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Comment by bshepard | Hacker News Reader

This wrong is subsidiary on the the prior moral wrong of kidnapping and caging humans. This practice will look very bad from the perspective of any desirable future. But many futures await with even more cages.

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Is it okay to kidnap people who kidnap people? Or should we just let them keep kidnapping people?

IMO, we’ve learned over many centuries that some slim fraction of the population has demonstrated themselves unable/unfit to live freely in society.

What should society do when that conclusion is appropriately reached?

> kidnapping and caging humans

What does this refer to? It's illegal to kidnap people, if caught you'll get sent to prison for it.

Not if you're a police officer working under the law.

The GP is trying to say that the whole notion of incarceration is barbaric, and that future generations will look back on it just like we look at, say, stokades.

What will future generations do with people who kill other people?

That's really the issue with calling incarceration wrong generally. I'd understand someone opposing it for all crimes and proposing alternative punishments depending on the situation but it seems that there are going to be situations where it's immoral /not/ to lock someone in prison.

The immoral part is when you lock someone up as a punishment. If we did this to ensure safety for everyone else, we'd only lock up people who are actually likely to commit another crime, and then only for as long as that remains true. Notions like "if you do X, the minimum sentence is Y", which are kinda fundamental to how we run our justice system, are not compatible with that.

> The immoral part is when you lock someone up as a punishment.

I guess this is where the fundamental disagreement is located. I don't see anything immoral about locking someone up for committing certain crimes any more than its immoral for a parent to confine a child to a room or take away something according to the "crime".

Well, yes, it's the difference between punitive vs restorative justice.

But the thing about prisons is that they aren't good as a punishment, either. Indeed, they came about as a supposedly "corrective" alternative to the more punitive approach. In practice, to punish someone by locking them up, you have to make the terms so long that the effects linger in their lives long after. Furthermore, locking random people up with career criminals for long periods of time is a wonderful way to turn them into the same.

If we really just want to punish people, let's bring back corporal punishment and be done with it. Ah, but that's considered barbaric - and yet somehow locking someone up for years is not?..

> The GP is trying to say that the whole notion of incarceration is barbaric, and that future generations will look back on it just like we look at, say, stokades.

What is the alternative? If someone kills someone in cold blood do you just let them roam free? You could argue that certain crimes don't warrant certain levels of punishment but incarceration /generally/ seems necessary.

In principle, for the vast majority of even violent offenders, a rehabilitation facility (including mental Healthcare and job education) would probably be the most humane idea we've come up with (ignoring the risk of this becoming a USSR-style re-education camp).

Would this work for someone like Stalin? No, I don't think so, so I don't agree entirely with GP.

>What is the alternative? If someone kills someone in cold blood do you just let them roam free? You could argue that certain crimes don't warrant certain levels of punishment but incarceration /generally/ seems necessary.

There are more crimes and pre/potential crimes than just violence and murder. We even treat some innocent people as guilty by locking them up. At least we wouldn't have innocent people in cages if there were no cages. Perhaps restitution or weregeld could be a substitute for theft or assault. But I strongly doubt that putting people behind bars does much to improve their lives or the ones they've affected in the overall vast majority of cases.

Imprisoning people is kidnapping and caging them.

Is "kidnapping and caging" a mass murderer, to use a colorful example, wrong?

Good question. I do not believe so. However, that is notnthe majority of the prison population. Also, back to you: what interventions were missed that allowed someone to be so damaged that they became a mass murderer?

I think you don’t understand the distinction between imprisoning someone who has broken a law and kidnapping a person.

The implication is that, regardless of the words you use to describe it, law enforcement capturing individuals and incarcerating them strongly resembles kidnapping. Personally, having had a close friend who was driving my car at the time disappear without any communications for days due to this process, I'm not entirely against this categorization.

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