Shouldn’t you use evidence to determine if you should or should not do so? See, what you just invoked there is a destructive meme called “political correctness”. There might or might not be differences between racial and genetic subgroups for the effectiveness of certain interventions. There certainly are for medical care, why not psychological corrections?
But you just invoked political correctness. Implicitly, you just called anyone who even considers if there might or might not be racial differences a racist. Maybe there are racial differences, maybe there are not, but it’s a valid subject of inquiry like any other.
Well, its cultural as well. In some places crime is considered to be a sin, in others its an unavoidable part of life. Immigrants carry their beliefs with them to their new countries and this can influence the crime rate.
Also, the reason we punish criminals is because they deserve it. Doing bad things to bad people is probably an innate drive because it’s what everyone everywhere does and has done (though some may be a bit harsh, thats a matter of degree).
Does anyone here have any actual experience with prison? They’re not medieval dungeons with racks and iron maidens. They’re not even the kinds of imaginary prisons you see in movies and TV. Prisons aren’t “sadistically punishing” people. In fact, the most prevalent aspect of prison is how mind-numbingly boring it is. It’s not a pleasant place by any means but it’s mostly unpleasant in the same way that visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles is unpleasant. Imagine sitting in a DMV lobby for several years - that’s what prison is like.
As for rehabilitation, every prison I’ve ever worked in has been 100% in favor of it. We love rehabilitation. And if you have any ideas on how to make it work, be sure to tell us. Because after two hundred years of trying, nobody has yet figured out how to rehabilitate somebody.
Because here’s the central reality of rehabilitation: the only person who can rehabilitate a criminal is the criminal himself. When he decides he wants to rehabilitate himself, he will do it. And if he doesn’t want to rehabilitate himself, nobody else will ever be able to make him do it. All anyone else can do is offer encouragement and suggestions.
And if you want to address the problems that put people in prison, step outside of prison. Prison is the end of the line. If you want to help somebody, you should have started several years before they step inside a cell. If you want to fix society, go work on schools and libraries and clinics and rec centers and housing projects. Trying to fix social problems in prison is like trying to fix health problems in the morgue.
As for drugs, there a lot of solutions, like for example, legalization of marijuana, and easing up on penalties for other, harsher substances. Prohibition didn’t work, so why are we trying it with drugs? I’m not saying it will be easy, but we lost the War on Drugs a long time ago.
Well, yeah, but what’s the alternative? I mean, let’s face it: there are some people who are too dangerous to be let out. (Serial killers like Charles Manson and co., child molestors like Jerry Sandusky, etc). And they’re not the type who CAN be rehabilitated. So while there’s probably room for making prison a little less boring, there’s always going to be a need for it.
As they should. Many say they’d rather a thousand guilty go free, than one innocent be jailed. I say I’d rather a thousand criminals serve severely long sentences, than one innocent be killed by an early release. And I make this very clear to my representatives.
They’re criminals. They chose to be criminals. Either execute them, or lock 'em up and leave 'em. Although I prefer execution for the violent, I’m content with permanently caging them, just so long as they cannot endanger the rest of us.
As to the OP, people like me are why we punish criminals.
This is a well-established point of view. The problem with it is several-fold :
You aren’t really reducing crime much, because that 1% or 10% you have locked up, were you to release them, has similar probability of committing a crime over the long term as the 90% or 99% you haven’t locked up.
What you’ve done here, by labeling people “criminals”, is make the death penalty (by old age) the punishment for all crimes.
Number 2 sounds good, right. Well, ever consider what this forces criminals to do? Suppose a punk breaks into a house and pilfers something. Homeowner comes home. Punk might as well murder the homeowner - penalty is the same, and the witness is dead.
Suppose a person is sitting in their car, smoking a little reefer. A police officer comes up. Might as well murder the cop - penalty is the same, and the witness is dead.
Suppose a person knows they are wanted for a crime, and a team of police officers shows up to arrest them. Might as well go out shooting - you’re going to die anyways.
You’ve turned every criminal justice encounter into a fight to the death. In a country with almost as many firearms as people. In a world where body armor does not protect against higher end rifle rounds, and human reaction delays are slow enough that even if you sent a SWAT team to make an arrest, if the suspect gets the first shot off he’ll probably take at least one lawman with him.
This isn’t sustainable. Modern society has decided that 1-5% of the entire adult population are criminals.
I thought of this when I thought about how when police officers shoot an unarmed suspect who might be going for a gun, the police officer is prioritizing his own safety enormously over that over the suspect. The suspect might be going for a gun to shoot the officer, but if the officer shoots him, the suspect will definitely be dead.
Well, police officers could simply fire a “security round” every time they encounter anyone. Pull someone over? Shoot em dead the moment their car stops. After all, when they reach for the glove compartment to pull out their insurance card, they might have a gun in there. Encounter someone in the street for jaywalking? Shoot them the moment you see them twitch - they might have a gun hidden on them and be a world class quick-draw champion.
This obviously does not save police officer lives, though, because it turns every encounter into a fight to the death.
Am I straw manning? Maybe. But the point is, if you decide that, say, 10% of crimes are death penalty worthy, then that 10% of “criminals” is going to fight to the death rather than be brought in. You’re going to run out of cops before you run out of criminals. If you start shooting unarmed suspects enough every year, eventually the people will start shooting back. Etc.
I did find this. The article is from a decade old and deals with the time period of 1997-2001.
http://www.thelocal.se/20051214/2683
“The report is based on statistics for those “suspected” of offences for reasons of comparison, but Stina Holmberg of the Council for Crime Prevention said that there was “little difference” in the statistics for those suspected of crimes and those actually convicted.”
The problem is we’re not dealing with a typical group of people. If you just picked a thousand people at random off the streets and locked them up in prison, you could probably get away with having a prison with minimal rules and maximum freedom.
But prisons are not full of random people. The people that get sent to prison are those that chose to break the rules and put their own interests ahead of other people’s. You essentially have a society in which every individual thinks the rules only apply to other people.
Because have no illusion: prisoners love the rules in prison - as long as they’re being enforced on somebody else. I can’t tell you how many times I had a prisoner telling me I should be cracking down harder on other prisoners.
Tell a guy to turn down the volume on the TV and he’ll complain. But if you don’t control the volume, everyone else will complain it’s too loud for them to sleep. Tell one guy to clean the shower after he’s done and he’ll complain. But if you don’t tell people to clean the shower, everyone else will complain how dirty it is. Tell the guy on the phone to hang up and give somebody else a chance and he’ll complain. But if you let people stay on the phone as long as they want, everyone else will complain when one guy makes a two hour call and nobody else gets a chance to use the phone. Make guys turn their ID card in when they use rec equipment and they complain. But if you don’t keep track of the rec equipment, everyone will be complaining because all the rec equipment is missing.
Running a prison unit is like being in charge of a crowd of irresponsible five-year-olds. You have to set up rules to control pretty much every aspect of their behavior in order to keep the place livable. And every one of them will spend half their time complaining about the rules and why are you telling them what to do and the other half of their time complaining about what everyone else is doing and why aren’t you making them stop.
Thanks!
I have always heard that sweden and the other nordic countries have better justice systems than the US. At least in terms of recidivism, it appears not to be the case. Crime and punishment is hard. No one has a good answer.
Do you have a cite for this? IIUYC you are saying that there is no difference in crime rates between ex-cons and the general public. I don’t think that is correct.
Let’s disregard drug crime for now. Property crime offenders are the most likely to re-offend in the US, at 82.1 percent. 73.6 percent of “public order offenders” re-offend, and 71.3 percent of violent offenders.(cite). I don’t think it is possible that the general public commits a prison-worthy felony at anywhere near 70%.
I have heard theories that a small percentage of convicts are responsible for a disproportionate or majority of crimes committed by repeat offenders. Thus in theory one could release most inmates, keep the particularly bad ones in prison, and thus save money on incarceration while getting much of the benefit of preventing felons from committing crimes.
The problem is that there is no reliable, practical way to identify who the most likely repeat offenders will be (cite). There is a scale used to predict whether a given child molestor is likely to reoffend or not - if a molestor is over 25, has molested non-family members, or has molested at least one boy, his chances of re-offending go way up - but that is statistical rather than individually predictive, and there are Constitutional issues with punishing someone more or less based on such a measurement.
But if you have a cite for the claim that we aren’t preventing crime by incarcerating criminals, I would like to see it. Certainly it costs a lot to imprison people. No one disputes that. But it does reduce crime by preventing convicts from committing crimes.
I am curious about your definition of “young man”.
“Man” implies adult. If one is 18, then one is eligible to vote. The right to vote carries an implicit assumption that one is capable of evaluating consequences and making rational choices.
If this assumption is invalid, what would be a more sensible age of majority?
The weird thing is some of the people who commit the worst crimes are the ones least likely to ever commit another crime.
Take Sonya Spoon as an example. She murdered her own children - a crime so horrible that it would make even hardened criminals shudder. But she’ll probably never commit another serious crime in her life.
Meanwhile, you’ve got John Smith - a petty criminal who’s been convicted fifty times for minor crimes like petit larceny. Smith’s a career criminal who’s going to keep on committing crimes as long as he’s out on the street.
So if you have limited cell space, which one do you put in prison? The one who committed a horrible crime or the one who will commit dozens of future minor crimes?
