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Comment by conanbatt | Hacker News Reader

After long introspeccion on the topic of prisons I finally distilled why I found them terrible. Prisons as we know them are monuments to the hatred of freedom.

If a society valued freedom as highly as possible, sending someone to prison would be such a spectacular condemnation that great accomodations would be offered. Instead, prisons serve as a demeaning punishment and eternal condemnation.

There is great moral value in taking the liberty stance: it would mean that prison would not be a great punishment for the great number of innocent and wrongfully incarcerated. And It would also be a lot easier to prosecute all kinds of crimes, as prison would not be as terrible as it is (but, if freedom valued, still a punishment)

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But then you lose the value of deterrence. I'm not bashing Norway, but if that's what our prisons were like, I think a lot of people wouldn't find them a deterrent at all, and in fact for a lot of people, they would represent an improvement in their lives.

Prison should not be cruel (e.g., solitary confinement for more than a short period of time in unacceptable), but it should still be unpleasant if it is to serve as a deterrent to committing crime, and that is definitely one of the biggest reasons we have prisons... to incentivize people to stay out of them.

Unfortunately, I think this is true.

If in a game I can steal 10 points and at most get a 1 point penalty for getting caught, I'm much more likely to give it a shot than if I get a 10 or 20 point penalty for getting caught. Plus, if everyone else in the game is cheating and getting away with it, I'm much more likely to try it too.

The problem is if you make the penalties so severe and the application of the rules unequal, then you end up with chopping people's hands off for stealing.

Losing your freedom is a -100. That is, if you value freedom.

Depends on how long you're in jail for and if it's Club Fed, or a Super Max.

I'm sure there are tons of people that would be willing to risk a month or even a year in Club Fed for a chance at set for life money.

The calculation is different for everyone.

If jail were not a terrible place, would criminals to be choose not to be criminals and just go to jail?

Perversion is not a solution to deterrence. Moreover, there are grave consequences to disproportionate punishment: all parts of the system would fight against it in different forms, from commiting crimes to prevent being caught, to disproportionate punishments based on the quality of the lawyers, etc.

It would be a much better deterrent to know that if a crime were committed, the punishment came swiftly: the threat of (almost) immediate jail time is much more powerful than the maybe (your life is over).

Again, if a society truly valued freedom, just losing that would be such a great punishment. When you say that such a punishment is not enough its precisely because you dont value freedom that highly.

What brought me to this path was the simple thought exercise: should escaping jail be illegal? How can it be illegal if it is a fundamentally moral act?

Your phrasing is really unfortunate in the sense that it limits our conception of how to deal with other humans. Yes, if we are trying to keep the malignant hoards at bay, then 'incentivize' with a whip. It's a fundamentally negative view of humanity and human nature.

Norway also has social welfare programs so prison is not anyone's best option.

Prisons aren't mainly intended to deter crime, they are for satisfying the public's vengeance lust and to divert taxpayer funds to cronies of government officials.

People glance over and talk around it, but part of prison or punishment in general is to appease victims. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Sending someone to a 4-star hotel after they've damaged a victim in some way will not appear as justice to the victim. Some people say that isn't the purpose of punishment, but it serves as a reason to "believe" in the justice system and processes itself, which is important.

It’s not just to appease victims, but to prevent them from seeking out their own justice, which is a noble endeavor. Blood feuds and cycles of retribution are the state of society without the capability to deliver justice.

The prison system itself creates a blood feud and cycles of retribution between the State and the citizenry (both the prisoners and their families).

An ugly side to the fact that without prisons, people take justices on their own hands if not satisfied.

Unfortunately, it is estimated 4% of people in jail are wrongfully incarcerated. What to do about those in this appeasing stance?

> Prisons as we know them are monuments to the hatred of freedom

I think restricting freedom of movement as punishment is saying that society values law and order (or safety) on equal footing with freedom.

Sure, there are tons of laws that don't make sense and that don't actually make us safer.

But for serious crimes the mechanism of removing your freedom if you remove our safety actually respects freedom as having a lot of value.

And for less serious crimes, you're correct the punishment rarely fits the crime.

To clarify: it is absolutely necessary, at least for our current toolkit, to rob someones freedom in exchange for the safety of others. But that should come at a very high cost to the punisher: that is society in general as well. Whereas today, it is common to curse someone to "rot in prison" or to suffer torture at the hands of the state, the police or other inmates. That vengeance is not sated because freedom is not valued highly.

US prisons do far more than restrict movement. they infringe on prisoners liberties in dozens of ways unfelated to public safety, from reading material to phone calls to lifestyle within prison and more

If a society valued freedom as highly as possible, sending someone to prison would be such a spectacular condemnation that great accomodations would be offered.

This is nonsensical. If we valued freedom, we'd make prisons into resorts?

Prisons are intended first and foremost to punish criminal offenders and to deter them from committing additional crimes by removing their opportunity to further offend. If they were luxurious, you'd get plenty of people who would commit crimes just so they could keep enjoying the life of luxury you propose. Not every cares about abstract concepts like freedom.

US prisons are also not as bad as most people think. In the real world, they're mostly like Orange is the New Black, not Oz.

Yet US prisons do solitary confinement. It is estimated that 4% of inmates are wrongfully convicted(innocent, at least of the crime accused). Inmates have diminished capacity of communication, consumption, safety. There are a disproportionate populations in prison to respect to crimes actually committed.

Your indignation is just because you value freedom very lowly. It is true that another man's freedom is so worthless to oneself that it doesn't sate your thirst for vengeance.

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