Right or wrong, a large function of the prison system is to ruin someone's life in a sufficiently public way for performing actions outside of the given society's norms and values to serve as a deterrent to those who would follow in their footsteps.
Punishment is a deterrent and has been proven so for millennia.
At least in the US, murder rates are consistently higher in states with the death penalty.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140330143555/http://www.amnest...
Magashna is clearly not arguing causality, but rather that the death penalty has failed to be a deterrent to murder.
Edit: legitimately curious, not trying to be nitpicky
Generally the best ways to analyze the impact of similar social changes is to compare two similar locations, one that makes a change and one that doesn't, over the same time period, and hope that controls for broader social change.
It's not perfect by any means though.
A proven deterrent? Do you have any facts to back-up your posit? The crime and recidivism rates would seem to indicate the contrary; especially, in the states.
Essentially, we should - in theory - have no crime by now (given it's been over a millennium) as all rates should've diminished to zero, yeah?
At best, punishment as a deterrent is keeping the for-profit prison-industrial complex in business and that's about the extent of any benefit[s] (if it can even be called that) it might be providing to society.
So, punishment as a deterrent is currently a theory.
@wickedsickeune
That is how I meant it. I posted that to refute @maxheadroom's comment:
> A proven deterrent? Do you have any facts to back-up your posit?
I want to reply to wickedsickeune below, "Gravity is also a theory," but I think the thread's hit max-depth.
The word "theory" in the context of Deterrence_(penology) is not the same as the word "theory" in "theory of Gravity." The _Theory_ of Gravity refers to a model or explanation that follows from observed facts.
Deterrence, according to the Wikipedia page, doesn't fit that definition of the word.
> Despite numerous studies using a variety of data sources, sanctions, crime types, statistical methods and theoretical approaches, there remains little agreement in the scientific literature about whether, how, under what circumstances, to what extent, for which crimes, at what cost, for which individuals and, perhaps most importantly, in which direction do various aspects of contemporary criminal sanctions affect subsequent criminal behavior.
Yes, because the word "theory" was used erroneously. Saying that its currently a hypothesis would have been better.
No, it was used correctly; “theory” has definitions other than those in the context of empirical science and the use of “hypothesis” would have been at least as wrong as the scientific sense of “theory”.
The use of “theory” in that sentence is not in the scientific sense; it is a philosophical rather than a predictive model. (There are predictive models of deterrence, some of which might be theories, or perhaps hypotheses, in the scientific sense, but that's not what the quote is discussing.)
There's a line of thought I keep seeing in this thread: a purpose of imprisonment is deterrence by punishment. people still commit crimes. therefore deterrence by punishment doesn't work. therefore prisons should be replaced with free-range daycare for adults.
You don't have to like the idea of restricting someone's freedom. But would you rather that a violent offender be in prison and unable to cause further harm? I would.
Prison doesn't have to be a place where punishment is meted out upon some imperfect soul for an eternity. It can just as easily be a place where the inmates are expected to make an effort to understand why they are there and how they can move on from that chapter of their life. And we can still lock up the unrepentant for a very long time.
Many of the Christians that I've talked to use the phrase "hate the sin, love the sinner." Maybe it's time we took that to heart and allow our prison population the dignity of being treated like human beings?
If you entertain such a possibility then it is easy to see that the system with ideal deterrence (i.e. it detters everyone who could possibly be deterred) will also have 100% recidivism as the only people who get punished are the ones who cannot be deterred and will keep committing crimes no matter what.
No, the reason is because of the four main theories of criminal punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation (also known as reformation), and incapacitation—that is, all but retribution—are all forms of prevention, and so “prevention” lacks specificity.
> If you entertain such a possibility then it is easy to see that the system with ideal deterrence (i.e. it detters everyone who could possibly be deterred) will also have 100% recidivism as the only people who get punished are the ones who cannot be deterred and will keep committing crimes no matter what.
This assumes that the system not only has ideal deterrence, but entirely lacks both rehabilitation and incapacitation.
But the article in question is about a human trafficker. How does giving a human trafficker "education" (free college?) deter them from doing more trafficking?
just Saturday night I tried to walk outside of a bar holding my drink. the owner asked me not to do it because he might get in trouble.
Would I try heroin if there were no negative consequences? I'd certainly be less averse.
Why?
I'm mainly using it as an example of a behavior that's mildly antisocial but not bad enough to trigger serious enough guilt/embarrassment to stop people from doing it if they couldn't be punished.
I know a lot more people would park in handicap spaces if the fines were made optional. Speeding is another good example where people literally slow down when they see someone capable of punishing them.
I have my personal set of ethics/morals. Murder and theft are not allowed by those. The laws in Canada line up pretty close to these ethics, but not perfectly. The threat of punishment is what stops me from doing stuff in the "does no harm to anyone" category where the laws and my ethics disagree.
Many years ago I worked in a startup, as it turns out the primary owner of the business is what a typical person would likely consider a con-man. I have a rolodex filled with people who were harmed by this man's lies.
Good luck seeking justice if you don't have a bank-roll to fund a strong lawsuit.
I've long since let it go, but for a solid year or so I was consumed by hatred for this man and very much would've loved to take a tire-iron to this man's knees. Some of the other people hurt are close personal friends, I can say with certainty that I'm not the only one who wanted retribution. These people also have family / relationships, some amount of wealth, opportunity, etc.
As it turns out, the risking non-trivial amounts of time in prison serves a deterrent for certain classes of individual. People with something to lose. That, statistically, it doesn't quite appear to serve the purpose should make you question the circumstances, the incentives at play as relates to the people committing those crimes.
Do be cautions when drawing black-and-white conclusions from statistics.
This argument can be extended to cover murder, theft, drug use and any other crimes you might think of by examining people’s value systems. I think we can all agree that murder is against most people’s values but you can’t say it’s universal. Some people are okay with murder in different circumstances but they may not necessarily be psychopaths who crave murder to the detriment of all else. It’s these people that I think may be deterred by the threat of punishment for murder.
Furthermore, to complicate matters a little bit, there is the principle of marginal deterrence. If the punishment for murder is much more severe than for burglary, for example, you can expect a burglar to think twice before deciding to murder the home owner during a break-in. If, on the other hand, you punish stealing with the same severe penalty as murder (say, death penalty for either crime) then you risk incentivizing the burglar to murder anyone who might be a witness to the burglary.
Ultimately, I think the soundness of the principle of punishment as a deterrent derives not from the assumption that everyone has the same values (we don’t) but from the differences in everyone’s values. This helps society produce an outcome that would not otherwise be achievable if we required 100% consensus on every individual value.
In my experience, you have to pick something - and nothing is perfect or works all the time. It is usually worse not picking something (inaction) or being inconsistent in what you pick (wildly varying expectations/results).
How this applies to the current thread is up to the reader.
In addition, there's a saying that "locks don't keep criminals out, they just keep honest people honest". I think it's likely that punishment at least serves a similar role.
Granted, I think we would probably both agree that the US justice system (for example) is too focused on punishment and not enough on rehabilitation.
There is a thing that officially gets called Oppositional Defiant Disorder where you have a kid whose wiring boils down to You can't make me! Neither of my sons has been given such a diagnosis, but that's perhaps in part because I recognized that trying to force issues as a routine thing or be dictatorial with them would be counterproductive.
As a parent, I didn't use a punishment model because I believed that would backfire with my kids. Maybe it kind of works with some kids, but I was sure that would be a case of "There will be hell to pay" in my home.
Studies typically show that every dollar invested in the health, welfare and education of preschoolers saves multiple dollars down the line on things like prison. Of course, we still need some means to address the issue when things go sideways, but it's problematic to focus overly much on addressing problems at that late stage.
We have jokes about "the third world country of America" because America does a relatively poor job of designing a society that generally works for most people and prevents issues as much as possible. Instead, we deal with problems after they develop at a point when they are much harder to address and when any optimal outcomes are no longer possible.
It is certainly possible to question how well any of these goals are met, or even the overall framework. But it is useful to start with the reality of how folks talk about punishment in a criminal justice context.
Ref: search "purpose of criminal punishment" and pick one.
is this actually true? as I understand it, we are well past the peak of criminal activity ( at least in the US).
It's a multi-variable system. It could be that other conditions and effects override what is, in other circumstances, a solid deterrent.
Threat of long imprisonment works great on the guy who doesn't want to lose his cushy job and easy life. It doesn't work as well on someone with nothing and no hope of gaining anything.
Saying it doesn't serve as a deterrent for a certain class of individual is a fair statement, saying it doesn't work, full-stop is most certainly wrong.
The irony is that these systems do not achieve restitution. The victims may experience righteous indignation, but that will soon fade away. Meanwhile the perpetrators gets to spend a few years among their peers in crime university.
> The Swedes
That is a reformative incarceration system.
Deterrence is a nice in theory, but it depends on awareness among the general populace, and depending on people being aware is not a good start to any policy.
Racist sentimemts could be exploited for this in a very humorous way. Imagine hackers being exiled to Mexico, and being let in on the precondition that they spend the first X years working on improving Mexico's public infrastructure.
I think people would even volunteer to do that for free if the willingness was there, but it isn't really.