This may be a well-run question here, but I it’s something I often wonder about. The death penalty is not a good idea, neither is prison. What should be done to people who commit serious crimes?
I was fond of the idea of hard labor, breaking rocks.
But that’s not mentioned anymore. I think they may still have chain gangs in the south clearing weeds besides the roads.
Anyway, a life sentence with hard labor sounds like punishment. Just sitting in a cell is what monks do voluntarily.
As I see it, there are a limited number of ways for the government to punish criminals. At various times and plances in human history, various societies have used the following.
- Death
- Torture
- Amputation/permanent disfigurment
- Exile
- Prison time
- Fines
- Community service
- Public humiliation
- Punishment of the criminal’s family and/or friends
1, 2 and 3 are violations of human rights, and banned by Amendment VIII.
4 might be somewhat useful, but there are practical issues. A country as large as the United States can never police all of its borders perfectly. The exiled criminal would always have a chance to sneak back into the country, with only a small chance of being caught. And of course there’s no guarantee that they’ll view exile in another country as a punishment. For some criminals, the chance to start life anew in another country would be viewed as a plus rather than a minus.
5 is effective, and the criminals can’t commit more crimes against the law-abiding public while they’re in prison. On the other hand, prison is extremely expensive compared to the other options, so I think it should be used only for violent criminals.
6 has a fairness issue. Suppose you impose a $10,000 fine for crime X. Then a poor person who commits X has their life ruined. A millionaire who commits X, on the other hand, recieves only a trivial punishment. If fines were used as a punishment for serious crimes, they would have to be scaled according to the criminal’s wealth. This option also has the advantage that it brings money in, rather than costing money.
7 also has financial advantages, and in some cases would have positive effects on the criminal’s attitude. However, there’s always the possibility of criminals simply refusing to do service. In that case, there must be a backup punishment for those who won’t cooperate.
8 should be used more often, in my opinion.
9 is a violation of human rights, and unconstitutional. Furthermore, it would breed enormous hatred of the government. And many hardened criminals have no friends and care very little about what happens to their families.
There are a couple of others I can think of that have been tried.
Hard Labour - This was generally during an age when jail terms were usually much shorter, and thre was the death penalty for a multitude of crimes, some of which we would consider rather petty nowadays. It still is used in some countries.
The idea being to make prison an experience that the criminal does not wish to repeat.
Isolation and religious re-education - Victorians had a view that if they could ensure that the only human vocal contact would be with padres and chaplains, to the extent that prisoners could not only not talk to each other at any time, they had to wear blinekrs to ensure they hardly saw another human being - idea was that the prisoner had lots of time to reflect on God and their own crimes - this was dropped as it sent prisoners mad in short order.
Age - Seems to work well as far as I can see, keep repeat offenders locked up until they are well into their 30’s or early 40’s, go in any prison and you’ll not see many in this age group unless they are very serious offenders serving very long terms.
I think one huge weakness of western judicial systems is that the maximum term allowed for a particular offence is not a real deterrant.
For example stealing a car might attract perhaps a couple of years, do it again and it may earn a longer term, but, national legislation ensires that there is a maximum limit that can be awareded.
My view is that previous offences of any sort should act as a multiplier with no maximum limit. So a career criminal who has committed dozens of offences can be facing very substantial jail terms for crimes that maybe would attract a fairly short sentence.
I also think there should be a differant type of jail available for these persistant recidivists.
This jail would be extremely cheap to run, because it would not make any pretence at rehabilitation, education, detox, these would simply be human warehouses for those who have retruned to the umpteenth time, and should send a message to other offenders that it has lost all patience and will invest no more money in trying to make facilities available to assist, counsel, rehabilitate.
Such a prison would literally only require a minimum staff, because there would be no hope of having mass get togethers, inmates would only be allowed to associate in veyr limited numbers, they would not be allowed visits, only letters and would not be allowed any access to any goods and services except for the bare minimum that the state provides - you would be amazed at what they are currently allowed to have.