Prison has multiple purposes: retribution, incapacitance, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

- retribution: gives victims and families of the victim retribution. This one doesn't seem important in the modern day, but if you ignore it you get vigilante revenge, blood feuds, honor culture etc. Having the state take on "revenge" kills these cycles.

- incapacitance: straight up preventing dangerous people from being out and being dangerous.

- deterrence: long prison sentences deter other people from committing crimes because they don't want to get a long prison sentence. Also deters the prisoners themselves from committing another crime (if their sentence is short enough)

- rehabilitation: here's finally the "corrections" part, and honestly our system in the US isn't great at rehabilitating anyone. In principle this is a prudent idea, but we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything. That's politically pretty unappealing

> we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything

Not necessarily. Recidivism costs a lot, too. Norway spends over $100k/inmate, to the US's $25k/inmate (https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/25/what-can-we-learn-from-t...), but only 20% reoffend versus 2/3 of American inmates. (Resulting in 70/100k incarcerated versus the US's 700/100k; that $100k/year starts to look like $10k/year now.)

Here in NY, there was a big political fuss over free community college for prisoners a few years back (pre-pandemic); Cuomo wound up killing it. I suspect helping inmates get associates degrees to use when they got out would've wound up saving money, but that's not how it played in the PR realm.

> recidivism costs a lot too

Right, but it's all indirect costs, paid in diffuse ways by various entities (insurance companies, often), whereas a politician suggesting raising taxes to help prisoners is a direct cost that taxpayers are loathe to pay.

Which isn't to say you're wrong, but it'd be a long campaign to change the cultural framing in a way that allowed these kinds of reforms to take place. Until then, people will be looking at that top-line Norway $100K per prisoner and shaking their heads.

I'm not against spending more per prisoner on actual rehabilitation efforts but I am very skeptical the US would see anywhere near that improvement. The circumstances that lead to crime in the two countries are quite different and those US prisoners end up right back in those situations when they are released.

I don't doubt that the Norwegian system has other aspects / safety nets that help here, but the article says they had a 70% rate as recently as the 1990s. It would be silly not to look at that 70% -> 20% drop and at least try and learn some of the lessons from it.

"Officers are trained for 2 to 3 years before being sent to work" seems like a good one to start with, as does the skills building to prepare them for the outside.

Agreed but I have no idea if those aspects/safety nets existed in the 90s.

It perks my ears up a bit when I never see that mentioned because it would likely balloon the 4x price difference between the two prison systems.

Deterrence? I don't think that long sentences deter any crime. If the ultimate sentence (DP) doesn't deter murder, then why would lesser sentences deter lesser crimes?

It's always weird for me to hear arguments about death penalty not deterring crime, then in the same breath they favor life in prison over death penalty. Not even aware of their double standard.

You'll find a wide spectrum of beliefs within that "same breath".

Personally, I think life in prison is necessary in some cases - that there are people who will never be able to function safely in society - but that it is simultaneously overused (case in point: stealing four cookies; https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jun-19-me-12244...).

There's also the "you can release someone from life in prison" aspect if there was a mistake, malicious prosecution, or they've shown signs of genuine rehabilitation.

My opposition to the DP is based on my distrust in our justice system and the fact that a wrongly applied DP is irrevocable. Life w/o Parole lets you amend failures in our legal system.

It's a common opinion. I find this stance a bit weak, since it doesn't hold the justice system to the highest standards and expectations. I know, death seems so immediate and there is no taking it back, but things aren't usually that trivial in reality, a life in prison can also mean the person dies in prison without reparation, or even if revoked, the person might spend most their life in prison and has a few years to live free. A person on death row might have many years to prove their innocence. I guess we could also apply a statistical analysis and determine if the error margin is tolerable, sort like how we handle hundreds of deaths in traffic.

> Deterrence? I don't think that long sentences deter any crime.

So you think if there was no punishment for any crime, the crime rates wouldn't skyrocket? Not sure what to say to you if you think that's true.

> If the ultimate sentence (DP) doesn't deter murder...

Who says it doesn't?

Deter doesn't mean prevent entirely. You can't just say "well murders still happen", that doesn't prove that there wouldn't be more murders if it had no prospective punishment.

Reductio ad absurdum, and a straw man as well. Of course if you eliminated all punishment for crimes, crime would skyrocket.

I think that long sentences are counterproductive and expensive, both in terms of societal expense and in how we treat people. The US would be wise to wean itself off the nipple of hatred and revenge that feeds our punitive "correctional system."

And it doesn't take much googling to find the answer to your final question. The majority of murders are committed in anger, because of mental illness, under the influence of drugs/alcohol etc. Few murders are committed by people planning rationally in cold blood, weighing the pros and cons.

Do I think some people deserve to be locked up for life? Yup. The man who murdered my niece and two others in a fit of drunken rage should never be allowed to walk freely in society. In the state where he committed his crimes, the DP was an option, but I'm glad it wasn't imposed. Having the DP on the books sure didn't deter him. And it hasn't deterred proven to be a deterrent in states that have it as law; homicide rates are higher in states with the DP than those without.

I have family in LE. In the justice system. Colleagues who work in the FBI and DoJ. Coworkers who were COs in prison. None of them think what we're doing is effective, either for less serious offenders or the most heinous prisoners. We either put them in a SHU, give them the needle or throw them to the wolves in Gen Pop. Prisons have become our toxic waste dumps.

> but we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything. That's politically pretty unappealing

I don't have a source for this but I thought the opposite was true? That the general consensus was we'd end up spending less because the recidivism rate would go down?

I think they mean more per prisoner per year, which is immediately measurable. It'd be done in the hope that total costs would go down over decades, but in our current political climate it's hard to sell improvements that take decades to manifest.

> rehabilitation ... That's politically pretty unappealing

Here in the USA, yes. Some EU countries take this quite a bit more seriously, to good effect.

So where's the math in that? It makes absolutely no sense that entirely quantitative prison sentencing is at best qualitatively determined and completely devoid of metric tracking, everywhere on Earth. wtf is this.

Some countries limit the time you can spend in prison for this very reason, no matter what you did. For instance, Brazil sets it to 40 years total even if you killed 100 people.

Croatia is the same, our serial killer that started killing when he was 16 is being released soon, killed someone on a free weekend while serving time, got married in prison. Not sure what to say of such a system, I'm not really in favor.

And 40 years is like the max, for raping and killing it's more like 15-20, eg a deranged man who chopped of a tourist's head is released in a few years after serving 15, another man that raped and killed a minor is soon to be out as well after 22 years in prison.

That sucks. That guy will 100% guaranteed kill someone again. Portugal is the same except instead of 40 it's 25 if I remember correctly. Egregious.

I’m a fan of the death penalty for really egregious cases, given a hypothetical perfect Justice system. Some people are not worth trying to rehabilitate. However, the Justice system is flawed and a decent percentage of people who get the death penalty are innocent. So what do you do? I’d rather they be locked up for the rest of their natural lives, barring a change in evidence or technology that leads to a change in sentence. But I don’t want some remorseless psychopath back in society because they’ve reached the limit on how long we can hold them.

I'm against it as I do believe that we are not just the result of our own free will free of anything but a result of our environment, luck etc.

I'm lucky that I had parents which gave me behavior patterns which do not make me kill or rape others.

And even if someone believes they are right, they are actually right just no in the moral and ethical sphere of a majority.

I don't like rape and in my world it's wrong. But that doesn't change their world view. And I don't kill him due to this because why would I be allowed to end the life of someone else?

The best I can do is to remove this person from the society.

It's easy to kill and hard not to.

And in the worst case scenario I would kill someone who hurts or killed a close person (perhaps) but I would need to accept the consequences of it.

I wonder if something productive could be done by expanding the options beyond "guilty" and "not guilty" because someone can be found guilty by a jury for almost any reason. Perhaps if there was a further status of "guilty by egregious evidence" that required a higher standard of evidence such as direct recording of the commission of the crime by the perpetrator and the death penalty was only applicable in those cases. I'm not ok with a one percent chance of executing the wrong person for any crime no matter how horrific, and our justice system trends at least 4% wrongful conviction. I'm fully ok with a 0.001% chance of executing the wrong person for even second-degree murder.

Isn't "beyond reasonable doubt" already a high standard? I've watched cases on youtube where it was really obvious from all the circumstances that the defendant did it. But it wasn't beyond reasonable doubt, so the jury had no choice but to declare them innocent.

> if in the united states we refer to our prisons as 'correctional' facilities, what quantitative correction could require nearly a century of internment?

It's only punishment, there is no correction at all.

> if by any study it costs nearly 40,000 dollars to house a prisoner for one (1) year, was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars of Connecticut taxpayers money?

Can we please not value people's life in money? Because if we can then slavery would be justified.

> what meaningful value was extracted from his slave labor? was it enough to offset even a fraction of the internment cost?

Ditto.

> Can we please not value people's life in money?

It feels quite icky to do this, but it is necessary when making policy decisions.

Every day, governments and corporations decide to spend (or not spend) X amount of dollars to save Y number of lives. Does it make sense to spend some money on infant mortality prevention, vs research on cancer types that only really old people get? What about seatbelt laws? Or pollution prevention?

Ideally, we would rationally spend our limited money on providing the best life for the most people. Not that this actually happens for a variety of reasons.

If we are to get the best value for our money, then we need to assign a value to human life in terms similar to disability-adjusted life years (DALY):

https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...

That's distasteful but necessary. It's when we start making policy by valuing peoples live based on economic output that things get bad. Otherwise you end up killing a healthy young person to harvest their organs for old people at the top of their career.

Notice the comment being objected to was "is the night watchman's life worth 3.2 million"

No, measuring loss of income due to premature death is very different from saying "was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars".

On top of that, making healthcare decisions based on future income goes straight against ethical guidelines. By your logic people unable to work due to disability, age or serving a life sentence would be denied any healthcare.

> Can we please not value people's life in money? Because if we can then slavery would be justified.

That isn't a logical statement, one does not follow from the other.