[alexpotato]

I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."

I'm not sure how true that is but what I do believe is that the following is 100% true:

- smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison

How do I know this? I've worked with a couple people like this. Some ended up in prison, others almost went to prison and later on went to work in corporate America (no sarcasm intended here).

[qingcharles]

Some people really activate their brains once they get locked up. The things I've seen people construct from literal garbage in prison. Tattoo guns are a popular one. Obviously half the population has a way of making some sort of device analogous to a car cigarette lighter in prison by finding staples, bits of wire, foil etc that they can stick in a 110V outlet to heat up and light their drugs from. Necessity really is the mother of invention.

A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation. Knowing this would happen we'd come up with a way to communicate across the facility. We had these 5x5 grids of letters, no "K", where 11 on the grid was A, 15 was E, 55 was Z etc. They had these touchscreen commissary kiosks where you could order food. The quantity of each item allowed up to 4 digits, e.g. 9999. So that gives you two letters. 1121 = AF for instance. We'd start at the top, Beef Noodles, 1121. Chicken Noodles, 2412 etc and work through the menu. We shared our login IDs with each other. We'd place these huge orders into the cart but never checkout. Then we'd log in to each other's accts from our separate cell blocks multiple times a day, read our messages and write our replies. Got caught eventually, 10 days in the Hole. I FOIA'd their investigation and it was very amusing seeing the report from the facility "Intelligence Dept" trying to decode all the messages.

[nextaccountic]

> A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation.

Are they legally able to prevent inmates from helping the litigation of another? That's insane

The US is not a free society

[qingcharles]

Yes, especially when it is civil rights litigation, e.g. facility conditions. They will do everything within their disposal to interfere with litigation. A lot of county facilities in the USA will retain private counsel, not government lawyers, for these kinds of cases, and it is enormously expensive. I can remember one case where they took a newspaper from a prisoner and he sued, and the jail took it to trial and lost and had to pay not only damages of $15K, but also their legal fees, which were somewhere around $1.5m, but also the plaintiff's counsel, which was another $900K IIRC.

[_DeadFred_]

Don't forget if an inmate starts to look like they are winning all they have to do is change that one inmates conditions and the inmate no longer has standing and the case is dismissed (unless they have permeant damages and they are suing for damages), yet the system is designed for those lawsuits to be the check/balances. It seems like a good system, but in actuality the check/balance is easily negated by those in power.

And the 'change' of the condition is often the inmate getting shipped to a different prison, with the transfer/shipping process having the nick name 'diesel therapy'. So if you do are challenge, you are going to get punished, your safety is going to be put at VERY high risk (you are going to have to fight, and who knows who they lock you up with at night and what might get pulled on you), and you are going to be VERY hungry (meal times/shipping times often accidentally don't work out) you don't stay anywhere long enough to purchase commissary to make up for them not feeding you, etc.

Look at how upset immigration people are now that the Fed loopholes I point out are being made very public in immigration stuff (all the movement between facilities to limit court access). These are things that have happened forever, just no one cared when it was normal inmates.

[mothballed]

I'm aware of a businessman who did high profile pro se case, regarding some alleged white collar business license violations . They moved him to different jails 300 times in a year to sabotage his defense (SDNY, so they had unlimited amount of money to fuck with him). He miraculously still won the case.

[kelseydh]

The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with approximately 541 to 614 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents as of 2022–2026. While representing only 5% of the global population, the US holds roughly 20% of the world's prisoners, totalling over 1.8 million people.

For many crimes, the U.S. loves giving eye watering long sentences for offences that would result in a tenth of the prison time in other countries.

[dnemmers]

I read ‘helping the litigation’ to mean they both may have been involved in the same crime, and they mean to stop collusion after the fact, before trial concludes?

[qingcharles]

Both ways. Mostly it is just helping with the legal process. Rarely is it a multi-plaintiff case as the courts don't like those from prisoners. It causes too many logistical nightmares. How are two plaintiffs to communicate their wishes to each other on how to proceed? How will they both appear in court together if they are in different buildings or even different institutions?

I remember being on one join-plaintiff civil rights case and the government lawyer told the judge they were going to criminally charge me with impersonating a lawyer as I "must have given legal advice to the other plaintiff." The judge asked how they thought the complaint was written. "As I see it, one plaintiff must have pressed one key, then the other plaintiff pressed the next key on the keyboard. That is our belief."

[_DeadFred_]

The feds used to allow you to appeal your sentence forever. I mean if there are problems with a sentence, the government should want to fix it, right?

But then they decided it was too expensive giving convicts access to the courts. So they changed it to I think 7 days. But they decided that was too short.

So the compromise between forever and 7 days? 14 days. If you don't appeal within 14 days you can only appeal on a very narrow scope. Now realize, those 14 days after sentencing you are being transferred from a federal detention center (fed jail) to a prison, either via con-air or prison bus, cross country, staying in various country jails with minimal access to your lawyer or a legal library if you can't afford a lawyer.

The American Justice System is designed to appear like a justice system but to in actuality be non-navigable unless you have expensive paid lawyers working for you. It is very much a multi-teared system. Have you ever tried canceling the WSJ? Imagine if every single step of a Justice system was designed to be as frustrating/stiffling/delaying (when every day counts) as the WSJ canceling process. Oh, you are being transported, and you want access to the law library? Well we can only get you that during lunch hours, so chose if you want to eat. And oh yeah sorry that the morning transfer to the bus was messed up and you happened to miss breakfast. Sure you want to skip lunch? We might ship you again any time and you might miss dinner if we do.

[qingcharles]

Also, certainly for state cases, a lot of appeal routes are not available unless you are actively in prison. Post-conviction relief, and federal habeas corpus are basically only available while you are locked in prison. If you do all your time in pre-trial detention, or your sentence is too short to fully complete your appeal then your conviction is stuck forever, even if you have meritorious claims. For instance, if your lawyer was drunk, high or not a real lawyer, there is no way to appeal that after you're released, you just have to live with the conviction for the rest of your life and all the collateral reduction in civil rights that comes with that until you die.

[FpUser]

>"smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison"

I believe this to be true and some of my former schoolmates who were brilliant IQ wise and got high marks on math and physics still ended up in jails. Some were later able to recover and lead more productive life

[mothballed]

Crime is also just more accepted in "disadvantaged locales."

Drinking openly is illegal in most of Mexico and the USA. If the area is run down and the shops are broken I will crack open a beer on the street without a second thought. I wouldn't think of doing it openly in some yuppie neighborhood where some Karen will rat your ass out in 5 minutes.

[shmeeed]

Aka the Broken Window Theory.

[mothballed]

Sort of yeah, but in this case "broken windows" are used to determine the culture of an area, even if you fixed the "broken windows" I would use some other clues. I think the broken window theory relies on the idea if you fixed the broken windows crime would change, which I don't think is necessarily true.

[Illniyar]

The extra line supposes that being smart reduces the chances of getting caught.

Which from what I gather isn't very true - being smart can often lead to over confidence and making mistakes, and also a lot of crime is not premeditated.

[cjbgkagh]

The average IQ of a prisoner is 90-95 which is a long way from 100.

[Enginerrrd]

Prison IQ is a very different distribution. As I recall, the top 2% IQ of the general population makes up something like 20% of the prison population. You also have quite a few at the other end.

The gifted are more over represented in prison then black males, however, most of those gifted are themselves minorities.

[cjbgkagh]

I’ll have to see some evidence on that, in my search it’s basically a normal bell curve shifted 8 pts down. The idea that 130+ IQ individuals make up 1/5th of the prison population does not pass the sniff test, that would be a crazy statistical aberration. In my search I found reports that 130+ IQ individuals only represent less than 0.4% of the prison population.

[LAC-Tech]

Is the average IQ of the US still 100?

[cjbgkagh]

Roughly yes, it is declining. The Flynn effect was just smart people having kids later which has now normalized and reversed (with smart people having fewer kids).

[throwawaymobule]

Isn't it always 100, by definition?

[LAC-Tech]

I dont think IQ is based on american adults.

[throwawaymobule]

It's based on whatever population you're testing, IIRC.

[red-iron-pine]

isn't the point that 100 is roughly the average? or 100 at the year they made the test, anyway.

[red-iron-pine]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences

each ACE you experience ups the likelihood of all sorts of negative outcomes, with crime and addiction being very common.

strong linkages to bad health outcomes, too.

[mothballed]

I wonder if there are any benefits of the adaptations made by those with higher ACE scores. Surely the adaptations we've evolved to make can't be entirely maladaptive.

Here's one

   Emotional abuse: verbal threats, swearing at, insulting, or humiliating a child.[1][3]

I'm trying to imagine what someone would be like if they reached 18 without ever having been "sworn at, insulted, or humiliated." Given this is one of the gentlest ways of correcting anti-social behavior, I can only imagine such person would be a maladapted nightmare.

[red-iron-pine]

resilience is talked about in the wiki article.

there are strategies that can be taught to increase resilience, and sometimes that may include some tough love.

but there are differences between some tough love to build character vs. years of emotional and verbal abuse. one of the big kids calling you a loser on the playground is not ACE; your mom telling you're worthless and she hates you and you should have never been born for most of your childhood is.

put another way, 8 weeks of military boot camp teaches you to handle some of the stresses you might encounter; it builds resilience. but 18 years of it would create someone deeply screwed up.

[coldtea]

>I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."

This includes white collar crime and all kinds of non-violent crimes though.

Is it the same for the violent crime subset?

[cortesoft]

Hmm, what would make you assume perpetrators of violent crimes would have a different IQ level than other crimes?

My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.

[9x39]

IQ is positively correlated with impulse control.

Example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

[alphawhisky]

IQ is negatively correlated with reactive violence, but positively correlated with premeditated violence, per the evolution of our species. Despite our greater emotional regulation and lack of reasonable contextual circumstances to support the need for violence, we're still killing people all the time just like our ancestors.

[coldtea]

>Hmm, what would make you assume perpetrators of violent crimes would have a different IQ level than other crimes?

For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.

That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.

Besides several studies have found the general correlation.

>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.

Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.

Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.

[alphawhisky]

Don't forget indirect violence, like electing politicians that use your tax money to blow up kids.

[conradev]

My initial instinct would be that the higher IQ someone is, the better they are able to do most things including control their impulses.

[wat10000]

Higher IQ would correlate with an increased ability to predict the consequences of one’s actions. “If I stab this person I will go to prison” versus “if I stab this person everyone will think I’m great because that person sucks.”

[Melatonic]

And possibly also getting away with hiding the consequences of one's actions

[jcgrillo]

Yes. The biasing function is that (mostly) only the less smart ones get exposed and caught.