Well crimes must have consequences, so we should compare different possibilities and see which has more benefits and less drawbacks.

I didn't frame my question as in opposition to your statement. Basically it boils down to "what else do you feel is barbaric?"

Some form of prison is necessary, and it serves three purposes:

- rehabilitation

- deterrence

- protecting society from the criminally inclined

Every society, including the most liberal, have found some type of prison to be necessary. It is not inherently barbaric, and it's the minimally barbaric option when dealing with a murdered for example. Public torture doesn't fulfill all three objectives, especially not the third, and is therefore a non-starter.

Note that this is distinct from claiming support for a specific instance of a prison in a specific country, which may well be barbaric.

Well, I disagree that some form of prison is necessary. Like I said earlier somewhere I'm here, my opinion is probably a very unpopular one. I believe that if we can create a set of laws with no victimless crimes (which are also barbaric) then the world would be better with 2 sets of punishments: fines and corporal punishment, so long as no maiming is allowed in corporal punishment. I believe such a system would be much less barbaric than any system based around incarceration, and I believe incarceration is ineffective as a deterrent, and as rehabilitation. As far as protecting society from the criminally inclined, you're basically saying some people must be removed from society, and I would agree on that, though I think not nearly as many as we think go into prison like that, but many more come out like that, and I can think of a more humane way to remove that element from society than locking them away for the rest of their days, if they're truly beyond rehabilitation.

For the small number of people that are truly beyond rehabilitation (say they have some compulsion to keep murdering people because of some problem with their brain), what do you propose if not some sort of confinement (i.e. prison)?

> Some form of prison is necessary, and it serves three purposes: > - rehabilitation

This is decidedly not true in the US where prison is about retribution.

I was making a normative statement, not a descriptive one (although I didn't communicate that effectively).

Those are the three valid purposes that prison should serve, whether or not that happens to be true for a specific instance of a prison system in a specific country.