You're making a lot of assumptions here. 1) There is no crime in prison. 2) The imprisoned would have kept on committing crime for their total sentence if they were not in jail. 3) Prisoners 'return' to the world committing the same type/volume of crimes that they were committing when they went in.
For #1: There is crime in prison, a whole lot of it, and (even if you don't have sympathy for criminals) it's bad for society; people may come out worse off than they went in, driving crime up further. Jail is an intense experience, and it seems like the skills that you develop while 'surviving' in jail may not be so constructive for society when you're released.
For #2: As a kid my friends and I made a lot of stupid mistakes and some pretty bad decisions. Purely arbitrary factors (race, affluence, geography, etc) meant that none of us were ever locked up for them. We had the opportunity to correct our behavior, grow out of it. Had we have been punished harshly, it's likely that that our bad behavior would have continued. This is due to #1 (exposure to crime/criminals in prison, and contact with the justice system), but also loss of opportunities, and probably a different exposure or experience with drugs.
For #3: The above two points lead to the possibility that people who come out of jail are more likely to engage in more or worse criminal activity when they're released than when they went in.
So while there need to be consequences for crime, it's not at all evident that increased incarceration, certainly the way we are doing it, would lead to reduced criminal activity.
She did not stay clean, and I'm sure we can do better as a society to rehab our people, but for 6 months she was limited in the damage she could do to those around her.
I'm pretty conflicted on the topic
Presumably someone or some institution stepped in, probably the family. How much was the jailing necessary for the kid to get this help?
Keep the easy questions coming.
Physical, emotional and sexual abuse are all very different from neglect. All forms of abuse are different in terms of the psychological effects on the abused, societal reactions to both parties, motivation on the part of the abuser and much more.
It seems the US is using prison as the catch all for people who have trouble living in society. Be it for mental health reasons or drug addiction.
I think you are underestimating the power of a heroin addiction and overestimating the effectiveness of rehab in the US, especially for unwilling participants
Improving the quality of rehab is certainly worth a discussion. But there the US mindset gets in the way that doesn't want to spend money on welfare but instead prefers to spend more money on prisons. The only problem is that prisons don't know that their role now is not only to hold criminals but also people with mental health issues or addiction.
If you want to help people get off drugs, don't criminalize them, send them to rehab, end of story. Portugal decriminalized all drugs and started sending people to mandatory rehab if they had problems and the rate of drug harm went from one of the highest in the EU to one of the lowest in just 15 years. Portugal has 3 overdose deaths per million citizens, compared to the EU average of 17.3 [2, 3] The US is 213 per million, accounting for 1 in every 4 worldwide. [4] Clearly the US system does not work.
It's crazy, right, that a country where all drugs are legal has a 100x lower overdose rate than one where drugs crimes are enforced as strictly as humanly possible.
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/13/17020002/p...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/portugal-dec...
It's important to remember a single data point (an anecdote) is no substitute for large-scale studies (country-wide in the case of Portugal). The data I gave you covers millions and millions of individuals, and in my opinion, and should be weighed accordingly. I'd love for you to read them and provide your own thoughts rather than just saying "no, I have one data point close to me and advocate policy based on it."
Drug addictions are truly complicated things. In regards to the relapse after release, there's some evidence that addictions are in part situational. By the end of the Vietnam war, some 20% of service members where addicted to heroin. 95% of them were no longer addicted to heroin as soon as they returned home. Whereas people with additions in the US had a 90% chase of relapse after they returned home to the environment in which they used to be addicted. [1] I even notice this to a smaller degree myself, I drink more in SF - when I'm there, I drink more, when I travel, I drink less even controlling for everything else to the best of my abilities (again, an anecdote not a study).
Prison is a hammer, we need a scalpel, and it's important we use data dispassionately to solve this problem. What we have so far is clearly not working, and it's time to look outside and adopt things that have worked elsewhere even if they fly in the face of the status quo. I would argue especially if they fly in the face of the status quo.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/1444317...
"I'm confident she did drugs in prison"
where you disputed this single data point. I did not mean it was representative of the majority.
Prison was mainly only good for the lives she was destroying in her downward spiral.
But don't be fooled thinking rehab will be that scalpal. Many rehab facilities are privately owned and corrupt.
Her mother is now completely broke from trying to pay for rehab & she was still able to use there & make more addict friends (new roomates after rehab)
> "Incarceration is not only "an expensive way to achieve less public safety," but it may actually increase crime by breaking down the social and family bonds that guide individuals away from crime, removing adults who would otherwise nurture children, depriving communities of income, reducing future income potential, and engendering a deep resentment toward the legal system."
Put crudely: Put someone in jail and he's not going to be around to rob anyone. But he's also not going to be around to talk sense into his kid brother.
Nor is he around his children, making a stable household for them to grow up focusing on school and building their own futures.
That doesn't automatically follow.
First, it ignores crimes committed while in jail, which is totally a thing - but at least hopefully the impact of those on "innocents" is reduced.
Second, if punishment reduces honest opportunities and increases criminal opportunities (networking?), enough new criminal acts may follow to make up for the lost time.
Likewise, I think networking also doesn't account for much when your prison sentence is five or ten years instead of three. There's a big jump from zero to one, and a much smaller jump after. (Regardless, that's one reason why I explicitly excluded organized crime.)
These are a few reasons why I think corporal punishment might be a good idea.
An incarceration focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment is something i think would work a lot better, I could at least stand sending innocent people to such a place.
What if I told you that to imprison citizens for small crimes causes them to commit a more serious crime in the future? Does that changes your conclusion?
Your over-simplification does not make sense. And assuming that the people that did the study are just blatantly incompetent without any information is very presumptuous.
If you believe confounding factors make it impossible to use empirical methods to study the subject you're just giving up on scientific method.
Because your alternative seems to be a few slogans that claim to be "common sense", but are really just a projection of your moral preferences into a causal model.
Fortunately, policy professionals are not giving up on evidence-based decision-making quite as quickly.