the model for "freedom" with the highest imprisonment rate in the world, higher than Russia, China, or any of the "Evil Empire" -- a fact that is well document but seems to keep coming as a surprise to many people.

We have a system ostensibly designed to resolve the problems of urban crime that seems to be sustaining the problem of urban crime by destroying black families and the ability of blacks to find employment.

And, we have adamant people, most of whom I'm sure are well intentioned, who see different "parts of the elephant" from which they have polarized into camps that are convinced the other camps are not only wrong, but must be driven by misguided or evil motives.

And, as John Gall points out, we have almost everyone convinced that the world would in fact work marvelously well if only everyone else would see the wisdom of accepting the solution and System that the first group is proposing, which frames the problem as one of trying to "win" the debate, to elect "candidates" who will "do the right thing" and finally "fix the problem."

And, we have the very few, like John Gall and systems thinkers, who realize this is all a huge misunderstanding and are wringing their hands trying to find out how to explain the issues so that people can finally see what is going wrong and where.

Again, following Gall's spirit of advice, we need to focus not on any one particular issue and get bent out of shape over that, regardless how obvious our righteousness is, and step back and focus on why it is we are having all this trouble reaching an actual consensus on the issue.

Hint - the answer is not "bad people" or "dumb people." The answer is that we need to learn how to make "systems" become visible so that we can see where it is going wrong. Things are breaking in places where we didn't even realize there were places, so we don't look there.

And blame is so easy. But generally wrong.

We should start with the assumption that most people, MOST people, are relatively sane and well intentioned, so

the question we need to stop acting as if it's solved is"Why can't we reach a consensus on this?"

The same battle is going on between sects or branches of major religions, and between religions and between religions and science. We settle for the easy conclusion that the "other camps" are clearly populated by demented fools or bad people, but that's not it at all.

The "why" has to do with systems effects, with feedback, that distorts causality, distorts time and space, distorts our perceptions, and then distorts the social markers we use to latch down those perceptions into beliefs and convictions we can act on, which then changes the people we are comfortable interacting with so we end up talking mostly to people who agree with us, further increasing our mistaken certainty.

Humans are extraordinarily good at discounting "facts" that don't agree with their beliefs, and waving around triumphantly "facts" that do agree with their beliefs, so the net effect is to inform their visual system to help out and start making the "wrong facts" completely invisible, which it helpfully does, and to make the "right facts" vivid, which it does. Then we "see" the world in "obvious" colors and can't comprehend how any sane person could disagree with us. We are not good at "hypothesis testing" and looking for evidence that our cherished beliefs are in need of an update in some areas. That's uncomfortable anyway. It's more fun to exult in how stupid "they" are and how "right" we are.

It's easy to use the "OR" model and say the problem is that EITHER they are right OR we are right. It's hard to use the "AND" model and say "Maybe we're BOTH right... and both incomplete" and search for the unity above diversity, the "elephant" instead of the "tree" or "leaf" solution. But that's where we are now, and it means nothing important is getting resolved.

This is a very expensive error. It is ripping apart our society, making our governments dysfunctional, leading to intractable wars and economic depressions, none of which are necessary.


The first step in civilization is the minimal amount of humility to accept that, despite all the evidence, it is barely possible that we, ourselves, might be wrong on something that we are sure is right. The second step is to figure out how to compare notes and "learn" from each other without jumping up and down in gloating glee when we prove to be "right" and someone else proves to be "wrong" on some fact -- as that just shuts down the whole process again.

And we need enough faith in each other to believe that long ago, before they got so mired in self-fulfilling error, most of the other people in the room were sane and well-intentioned and, under that idiotic front they have now, is a person you could actually talk to and relate to.

If we could get that far, it might be enough, with a lot of public discussion of how systems effects work, to start defusing and disentangling the social bottlenecks that are strangling us today.

Instead of trying to shout each other down and win by 51%, we need to say "I don't see anything that supports your point of view, but maybe I missed it. Help me understand. What is it that you see that I don't that might explain why we conclude such different things are going on?"

That's "civility". We seem to have lost it somewhere and need to turn the car around and go get it back again.