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Thread: Why Prison

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    Default Why Prison

    I was just curious what you guys think wrt why jails or prisons should exist - containment, rehabilitation, punishment, all of the above? Maybe they shouldn't exist at all, or for other reasons than they do currently?

    Is the reasoning type related? Hehe

    Submit your essays within the week, please.

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    I think jails have resulted from the confluence of two impulses.

    One, there is the desire by many people to solve the problem of offenders offending them by keeping them away from them. This is only one way to deal with behavioral problems, though. It is the cheap, fast, and stupid method.

    You could try to re-educate offenders to make them realize the error of their ways, you could banish them, you could publicly shame and humiliate them, you could kill them and their entire family; there are lots of ways to deal with what is considered to be bad behavior.

    However, we now come to point #2. Long term incarceration without rehabilitation is a profit center for many people. Jail is like those monthly Storage Lockers, only for people, and Storage Lockers are incredibly profitable for the people who run them.

    Parking people in storage without education or correction is probably the least effective way to modify behavior, but it does ensure a steady supply of repeat offenders.

    Imagine if your three-year-old gets into the flour under the sink and dusts the cat and the Persian rug with it, and then dumps bleach water on both of them. If you park the kid in their room for a month and ignore them aside from regular feeding, you shouldn't be surprised if the kid emerges just a little bit crazier.

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    I think rehabilitation should be the primary goal. Some people can be proven to be beyond rehabilitation however, and even if they are rehabilitated, they may have committed an act so extreme that you can't take any risks. Therefore they should be kept on a tight leash, likely jailed for life. I'm talking about people like Breivik, ISIS terrorists, the Christchurch shooter, and pedophiles who have acted on their urges. I oppose the death penalty since I'm pro-life. They shouldn't be given a life in luxury though.

    So the primary goal is to a) rehabilitate, and b) keep society safe. Pure punishment leads us nowhere in the long run, I think.

    Gammas seem more likely to favour strict punishments, don't know about the other quadras.

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    As for my own thoughts (which are not fleshed out at all), containment seems like the best benefit - protecting the general public. Rehabilitation would be ideal but a prison-like setting seems like a silly place to achieve that. That setting might be necessary for containment though. I don't get any gratification from punishment when I'm not personally involved in something, maybe I should care about people I don't know getting their just desserts when I think some actions are fucked up and they might abstractly deserve it, but other than an emotional balancing of scales people might experience, punishment seems pointless.

    I guess if containment of people dangerous to the public is the goal, people who have done bad actions but aren't dangerous to the public need to be jailed as well for the sake of fairness? Should we institute an objective system for determining widespread danger? Hmm.

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    Man, I was just thinking this today.

    No idea.

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    Deterrent. That's a good reason I didn't immediately think of. Feel free to add stuff since im not prepared at all lol. I mean, the thought of jail has stopped me from a facepunch or two.

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    Eh idk, I err on the side of forgiveness, as the people running the prisons/system tend to be more hateful and abusive than the criminals. Though it could be argued that they have to be, to protect society... I still don't think it's okay though.

    I think such a place ideally should be reserved for those who commit the most physically objective destructive acts to others, but really -somebody who goes that far, I would say just shooting them right then and there would be the best thing rather than waste time and money on some snobby and horribly inefficient governmental system. If somebody thinks you are too bad or evil, prison is a type of illusion in a way as people will end up killing you anyway.

    Also there are a lot of evil and sick people working in the system who have somehow convinced themselves that what they are doing is good, and will even lie about inmates being sexual predators when they are not at all (and they are just manipulating other people because of how wrong child sex abuse is, that's just a pawn they use for power like a lot of judges or DAs), and make stuff up about people they don't like to get them in trouble with no/very weak evidence, or they will make evidence up. I have no issues with punishing real child predators, but don't be too quick to believe some hateful government agent that likes to pit neighbor against neighbor, or doesn't care how many people they hurt if it makes them look good for their career. Yes, child abuse is very evil & deserves consequences - but they are using it as a manipulative tactic to stay in power and remain abusive.

    Only very, very naive people would ever think these people are the 'good guys.' They then exploit the average person's mentality to simply want to see anybody suffer sadistically. Covering it up with 'well they deserve it' doesn't seem like justice to me, just cruel vengeance. With a lot of things, we have devolved into guilty until proven innocent. And too many people don't even care if innocent people get thrown in prison, they sadly think those people are good sacrificial lambs to catch the bad guys.

    It should be very challenging for the State to prove somebody's guilt.

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    out of time, but good question. I think it would be great if everyone was punished according to their own crime and according to their own nature. what does a culprit value most? freedom to roam? then jail is the harshest punishment. was the culprit a financial thief? then perhaps a very high fine would work better. was he a sexual offender? then restricting their sexuality would work. some people can even take pride in being jailed, so that wouldn't be their best punishment.

    "we" don't just punish for the desire of punishing guilty people though, the idea is that we want justice for the victims, and a safe society to live in. very important things.

    on the other hand, like the guys above said, we have to allow to the guilty people to get rehabilitated to live into this society, and this means to help them and forgive them... not easy things.

    as the enlightened thinkers who first condemned death penalty 200+ years ago, I think too that the most effective way to punish someone is not in the harshness of the punishment, but in the certainty and readiness of the punishment. many people do in fact go on committing illicit because they know that the punishment will be delayed, amendable, or ridiculous compared to the crime they commit.

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    prisons are used for punishment, temporal isolation to prevent a harm for people, to force to compensate the harm to a socium
    mostly they are to reduce "bad" actions of normal people
    for psychopaths and for criminals as way of income - punishments are not effective

    there were no mass prisons in the past. serious criminals mostly were killed, became life-long slaves, were forbidden to live near, etc. - the possibility to make another harm was radically removed

    for psychopaths and "professional" criminals would be best life-long isolation. those are almost not fixable. for example, to place them all on a island to allow to live as they want or can there. mb without an abbility to have children
    others should be forced to compensate the harm while living in normal socium and be explained why that is not acceptable. if a person is not fixed - may go to above category

    there should be better upbringing system than now. people should be better trained to be "good" people
    also better socium environment so people had higher control and lesser motivation to behave harmfully. for example, in USSR there was in several times lesser of hard crimes than in capitalistic RF. poverty, egocentric ideology and other makes people more amoral and stupid what leaves lesser place to live "good"

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    I'd greatly prefer solitary confinement over general population. Those things are meat grinders in this country and they'll scrub you out of the crevices unless you were already muscular and beefy going into them. It's funny because the only explanation anyone can give for why you "inevitably go mad from boredom" in solitary and how horrible that's supposed to be always ends up derailing into some pretentious psychoanalytical bullshit, while the reasons not to take your chances in general population are extremely salient: your immediate physical existence is at stake. I'd take spending eight straight years locked in a dark closet over having to spend a day in the gang-incubators.

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