Prison is pretty inhumane, especially in the context of a limited lifespan. Even if we're immortal, it's still inhumane.
Moreover, how does making people go to prison fixes anything? It's just a way to assign punishment and blame people.
That said, the reason for jail is to not only rehabilitate but also to deter.
The problem we have is that white collar crimes almost never result in jail time for the rich. The financial deterrent is just ineffective at stopping bad behavior. They can run the risk/rewards calculations and often come up with the conclusion that "we'll make more money than we lose to a fine" and they proceed to do the bad behavior.
A good example of this is fireworks at disneyland. They pay fines for their daily displays and write it off as a cost of doing business. So what's the point of the fine? Weren't we trying to stop them from launching fireworks or was it just to extract money from a theme park?
Now imagine if the action for launching fireworks was the general manager of disneyland or their manager serving 2 days in jail. I can assure you, those fireworks would be stopped the next day.
That's the point. If the law is only a set of rules for the poor how can anyone be confident that it is going to work or be applied fairly? If you can buy your way out of compliance then what's the point?
I doubt if it ended up with the CEO and going to jail that they'd keep it up.
If you're talking about prisons, nearly 4 times as many people are in prison for violent crimes (robbery, assault, rape, murder...) than drug charges.
US sentencing has always seemed absolutely crazy to me, to the point where if I through some magic found myself on a US jury I'd have a hard time justifying a vote to convict, and the sentences seem to be more about vengeance than about rehabilitation or making society safer.
I mean, if you think that isn't an insult to the victims, their families, etc.; if you don't think that's absolutely crazy, and I don't know what to tell you, man. Heck, if killing someone, let alone that many people, isn't so bad, why do we care about any other crime as much as we do? Why all this ridiculous outrage in the public square about all sorts real and imagined sins when life itself is so cheap?
Whatever the flaws in the American justice system (and there are many), Norwegian law and the sensibilities behind it are insane in this respect.
> sentences seem to be more about vengeance than about rehabilitation or making society safer.
Justice has more than one aim. Deterrence and rehabilitation are two of them, so is the preservation of social order. But justice is also retributive. Retribution isn't about hate, whatever modern confusion tells you. That's why we aim to have qualified impartial third-parties (judges) who are supposed to adjudicate such things instead of leaving things up to a hate-filled lynch mob, one that often confuses envy with anger at injustice.
> to adjudicate such things instead of leaving things up to a hate-filled lynch mob
See the duality of your own post.
If I try to be impartial, I can hardly see the point to any sentence larger than a couple decades. When you get to those levels of sentencing where you basically decimate the total useful lifetime of someone, you might as well kill the person.
... and I guess I understand something now.
> See the duality of your own post.
That reads as though you scored some virtual point, but I can't figure out what you're saying. Can you clarify?
And Norwegian society operate just fine with Breivik playing xbox in prison.
In the end, retribution still doesn't fix anything. We're machines. We should act like this is true, not surrender to our monkey brain.
Breivik is unlikely to get out because he is likely to continue to be deemed a threat on every re-evaluation. But if he demonstrates that he is reforming and is no longer likely to be a threat, then yes, that is not just normal to me but desirable.
It is a system that works given that re-offending rates in Norway are low.
I'd consider it an absolute insult to victims of violent crime to focus on things like retribution over policies shown to actually reduce the rates of future crime.
Valuing the perpetuation of violence for the sake of retribution over reducing the number of victims seems to me the height of barbaric and immoral behaviour.
But even without any benefits to re-offending rates I'd still consider it barbaric to threat prisoners badly for retributive purposes. Free will is a fiction, and so when we are punishing people for anything other than the practical purposes of keeping society safe we are no better than those we assign blame for crimes, we just tell ourselves we are.
If we "step into the fiction" so to speak, there is reason for passing judgement if passing judgement leads to better outcomes. A lack of agency does not shield us from those outcomes.
But it makes retribution as a justification fundamentally immoral. Of course, there's recursion here - retribution for retribution would be no better.
Beyond that, prison is inhumane as a rough function of where you are. Maybe you're thinking of a particular prison system.
How does it fix anything? It should primarily be a deterrent, and secondarily a way to protect society from dangerous people.
I could definitely see a class system forming in private prisons (it is sort of there already). For public prisons, that's harder. They have to convince law makers to pass laws to enable them to get special treatment. That'd be pretty unpopular.
But, then again, MJ legalization is very popular and it still hasn't happened yet so who knows if policy popularity even sways politicians at this point.
You have a very warped view of justice. Rape isn't "inhumane"? Murdering someone isn't "inhumane"?
In the case of premeditated murder the murderer forfeits the right to life, so the death penalty, especially for especially egregious acts, is entirely just. To claim it isn't is unjust and an insult to the victim. Mercy only has meaning when the penalty is deserved and prudence will dictate whether the peantly ought to be exercised in the given circumstances given the best account of the facts and our limited knowledge (hence the need for judges who have the authority and the perspective to better adjudicate dispassionately instead of fueling some Sicilian family feud or a lynch mob that confuses envy with anger at injustice).
> Moreover, how does making people go to prison fixes anything? It's just a way to assign punishment and blame people.
Uh, yes? OBVIOUSLY, if someone is GUILTY, he DESERVES blame and punishment. I don't know why this is so difficult for you to understand or how you could possibly think this is wrong or that a world without them is preferable or even feasible. If someone has freely committed a crime, if he has chosen to commit that crime and has carried it out, then OBVIOUSLY he bears responsibility for it and is culpable for his actions.