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;
"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.
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
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.
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"
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.