Makes it clear that what happened in Abu grab was not just some bad apples but and underlying acceptance of such behavior at home.
It is shameful.
1. Innocent people do get convicted
2. Prisoner suicide
3. Inability to integrate back into a less violent community
4. A prisoner code that requires you to participate in violence or be subjected to it
For a sobering account, check out Shaun Attwood on YouTube: https://youtube.com/user/derickatt
He served in Maricopa County Jail under super Max and medium security. The stories of violence from medium security are just as violent as any fictional movie you've seen.
Our prisons seem to be trying to fight fire (violence) with more fire.
It's a horribly unethical game we're playing with people's lives that seems to provide little comfort to our society or the victims.
I'm fairly sure if you took anyone with this view and forced them to have a conversation with you where you presented various scenarios (such as some low-harm and impact crime prisoner ending up getting repeatedly raped), they might change their mind, but actually getting people to listen with an open mind to alternative points of view is amazingly hard in the current charged climate where every issue is a political one.
Aye, they view it from a purely punitive perspective, rather than a punishment + rehabilitative perspective. In other words, zero thought or care is given to what happens in prisons or how those prisoners will reintegrate into society. They're dehumanized down to that action: shoplifter, murderer, etc.
If you remove the humanity from the person, you care less about anything to do with them.
American prisoners seem to have some narcissistic pride in how "bad" they are. Being the gangster type is glorified, and they're given a bit too much freedom in prison.
In Russian prisons, any ego is quickly dealt with, there's more discipline, and prisoners are afraid to come back. I remember a prisoner interviewed in an American prison having a very blasé attitude and saying "yeah, I get out in a couple of weeks, and then I'll probably be on the streets for another week before I'm back in here. That's just the system maaaaaaan."
You also seemed to have missed the recursive pattern in her statement. "I'll probably be on the streets," infers - to me at least - that she'll be homeless and/or without the prospect of any employability. This facet, right here, explains the recursive nature of repeat offenders.
Approached another way: Was she originally in for theft, which could be a felony, and keeps landing in jail because she can't get a job with a felony on her record and, therefore, has to steal to survive?
Disbarment from employment because of a criminal past is an example of how, even though the debt to society has been paid (e.g.: prison time, fines, etc.), the person is still - punitively punished - until they die.
Now to finally address the Russia question: How do you think the quashing of the ego occurs in there, if - indeed - such action occurs there? Somehow, I highly doubt that discipline is the reductionary answer and that it includes far more unsavoury contributors than simple discipline.
Put another way, a lot of military forces in the world have rigid discipline training but that doesn't mean that the ego is quashed.
Now, having said all of that, the problem is manifestly far more complicated, I do admit, than my simple explanation.
For example, when jails and prisons are run by for-profit corporations and they're only paid per head, then there's - likely - an unnecessary influence in the sense that the city, state, county, what-have-you will need to keep the prison population at a certain level to maintain the business' profit maintained, to continue to retain their services. The for-profit design, in this regard, is such that a reduction in crime (and, as a byproduct, criminals) doesn't bode well for the system.
Is it any wonder, then, that the three-strikes law[s] aren't desinged around three gross offences but one gross offence (e.g.: felony shoplifting) and two minor (misdemeanor) offences?
Then, there's the societal implications of the devaluation and dehumanisation of life in society. Reduction to a simple action is how a person is defined. So, if we do this, then we are implying that this is all the person is - forever. That's it. Paid your debt by serving 30 days for stealing a candy bar? Too bad, still a shoplifter.
I agree that the issue isn't very simple but I think the majority of the corrosion that enters is far more societal-based than anything else.
It wasn't a direct quote — I paraphrased from memory. As I recall, she wasn't homeless. By being "on the streets", I think she meant she'll be consorting with other common criminals, possibly dealing in drugs and sex. She gets in with the wrong crowd, offends, is incarcerated, gets out, rejoins the same crowd, etc.
I don't have any grand answers to this big complex problem. My point is I still believe in punishing criminals (proportionately).
If you have an unruly kid in the class and you send him outside, if he is able to pull faces at the other students or in any way undermine the teacher's authority, he will endure the punishment and then continue to be unruly because his spirit is not broken.
I don't think adults are any different. The key difference between cultures (at least what I could glean from these documentaries, so this is totally unscientific) is that the Russian authorities do not give an inch, so the inmates have no choice but to surrender their pride and learn their place.
Empathy doesn't work with everyone. Anders Behring Breivik is an example; he commits a truly terrible crime, and now he is mocking us from the comfort of his cell which has more amenities than in the homes of many innocent and hard-working people in Eastern Europe or South-East Asia.
Mental, physical and emotional fortitude is one thing as a side effect to the ends, but to make it as an end is perverse, I think.
I see prison as obviously both punishment and isolation, to varying degrees for different crimes. Making it about just isolation doesn't solve the problem with prison, it just trades problems stemming from overbalancing punishment for ones overbalancing isolation.
> Does the repeat shoplifter, which can't be trusted to stop, deserve life in prison then?
Two choices:
1) Accept the cost to society of letting a person run around stealing from various different businesses, probably over the course of years. Not only do those businesses lose money, but it makes their employees' work experience more unpleasant, and adds to a general low-trust atmosphere among strangers.
2) Accept the cost to the shoplifter of putting them in a miserable environment where they won't be able to thrive as a person.
Either dispersed costs for lots of people who aren't responsible for the wrongdoing, or concentrated costs to the one person who is doing the objectionable actions. I loosely favor the former... but this is a constrained example, and the available options kinda suck. (Not dissimilar to real life in that way...)
If you can actually get the shoplifter to stop their bad behavior, then the options and attendant tradeoffs change.
One needn't look very hard, /r/ for example, to see examples of this. People lauding, revelling, and even rejoicing in the suffering of criminals is kind of par for the course there.
Well, if they aren't separated, they do things to each other. This should be unsurprising. It is unavoidable.
They are also a bad influence on each other.