Insurance companies are not the victims they are the beneficiaries. Without crime insurance would not be as expensive. The higher insurance rates mean higher prices for everyone who is not stealing. Crime means higher prices from the security safeguards businesses have to implement. Crime costs the economy tens of billions of dollars if not scores every year.
Around 48% of prisoners are in jail for violent crimes. That means their victims have intense pain and suffering at the time of the crime, then psychological damage for the rest of their lives.
Then there is the cost of the fear of crime to people who have to worry about going out at night, or worry about there loved ones who could be attacked.
Criminals produce much more suffering.
But they do not “suffer” as individuals suffer.
Where did all the creative math, questionable assumptions and wild generalizations in the OP come from?
I lived in a high crime area in Little Rock. Within the first two weeks of moving into my new neighborhood my car was broken into and I called the police to put a stop to the brawl involving roughly twenty males aged late teens through their early 20s in my front yard. Over the years I lived there my car was broken into four times, I was just happy they only smashed the window once to do it, most of my immediate neighbors had their houses broken into, one of my neighbors shot a seventeen year old dead during a home invasion (there was a drive-by of his house a week later), it got to the point where I didn’t bothering calling the police when I heard gun shots unless it was practically at my door step, and over the years I had several things stolen from my yard but thankfully nobody ever broke in. Someone did jiggle the front door knob but they decided against coming in.
I’m not going to make any claims that I suffered as severely as others but I did suffer. I was afraid to leave my house for work for fear that it would get broken into, I was afraid to leave my wife alone for fear of the same, hell, let’s talk about having a hard time enjoying my vacation because I was worried the whole time that someone would break into my house. My wife didn’t feel safe walking the dog through the neighborhood in the evenings because nearby stores/banks were frequently being robbed as were people walking near the university. It really made for a shitty experience feeling like you were constantly under siege.
Hmmm…somebody stole some facts from this discourse, and has murdered accepted definitions, defrauding the victims who thought that the OP would be about who created more suffering…
What about “making institutions less horrible?”
That didn’t seem to be the thrust of the OP. It sounded like he was suggesting that the concept of imprisonment wasn’t useful.
Perhaps you’d like to live in Somalia or some parts of Mexico before asking this question?
The only way someone can reasonably think that prison is worse than crime is if they’re a modern sophisticate inured from the reality of crime. Now, you can have a discussion over the merits of the US’s prison system, but it’s clearly better than not having law enforcement at all.
Without a doubt, organized criminals destroy society with their prisons more than disorganized criminals hurt society with their crimes.
I never understood the eye for a eye system and feel like it’s just using bad people to control bad people. As such it is as great a evil as the evil that the person is accused of. No benefit to society, karmicly it is worse for society as you have used evil against evil, so more evil in the world.
Yes that person you execute may never commit another murder, but the sentence society imposed plus his unrepentant ensures that both will come back to haunt society till they learn, and the way we are going we will learn when most of us are either in jail or the ones put us in jail.