That's not simple at all. In the English language, we have terminology for a great many things we don't know how to do yet. "Faster than light travel" for instance. Rehabilitation is one of those things.
I've had the argument online many times, but people are simply too stupid and/or wishful-thinking to understand how wrong they are. We do not know how to do rehabilitation. While no doubt it is possible, and while it occasionally happens on its own (spontaneous rehabilitation), no one has a theory of crime or a theory of mind sufficiently developed to even begin to guess what inputs/therapies might result in engineered rehabilitation. You don't know how to do it. There's not some expert somewhere whose name you don't know who (still, somehow) knows how to do it.
Your idea of rehabilitation is "hey, we're going to try to be nice to lowlifes, and they'll suddenly become upstanding citizens". You're not even sure why you have this idea, but you can't tell me that because it would be embarrassing and undermine your rebuttals. You might stumble around saying things like "hey, it works in Europe!" and other nonsense, without bothering to ask yourself what other differences there are between the United States and Europe on this topic (you know, other than Swedish resort prisons).
What would happen, if you had enough influence on policy (and you might, those like you have been pushing this hard for decades) is that we'd just experience an upsurge in horrific violent crime, and the pendulum would swing the other way towards the conservatives who would cream their panties to see a good excuse to be "tough on crime" like grandpa was. We'd probably even get a reboot of Dirty Harry (we've already gotten Death Wish, I think).
> Another set of approaches would be to fund pro-natal/pro-family initiatives such as child income tax credits, to make it easier for fathers to participate in family life;
Do you really believe that would work? Like, how much can you afford? If it's anything measured only in the hundreds or single digit thousands of dollars, daddy is much more likely to ignore that low-wage offer entirely. He can make it up (and more some) elsewhere.
I mean, goddamn. People are griping that they hate the idea of working their 8 hour shift at the coffee shop for a higher wage, doing all that silent-quitting and great resignation crap... but the government offering him an extra $1500/year is going to make the difference here? A $1500 he won't get to spend on himself anyway?
No doubt there is a financial incentive that would spur even the lowest of lowlifes to stick around. But the government can't afford it. You and I, the taxpayers, can't afford it.
> I think you can look to other countries for examples here, Scandinavian countries for example
If I had a magic wand that could turn the US into a Scandinavian country, that might be an option. But what makes them work (and there's less evidence than you might think, that they are actually working much better than us), just doesn't exist here.
And it exists less there, too, each day.
This is a strawman. You have no idea what their idea of rehabilitation is, in fact they only shared that our balance is out of whack.
And it is. What we are doing now, with mass incarceration and barely-humane conditions DOES NOT WORK. In fact, it would be hard to intentionally design the system in a way that does a better job of increasing recidivism and overall human misery.
Forget all this talk of "being nice to lowlifes", how about we stop shooting ourselves in the foot first?
>Do you really believe that would work? Like, how much can you afford?
Our government spends billions and trillions of dollars on things which have less utility. Resources are not what is lacking, prioritization and political will is.
Either their definition is the same as the popularly known definition, or it is a worthless definition.
The popular definition is "whatever defects of personality caused the person to commit criminal acts have been mitigated entirely or reduced to the point that the risk of recidivism is negligible" or something like that.
Is there another definition any sane person should care about?
> What we are doing now, with mass incarceration and barely-humane conditions DOES NOT WORK.
It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's just that the thing it's supposed to do isn't rehabilitation, and never was. And you'd have to be a seriously naive person to have ever swindled yourself into believing anything else.
1. Punishment of the wicked.
2. Sequestration of the dangerous.
3. Deterrence of the tempted.
> In fact, it would be hard to intentionally design the system in a way that does a better job of increasing recidivism
We could just let them out early, so they'll do it again. It would increase recidivism nicely, since given a (more or less) fixed population of criminals in any given time period, they'd be outside prison for longer periods of time where they have the opportunity to do it again. If in a span of 10 years an armed robber spends 8 years in prison, he only has 2 years in which to commit crime.
Let's just let him out after a weekend, so he has 9.9.
We could even call it rehabilitation, because you know, if we don't make him so miserable surely he will magically transform into some excellent citizen.
> Our government spends billions and trillions of dollars on things which have less utility.
This weakens your case, it doesn't make it stronger. "We're already spending trillions on other things" means there's less available to spend on this. Not more.
This is a terrible way to conduct a discussion. Please read the site rules, in particular “be nice”. If you can’t comment without being triggered, don’t.
Another set of approaches would be to fund pro-natal/pro-family initiatives such as child income tax credits, to make it easier for fathers to participate in family life; at the margin economic instability drives families apart among other things. (More paternity leave (and better maternity leave while we’re at it) would help a lot here too).
I think you can look to other countries for examples here, Scandinavian countries for example have much better pro-family programs we could copy if we were really serious about this.