I am by no means an expert, but here are a couple of options that come to mind. I came up with most of these by thinking “what kind of emergency are you reasonably likely to run into at some point, and what can you do to mitigate them?”
Learn some measure of first aid, or at least the Heimlich maneuver and CPR.
Keep a Seat belt cutter and window breaker in your glove compartment. And on the subject, there are a bunch of other things that you may want to keep in your car as well.
Have an emergency kit at home, and have a plan for dealing with natural disasters (fire, storms, etc). If you live with anyone, make sure that everyone is on the same page about this.
On the financial side, have an emergency fund. This might not impress your friends, but given how likely financial emergencies (e.g. unexpectedly losing a job) are relative to other emergencies, this is a good thing to plan for nonetheless. I think the standard advice is to have something on the order 3-6 months of income tucked away for a rainy day.
Great suggestion! That said, in light of your first paragraph, I’d like to point out a couple of issues. I came up with most of these by asking the questions “What exactly are you trying to encourage? What exactly are you incentivising? What differences are there between the two, and what would make those difference significant?”
You are trying to encourage prisons to rehabilitate their inmates. If, for a given prisoner, we use p to represent their propensity towards recidivism and a to represent their actual recidivism, rehabilitation is represented by p-a. Of course, we can’t actually measure these values, so we use proxies; anticipated recidivism according to your algorithm and re-conviction rate (we’ll call these p’ and a’, respectively).
With this incentive scheme, our prisons have three incentives: increasing p’-p, increasing p-a, and increasing a-a’. The first and last can lead to some problematic incentives.
To increase p’-p, prisons need to incarcerate prisoners which are less prone to recidivism than predicted. Given that past criminality is an excellent predictor of future criminality, this leads to a perverse incentive towards incarcerating those who were unfairly convicted (wrongly convicted innocents or over-convinced lesser offenders). If said prisons can influence the judges supplying their inmates, this may lead to judges being bribed to aggressively convict edge-cases or even outright innocents, and to convict lesser offenses of crimes more correlated with recidivism. (Counterpoint: We already have this problem, so this perverse incentive might not be making things much worse than they already are.)
To increase a-a’, prisons need to reduce the probability of re-conviction relative to recidivism. At the comically amoral end, this can lead to prisons teaching inmates “how not to get caught.” Even if that doesn’t happen, I can see prisons handing out their lawyer’s business cards to released inmates. “We are invested in making you a contributing member of society. If you are ever in trouble, let us know—we might be able to help you get back on track.” (Counterpoint: Some of these tactics are likely to be too expensive to be worthwhile, even ignoring morality issues.)
Also, since you are incentivising improvement but not disincentivizing regression, prisons who are below-average are encouraged to try high-volatility reforms even if they would yield negative expected improvement. For example, if a reform has a 20% chance of making things much better but a 80% chance of making things equally worse, it is still a good business decision (since the latter consequence does not carry any costs).