I was at a hotel recently where their was a convention of persons associated with the FBI and various other police departments that were working on this new computer program to share biometric and DNA information.
Well that got me thinking? What real good does that do?
Ok, so this program uses DNA information to catch a few more rapists and other criminals and that person is now in prison. What then? The “bad” person is still “bad”. They commit crimes in prison and cost the taxpayers money. Over 70% of released felons will offend again and now they are better at hiding it.
Plus, what is the effect on society? Often the “bad” person is a father, brother, and someone’s son (or daughter). Those families have lost the positive input of a loved one.
So what I’m asking is there some way we can stop a person from going on that path to doing terrible things and winding up in prison in the first place?
As a Christian I always think a persons salvation often changes them as in this song : The Baptism of Jesse Taylor. Its the story of a local troublemaker changing his ways. Granted I know this isnt for everyone.
What do you all think? How can we either prevent people from doing bad things or once they start, get them to change?
from the people I’ve known, converting/being “born again” doesn’t really make them “good people.” they wear it as a mask, and here and there you’ll still get see the ugliness beneath.
I thought one of the Nordic countries was experimenting with less-punitive incarceration and other more reform-minded programs in prisons, but I haven’t heard the results - it may be recent enough that there isn’t any long-term data yet.
Religion doesn’t do anything to turn a bad person good. My extended family is living proof that religious people can be just as cruel as anyone non-religious. They may not be law-breakers, but they definitely aren’t “good”.
Why do you think religious conversion is a reliable way to make people “good” in the first place? Religiosity has nothing to do with goodness, so it’s not a good baseline for comparing other methods of improving human behavior.
Religiosity is, in fact, correlated to nearly all negative statistics.
Fundamentally, religion allows for the concept that some people are better than others. A king has a divine right to do X, a priest has a divine right to do Y, a man who experiences visions has a divine right to do Z. Minus religion, you have to accept that we’re all just bags of cells, with the same right to be here as anyone else.
Most of the good things in the world - the concept of human rights, scientific rigor, democracy, etc. - started during the Enlightenment, with the rise of Humanism and Deism. They did not start with Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, nor Mohamed. People murdered, pillaged, and raped before those figures came to the fore, and the continued to do so after. These numbers did not begin to change until thousands of years later.
As to the question of how to make people into better people than they naturally would be? A first step would be to prevent their creation to begin with. Break up communities that concentrate the poor, so that the children are going to schools with and becoming friends with children of families who have done better in life. Continue to advance medical research, so that we can better deal with and cure mental illness and prevent addiction. Drive science towards discovering recreational drugs that are less harmful to society, and tax in such a way as to drive people away from the more socially harmful ones (i.e. alcohol), and criminalize those as it becomes socially feasible to do so. Encourage the move towards virtual space, where no matter how bad you might be, it’s still all fake.
It has been my personal experience that religious belief will neither reform a bad person or corrupt a good person. Many forms of Protestantism with their emphasis on belief alone rather than actions as the path to “salvation” seem like a criminal’s dream pass for life.
Across America, prisons are filled wall to wall with people who self-identify as Christians. In fact, the countries that have the lowest crime rates tend to be the least religious. Taking this as data points, a good start in improving society might be replacing religious indoctrination with a quality secular education.
Predictably you’ve run into intense opposition to this idea. But when it comes to changing individuals, not society as a whole*, IME and just on general first principals your position is the more plausible one. Especially if further watered down to ‘can’. A structured system of belief saying you should be good, that an outside force sets rules and knows how truly you follow them. A human community reinforcing that, with emotional and joyful celebration of that belief in doing good. It would seem straight forward that this would influence some people’s lives toward good, and only by some more complex process have the opposite effect. IOW Occam’s Razor would seem to be on your side.
As opposed to sitting at a keyboard alone busting on that idea…how is that going to turn anybody’s life around? Seriously, just each person in their own bubble of ‘I can believe what I want and justify whatever I do’ doesn’t seem likely to generate people doing anything other than…what they want. Although the same can be be true within a fervent community celebrating the idea of doing good: the inner self of members still might just do what it wants, and justify whatever it does. Obviously this is true in some real life individuals, almost everybody knows some.
But your basic idea that ethically oriented religion (some religions aren’t necessarily**) will turn some people toward the ethics they profess seems pretty straight forward to me. And it wouldn’t be absolutely limited to a ‘religion’. Confucianism isn’t exactly a religion though sometimes classified as one. But it’s an organized emphasis on a set of fixed ethics, in some cases a state ideology***. Post-religious Western society doesn’t really have that, or it’s at most a small phenomenon (some small completely non-religiously affiliated groups I’ve read of which use a group setting to urge people to act rightly in their lives in general) or specialized (AA is a larger more specialized version of the same thing, religiously ambiguous if not outright non-religious).
*IMO it’s totally hopeless and groundless to try to solidly tie the centuries long trend to less violence directly to religion, either way. If there’s any relation, it’s complicated in ways which would generate their own white hot debates about the role of religion. Eg the world might be becoming less violent because of technology>complex social interactions requiring order>more to lose from negative behavior. But is the Western (where it started) revolution in technology mainly because of the foundation of Christianity, or against it? Maybe both in a complicated way.
**you might even argue as was mentioned some Protestant sects aren’t, as in ‘only faith counts’, if taken to an extreme.
***what neo-Confucianism basically was in the Joseon dynasty in Korea, viewed in that context as ‘anti-religious’ in the sense of pushing Buddhist belief out of the public sphere though not persecuting private Buddhist belief. But it was later the ethical justification for persecuting private Christian belief: Christianity was unethical in the neo Confucianist view of the time in how Jesus subordinated family ties to following Him. The modern post-Christian West tends to want to push the traditional religion of the culture (Christianity rather than Buddhism) out of the public sphere, but seems to have less with which to replace it, there being room IMO to question how workable ‘you don’t need generally agreed morality, everyone can have their own’ is in the long run.
What rehabilitation programs work to either divert people from crime or reform them after crime is committed?
I don’t know. Little Nemo was a warden, he would probably know a few things about what works and what doesn’t.
I’m not sure how to separate cause and effect though. For example, the more education you have the less likely you are to end up in prison. The more secular you are the less likely you are to end up in prison. But correlation is not causation.
There is a hypothesis that lead (mostly from lead based gasoline, but also from lead based paint) increased criminality because lead lowers IQ, increases impulsivity, etc.
FWIW, older people commit less crimes. So if you keep people imprisoned until they are in their 40s or 50s, then let them out they will be less criminal than they were in their teens and 20s.
As someone who is not and never has been Christian I find it annoying and/or offensive when Christians say things that imply you can’t be a good person unless you’re a Christian first.
Please do not say you didn’t intend to cause offense. If I believe you when you do say that I will believe it because I think you simply disregarded/ignored/didn’t think about anyone not of your faith, which is also annoying and/or offensive.
In my experience, Christians are no better and no worse than anyone else and being Christian or “saved” doesn’t suddenly make the bad into good.
I think we have to start by accepting that we can’t fix everything or every one. You can encourage people to change, but you can’t force them to.
IME, when conversion or re-dedication to a religion has positively affected someone’s life it’s b/c the basis for their improved behavior was changing unproductive habits through what is essentially cognitive behavioral therapy. One person turned back to the stronger Muslim traditions they were raised in and the other became a Buddhist.
While their new direction was deity-centered rather than self-centered the result was the same b/c they kept at the new actions frequently enough that it became their automatic behavior.
To the answer the OP, I’d say the only tried and true method of changing habits is cognitive behavioral therapy activities, not magical thinking of, ‘I pledge my allegiance to this deity and in exchange the deity changes something in me that I cannot change in myself.’
I’ve been in six countries in the past two years that were former Soviet republics, and generally, the population does not embrace any religion, although both Christianity and Islam are creeping back in.
The streets are just as safe as any other country, day or night, and the people treat each other with the same respect and dignity and trust and honesty as in any other country in which there is a religious foundation to their morality and ethic.
Do we really believe that any criminal ever read the bible and, convinced by its compelling logic and stunning moral insights, turned away from crime? (Of course, if you genuinely believe that “god did it”, I suppose that’s another matter.) But rather, the criminal was psychologically ready to find some way to change, and found a supportive framework to give coherence and justification to a new set of behaviors; aided, of course, by a whole new set of friends.
Just to add to the above: I think we have a psychological need to provide a coherent narrative to our identity, and a “religious conversion” is an accepted convention that provides a narrative of change.
It may be that somebody who has been evil feels “locked in” to this identity, because all of his transactions with the world have conformed to the mutual expectations and patterns of behavior of a criminal. Indeed, if he just suddenly starts mysteriously being “good” for no reason, it almost makes him seem a worse person: if it is within his capacity to be good, why did he choose to be evil before?
For somebody psychologically ready to change, a religious conversion provides a coherent narrative that society (and he himself) conventionally find acceptable to explain that change, a justification for finding new ways to interact untainted by prior patterns of behavior.
My Stupid Cousin became a lot less stupid after a month in “inverted second degree”: he slept at his mother’s house and spent days in prison. As his lawyer had hoped, it was enough to shock him into getting out his big boy britches and putting them on. No religion involved.
I’ve known people who were involved in cult or cult-like organizations which were very bad for them, as they fed their neurosis; sometimes, as Sage Rat said, that gave them a reason to think themselves better than others merely because they belonged to the organization. I’ve known a pastor who preached the Gospel of Prosperity (the same stunt that’s used by TV evangelists to shear off their viewers), but who used it to teach his flock basic Home Ec. I’ve known people (my parents and one of my brothers+wife among them) who have been made better by belonging to a religion-based group of married couples who’ll tell each other to come on down when they climb on a high horse or a high tree.
A person can be made better by many ways that have nothing to do with religion, and religion doesn’t necessarily make someone better. Shit, one of the signs that someone may be on the path to ISIL is when they suddenly “get religion”…
No method would work 100% of the time. But the most effective, in my opinion, is to come from a stable family life with at least one parent or parent-surrogate who both loves you and who teaches you right from wrong, with appropriate punishment* as needed.
The other lesson that every child should be instilled with incessantly is that life isn’t fair and never will be, and to just get over it already. Whining is ugly and makes you no friends.
I think learning to be good is like learning a language, it comes much easier if you start very early. If you try learning as an adult, you may be successful at it, but it will be a lot harder.
*Appropriate punishment shouldn’t come from anger or be based on pain. It just needs to show you that actions have consequences, and bad actions can and will have bad consequences.
Seriously, just each person in their own bubble of ‘I can believe what I want and justify whatever I do’ doesn’t seem likely to generate people doing anything other than…what they want. Although the same can be be true within a fervent community celebrating the idea of doing good: the inner self of members still might just do what it wants, and justify whatever it does. Obviously this is true in some real life individuals, almost everybody knows some.