Not saying the current system is in any way an optimal solution or even close to it, but one thing it does provide is a lot of time for those who have acted without empathy to reflect on their misdeeds.

It’s also not about rehabilitation, it’s about penance but that rarely materializes.

Once you go to prison you learn how to be a better criminal. You can’t get a job because of your record. Far too easy to turn back to crime and land right back inside.

It’s cruel. It has nothing to do with reflection. Inhumane at best.

This guy killed someone. He mentions it so briefly it's as though he thinks it's a minor detail. That person he killed was a real human. They were someone's kid, someone's sibling, someone's parent perhaps, someone's friend.

He also seems to behave poorly in prison, still, after 30 years. He flippantly notes a "riot" as though it was something that happened to him. He brags about his abs. I'm not a psychologist but this guy reads like a stock standard psychopath. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

For many people (including myself), it's not about rehab, it's not about penance, it's about keeping someone like this away from everyone else.

I would put harm prevention above penance. Penance is just a tool that promotes caring, ideally before said harms become permanent.

What we ultimately want is that people who don't murder. Also, as someone noted, you probably reading too much into it.

You just state it more concisely :)

Prison isn't something we should want in a society, but actively reduce, even if we never realistically achieve it.

Believe it or not, a society with 300 million plus people can do many things at once.

Human resources aren't really fungible. Big brains spent on improving education of children can't really be reallocated to spend on cancer research or other part of medical science, not without extensive training at least.

So too we can spend on psychological, social services, and welfare which is what we probably need to reduce crime and overall human suffering to a more manageable level. Hopefully, the improvement to societal health means more resources are available that can be then reallocated to tackle the remainder of human caused suffering.

It's flat wrong.

Of course he could be a psychopath. Or who knows. I wouldn't presume anything. But I wouldn't be so righteous feeling good about myself for not doing what he did. We're all lucky we didn't have it so bad, be it nature or nurture, or both.

For all we know, he was in the wrong hood at the wrong time, and had to adapt to "prison life" because that is the culture that is foist upon him.

I'm not saying he's not a psychopath, but that's not an evidence-based assertion here.

This isn't a strong assertion and hence doesn't need a water tight argument or strong evidence. It notes I'm not an expert in the field, and that I'm basing the judgement on the writing only. Not everything is an academic paper or a judgement from a jury.

That being said, read the section on "core traits" in that link and read the article again. Lack of remorse... arrogance (the abs section?) and impulsive behavior (he murdered someone and is in and out of the hole for 30 years....).

https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-93-number-5/juris....

[1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

[1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

That report is on the first page results of private vs public prisons. I encourage everyone to go volunteer and talk to inmates.

Look at unicore. Total scam.

And you would instead promote.. what? 'Rehabilition'? These arguments always show an absurd amount of empathy for the criminal, and little-to-none for the victims and (statistically extremely likely) future victims.

There is a large number of people that simply cannot function in society. If they aren't violent, cool: I have no problem with anyone living how they like. If they are violent, then they need to be removed from potential victims.

> the experience of other societies which incarcerate a much, much smaller part of the population indicates that most people in USA prisons are not there because of this reason.

This does not track. People like to point to Norway as a model for rehabilition and low incarceration rates, while completely ignoring the fact that their crime rate is one of the lowest on the planet.

So, yes, if your crime rate (and anti-sociality) is near zero, I would expect the incarceration rate to be much lower, as well.

Out of large countries except USA the ones with the highest incarceration rate are Brazil, Turkey and Russia, which definitely do not have "crime rate (and anti-sociality) near zero" but have literally twice as few per capita incarcerated people than USA, and all the moderate-but-still-high-crime countries like Morocco or Mexico or Malaysia have three times smaller incarceration rates than USA.

Unless you can make a good argument why USA has a twice larger proportion of people that simply cannot function in society than the abovementioned countries, I'll repeat my assertion that most people in USA prisons are not there because of this reason.

There's no objective measures showing that private prisons are somehow more 'inhumane' than government-run facilities.

> That report is on the first page results of private vs public prisons

It is, so there's no excuse to not have some actual data to go by, compared to anecdotal experiences.

> Look at unicore. Total scam.

UNICOR is ran by the BOP. It has nothing to do with private vs public prisons.

Not to mention all the private services revolving around public prisons.

In contrast, this is:

- Half of what the Car Wash Illuminati makes [2]

- About the same as the Evil Door Handle Lobby [3]

- Only 80% of the Portable Fire Extinguisher Cartel [4]

- Only 4% of the Yoga Tourism Cabal [5]

This is just nonsense.

[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html

[2] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-car-w...

[3] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/door-han...

[4] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/portable...

[5] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/yoga-tou...

The real issue is the concept of imprisonment ought be about putting people who truly can not be trusted to be "at large". Prison shouldn't be a punishment. There are other alternatives.

possibly, but the issue is not cost conservation; the problem is that there are shareholders who benefit the more people are sent to prison. This creates perverse incentives (lobbying for stricter/longer sentencing, bribing officials, etc.).

Have you heard of the "Kids For Cash" scandal? Private prisons actively try to get more people incarcerated by bribing judges. The judges are complicit too, but the private prisons are absolutely trying to "funnel them into their pocket books"

Any system with any amount of scale will have bad actors. It’s one very bad data point, but certainly not enough evidence that the whole system is corrupt

There’s a lot of hyperbole and incentives for the narrative to sound better than it is.

Unfortunately I have experience from a family member. See it for yourself if this is an issue you care about.

I've been the victim of a range of crimes over my life including assault and robbery.

I particularly remember the one case where I was robbed from a studio apartment while I was sleeping. I was, obviously, quite rattled. I remember looking for other stories of this happening to people and was surprised how many people viewed being robbed as an assault on their dignity and expressed incredible desire for revenge. I just couldn't muster these same feelings.

While my day was ruined by the evening I could already feel my life coming back together: the lock had been changed, I cancelled all my credit cards, has a replacement license on it's way to me, and all in all was just out about $20 that had been in my wallet.

I had a realization then that while my life was already coming back together the life of the person who robbed me was perpetually in the state of chaos that I had felt that morning. I high risk, low reward robbery like that is typically for drug money, and undoubtedly whatever fix that robber had gotten for my $20 was long faded and they were back putting themselves at risk.

The key insight that hit me was that that momentary break in my sense of security that morning, that's what the person who robbed me constantly lives in. That person goes to bed with the same sense of insecurity I woke up in. But my security is only disrupted on these rare occasions where our lives our inverted, but my default is comfort and theirs is perpetually in that state baring that brief moment where they have enough money for that next fix.

I earnestly felt no need for any vengeance as any desire for vengeance was already dealt out by reality. What more punishment could I wish on someone than for them to wake up every morning feeling the same as I did for just that one.

The guys who attacked me don’t live a life of chaos. It’s a job for them and the market is the most lucrative it has ever been.

It’s difficult to hear about that and not have some pity for those kids- yeah they got my phone, but I got to go home to my wife and kid and a high paying tech job.

At the same time, I have a distant relative who will spend the rest of his life in jail for committing a serial string of crimes without apparent remorse over many years. Family members who know him describe him as “scary” and a “psychopath” - but he was also kidnapped and abused as a child. Are those things unrelated? Are some people just evil?

I can have sympathy for the boys who are drafted into drug work, age 11, and I can personally want the legal systems’ incentives to change while ALSO understanding that some people will choose to be rotten nearly every time. I’m not making an argument for the “carceral state” or one in support of the US’ present prison system. Just making clear my observation that far from everyone is a “victim” of the system and acting like they are hurts the real victims on both sides.

As a society we give parents wide latitude in how they raise their kids. And I suspect most people don’t even realize how their parenting decisions might affect their kids down the line.

I think that view has the risk of being damaging. In particular parents or partners are often misattributed as the “cause”.

1: It leads to victimisation, where people blame their environment rather than fix themselves. We all can find traumatic childhood incidents if we look for them (“repressed” memories can fill in if you didn’t actually have anything obviously traumatic happen).

2: If you suspect trauma and then wonder “what did the parents do”, that is rather unpleasant for the majority of loving parents that didn’t abuse their children whatsoever. All parents make honest mistakes, and any good parent has plenty of unexpunged guilt, usually for no good reason. Also we can be traumatised for entirely mundane events in our lives - where nobody is actually to blame for evil, yet we often look for blame in others.

3: we can’t change our past, so acceptance of what happened is important. Whether we see ourselves as helpless victims or capable actors is critical I think. Creatinig a narrative of victims is unhealthy, in my experience. One of the worst abuses I have seen, was professionals getting a bunch of troubled teenagers together, letting them talk about their trauma together, and then sending them home. Normalising abuse, and it was extremely damaging to the sensitive, empathetic teens in the group.

4: There are great parents that end up with fucked-up kids, for reasons beyond their control.

I am concentrating on parents here, because although the people I know with your attitude might say they think about the wider picture, often the first thought I see from them is assuming the parents caused the problem - judgy people are very damaging IMHO. I am definitely not accusing you - but I am accusing others I see with an similar attitude. Disclaimer: not a parent, just old enough to have had the opportunity to learn a little, and trying to be wise enough to know how innocently we can all make mistakes.

We should take steps to prevent it, and the discussions are useful, but once someone is provably willing and capable of committing violent offenses, they have forfeited most forms of sympathy.

Probably it is part genetic and part environmental, just like most other human traits.

By the way, the fact that many criminals were abused in childhood has many possible explanations, and it is not obvious which one of them is correct. For example:

* Maybe child abuse causes people to become criminals.

* Maybe there is much more child abuse than we imagine, so a majority of criminals was abused, but also a majority of non-criminals was abused.

* Psychopathy is heritable, which means that most psychopaths also had a psychopath parent, and that is why they were abused.

A simple robbery can quickly end-up more tragic. I would like that person to be put in jail until it develops the skills and behaviour fit for society. The time based sentence is wrong. There is no point to let someone free if that person gets even worse in prison. The sentence should include time based punishment and mandatory rehabilitation. What's the point of catching criminals if rehabilitation is not achieved? It is just vengence?

Citation please? From my understanding, there are typically a wide swath of reasons people commit crimes, but I have never seen a stat suggesting that jail is preferable to a stupid job.

Sometimes jail time is even priced in already, usually in financial crimes but that's a different story.

My point is that people should not be left out of prison until they prove themselves worthy to live in a free society.

If you believe that there are too many people already the death penalty for j-walking isn't a punishment it's a policy to keep the rest of us alive past 2100.

Furthermore, you may have gotten off with a day of inconvenience, but consider those victims that have permanent scars from their encounters with those lacking empathy. Victims of sexual assault, those suffering permanent injury, and the relatives of prematurely deceased victims will never be the same. These are not hypotheticals (e.g., just the stats on sexual violence against women are appalling). All we can do as a society for such individuals is do our best to prevent some percentage of future similar acts. A better path for reformation may be part of that, but I'm not sure squeezing victims for more empathy gets us very far.

Maybe for some, but for many it’s a job or hobby. Some actually enjoy it. I grew up in a rough neighborhood and know people bragging about robbing just for the thrill of it.

In my case, I have pets and a young child living with me. The dogs may get over the violated sense of safety quite easily, but my little girl likely wouldn’t. It’s imperative to her healthy development that I be able to provide her a safe, secure place to live that also feels safe and secure.

Call me selfish but that overrides my concerns for the chaotic state of other peoples’ lives: their problems do not entitle them to harm my family.

> high risk, low reward robbery like that is typically for drug money

You found yourself in that state of chaos for reasons entirely outside your control. The robber freely chose to take the first hit of the drug that led to the addiction that led to the life of crime.

Whether someone who committed a crime should be empathetic depends on the nature and seriousness of the crime. The vast majority of crimes are non-confrontational, people do not naturally want to get into a position where they have to be violent. It's often when a situation is forced that violence happens.

I've had my car broken into multiple times, a common crime. Each time they took some coins and left all the stuff in the glove box on the seats. Each time no damage was done which I'm grateful for (I suspect it was the same person). I have empathy for that person, they were willing to risk breaking into my car for some coins. To imagine myself doing that, I'd have to be pretty desperate, I wouldn't own a car that's for sure. Why would this person empathise with me? I'm effectively privileged compared to them, If I was in their shoes I sure wouldn't empathise with me. "Criminals" do not lack empathy in an absolute sense, they are just in a different position to you and I. The majority of people who commit crimes do not seek it out, it's a means to an end for them, a sign of an issue with society, economy, or inequality.

Most of us have broken multiple laws without being aware of it (or casually aware of it) - the idea of separating citizenry between "criminals" and "non-criminal victims" is too binary, as root comment mentioned.

Is it punishment? If so, then there are much more effective and cheaper ways we could punish people. Is it rehabilitation? If so, how does being locked into a room with a bunch of other criminals rehabilitate someone? Is it removing criminals from society altogether? In that case, there's a far more efficient way to do that.

Because prisons don't have a clear role, they end up being a weird and ineffective mix that achieves virtually nothing.

The purpose of prisons is to remove people from society altogether, yes. They do accomplish this. Your complaint on that point is that they don't do this efficiently (compared to what, killing the prisoners instead?)

1) Segregation. Taking dangerous individuals and putting them in a separate area away from society.

2) Rehabilitation. Changing the behavior of these individuals to avoid recidivism.

3) Retribution. Just making these people miserable because it people outside prison feel good knowing the people in prison are having a bad time.

The US penal system is designed principally around (1) and (3) and pays lip service to (2).

> The court, in determining the particular sentence to be imposed, shall consider ...

> (2) the need for the sentence imposed—

> (A) to reflect the seriousness of the offense, to promote respect for the law, and to provide just punishment for the offense;

> (B) to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct;

> (C) to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant; and

> (D) to provide the defendant with needed educational or vocational training, medical care, or other correctional treatment in the most effective manner;

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3553

"recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation."

In contrast, serving sentence in prison may change their personality.

So as I see it: it's revenge + lesson to people outside, to not commit crime.

I'm not endorsing this practice, just stating how I think deterrence is alleged to work.

I think that is the innocent opinion.

If it were for deterrence, then it would need to effectively deter better than it does. It does deter some people, but perhaps not others (especially in the US with its extremely high incarceration rate). And do life sentences effectively deter? It is possible to measure deterrence scientifically, because there is variation.

Also for it to properly deter, many of us would need to experience it first. From the outside we “know” it is horrible, but experiencing it is the only way to bellyfeel just how horrible. And what about the people who like the scene, the routine, and zero responsibilities?

How many people must be deterred it a balancing act. If jaywalking is punished by death, it will deter most people, but it is not adequate to the crime. And even death is not enough to deter absolutely everyone. One has to find the right balance.

Experiencing it first hand is not needed at all in my opinion. Per the above, it just has to work "well enough", and it usually does, even in the US.

Now part of this group should be able to reintegrate. If they are given a reasonable chance, but it feels that entire other part of system is build on this never happening.

Worse still it's burned to a crisp the day after you touch the stove. Is my hand a blackened stump because of the stove? Maybe? Who can say for sure.

My ideal would be that when you commit a crime the justice system finds you guilty or innocent extremely quickly and if prison time is the punishment you get in prison quickly, get out quickly and once done with that the slate is clean. I honestly think that would be more of a deterrent then the status quo.

I don't agree with this part. If someone was convicted of embezzlement on three separate occasions, and served a year in jail each time, would that be someone you'd be willing to hire as your accountant?

The 13th*

source? Specifically, the claim that it's "mostly" money.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/why-private-prisons-geo-grou...

Well, it seems I need to brush up on some reading then.

"recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation."

Do you reject the entire concept of punishment?

There are dangerous individuals that need to be removed from society, and when they're not, they hurt and kill those around them. If there is a more efficient and effective way to do this, that would be great. But it's hard to have this discussion when people pretend these things aren't important functions that need to be addressed in some way.

[1] https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/stalking-murder-...

And what do we do to try to change those people so that they don’t do it again when they are released?

I personally think we should provide more productive activities for prisoners, so that it is not necessarily the end of their lives or contributions to society. But that is so ripe for abuse that it's useless to even start the discussion.

[1] https://harvardpolitics.com/recidivism-american-progress/

A more insidious problem is that there are some guys who aren't as dangerous as killers/rapists, but who are nuisance to others (e.g. multi-recidivist non violent theft). Putting them away for years doesn't seem like a fair solution.

The idea that their entire livelihood could be taken from them doesn't cross their mind

The cost of living in a low-trust environment is orders of magnitude greater than the value of the items stolen. Severe penalties for persistent defection against society are absolutely warranted.

Absolutely!

A) Imprison every stalker for life or kill them

B) Focus on rehabilitation and prevention. E.g. relocate the stalker to another city, monitor their movements etc.

A) That's disproportionate.

B) This requires an extensive police state.

Much more simply: evaluate each crime based on the severity, likelihood of re-offense, and apply a sentence commensurate with the crime. We could make lots of efforts to make this a fair and impartial process. I wonder what we could name that?

If anything it's the contrary.

I don't understand what this is supposed to be a case of. Are you suggesting that if he weren't let out on parole and had served his full sentence that he wouldn't have murdered the woman, or that all people who commit crimes should be given a choice between a life sentence or execution to prevent recidivism?

And do we make this decision without reference to the statistics, e.g. how many people were released from prison for assaulting a woman failed to go on to murder that same woman? I suspect the proportion would be very high. So is it worth it to imprison or execute any number of offenders who would not go on to commit even worse crimes if it saves just one woman from being killed? Have we looked up the number of released felons who have saved lives, have raised well-adjusted, productive children, have contributed to the world? Are we sure that this number is vastly lower than the number that have gone on to murder women? Could we even boost this number by giving prisoners education and safety, and making sure they can find employment after release, or is that a more onerous prospect than paying $50K/year to keep them caged eternally?

In fact, seeing as most women and children are murdered by their (male) loved ones, have we compared the likelihood of a man without a record to murder their partner to men who have a record of abuse? It may not be low enough to justify not imprisoning all men indefinitely, especially if citing a single murdered woman constitutes an argument.

> If there is a more efficient and effective way to do this, that would be great.

It's not effective at all, we have the worst violent crime rates in the developed world.

No need to suspect, or try to apply universal statistical arguments that _might_ be the case. This has been well studied, and recidivism rates for violent criminals are _extremely_ high, and incarceration is an effective strategy for preventing crime.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the penal system, but your speculation about its total inefficacy is incorrect. If you are interested in learning more, I found the book "Criminal Injustice" enlightening:

https://www.amazon.com/Criminal-Justice-Decarceration-Depoli...

For less of a commitment, the author has done many interviews. Just search podcasts for his name.

There are many societies around the world with much lower incarceration rates, much milder penalties, less recidivism, and much lower overall amounts of crime. Shouldn’t we be investigating what they are doing right and trying to copy it, instead of doubling down on our current methods which seem to be extremely (monetarily and socially) expensive failures?

Or do you think Americans are just on average inherently defective compared to people who live in other developed countries?

I think you may have been being sarcastic with your last comment on Americans being defective, but it may not actually be that far from the truth, and I'm American. I'm sure we could copy some strategies and be so much better at everything like the extremely developed Europeans across the pond, but the American society and certain features that are rotting from within has a lot to do with it.

Band-aids are nice though and I see no harm in using them.

Yes, if the serial woman abuser was in prison where he belonged, he would not have been able to commit murder. Putting violent criminals in jail saves lives.

https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/justice-studies/blog/diffe...

IMO prisons serve the functions of deterrence and rehabilitation - although not well - but they also serve to keep the public happy.

We put criminals in prison to sate the public’s need to see justice done. Even if we had the perfect rehabilitation regime that would just “cure” criminals, I think putting it into practice would be an uphill battle if it didn’t entail doing some kind of serious harm to the convicted.

People want revenge. Prison is a controlled method of providing that.

Those are legitimate and valid goals. However it seems in many cases we only succeed in the third. Criminal activity in prisons is rampant and rehabilitation more often than not fails.

The usual complaint about rehabilitation methods seems to be that they compromise the deterrence or retribution aspects.

I think you are confusing "this system is bad at achieving its goals" and "this system has other goals". The goals of the prison system are really hard. Rehabilitating people is really hard.

"recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation"

(A) to reflect the seriousness of the offense, to promote respect for the law, and to provide just punishment for the offense; (B) to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct; (C) to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant; and (D) to provide the defendant with needed educational or vocational training, medical care, or other correctional treatment in the most effective manner;

D sounds a lot like rehabilitation to me.

Funny you care enough to post false information to shape a narrative of your choosing but not enough to educate yourself on the subject.

I think that was uncalled for. I am not “posting false information to shape a narrative”. I was wrong about my understanding of the statute because as you pointed out my understanding of “sentencing” was incorrect.

You might take “you’re right” with a little more grace.

(You also might look into state systems. Texas runs the second largest prison system in the US. They explicitly cite rehabilitation as a role for prisons.)

You then never said I was correct, you said 'I’ll take your word for it' which can have implied subtext and connotation. I responded there was no need to 'take my word' when it comes to the facts and what the law says, and that if you want to stake out a non-factual position instead of 'taking my word' maybe educate yourself on the issue that you felt strongly enough about to post false information about multiple times.

I'm sorry but 'I'll take your word' is not even close to saying 'you're right'.

Even in the above, you try to redirect to Texas, when the Feds have established via constitutional challenges and studies that 'imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation'. Who do you think has delved into the issue deeper? The Feds or Texas? Why do you keep pushing that prison is rehabilitative when you have 1. nothing to back your position 2. made assertions relating to it that are PROVEN not factual? 3. You present nothing to disprove the Federal Judicial System's position that it is not rehabilitative? Why do you keep pushing a false narrative? If the Federal Judicial System declares imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation you have a higher bar than 'your personal feelings' (which I apologize for hurting) that your personal opinion countermans the entire Federal justice system's position, along with Congresses' position and the Congressional committees that do extensive research in writing the statutes.

In cases where someone is wronged, they want to see the perpetrator punished and feel like they are getting what they deserve. It's not enough to have the perpetrator punished quietly. The victim wants to know it. And they want to feel as though it matches or surpasses their suffering. Eye for an eye.

Prison would ideally do three things:

1. Act as a punishment and by extension as a deterrent to people who have functioning impulse control, but might otherwise choose to commit crimes, and to deter people who have committed crimes from committing more crimes after their sentence.

2. Segregate from the rest of society people who have harmed others through criminal acts so they can't continue to harm the public during their incarceration.

3. Rehabilitate people by addressing mental illness and unhealthy modes of thinking to reduce the chance that they will re-offend after their period of incarceration is over.

In the US, at least, I think the system does a decent job of the first one, to the point that prisons are full of people who are mentally ill, drug-addicted, or just have such terrible impulse control that the idea of avoiding punishment never figures into their actions. I don't think prisons need to be horrible or sentences long in order to serve as a a deterrent, the idea of loss of freedom is enough to deter anyone who can reasonably be deterred.

The second one is working OK, too, but it's terrible; people who are locked up somewhere are not out committing crimes, so crime goes down. So we give longer and longer sentences for smaller and smaller crimes, and it 'works', in the same sense that letting people starve to death reduces hunger.

Finally, there's rehabilitation; on a scale of 0 to 100, we rate a -100. We could not reasonably get any worse at this. As you mentioned, spending years locked in a cage with other criminals just makes people better criminals. If you wanted to design a system that maximized recidivism, you could do little better than the US prison system. Prison makes people harder, more violent and more ruthless, and/or breaks them psychologically. People join criminal gangs, which they remain in after they leave prison, and beyond that it provides an opportunity to make contacts and generally 'network' to further a criminal career. Little to no attempt is made to identify or treat existing mental illness, which is of course exacerbated by the conditions in prison. So we eventually let these people go, and they re-offend, which takes us back to the second purpose, in a feedback loop.

It's a huge mess. And the sad thing is, it's a problem that could be solved, but it would be expensive and politicians don't want to be seen as 'soft on criminals, so we just keep doing more and more of the same thing and it keeps costing us money and lives.

Sure you could! Would you like some suggestions?

Try adding classes on topics like lockpicking and marksmanship to the prison vocational programs.

Make it illegal for any business to hire ex-convicts for any position whatsoever.

Provide inmates with easy access to regulated amounts of prescription painkillers and other addictive drugs. Make it illegal for pharmacies to sell these to ex-cons.

Formalize the prison gang system, and make regular calls to one's gang leader a condition of parole.

I can probably come up with more if you'd like; once you give up on pretending it's not intentional, there's a lot that can be 'improved' here.

Some people can't function in society. What do you do with them?

So if this was the strategy of the U.S until about 2010 I suppose it would have been morally justifiable as an act of self-preservation to kill anyone that saw you smoking pot - assuming of course that there is such a thing as personal rights and people had the right to smoke pot, but the government prevented them from doing so.

If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable.

You should be aware that drug use is not affecting only you. You also fund a criminal enterprise. If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism). As far as I'm concerned all drugs should be legal and served in hospitals unpon request at reasonable prices or free for those who cannot afford them.

If you have a right to smoke pot then you should not have to rehabilitate yourself, just as you should not have to love Big Brother or any other number of things.

>If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism).

here I'm wondering if you are using 'you' to refer to people in general or to me? Either way it's sort of silly, hardly anybody is going to say I will do drugs after my political activism to make doing drugs legal succeeds! If it's to me I don't smoke pot, but I do believe people have the right to do it.

So if you are going to be thrown in prison on an indefinite sentence for something you have the right to do then I would advocate extreme violence for anyone that was in danger of being arrested for smoking pot.

In the end your indefinite time until rehabilitation proposal is more extreme than the current American system.

>As far as I'm concerned....

reading your last paragraph I get the feeling your view of 'drugs' is they are all somehow the same as heroin?

Well, if you have that right into law then I don't understand why you think you risk going to jail.

As far as I am concerned I believe people should be allowed to take any drug they want and even commit assisted suicide for any reason they want (as long as they are sane). After all we own our body and the gov should only protect us from abuse from others(i.e misleading advertising like they did with the tabacco).

That being said I believe in indefinite time until rehabilitation. If the law is wrong we should work to fix it instead to bend it at the expense of so many especially for crimes that lead to violent/tragic outcomes.

I also think people should own the effects of their choices. Buying from criminal or terrorist organisations does lead to tragic situations for many people regardless of the product you buy. Being ignorant shouldn't absolve you of guilt.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/5-charts-show-mandator...

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/end-...

I goggled this: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

I think it's kind of interesting. The people one might concerned about are probably: "Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses" -> 3.2% of prisoners. "Robbery" -> 2.8% ...

I think the first question is what % of all prisoners should probably not be there in the first place and how do you deal with the root causes of them getting there. Then we can worry about when we let them out.

The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at. Without them, we'd just have judges sentencing white snorters to probation and putting black smokers under the jail on their own discretion, and we'd need statistics that we wouldn't be given access to in order to make a case. It's better when racism is out in the open rather than buried in a judge's latitude.

> The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at.

So you're saying the system is racist and we're seeing it in the value of mandatory minimums, therefore we should aim for more mandatory minimums to even out the racism? Do you believe the same thing when it comes to police shooting black men, i.e. that more white men should also get shot in order to live in a world that's more fair? Therefore making it a "good thing" that people get shot at all?

How could this be done in practice?

Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening? I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense?

Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation? Inflation is higher, more people are addicted to things, housing insecurity is rising.

Most metropolitan areas. Seattle [1][2] and Minneapolis [3] have both established public policies of not responding to, citing, or arresting for a wide range of offenses.

> I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense?

Minneapolis has reduced the number of police officers, through various means, by 30%. [4]

> Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation?

Because we have multiple studies proving a causal relationship. [5][6]

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sea...

[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-police-bellevue-oth...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...

[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-supreme-cou...

[5] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12142

[6] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/426877

Crime rates have multiple causes to them, many go years back.

Maybe we should try to address the root causes instead of locking up more people? We have tough times economically, many reasons for people to despair, endless incitement to violence as means of resolving disagreements or other problems.

At the very least, a harsher approach to law enforcement has to be coupled with some path forward to address the other issues.

Primarily as a completely organized and funded way to attack recently elected "progressive" city officials. After the enemy prosecutor/sheriff disappears, the crime wave evaporates as fast as the complaints about kids in cages did when Biden took over.

There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics.

For the winners to feel better about themselves, the losers have to lose hard. It's essentially just sadism.

This has nothing at all to do with preventing criminality, as the penal systems in other countries - notably Scandinavia - have proved.

This made me chuckle out loud, well done!

> There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics.

Yes, there are biases against various races and classes, but they absolutely don't override the bias against criminals. Our system is flawed, but it's far from "about terrorizing and brutalizing certain demographics". This kind extreme hyperbolic rhetoric isn't helpful, and insofar as it motivated the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge, it has done far more harm to minority communities than the criminal justice system could hope to do.

I don't actually know if this is true, intuitively. The highest-crime areas are not the areas with the least police. The lowest-crime areas are not the areas with the most police. Crime seems to respond as a phenomenon to other dysfunction of society, not because there is opportunity to commit them.

So, I don't know, can you educate me more about the relationship between police presence and its causation statistically towards crime? [To be clear, I'm not asking in bad faith or whataboutism. I'm genuinely trying to become more educated in this as a layperson who doesn't study crime to any degree.]

> In June 2020, Harvard economist Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi released a paper showing evidence of the Ferguson effect. Across five cities where a deadly shooting that went viral preceded an investigation into crime and policing, they found that the violent crime rate increased, resulting in an additional 900 homicides and 34,000 excess felonies across two years. They suggest that this was caused by changes in the quantity of policing. Other theories, such as changes in community trust, were not supported by the data.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w27324.pdf

A lot of crimes are not one-offs but something done over and over again until they're caught. This applies for both (sexual) assault and property theft. Laws against those need to be enforced even if the first X don't involve prison, because the people stealing hundreds of dollars of merch every week or picking fights are making their communities worse in systemic ways, and after a certain point separation from society is the only way to protect everybody else from the antisocial behavior (and serve as a deterrent).

No, I am not affected by a single instance of someone taking candy from Walgreens. But I am when so much theft occurs that everything valuable is locked up, when prices are raised to account for shrinkage, or when retail operations close down. I am when I have to tell people to leave nothing in their car and not to park in certain spots with frequent breakins, or when I can't leave my bike locked up outside even for a few minutes, or when I can't get packages delivered to my address anymore because it will be immediately stolen if I'm not there.

The victims in aggregate aren't just the people or businesses being stolen from, but all the other people in the community who subsequently have to live in a food desert, pay high prices, or can't even get deliveries any more because there is so much theft.

Scandinavian countries have generous social systems which reduce the demand for crime in the first place. We could have that too.

Such as?

Lol what? No.

I mean, can you imagine? People just walking around doing what they please to their own bodies and not providing slave labor to the state or private prison corporations? The absolute horror!

I think the role of prisons is really clear, we just have a common social lie we tell ourselves because the truth is really ugly. The prison system exists to provide slave labor to those willing to use it and as a tool to hurt marginalized communities.

Anyway I've never really had the desire to act badly towards others eg. despite being into technology, not a hacker/scammer.

It's to remove known criminals and violent offenders from society.

> Is it removing criminals from society altogether? In that case, there's a far more efficient way to do that.

It's also irreversible.

* Punishment

* Retribution (yeah, it's different thing)

* Protection (of society)

* Time to think about your crime

There are probably more.

2. Deter crime.

3. Rehabilitate.

4. Punish.

These are the four pillars of incarceration. How different countries weigh the different elements varies greatly between cultures.

Us system is basically 90 percent punishment, 10 percent protecting the public, and nothing else.

As for smaller crimes which carry time, then that begs the question of whether its for punishment or rehabilitation. Perhaps it's both, being stripped of your freedom to participate in society for years is a form of punishment. There is likely an outdated precedent that if you have those freedoms taken away for considerable time, people will not look to break the law again.

The problem is that there are systems in society which people are brought into which perpetuate crime.

That's an important one.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution says most of what's important to know about the carceral state of the US today:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States"

In the US, it is designed to be punitive, and there is a direct financial incentive to increase the percentage of prisoners that are sent back to prison after serving their time.

The system is working as designed: the US has a much higher percentage of its population in prison than most other countries, and extremely high recividism rates.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...

Also, many state run prisons outsource things to contractors that price gouge.

But what do you mean by “ineffective”? The purpose of prison in the US is twofold: punitive as a deterrent, and to keep criminals away from the rest of society. I have doubts about the effectiveness of the former, but the latter is super effective, we lock up more people than any other first world country! It’s really hard to argue against that from a political standpoint.

>We want “problems” to just go away. And stay away.

We do. But the thing is, sharing public spaces with a fuller range of human misery and depravity each time you leave your home, is an option. I just don't see it accomplishing the sort of positive transformation that people credit it with. Instead it makes everybody miserable, afraid, and insular - avoiding public spaces, locking themselves in cars, moving to the exurbs.

There are clearly people who don't morally deserve some kind of brutal punishment, and yet are the reason we can't have nice things. God damnit, I want nice things. But it's probably true that justice demands we accept a certain amount of spoilage.

That's great that your congregation did such a thing and reached out to you and you took the opportunity.

Your comments about outsourcing human lives to an alternative universe invisible seems to me very observant. Have your attempts to talk about what you saw ever done anything to change the imagination of those who you are talking to?

How?

Get back to us if you ever have a loved one get murdered, raped, or assaulted.

Justice is not solely about rehabilitation. It is very much about righteous punishment for doing evil. We can acknowledge that context and environment foster crime while also not tolerating crime.

Personally, I don't give one care about the "why" of certain classes of crime. I have zero tolerance or empathy for the doers of violence. If you murder someone, your life is forfeit to me. If you rape someone, I hope you get locked away for a minimum of 20 years. If you seriously assault someone, you should have to do jail time.

The moral use of the penal system is to remove the danger from society, make restitution, and rehabilitate where possible. Those are not always possible. Torturing people held captive is its own crime, and one we are guilty of to a horrifying extent as a nation. To say nothing of the innocent people we subject to these horrors.

This might be your opinion, but it is definitely not in keeping with any standard or common definition of justice:

- https://open.lib.umn.edu/criminallaw/chapter/1-5-the-purpose...

- https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/reasons-...

- https://ua.pressbooks.pub/criminallawalaskaed/chapter/1-5-th...

https://www.wbez.org/stories/how-finlands-criminal-justice-s...

Any definition of justice is going to be arbitrary and subjective. I disagree with your definition. I see elsewhere in this thread that you take an absolutist stance with regard to your opinion on how justice should be done, one in which you're unwilling to acknowledge that it is possible to have differing opinions on what justice should be. That's fine. You're just out of sync with the majority opinion. And you will be ineffective in persuading a sufficient number of other people (see also Marjorie Taylor Green, AOC, etc). You also seem to be able to predict the future ("you're on the wrong side of history"). Again, that's fine (I'll take some stock tips if you can make those predictions too). I just disagree.

I won't be replying further as your replies suggest to me an inflexibility and intolerance regarding this subject.

It's not hard, since we see other countries already in the "future" where it's working. You're free to disagree and turn a blind eye. I'm hoping that the people reading will see that this kind of attitude about being resolute that the horrors we inflict on our prisoners both innocent and guilty are good, is itself its own kind of horror. That this attitude will perpetuate the suffering of our fellow Americans.

Edit: you dont want my stock tips

The reason I posted is because you seemed to be unaware other people have different moral value systems. This is the fundamental reason behind a lot of disagreements. Here's the root of it: you think I a morally wrong and I think I am morally right. There is no rational argument to demonstrate that either of us are correct.

That's also why you're fundamentally unpersuasive. You're not convincing anyone by making bald assertions of your unsupported moral beliefs.

> the wrong side of history.

History will go on for a long time, and there is no arc of some sort of moral progress, just shifting social norms changing with historical accidents. This type of argument is particularly unpersuasive and tends to raise people's hackles immediately, because it's a declaration that you are (again, without evidence) so incredibly righteous that history itself will steamroll people who disagree with you.

> There are good examples of much better humanitarian penal systems with far better outcomes in Scandinavian countries that demonstrate this reality well.

The better outcomes may have nothing to do with the nature of the penal system itself, but wider cultural differences. In fact, this seems much more likely, given the extant differences in US subcultures and demographics. Slicing up the US crime data by economic quintiles and various demographics gives the lie to a lot of arguments. Even excluding the wider cultural comparison, talking about this without evaluating the commonalities between the crimes in questions and aggravating factors between the two countries makes this a really apples-to-oranges comparison.

I have no such illusions; I'm simply saying that this archaic one is objectively wrong from a humanitarian and historical standpoint. We both think we are right; the difference is you are wrong. There is no agreeing to disagree here, and it is quite cut and dried.

Further, I am not saying these things to convince you of anything, and I of course don't think I will. I cannot convince someone to care about their fellow human being. I am saying these things for the sake of those reading.

I agree there is no agreeing to disagree about value differences. The key is to identify what outcomes we both want and, from that starting point, evaluate what historical and sociological evidence suggests can get us to those outcomes. Moral framing does not help.

We know that punitive measures do not act as a deterrence and in the case of more progressive countries that have wildly better outcomes we know what actually has good outcomes. If you're really interested all the literature is just a google away. Check out US incarceration and recidivism rates (which are the worst in the world) and those of more progressive countries. The data is all there for you, if you are curious. We've seen what doesn't work, and we've seen what does. It's not my job to educate you.

Like I said, I'm not here to convince you of anything. I cannot change your value system, I can only make a public example of why it does no good to drag us into the past, and all the atrocities that entails.

EDIT: sort of an afterthought, but for those reading I always find it hilarious that whenever a reactionary sees something work in another country the first instinct is to say "actually the US might exist in a bizarro reality where everything is opposite, and you can't prove that it's not so ha". As if the most scientific approach to seeing someone's repeated successful results is to absolutely refuse to try to replicate it yourself!

It’s not a bizzaro reality: peoples and cultures vary across geography in different ways.

Contrary to being a reactionary, my fear is that the denial of these differences and the failure of well-intentioned policies is going to eventually lead to a draconian authoritarian backlash that could be prevented by having more sensible policies now. And as I said in my original post, many of the worst aspects of American culture and the legal system are already downstream consequences of failed “humanitarian” policies that are making a mockery of justice, civil rights, and peace/safety.

All in all, I am afraid that you will not make much progress by assuming everyone who disagrees with you is a morally objectionable reactionary and refusing to seriously engage with them. You are making a religious argument and not a policy argument. I also don’t think it does you service to conflate punishment with torture and make straw men.

Says you.

I have seen false conviction estimates ranging from 1 to 5 percent. All systems which involve any kind of classification will have a non-zero false positive rate. Does that mean we should do away with them? Of course not. We should simply seek to improve systems with better and better processes, while accepting that we might approach but never achieve zero false positives.

What alternative would you propose? Doing away with criminal justice? Do you think murderers and rapists should be allowed to roam free? How about drug traffickers who knowingly distribute life destroying substances in their communities?

Think of someone you really love. Maybe its your child, your parents, your partner, or a friend. Now imagine the pain and fear they would feel as they are murdered. What would they think and feel as they are choked to death? Or bludgeoned? The sheer terror. The pain. The senselessness of their life ending. Imagine that you find their corpse. Imagine the pain and horror you would experience. The hole in your heart. Really try to visualize this scenario. To feel it emotionally and with your senses.

Now imagine the perpetrator going unpunished. Walking free. Or getting put on some cushy rehabilitation program to better their life. Does that seem right? Does it seem just? Does it seem fair?

In my opinion, this discussion is way too academic, abstract, and one-sided. How about we focus on victims and their survivors?

Yes, the scene you describe is appalling. And, from reports, not uncommon in the States. Would I be in the right state of mind to make effective policy or humane decisions after that trauma? No. Would a reasonable person want revenge? Probably. Would a systematic revenge-based system lead to more or less miserable outcomes?

The US has the highest rate of incarcerations in the world. Is that working?

Putting so much effort into punshiment and so little into prevention smacks of revenge rather than wanting to actually improve things.

It seems that victims and their survivors already have a wellspring of support, but not as much effort on reducing the number of perpetrators and victims in our society.

We are focused on 'righting' the wrong rather than actually fixing it. Of course, you could incarcerate or execute these individuals, but that would not be a fix in the same way that starving people to death is a way of 'solving' the famine.

Individuals, no matter how much 'free will' or 'agency' they have, are all subjected to cause and effect.

If we built a society that treated everyone with respect, we likely wouldn't have so much crime to begin with. If our social institutions were setup to remove children from abusive situations ASAP, if we lived in a world where baby formula didn't have to be locked up at grocery stores (seriously, that is very fucked up, anyone who needs baby formula should be able to go to a government provided store and get some no questions asked, no hoops to jump through), and if we lived in a world where parents didn't have to work multiple jobs with every changing shifts just to pay rent, maybe we wouldn't have to worry about crime so much.

Instead we live in a world where minority children are treated worse in schools, where society assumes teenagers who aren't white are "up to some trouble", and in a world where those in power regularly show distain for life in general.

We've had presidents go on TV defending torture, why the hell should some poor kid who has nothing in life start to feel empathy for anyone?

It's not OK, but it is inevitable.

> If we built a society that treated everyone with respect, we ...

Agreed. But it's irrelevant. You can build a better world and still punish criminals at the same time.

I agree with the rest of your comment, but I think this statistics only means that 1-5% of convicts were falsely convicted and could prove it. So the actual number is probably much larger. I would guess something like 20%.

- https://open.lib.umn.edu/criminallaw/chapter/1-5-the-purpose...

- https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/reasons-...

- https://ua.pressbooks.pub/criminallawalaskaed/chapter/1-5-th...

We can acknowledge that context and environment foster crime while also not tolerating crime.

Are you interested in having less victims and less perpetrators in the future, or is punishment you're interested in for its own sake rather than as a potential tool?

What is your specific proposal? Do you think murderers and rapists should go unpunished or be allowed to remain free?

What is your specific proposal? Do you think murderers and rapists should go unpunished or be allowed to remain free?

I don't care about punishing them. I care about reducing and preventing harm to society.

You should turn to a more productive activity perhaps. But to do that without regret you'll have to first ask yourself why you are willing to spend your time on prisoners.

My friend was a guard at a maximum facility and he said the best prisoners were the lifers; they had nothing to prove and were in it for the long haul; the worst were the ones doing a short sentence or had been transferred from lesser-security prisons.

Part of the problem is we have prison stratification - instead of each suburb or neighborhood having a jail for the appropriate inmates from the area, we ship them all to massive processing facilities for "efficiency" which has all sorts of side-effects.

It's entirely possible to have empathy for prisoners without desiring them to be released from prison.

I've always been a pretty moderate liberal, but seeing how "soft on crime" policies (reducing the amount of policing and catch/release prosecution) have dramatically harmed communities in Chicago (especially the minority communities that were "plagued by racist police") over the last ~decade has made me into a "hard on crime" person insofar as I think violent offenders should be removed from society first and foremost. We can work on tackling crime from the frontend and we can try and make prisons more humane, but I don't think these concerns can override the need to keep law-abiding people safe.

Note: I’m not advocating for violence or violent crime; I was arrested for an overdue traffic ticket and just that experience alone was absolute shit.