I was reading lately how effective Norway’s rehabilitation system is and unfortunately the main roadblock to any such reform in the United States - effective though it could be - is the big V word: Vindictiveness.
There is simply no way around this; it’s the giant boulder, main obstacle, that blocks the path to meaningful criminal-justice reform in America. All attempts at reform will find only limited or no success until or unless the huge Vindictiveness problem is solved. As long as society lusts to see criminals suffer, the status quo is immovable. This isn’t solely a conservative sentiment either; I’ve seen plenty of liberals bathe in schadenfruede on this topic as well, although liberals are as a whole somewhat likelier to favor rehabilitation. What’s the solution?
How does your assault and battery in response to being knocked down, deliberately or not, make society a better place?
Note that I don’t disagree with you. If someone pushed my wife over, especially on purpose, I very well might physically assault them in the heat of the moment. But through self reflection, I can realize that acting this way is not beneficial and that planning our society in this way would be a stupid thing to do.
Vindictiveness would best describe why we still have capital punishment in the U.S. If executing a murderer could bring back the victim, I’d be all for it. Of course, the idea that it’s a deterrent is ridiculous; people who commit murder either do so in the heat of the moment, or if they do so premeditated, they do so with the idea that they aren’t going to be caught.
In terms of the criminal justice system as a whole, vindictiveness does play a role, but this discounts the privatization angle. Quite simply, we have an entire industry in this country whose growth model is predicated on the need for more people to be imprisoned. This explains why we have such draconian drug laws still on the books, and why we have not invested in meaningful programs for prisoners to be rehabilitated. Private prison companies need repeat customers, after all.
The thing that always gets me is how, once you’ve looked at the evidence, and made your case for criminal justice reform based on the results other nations have gotten, someone will make the argument: “But what if the victim was YOUR OWN CHILD?!?11ELEVEN??”
Well… that’s exactly why we have a representative democracy, not a greiving-mother-ocracy. Yes, if it was my own child who was a victim of a crime that I was asked to write a punishment for, I’d come up with something cruel and unusual. But that’s why we have laws instead of just asking the victim’s parents what they think we should do.
Vindictiveness goes beyond mere justice, it is akin to schadenfreude or sadism. There is a whole culture of this; you see people commenting online all the time about how this-or-that criminal should get his genitalia cut off, or get raped in prison, or in the more administrative context, how there is still widespread opposition to prisoners in Texas or the South getting air conditioning even though a considerable number of inmates have died from heat and also from getting too little water.
I can’t put my finger on it exactly. Maybe a social scientist could come up with the right word. But I suspect that the “vindictiveness” described by the OP is an example of typically (or stereotypically) American personality traits, similar to those behind our inability to replace the dollar bill with a coin.
“Nobody’s gonna push me around!” is much more evident in the American than in others. My guess is that it is a residual effect from the War of Independence. The Founding Fathers were philosophers and decent people, and had no idea of what their baby would evolve into.
IMHO the problem is we aren’t able to effectively deal with the few violent offenders for two reasons.
The system is clogged up with non-violent offenders who would be better off with referrals social services or medical care. People in the system for drugs, prostitution, gambling in places where it’s illegal, etc. They should be sentenced to those rehabilitation programs rather than prison.
The court system is clogged up with repeat violent offenders. Those who commit the vast violent crimes should go away for long periods of time. Some caveats would apply, for example an abuse victim who retaliates against their abuser should have a very light sentence. On the other hand, the guy who just murdered someone and is found to have a long list of prior offenses for assault, robbery, home invasion, etc. punished by probation or a few months of prison should have likely been given 10 - 20 much earlier in his “career.” 30+ years by the time someone reaches a third violent offense should be reasonable.
Property crimes like theft, pickpocketing, etc. would fall somewhere in the middle. Those offenders should be incarcerated for shorter time periods with a focus on rehabilitation for the underlying issues.
And/but/or we should take a deeper look into the foundational causes that lead people to crime and decide if it’s cheaper, better, and more morally correct to invest in improving circumstances far upstream.
But – America being America – we default to the solutions that create profit for somebody, rather than seek to address root causes or ameliorate the misery piece directly.
Agreed. This would help a lot in reducing crimes of desperation. That would lower the burden on the courts and the prisons to allow them focus on those who truly deserve to be there. We would also likely need fewer prisons in those circumstances.
It seems to me that “vindictiveness” and “retribution” are synonyms, and both are basically orthogonal to “justice”. Justice is what we have when everyone gets at least what they deserve. There is no injustice in someone getting more than they deserve, and I would not want to live in a world where nobody got more than they deserve.
Now, it is possible for someone to not deserve freedom. I’ll even go so far as to say that it’s possible for someone to not deserve life. In such cases, there is no injustice in denying them freedom or life. But neither is their injustice in allowing them freedom or life. In such cases, then, we must look at what others deserve.
If someone is robbed, they deserve to get their property back. If we can catch the thief and recover the property, then justice is served by doing so. So restitution is a valid form of justice.
People deserve to be able walk the street without being violently assaulted. By putting the perpetrators of violence behind bars, we keep them off the streets, and so give others the safety they deserve. So justice is also served by imprisoning the violent.
But putting that offender in a non-air-conditioned prison, or clamping his testicles in a vise grip, or any of the other sorts of punishment for punishment’s sake, do not do anything to get anyone what they deserve. And so they do not serve justice.
The way it makes society better is that people will be less likely to deliberately knock other people down if there is a significant risk of a punch in the face.
It’s an industry. It’s a for-profit industry. They have a foot in the door, have identified a market, have access to capital (particularly the publicly-traded corrections companies), and a track record for growth:
Except that study after study has shown that this isn’t really the case, and that rehabilitation works much better. That’s what the OP is about. So really, it isn’t about making society better at all, but about fulfilling our desire to punch the person that hurt us in the face.
The government that has the most control over how a state prison is run is the state government, not the federal government. And in many states, prisoner populations in private prisons are extremely high - especially New Mexico with over half its prisoners in private prisons.