Loss of liberty is the punishment.
Precisely!
Maybe I’m an idiot, but I’m not getting this. The punishment for crime is the loss of liberty, so we send you to prison, where you are punished by not having liberty any more. How does the meaning change if you use the verb form instead of the noun form?
I believe they mean actively punishing you beyond the incarceration itself.
Fully agreed. If we are going to use prison as punishment, we should be clear-headed about what we’re doing and even-handed about its application. If we would not sentence someone to rape, we should not tolerate it in prisons. It doesn’t matter what their crimes were.
If someone wants to advocate rape as a sentence… well, that’s also utterly horrific, but it’s at least more honest than the wink-wink nudge-nudge attitude that some people have toward criminals getting what they “deserve” when they are raped in prison.
If I were senior management for a prison system – particularly a for-profit prison system, I’d have three main priorities:
- Make more things criminal (via lobbying)
- Increase sentences for everything (ditto)
- Decrease costs of operation (by reducing services and quality of services at my prisons)
It’s very America. It’s the combo of perverse incentive and ‘privatizing profit while socializing loss.’
And crime and punishment is inarguably big business.
More on-point … I totally agree with those who say that the incarceration is the punishment. We shouldn’t heap on neglect, abuse, torture, and Geneva Accord-violation-esque tactics on top of that.
Nor should we allow them.
I think the Innocence Project has exonerated some 300 death row inmates via DNA technology. Think about that. While I don’t philosophically draw a distinction about who gets treated how while incarcerated, imagine the additional nightmare lived by a person who’s spending decades wrongfully incarcerated.
But lastly, it’s just another problem with our entire brand of capitalism: we profit heavily off of all kinds of misery – misery which could be improved, lessened, ameliorated, abated … if we had different collective values.
Upstream solutions.
We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, don’t we ?
Something’s horribly broken.
I also – as I do often – think about the Stanford Prison Experiment. No need to try to tear apart the criticisms against it for this post. We can take its results at face value.
I don’t think it would be easy to keep (particularly) violent criminals from doing unspeakable things to each other while incarcerated, but – as always – I think we should look around the world, see who might be doing it better than we are, and look to implement best practices.
I cannot imagine being homeless for any length of time. Similarly, I cannot imagine the living hell that some of these prisons must represent.
That’s not what governmental senior management of prisons makes a priority, that’s what the state legislature and often the governor want prioritized. It makes them “tough on crime and fiscally responsible” in the eyes of the average voter. And elected officials are some of the most ignorant people I’ve encountered when it comes to the rights of inmates and of individuals in general. One legislator demanded to know why we even have doctors and nurses in a prison, as he felt inmates did not merit medical care.
At least in my state, Corrections senior management generally rose thru the ranks and they know what a horror overcrowding, inappropriately long sentences, and lack of resources cause for absolutely everyone at the prison.
I assume that there is at least some bit of difference from the people who actually work in a prison, and those who work in an office hundreds of miles away who actually own the prison.
It’s the latter that are giving campaign donations to those politicians, either propping up the ignorant ones, or giving them incentive to remain ignorant.
I wonder, though, whether your direct experience is more with “store managers” rather than those at “corporate.”
IOW, aren’t there still a few levels between the most senior person in a correctional facility and the feckless policy makers to whom you refer ? In corporate speak, they might be district managers, regional managers, or Officers.
Who, obviously, are beholden to the budgets and priorities set out for them. I’m quite sure that well-meaning people working in the system shout to the heavens to make things better.
I’m talking about, effectively, the suits – the bean counters.
[I’m glad you got released ;-)]
This, and also avoid creating a generic punitive, cruel environment in the first place. Rape, physical assault, threats, intimidation, etc. should NOT be part of the prison community structure
I was a Medical Director for the state. I dealt with the Warden of all wardens, and various Corrections Secretaries (those folks who are appointed by the governor).
Thanks.
Then – in all sincerity – can you help me understand where that line is (between those who are trying to enact significant reform and those who are the impediment) ?
Is it at the legislative level ?
Is it primarily a question of funding, or does the Department of Corrections at a state level also block meaningful change – the kind of change that you might support ? Put another way: could there be ‘enough money’ to make things better, but the policies and procedures are far too intractable.
[Stipulating that There Is Never Enough Money]
Aside from the moral and practical implications, we have the 8th Amendment that outlaws this sort of thing.
I think this is on-topic:
Anybody seen this documentary ? IIRC, I saw it within the first year after it was released. I found it powerful. I may watch it again:
I’m from San Diego, so I’m aware that some efforts – no matter how much of a win-win they may be – get ridiculous pushback from Those People.
But it makes you wonder …
[drifting a bit farther afield…]
Which reminds me of the Appleton School Food Project.
It does come down to changing things via legislation. In my state it takes legislative approval to create needed new facilities like housing for our elderly/frail population in prison. It takes their approval to create more professional positions (nursing, physician, social worker, physical therapists, teachers, pharmacists, corrections officers). It takes their approval to reform hiring procedures so we can somewhat quickly offer qualified people these spots instead of having the process of hiring take so long that we lose good candidates to the private sector. It takes their approval to increase wages enough to be competitive.
Honestly, we’ve made the most progress in improving our prison system in the last 2 decades as a result of LOSING lawsuits, and having the courts mandate that we MUST make changes, and that the state MUST spend the money to do so. That’s when I’ve seen the legislature, very grudgingly, give us the reforms and monies needed for real change.
a) We tend to do the right thing … when everything else has failed (also see: better to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than not at all);
b) Generically, who sued who, and who lost ? Was it like the ACLU and/or (families of) inmates suing the state or the DoC ?
Just in case anyone thought I’d started this thread and bailed: many of the posts were while I was asleep, what with me living in China. I just finished reading the whole thread, and I really appreciate the participation thus far–even from a certain other poster!
I may make a more extensive comment addressing many of the points y’all have brought to the table, but for now, I just want to say two things:
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Karma is meaningless to me. “What goes around comes around” sounds good, but I think we have more than enough empirical evidence to show that is not the case. On top of that, as I believe another poster indicated, different people have different ideas of what Karma is.
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Nobody–and I mean nodobody–deserves to be murdered, raped, assaulted, punched in the mouth, stolen from, cheated, etc. That’s the reason we have a justice system in the first place: to remove ourselves from the barbarism prohibited, as another poster mentioned, by the 8th amendment.
Thank you for participating in this thread!
ETA: Even before I “went woke” ages ago, I never considered ACLU to be the evil so many conservatives do. It’s a very good thing, IMHO, that we have an organization with the capacity to hold the government to task. And it’s a sad thing that we need to have it.
Yes, that would be ideal. But what you’re essentially saying is prisoners shouldn’t be around prisoners.
And that idea’s been tried. Prisons have been run where they isolated prisoners from each other. The results were not good. Isolating prisoners from social interaction with other prisoners causes psychological problems. But not isolating prisoners from each other means that many prisoners will be committing crimes against other prisoners.
It seems to me, though, that those revenge fantasies actually do hurt people. Look at GreysonCarlisle’s post above. He’s fine with society abdicating its responsibilities so long as they can blame the hell the prisoner suffers through on the prisoner. And think about all the political traction being “tough on crime” gets. Of course, being tough on crime is really being abusive to those incarcerated instead of seeking actual solutions to the problem of crime in the first place.
EXACTLY! The cop was obviously operating according to his morality (or his version of karma), not the morality of the society he’s supposed to serve, said morality expressed in the laws it was his job to enforce.
Yep. There’s that whole 8th amendment thing mentioned.
And the arbitrary (so-called “deserved”) punishment is not limited to just those who have committed what society in general, through the legislative process, has deemed crimes. There are plenty of victims of prison violence who got sent to prison for things other than crimes of violence.
Your last sentence really is just another way of saying, “What’s the rest of the plan? How is the dispenser of prison justice to be rewarded for that?” Of course they are not to be rewarded, just as GreysonCarlisle said above. He’s fine with someone being murdered in prison and calling that justice, but he’s not fine with rewarding the person who dispensed that “justice”. That’s not a system of morality; it’s capricious. And that’s no way to run a society.
A very old, and unsettled, debate is: What is the purpose of prison? Yes, a decent society focuses on the reason for the criminal behavior in the first place, and then, while protecting itself, separates dangerous people for rehabilitation if such rehabilitation is possible, or keeps the offender separate from society without being barbaric in its own treatment of the offender.
Personally, I do not see how victim impact statements as currently practiced now cannot have an effect on the judge pronouncing sentence. The trial, with the prosecutor representing society and the defense attorney representing the accused is the venue, IMHO, to determine what happened and to assign guilt. Victims standing up in court and delivering quite emotional comments to and about the accused with no recourse for the accused is not something I am comfortable with calling part of a fair trial.
To the poster who accused me of believing my morality is the morality: Hah! Quite hypocritical. I am not the only one, as evidenced by the number of posters responding in this thread, to think that my morality on this issue is the moral view.
I have mentioned it before on this site: More than once, I have been falsely accused of crimes. Those crimes meet some people’s view of “He deserves whatever happens to him in prison”. Luckily, I was not taken to trial and certainly not incarcerated for something I did not do. I take false accusations of criminal behavior and society’s obligations to those society incarcerates quite seriously. Does that make me a “chickenshit”? Well, if so, cluck cluck poop.
The other points in the posts I have not quoted in this one have already been answered either the way I would have (but more eloquently than I) or are tangential to what has already been answered.
And that brings up another obligation society has: staff the prison appropriately to avoid that happenning.