Yeah there aren't many people like that and the people who are like that don't belong in a prison.

Anyways, one of the best ways to make someone "a continued drain on society due to continued criminal activity" is to put them in prison, give them a career-killing record that will follow them forever, and put them in contact with other criminals on a daily basis.

Prison is a self-reinforcing system that is itself the drain on society.

So where do they belong? If you say "mental hospital", what's to stop them from simply leaving? If the answer is anything other than "nothing" how is said mental hospital any different from a prison?

I guess the question is, if not prison, what do you do with the people that prove time and again to be incompatible with society?

Prisons are not places of rehabilitation in the US, and a person who is suffering from a severe mental illness is likely to suffer profound abuse in prison.

Anywhere you hold someone against their will eventually becomes fraught, no matter what the stated purpose of the facility is.

At any rate, it's not necessary to pick a specific answer from the massive pile of alternative approaches tried, theorized, and developed in modern history to say that this one thing that is done in the US right now is clearly not the right answer.

I read that some nordic countries have programs that are more focused on rehabilitation that seem to work relatively well for those who want to atone for their mistakes and be better. In terms of implementations, I believe solutions exist.

The problem IMHO is that there's a deep culture of polarization and punitiveness in the US. Consider for example someone who gets arrested for drug possession. In many parts of the country, it's not at all uncommon for people to think that junkies should rot in jail. Treating it as a public health issue doesn't even cross their minds. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that many people subconsciously think that once a person enters the prison system, they can be discriminated forever as if they were sub-human.

But if as a society, there's never a notion of change/forgiveness, how is one expected to leave the vicious cycle?

When it comes to child development, it's fairly well documented that chronically punitive interventions don't work. This same line of research needs to be more broadly publicized for adults as well. I don't believe there can be change in the penal system unless society can first get over the hollywood idea of "bad guy in jail == happy ending" and realize that in real life, things keep rolling after the movie credits.

> But if as a society, there's never a notion of change/forgiveness, how is one expected to leave the vicious cycle?

People still believe that certain things are irredeemable. As long as one person is allowed to sit around and tout that for one thing, then another person will do it for another thing, so on and so forth. Morals are hazy like that.

What you're asking for is a fundamental societal shift where pretty much everyone drops their baggage at the door. I'm hopeful, but I don't see that coming true.

How would it have worked? Prison isn't about reform in this country, it's about punishment. And there's basically no support once you're out, which just leads to criminals going back to what they were doing before going in because they don't have any other options.

For starters, how about a government infrastructure program that offers former convicts a reliable source of income? Society benefits from both their labor and in theory the fact they aren't committing crimes to feed themselves.

It’s even worse than that. If you weren’t a hardened criminal when you go in, chances are, you will have all the skills to be one when you get out. It’s like vocational training for your only option of criminality when you get out.

Someone who goes to prison for cheating on their taxes or having a baggie of coke comes out with the same scarlet letter of unemployability as someone who goes in for murder.

Prison is literally a factory that creates future crime.

There are some people who are born without empathy or morals, and they will do cruel and evil things just for kicks. I do think that prisons will exist in some capacity basically forever, but I would apply my philosophy as a software engineer to this problem as well:

- Look at other places that have a successful implementation, study how they do it.

- Copy it and adapt it to my use case.

There are prison systems that are more cruel, but there are also prison systems that are LESS cruel and get better results. Either way, we have some holes we need to plug in our own system which seems to be optimized to make the right people money while being as cruel as possible.

However, most prisoners are not psychopaths and our money would be better spent setting up programs to help people escape poverty and have a decent quality of life to make criminal behavior less attractive. A lot of criminal activity emerges as a by-product of poverty. Illegal drugs and all of the crime that goes along with that [0] would be remediated if people were not so desperate to escape poverty. Additionally crimes associated with vagrancy [1] would be remediated.

0: ( Such as territory conflicts leading to violence, selling the illegal drugs on the street, etc. )

1: ( bike theft, sleeping in illegal places, trespassing, drug possession )

This is definitely true. Prison is sometimes justified as "punishment" and sometimes justified as "protection"of the vulnerable. Both approaches have merit and society generally uses both.

However, if you look at the system as a whole, terrible prison conditions are an obstacle to protecting society. As we have seen fit to imprison some people for less than the entire term of their natural life, you will notice that this means we release people. When people who have been abused by a needlessly cruel prison system are released, it is harder for them to re-integrate into society, and much more likely that they will re-offend, perhaps with the assistance of people who they met in prison (often their only resource upon release.)

Unless you are prepared to argue here that substantially all sentences ought to be life sentences (or death sentences) it is thus critical for the project of protecting society that prison is not cruelly abusive. Rest assured that it is still punishment to be locked in a small room! It is altogether unnecessary and counterproductive for you to rot in the small room, to ruin your health with the food, to lose your teeth for lack of basic dental care, to be abused by guards for fun, to be abused by other inmates, or to be raped, but all of this is common. It is especially counterproductive for prisoners to be denied access to means of self-betterment such as reading material, or to have their reading material replaced with rent-a-book tablets charging exorbitant prices, but this too is a trend in some states.

And this is, of course, just a start; there are of course many other inhumane things in US prisons that harm society as a whole, so much so that it is hard to enumerate a meaningful inventory — perhaps you could start with the article linked?

Nor is it in the service of society that prison guards should put a man in a shower and turn on scalding hot water and leave it on until he dies, but it happened to Darren Rainey. Nor is it in the service of protecting society that prison cards should leave a man in a cell, naked, with the floor covered in sewage, but it happened to Trent Taylor, and the guards were afforded qualified immunity.

And most people who are not literally Nazis and have a shred of moral fiber would not say that involuntarily sterilizing women in prison, and lying to them about it and saying they have cancer, is something that protects society, but it was happening in California AS RECENTLY AS 2014 — yes, the year of our lord two thousand and fourteen, that is not a typo. And the next time you start hearing about "private prisons" remember that this was in a state run facility. (Documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoD7VgFl9EI )

Society has to address the topic somehow. For me, it’s not about saving money but there’s also obviously some limit to how much resources society will devote to the topic if an equally effective but much cheaper method is available.

“We’re going to raise your taxes so we can treat prisoners better!” has not been tried as a campaign slogan to my knowledge, but it would poll pretty poorly I’d think.

So I argue that it is a cost benefit analysis, you just have to look in the long term.

To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time taking anyone serious that still uses a euphemism for this.