School to prison pipelines

Why did this surprise people?

Prisons are full of — especially now — a wide slice of people. While on average research shows inmate IQs to be lower than non-incarcerated, this doesn’t mean much.

There’s a very good chance that if I’d stayed in North Florida I’d be in prison now. Would that somehow have made me dumber?

Who makes it to prison is more about socioeconomic opportunities than outright intelligence and that is becoming more true in our society, not less so.

Combine that with the fact that many who make it to the Ivy League are quite dull intellectually (legacy admissions, those who know the textbooks but nothing else, etc.) and these results aren’t really surprising.