Hacker News Reader

Comment by Qz | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com