> A system that does not incarcerate anyone for any reason would be much preferable

surely you don't actually believe that? I don't think the result of this is just 0 false positives. The result of that is a lot more crime, and a lot more injustice.

I think you (as is very common) vastly overestimate the effect of the threat of incarceration on crime.

I think incarceration is very bad at deterring future crimes, but it very good at delaying them. Someone in jail for 10 years is at the very least not going to commit a crime for 10 years. There is some merit to that until we have a better system.

Forget the threat. Serial muggers/armed robbers/thugs need to be off the street. This "nobody should be in prison" rhetoric is painfully naïve. Wait till you've had elderly/defenseless parents or friends violently mugged and beaten, you'll change your tune.

to be replaced with what? i'm all for making changes that are an improvement, but just burning it to the ground for the sake of it with no end game is not an improvement

A system that does not incarcerate anyone for any reason would be much preferable to the atrocities that are the current criminal justice systems in most of the global west (and especially of course the United States).

Interesting and unusual perspective - we have the one person in this thread who supports wildly expanding the death penalty.

Unless the person above is, of course, an anarchist who has no answer for what to do about Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Phillip Garrido, or Brian Mitchell. I would say that as imperfect and heavily flawed as our system is, "Perfect is the enemy of good."

> what to do about Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Phillip Garrido, or Brian Mitchell

Nothing. Those people are one-in-a-million anomalies. If it weren't for the media hype surrounding them, their impact on society would be comparable to the impact of deaths from lightning strikes. What do we do about people being struck by lightning? Nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_wick

That’s nuts. Even if you were correct about that, and I’m not admitting any such thing, it isn’t how people work. If the state doesn’t provide justice, then the mob will.

"Justice" is an incredibly malleable idea that is largely shaped by what people are told. Until very, very recently, nobody gave a fuck about serial killers, or even knew they existed. If the hype stopped, there wouldn't be any mobs to worry about.

Define recently. There is plenty of historical hysteria around them. Ever heard of Jack the Ripper?

That's not true. We have things in place to protect people and objects from lightning strikes. For example, lightning protection systems on tall buildings.

Those protect the building, not individual people. Nobody carries around mobile lightning rods, even though they were invented centuries ago.

It protects the people in the building. Likewise, arresting a serial killer protects anyone they would have killed next.

Have you thought about moving to Somalia?

At this point, I would not be surprised if having two judges per case, randomly selected from the community, from parents who have successfully had at least three children leave the nest while still remaining on speaking terms, was a more reliable method of justice.

isn't an even number of judges ripe for uselessness?

If you burnt to the ground everything doing the best it can probably 75% of the public and every instution would spontaneously combust.