yeah, criminals shouldn't be treated with dignity anyway... any mistake should mark you for life. Who would give a petty thief a second chance, they may get good and land a job, your job - you, the law abiding citizen - at Google. Amirite?
Crimimals serving prison time have violated the laws of society. They have a responsibility for this and they will indeed be marked for life, and rightly so. That doesn't mean that they should be restricted from any job, but it makes sense to limit their career options. You don't want a pedo in day care, a bank robber in banking, or a wife beater as a carpenter.
As for teaching inmates about mathematics, this is probably a good idea. Many inmates suffer from low education, which makes it hard for them to understand today's society. Mathematics is fine, but it will only be useful to a percent of the inmates. Most of them have other, more basic educational needs.
But hey, who doesn't need a clappy-happy sunshine story about a convicted felon every now and then? You could be next, you never know when they are gonna come for you, bad boy.
Ultimately, everything needs to be judged on results. There are definitely groups that benefit from the US prison system, but the public at large and taxpayers are not among them.
You had me . . .
> Actually, you're proposing the anti-science, knee-jerk cruelty of the American system, which is as far from a rational prison system as a first world country gets.
And then you lost me. You pack a lot of shallow, sloppy thinking into that second sentence.
I don't get this one.
Yeah, but let's not forget that "civilized society" is a necessary evil - we accept it simply because we know no better way to minimize suffering, on average. For any one particular individual, the laws of the particular society (s)he happens to be living in are probably far from the laws that would be best for him/her in particular... Some individuals would flourish better in societies where stealing is accepted. Other in ones where murder is accepted, etc.
There's nothing absolutely better about out set of rules and moral values made of o concepts like "don't kill", "don't rape", "don't steal" etc. They are just a good local average maximum... Maybe the actual global maximum of human flourishing would be achieved in a society where rape and murder are allowed in a certain circumstances. I'd personally bet it is, though the definition of that set of circumstances is probably too complex to allow optimal practical implementation of such policies.
I mostly like our current set of rules, but let's not delude ourselves into seeing them as anything other than a local average optimization! The "criminals" are just the unlucky fellas whose traits don't correspond well with flourishing while playing by the rules in our little play pen we call civilized society. Nothing more.
A sadistic murdering rapist can at the same time be a great mathematician, and, judged by the global maximum of the universe, may have a much greater positive contribution to the betterment of the human race through his mathematical discoveries and their consequences (than the relatively minor negative contribution done by taking some of his unlucky victims out of the population a few decades sooner than their natural death) and judged by this one could say he could be a better human being than you in total, even if he/she may have directly killed 20 people, and you may have killed 0.
And be honest with yourself if you think the society we live in is anything but a necessary evil: you know you've felt the desire to murder, or torture, or rape, one time or another, just as any other human being, and that you've been hurt by society because it didn't let you exercise the freedom to do these things. (Yeah, you've been hurt less than the victims of such actions would've been hurt, hence the optimal average given by the current set of rules. But maybe it's not the optimal average for you as and individual.)
(And to put thing in better context: the character that started the talk, Christopher, was far from a sadistic murdering rapist, he was convicted for armed robbery... basically "stealing some crap while holding a gun in your hand to look more terrifying, or for self-defense against the shopkeeper who might have a gun himself and shoot you instead"... something with less negative moral value than most actions of most heads of state I'd guess, and far from "a true monster")
I agree with this "I mostly like our current set of rules, but let's not delude ourselves into seeing them as anything other than a local average optimization!".
...yeah, that's the bigger problem imho, most people are far from honest with themselves :) And then some people, instead of doing some "harmless rape & murder" bending "slightly" some rules of society to let off some steam (like medieval warlords did, chopping some heads off doing a big party "for the lulz", and moving on, maybe even building some churches later to "atone their sins"), choose instead to be "civilized", and go sign some orders to deport millions to concentration camps, or order the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, or some other shit "civilized" people do.
Probably not obvious for folks not into machine-learning (or other compsci areas with similar terminology), I know... not the best cross-disciplinary metaphor :)
What you refer to I would call "current/local reward" vs "total (lifetime) reward", or "punishment" if you take the negative.
And, by "local optima" I mean that "any small tweak/modification to the current set of laws" would result in worse systems, even if there probably are combinations of laws/rules that would make a better society further away in the space of possibilities. To get from current state to a higher local optima (or to an imaginary global one), would involve going through much worse intermediary states - things like near destruction of civilization or other stuff nobody would want to live through...
Maximizing human well-being seems axiomatic to our project here; not a 'playpen'.
Makes sense.
> a bank robber in banking,
True.
> or a wife beater as a carpenter.
LOLWHUT?