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So this is a topic that has been bothering me recently, and I thought I'd make a thread about it because there seems to be some genuine contention between people irrespective of their political alignments. So the topic of this thread is the penal system, specifically individuals who are incarcerated, how it fits into a given nation's justice system (I am only particularly acquainted with the US and UK, but welcome all others), and considering whether or not it needs to see change. It is not to really deal with the process of law enforcement or conviction, even though those are major issues that probably need looking at too. So to begin with, what's the problem? Well, some nations, those found in the UK and the US for example, experience relatively high rates of prisoner recidivism (IE, when they are released they are more likely to commit another crime as time passes). Prisoners are also notoriously expensive for the state, costing roughly £30,000 GBP (~$44,000 USD) per prisoner to secure, feed etcetera. Private prisons, which form a powerful interest group in the US, often get away with paying much less per prisoner, but at great cost to prisoner safety and welfare, and higher rates of recidivism. So let's quickly look at the purpose of prisons and incarceration, so we can better measure how effective they are. Deterrence is the first key purpose of a prison, and wider penal actions in general. The idea is based on the theory that people tend to weigh up the consequences of their actions, with a tough penalty for committing the 'wrong' (criminal) action weighing greater than the benefit they'd receive from that action. I'm less likely to steal your Apple if I might lose my hand as punishment, because an apple simply isn't worth my hand. Retribution is the second purpose of a prison. Simply put, people like to see others they deem 'bad' to suffer. It is cathartic, acts as a form of social validation that arguably helps people better triangulate their own morality, and it prevents people from engaging in vigilantism because they have sufficient trust in the law to exact 'just desserts' on criminals. Rehabilitation tends to, though not always, run at cross purposes to retribution. Rehabilitation emphasises the fact that many criminals are victims of poor circumstance, lack of opportunities, or have an absence of common advantages that would've made them less culpable to committing a crime. Incapacitation is the final element of any prison system, and probably the most vital. It simply is a way to keep the criminal's actions from harming the rest of society. Keeping a mass murderer behind walls is first and foremost a safety measure to prevent more mass murders. Deterrence and rehabilitation are both explicit about trying to reduce the net amount of crime in society. However, there have been a pretty compelling array of studies to show that, usually when weighing up the consequences of committing a negative action, people tend to evaluate it against the chance of being caught, not the consequences of being caught. if you only get a slap on the wrist but you're highly like to get caught, this is far more effective at deterring a crime than threatening a steep punishment but with a low likelihood of being caught. For this reason, I do not think prisons as deterrence are effective at achieving that goal. I'm going to tackle rehabilitation and retribution together, because they tend towards being mutually exclusive. In order to effectively rehabilitate somebody, and to change their hearts and their minds, you often need to give them chances, comfort and opportunity. This runs counter to retributive justice, which revels in the negative consequences an individual receives. The thing is, rehabilitative programs have been shown to produce strong results. recidivism rates are markedly lower, with my favourite example being a Texas prison giving inmates a puppy to look after and nurture (to then be given to veterans). It turns out that being given responsibility for something teaches you.. responsibility? recidivism rates for inmates program when from 50%, to 3% almost instantly. I believe a lot of the problems with many current prison systems stem from this attitude of 'it should be a bad place, those fuckers deserve it'. What I find particularly funny is that it is found on both sides of the political spectrum. conservatives love their talk about being tough on crime, with many snide remarks about 'not dropping the soap', but when I've talked about seeking to rehabilitate, not punish, certain kinds of criminals, liberals too have got upset and turned into frothing die-hard retributivists. these types of criminals might be rapists, or bankers who've conned a lot of people out of their cash. Here's the thing, you can either accept that crime, all crime, is a kind social sickness, a manifestation of symptoms betraying deeper issues, or not. The deterrence effect isn't really a thing for prisons, so we are left with two choices. Rehabilitation, which likely result in lower net crime, but also less of that satisfying feeling (some call it justice, I call it revenge), or retribution, which makes people feel better at the cost of more crime. Personally I think it would be worth trying to make prisons a nicer place to be. Shorter sentences with more emphasis on education and training for more minor offenses such as drugs and burglary. longer sentences to those who commit more serious crimes, as they're likely to take longer to 'cure' of their predilections. Yes, even money hungry banker-types can feel like they're more a part of society after being in prison, which is a great social leveller, just ask Jordan Belfort. These people owe a debt to society because by committing a crime they are causing it damage, surely we should offer them the tools to repay it and become participating members? Incapacitation in my ideal system (IE extremely long or complete incarceration) would be reserved for those simply too dangerous to release again. These people should also be treated reasonably well, they aren't there for 'punishment', but to keep the rest of us from being harmed. I'm sure some of you will disagree with this though so, have at me.
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Apr 29, 2016 04:52
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Hell yes, I absolutely agree. You know how beyond the pale we are? You remember that movie Idiocracy? In the grim dark world of an America doomed to an apocalypse through stupidity, they had prisons which let you do a test to determine what sort of job you'd be best qualified for based on your skills. Present day America has nothing of the sort, and actually prefers for felons to be part of a locked cycle of release and re-incarceration. Our present day prison system is worse than Idiocracy's. Just...consider that.
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Apr 29, 2016 07:00
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Yes, reform is badly needed. I'm an ex-con involved with prison reform advocacy & activism; and I've written about this at length over the past 10 years, some of which has been reposted here.
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Apr 29, 2016 07:09
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A question for the thread that I am curious about... Is there any salience to the "perpetual prisoner machine" or "crime control as industry" styles of thought when it comes to actual prison reform? Coming at it as an outsider with no interaction with the justice system at all, I've heard it described as either an academically sound point or a conspiracy theory, without anything said in the middle. Is it actually a valid concern? Or simply a morbid thought exercise? A favourite radio documentarian of mine used the crime control as industry as gateway to create quite a few long documentaries about prisons and their effects. I just don't know if it not unbiased enough since the documentarian seemed a little too much a fan of the one criminologist trying to advance the idea.
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Apr 29, 2016 09:30
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Ocrassus posted:We are left with two choices. Rehabilitation, which likely result in lower net crime, but also less of that satisfying feeling (some call it justice, I call it revenge), or retribution, which makes people feel better at the cost of more crime. During the initial furor over the sentencing of the "Affluenza" teen, I read a memorable quote saying that when an emphasis on rehabilitation goes too far, it can become "making GBS threads on the victims." After devoting more than a decade of your life to raising your children, it's got to be tough to hear that the guy who casually went joyriding wasted and ran them over can afford a resort-style rehab and so will get a lighter punishment than the other drunk who ran over his own mailbox.
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Apr 29, 2016 14:43
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Phyzzle posted:During the initial furor over the sentencing of the "Affluenza" teen, I read a memorable quote saying that when an emphasis on rehabilitation goes too far, it can become "making GBS threads on the victims." Well in the case of the 'affluenza' dude I think part of his problem is/was his fantastic privilege and lack of social concern. He should've been moved to an institution where nobody knew of his wealth, where he was the exact same as everybody else there. THAT would've been more effective rehabilitation imho. Victims have legitimate and strong emotions towards criminals, but I wonder how much we ought to indulge them? Particularly if indulging them indirectly leads to more instances of crime happening. If someone hurt my family, I would want the worst to happen to them.. But that's not justice, it's more like an urge for revenge. a neurotic ai fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 15:19
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The affluenza kid is just a perfect example of how hosed up our system is. Compare rich people getting drug charges to poor people getting drug charges. It's the same thing. Black guy who works part time for minimum wage gets caught with a bit of crack? Dude might end up with life. If he doesn't he's completely hosed either way. He can't go to college because a drug charge means "lol gently caress you, no loans." He has a criminal record now and might even end up being a felon which means no voting ever again in much of America. Then once he does get out of jail he's going to be on probation and will be treated like tainted goods. He may never be able to hold a traditional job ever again which dramatically increases his chances of going back to jail. Rush Limbaugh gets caught with tens of thousands of pills and he gets to go to a swanky, expensive rehab. Once he's done he immediately goes back to his old job and old life, no questions asked, and no criminal record to speak of.
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Apr 29, 2016 22:11
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Phyzzle posted:During the initial furor over the sentencing of the "Affluenza" teen, I read a memorable quote saying that when an emphasis on rehabilitation goes too far, it can become "making GBS threads on the victims." Is that making GBS threads on the victims, or is that making GBS threads on poor people what can't afford Omega-level legal defense? The whole "rehabilitation vs. retribution" thing is a totally different issue from that of class/racial discrimination in sentencing (obviously, no one with any trace of a conscience would find the latter acceptable). I've always thought that if you're more concerned with your own emotional desire for retribution than with having society work to spare others whatever harm has been done to you, you are dangerously close to becoming the monster you seek to destroy. One might make a valid case for making prison undesirable enough that would be criminals aren't just writing it off as an occupational hazard, but there's absolutely no excuse for making it so brutal as to leave people more messed up than when they came in.
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Apr 29, 2016 23:11
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Yeah I'm not trying to get at the differences in sentencing here. This thread is more focused on the actual purpose of a conviction in the first place. The rich kid committing a crime is not a tragic figure, but that doesn't mean we should just say 'you've caused harm so now you ought to receive harm', if instead the alternative means available allows him to reintegrate at a society where he can make something of himself and.. Yknow.. Just generally be a better human being to himself and to others.
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Apr 29, 2016 23:44
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HidingFromGoro posted:Yes, reform is badly needed. I'd been wondering where you went, good to see you.  Your threads were fantastic.
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Apr 30, 2016 00:08
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This article on Prisoners in the United States (2014) is probably pretty relevant to the latest discussion. Of note: (State prisons are where the vast majority of inmates are, especially for drug related offenses)
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Apr 30, 2016 01:30
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Approximately 50,000 are in prison for drug possession. That's more than the population of my hometown...
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Apr 30, 2016 01:46
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mitztronic posted:Approximately 50,000 are in prison for drug possession. That's more than the population of my hometown... Yeah but that's nationwide. Even just considering the prison population, it's fairly small. What's interesting is the percentage breakdown. Black people are slightly more populous in absolute numbers than whites, which is vastly more than their correct proportion. The notable thing is that it seems to be proportionally consistent with the other races. Like, certain factors are much higher (Robbery being the big one) but for drug possession the percentage of incarcerated are more or less the same. In other words, the stereotype about drug laws being used to jail black people isn't really true. Black people are being unfairly jailed, but they're being unfairly jailed for every offense. Drug possession offenses are actually the most fair, since they're about equal among all races. (there is a slight difference in non-possession drug charges, so they might be getting screwed there, but it's a lot less than the disparity for robbery)
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Apr 30, 2016 01:55
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mitztronic posted:Approximately 50,000 are in prison for drug possession. That's more than the population of my hometown... Speaking of small towns: don't forget that for election/redistricting purposes, prison inmates count toward the census population of a legislative district where the prison is located, regardless of where their home address is. So politicians from rural districts with prisons get more clout due to artificially inflated population numbers, and they get it for nothing, because inmates can't vote. This is known as "prison gerrymandering" and it's more widespread than you think. Prisoners of the Census posted:60% of Illinois' prisoners are from Cook County (Chicago), yet 99% of them are counted outside the county.
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Apr 30, 2016 06:56
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Cockmaster posted:I've always thought that if you're more concerned with your own emotional desire for retribution than with having society work to spare others whatever harm has been done to you, you are dangerously close to becoming the monster you seek to destroy. One might make a valid case for making prison undesirable enough that would be criminals aren't just writing it off as an occupational hazard, but there's absolutely no excuse for making it so brutal as to leave people more messed up than when they came in. Another salient point is that we really, really need to work on improving the quality of life for the poorest demorgaphics of our society so that being convicted and going to prison isn't shrugged off as a better end-game than not getting involved in criminal enterprise.
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Apr 30, 2016 23:27
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Liquid Communism posted:Another salient point is that we really, really need to work on improving the quality of life for the poorest demorgaphics of our society so that being convicted and going to prison isn't shrugged off as a better end-game than not getting involved in criminal enterprise. I've found that it's extremely difficult to explain to people why poverty leads to crime and why reducing poverty directly reduces crime. Like the situations the poor end up in can give them difficult decisions. Rent's due in three days, the kitchen is almost out of food, and the kids are hungry. Your car is going to need work any day now. You have $50 and pay day isn't for a week and a half. A coworker offers you $1,000 to take a package to a guy he knows in the city. He never said what was in it but you know it's a box full of drugs. What do you do? So you do it then you don't get caught. The he asks you again later and you don't get caught again. So when you need some cash you work as a drug mule; hey it's decent money. Then you get caught, you go to jail, you get a few charges. Luckily you don't get life but when you get out well...gently caress, now you don't have a job but the guys you ran drugs for have a need for a good pair of hands to...take care of some things. Nobody will hire you because you're an ex-con and even if they did they'd offer you bottom rung minimum wage work at best but the drug guys are actually pretty alright in your book and pay better. Or, you know, dude is hungry and can't afford to eat so he steals a loaf of bread. "Just this once," he promises himself. He doesn't get caught; turns out he's good at sneaking and stealing. Well gently caress the rent is due and I don't have the money. Well this guy here is pretty wealthy so he won't miss it if I steal his wallet. Oh drat, he only had $75 in it. gently caress, well let's see that guy leaves his house unlocked and lives alone...I'll just sneak in, nick a few things, and head for the pawn shop. Desperate people do desperate things and no amount of "well you just shouldn't do those things" is going to keep a truly desperate person from doing it. Generally speaking relatively few people actively seek out a life of crime. Usually if they end up doing illegal things there's some external circumstance doing it. Poverty and lovely prospects are a big one.
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Apr 30, 2016 23:36
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Morroque posted:A question for the thread that I am curious about... Is there any salience to the "perpetual prisoner machine" or "crime control as industry" styles of thought when it comes to actual prison reform? Coming at it as an outsider with no interaction with the justice system at all, I've heard it described as either an academically sound point or a conspiracy theory, without anything said in the middle. Is it actually a valid concern? Or simply a morbid thought exercise? I can't find any of my old effort posts on the issue but: basically the relationship between specific business interests and private prisons is badly overstated and misses most of the point (haha don't worry the real story is a lot worse). I mean, okay, there absolutely is something like a "prison-industrial complex". Prisons and crime can be made to be profitable and that profitability absolutely has something to do with their continued expansion. But the notion that prisons are a source of cheap labor and therefore imprisonment is encouraged and expanded has a giant neo liberal-shaped hole where its understanding of both prisons and actual labor markets should be. There isn't nearly enough actual prison labor to explain the massive increase in incarceration, and prison labor itself isn't actually all that productive compared to the third world (what does that tell you?). There are direct, tit-for-tat relationships between the two in a number of isolated cases, the most horrific of which is probably something like the kids for cash scandal, but from the standpoint of the sort of American firm that has these kinds of labor needs it doesn't usually make sense of go to the trouble of hiring prisoners and lobbying for tough-on-crime politics when they already have legislation in place to let them hire children abroad. In the overwhelming majority of cases its hard to see how three-strikes laws, for example, directly impact the bottom line of most labor-intensive industries, except for maybe the handful directly implicated in building, staffing, and supplying new prisons. Some stuff can't be outsourced because it's waste disposal or whatever else and some times it's just pure ideology for some true believer CEO but most of the time prison labor doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense for most companies. The more direct, stable, and long-term relationship between prisons, business, and labor is as an alternative to social welfare. This is point where most people lose sight of the bigger picture, because intuitively the relationship is exactly backwards. They'll shake their heads and say: "This system is crazy! Don't you see if we'd just spend that money on schools, public housing, healthcare, and safety nets that crime rates would inevitably drop and we could stop spending so much on prisons? These crazy Republicans, I tell ya." Well, yes, actually, the basic viability of that kind of platform is perfectly clear to conservatives in the business community-especially to the ones who were losing massive battles with unions that had essentially been bankrolled by welfare checks during lengthy strikes. Laborers could spend all day on the picket line and they didn't even need a huge war chest or even personal savings to get by for the long periods needed to really win concessions at that level. Social welfare, however big of role it actually played, came to be seen as literally financing acts of class of warfare (lol) which is why to this day conservatives love to bitch about lazy, entitled poors leeching off the system. Even before Reagan though that specific relationship was clear to the business community. In fact it was broadly the genesis of the "Law and Order" politics of the Nixon era and beyond. The basic predicament of 60s civil unrest was that you couldn't really do anything about it without getting middle America just crazy woke because you shot a bunch of college students or whatever and they weren't really starving to death on their own living the free love version of NEET lyfe (incidentally some of that was actually due to drug money, not social welfare, so guess what sort of crime the Federal government gets really mad about). The prevailing sentiment in the aftermath kind of became something like "give these loving freeloaders an inch and they'll take a mile". So the relationship between business and the carceral system becomes not necessarily one of direct collusion, but rather takes the posture of "something has got to be done about all these blacks and hippies." You can't really chain them to employment because as excess labor they aren't really employable, and placating them with social welfare only really works in times of growth. Besides which its weak and capitulating and these people just poo poo in our cereal. Prisons are a better deal. What's the point of spending money to keep excess labor healthy, educated, and safe when you can just convict them of something and warehouse them and maybe rent them out once in a while? Either way, it's on the taxpayer dime. Legal punishment becomes the collective punishment for communities that can't or won't get with the basic program of making rich people richer through the wage system. That's how prisons can really become profitable. Yeah, there's a kind of cottage industry that has this gross, incestuous relationship with law-enforcement and they can apply some pressure to keep business booming, but the real motivation has to do with how we handle excess labor in times of contraction and crisis. It's civil unrest, after all, that forms the basis of criminalizing bullshit. Drug crimes, vice, crimes public order, etc--which are the real winners in terms of expanding the prison system because they represent the basic interests and hobbies of the working class and you can nail just about everyone with them sooner or later--give the police an excuse to actively go out and find new people to lock up and neatly sort criminals and law-abiders along racialized and class lines. No one even has to complain before you can go out and collect the nation's idle poor, you can just pick them up right off the street. The reason, then, that we have a metric fuckton of prisoners without necessarily also having a metric fuckton of crime is not actually that they work cheap. They already worked cheap. Their overseas counterparts work even cheaper! And spoiler alert: most of the ones in prison don't do any work that doesn't directly relate to the basic maintenance and operation of the prison itself. We have lots and lots of prisoners because we have lots and lots of poor, because we have a business community and a socioeconomic order that can't employ the entire nation and still expect to make a profit. Part of the reason, in fact, that you're only just recently seeing a serious backlash against police and prisons is that no one has any real reason to give a poo poo any more. Why are the critiques of the prison system like those you mention really picking up steam in the mainstream political discourse almost 60 years after they were transformed into rape dungeons for the poor? Why are Millennials ideologically capable of criticizing Hero Cops when older generations see this as a species of profanity? I tend to think its because it doesn't matter any more in the eyes of people who actually have a say. The unions are dead, the third world provides all the cheap labor you could ever ask for, and there's no longer any ideological reason to go around vacuuming up America's poverty problem because there's not even a real political left trying to make the case that this is actually a bad thing. I mean, it sucks to step over the cold bodies of the homeless on your way to work but as far as the right wing is concerned its one of those problems that has a way of solving itself. The "law and order" narrative is still out there but it doesn't have the energy it used to when crime rates keep dropping, so you can kind of get away with pressuring liberals to do something about the prison system today because who is it really going to hurt? The damage is already done. C.C.A. or whoever else can make some noise but Wall Street isn't going to care. Mainstream liberals are merely embarrassed by the problem, they aren't really affected by it. Any real opposition to social welfare and prison reform at this point is just ideological inertia. Any sort of counter-cyclical Keynesian program--I mean you could fill holes with money and have people dig them up--will do just as much to prevent crime and burn labor as police and prisons but I guess its better to have the latter in your back pocket in times of crisis? In any case there isn't really any particularly well-organized conspiracy to lock people up for the explicit purpose of solving a specific labor problem. That is actually what it amounts to, but indirectly, and on a massive scale. Not many actual businesses would even notice at this point if the government just up and declared "prisons are schools now" or something. The basic function of the institution and everything that feeds into it is one of storage, not crime-fighting. Conditions aside, that's part of what's so ghoulish about the whole thing: there's not even any cynical reason to keep doing it. The only conceivable reason to oppose prison reform in 2016 is that not opposing prison reform means you have admit why you built them in the first place.
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May 1, 2016 15:11
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Woozy, I think I read what you are saying as in general support of the "crime control as industry" hypothesis, but with the general caveat that it isn't really the surface elements that are the real reason why it's there. I recall Nils Christie made the similar point that it was mostly about storage, and even recently there has been the discovery that the War on Drugs was a political machination even at it's inception -- though, I'm unsure how weighty that particular evidence will remain. I want to ask the question "if it really doesn't matter anymore, then what now," but I get the feeling that is outside the scope of this thread. So instead: how much is "storage" a factor in the current thought of prison reform? Is there any good working definition of what "storage" means in this context that most criminologists would agree on?
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May 1, 2016 15:52
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Ocrassus posted:What I find particularly funny is that it is found on both sides of the political spectrum. There is no political spectrum in the United States. Your political thought is all based on jingoistic right wing authoritarianism and just modifies it, sometimes with a brightly coloured jackboot, sometimes with a cross and sometimes treating "Mad Max" as an ideal world. Actual left wing ideas are uniformly treated as heresy. It should come to no surprise that your justice and prison system reflects the moralizing casual sadism that is American politics and is supported by pretty much everyone.
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May 1, 2016 16:48
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ductonius posted:Actual left wing ideas are uniformly treated as heresy. This is a good thing. Happy "millions of people were killed by Communism" day.
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May 2, 2016 00:32
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Morroque posted:Woozy, I think I read what you are saying as in general support of the "crime control as industry" hypothesis, but with the general caveat that it isn't really the surface elements that are the real reason why it's there. I recall Nils Christie made the similar point that it was mostly about storage, and even recently there has been the discovery that the War on Drugs was a political machination even at it's inception -- though, I'm unsure how weighty that particular evidence will remain. That's the intended reading, yea. As to the notion of storage, you could say part of the problem is that a criminologist wouldn't actually have anything to say about it. One of the reasons prison threads tend to be such broad topics of discussion is because its an old and massive system with deep structural roots and about a dozen or so areas of serious institutional dysfunction, and to that extent the field of criminology is actually a whole other huge wall of text. Even the basic psychology of crime and punishment is an ideological question and criminology as a field of study produces more, uh, "career oriented" sorts of people than real serious critical types. I would suggest with something like Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, Lockdown America: Police and Prison's in the Age of Crisis, or The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison as starting points for reading material on the notion of "storage" formulated as prisons as an alternative to social welfare.. Those are the three most commonly linked books in these threads by my informal counting. It's not actually usually that dry of reading, although it is depressing. You can knock out Lockdown America in an evening or two. Anyhoo, the question of "what now" doesn't change, really. Do prison outreach, do justice advocacy, do activism for prison reform. Most facilities will have some way of getting books donated to their libraries, which are universally the shittiest most mind-numbing collection of romance novels and inspirational pablum. Sometimes there are a bunch of hoops to jump through due to rules on contraband. It's the best possible time to be working on those issues since like I said institutional opposition is at an all-time low. A dozen or more states have very recently suffered serious and embarrassing crises in their prison populations, sometimes reaching the point of full-on breakdown at local levels where, say, judges have ordered something, the police and government won't or can't comply, and now the two are just staring at eachother. It still matters to me as an activist, to the millions still inside, and to people like HFG whose voice really is the substance and necessity of what these threads have historically been. It just doesn't matter as much to the rich, who have already won.
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May 2, 2016 02:02
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ductonius posted:There is no political spectrum in the United States. Your political thought is all based on jingoistic right wing authoritarianism and just modifies it, sometimes with a brightly coloured jackboot, sometimes with a cross and sometimes treating "Mad Max" as an ideal world. I mean I'm not American nor do I live there so Yknow...
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May 2, 2016 05:14
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Something that also is a serious problem is the effects that, not just prison, but any kind of criminal sentence even fines, have on the convicted's life. Even a misdemeanour with a minor fine can haunt a person his entire life and affect jobs, immigration status, among others. The effects on a person's life from any kind of conviction can be wildly out of proportion, especially in the US.
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May 2, 2016 15:21
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Cockmaster posted:One might make a valid case for making prison undesirable enough that would be criminals aren't just writing it off as an occupational hazard, but there's absolutely no excuse for making it so brutal as to leave people more messed up than when they came in. One would be misguided in making that case, though, since a gilded cage is still a cage. I could give you a luxury suite at Four Seasons or Caesar's Palace but you wouldn't like it very much if I locked you in there for a decade or two; plus sent some dudes in there to control everything you do 24/7 the whole time- to include what you eat, when you eat, what time you go to bed, what you do when you're awake, what clothes you wear, when you're allowed to open the curtains to see the sky, and all that. You wouldn't like that suite very much if I were to control all contact with the outside world, monitor & record the entirety of those limited interactions, read all of your mail, supervising you when you use the shower or toilet, control & monitor what little amount of reading/TV watching you're allowed to do, control what little exercise you're allowed to do, control all aspects of your health care to include what drugs you take and how often (with or without the involvement of a doctor- at my sole discretion) (with or without your consent or cooperation), go through all of your meager belongings every so often & throw it all on the floor, strip search you at my discretion, cavity search you while we're at it, and all the rest. And, of course, using whatever force is necessary to ensure all of this. The myth of "humane prisons coddle criminals and will make them commit more crimes," like all revenge-based prison misconceptions, needs to die ASAP. If "deterrence" worked then there wouldn't be any more murders in death-penalty states. It's easy to write off penalties as "cost of doing business" because that's what our elites do: the investment banking firm pays the SEC fine because it's less than the profits it made from the illegal act, the retailer pays the class-action settlement because it's cheaper than paying the employees it wronged, etc- and that's what you see on the news. That kind of stuff doesn't hold up when you try to apply it to an individual low-income offender (much like the "family sitting at the kitchen table doing the budget" example never holds up when comparing it to the Federal budget). Take it from a former low-level offender: the one and only thing that drives behavior is probability of being caught. Period. Full stop. More on this later.
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May 3, 2016 08:43
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All together this is about what the purpose of a prison is. And I think it has become clearer and clearer that, if we actually want to reduce crime, we need to move away from the 'they are there to punish bad people' idea! It's not just about decent conditions, it's about fundamentally helping these people to readjust to being law abiding citizens. That means we need crimes, particularly less severe ones, to 'stick' far less to people throughout their lives, so they can actually get work. We need courses that give them real qualifications, and hope that they can make it in society rather than fall back into a life of crime.
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May 3, 2016 11:59
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What a ton of people fail to realize is that deterrence and punishment are only part of the equation. They also never bother to think about it beyond "punish criminals" because whatever gently caress 'em. A very common view is that rehabilitation should be entirely removed from the system because if they couldn't deal with the punishment they never should have done the crime. Then every year they elect somebody else that promises to be "tough on crime" while anybody that dares even suggest that maybe just maybe a purely punitive system doesn't work will get the "this guy is soft on crime and wants you to be raped and murdered let's destroy him" response. What actually works isn't even considered relevant. If a "jail to work" program gets set up somewhere it's probably also corrupted to shuffle ex-cons into lovely, minimum wage jobs that they must keep as part of their probation conditions. Take a wild guess how those jobs tend to treat people that are not allowed to lose their jobs.
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May 3, 2016 17:11
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This thread is treating the public attitude toward criminals as the main barrier to reform but the truth is that public sentiment has softened significantly since the crime wave peaked in the early 90s. At this point the much larger problem is the sheer institutional inertia and the fact that powerful interest groups have huge sums of money invested in perpetuating the current system. Instead of focusing so much on these abstract questions about the systems objectives or the public's attitude toward prisoners you might want to focus more on thinking about plausible ways to deal with the interest groups who are doing the most to maintain and perpetuate the system.
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May 3, 2016 17:20
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Phyzzle posted:I read a memorable quote saying that when an emphasis on rehabilitation goes too far, it can become "making GBS threads on the victims." Helsing posted:Instead of focusing so much on these abstract questions about the systems objectives or the public's attitude toward prisoners you might want to focus more on thinking about plausible ways to deal with the interest groups who are doing the most to maintain and perpetuate the system. wiregrind fucked around with this message at 21:38 on May 3, 2016 |
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May 3, 2016 21:26
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wiregrind posted:Turning the criminals into victims by throwing them into an amoral dungeon followed by a perpetual cycle of dread, long-term turning the criminal into a "martyr": Isn't that making GBS threads on the original victims of the crime, too? You're only a martyr if people care about your suffering. 
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May 4, 2016 03:50
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