Well it’s just like Club Med minus the access to porn, though, right?
Sadly, there’s a rather sizable faction of the populace who seem to get a vicarious thrill from making the lives of prisoners as miserable as possible. I doubt they’ll be satisfied until we’re hanging drug addicts by their testicles over cauldrons of boiling urine.
[QUOTE=Ibn Warraq]
Cite?
[/QUOTE]
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=913013
http://www.toddkendall.net/internetcrime.pdf
People who get their image of prison from movies and TV have the mistaken idea that prison is an exciting place - dangerous and violent, yes, but exciting.
Completely wrong. Prison is like the most boring place you can imagine. You’ve probably sat in a doctor’s waiting room at some point and you were probably bored. Imagine how bored you’d be if you had to sit there all day. Now imagine if you had to sit in that waiting room for five years.
The biggest danger in prison isn’t getting raped or stabbed. The biggest danger is getting institutionalized. That’s when your brain basically stops and you surrender to the routine. You just walk around doing the same thing every day without thinking. Eventually you lose the ability to think for yourself - you need the routine to function.
Yes, because arbitrarily creating extra rules is the way to make people become more likely to follow the others. That’s why strict parents always wind up with well-behaved kids.
If the threat of punishment was going to stop you, it should have stopped you before prison, at least after sentencing. Further punishment will not make you more likely to learn. It’s stupid to try the same thing over. It’s even dumber for it to be something that correlates with more crime being committed.
Furthermore, I’m not convinced that criminals are just people without the ability to follow laws they disagree with. I think most violent criminals have an anger problem. They get so angry that the normal reasons for not being violent don’t occur to them until it is too late. And while treating an anger problem does eventually involve making someone angry while telling them not to react, you first have to teach them the latter part–how to not react to being angry.
As QtM says, the idea that prison actually rehabilitates is silly. There’s very little focus on actually trying to teach anyone anything. Shoving people in a room where it’s pretty much attack or be attacked does nothing about teaching you not to be violent.
Why not chemically castrate them for the duration of their sentence?
No one can control their urges. Free will is an illusion.
Using the super reliable warsaw pact crime statstics, right? And after all all those countries had exactly the same cultures.
It doesn’t matter how you feel. This is where criminal justice has been going wrong since day 0.
Meaningful macro objectives/goals should be set based upon “how you feel”, such as “grandmothers feeling safe from muggings”.
Then everything else should be done, so far as possible, based upon the sceintific method.
Brains don’t work the way you seem to think they do.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, with over 2.2 million currently locked up and an additional 5 million on probation or parole. The serial killers and rapists are well in the minority. There’s also the potential health complications of chemical castration; ranging from breast development and muscle loss to bone weakening and cardiac issues.
All in all, it’d be much, much more ethically troubling and expensive than just letting Jeffrey the Drug Dealer subscribe to Penthouse.