Ok, Charles Manson – good point. I think I concede.
Say what? We have a huge prison population, the highest incarceration rate in the world. Which is a major reason why people seldom serve their full sentences; we are so enthusiastic about throwing people in prison that there just isn’t room.
Heck, the casual use of plea bargaining shows you don’t even have the resources to process them all, long before you get around to imprisoning them.
Instead of prisons, rehab centers. Instead of serving sentences, being forced to go to behavioral counseling. Maybe a bunch reoffend, but if you put them in prison, then release them after x years, they will still reoffend.
Society would be
a) better
When you arrest people you are only catching a fraction of those that commit the offenses. Do speed traps reduce the number of speeders or do most people have a commitment to following the law?
Fill the graveyards.
Ultimately, the options are:
- Don’t punish crimes.
- Apply corporal punishment to criminals.
- Imprison criminals.
- Execute criminals.
Option 1: Obviously, the problem is that a significant number of people would routinely commit crimes if they knew they could get away with it, causing society to break down into a Hobbesean war of all against all.
Option 2: I can actually see a case for this as an alternative for some minor crimes (for one thing, it might be a more effective deterrent for the sort of petty offenses that are often the first steps toward career criminality). However, it would break down for more serious crimes: corporal punishments that would fit the crime would be so severe that it would be more honest to invoke Option 4 explicitly.
Option 3: The current system, ruled out by the OP.
Option 4: Even people who accept the death penalty as a reasonable option reserve it for the most severe crimes, which goes back to selecting one of the three previous options for everything else.
Exactly. Although institutional prisons are a recent development, exile and banishment as old as the Greeks (older if you believe the Bible), and pretty much the same as prison (better, if you consider the costs to the state).
The problem today, of course, is that true exile is impractical. But in the ancient world it was an effective substitute for modern prisons (at least for more serious crimes)
In Larry Niven’s Organ Bank stories, most crimes resulted in the criminals being broken down for parts. The jails existed for people who hadn’t been convicted yet. This was a popular system, because there was always a demand for organ transplants and most crimes were converted to capital offenses.
Isn’t a mental institution just a different type of prison? (And by extension, wouldn’t any rehab center for violent criminals quickly become a mental institution?) I’m all for focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment, but it’s still a “confinement-style” sentence.
Scotty Mo, I wonder if you could elaborate. What do you believe would happen under this proposal?
Imagine two people.
- Joe rapes and murders a 15-year-old girl. He’s tried and convicted and set free. What do you think would happen next?
- Jen shoplifts. She’s tried and convicted of shoplifting and set free. What do you think would happen next?
The good part about prisons is that they serve the function of incarceration, keeping dangerous people away from the rest of society. The bad part is everything else. I don’t think it’s the most effective means of punishment. Torture and execution would be much more effective. It certainly is terrible at rehabilitation. Any beneficial rehabiliation that occurs in prisons may be cancelled out by the ‘crime school’ environment and released prisoners relegated to a life of poverty where they are more likely to commit more crimes. In times past, exile was often a punishment, which meant passing the problem to the next town over. So there may be better ways to integrate prisons into the criminal justice system, but doing without them seems absurd.
Prisons kept me gainfully employed for several decades.
I don’t have a problem with public sector jobs for reasonable purposes, and as I mentioned, no prison means lots of problems, so you should still be employed. But don’t you think the way prisons operate now leaves something to be desired? And couldn’t some things be done that would make life easier for the prison guards and administration as well?
And, you’re not advocating locking up more people to create more prison jobs are you?
Quite the opposite. Several times on this board, I’ve said that I personally would line to repeal pretty much all laws against “victimless” crimes. That would greatly reduce the number of people serving time (admittedly, it would have a much larger effect on jails than prisons).
I’m all in favor of rehabilitation. I’m in favor of curing cancer too. But despite massive efforts, we haven’t figured out a general solution to either problem.
I’ve also said you won’t ever solve the problem of crime in the prisons. That makes no more sense than trying to fight disease at the mortuary. Crime needs to be solved out in the community. Prisons are the result of the problem, not its cause.
I’m trying to find the point of disagreement here, but I keep missing it.