I’ve been reading about muggle prison conditions lately, and while I’ve understood that “prison conditions are terrible and torturing people is pointless etc” for both systems, it did not occur to me that you were making a commentary.
It actually made me sit and think for a minute (though not the full five—oops) about whether there was any way I could contribute to improving conditions in prisons, that was comparatively low-cost, that I had overlooked.
I didn’t think of one, but it’s worth thinking about some more, probably.
In general, how does one determine whether X in HPMOR is supposed to [represent / be commentary on] Y? I could make up a connection between Azkaban and Muggle prisons, probably by running it through my black-box mental model of Eliezer, but I don’t feel any kind of justified in the connection.
Congratulations, you have just discovered the difference between art and design. If Azkaban had been designed to be a commentary on muggle prisons, the connection would have had to have been made explicit within the text. The fact that Eliezer pointed out the connection does not mean he consciously tried to make it explicit in the text. Since the connection is implicit rather than explicit, the commentary is an artistic interpretation of the text. You don’t need to feel justified in an artistic interpretation.
It seems much more like a commentary on the American prison system than anything else. The Western European systems don’t generally suffer many of the problems of American Muggle prisons, or the problems they do share are often to a smaller degree. Britain is one of the middle range countries in this regard, but this may be enough for some people to not get the point.
While American prisons may indeed be worse (on average) than their Western European counterparts, the latter are still more than bad enough for the commentary to apply.
In any case, most of the suffering of imprisonment is psychological and derives from having one’s freedom restricted and status reduced (to put it mildly). So the (physical) conditions of the facility may be almost beside the point (despite the fact that this is what it is most socially acceptable to focus on).
So the (physical) conditions of the facility may be almost beside the point (despite the fact that this is what it is most socially acceptable to focus on).
So the (physical) conditions of the facility may be almost beside the point (despite the fact that this is what it is most socially acceptable to focus on).
...not to mention the fact that the behavior of persons is arguably not within the scope of “the (physical) conditions of the facility”.
In short, the comment contained more than enough hedging to preclude such a retort.
In short, the comment contained more than enough hedging to preclude such a retort.
Even if it did, orthonormal’s point contains a significant subclass of the suffering that occurs in prisons. Hence ignoring it or sweeping it under a hedge seems somewhat strange.
It seems much more like a commentary on the American prison system than anything else. The Western European systems don’t generally suffer many of the problems of American Muggle prisons, or the problems they do share are often to a smaller degree. Britain is one of the middle range countries in this regard, but this may be enough for some people to not get the point.
Notice what this says: Western European prisons are so good that Eliezer’s commentary is really only about American prisons. (Also note the implication that the Muggle world is partitioned into two regions: Western Europe and the United States.)
3. I—having become familiar with the similarities and differences between the U.S. and European criminal justice systems as a result of the Amanda Knox case—disputed this, in a comment whose point was to argue that Western European prisons are not pleasant places. They are, in fact, really awful places. Yes, they may not be as bad as U.S. prisons, but they are still bad: places of torment, suffering and despair, despite the fact that the facilities may be a little nicer. They are bad enough that the Azkaban metaphor applies. (And U.S. prisons are nowhere near as bad as those in other, non-Western-European parts of the world—so was Eliezer’s commentary “only” or “mostly” about China, Iran, or North Korea, and not really about the American justice system at all? Of course not.)
Furthermore, at the time he was writing the Azkaban-rescue sequence, Eliezer knew that Amanda Knox—then trapped in a Western European prison—was among his readers. This is just one of many reasons why it simply isn’t plausible that the commentary was meant to be geographically (and thus, in effect, politically) limited to the United States.
4. Some people (bizarrely) downvoted my comment and attempted to educate me about the evils of United States prisons, as if I were unfamiliar with the subject. This is completely missing the point. My comment argued that European prisons are bad, not that American prisons are good. My point was that the fact that European prisons have (for example) bidets does not make them spas. I did take a slightly “extreme” line—that the real torment of incarceration is psychological. But this is not actually an absurd position by any means. I expect that relatively few who have actually been incarcerated would disagree—even among those who had been imprisoned in terrible physical conditions. For one thing, such treatment often has a specifically psychological purpose.
The two “sides” in this argument are: people who think the Azkaban metaphor applies universally (me), and people who think its scope is restricted to the United States (JoshuaZ). Everything
I have said in this thread should be understood in that context. In no sense am I downplaying any bad aspect of American prisons. To “correct” me on such a point is to increase the noise and decrease the signal.
This is not a case of me not reading the previous thread before commenting.
It seems much more like a commentary on the American prison system than anything else. The Western European systems don’t generally suffer many of the problems of American Muggle prisons, or the problems they do share are often to a smaller degree. Britain is one of the middle range countries in this regard, but this may be enough for some people to not get the point.
Notice what this says: Western European prisons are so good that Eliezer’s commentary is really only about American prisons. (Also note the implication that the Muggle world is partitioned into two regions: Western Europe and the United States.)
In my opinion, you’re reading too much into the original comment. There are fewer Western Europeans in prison than Americans. Aside: their “Western Europe” is much larger than the traditional one, which already has a higher population than the United States, and so we can also say there are fewer prisoners per capita in Europe than the United States.
It’d be surprising if American prisons didn’t tend to have more problems.
For all narrative purposes, the only regions of the Muggle world that significantly matter to the story are Europe and the United States, so your aside seems a misplaced criticism.
I more or less agree with your assessment of the metaphor, but there is no purpose to letting a poorly-grounded argument carry through just because one agrees with the conclusion.
To “correct” me on such a point is to increase the noise and decrease the signal.
Aye, but pray, where was the signal in the first place?
It’s not under the scope of “having one’s freedom restricted and status reduced”, either. Sorry if I misinterpreted you, but it looks as if I’m not the only one who thought you were omitting the most significant part of the horror of modern prisons.
I thought it was a nice commentary, but I hadn’t realized it was intentional (on either your or Rowling’s part). If you want anyone to get it, you need to slip in anal rape or something, and even then most readers will miss it.
Do you oppose jokes involving rape because of social consequences of rape being found to be funny, jokes involving rape because of direct consequences on people hearing the joke, jokes about prison rape because of consequences of prisoners, or something else?
I was quite serious. And why not? Murder is worse than anal rape, and that has already been included; besides that, people have argued we see at least one kind of rape already in MoR.
Especially those of us who deliberately try to avoid drawing conclusions about authorial intent from text. Whether the author is trying to make an analogical point with a fictional construct is not something I think about too much while reading fiction, though of course correspondences I notice (intentional or not) inform my reading.
Here’s one more option: e) People don’t think enough about the level of brutality in prisons, and when they do think and talk about it they find it easier to applaud brutality; because anyone who spoke against it “would associate themselves with criminals, with weakness, with distasteful things that people would rather not think about”, while speaking in its favor make you look tough on crime.
Given political discussions I’ve partaken in other forums, I know full well that whenever I condemned prison rape and suggested ways in which it might be reduced/prevented, the typical response was something to the effect of “Why do you love criminals so much?”
Given political discussions I’ve partaken in other forums, I know full well that whenever I condemned prison rape and suggested ways in which it might be reduced/prevented,
For example: Punish rapes among inmates in the same manner that other rapes of citizens by other citizens. Punish rapes of inmates by wardens in the same way with the additional loading that should be applied to all abuses of authority, particularly state sanctioned authority. But to do that we would need to replace Uncle Sam with Uncle Ben.
That would be by sending them to prison, which is not much of a punishment to someone who’s already in prison.
Yes it is. Not all sentences are life sentences. Then there are the obvious differences in types of imprisonment—including level of security and whether they have access to other prisoners or are confined to solitary.
Not all, but entirely too many. If someone is already going to be in a big concrete box for the next ten years no matter what they do, and doesn’t expect to survive more than five years in that environment, what more can you do to them?
Assume they’re already in the worst box that various legislation (mostly related to human rights) permits you to construct, or the closest cost-effective approximation thereof.
At that point, if they are not already, they should be put into solitary. Some would consider it reward, but if they prey on others, then they should be put somewhere that they can’t—that’s (ostensibly) why they’re there in the first place, at least in part.
The stated function of a prison is to imprison (i.e. detain). If the function of the prison was to get people physically hurt, then the state would have official torturers to brutalize people to such exact specifications as their convictions by the courts (e.g. official sentences would state things like “ten years in prison, plus three beatings and one anal rape per month”, and the state would hire official rapists for the purpose).
If brutality was supposed to be part of a prison’s specification, then we would have the responsibility of quantifying how much brutality is deserved for each crime. (the question you asked “How brutal should they be?” doesn’t only work for people criticizing their current brutality, but also for the people who support it, you see)
But the delegation of this task randomly to convicts speaks of the same hypocrisy that Quirrel mocks in the chapters in question.
The stated function of a prison is to imprison (i.e. detain).
There are several functions commonly ascribed to prisons, including:
Detention: to prevent people with criminal tendencies from having the opportunity to commit crimes against the general public, by physically separating them from the public.
Deterrence: to deprive criminals of the pleasures of normal society, in order to discourage other people from becoming criminals. If you would like to live with your partner, children, and friends in relative comfort instead of with a cellmate in relative discomfort, you have a motivation for staying out of prison.
Rehabilitation: to cure criminals of tendencies that may lead them to commit crimes; for instance, lack of cultural or moral education, or lack of non-criminal job skills. This is given as a reason for prisons to offer classes, job training, etc.
Penitence: to put criminals in an isolating environment where they will reflect on their crimes and regret them — or a panoptic environment in which they will internalize the conduct standards of the authorities.
(I’m not disagreeing with you on the badness of prison brutality; just on the “stated function” claim.)
Penitentiaries were name for the theory that prisoners should be penitent. More generally, rehabilitation is often a purpose of imprisonment.
It’s a factor for every US federal judge to consider when deciding what sentence to impose. In fairness, 3553(a) authorizes a judge to consider just about anything—it’s totally agnostic as to the appropriate theory of punishment.
When it comes down to it, the purpose of prisons is to reduce crime. The two main methods by which they accomplish this are being sufficiently nasty to deter would be criminals, and keeping the people who fail to be deterred confined so they can’t victimize law-abiding citizens.
Rehabilitation mostly exists so that (some of the) people doing the locking up can signal their compassion by supporting it.
Rapes, murders, and beatings in prison are also supposed to be crimes, no?
The two main methods by which they accomplish this are being sufficiently nasty to deter would be criminals,
At this point you’re surely using the same argument that would be used to justify Dementors in Azkaban—it makes Azkaban nastier: hence it serves as deterrent.
At this point you’re surely using the same argument that would be used to justify Dementors in Azkaban—it makes Azkaban nastier: hence it serves as deterrent.
If your argument is simply “brutality acts as a deterrent,” it’s almost certainly true. If your argument is, “Therefore the current level of prison brutality is optimal,” or, “we should be happy with prison brutality,” the only counterargument needed is that nobody’s provided any evidence at all for those positions.
But if either of those is the assertion, here are some counterarguments:
1) There is a countereffect: longer (and therefore more brutal) prison sentences increase rates of recidivism.
2) Flogging and caning are brutal deterrents. Many (most?) people will take a punishment of flogging over a punishment of a long prison sentence when given the choice. Ergo at least for many, prisons are more brutal than literal torture.
3) From a cursory glance at stats, violent crime rates don’t seem to be much lower in countries with higher incidences of prison rape or prison hospitalizations. I would like to see some rigorous analysis on this.
4) Violent crime rates don’t seem to be much higher in countries that employ flogging or caning. Again, not a rigorous statistical analysis, but weak evidence nonetheless.
5) Let’s not forget that we’re trying to minimize violent crime, and prison brutality is just the perpetration of violent crime while in prison. Prisoners are people too, and many of them are innocent or overcharged. Determining optimal brutality levels will take this into account.
6) And of course I shouldn’t even have to say that a large number of people undergoing the brutality of prison are completely innocent of hurting anybody at all; they are only guilty of crimes that shouldn’t be crimes.
I don’t think there’s any evidence at all that the brutality levels in western prisons are optimal. But are they a deterrent? Yeah, sure. And the death penalty is a deterrent of shoplifting. What’s the relevance to the actual debate of prison brutality? That people who applaud prison brutality have a point? Not any more than advocates of the death penalty for shoplifting do.
In that case you are completely correct! But I think the counteropinion generally being expressed here, if not clearly, is that prisons are extremely brutal.
But I think the counteropinion generally being expressed here, if not clearly, is that prisons are extremely brutal.
My point is basically “so what?”, i.e., they’re missing part of their argument.
Also, extremely brutal compared to what? As ArisKatsaris pointed out in several places in this thread the most dangerous thing prisoners have to fear in modern prisons is their fellow prisoners.
There’s an argument (first advanced by Beccaria in the late 18th century) that it matters more that punishment be swift and certain, than that it be harsh. If people don’t really believe a punishment is likely to happen to them, it won’t deter reliably. Human cognitive biases being what they are, we might be better served trying to make punishment visible, rather than horrifying. Azkaban, being remote and unpleasant to think about, is perhaps less effective than some punishment that would be constantly in sight. Having the convicted criminal’s wand broken. say.
In a society with veritaserum, legilimency and assorted other magic you’d think it would be straightforward to establish guilt or innocence in the vast majority of cases.
In a society with veritaserum, legilimency and assorted other magic you’d think it would be straightforward to establish guilt or innocence in the vast majority of cases.
Of course, said society also has occlumency and memory charms.
My point is that with prisons, the more brutal, the more effective. Yes, there are tradeoffs to consider. I actually agree with your statement here that the justice system would work better if people were willing to admit its main purpose was deterrent, secondarily detention, and not implicitly delegate the brutality part to other convicts so they can wipe their hands of it.
My $0.02: there are several different functions person A can perform by punishing person B for some action C.
For example: (a) lowering B’s chances of performing C in the future (b) lowering the chances of observers performing C (c) encouraging observers to anti-identify with B (d) encouraging observers who anti-identify with B to support A (e) encouraging observers who identify with B to oppose A
IME, conversations about how prisons should work become really confused because people aren’t very clear about which of those functions they endorse.
Personally, it seems clear to me that (b) is by far the most valuable of these goals. That said, prison policy has almost no influence on (b); law enforcement and courts are far more relevant, and their current implementation pretty much screens off the effects of prison policy.
People who are interested in (a) and also value B’s continued existence will tend to be interested in punishment as a behavioral modification tool, and will happily set it aside in favor of more effective behavioral modification tools as science develops them.
People interested in (a) who don’t value B’s continued existence will be uninterested in punishment, since simply killing B is more efficient.
AFAICT, the folks who establish the policies that govern prisoner punishment (as distinct from prisoner restraint) are primarily motivated by the desire to obtain political support, which suggests minimizing (e) and maximizing (d), which does seem to be what most of our prison policies are designed to do. Maximizing (c) is one way to minimize (e), though there are many others.
Personally, it seems clear to me that (b) is by far the most valuable of these goals. That said, prison policy has almost no influence on (b); law enforcement and courts are far more relevant, and their current implementation pretty much screens off the effects of prison policy.
This isn’t obvious at all. In particular if prisons were extremely nice, their deterrent effect would be much less no matter how law enforcement and the courts worked. One could argue that the policies in the current Overton window aren’t significantly different from each other, but that argument would have to be made.
Agreed that if prisons were extremely nice, their deterrent effect due to the threat of punishment would be lower than it is now.
That said… when the mechanism that results in my being punished for an act is perceived as unreliable and capricious (including, but not limited to, cases where it is unreliable and capricious), the correlation between the severity of the punishment and the intensity of the deterrent effect is much, much lower than when the mechanism is perceived as fair and reliable.
So if law enforcement and courts were perceived as fair and reliable (that is, reliably assigning punishment to criminals and not assigning punishment to noncriminals), I expect making prisons equally unpleasant would create a much greater deterrent effect (to being a criminal) than it does now.
If my goal is to maximize deterrent effect, then, I expect that I would do better to invest my efforts in increasing the perception of law enforcement and courts as fair and reliable than to invest them in increasing the perception of prisons as unpleasant.
But, as I say, I don’t think many people involved in setting prison policies are primarily motivated by maximizing deterrent effect.
That said… when the mechanism that results in my being punished for an act is perceived as unreliable and capricious (including, but not limited to, cases where it is unreliable and capricious), the correlation between the severity of the punishment and the intensity of the deterrent effect is much, much lower than when the mechanism is perceived as fair and reliable.
Depending on what you mean by “unreliable and capricious”, I find this dubious. At the very least it seems to me that brutal dictatorships are much better at reducing crime (at least the crimes they care about) than democracies. For example, Mussolini’s successful campaign against the Sicilian mafia.
What I mean by enforcement being unreliable and capricious is, roughly. that agents believe that their performing the act is not well-correlated with their being punished.
It sounds from that wiki article like Mussolini created an environment where people believed that being a mafioso would reliably result in being punished.
I suspect they also believed that not being a mafioso stood a good chance of being punished, which has other consequences; when punishment occurs in the absence of a reliable and controllable cue, the result is learned helplessness. But if we care about deterring criminals and we don’t care about the effect on noncriminals, punishing 90% of criminals and 5% of noncriminals can work OK, even if only 5% of the people we punish are criminals.
Of course, if we care about things in addition to deterrence, that may not be a great policy, but that’s another conversation.
What I mean by enforcement being unreliable and capricious is, roughly. that agents believe that their performing the act is not well-correlated with their being punished.
So what you’re saying is that in modern developed states committing crimes is not well-correlated with being punished? I find this highly dubious.
At the very least, I’m saying that that’s the perception: most crimes go unpunished. But yes, I also suspect that perception is true.
I haven’t done any research on the matter, though, and attempts to find statistics via cursory Googling failed. If you have any cites handy, I’m happy to be corrected.
committing crimes is not well-correlated with being punished? I find this highly dubious.
TheOtherDave said:
the perception [is] most crimes go unpunished.
These aren’t actually in contradiction. If a criminal committing a “mid-size” offense has a 25% chance of being caught for each crime, then being a career criminal is likely to end you in jail, but most crimes will still be unpunished.
My sense is that most crimes (and most dollar-loss to crime) are small/midsize thefts; hundreds or thousands of dollars, not more. Thefts big enough to set you up for a lifetime are freakishly rare compared to the number of criminals. And that means to have a tolerable lifestyle as a criminal, you have to commit lots of offenses—so even a small chance of being caught for each mugging or burglary starts to add up.
Yeah, I agree with this. I’d be surprised if the chance was as high as .25, but the principle is the same; career criminals can count on eventually being arrested.
That said, the original context of this discussion was the behavior-modification effects of prison policy on the not-yet-arrested population, and from a behavior modification point of view a punishment that usually fails to kick in for the first several crimes doesn’t do much to deter those first few crimes.
And making the punishment more and more severe doesn’t help the deterrence factor all that much in that situation, which was my original point.
and from a behavior modification point of view a punishment that usually fails to kick in for the first several crimes doesn’t do much to deter those first few crimes.
Disagree. It deters the first crime. It’s deterrent power will decrease for subsequent crimes (until caught) unless the criminal has friends who have been caught.
Can you say more about the mechanism whereby increasing the severity of a punishment I am confident won’t apply to my first crime deters my first crime? That seems pretty implausible to me.
If committing a crime required playing Russian Roulette, a gun with a bullet in it would be more of a deterrent than a gun with a paintball in it. Yes?
The law-enforcement/courts system has significantly better first-time odds than Russian Roulette. For most crimes, the odds that I will be arrested and convicted and sentenced to significant jail time for a first crime are significantly lower than one in six.
“But Dave,” someone will now patiently explain to me, “that doesn’t matter. An N% chance of death is always going to be significantly worse than an N% chance of a paintball in the head, no matter how low N%. It’s scale-invariant!”
Except the decision to ignore the psychological effects of scale is precisely what I’m skeptical about here. Sure, if I make prisons bad enough (supposing I can do so), then everyone rational does an EV calculation and concludes that even a miniscule chance of going to prison is more disutility than the opportunity cost of foregoing a crime.
But I don’t think that’s what most people reliably do faced with small probabilities of large disutilities. Some people, faced with that situation, look at the magnitude of the disutility and ignore the probability (“Sure it’s unlikely, but if it happened it would be really awful, so let’s not take the risk!”). Some people look at the magnitude of the probability and ignore the disutility (“Sure, it would be awful, but it’s not going to happen, so who cares?”).
Very few look at the EV.
That said, if we restrict our domain of discourse to potential criminals who do perform EV calculations (which I think is a silly thing to do in the real world, but leaving that aside for now), then I agree that doubling the expected disutility-of-punishment (e.g., making prisons twice as unpleasant) halves their chance of performing the crime.
Of course, so does doubling the expected chance of being punished in the first place .
That is, if I start out with a P1 confidence that I will be arrested and convicted for commiting a crime, a P2 confidence that if convicted I will receive significant prison time, and a >.99 confidence that the disutility of significant prison time is D1, and you want to double my expected disutility of commiting that crime, you can double P1, or P2, or D1, or mix-and-match.
So a system primarily interested in maximizing deterrent effect among rational EV calculators asks which of those strategies gets the largest increase in expected disutility for a given cost.
It’s not at all clear to me that in the U.S. today, doubling D1 is the most cost-effective way to do that if I consider decreasing the QALYs of prison inmates to be a cost. So if someone insists on doubling D1, I infer that either...: ...(a) they value the QALYs of prison inmates less than I do, or ...(b) they have some reason to believe that doubling D1 is the most cost-effective way of buying deterrence, or ...(c) they aren’t exclusively interested in deterrence, or ...(d) something else I haven’t thought of.
In practice I usually assume some combination of (a) and (c), but I considered (b) potentially interesting enough to be worth exploring the question. At this point, though, my confidence that I can explore (b) in this conversation in an interesting way is low.
Some people look at the magnitude of the probability and ignore the disutility (“Sure, it would be awful, but it’s not going to happen, so who cares?”).
It seems rather difficult to actually affect those people, though. The difference between P1=.04 and P1=.08 would have dramatic effects on an EV-calculator, but very little effect on the sort of person who judges probabilities by ‘feel’.
That is, if I start out with a P1 confidence that I will be arrested and convicted for commiting a crime, a P2 confidence that if convicted I will receive significant prison time, and a >.99 confidence that the disutility of significant prison time is D1, and you want to double my expected disutility of commiting that crime, you can double P1, or P2, or D1, or mix-and-match.
I would suppose the D1 advocates would argue that the hidden costs of increasing P1 are higher than you think, or possibly they just value them more (e.g. the right to privacy). I admit I’ve never heard a good argument that what the US needs is to greatly increase the likelihood of sentencing a convict to significant prison time.
The difference between P1=.04 and P1=.08 would have dramatic effects on an EV-calculator, but very little effect on the sort of person who judges probabilities by ‘feel’.
I would expect it depends a lot on the algorithms underlying “feel” and what aspects of the environment they depend on. It’s unlikely these people are choosing their behaviors or beliefs at random, after all.
More generally, if I actually want to manipulate the behavior of a group, I should expect that a good first step is to understand how their behavior depends on aspects of their environment, since often their environment is what I can actually manipulate.
Edit: I should add to this that I certainly agree that it’s possible in principle for a system to be in a state where the most cost-effective thing to do to achieve deterrence is increase D. I just don’t think it’s necessarily true, and am skeptical that the U.S. is currently in such a state.
the hidden costs of increasing P1 are higher than you think
Sure, that’s another possibility. Or of P2, come to that.
I admit I’ve never heard a good argument that what the US needs is to greatly increase the likelihood of sentencing a convict to significant prison time.
Is this not the rationale behind mandatory sentencing laws?
I admit I’ve never heard a good argument that what the US needs is to greatly increase the likelihood of sentencing a convict to significant prison time.
Is this not the rationale behind mandatory sentencing laws?
I can’t think of a response to this that isn’t threatening to devolve into a political argument, so I’ll bow out here. Sorry.
At the very least, I’m saying that that’s the perception: most crimes go unpunished.
But yes, I also suspect that perception is true. I haven’t done any research on the matter, though, and attempts to find statistics via cursory Googling failed.
If you have any cites handy, I’m happy to be corrected.
In that case, why aren’t you stealing money and donating to SIAI? ;)
But seriously, there are countries where your comment is actually true. You can tell the difference pretty easily.
To be honest, I’m not convinced that it isn’t true even in first-world countries. Solve rates for murders in the US appear to be around 66% as of 2007. I haven’t directly been able to dig up solve rates for crimes in general, but clearance rates (the rate of crimes prosecuted to crimes reported) are available, and are well under 50% for pretty much everything except murder. Most prosecuted crimes appear to result in convictions, but this still says to me that TheOtherDave’s got it right, at least in a US context and assuming that most reports aren’t frivolous.
YMMV for other nations.
ETA: Looking over these statistics again, I strongly suspect that the “solve” figures you find in various places are in fact identical to the clearance rates I refer to. So the reports-to-convictions ratio would be significantly lower—compare conviction rates for cases brought to court.
I infer that your intuitions differ from mine but you don’t have any cites handy either. Fair enough. Updated, to a degree proportional to my confidence in the reliability of your intuition on this matter, in your direction.
Yeah, but due to the politics is a mind-killer thing, we don’t really comment on it… just like a lot of other political hints are left alone (at least on my behalf) and I try to focus on making predictions and figuring out where the agents in this story will go given their apparent rationality (or lack thereof) and value sets. That’s the reason why I read this: it’s well-written entertainment I can use to train my ability to predict and phrase said predictions. Plus I like to see theories put to practice.
By the way, I believe the rescue of Bellatrix was around the point in the story that Amanda Knox had gotten to when she made it out of Muggle Azkaban herself.
Really? I understood from the human interest fluff pieces I tried to avoid that she had used her time in Azkaban very well, learning Italian to a high level and catching up on a great deal of high-quality reading. I don’t think Bellatrix would regard their stays, pound for pound, as equivalent.
I think you misunderstood me: by “point in the story she had gotten to” I meant literally the point in the actual story (MoR). It wasn’t some kind of figure of speech about her experience. (I wonder how many other people misunderstood my comment in this way; it’s an interpretation that never occurred to me. I thought people knew she was a MoR reader.)
However, her experience itself was no picnic, fluff pieces notwithstanding.
Azkaban is commentary on Muggle prisons. I really hope people got that.
I’ve been reading about muggle prison conditions lately, and while I’ve understood that “prison conditions are terrible and torturing people is pointless etc” for both systems, it did not occur to me that you were making a commentary.
It actually made me sit and think for a minute (though not the full five—oops) about whether there was any way I could contribute to improving conditions in prisons, that was comparatively low-cost, that I had overlooked.
I didn’t think of one, but it’s worth thinking about some more, probably.
In general, how does one determine whether X in HPMOR is supposed to [represent / be commentary on] Y? I could make up a connection between Azkaban and Muggle prisons, probably by running it through my black-box mental model of Eliezer, but I don’t feel any kind of justified in the connection.
Usually it more or less outright says it in the title.
Congratulations, you have just discovered the difference between art and design. If Azkaban had been designed to be a commentary on muggle prisons, the connection would have had to have been made explicit within the text. The fact that Eliezer pointed out the connection does not mean he consciously tried to make it explicit in the text. Since the connection is implicit rather than explicit, the commentary is an artistic interpretation of the text. You don’t need to feel justified in an artistic interpretation.
I don’t think your distinction carves reality, or language, at the joints.
It seems much more like a commentary on the American prison system than anything else. The Western European systems don’t generally suffer many of the problems of American Muggle prisons, or the problems they do share are often to a smaller degree. Britain is one of the middle range countries in this regard, but this may be enough for some people to not get the point.
While American prisons may indeed be worse (on average) than their Western European counterparts, the latter are still more than bad enough for the commentary to apply.
In any case, most of the suffering of imprisonment is psychological and derives from having one’s freedom restricted and status reduced (to put it mildly). So the (physical) conditions of the facility may be almost beside the point (despite the fact that this is what it is most socially acceptable to focus on).
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that massive institutionalized rape is not beside the point.
Ahem:
...not to mention the fact that the behavior of persons is arguably not within the scope of “the (physical) conditions of the facility”.
In short, the comment contained more than enough hedging to preclude such a retort.
Even if it did, orthonormal’s point contains a significant subclass of the suffering that occurs in prisons. Hence ignoring it or sweeping it under a hedge seems somewhat strange.
Let’s back up. Here is the history of this conversation:
Eliezer stated that “Azkaban is commentary on Muggle prisons”.
JoshuaZ replied:
Notice what this says: Western European prisons are so good that Eliezer’s commentary is really only about American prisons. (Also note the implication that the Muggle world is partitioned into two regions: Western Europe and the United States.)
3. I—having become familiar with the similarities and differences between the U.S. and European criminal justice systems as a result of the Amanda Knox case—disputed this, in a comment whose point was to argue that Western European prisons are not pleasant places. They are, in fact, really awful places. Yes, they may not be as bad as U.S. prisons, but they are still bad: places of torment, suffering and despair, despite the fact that the facilities may be a little nicer. They are bad enough that the Azkaban metaphor applies. (And U.S. prisons are nowhere near as bad as those in other, non-Western-European parts of the world—so was Eliezer’s commentary “only” or “mostly” about China, Iran, or North Korea, and not really about the American justice system at all? Of course not.)
Furthermore, at the time he was writing the Azkaban-rescue sequence, Eliezer knew that Amanda Knox—then trapped in a Western European prison—was among his readers. This is just one of many reasons why it simply isn’t plausible that the commentary was meant to be geographically (and thus, in effect, politically) limited to the United States.
4. Some people (bizarrely) downvoted my comment and attempted to educate me about the evils of United States prisons, as if I were unfamiliar with the subject. This is completely missing the point. My comment argued that European prisons are bad, not that American prisons are good. My point was that the fact that European prisons have (for example) bidets does not make them spas. I did take a slightly “extreme” line—that the real torment of incarceration is psychological. But this is not actually an absurd position by any means. I expect that relatively few who have actually been incarcerated would disagree—even among those who had been imprisoned in terrible physical conditions. For one thing, such treatment often has a specifically psychological purpose.
The two “sides” in this argument are: people who think the Azkaban metaphor applies universally (me), and people who think its scope is restricted to the United States (JoshuaZ). Everything I have said in this thread should be understood in that context. In no sense am I downplaying any bad aspect of American prisons. To “correct” me on such a point is to increase the noise and decrease the signal.
This is not a case of me not reading the previous thread before commenting.
In my opinion, you’re reading too much into the original comment. There are fewer Western Europeans in prison than Americans. Aside: their “Western Europe” is much larger than the traditional one, which already has a higher population than the United States, and so we can also say there are fewer prisoners per capita in Europe than the United States.
It’d be surprising if American prisons didn’t tend to have more problems.
For all narrative purposes, the only regions of the Muggle world that significantly matter to the story are Europe and the United States, so your aside seems a misplaced criticism.
I more or less agree with your assessment of the metaphor, but there is no purpose to letting a poorly-grounded argument carry through just because one agrees with the conclusion.
Aye, but pray, where was the signal in the first place?
It’s not under the scope of “having one’s freedom restricted and status reduced”, either. Sorry if I misinterpreted you, but it looks as if I’m not the only one who thought you were omitting the most significant part of the horror of modern prisons.
I thought it was a nice commentary, but I hadn’t realized it was intentional (on either your or Rowling’s part). If you want anyone to get it, you need to slip in anal rape or something, and even then most readers will miss it.
IAWYC but don’t actually make it a rape.
I think the “anal rape” was a joke on Gwern’s part; I oppose such jokes on political grounds.
Do you oppose jokes involving rape because of social consequences of rape being found to be funny, jokes involving rape because of direct consequences on people hearing the joke, jokes about prison rape because of consequences of prisoners, or something else?
All three of those, and I could probably think of other adverse consequences given time.
I was quite serious. And why not? Murder is worse than anal rape, and that has already been included; besides that, people have argued we see at least one kind of rape already in MoR.
Especially those of us who deliberately try to avoid drawing conclusions about authorial intent from text. Whether the author is trying to make an analogical point with a fictional construct is not something I think about too much while reading fiction, though of course correspondences I notice (intentional or not) inform my reading.
What specific commentary were you trying to make? The possible commentaries that I can think of:
a) prisons are too brutal. If so how brutal do you think prisons should be?
b) prisons should be replaced with a different form of punishment. If so what punishment do you have in mind?
c) criminals shouldn’t be punished at all.
d) I haven’t really thought about these issues at all but saying “boo, prisons!” is a great way to signal that I’m compassionate.
The people who seem to agree with Eliezer’s commentary should feel free to specify which commentary they agree with.
Here’s one more option:
e) People don’t think enough about the level of brutality in prisons, and when they do think and talk about it they find it easier to applaud brutality; because anyone who spoke against it “would associate themselves with criminals, with weakness, with distasteful things that people would rather not think about”, while speaking in its favor make you look tough on crime.
Given political discussions I’ve partaken in other forums, I know full well that whenever I condemned prison rape and suggested ways in which it might be reduced/prevented, the typical response was something to the effect of “Why do you love criminals so much?”
For example: Punish rapes among inmates in the same manner that other rapes of citizens by other citizens. Punish rapes of inmates by wardens in the same way with the additional loading that should be applied to all abuses of authority, particularly state sanctioned authority. But to do that we would need to replace Uncle Sam with Uncle Ben.
That would be by sending them to prison, which is not much of a punishment to someone who’s already in prison.
Yes it is. Not all sentences are life sentences. Then there are the obvious differences in types of imprisonment—including level of security and whether they have access to other prisoners or are confined to solitary.
Not all, but entirely too many. If someone is already going to be in a big concrete box for the next ten years no matter what they do, and doesn’t expect to survive more than five years in that environment, what more can you do to them?
Put them in a smaller concrete box and with other prisoners that lower that estimate of their lifespan?
Assume they’re already in the worst box that various legislation (mostly related to human rights) permits you to construct, or the closest cost-effective approximation thereof.
At that point, if they are not already, they should be put into solitary. Some would consider it reward, but if they prey on others, then they should be put somewhere that they can’t—that’s (ostensibly) why they’re there in the first place, at least in part.
Locking criminals up for years, away from everyone else, seems like a horrible way of scaring others into not committing crimes.
Following this train of thought, ideally prisons should be replaced with a more public/visible type of punishment. Maybe caning?
I dunno. In the real world, I know a lot of people who seem awfully frightened of prisons. But sure, maybe they’d be more frightened of public caning.
Well, being brutal is directly connected to a prison’s ability to serve its function.
The stated function of a prison is to imprison (i.e. detain). If the function of the prison was to get people physically hurt, then the state would have official torturers to brutalize people to such exact specifications as their convictions by the courts (e.g. official sentences would state things like “ten years in prison, plus three beatings and one anal rape per month”, and the state would hire official rapists for the purpose).
If brutality was supposed to be part of a prison’s specification, then we would have the responsibility of quantifying how much brutality is deserved for each crime. (the question you asked “How brutal should they be?” doesn’t only work for people criticizing their current brutality, but also for the people who support it, you see)
But the delegation of this task randomly to convicts speaks of the same hypocrisy that Quirrel mocks in the chapters in question.
There are several functions commonly ascribed to prisons, including:
Detention: to prevent people with criminal tendencies from having the opportunity to commit crimes against the general public, by physically separating them from the public.
Deterrence: to deprive criminals of the pleasures of normal society, in order to discourage other people from becoming criminals. If you would like to live with your partner, children, and friends in relative comfort instead of with a cellmate in relative discomfort, you have a motivation for staying out of prison.
Rehabilitation: to cure criminals of tendencies that may lead them to commit crimes; for instance, lack of cultural or moral education, or lack of non-criminal job skills. This is given as a reason for prisons to offer classes, job training, etc.
Penitence: to put criminals in an isolating environment where they will reflect on their crimes and regret them — or a panoptic environment in which they will internalize the conduct standards of the authorities.
(I’m not disagreeing with you on the badness of prison brutality; just on the “stated function” claim.)
That’s not exactly an undisputed assertion.
Penitentiaries were name for the theory that prisoners should be penitent. More generally, rehabilitation is often a purpose of imprisonment.
It’s a factor for every US federal judge to consider when deciding what sentence to impose. In fairness, 3553(a) authorizes a judge to consider just about anything—it’s totally agnostic as to the appropriate theory of punishment.
True, but neither is the theory of evolution. ;)
When it comes down to it, the purpose of prisons is to reduce crime. The two main methods by which they accomplish this are being sufficiently nasty to deter would be criminals, and keeping the people who fail to be deterred confined so they can’t victimize law-abiding citizens.
Rehabilitation mostly exists so that (some of the) people doing the locking up can signal their compassion by supporting it.
Rapes, murders, and beatings in prison are also supposed to be crimes, no?
At this point you’re surely using the same argument that would be used to justify Dementors in Azkaban—it makes Azkaban nastier: hence it serves as deterrent.
And I’ve yet to hear a good counterargument.
If your argument is simply “brutality acts as a deterrent,” it’s almost certainly true. If your argument is, “Therefore the current level of prison brutality is optimal,” or, “we should be happy with prison brutality,” the only counterargument needed is that nobody’s provided any evidence at all for those positions.
But if either of those is the assertion, here are some counterarguments: 1) There is a countereffect: longer (and therefore more brutal) prison sentences increase rates of recidivism. 2) Flogging and caning are brutal deterrents. Many (most?) people will take a punishment of flogging over a punishment of a long prison sentence when given the choice. Ergo at least for many, prisons are more brutal than literal torture. 3) From a cursory glance at stats, violent crime rates don’t seem to be much lower in countries with higher incidences of prison rape or prison hospitalizations. I would like to see some rigorous analysis on this. 4) Violent crime rates don’t seem to be much higher in countries that employ flogging or caning. Again, not a rigorous statistical analysis, but weak evidence nonetheless. 5) Let’s not forget that we’re trying to minimize violent crime, and prison brutality is just the perpetration of violent crime while in prison. Prisoners are people too, and many of them are innocent or overcharged. Determining optimal brutality levels will take this into account. 6) And of course I shouldn’t even have to say that a large number of people undergoing the brutality of prison are completely innocent of hurting anybody at all; they are only guilty of crimes that shouldn’t be crimes.
I don’t think there’s any evidence at all that the brutality levels in western prisons are optimal. But are they a deterrent? Yeah, sure. And the death penalty is a deterrent of shoplifting. What’s the relevance to the actual debate of prison brutality? That people who applaud prison brutality have a point? Not any more than advocates of the death penalty for shoplifting do.
My point that the merely pointing out that prisons are brutal is not enough to argue that they should be made less brutal.
In that case you are completely correct! But I think the counteropinion generally being expressed here, if not clearly, is that prisons are extremely brutal.
My point is basically “so what?”, i.e., they’re missing part of their argument.
Also, extremely brutal compared to what? As ArisKatsaris pointed out in several places in this thread the most dangerous thing prisoners have to fear in modern prisons is their fellow prisoners.
Hurting people is bad.
There’s an argument (first advanced by Beccaria in the late 18th century) that it matters more that punishment be swift and certain, than that it be harsh. If people don’t really believe a punishment is likely to happen to them, it won’t deter reliably. Human cognitive biases being what they are, we might be better served trying to make punishment visible, rather than horrifying. Azkaban, being remote and unpleasant to think about, is perhaps less effective than some punishment that would be constantly in sight. Having the convicted criminal’s wand broken. say.
Beccaria puts it much better than I could, so I’ll just refer you to his essay on the topic: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_Crimes_and_Punishments/Chapter_XXVII
In a society with veritaserum, legilimency and assorted other magic you’d think it would be straightforward to establish guilt or innocence in the vast majority of cases.
Of course, said society also has occlumency and memory charms.
It’s not as if you’ve stated the exact position you want a counterargument to: Is it “the more brutal the better”?
My point is that with prisons, the more brutal, the more effective. Yes, there are tradeoffs to consider. I actually agree with your statement here that the justice system would work better if people were willing to admit its main purpose was deterrent, secondarily detention, and not implicitly delegate the brutality part to other convicts so they can wipe their hands of it.
My $0.02: there are several different functions person A can perform by punishing person B for some action C.
For example:
(a) lowering B’s chances of performing C in the future
(b) lowering the chances of observers performing C
(c) encouraging observers to anti-identify with B
(d) encouraging observers who anti-identify with B to support A
(e) encouraging observers who identify with B to oppose A
IME, conversations about how prisons should work become really confused because people aren’t very clear about which of those functions they endorse.
Personally, it seems clear to me that (b) is by far the most valuable of these goals. That said, prison policy has almost no influence on (b); law enforcement and courts are far more relevant, and their current implementation pretty much screens off the effects of prison policy.
People who are interested in (a) and also value B’s continued existence will tend to be interested in punishment as a behavioral modification tool, and will happily set it aside in favor of more effective behavioral modification tools as science develops them.
People interested in (a) who don’t value B’s continued existence will be uninterested in punishment, since simply killing B is more efficient.
AFAICT, the folks who establish the policies that govern prisoner punishment (as distinct from prisoner restraint) are primarily motivated by the desire to obtain political support, which suggests minimizing (e) and maximizing (d), which does seem to be what most of our prison policies are designed to do. Maximizing (c) is one way to minimize (e), though there are many others.
This isn’t obvious at all. In particular if prisons were extremely nice, their deterrent effect would be much less no matter how law enforcement and the courts worked. One could argue that the policies in the current Overton window aren’t significantly different from each other, but that argument would have to be made.
Agreed that if prisons were extremely nice, their deterrent effect due to the threat of punishment would be lower than it is now.
That said… when the mechanism that results in my being punished for an act is perceived as unreliable and capricious (including, but not limited to, cases where it is unreliable and capricious), the correlation between the severity of the punishment and the intensity of the deterrent effect is much, much lower than when the mechanism is perceived as fair and reliable.
So if law enforcement and courts were perceived as fair and reliable (that is, reliably assigning punishment to criminals and not assigning punishment to noncriminals), I expect making prisons equally unpleasant would create a much greater deterrent effect (to being a criminal) than it does now.
If my goal is to maximize deterrent effect, then, I expect that I would do better to invest my efforts in increasing the perception of law enforcement and courts as fair and reliable than to invest them in increasing the perception of prisons as unpleasant.
But, as I say, I don’t think many people involved in setting prison policies are primarily motivated by maximizing deterrent effect.
Depending on what you mean by “unreliable and capricious”, I find this dubious. At the very least it seems to me that brutal dictatorships are much better at reducing crime (at least the crimes they care about) than democracies. For example, Mussolini’s successful campaign against the Sicilian mafia.
What I mean by enforcement being unreliable and capricious is, roughly. that agents believe that their performing the act is not well-correlated with their being punished.
It sounds from that wiki article like Mussolini created an environment where people believed that being a mafioso would reliably result in being punished.
I suspect they also believed that not being a mafioso stood a good chance of being punished, which has other consequences; when punishment occurs in the absence of a reliable and controllable cue, the result is learned helplessness. But if we care about deterring criminals and we don’t care about the effect on noncriminals, punishing 90% of criminals and 5% of noncriminals can work OK, even if only 5% of the people we punish are criminals.
Of course, if we care about things in addition to deterrence, that may not be a great policy, but that’s another conversation.
So what you’re saying is that in modern developed states committing crimes is not well-correlated with being punished? I find this highly dubious.
At the very least, I’m saying that that’s the perception: most crimes go unpunished.
But yes, I also suspect that perception is true. I haven’t done any research on the matter, though, and attempts to find statistics via cursory Googling failed.
If you have any cites handy, I’m happy to be corrected.
Eugine said:
TheOtherDave said:
These aren’t actually in contradiction. If a criminal committing a “mid-size” offense has a 25% chance of being caught for each crime, then being a career criminal is likely to end you in jail, but most crimes will still be unpunished.
My sense is that most crimes (and most dollar-loss to crime) are small/midsize thefts; hundreds or thousands of dollars, not more. Thefts big enough to set you up for a lifetime are freakishly rare compared to the number of criminals. And that means to have a tolerable lifestyle as a criminal, you have to commit lots of offenses—so even a small chance of being caught for each mugging or burglary starts to add up.
Yeah, I agree with this. I’d be surprised if the chance was as high as .25, but the principle is the same; career criminals can count on eventually being arrested.
That said, the original context of this discussion was the behavior-modification effects of prison policy on the not-yet-arrested population, and from a behavior modification point of view a punishment that usually fails to kick in for the first several crimes doesn’t do much to deter those first few crimes.
And making the punishment more and more severe doesn’t help the deterrence factor all that much in that situation, which was my original point.
Disagree. It deters the first crime. It’s deterrent power will decrease for subsequent crimes (until caught) unless the criminal has friends who have been caught.
Can you say more about the mechanism whereby increasing the severity of a punishment I am confident won’t apply to my first crime deters my first crime? That seems pretty implausible to me.
If committing a crime required playing Russian Roulette, a gun with a bullet in it would be more of a deterrent than a gun with a paintball in it. Yes?
The law-enforcement/courts system has significantly better first-time odds than Russian Roulette. For most crimes, the odds that I will be arrested and convicted and sentenced to significant jail time for a first crime are significantly lower than one in six.
“But Dave,” someone will now patiently explain to me, “that doesn’t matter. An N% chance of death is always going to be significantly worse than an N% chance of a paintball in the head, no matter how low N%. It’s scale-invariant!”
Except the decision to ignore the psychological effects of scale is precisely what I’m skeptical about here. Sure, if I make prisons bad enough (supposing I can do so), then everyone rational does an EV calculation and concludes that even a miniscule chance of going to prison is more disutility than the opportunity cost of foregoing a crime.
But I don’t think that’s what most people reliably do faced with small probabilities of large disutilities. Some people, faced with that situation, look at the magnitude of the disutility and ignore the probability (“Sure it’s unlikely, but if it happened it would be really awful, so let’s not take the risk!”). Some people look at the magnitude of the probability and ignore the disutility (“Sure, it would be awful, but it’s not going to happen, so who cares?”).
Very few look at the EV.
That said, if we restrict our domain of discourse to potential criminals who do perform EV calculations (which I think is a silly thing to do in the real world, but leaving that aside for now), then I agree that doubling the expected disutility-of-punishment (e.g., making prisons twice as unpleasant) halves their chance of performing the crime.
Of course, so does doubling the expected chance of being punished in the first place .
That is, if I start out with a P1 confidence that I will be arrested and convicted for commiting a crime, a P2 confidence that if convicted I will receive significant prison time, and a >.99 confidence that the disutility of significant prison time is D1, and you want to double my expected disutility of commiting that crime, you can double P1, or P2, or D1, or mix-and-match.
So a system primarily interested in maximizing deterrent effect among rational EV calculators asks which of those strategies gets the largest increase in expected disutility for a given cost.
It’s not at all clear to me that in the U.S. today, doubling D1 is the most cost-effective way to do that if I consider decreasing the QALYs of prison inmates to be a cost. So if someone insists on doubling D1, I infer that either...:
...(a) they value the QALYs of prison inmates less than I do, or
...(b) they have some reason to believe that doubling D1 is the most cost-effective way of buying deterrence, or
...(c) they aren’t exclusively interested in deterrence, or
...(d) something else I haven’t thought of.
In practice I usually assume some combination of (a) and (c), but I considered (b) potentially interesting enough to be worth exploring the question. At this point, though, my confidence that I can explore (b) in this conversation in an interesting way is low.
It seems rather difficult to actually affect those people, though. The difference between P1=.04 and P1=.08 would have dramatic effects on an EV-calculator, but very little effect on the sort of person who judges probabilities by ‘feel’.
I would suppose the D1 advocates would argue that the hidden costs of increasing P1 are higher than you think, or possibly they just value them more (e.g. the right to privacy). I admit I’ve never heard a good argument that what the US needs is to greatly increase the likelihood of sentencing a convict to significant prison time.
I would expect it depends a lot on the algorithms underlying “feel” and what aspects of the environment they depend on. It’s unlikely these people are choosing their behaviors or beliefs at random, after all.
More generally, if I actually want to manipulate the behavior of a group, I should expect that a good first step is to understand how their behavior depends on aspects of their environment, since often their environment is what I can actually manipulate.
Edit: I should add to this that I certainly agree that it’s possible in principle for a system to be in a state where the most cost-effective thing to do to achieve deterrence is increase D. I just don’t think it’s necessarily true, and am skeptical that the U.S. is currently in such a state.
Sure, that’s another possibility. Or of P2, come to that.
Is this not the rationale behind mandatory sentencing laws?
I can’t think of a response to this that isn’t threatening to devolve into a political argument, so I’ll bow out here. Sorry.
In that case, why aren’t you stealing money and donating to SIAI? ;)
But seriously, there are countries where your comment is actually true. You can tell the difference pretty easily.
To be honest, I’m not convinced that it isn’t true even in first-world countries. Solve rates for murders in the US appear to be around 66% as of 2007. I haven’t directly been able to dig up solve rates for crimes in general, but clearance rates (the rate of crimes prosecuted to crimes reported) are available, and are well under 50% for pretty much everything except murder. Most prosecuted crimes appear to result in convictions, but this still says to me that TheOtherDave’s got it right, at least in a US context and assuming that most reports aren’t frivolous.
YMMV for other nations.
ETA: Looking over these statistics again, I strongly suspect that the “solve” figures you find in various places are in fact identical to the clearance rates I refer to. So the reports-to-convictions ratio would be significantly lower—compare conviction rates for cases brought to court.
I infer that your intuitions differ from mine but you don’t have any cites handy either.
Fair enough.
Updated, to a degree proportional to my confidence in the reliability of your intuition on this matter, in your direction.
Yeah, but due to the politics is a mind-killer thing, we don’t really comment on it… just like a lot of other political hints are left alone (at least on my behalf) and I try to focus on making predictions and figuring out where the agents in this story will go given their apparent rationality (or lack thereof) and value sets. That’s the reason why I read this: it’s well-written entertainment I can use to train my ability to predict and phrase said predictions. Plus I like to see theories put to practice.
By the way, I believe the rescue of Bellatrix was around the point in the story that Amanda Knox had gotten to when she made it out of Muggle Azkaban herself.
Really? I understood from the human interest fluff pieces I tried to avoid that she had used her time in Azkaban very well, learning Italian to a high level and catching up on a great deal of high-quality reading. I don’t think Bellatrix would regard their stays, pound for pound, as equivalent.
I think you misunderstood me: by “point in the story she had gotten to” I meant literally the point in the actual story (MoR). It wasn’t some kind of figure of speech about her experience. (I wonder how many other people misunderstood my comment in this way; it’s an interpretation that never occurred to me. I thought people knew she was a MoR reader.)
However, her experience itself was no picnic, fluff pieces notwithstanding.
It’s been mentioned in Author’s Notes. For what it’s worth, I thought gwern’s comment was a non sequitur on first reading.
I took your original post to mean this, and looked for other information about it, and found none.
See here.