The grandparent comment here is very good and I agree with all of it — comparing prison to high school is risible, at best — but that doesn’t mean we should fetishize expression of personal experience above any other kind of comment.
Secondly, you're wrong. "Lived experience" is not the same as "an anecdote." An anecdote is a story. Experience is interrogable. The man sharing his experience is right here on HN. The person who wrote was not repeating a story that he had heard, or describing a single isolated incident.
an·ec·dote
/ˈanəkˌdōt/
noun
a short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person.
Your key word in that definition is "real".
I actually was searching for a response to GP claims about prison not being a deterrent and if nobody had mentioned it would commented it myself.
To add to the arguments: GP even contradicts himself by stating how bad prison is and that you really don't want to be there while claiming it's not a deterrent.
Criticizing that point was absolutely fair and doesn't mean the rest of GP's comment is bad or untrue.
Even if that part is useful though there's no real reason to impugn the integrity of the people the GP references, and the reply does not tell us why we should find those people more likely to be prone to self-rationalization, which it needs to.
So our best theory of behavioral modification states that prisons is not a deterrent for crime, nor is there any evidence for it in the records. All the while prisons are an inhumane and terrible way to treat people. Can we just please abolish prisons.
It would be a contradiction if people only ended up in prison because they wanted to go.
In reality many people commit crimes for other reasons, like lack of food and shelter.
Its much harder to get a job with a criminal record, so many former criminals end up forced back into criminal activities for food and shelter.
This is the part which is a personal attack. You have some time to edit your comment to restate that, if you're up for it. :)
This kind of thing only gets solved one way. And it's not pretty.
