Death penalty opponents; how would you reform prisons and criminal justice?

Great Debates
21

Here is the source of the report.

http://www.howardleague.org/what-if-property-offences/

Reports like this tend to be distorted by sections of the press in the UK whose readership are very socially conservative. Older folk mainly, who are fond of simple solutions to many of societies problems.

Everyone knows that on issues like crime, justice and prison reform there are few votes to be won but and awful lot to lost.

But…if you look at what he is saying, it is a logical argument. He argues that prison, as our most severe punishment, should only be used for the most serious crimes: those of a violent, threatening or sexual nature.

Consider, also that prisons are extremely expensive and often desperately overcrowded. This has arisen because of changes to sentencing policy that imprison more offenders. These changes get peoples votes, but they have little effect on crime. Overcrowding means there is little scope for rehabilitation and reoffending rates are high. He is proposing large changes in sentencing policy to address this issue. Given that it is a vote loser, it is probably politically untenable.

Looking at some international statistics, the UK imprisons more people that any other country in Western Europe at 146/100,000

The figures for the US are astonishing 724/100,000 and a prison population of more than 2Million. I guess a lot of that is accounted for by the War on Drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing policies.

Looks like you have the same debate in the US.

Is there a feeling that the system needs reform or is the prison lobby still on a roll?

22

Keep in mind that prison is rarely the first resort except in cases of serious crimes like murder. People sent to prison for minor property crimes almost always have a history of multiple arrests for these crimes. In other words, these are the criminals who are not showing any signs of being rehabilitated from non-prison punishments. If you have somebody who’s been given probation for shoplifting twenty times already and he gets arrested for shoplifting again, is there any reason to think another probation will stop him this time?

23

I advocate an evidenced based approach to discover cost effective methods of advancing public safety. Run randomized controlled experiments on folks convicted of different crimes with varying intensities of punishment and rehabilitation resources. This proposal won’t go over very well since people think that the same sorts of crime should be punished in the same way. I on the other hand don’t have a problem with turning convicted criminals into guinea pigs. Criminals should receive fourth amendment protections, due process prior to sentencing phase and due process up to the point of receiving a randomized sentence (with pre-set minimums and maximums of course). They don’t deserve, “Fair” IMO.

If somebody can demonstrate empirically that they have the most cost effective method of reducing crime, I’ll listen to their ideas with interest whether they come from Professor Ashworth or Professor Xavier.

24

Your plan is fundamentally flawed. Even if you ignore the ethical problems, your results are going to be tainted by the participants’ knowledge that the legal system has become deliberately arbitrary.

25

Rehabilitation of prisoners. No more corruption in prison guards. Shorter sentences. No more purely drug-based incarcerations, no matter what the drug. A complete change in prison culture, similar to Norway’s setup.

It’s a pipe dream, but it lets me sleep at night.

26

A friend was in a church meeting where the speaker looked around and said “There is only one person here who looks like a criminal…”

The point being that my friend was the only young man in the room.

Unless you have a prison system that just shelves people for so long that they grow old in confinement, your prison system will be full of young men.

This doesn’t mean that you have to wait until young men are too old to do crimes. You only have to wait until young men are to old to want to do crimes. That still leaves another 30-40 years until retirement.

27

“I’d like to hope that it acts as a deterrent for similar white collar crimes.”

I’ll make this simple: punishment is not an effective deterrent.

The threat of getting caught is an effective deterrent.

So: if you want deterrent, spend the money on policeman, not wardens.

28

Not arbitrary. Randomized.

And yeah, there’s a Heisenberg problem. But I have no reason to believe that it’s especially devastating. I have trouble believing that key variables like parole violations and recidivism would be affected to a great degree by the subject’s knowledge that he or she is in an experiment. Or (moreover) that it would affect different pools in different ways to a pronounced extent. Besides, you could control for this effect partly by limiting experimentation to certain states and using the other states as a baseline. Ditto at the country level.

29

Why stop there? Why not also call for an end to hunger, a cure for all diseases, and a just and lasting world peace?

30

And completely unconstitutional. It would violate prisoners 5th and 14th Amendment rights.

31

This idea has many merits in my opinion-too often those convicted of second-degree murder or voluntary manslaughter get away with but a slap on their wrists to their crimes.

32

Thanks. I always think too about what it would be like for someone to kill my wife or my child or my sister or a good friend and then to see them a few years later walking around the supermarket or whatever. Or even worse, perhaps, to have someone kill a loved one and find out that they had previously done a stint in prison for manslaughter. Once you end someone else’s life without justification, to me you have cashed your ticket to be allowed to live a free life.

33

HOW will prison, in America, rehabilitate anyone, with rare exceptions, if it amounts to a gang and race segregated (by the actions of the inmates admittedly) training ground and weight-room where lifelong thugs and members of organized crime can groom younger criminals for a more successful career in crime after their release?

Prison in America equals:

Warehousing
Deterrence, a little
Punishment

It’s still better than capital punishment, or torture, so at least we’ve got that going for us.

Capital punishment is just wrong … there’s no way to be absolutely 100% sure without a shadow of any doubt that the guy you just gassed was the perpetrator. There just isn’t.

34

To answer the OP (I am against the death penalty)- first, take the profit motive out. No more private prisons- make it a federal law (good luck!).

Get rid of mandatory minimums and “three strikes and you’re out” laws. Judges should have significant leeway to sentence as they deem appropriate.

End the drug war and decriminalize possession- small-scale dealing should be a misdemeanor.

Lengthy prison sentences should mostly be for violent criminals and the most severe of property crimes (large-scale fraud, big theft rings, etc). Focus on rehabilitation in prisons- especially identifying which individuals can be rehabilitated, and which can’t. It’s my understanding that many other western countries have far lower recidivism rates than we do- find the best practices and emulate them. Chances are the Finns do it well (the Finns seem to do most things well, from my reading).

And end the death penalty, of course. By the way, I don’t have a moral problem with executing murderers- I just don’t think it’s worth the risk of executing an innocent person. I don’t believe the death penalty applies “more justice” then life imprisonment.

That seems like a start.

35

Your rhetoric is cute and all, but other first world nations have shorter prison sentences, fewer prisoners, and less crime because they rehabilitate. It’s hardly the most impossible thing I advocated in my post. Changing our prison culture and removing corrupt guards would be *far *more difficult at this point.

36

I have seen many prisoners change their crime of choice, however the reoffending rate needs to be taken with a lot of caution. Most folk do not understand the markers that are used to define what is, or is not a reoffence.

In fact it is not as easy to define crime as you might imagine. It is also very difficult to properly define rehabilitation.

No matter what definitions you use, you will include some things that perhaps should not be there, and exclude others that should.

All of us knows what a crime is? Wrong, you know what some crimes are and even in some of those crimes there are unusual or exceptional circumstances, What you really have is a set of beliefs and notions about crime.

It would be far better to think of harm reduction and social welfare.

Once an individual has made all the effort to obtain incarceration, money spent attempting rehabilitation is likely to be very expensive and doomed to many failures.

Your real alternative is to spend the money elsewhere, such as education, social work, real life opportunities, parenting education, eliminating the desperation of very basic needs. These things are not glamorous and the results as difficult to analyse in a neat format for the conservative law and order brigade, but I have seen the real effects of such social work and can testify it works.

Right now in the UK we have ‘problem family’ caseworkers. These people basically educate and intervene in such families - to the extent of teaching parents to do very simple things such as cook from raw ingredients, budget plan, parenting skills.

The effect of this is noticeable in our juvenile and young offender estates, the populations in those place has fallen to 2/3 in around 7 or 8 years, and this will have a knock on effect into the adult male estate.(note that this is at a time of a rising number in this particular demographic)

You want to cut crime, or cut down on prisons, then you need to invest in some social capitol - the liberalist view of society does not work, the individualism they espouse is merely the politics of laissez faire neglect. Proper social policy is not at all easy, its extremely hard but it works and in the UK we can prove it.

I have seen this at several levels, and experienced it directly at more levels than you would want to think about.

37

Occasionally, you can be pretty sure, if they are a mass shooter as in Aurora. But I still think the death penalty is wrong even then, albeit a minour league wrong.

38

Actually the last time I looked at the statistics the United States had an unusually high homicide rate for an OECD country but many other OECD countries actually had higher overall violent crime rates and many had higher overall property crime rates. Homicide is the most egregious crime we typically deal with in a criminal justice system, so gets the most attention. However even in the United States it’s an extreme minority of total criminal activity.

39

Definitely no to War on Drugs imprisonments.
Set some sort of reasonable level of equivalency between nonviolent financial-type crimes and other ones - say, (arbitrarily, not hung up on exact figure), that any fraud > 1x average national income is going to be treated as a jailable offence just like theft, 10x = say, assault, 100x = manslaughter, 1000x = murder. This lets you off with a fine for passing a $250 check, jails career small-time embezzlers for enough to be discouraging, but gets you serious jail time for your Maddoffs.

40

My point is you seem to think American prisons aren’t rehabilitating. Where did you get that idea? American prisons have extensive rehabilitation and have had for centuries. The United States pretty much invented the idea of prison rehabilitation and is in the forefront of the field to this day. Most other countries are using rehabilitation programs that were developed in America.

But the reality is prison is literally the last place you should be trying to rehabilitate people. Prison is where people end up. If you want to reduce crime, you need to work in places like schools, community centers, clinics, workplaces, and homes. The reason other countries have fewer prisoners is because they have fewer criminals. Don’t blame prisons for the problems that society in general failed to solve.