Industrialized nations around the world have pretty much all turned to using prisons (as well as fines for certain kinds of crime) as the main method of punishing wrongdoers and ostensibly “rehabilitating” them (with the addition of capital punishment in a very few developed countries for a very limited number of crimes). But is this justified, both financially and as an effective means of turning people away from crime after they are released?
I don’t have any strong convictions on the matter, but looking at the criminal justice system from the outside, it does seem a little absurd—locking criminals up in compounds with other criminals for extended periods of time, providing food, housing, and basic services for free, and creating an atmosphere of resentment and fear of one’s fellow prisoners—and expecting them to come out reformed on the other side. I’ve also never been a fan of the “life without parole” sentence, as it seems to be basically execution by means of old age—if the criminal is so reprehensible as to never be allowed out of prison again, why not go ahead and execute him? (But I’d rather the thread not focus on that specifically, please.) Is this really always the most effective way of going about things? Could, for example, corporal punishments like flogging (or even more severe ones like Sharia-style amputation?) be more suitable for certain types of crime? What about shame—based punishments, like the stocks in past times? Should the expansion of capital punishment be considered? Other types of punishment not considered?
I’m not saying that I support all of those things, but why is the state generally considered capable of depriving people of liberty (and, in some cases, life), but not pain or humiliation? And is the prison-based system worth the cost, if only for isolating criminals from the rest of society? And does this result in a greater rate of reform, and is it a greater deterrent than more immediate punishments?
Inspired by this article and another thread in GQ. Hopefully, this will spark some interesting debate.
Looking at it empirically, maybe not. Claudine Longet was sentenced to only 30 days for shooting Spider Sabich, but she never again shot another skier. On the other hand, Jean Harris did 11 years with the same result, except in her case she never shot another diet doctor.
I think for best deterrence you do not need to make the punishment severe, you need to make it as inescapable as possible. Look at the penalties for a rolling stop at a stop sign. Fines amounting to hundreds of dollars, points on your license and increased insurance costs, yet people do them every day, because you might get stopped for it once in a thousand times. You could have the death penalty for rolling stops and people would still do them.
Now, if the penalty was a $10 fine, and you got caught every time, you’d hardly ever do one. It’s more important that punishment be certain than draconian. It’s why stop light cameras stop red light runners more effectively than higher fines.
Of course, making capture and conviction more certain would probably involve greater changes in our criminal justice system than most people would tolerate, but that’s another debate.
Since the article you linked is one I put out there in an old thread, I’ll comment on this.
Long-term incarceration is too ineffective and too expensive.
Heinous crimes with absolute establishment of guilt and a free-will confession: death penalty.
Financial crimes: restitution from personal assets with additional fines; for large enough crimes total loss of all personal assets for life with an additional provision of personal service that involves essentially living in poverty. So that, for instance, you can’t just go live with a rich friend despite personal poverty. You are, instead, living at the Y and cleaning their toilets.
Drug crimes: no punishment at all for personal use. For drug-related crimes felt to disrupt the neighborhood (distributing to kiddies or something): neighborhood service. Sweeping the streets; whatever.
Violent crimes where violence was threatened or committed: incarceration. Option of earlier release with good behaviour and enforced chemical modification of behaviour.
Petty crimes of various types: public service and public branding–an obvious bracelet, for example. No mutilation. No beatings.
Incarceration is big business. It won’t change anytime soon.
I thought we decided the valete thing was going to go away. Just a thought…
The purpose of incarceration is neither retribution nor rehabilitation. The purpose of incarceration is incarceration. It takes people who have shown themselves dangerous to society, takes them out of the general population, and puts them, for a time, in a place where they can commit no crimes save against fellow criminals. For that purpose, it works well enough.
The idea of rehabilitation has been abandoned long ago. The right wingers won.
It would be weak to coddle prisoners. Being tough on them will make them better citizens.
Actually, it needs to be both sure, and severe, and swift as well, if you want to succeed.
Think like you’re housebreaking a dog- you can’t scold them, you can’t come back hours later and rub their nose in it, and you can’t let them get away with it.
If they crap off the paper, you rub their nose in it right then and there, every single time until they get the message.
The problem with the criminal justice system is that although the punishments may be severe, they’re neither sure nor swift, so there’s not the surety that a criminal will be caught, sentenced and punished swiftly after the commission of a crime.
Some of that is to ensure that we’re not punishing the innocent, but some of it is inefficiency and a concentration on draconian punishments rather than stepping up the sure and swift side of things.
I disagree that severe punishments are that important. Like in my analogy with the rolling stops. It would take very minimal fines to stop them as long as they were relatively certain.
Hell, look at drunk driving. Drunk drivers face very severe penalties, years in prison, thousands of dollars in fines, and permanent loss of license, yet it happens thousands of times a day. There’s data out there that shows that the typical drunk driver who is caught has done it close to a hundred times before their first arrest. Don’t you think that a $500 fine and a week in jail would stop the behavior, as long as it happened frequently? I’d bet even a 50/50 chance of getting caught would stop more than 9 out of 10 drunk drivers, and if the drunk driver were caught every time it would be as rare as solar eclipses.
But is that wise? I mean, do we really gain more from locking a burglar up for 5 years (and paying big bucks for it) and then letting him out than we would beating him or making him wear a “marker”? Is it more or less fair to take away five years of (likely) the prime of his life than to give him the worst beating of his life? And is the burglar less likely to do it again after he gets out? For that matter, if he seems unlikely to ever stop, considering things on a purely practical basis, why not shoot him?
And I agree that the best way is to guarantee conviction, and I support things like extensive systems of cameras in public locations to make that happen, but where do we cross over into 1984-style territory? And since we don’t have guaranteed conviction right now, or likely in the near future, what’s the best way without it?
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris (I don’t want to look up the Pit thread again, but Ed Zotti came in and said sign-offs were okay.)
Beatings are absolutely out of the question - nevermind the inherent amorality of it, but how do you know you’re not going to damage anything, permanently ? How do you gauge the amount of “beat” you’re giving someone ? And finally, who gets to do the sick job ? And of those who break the ranks to volunteer for the job, can we think any good ?
Not that violent punishment prevents anything anyway - think of the old Navies, with their hundreds of lashes, and mock hangings, and keelhauls. Did they make the sailors any less rowdy or any more disciplined ? Hell, think of the countries where they mutilate thieves - don’t they still have theft ? All violent punishments accomplish is making people more tolerant of violence, both in their bodies and their minds (i.e. if the state does it, it’s not so bad). It banalizes violence throughout society, and we gave it up for a reason.
This is what I think is interesting. That is my natural reaction to the idea of beatings or similar kinds of punishment, too. But what actually makes that worse than locking someone up for years of his life in a hellhole, surrounded by violent criminals?
If you make it your duty to make it a hellhole, I agree it’s little better - but prison doesn’t need to be if we agree that the point is to keep the inmates in a defined, enclosed area away from the general population. You could even make it a sunny ranch on the plains where violent criminals grow hearty food and live a comfortable life away from the stress and tribulations of modern life if you wanted to :).
Note also that not all prisons are Alcatraz-style, SHU program, mandatory buttsex and shivving, cockroaches for chow operations either. If someone’s in a prison surrounded by violent criminals, it usually means he’s one too.
And finally, while the system itself may be “amoral” or cruel, it doesn’t require anyone in it to be - except in death penalty states, and even then it could be argued the hangman’s duty is to see his wards through with the least pain and anguish possible.
I’m of the opinion that incarceration breeds criminals rather than accomplishing anything else.
In some cases, yes, it is beneficial to take someone dangerous out of the public where they can continue to be dangerous. However, I believe that:
Many non-dangerous people are incarcerated, and
Prison only serves to make criminals MORE dangerous when they ARE allowed back into the general population.
I’m not sure who said it, but I’ve seen it attributed to Abraham Lincoln: In the end we cannot help but become what others believe us to be.
Take someone with a $50 forged check, a DUI without accidents or injuries, a shoplifting charge and put them in jail/prison for 30 days. There, they will learn to think of themselves as criminals, be treated like an animal, and come out LESS likely to be able to get good employment and otherwise in a worse state of mind and worse situation than the one that caused them to commit the crime in the first place.
A quote from a corrections officer in a Massachusetts state prison: This is no place to learn a lesson.
The only lesson one learns in prison is that they’re a worthless human being. You only have to look at the Stanford Experiment (http://www.prisonexp.org/) to see what takes place, and takes place almost instantly in the mind of the incarcerated.
I abhor the thought of the barbaric punishments mentioned and I assume most Americans do. That is why we have the prison system…we consider it a more humane form of punishment. We’ve decided that depriving a shoplifter of their hand for the rest of their life is more barbaric than taking away their freedom for a period of time. I agree. However, most people don’t know just how barbaric incarceration really is. And how little good it does. With the exception of life imprisonment dangerous people are still re-introduced to the population at some point, and at that point they are likely even more dangerous than they were when the incarceration began.
So, with a faulty justice/penal system that inconsistently applies punishments, both in detection and severity of punishment, the only really GOOD solution is to fix the problems that are likely to cause crime in the first place so that it doesn’t happen. But that’s a lot more expensive, difficult, and complex than just tossing people into a hole for a time.
Even weeks of life spent in a hell hole can be VERY damaging. And I don’t know if they prison system even makes an attempt to separate violent from non-violent offenders. If they do make that attempt, it’s a very poor one. Your DUI can land you in a 5 X 8 cell with a sex offender.
Alright, so aside from what the prisons are like in Utopia, how should we actually go about making them better based on what we have now? I’m not really sure myself, since you want to actually punish people for their crimes, not treat them to a life better than that of a law-abiding citizen in poverty, but on the other hand, you don’t want to punish people exceedingly for the crimes they committed. And Kobal2, I realize that it would be violent criminals (mostly) that would be surrounded by violent criminals, but do even they deserve it?
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: KnitWit, so are you saying it would be worse than or better than a one-time beating by a government-sanctioned flagellist? Kobal2 does have a very good point about not having the government participate in such acts at all, which I think is a very good reason not to do it. That only goes so far, though; I think some people truly deserve and should receive execution even though killing is usually considered barbaric.
I’m saying that I’m not sure. Given that there isn’t even a nod toward rehabilitation, they’re both probably about equally as barbaric. I guess that was my point…just to emphasize that while most of us think of physical torture as out of the question, we also don’t realize what torture it is to be locked up in the current system.
I guess I just intended to point out that it’s a valid comparison for debate becaue I think most peoples’ initial reaction would be to find physical punishment reprehensible. We look down our noses, superior in our human rights efforts to those countries who punish people differently. Meanwhile, we do some sort of sick, “Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” thing in our own country.
Rehabilitation is like flying cars. Everybody loves the concept but nobody seems to be able to make it work. There’s all kinds of theories about how to rehabilitate somebody but all of them fail in practice. My experience is that you can’t rehabilitate somebody else; they’re either going to rehabilitate themselves or they’re not going to get rehabilitated. So offering opportunities for rehabilitation is great but don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s going to eliminate crime.
Incarceration works because it segregates criminals from society. Anything after that is a bonus. If the possibility of being imprisoned deters somebody from committing a crime or motivates somebody into rehabilitating themself, that’s great, but don’t rely on it happening. Punishments like flogging or amputations or fines or shaming or community service all leave the criminal in society and hope that he’ll choose not to commit more crimes. Incarceration doesn’t work on hope; it takes the criminal out of society so it’s no longer a concern whether or not he wants to commit crimes.
I kinda agree with **KnitWit **there, the whole prison concept doesn’t really sound like a good solution to me, and does probably breed more criminals than it “cures”.
Maybe a better solution would be home arrest for small crimes, and “deportation” for larger ones ? Create a large enclosed area and dump them there. No rules, no guards inside the perimeter, plenty of tools and basic resources, and the place is what they want to make of it. Govern yourselves, make your own laws, apply them yourselves, we don’t wanna know. You just can’t leave before your time is up.
It could turn into Lord of the Flies, I know. But then again, it could also turn into Australia :D.