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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

> “The idea that’s wrong is that these people are ‘bad’ and we know what to do with them, which is punish them,” says Slutkin. “That’s fundamentally a misunderstanding of the human. Behaviour is formed by modelling and copying. When you’re in a health lens, you don’t blame. You try to understand, and you aim for solutions.”

Analyzing our current justice system from this perspective shows just how absurd it is. Sending people to jail for committing minor crimes is like sending people to a smallpox quarantine camp for coughing.

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Not only that, but we intern coughing people with other people of various illnesses, and then we send those infected back to society based on time criteria, instead of health criteria.

This sounds great until we realize that the vast majority of crimes, even minor ones, have someone on the other side of them.

Simple assault, theft, fraud, reckless driving. Hey, someone came up and beat the crap out of you for the $20 in your wallet? Well sorry, we can't do anything but talk about how they might of come to this point. Someone who gets the flu, unless they're acting to intentionally infect others, has no "victim".

That doesn't mean justice should be based on retribution, but removal of the offender from society is something which society typically requires.

Violence is an output, a symptom of something else. Punishing a violent offender with violence (imprisonment etc) is just a form of reifying that behavior.

Alternative treatment of violence is not the same as saying there are "no consequences" - it's acknowledging that to actually "cure" violent behavior requires other methods.

Removing people from society has historically not stopped violence (see Gulags, mass prison, etc). What it does do is instill a sense of fear in the populace that the governing power can use as a form of control. A sense of fear brought on by, you guessed it, a threat of violence!

Unlike quarantines, a reverse dispersal with watch to dismantle centers of criminality could probably work too...

But nobody is testing these things because they think they know better.

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