I've always held to the "Sin City"[1] philosophy: society's needs change over time, while people fundamentally don't. The existence of prison is just a failure of society to accommodate the wide variety of human natures.
Obviously this brings up questions of the "dangerous to society" variety, but a minuscule percentage of prisoners are dangerous psycho killers.
[1] Most people think Marv is crazy, but I don't believe that.
I'm no shrink and I'm not saying I've got Marv all figured out or anything, but "crazy" just doesn't explain him. Not to me. Sometimes I think he's retarded, a big, brutal kid who never learned the ground rules about how people are supposed to act around each other.
But that doesn't have the right ring to it either. No, it's more like there's nothing wrong with Marv, nothing at all--except that he had the rotten luck of being born at the wrong time in history. He'd have been okay if he'd been born a couple of thousand years ago. He'd be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody's face. Or in a roman arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him.
They'd have tossed him girls like Nancy, back then.
I can say I would not want to live in a society that "accommodates" the needs of rapists, murderers, child molesters as well as the various petty criminals.
Sin City was a dark film, I never found it a model for cultural structure.
What about one that accommodates people who possess marijuana? What about a society that accommodates people who have opioid addictions and need medical help? I think you have a rather skewed idea of the majority of our prison population. I'll give you a hint, though: most of them aren't rapists, murderers, and child molesters.
> most of them aren't rapists, murderers, and child molesters.
I assume there are also a lot of people in prison that aren't rapists or murderers but still cause a lot of troubles if left to their own device. What should be done with these ones? I agree prison is cruel and inhuman and I'm all for better detention conditions, but I don't think it's realistic to suggest we should leave these people walk freely (or to suggest that they don't exist). What are the alternatives?
>"What about one that accommodates people who possess marijuana? What about a society that accommodates people who have opioid addictions and need medical help?"
Marijuana at least in the US, is an example of where society is actually changing to accommodate people:
Also the Opioid epidemic is finally getting the attention it deserves at the federal level in the US. I think we will see an end to the cruel policies that are in place:
We got Al Capone for tax evasion. Sometimes the laws you see as unjust are there for a reason. In California, for instance, a DUI has a part A and B so if they drop one part you always get convicted of the other.
Are you suggesting that most offenders of what are typically seen as 'minor' or 'victimless' crimes are actually guilty of more serious crimes, but for whatever reason cannot be caught or prosecuted?
He's saying that minor crimes are the element of indeterminacy that gives the legal system wiggle room to dole out arbitrary punishment when actual circumstances almost, but not fully warrant normal punishment.
A classic example is Al Capone caught for tax evasion. A more recent one is OJ Simpson jailed for some break-and-entering bullshit because everyone wants to punish him for those famous murders.
>" A more recent one is OJ Simpson jailed for some break-and-entering bullshit because everyone wants to punish him for those famous murders."
I'm sorry "breaking and entering bullshit"?
The crime was armed robbery and kidnapping. And it was OJ Simpson who said that nobody could leave the room which brought up the kidnapping charge. All of this actually happened. Nobody disputes these claims. Nothing to do with breaking and entering but much more serious crimes.[1]
If a family member of yours was robbed in their hotel room at gun point would it still be "bullshit"?
I saw a tv show that presented those facts, yes. It also features the Goldman family celebrating that he got any kind of jail time at all. And it was a long sentence too!
So are you saying he shouldn't have been jailed for armed robbery and kidnapping? That seems unreasonable. Or are you saying that the Goldmans shouldn't have been happy he was in prison? Maybe so, but that's got nothing to do with the criminal justice system.
Actually, my broader point is that there's substancial indeterminacy to the legal system and that society uses this wiggle room to dole out mob justice.
That may be true, but I don't see how it's relevant to OJ. He wasn't lynched or set up; he committed a crime and went to prison for it. I don't see how that's mob justice even if some people were happy about it.
This is me being an armchair "bird lawyer" without actual expertise, but it seems to me that his threatening people with a gun for them to stay in a room for a few minutes while he searched the place for the goods they thought stolen from him...
... well, it's not good. But is it kidnapping? My common sense tells me by then the system was biased against him. Mob justice, therefore, even if not from a wild, tar-and-feather variety.
>> I'll give you a hint, though: most of them aren't rapists, murderers, and child molesters.
> HINT = 15% of the prison population in California are sex offenders.
Rapists and child molesters would both fall under the sex offender category, meaning 85% of prisoners are not convicted of those crimes (according to your post, which lacks citation).
Are you indicating that more than one in three California prisoners are convicted of murder? It sounds like you’re making a case for more than 35% of prisoners as murderes (15 + 35 = 50%). I’m not comfortable with that assumption without links to data.
This definitely doesn't support their point, but the State of California's report[0] turns out to be generally fascinating. More to the point of this thread, sex offenders and murderers make up ~26% of their prison population.
I was myself confused by the comment I was replying to. I don't like when people say "hint, most people x".
I wanted to get better information about what the actual statistics were, because I didn't know what percent of the prison population were sex offenders, which was 15%.
I'm not sure what my position on this issue is. But it appears that a decent percentage of people in prison in California are serious criminals, and although some are definitely marijuana offenders that should probably be released, I don't think its fair to call that the majority of the people in the prison system.
I can say I would not want to live in a society that "accommodates" the needs of rapists, murderers, child molesters as well as the various petty criminals.
The communists did this in the Gulag system, by putting the rapists and murders -- who had obviously been victimized by the previous system -- in charge.
Pretty sure that wasn't intentional. It's just what happens in dangerous times -- dangerous people prosper.
It was deliberate and ideologically driven. The people who were imprisoned by the previous repressive system must have been innocent victims of that system.
> a failure of society to accommodate the wide variety of human natures
The raison d'être of the society (and the state) is not to "accommodate" anything, especially not some particular aspects of human nature, but rather to suppress them, limit the "natural" freedoms -- in order to create a semblance of order and harmony among humans, which, in particular, makes it easier to control (and protect) them.
Oof. That is one view. There are others, that tend to note that society exists without state institutions - in fact, society is a necessary precondition to a state.
Some of these other views don't credit 'society' as something with a will or a reason, simply as an emergent property. That's not to say 'society' doesn't cause things to happen, but it does imply disagreement with the parent comment.
I absolutely agree that states are primarily instruments of suppression and coercion. I just think that equating state and society is not only incorrect, but also heads down a potentially dangerous path. Societies emerge from being social animals in proximity, states emerge from negotiations, coercion, or some combination thereof.
Are you sure that states don't emerge automatically too?
We are hierarchical creatures, even in a small group of friends hierarchy appears on its own. If you have a hierarchy the rest is just organizational details.
I disagree. If society always let people get away with their crimes, criminals would gain an evolutionary upper hand and soon crime and distrust would become the norm. Criminals would be popping out children and altruistic people would be picking up the bill.
Also I think that our current system lets white collar criminals off too easily; they should be punished more severely.
This type of evolution is especially dangerous in a modern context because technology and globalization have taken the humanity out of our daily interactions and have therefore reduced the importance of altruism.
But if don't have prison sentences, how do you prevent the next Madoff? Human nature is what it is, you just can't assume that all citizens are fundamentally good. There needs to be somehow a system of penalty/incentive to behaving well. It's not just about locking dangerous people away.
Perhaps if we tried prosecuting most of the people who commit large-scale financial abuse, instead of throwing the book at one guy and letting the rest off with a wink and a nod.
If prison sentences are merely a deterrent to other criminals, then sure, we need some evidence to back up the idea that deterrence works. (I would think it's pretty self-evident that there are a ton of minor/medium crimes that would increase in prevalence if there were no consequences, though.)
But it's not. Prison is also a punishment for the person who committed the crime, and, if our prison system wasn't so messed up, could be a place for reform.
The most fundamental human rights are to be able to live without suffering what the guys that are in these prisons do to the society. Living without fear of violence, rape, murder, being burglarized, conned, etc. These are human rights.
Merely keeping someone in a cell is a rather gentle treatment compared to how other cultures or other times treat/treated criminals.
Now we can discuss sentence lengths, prison sentencing for certain non violent crimes, etc. But I am sure I am not alone to have no sympathy for the idea that putting criminals in jail is violating their human rights.
Living without fear of being conned is a human right??
I can buy that living without fear of murder or rape or even theft is a human right (we have a right to life, liberty, and property). I can even buy that locking con men away is desirable from the point of view of improving society as a whole. But raising that to the level of a human right seems much.
Yes, as I said in my comment, property is commonly recognized as a human right.
Nothing in that Wikipedia article says anything about being conned or deceived out of your property, and my question is whether a right to not be conned can be derived from that right. Do I have a fundamental human right to hold onto my property even if I am making a decision to give it up that other people think is unsound? Does that right prevent me from giving up my property? (There are, in general, rights that prevent you from doing things - for instance, I'd say that the right to liberty prevents you from consenting indefinitely to authoritarian government. Is this one of them?) Or do I have a fundamental human right to do with my property as I wish, and a right to not have my decisions second-guessed by the government?
For example, several jurisdictions believe that I cannot give up all copyright claims to some software I write, and that whatever I do, I maintain a "moral right" or "author's right" to the software, and even if I want to promise someone that they can literally do whatever with the software, the laws prevent me from doing that. I think this is a violation of my liberty, but clearly the people writing the laws think that I am being conned.
> IMO, the whole idea of prisons is inherently inhumane. We've really got to do better.
At some point I reread Isaiah 61:1, "...to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound...," and it's been bugging me ever since that prison is, as far as I know, not a concept in the Judeo-Christian worldview. Isaiah doesn't want to proclaim liberty to the unjustly captive and release to the unjustly imprisoned; he's proclaiming release to everyone.
All the examples of people going to prison in the Bible that I can think of - Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, John the Baptist in Judea, Paul and Silas in Philippi, etc. - are of "good guys" being thrown in prison by "bad guy" governments. I can't think of an example where God says to build a prison, or where a follower of God puts someone in prison, and the Bible says they did a good thing. (Maybe I'm forgetting something, though; I'd appreciate correction here.)
For all that Western culture seems to be proud of our Judeo-Christian morality, did we inherit this one keystone of our whole thing from pagan concepts of how to run a justice system?
And is it my religious duty as a Christian to fight for release for all the prisoners?
> And is it my religious duty as a Christian to fight for release for all the prisoners?
I think it probably is.
Prisons are pretty inhumane: this has been recognized in the modern era by people as disperate as Johnny Cash and Eugene Debs[0] (and many others besides).
The cloak of "rehabilitation" or "correction" is really just a way of making punishment more paletable -- and as others in the thread have commented, that is actually what many people (in the US and Britain certainly) believe prisons are for, and ought to be for. But punishment doesn't improve society: recitivism rates remain very high even with very brutal criminal justice systems, and obviously don't deter. Even the "Bloody Code" in the 19th century in the UK didn't work, otherwise crime would have died out.
The causes of crime are various and complex. If we want to reduce crime and bring about justice and security for everyone, we need to address those causes. And as Debs wrote about rather eloquently after spending time in prison, all the American system has done for hundreds of years, by and large, is take people in desperate circumstances and make those circumstances even more desperate. It essentially exacerbates the causes of crime in countless instances.
Thus the fight for real justice and real peace has to be the fight not just on behalf of victims, but on the perpatrators as well. It prevents more victims, for one. But Christian duty, and Christian compassion, also demands caring attention to everyone, even people that have done truly terrible things. This isn't easy, or even pleasant, but that's one of the real radical roots of Christianity.
That struggle for justice and peace isn't as simple as "open the gates of the prisons, and let people do what they want." A lot of people would try to reduce such an argument to that. It's a process, and a path, and taken seriously, we could find ourselves at the end of that path with a society that is fairer, happier, more peaceful, and which has no need of prisons.
(And as a further aside of personal interest, that question of radical Christianity and the very real attention to the precepts of the gospels was one of the things that led George Fox to found the Quaker movement, which was also for a long time considered insidiously radical, and violently surpressed: largely because the Quakers refused to swear oaths or participate in war. The Peace Testimony of the Quakers -- also often treated in reductive terms along the lines of "oh, so you don't fight to defend anyone then" -- is pretty powerful stuff, that acknowledges the complexities of conflict and violence[1], but also the causes of conflict and violence, and seeks to end violence by putting an end to the causes of it[2].)
states want private prisons. prisons should be to rehabilitate. so pay the prison business only if it delivers. i.e. pay private prisons on a rehabilitation rate instead of simply the number of inmates.
it's not like you're expected to pay for damaged goods in a regular business transaction, so simply stop doing so with private prisons.
A lot of people, regardless of political persuasion, believe that the purpose of prisons is to punish those inside. No more, no less, and any "rehabilitation" is just something that happens alongside (and often in spite of) the real purpose.
Even if the purpose was punishment, I wonder why we harbor such a deep aversion to corporal punishment.
The (US) Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual" punishments in sentencing, but in my mind, losing years of one's life, which one will never get back, is significantly more cruel than, say, fifty lashes.
SCOTUS has said about the death penalty specifically that it is without a doubt cruel; however, it is pervasive, and therefore not an unusual punishment. Therefore there is no Constitutional violation. I suspect a similar argument in the inverse rules out corporal punishment. Fifty lashes, even if less cruel than decades in prison, is certainly a cruel punishment. It's also very unusual for 2017 America.
Prohibitions against X and Y unfortunately tend to be grammatically ambiguous. If your read it as "prohibited to do X and prohibited to do Y" rather than "prohibited to do [X and Y]", then it is equivalent to "prohibited to do [X or Y]". So for example, the statement "It is prohibited to bring fruits and vegetables across the border" would usually be taken to prohibit bringing fruits or vegetables alone.
Ok. We can argue grammatical pedantry all we want, I'm just saying what SCOTUS has said with regard to its interpretation of 8A specifically. There are three things not allowed: 1) excessive bail required; 2) excessive fines imposed; 3) cruel and unusual punishment. The application of a cruel but common punishment doesn't fit #3.
The trouble is that punishment and rehabilitation are seen as mutually exclusive. That a "soft" prison is less punishing. But really the removal of freedom in itself is a vast punishment. Going further than that is just unceccessary and counterproductive.
The problem is rehabilitation only works on some people, and punishment works on virtually no one.
Prisons are a dumping ground for people with personality disorders. You can't fix a personality disorder with rehabilitation, or with punishment. (Arguably you can't fix a personality disorder at all.)
Some people are relatively rational. They commit crimes for a variety of reasons, a good proportion of which are a direct outcome of poverty and/or economic abuse and/or racism.
The best way to rehabilitate them is to rehabilitate society so it doesn't push them into a corner, or create subcultures where crime is a reasonable survival option.
The people with psychological issues are much harder to deal with. Keeping them locked and away and occupied is more humane than trying to "punish" them, because the punishment is pointless and will have exactly zero effect.
Running prisons as a for-profit industry instead of a social service is barbarism, and ultimately just puts more criminals on the streets.
If punishment is rehabilitating, in average, the harder the prisons the nicer the people that come from them. We could check for instance, I don't know, Russia vs. Sweden or something like that.
If we believe prisons are to act as a sort of operant conditioning for the inmates, then the punishment IS supposed the rehabilitation. However, as you probably know, many folks do not respond to this type of conditioning.
That's not even remotely accurate. All you need to do is look at the number of people in prison who aren't felons to know that that's wrong on its face.
What I personally appreciate the most is the simple fact of having dangerous people confined so that the danger to others (including myself) is no longer there.
I'm not sure where you're from and prison effectiveness tends to be dramatically different throughout the world. However, where I'm from, federal penitentiaries have a first year recidivism rate of over 40% (for non indigenous males) and nearly 60% (for indigenous males). In Canada, the provincial correctional system houses people sentenced to two years less a day, so federal penitentiaries tend to house more violent criminals.
I'll agree that it's nice having them off the streets, though I hate knowing that we release people knowing that on average, over 40% for reoffend within their first year.
At least in the US, that results in the dangerous people you mentioned being confined with lots of people with undiagnosed or untreated mental problems and lots of nonviolent (non-dangerous) offenders. On top of that, you have a significant number of innocent people incarcerated also, people who got screwed by the system along the way.
When we place all those people together, in a setting where violent assaults are shockingly common -- and, in particular, the constant threat of rape -- we are definitely making you less safe, not more safe. One might argue that at least the "dangerous people" are preying on other "criminals" while they are inside, but how many of those victims end up becoming MORE dangerous to you and your family due to years of state-supervised abuse?
You are completely correct. I'd also add that even if we assume everyone IS dangerous, would you really want to lock them away for 5, 10, 15 years without any thought as to what sort of human they'd be after that? My personal opinion is that we should treat these people humanely and with sympathy, but if GP is taking an extreme self-centered approach then why not consider the possibility that the system is creating people who are more dangerous to them in the long run?
It's hard to precisely quantify the violent versus non-violent crimes, so I'll be making some assumptions in my summary based on some educated guesses about the kinds of crimes that land you in each category:
I question the reliability of the metrics, especially at the state-level where records keeping, analysis, and justice procedures are disjoint. I would find it hard to believe that we have both the highest prisoners per capita and the highest violent people per capita.
Why is this hard to believe? Even with more ready access to guns, Americans stab, beat, and bludgeon more people to death that most countries entire murder rate. The US is a violent country even without counting the guns.
I believe GP's claim is factually accurate. The USA has the 4th highest homicide rate in the OECD, after Mexico, Turkey, and Estonia [1]. Roughly 2/3 of US homicides are using firearms [2]. After reducing the US homicide rate by a factor of 3, the US would still be 13th (out of 34) on the OECD list, between Portugal and France.
Which figures are you using to consider their statement absurd? I suppose the 'most' countries part is only true if you restrict it to the usually considered rich countries or 'developed' countries, but that seems like a reasonable restriction to make given the context.
I did a quick calculation based on probably obsolete numbers, but I got a homicide rate of around 4.8 per 100000 of which 2.7 are with guns, leaving 2.1 without which is still higher than most European countries. (check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... )
>Americans stab, beat, and bludgeon more people to death that most countries entire murder rate. The US is a violent country even without counting the guns.
Which is still not backed up. However, I am surprised to see the stats on the murder rate and gun violence all the same.
Why do we think that "dangerous people" is a coherent concept? Are there actually two million people in the US who are inherently dangerous and will commit crimes no matter what?
It's hard to know the exact number, but there certainly are people prone to violence. I don't see any indication there exists a reliable method to make them less so.
how about: prisons turns thousands of lowly offenders into hardened, violent criminals that will be out in innefective parole a few months down the road?
doesnt that make you more scared than "but at least 5 of them will be back in prision before commiting any seriously violent crime"
I've thought this for a long time. How do you actually make it happen, though?
If prisons had to refund the state when there was an instance of recidivism, they'd have an incentive to insure former prisoners were able to integrate back into society again.
Interesting system where you can bring your own things to prison instead of being forced to buy 300% price increased items from the prison commissary in N. America like clothing, fans, radios.
System here is very different in other ways such as being in a 200+ inmate dorm is the standard instead of cells, and there's dozens of rules set by inmates none of which were in this guide. You also get a 'prison consultant' if you can in the US if you are pleading guilty, they help you choose your own prison as part of the plea deal such as Madoff who's prison lets him teach other inmates economics.
The British prison system became increasingly chaotic during the 1980s, culminating in the notorious 25-day riot in Strangeways prison in 1990. The response was a five-month public enquiry led by Lord Woolf that prompted major reform throughout the prison system.
Perhaps the most important single change was the introduction of the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme. Woolf recognised something that seems obvious in hindsight - prisoners on a bread-and-water regime have little incentive to comply with prison rules, because they have nothing to gain and very little to lose. Offering small luxuries like the right to wear your own clothing, access to a games console or a small amount of discretionary spending gives prisoners the opportunity to make rational choices about their own circumstances.
In 2013, the Conservative government made the catastrophic decision to "toughen up" the regime and withdraw parts of the IEP scheme, while also cutting prison expenditure and staffing ratios. The results were entirely predictable - a huge increase in prison violence and disorder.
I'd lay the blame more specifically at Chris Grayling's feet, rather than the Government as a whole. How far he got I don't know, but Michael Gove was addressing IEPs when he took over as Justice Secretary. I felt it was a real shame to have lost him from that role.
The fundamental blunder was appointing Grayling in the first place. He had an ignorant, regressive attitude to criminal justice that we haven't seen since Michael Howard. In addition to wrecking the prison service, Grayling did grievous damage to the courts with the Criminal Courts Charge and the massive cuts to Legal Aid. Gove spent most of his tenure as Justice Secretary undoing the damage that Grayling had done.
I completely agree that Grayling's appointment was a blunder in the first place. I couldn't get my head around that one, although that's partly because I've never been impressed by him to begin with.
You can bring some items, but you couldn't bring a telly etc. There was talk a while back about banning books being sent to prisioners, not sure what logic was used for that one.
I haven't been to prison in the UK or the US however what I've seen of both, the US system seems straight up about making money over anything else. I'd hope the UK system isn't this way although I fear it likely is going that way.
> I'd hope the UK system isn't this way although I fear it likely is going that way
I fear the same, for example:
"On 16 December 2016, some 600 prisoners took part in a riot at HM Prison Birmingham, a prison in Birmingham, England, operated by G4S.[71] The disturbance was described as the worst in Britain since the 1990 Strangeways riot."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G4S#Activities
There are a number of documentaries where the instigators cite conditions and staff abuses as the reason for the Strangeways Riot.
The two most serious ringleaders are both now free, or were in the most recent doc, and are doing fairl well. One is fond of handing out papers with motivational or philosophical thoughts on them and the other now has his own gym.
This was a fascinating read, especially as an American who is not entirely familiar with some of the slang terms. I had to look a few things up, but it was worth the time.
I would heartily recommend "Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass" by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple.
It gives keen insight into the cultural mindset of victimization that produces the persistent underclass. From the overview: "Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives."
Isn't this self contradictory? Instead of taking personal responsibility for a failed set of values, instead the author blames an "elite culture searching for victims".
This "everyone has ultimate personal responsibility" way of thinking is uniquely American as far as I can see. Even without giving much leeway to self-victimization politics, analysis leads clearly to (1) you not being a coherent agency, often getting besides yourself or outside of your mind; or even not being the same person who shoplifted as a teen and (2) you been in many important ways a drop in an ocean, an atom of mass being. Of course individuality plays a very important role in the Enlightenment kind of rational civilization we strive for, but it doesn't mean non-individuality ("dividuality" and "collectivity") are not huge aspects of how we live.
As Alain de Botton once put it, in England the poor are "unfortunates", in America they're losers.
In Dalrymple's world, elites have a duty to set the tone and the agenda; and they are instead shirking from making judgement calls and saying "good is good, bad is bad".I don't agree much (we have elites telling us how to think as it is), but he points in the general direction of something without hitting the bullseye.
An archer is £2000, the amount Conservative Party deputy chairman Jeffrey Archer was caught paying a prostitute to keep quiet about his allegedly being a client of hers.
I first heard this usage on The New Statesman (the Rick Mayall TV comedy), but it may have originated elsewhere.
Archer has sold 330 million copies of his books and thus has no pressing need for money. That however is no excuse for encouraging someone to steal from a writer however successful. What else would you encourage people to thieve and from whom? Anyone who's been to prison?
330 millions copies ? Let's say for the thought experiment that it was sold only on the European continent (including Russia), it would mean that one in two people living in Europe bought a copy.
He’s written quite a bit more than one book (over 25). Sales are >250 million according to his website. His books are practically their own genre in the UK, if second hand shops are anything to go by.
IMO, the whole idea of prisons is inherently inhumane. We've really got to do better.