US prisons always sound like hell.
In Germany, prison time is like being in the hospital without being sick. Mostly boring.
In Germany, prison time is like being in the hospital without being sick. Mostly boring.
Everyone else:
Fuck you if you get sick. Not our problem.
Fuck you if you have a kid. Not our problem. Maybe keep it in your pants next time.
Fuck you if don't need and can't afford a mansion. No, we absolutely don't believe that the insane square footage and cost inflation of housing has anything to do with our homeless problem. Why are you bringing up crazy talk like that?
Fuck you if you want an education. We are going to load you up with student loans that will ruin your life for decades to come and that you mostly can't discharge via bankruptcy, unlike most other forms of debt.
Then we say the so-called 99 Percent are irresponsible and ill behaved and not a product of our shitty system that is actively chewing up citizens and spitting them out.
Most prison terms are not 40-60 year virtual life sentences, so most people who go to prison will see the outside again. So while I dont think we should 'take it easy' on prisoners we really shouldn't be trying to do damage that will prevent them from having a chance to function in society.
Besides all that fundamental as a society either the society believes in human rights or it doesnt...
https://nij.gov/five-things/Pages/deterrence.aspx
As well, the purpose of prison should be not only to punish, but also to rehabilitate. I would actually argue rehabilitation should be the primary purpose of prison.
What about the wrongly convicted? I understand the desire for revenge, but prisons should be safe, secure and inmates should come out of there as people you'd be happy to have as a neighbor.
When you treat prisoners like animals, they'll act like animals.
And when you don't treat them like animals, they will still act like animals. Some, of course, not all, just like today not all US-inmates come out acting like animals.
All else being equal, I’d always prefer a non-ex-con over an ex-con as a neighbor. I doubt I’m alone in this.
These are human beings, and I consider it utterly uncivilized and inhumane that we would have an institution designed to "be like hell". It's also a typically Christian approach (I mean the church, not the original love commune nor the homeless man who taught to love each other as one self) - to play God, to judge, to create hell and condemn someone to it.
Many of these lost souls are already in hell, of a broken society, a broken home. Putting them in a deeper circle of hell is not any kind of a solution. For the person being punished, it's just a continuation of the same shit way they've been treated. How can we expect any rehabilitation, any healing to take place in a dungeon?
It just reminds me that we're still in the Dark Ages, underneath our veneer of "civilization".
Though it's only more recently that keeping people in prison for significant lengths of time has been commonplace, or thought of as a way of punishing/rehabilitating.
Present day is darker in some ways than the so-called Dark Ages.
But if you pretend to care about the larger good of society (but still harbor that mean streak) then you lock people away, assure the population you're doing your best to "reform" them, and choose the most expensive form of torture you can imagine: keeping people alive for the rest of their lives all the while subjecting them to sexual violence from their fellow prisoners.
Has the benefit of fewer angry riots over public execution and torture. More predictable.
If you actually care about people you create a system like they have in Norway.