By having it promote positive improvement and rehabilitation rather than purely punishment.
Here is what a humane prison looks like:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35813470 http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison
By treating prisoners humanely, a society is showing how it treats those who are at the bottom rungs of it. It is a reflection on the society itself.
And yet, they don't make the jump to the idea that maybe people shouldn't be living in worse conditions.
It's a long chain of logic, but fractional reserve banking, at the levels we're seeing, prevents it.
Most of our money supply is created through debt. As a result, housing is bought through debt rather than owned. The competition for better homes drives prices astronomical. The only way to actually get affordable housing is to either move people where there is no competition (e.g. desert of Arizona), or to reduce reserve limits.
Fractional reserve banking generates trillions for big banks, and the electorate doesn't get it. It's not going away.
What can be addressed is the concept of affordable housing. Housing, to a certain degree follows a pretty tight supply and demand curve; put simply if you want affordable housing, pressure your local government to green light permits to build affordable housing[2].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_theory_of_money [2]http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-cities-see-apartment-rents-f...
So to handle twice the population, we could either free up ~2,000 square metres, or re-develop the entire road two have twice the density, leading to the loss of most of the single dwelling houses and private gardens.
It's not so much that low density is bad, as that not having high density takes choice away once there's no more space and you have to start increasing density anyway, often in all kinds of suboptimal ways.
The main reason I'm anti high density areas is it's unhealthy: people are stressed, there's no sense of community, commerce space is scarce and extremely expensive to rent so { banks, supermarkets, estate agents } take all of them making any new commercial idea almost impossible to put through thus less employment too. I don't know much about this though, it's just my thoughts after living in very different areas and cities and how I feel about it.
Because a lot of people want to keep relatively untouched nature too.
> people are stressed
I don't see any evidence that this is caused by high density living.
> there's no sense of community
Most suburban areas, in my experience, have little sense of community. Maybe small villages are different, but in the suburban areas I've lived, at most I knew my immediate neighbours. People often tend to drive too and from the places where they are involved in community activities. If anything, I feel more connected to communities that form separate from the residential areas, and there tend to be more of them in high density city centres.
> commerce space is scarce
Is it? Near me, the densest areas have plenty of available commercial units cheaply available.
More importantly: Building densely allow for far more flexibility with the rest of the space.
You ever asked us?
>there's no sense of community
Says who? Ronald Reagan?
>commerce space is scarce and extremely expensive to rent so { banks, supermarkets, estate agents } take all of them making any new commercial idea almost impossible to put through thus less employment too
I guess I'll go tell all the shops and such in Davis Square that they don't exist.
We as society wants that certain people do not live among us. But that does not imply they have to live in worst condition. So the solution, instead of prision have contained societies. Both private and public run. So then going to prision would mean relocating to one of the contained societies [1], completely upto the the "offender". In these societies they will have their own system of governence.
[1] They would also would be allowed to move to another country.
If those countries are having them, that is. In medieval times banishment for the most part was equivalent to death (or turning to a life of crime as a bandit).
While a nice idea in theory, how would a contained society actually work? Prisons already are miniature societies (just generally not very humanely run ones). It'd still be a prison, albeit a larger one, wouldn't it? Worst case it'd be something like Manhattan in Escape from New York.
I'm not saying it couldn't work but it's not an easy thing to get right.
If a society is understanding enough to have CS, it safe to expect they would also not use CS for non-violent crimes.
So now what would CS for violent criminals with no skill look like ? Ok so this would be a prision/rehabilitation-center in traditional sense but with a twist that they can also leave provided the country have them.
What you describe - some of the prisons of the "old days" also produced ex-offenders that were seriously mentally ill. That is very easily the effect of having solitary of that sort for so many years. Even if you do wind up being able to mentally withstand the place, you get released with no knowledge of what has happened - which happens now, actually.
We've certainly had prisons before 1829 elsewhere in the world.
Allowing prisoners to interact face to face in open and closed environments is going to introduce these extra complexities of prisoners "poisoning" other prisoners.