Postcard from Halden | Hacker News Reader

Postcard from Halden

time.com

31 pointsnaner24 comments

I am 100% for this kind of system. Rehabilitation trumps punishment.

Of course. It's mostly a question of cost and scalability.

They do save money by having a lower recidivism rate. I do wonder how much it costs compared to other types of prisons.

Agreed. What's more valuable - letting a serial killer sit on death row for a few years, sucking up tax payer money for no good reason, and then killing him OR trying to understand why he did the things he did, and seeing if there is any way to help him enter society and be happy and productive? Does he deserve punishment? Well, that's another problem entirely. In many ways, my issue with this issue is the same one I have with religion - forcing people to not do bad things out of fear alone never works. If they're still doing them even when aware of what the de facto punishment is, there's a reason they're doing it and that reason needs to be understood.

Now I fear replies of the "But all perpetrators of Crime X can never be cured!" sort (with no supporting evidence, of course). The desire of modern society to punish everyone who doesn't live up to what is basically an arbitrary moral ideal without any attempt to help or understand the criminal is, to me, just as disturbing as the crimes they are seeking punishment for.

Not to be anti-rehabilitation, but I submit that letting serial killers out of jail is a bad idea.

What about the part where we hypothetically solved their problems? Once we kill a few people, have we crossed a line that keeps us from being ethical, higher-level beings?

I find it interesting and instructive in situations like this to think about what it would take to make you or me go over the edge and just start killing people (I'm NOT justifying murder in ANY way, I'm just throwing this out there). As I said above, these people did it for some reason, despite most or all of them knowing that there was a punishment involved...what is the reason? If we uncover it, can we help them and maybe release them into society? Why is my response starting to sound like a bad paper for an undergrad philosophy course? (-:

Well - you basically made the exact reply he was expecting.

I think that letting serial killers out of jail is a bad idea, yes. The reason why we should keep serial killers in jail, though, is not that they're serial killers - it's that, in most cases, they tend to not care and will willingly kill again.

If there is a serial killer who is provably not sociopathic and who can actually become reformed, then that person should be eventually let out of jail. That is a very difficult standard to meet.

Yes, my example of a serial killer was a really bad one in retrospect, exactly because most if not all are sociopaths and there probably isn't a way to help them.

okay. please spend your own money to do this and not mine.

Sadly, such a system would never work in the United States. We have far too many people already behind bars to make these types of prisons feasible. Our incarceration rate is 756 per 100,000[1] citizens, the highest in the world. Until we figure out how to put less people behind bars, our prison system will always be a huge mess.

[1]: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/10/02/us-tops-in-world-prison-...

It's not that hard to figure out. If we just got on that whole drug decriminalization / legalization bit, we'd drastically reduce our prison population.

One way to reduce prison population is to reduce recidivism. The article states that Norway's recidivist rate is %20, compared to the United States %50-%60.

It would be really interesting to look at some other sources comparing crime and punishment in Norway and in other countries.

Especially one that contrasts immigration rates and sources.

This makes me sick. There should be no room for human rights and comfort in a place for those who unabashedly trampled the rights and lives of others.

Also, I think prison should be ONLY for those who unabashedly trampled the rights and lives of others. There are a lot of people in prison these days whom I don't believe belong there.

> There should be no room for human rights and comfort in a place for those who unabashedly trampled the rights and lives of others.

Why is this? Aren't "human rights" rights that apply to all humans?

I'd be okay stripping the title of "human" from rapists and murderers.

  1) Move to Norway
  2) Commit a crime
  3) Free room and board
  4) Bootstrap startup for next to nothing

You should've seen the minus points coming — committing a crime never increases your karma. ;)

Except there are crimes this community often thinks should not be considered crimes.

If we just got on that whole drug decriminalization / legalization bit, we'd drastically reduce our prison population in a comment on this thread, got 9 points right now.

Not to mention copyright infringement, prostitution, assisted suicide, those few sodomy laws that are still on the books, obscenity...

Maybe you can find a crime that doesn't hurt anybody. Especially since you are planning to fail and get caught anyway. Just make sure not to traumatize any innocent bystanders.

Not sure why you were downvoted. Those inmates probably have better living conditions than I do.

It's more like

  1) Move to Norway
  2) Commit a crime
  3) Get deported

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