There are appropriate use cases for prison, and violence in prison will be inevitable. The very least we can do is take that more seriously, and stop shoving addicts into the same place as violent murderers.
Isn't this already partly achieved by the delineation between low security & high security prisons, as well as delineations within the same prison complex (general population vs SHU)?
There are places in europe, for example, where they focus on developing skills so that someone trying to integrate back into society has a more legitimate shot at being successful. Others have implemented non-policing systems such as drug addiction rehab programs, effectively diverting funds from a policy of handling certain types of issues as policing/legal issues and instead treat them as public health issues.
I also recall reading about a small town in US that was composed almost entirely of ex-cons, where they could start a normal-ish life in preparation to jumping back into the regular society, stigmas and all.
The topic of punishment of "lost causes" is itself sometimes a hot button. Some societies consider death penalty acceptable while others do not, for example. There's even differences in laws regarding things like involuntary manslaughter in driving accidents, for example (notoriously, the case of core.js maintainer going to prison for it). We could probably be here all day debating what is "beyond redemption" or not, and not come to an agreement, and we can see from the ratio of small crime inmates that we tend to err on the side of far too much caution / vengeful spirit.
You cannot treat miscreant behavior as if it was a movie, where you beat the bad guy and get a happy ending. Real people are complex beasts and life goes on after the credits roll.
Farming and nature isn't a cure, and does nothing to help someone adapt to the city they will likely be living in upon release.
Last time I checked unusual punishments were prohibited.
The guy in the article is in for 10 years for burglary due to a drug habit.
But we can all agree that we should help people who need it.
By all means, let us get rid of all of these things.
So the question becomes how do you reconcile the secretly dark desire to wipe undesirables off the face of the earth forever vs a legal system that says that people do have the right to live normal lives after they've paid their debts to society. There isn't really a viable middle ground here. The current status quo is to just spend ungodly amounts of tax dollars deferring the dilemma to X years in the future. But when the time is up, either you wait for a relapse and go through the whole thing again, or you just accept that society wants undesirables banished and just kill them all all the time to free resources, or you come up with some reasonable reintegration strategy where people are ok living near ex-cons. Most people would probably balk at the idea of unconditional life/death sentences, under some tautological idea of justice. You can see small scale cases where reformed murderers claim to have found god and built families, and whatever. The challenge is that there's a lot of very strong stigma as soon as you leave tight social circles and that's where the relapses often come from.
You may put a rapist in a prison but then they serve their sentence and might go on to become your neighbor, regardless of whether they repent or are willing to rape again. Where do you put them then? Who gets to decide who's unrepentant? You see how the question gets uncomfortable?
I get that you're trying to just imply that some criminals should just rot in prison, but that's exactly the blindsidedness that I was talking about when it comes to discussions about prison systems.
If you scroll elsewhere, you can see I also mentioned that one could spend weeks fruitlessly debating what constitutes a criminal beyond redemption and that that does add extra layers of touchiness when it comes things like capital punishment.
You may not like capital punishment (and I'm neither condemning nor advocating for it), but it is a real punishment framework that addresses tax burden and the problem of discomfort of having to live near a sex offender. Does it have flaws? Absolutely. As you said yourself, justice systems make mistakes. When I said "tautological idea of justice", what I'm deriding is the double standard some people fall into when making an argument that boils down to "killing innocent people is wrong because it cannot be undone" and use that as a differentiator in opinion between capital punishment and long prison sentences, since one can also make the same argument about innocent inmates (the "silver lining" type of argument is usually callously oblivious to the horrors of prison life, as well as stigma, trauma, loss of opportunity and health, etc and the fact that this damage cannot be undone, no matter how much one thinks saying "oops, sorry" is good enough). One can flip the silver lining argument as such: "at least he was put out of his misery quickly". (Again, not advocating for it, just reiterating that side of the debate)
A lot of anti-prison folks will argue that the better option is reintegration, which involves skill development, counseling, etc. This gels well with the vast majority of inmates who are in prison for small crimes. The flaw, of course, is that you can't really proactively stop the odd psychopath. Trade-offs, trade-offs.
Prisons existing is not a societal failure. You can't have a society with 330 million people and not have at least 1 murderer who is relentlessly violent, who needs to be physically confined to protect everyone around them. As soon as you have 1 individual like that (which is almost guaranteed by the law of large numbers irrespective of how good that society is), you've already agreed that some kind of prison (whether or not you label it as such) is necessary.
Every large country has some kind of supermax prison, including Scandinavian countries, because it's a simple reality that individuals like the above exist in small numbers.
How many of these people are the Dexter type murderer?
I'm focusing on the part I think we can all agree on and therefore is solvable.
It can be a historical running dark joke - "Sadly <x> still qualified as an improvement." such as slavery technically being a bit better than early human warfare ending in genocide either directly or indirectly (forced out of all territory capable of sustaining themselves).
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better (ones with far better recidivism rates should be a model for one) but given the history it isn't a failing in itself - that would suggest a shift away from widespread killing and mutilating people was a mistake.
Unfortunately the American people voted otherwise. See what Harris was up to in CA. Expect it to be rolled out nationwide. Biden created the laws that made it possible. They are a right pair.
Our criminal justice system is broken where innocent people should fear getting incarcerated because: 1. Almost everything is a crime and 2. Every crime is prosecuted harshly for political points. (look at me, I'm tough on crime, I imprisoned 300 criminals).
As an European the United States needs proper reform of its judicial/law system, or whatever you call the dreadful thing where you can imprison a person for 10 years because of non-violent property crime. Unfortunately I've read that the new VP had built her career partially on being tough on crime, hope that those people were wrong/lying or (if they were correct) that she'd be able to see that that's not the best road going forward.
They should. I don't think this is something I'm willing to change my mind on.
Prisons are literally one of the worst things we've made. They serve no purpose other than to dehumanize, rape, assault, and other fucked shit to "undesirables." It allows us to put problems to be solved to a later date, instead of addressing them head on and making sure it doesn't happen.
Prison should be an optional rehabilitation option for people, with it potentially being forced on a very very small minority of the population. No more than 0.01% of the population should be in forced rehabilitation, and no more than 1% in optional rehabilitation.
Come on, you know that's not true.
Prisons exist primarily to control threats from society. And secondarily to punish people for getting caught breaking rules, partially for vengeance and partially for deterrence.
Societies have tried other methods of controlling threats beyond imprisonment, including (but definitely not limited to) ankle bracelets, public shaming, shunning, exile, offender registries, altering brains via chemicals, brainwashing, torture, or surgery, altering bodies via sterilization or mutilation, death, even collective punishment.
So prisons aren't great, but they're better than many of the alternatives.
On a personal note: that crime of any kind is even possible in a 100% controlled environment speaks to the malicious incompetence of those administering the prisons, and to our shameful collective thirst for vengeance. As with people, judge a society by how they treat the least powerful.
On top of all that, it gets severely overused, not the least because of this broad assumption that it's "better than many of the alternatives", even when that's not actually true - in many cases, prison sentences that replaced one-off corporal punishments for minor crimes can be a lot more disruptive for the life of the person undergoing them.
But, that UK hacker that got arrested after black hat was in non-violent section.
What about the other prisoners and guards who don't smoke having smoke imposed on their lungs? Isn't that ridiculous? I'm suggesting we make this fairer, by not forcing inmates to breathe poisonous fumes in addition to serving their sentences. What makes prisons special compared to every other indoor public space (in most western countries) where it is banned - why are they exempt?
This is like saying "OMG, <thing that is regulated by the states> isn't illegal in the US". Prisons are run by the states. Jails are usually run by the counties. Banning tobacco across the board for prisoners and staff is common because it becomes one less potential avenue of illicit trade between the guards and prisoners. Just because there isn't a law against doesn't mean it's not usually prohibited in practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_ban#Effects_of_prison_...