How I survived a year in ‘the hole’ without losing my mind | Hacker News Reader

How I survived a year in ‘the hole’ without losing my mind

themarshallproject.org

429 pointsysjodha512 comments

I hate the US penal system. I grew up a semi conservative individual. Good guys and bad guys. Three strikes and your out sounded great. Tough on crime. All of that.

A couple years ago, I was asked by my faith congregation to serve as a volunteer at our local maximum security state prison, offering Sunday services to the inmates. I did so for 3 years. It changed me.

We’re there some truly troubled/warped people there? Yes. Do I kid myself that their “stories” weren’t surely one sided? No.

I was struck by how arbitrary the whole thing is. And how utterly ineffective it is. What troubled me the most is that we have outsourced this whole raft of problems, without sending it overseas. We want “problems” to just go away. And stay away. And so we outsource the existence of human lives to an alternate universe that exists right beneath our toes. And we maintain fascinating opinions about these people and their lives, with almost zero insight into what the existence we consigned them to was. When people heard I went to the prison every Sunday to visit with inmates, they would immediately wax their opinion about what it must be like. And I found over time that their imagination did not match my reality. Their can be no empathy in that scenario.

I dream (pointlessly) about a world where a much higher percentage of lay civilians spent volunteer time in prisons. Awareness leads to empathy. And only then when we weren’t outsourcing the issue, we might actually be moved to find something more effective.

Most of us have been the victim of some kind of crime at some point in our lives. The many times it's happened to me, I also considered the notion of empathy: namely that the criminal lacked it for me, the victim.

Not saying the current system is in any way an optimal solution or even close to it, but one thing it does provide is a lot of time for those who have acted without empathy to reflect on their misdeeds.

It also puts a lot of money in the pockets of those who run private prisons. The incentives are perverse.

It’s also not about rehabilitation, it’s about penance but that rarely materializes.

Once you go to prison you learn how to be a better criminal. You can’t get a job because of your record. Far too easy to turn back to crime and land right back inside.

It’s cruel. It has nothing to do with reflection. Inhumane at best.

Private prisons should be abolished. I cannot understand how we as a society accept the notion of a system that financially incentivizes incarcerating people. It's abhorrent. Does any other developed country do this?

private prisons maintain costs far better than public prisons. The issue you implicitly refer to is prison contracts state "minimum payments when populations drop below [some] threshold". Its not the private prisons arresting people, trying people, and funneling them into their pocket books.

The real issue is the concept of imprisonment ought be about putting people who truly can not be trusted to be "at large". Prison shouldn't be a punishment. There are other alternatives.

Private prisons shift the burden onto the inmates and often have subpar services such as food and cell hygiene.

There’s a lot of hyperbole and incentives for the narrative to sound better than it is.

Unfortunately I have experience from a family member. See it for yourself if this is an issue you care about.

Private prisons only have lower costs if you exclude the eventual, and inevitable, intervention by the Justice dept to fix their inhumane conditions.

> Its not the private prisons arresting people, trying people, and funneling them into their pocket books.

Have you heard of the "Kids For Cash" scandal? Private prisons actively try to get more people incarcerated by bribing judges. The judges are complicit too, but the private prisons are absolutely trying to "funnel them into their pocket books"

Any evidence that this continues to happen?

Any system with any amount of scale will have bad actors. It’s one very bad data point, but certainly not enough evidence that the whole system is corrupt

I know of at least one case where a judge was being paid by a private prison system to send people to them. I suspect that was not and is not the only case of that happening. Big money has a way of worming itself into other systems and manipulating them for its own benefit.

One case is the definition of 'not systemic'.

I would find it very unlikely if the one case I know about off the top of my head is the only case. Tip of the iceberg.

> private prisons maintain costs far better than public prisons

possibly, but the issue is not cost conservation; the problem is that there are shareholders who benefit the more people are sent to prison. This creates perverse incentives (lobbying for stricter/longer sentencing, bribing officials, etc.).

The private prison argument is mostly nonsense; between state and federal, only 8% of prisoners are incarcerated in private facilities. [1]

[1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

How is this the first time I hear this stat? I feel like my angst toward the system has been misallocated for a very long time.

It's like quite a few "horrible injustices"; they get piggybacked onto a few smaller and real issues, and then taken as gospel.

Private prison services like phone and email systems are still able to take advantage of prisoners, even in public prisons.

Because this is a recent development happening in part because it was a major agenda item for Biden. But note that they didn't close the private prisons, they just switched them to be used for ICE/Immigration incarceration because it's harder for those in that incarceration class to exercise their rights. https://www.geogroup.com/LOCATIONS

This is provably false. The private prison population has increased by 14% since 2000. [1]

[1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

Harmful viewpoint. If true - that’s still 8% of inmates living sub humanely.

That report is on the first page results of private vs public prisons. I encourage everyone to go volunteer and talk to inmates.

Look at unicore. Total scam.

> If true - that’s still 8% of inmates living sub humanely.

There's no objective measures showing that private prisons are somehow more 'inhumane' than government-run facilities.

> That report is on the first page results of private vs public prisons

It is, so there's no excuse to not have some actual data to go by, compared to anecdotal experiences.

> Look at unicore. Total scam.

UNICOR is ran by the BOP. It has nothing to do with private vs public prisons.

Far more than 8% of inmates live subhumanly because public prisons are awful too. Focusing on private prisons distracts us from how much of the problem is systemic and political—cruelty is built into the justice system top-down in the name of efficiency, being "tough on crime" and pure historical momentum. It's not a "follow the money" problem, it's a "politicians and voters" problem.

> cruelty is built into the justice system top-down in the name of efficiency

And you would instead promote.. what? 'Rehabilition'? These arguments always show an absurd amount of empathy for the criminal, and little-to-none for the victims and (statistically extremely likely) future victims.

There is a large number of people that simply cannot function in society. If they aren't violent, cool: I have no problem with anyone living how they like. If they are violent, then they need to be removed from potential victims.

While there is some proportion of people that simply cannot function in society, the experience of other societies which incarcerate a much, much smaller part of the population indicates that most people in USA prisons are not there because of this reason.

That's a common retort, and it's complete nonsense.

> the experience of other societies which incarcerate a much, much smaller part of the population indicates that most people in USA prisons are not there because of this reason.

This does not track. People like to point to Norway as a model for rehabilition and low incarceration rates, while completely ignoring the fact that their crime rate is one of the lowest on the planet.

So, yes, if your crime rate (and anti-sociality) is near zero, I would expect the incarceration rate to be much lower, as well.

I did not mention Norway, or low crime countries, because the same applies for literally every country in the world.

Out of large countries except USA the ones with the highest incarceration rate are Brazil, Turkey and Russia, which definitely do not have "crime rate (and anti-sociality) near zero" but have literally twice as few per capita incarcerated people than USA, and all the moderate-but-still-high-crime countries like Morocco or Mexico or Malaysia have three times smaller incarceration rates than USA.

Unless you can make a good argument why USA has a twice larger proportion of people that simply cannot function in society than the abovementioned countries, I'll repeat my assertion that most people in USA prisons are not there because of this reason.

"only"? That 8% is enough to make very wealthy owners successfully lobby politicians.

Not to mention all the private services revolving around public prisons.

Private prisons had 3.9B in revenue, and private prison services had 2.9B in revenue in 2021 [1].

In contrast, this is:

- Half of what the Car Wash Illuminati makes [2]

- About the same as the Evil Door Handle Lobby [3]

- Only 80% of the Portable Fire Extinguisher Cartel [4]

- Only 4% of the Yoga Tourism Cabal [5]

This is just nonsense.

[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html

[2] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-car-w...

[3] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/door-han...

[4] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/portable...

[5] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/yoga-tou...

It's also about keeping violent people off the streets.

This guy killed someone. He mentions it so briefly it's as though he thinks it's a minor detail. That person he killed was a real human. They were someone's kid, someone's sibling, someone's parent perhaps, someone's friend.

He also seems to behave poorly in prison, still, after 30 years. He flippantly notes a "riot" as though it was something that happened to him. He brags about his abs. I'm not a psychologist but this guy reads like a stock standard psychopath. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

For many people (including myself), it's not about rehab, it's not about penance, it's not about vengeance, it's about keeping someone like this away from everyone else.

That's reading quite a lot into an article which I don't believe supports those positions. We know nothing about the circumstances of the murder, nor of the riot, nor of his upbringing. There's absolutely nothing in this article to even suggest he's a psychopath.

For all we know, he was in the wrong hood at the wrong time, and had to adapt to "prison life" because that is the culture that is foist upon him.

I'm not saying he's not a psychopath, but that's not an evidence-based assertion here.

>> I'm not a psychologist but this guy reads like a stock standard psychopath. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

This isn't a strong assertion and hence doesn't need a water tight argument or strong evidence. It notes I'm not an expert in the field, and that I'm basing the judgement on the writing only. Not everything is an academic paper or a judgement from a jury.

That being said, read the section on "core traits" in that link and read the article again. Lack of remorse... arrogance (the abs section?) and impulsive behavior (he murdered someone and is in and out of the hole for 30 years....).

Agreed. The article displays a "me vs. the world" attitude and the whole thing aims to evoke admiration and sympathy in the reader. There's no evidence of any true human empathy. Who gives a flying f__k about his abdominal muscles?

For many people (including myself), it's not about rehab, it's not about penance, it's about keeping someone like this away from everyone else. He's a killer - he doesn't care about anyone's rights but his own.

I would put harm prevention above penance. Penance is just a tool that promotes caring, ideally before said harms become permanent.

What we ultimately want is that people who don't murder. Also, as someone noted, you probably reading too much into it.

"keeping someone like this away" = harm prevention.

You just state it more concisely :)

It's about preventing someone from becoming a person who harm people.

Prison isn't something we should want in a society, but actively reduce, even if we never realistically achieve it.

There aren't endless resources. Actively reducing would take a lot of effort from a lot of smart people and I'd rather spend those big brains on improving math and reading skills amongst children, or cancer research, or diabetes research, or dementia research.

Believe it or not, a society with 300 million plus people can do many things at once.

Human resources aren't really fungible. Big brains spent on improving education of children can't really be reallocated to spend on cancer research or other part of medical science, not without extensive training at least.

So too we can spend on psychological, social services, and welfare which is what we probably need to reduce crime and overall human suffering to a more manageable level. Hopefully, the improvement to societal health means more resources are available that can be then reallocated to tackle the remainder of human caused suffering.

On the surface this appears to say "we don't need to make tradeoffs", or "there are endless resources". Both are obviously wrong, but perhaps the intended message is something different?

I actually felt some sympathy for the prisoner. He went into Prison at 19. Perhaps he was even younger when he committed murder. WTF does a teenager know about themselves or the world to kill someone?! What kind of awful childhood and upbringing environment did he experience, if any?

Of course he could be a psychopath. Or who knows. I wouldn't presume anything. But I wouldn't be so righteous feeling good about myself for not doing what he did. We're all lucky we didn't have it so bad, be it nature or nurture, or both.

Agree with all of this - but the comment states that it's about keeping people like this away, not punishing them or feeling smug or anything of the sort. This guy causes real harm everywhere he goes.

And psychopaths are often quite charismatic, so plenty of people are taken in by them.

Case in point!

Private prisons are a problem, but as other posters mention, a sub-double-digit percent of our prisoners are in them. One of the real problems, it seems to me, is that pesky little clause in the 13th amendment allowing slavery as punishment for crimes. The government leases out prisons full of people as a work force to private industry. There are many industries and companies in the US that are now dependent on what is essentially slave labor - and no, 16 cents an hour doesn't somehow morally absolve us of the problem.

Yeah, they use the GEO facilities mainly for illegals now, because illegals have less ability to hold GEO accountable and navigate the overlycomplicated prison systems required to access your rights (and you must exhaust local administrative remedies through the Warden and then the BOP before you have access to the Courts). And that is considered progress in the eyes of the American system because it's all about appearances, not about actually following the Constitution.

https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-93-number-5/juris....

I always felt that private prisons could work great, if specific incentive laws are passed. First, give the inmate a choice of which prison to attend, so they are competing against each other based on reputation. Second, if someone re-offends and ends back in prison, then the original prison housing them would be on the hook paying for their stay at the new prison. This gives private prisons an incentive to properly rehabilitate by making sure the prisoner comes out in a better situation than they went in (education, therapy, etc).

If it's a repeat problem, then the prison time isn't working, perhaps the best solution would be some other rehabilitative way to learn empathy...

Or for those without empathy to find out that the society too, beneath it all, has no empathy

There's a bit of irony in the tone of this comment since it shows no capacity for empathy for those who commit crimes, most significantly in the sense that you clearly believe that prison is for others who are not you.

I've been the victim of a range of crimes over my life including assault and robbery.

I particularly remember the one case where I was robbed from a studio apartment while I was sleeping. I was, obviously, quite rattled. I remember looking for other stories of this happening to people and was surprised how many people viewed being robbed as an assault on their dignity and expressed incredible desire for revenge. I just couldn't muster these same feelings.

While my day was ruined by the evening I could already feel my life coming back together: the lock had been changed, I cancelled all my credit cards, has a replacement license on it's way to me, and all in all was just out about $20 that had been in my wallet.

I had a realization then that while my life was already coming back together the life of the person who robbed me was perpetually in the state of chaos that I had felt that morning. I high risk, low reward robbery like that is typically for drug money, and undoubtedly whatever fix that robber had gotten for my $20 was long faded and they were back putting themselves at risk.

The key insight that hit me was that that momentary break in my sense of security that morning, that's what the person who robbed me constantly lives in. That person goes to bed with the same sense of insecurity I woke up in. But my security is only disrupted on these rare occasions where our lives our inverted, but my default is comfort and theirs is perpetually in that state baring that brief moment where they have enough money for that next fix.

I earnestly felt no need for any vengeance as any desire for vengeance was already dealt out by reality. What more punishment could I wish on someone than for them to wake up every morning feeling the same as I did for just that one.

>There's a bit of irony in the tone of this comment since it shows no capacity for empathy for those who commit crimes, most significantly in the sense that you clearly believe that prison is for others who are not you.

If you believe that there are too many people already the death penalty for j-walking isn't a punishment it's a policy to keep the rest of us alive past 2100.

This is silly. I was robbed in the Tenderloin in December and had to spend days in the ICU. The cops won’t do anything. I have permanent brain damage and have lost all progress I made working on my C-PTSD from childhood sexual abuse.

The guys who attacked me don’t live a life of chaos. It’s a job for them and the market is the most lucrative it has ever been.

Well it’s possible for all these things to be true at the same time. I was mugged years ago by a group of high school kids - when the cops were able to track them down, they were all living in a shelter for kids in the foster system who had been unable to find a foster family, typically because of unmanageable behavior. They had often been the victims of sexual or physical abuse, and had lived on the streets.

It’s difficult to hear about that and not have some pity for those kids- yeah they got my phone, but I got to go home to my wife and kid and a high paying tech job.

At the same time, I have a distant relative who will spend the rest of his life in jail for committing a serial string of crimes without apparent remorse over many years. Family members who know him describe him as “scary” and a “psychopath” - but he was also kidnapped and abused as a child. Are those things unrelated? Are some people just evil?

I lived on Chicago’s south and west sides for years. Volunteered with youth at the Boys and Girls Club for much of that time - and did everything I could to raise money for that organization and more.

I can have sympathy for the boys who are drafted into drug work, age 11, and I can personally want the legal systems’ incentives to change while ALSO understanding that some people will choose to be rotten nearly every time. I’m not making an argument for the “carceral state” or one in support of the US’ present prison system. Just making clear my observation that far from everyone is a “victim” of the system and acting like they are hurts the real victims on both sides.

I suspect that almost all antisocial behavior, along with mental health and drug addiction issues, are in some way related to childhood trauma. Many people are able to heal enough that they don’t go down the really bad roads, but many more are not.

As a society we give parents wide latitude in how they raise their kids. And I suspect most people don’t even realize how their parenting decisions might affect their kids down the line.

> are in some way related to childhood trauma

I think that view has the risk of being damaging. In particular parents or partners are often misattributed as the “cause”.

1: It leads to victimisation, where people blame their environment rather than fix themselves. We all can find traumatic childhood incidents if we look for them (“repressed” memories can fill in if you didn’t actually have anything obviously traumatic happen).

2: If you suspect trauma and then wonder “what did the parents do”, that is rather unpleasant for the majority of loving parents that didn’t abuse their children whatsoever. All parents make honest mistakes, and any good parent has plenty of unexpunged guilt, usually for no good reason. Also we can be traumatised for entirely mundane events in our lives - where nobody is actually to blame for evil, yet we often look for blame in others.

3: we can’t change our past, so acceptance of what happened is important. Whether we see ourselves as helpless victims or capable actors is critical I think. Creatinig a narrative of victims is unhealthy, in my experience. One of the worst abuses I have seen, was professionals getting a bunch of troubled teenagers together, letting them talk about their extreme trauma together, and then sending them home. Normalising abuse, and it was extremely damaging to the sensitive, empathetic teens in the group (who had their own problems to deal with, and didn’t need to be loaded with other vile shit to process).

4: There are great parents that end up with fucked-up kids, for reasons beyond their control.

I am concentrating on parents here, because although the people I know with your attitude might say they think about the wider picture, often the first thought I see from them is assuming the parents caused the problem - judgy people are very damaging IMHO. I am definitely not accusing you - but I am accusing others I see with a similar attitude. Disclaimer: not a parent, just old enough to have had the opportunity to learn a little from the hurt people in my life, and trying to be wise enough to know how innocently we can all make mistakes.

It doesn't matter.

We should take steps to prevent it, and the discussions are useful, but once someone is provably willing and capable of committing violent offenses, they have forfeited most forms of sympathy.

> Are some people just evil?

Probably it is part genetic and part environmental, just like most other human traits.

By the way, the fact that many criminals were abused in childhood has many possible explanations, and it is not obvious which one of them is correct. For example:

* Maybe child abuse causes people to become criminals.

* Maybe there is much more child abuse than we imagine, so a majority of criminals was abused, but also a majority of non-criminals was abused.

* Psychopathy is heritable, which means that most psychopaths also had a psychopath parent, and that is why they were abused.

What reason did the cops give you for not doing anything? Was this in SF?

I was told there was no appetite to prosecute a robbery on a white male. They said the guys would be right back on the street within hours if they tried to pick them up.

Rule of law de facto doesn't exist in other words

Some people prefer to put themselves at risk robbing someone for $100 instead to work hard for $100. I think the emphaty should be on people working hard for little money not really on risk takers that risk not only their life but their victim's life as well.

A simple robbery can quickly end-up more tragic. I would like that person to be put in jail until it develops the skills and behaviour fit for society. The time based sentence is wrong. There is no point to let someone free if that person gets even worse in prison. The sentence should include time based punishment and mandatory rehabilitation. What's the point of catching criminals if rehabilitation is not achieved? It is just vengence? It's not unusual to hear convicted criminals that two-three-five or more years in jail is worth the risk rather than taking a stupid job.

> It's not unusual to hear convicted criminals that two-three-five or more years in jail is worth the risk rather than taking a stupid job.

Citation please? From my understanding, there are typically a wide swath of reasons people commit crimes, but I have never seen a stat suggesting that jail is preferable to a stupid job.

I didn't say people prefer jail instead of stupid jobs. But the chances of getting away with crime is worth it. That's the reason they commit crime in the first place and it doesnt change after serving time in prison. It's not unusual for convicted criminals to seek new crime jobs as soon as they are out of prison. The fact that they were caught is seen either as a mistake or price of doing business. Many get new crime skills and new connections in prison. A stupid job is not even remotely present in their mind.

Sometimes jail time is even priced in already, usually in financial crimes but that's a different story.

My point is that people should not be left out of prison until they prove themselves worthy to live in a free society.

On the contrary, I wish my criminal aggressors had precisely the amount of empathy I have for them. Such crimes would not have occurred were that the case, nor would they even be possible (as I would never violate another fellow human being in such a way).

Furthermore, you may have gotten off with a day of inconvenience, but consider those victims that have permanent scars from their encounters with those lacking empathy. Victims of sexual assault, those suffering permanent injury, and the relatives of prematurely deceased victims will never be the same. These are not hypotheticals (e.g., just the stats on sexual violence against women are appalling). All we can do as a society for such individuals is do our best to prevent some percentage of future similar acts. A better path for reformation may be part of that, but I'm not sure squeezing victims for more empathy gets us very far.

> key insight that hit me was that that momentary break in my sense of security that morning, that's what the person who robbed me constantly lives in

Maybe for some, but for many it’s a job or hobby. Some actually enjoy it. I grew up in a rough neighborhood and know people bragging about robbing just for the thrill of it.

It’s great for you that you can move on so quickly, but I think it’s a mistake to assume others can or should. Your experience is not the same as others, and your situation isn’t either.

In my case, I have pets and a young child living with me. The dogs may get over the violated sense of safety quite easily, but my little girl likely wouldn’t. It’s imperative to her healthy development that I be able to provide her a safe, secure place to live that also feels safe and secure.

Call me selfish but that overrides my concerns for the chaotic state of other peoples’ lives: their problems do not entitle them to harm my family.

> the state of chaos that I had felt that morning

> high risk, low reward robbery like that is typically for drug money

You found yourself in that state of chaos for reasons entirely outside your control. The robber freely chose to take the first hit of the drug that led to the addiction that led to the life of crime.

Yes I was going to make the same comment. The poster you're replying to seems confused in equating the two.

This seems extreme to me to be that empathetic when someone has broken into your home while you are inside, even in hindsight with the fact that it was non-violent situation for you. Coming into someone's home when you know they are there is another level of seriousness IMO. It takes a certain amount of confidence to do this - whether the are on drugs or not I don't think has any relevance. If someone were to do this to my home I would be looking at it like it's a me or them type of situation. There is no reason to stay vengeful after the event, but being this empathetic strikes me as overdoing it.

> Most of us have been the victim of some kind of crime at some point in our lives. The many times it's happened to me, I also considered the notion of empathy: namely that the criminal lacked it for me, the victim.

Most of us have broken multiple laws without being aware of it (or casually aware of it) - the idea of separating citizenry between "criminals" and "non-criminal victims" is too binary, as root comment mentioned.

The current system is an anti-solution, causing more problems than it solves and failing to succeed at even it's most basic purposes. Unless someone is an imminent violent threat they should not be detained in any form for long periods of time, and those who are detained should be treated in a way intended to improve their situation and remove the need for incarceration.

I don't really understand what the purpose of prisons is, and I don't think anyone else really does either.

Is it punishment? If so, then there are much more effective and cheaper ways we could punish people. Is it rehabilitation? If so, how does being locked into a room with a bunch of other criminals rehabilitate someone? Is it removing criminals from society altogether? In that case, there's a far more efficient way to do that.

Because prisons don't have a clear role, they end up being a weird and ineffective mix that achieves virtually nothing.

We know the purpose of prisons; very cheap labor without oversight.

An exemption to the prohibition of slavery.

UNICOR makes 61 million a year. Not exactly big business.

> achieves virtually nothing.

The purpose of prisons is to remove people from society altogether, yes. They do accomplish this. Your complaint on that point is that they don't do this efficiently (compared to what, killing the prisoners instead?)

The penal system generally solves along three axes, whose distribution varies based on the society in which they exist.

1) Segregation. Taking dangerous individuals and putting them in a separate area away from society.

2) Rehabilitation. Changing the behavior of these individuals to avoid recidivism.

3) Retribution. Just making these people miserable because it people outside prison feel good knowing the people in prison are having a bad time.

The US penal system is designed principally around (1) and (3) and pays lip service to (2).

I wouldn't overlook the money angle either. Privatization, either outright, or in part via service fees for phones, books, commissary, etc, has changed the system.

It's mostly money. The penal system is extremely profitable. Slave labour redefined.

>It's mostly money. The penal system is extremely profitable.

source? Specifically, the claim that it's "mostly" money.

CoreCivic and Geo both own and operate the majority of prisons in the US.

Only ~8% of prisoners are incarcerated in private facilities.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

"Companies own or manage 75% of U.S. detention facilities. Two of the biggest companies, CoreCivic and The GEO Group, are publicly traded. In the correctional system, however, less than 10% of state and federal inmates are in the care of private prisons."

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/why-private-prisons-geo-grou...

Well, it seems I need to brush up on some reading then.

Slave labor continued - the 14th amendment clearly spells it out : "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States[...]"

> the 14th amendment clearly spells

The 13th*

There’s also deterrence.

Deterrence is a very legit reason. At least make the rational actor part evaluate if the crime is worth the risk and time spend in jail.

Now part of this group should be able to reintegrate. If they are given a reasonable chance, but it feels that entire other part of system is build on this never happening.

Doesn't that become a transactional approach. "If I rob this bank I have a 50% chance of getting away with $1m and 50% chance of going to jail for 5 years, that means the value is $200k/year"

It is, just like fines are. I have x% chance of getting caught and the cost is xxx. Do I want to follow the rules or break them.

I'd like a US criminal justice system that got this part - my hand hurts when I touch a hot stove - right. Instead what happens is that you touch the hot stove 20 times to no effect and on time 21 your hand is burned to a crisp.

Worse still it's burned to a crisp the day after you touch the stove. Is my hand a blackened stump because of the stove? Maybe? Who can say for sure.

My ideal would be that when you commit a crime the justice system finds you guilty or innocent extremely quickly and if prison time is the punishment you get in prison quickly, get out quickly and once done with that the slate is clean. I honestly think that would be more of a deterrent then the status quo.

> once done with that the slate is clean

I don't agree with this part. If someone was convicted of embezzlement on three separate occasions, and served a year in jail each time, would that be someone you'd be willing to hire as your accountant?

Is this true? As far as I know the penal system has one and only one purpose: deterrence. 1) and 2) are a practically-oriented bonus. 3) is, to my knowledge, explicitly not a goal.

Officially, it's all of them. From title 18 section 3553 of the US code:

> The court, in determining the particular sentence to be imposed, shall consider ...

> (2) the need for the sentence imposed—

> (A) to reflect the seriousness of the offense, to promote respect for the law, and to provide just punishment for the offense;

> (B) to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct;

> (C) to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant; and

> (D) to provide the defendant with needed educational or vocational training, medical care, or other correctional treatment in the most effective manner;

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3553

Officially you are wrong. It is not intended to promote correction or rehabilitation. See §3582(a). Imposition of a sentence of imprisonment....

"recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation."

This is surprising to me. In Germany, the constitution (as the highest law) is clear on the issue: punishment is not a goal, only deterrence of also the violator but especially others. I guess it is because the constitution here is quite new, compared to US. Funny tho, as I believe the US played an important role in drafting it.

If it's main purpose was deterrence, then why put in prison people who killed soneon by accident? Not murder but manslaughter. And person is really sorry for that act and would do anything to be sure it to not happen again.

In contrast, serving sentence in prison may change their personality.

So as I see it: it's revenge + lesson to people outside, to not commit crime.

We don't put people in jail merely for killing someone by accident. There needs to be an additional component of recklessness, carelessness, etc.

Yeah, like smoking weed. Or a 3rd strike misdemeanor.

If you're smoking weed and you kill someone in a traffic accident - I'm okay with you going to jail.

Deterrence doesn't only mean to discourage the perpetrator from recommitting the act, it means to deter the public at large getting doing so, for fear of punishment. So in the event of an accident caused by willful negligence, tyou would want to discourage others from being similarly negligent. For example, someone texting while driving who runs an intersection and causes a fatality. One reason to punish them is to impress upon others in your community to show care and awareness while driving.

I'm not endorsing this practice, just stating how I think deterrence is alleged to work.

This is exactly my impression, too.

> deterrence

I think that is the innocent opinion.

If it were for deterrence, then it would need to effectively deter better than it does. It does deter some people, but perhaps not others (especially in the US with its extremely high incarceration rate). And do life sentences effectively deter? It is possible to measure deterrence scientifically, because there is variation.

Also for it to properly deter, many of us would need to experience it first. From the outside we “know” it is horrible, but experiencing it is the only way to bellyfeel just how horrible. And what about the people who like the scene, the routine, and zero responsibilities?

I think you made several unfounded assumptions. I agree that it's the innocent opinion - but this is a question about the basic, foundational rights, not the practical implementation (which is far from perfect).

How many people must be deterred it a balancing act. If jaywalking is punished by death, it will deter most people, but it is not adequate to the crime. And even death is not enough to deter absolutely everyone. One has to find the right balance.

Experiencing it first hand is not needed at all in my opinion. Per the above, it just has to work "well enough", and it usually does, even in the US.

Don’t forget (4) profit where forced labor is the norm as its refusal is tied to longer sentences. Also the cost per prisoner per day for us taxpayers is nothing short of obscene.

It explicitly excludes 2. From Title 18 §3582(a) Imposition of a sentence of imprisonment:

"recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation."

> 3) Retribution. Just making these people miserable because it people outside prison feel good knowing the people in prison are having a bad time.

Do you reject the entire concept of punishment?

I wasn’t really opining just observing, but it was an early American principle that losing your freedom is in and of itself punishment.

Indeed. Here's a case I happened across recently that go almost no media attention[1]. Got almost no media attention. Guy that stalked and assaulted a woman was released early on parole. Proceeds to stalk woman again, is arrested, prosecutors don't press charges. Assaults the woman again, is arrested again, prosecutors don't press charges. Eventually, the man kills the woman.

There are dangerous individuals that need to be removed from society, and when they're not, they hurt and kill those around them. If there is a more efficient and effective way to do this, that would be great. But it's hard to have this discussion when people pretend these things aren't important functions that need to be addressed in some way.

[1] https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/stalking-murder-...

Yes, that happens. But what percent of folks in the criminal Justice system are that guy? 5%? 95%?

And what do we do to try to change those people so that they don’t do it again when they are released?

The false positive vs false negative discussion in criminal justice is the whole problem. You cannot come up with a number that is satisfactory to everyone, and for every person you lock away forever because they will surely reoffend, how many should legitimately be over-punished for their actions?

I personally think we should provide more productive activities for prisoners, so that it is not necessarily the end of their lives or contributions to society. But that is so ripe for abuse that it's useless to even start the discussion.

76.6% of US prisoners are 'that guy'. [1]

[1] https://harvardpolitics.com/recidivism-american-progress/

Weird to cite an article citing the brutal non-rehabilitative nature of the US penal system as the major cause of recidivism in order to make that case.

I can disagree with the editorializing while looking at the numbers.

> There are dangerous individuals that need to be removed from society, and when they're not, they hurt and kill those around them.

A more insidious problem is that there are some guys who aren't as dangerous as killers/rapists, but who are nuisance to others (e.g. multi-recidivist non violent theft). Putting them away for years doesn't seem like a fair solution.

In general, the welfare of law-abiding citizens should be prioritized over that of criminals. But for certain crimes, I do thing short but harsh corporal punishment would be fairer and more effective than prison.

For privileged people theft is mainly an inconvenience. When my laptop got stolen I just filled out a form at work and got a replacement the next day. But for lots of people it’s more than that. If you work on cars or houses your tools are your livelihood. Getting them stolen means losing your job or replacing them at retail prices which is out of reach for lots of people. Likewise at the community college I go to some people are barely holding on. If their laptop gets stolen they either drop out or don’t pay rent that month. There are lots of people who would rather be violently assaulted than have their stuff stolen so the idea that theft is nonviolent has always seemed like a luxury belief to me.

Privileged people also tend to conceptualize theft as "theft from a corporation" as in, stealing clothes from Target or slim jims from a gas station.

The idea that their entire livelihood could be taken from them doesn't cross their mind

Theft isn't a mere nuisance, it's an attack on one of the fundamental buttresses against chaos and violence.

The cost of living in a low-trust environment is orders of magnitude greater than the value of the items stolen. Severe penalties for persistent defection against society are absolutely warranted.

>The cost of living in a low-trust environment is orders of magnitude greater than the value of the items stolen.

Absolutely!

What are you proposing instead?

A) Imprison every stalker for life or kill them

B) Focus on rehabilitation and prevention. E.g. relocate the stalker to another city, monitor their movements etc.

These are intentionally bad choices.

A) That's disproportionate.

B) This requires an extensive police state.

Much more simply: evaluate each crime based on the severity, likelihood of re-offense, and apply a sentence commensurate with the crime. We could make lots of efforts to make this a fair and impartial process. I wonder what we could name that?

> B) This requires an extensive police state.

If anything it's the contrary.

Unless there is way to test the likeabity for it to do it again I think imprisonment for most of its life is not that harsh if it's a second time recidivist. It's pretty obvious that person is not fit to live in a free society.

If the punishment for stalking a second time is life in prison, then quite a few more stalkers will resort to murder since the punishment is the same.

I don't think that will happen. However if that's the case then we need close monitoring/full surveilance of first time offenders. Perhaps also additional requirements (i.e 1000 miles restraining order). Breaking the restraining order should put the offender automatically back in jail. I'm pretty sure we have tools to deal with stalkers. It's just that there seems to be no will to re-educate them.

> Guy that stalked and assaulted a woman was released early on parole. Proceeds to stalk woman again, is arrested, prosecutors don't press charges. Assaults the woman again, is arrested again, prosecutors don't press charges. Eventually, the man kills the woman.

I don't understand what this is supposed to be a case of. Are you suggesting that if he weren't let out on parole and had served his full sentence that he wouldn't have murdered the woman, or that all people who commit crimes should be given a choice between a life sentence or execution to prevent recidivism?

And do we make this decision without reference to the statistics, e.g. how many people were released from prison for assaulting a woman failed to go on to murder that same woman? I suspect the proportion would be very high. So is it worth it to imprison or execute any number of offenders who would not go on to commit even worse crimes if it saves just one woman from being killed? Have we looked up the number of released felons who have saved lives, have raised well-adjusted, productive children, have contributed to the world? Are we sure that this number is vastly lower than the number that have gone on to murder women? Could we even boost this number by giving prisoners education and safety, and making sure they can find employment after release, or is that a more onerous prospect than paying $50K/year to keep them caged eternally?

In fact, seeing as most women and children are murdered by their (male) loved ones, have we compared the likelihood of a man without a record to murder their partner to men who have a record of abuse? It may not be low enough to justify not imprisoning all men indefinitely, especially if citing a single murdered woman constitutes an argument.

> If there is a more efficient and effective way to do this, that would be great.

It's not effective at all, we have the worst violent crime rates in the developed world.

> And do we make this decision without reference to the statistics, e.g. how many people were released from prison for assaulting a woman failed to go on to murder that same woman? I suspect the proportion would be very high.

No need to suspect, or try to apply universal statistical arguments that _might_ be the case. This has been well studied, and recidivism rates for violent criminals are _extremely_ high, and incarceration is an effective strategy for preventing crime.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the penal system, but your speculation about its total inefficacy is incorrect. If you are interested in learning more, I found the book "Criminal Injustice" enlightening:

https://www.amazon.com/Criminal-Justice-Decarceration-Depoli...

For less of a commitment, the author has done many interviews. Just search podcasts for his name.

If recidivism rates are high, that means the the rehabilitation function of our criminal justice system (and the broader society) is substantially ineffective. Does that indicate something inherent about the people being imprisoned, or does it instead indicate that our systems are poorly designed and failing?

There are many societies around the world with much lower incarceration rates, much milder penalties, less recidivism, and much lower overall amounts of crime. Shouldn’t we be investigating what they are doing right and trying to copy it, instead of doubling down on our current methods which seem to be extremely (monetarily and socially) expensive failures?

Or do you think Americans are just on average inherently defective compared to people who live in other developed countries?

I think you are asking the right question when asking if there is something inherent with the people, or if the systems are failing. But being binary about it strikes me as a tribal. The realistic answer to your question is that a little of both are true. There is no black and white answer here.

I think you may have been being sarcastic with your last comment on Americans being defective, but it may not actually be that far from the truth, and I'm American. I'm sure we could copy some strategies and be so much better at everything like the extremely developed Europeans across the pond, but the American society and certain features that are rotting from within has a lot to do with it.

Band-aids are nice though and I see no harm in using them.

> I don't understand what this is supposed to be a case of. Are you suggesting that if he weren't let out on parole and had served his full sentence that he wouldn't have murdered the woman

Yes, if the serial woman abuser was in prison where he belonged, he would not have been able to commit murder. Putting violent criminals in jail saves lives.

You could do this more efficiently by putting the nonviolent ones in a separate facility that is far less secure, more like army barracks. The incentive would be if they become violent, or escape, they go to the violent prison.

This is exactly the system in the UK, low security prisons for fraudsters and the like. Usually convicts do a stint in a high security prison at the start, to see if they are going to be a good boy, and to give them a taste of what it's like if they aren't.

I think you're describing the current system. There are multiple prison levels.

https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/justice-studies/blog/diffe...

> I don't really understand what the purpose of prisons is, and I don't think anyone else really does either.

Some people can't function in society. What do you do with them?

Lock them up with other maladjusted people for years, then let them loose on society with a hardened attitude, extensive criminal connections, and no ability to find employment?

The last part really leads to to question, what do people expect to happen? Them willingly starve or freeze to death?

The main issue is that we have time based sentences only for most crimes. Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back. Of course I don't mind a minumum time based sentences as punishment on top of that requirement either. However betrayed trust cannot be repaid in full just serving time locked-up.

>The main issue is that we have time based sentences only for most crimes. Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back.

So if this was the strategy of the U.S until about 2010 I suppose it would have been morally justifiable as an act of self-preservation to kill anyone that saw you smoking pot - assuming of course that there is such a thing as personal rights and people had the right to smoke pot, but the government prevented them from doing so.

on edit: perhaps I'm in a bad mood but I do find it astounding how often when one of these articles comes out about how inhumane the American prison system is, whole branches of the discussion devolve into conflicting ideas on how one can make it more inhumane.

Why would you kill someone who sees you smoking pot? That may lead to a minimum life sentece as punishment regardless of your rehabilitation.

If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable.

You should be aware that drug use is not affecting only you. You also fund an international criminal enterprise. If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism).

As far as I'm concerned all drugs should be legal and served in hospitals unpon request at reasonable prices or free for those who cannot afford them. But I'm not making the laws so I'm not looking providing drugs to addicts at affordable prices either regardless of how ethical would be.

>If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable.

If you have a right to smoke pot then you should not have to rehabilitate yourself, just as you should not have to love Big Brother or any other number of things.

>If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism).

here I'm wondering if you are using 'you' to refer to people in general or to me? Either way it's sort of silly, hardly anybody is going to say I will do drugs after my political activism to make doing drugs legal succeeds! If it's to me I don't smoke pot, but I do believe people have the right to do it.

So if you are going to be thrown in prison on an indefinite sentence for something you have the right to do then I would advocate extreme violence for anyone that was in danger of being arrested for smoking pot.

In the end your indefinite time until rehabilitation proposal is more extreme than the current American system.

>As far as I'm concerned....

reading your last paragraph I get the feeling your view of 'drugs' is they are all somehow the same as heroin?

>> If you have a right to smoke pot

Well, if you have that right into law then I don't understand why you think you risk going to jail.

As far as I am concerned I believe people should be allowed to take any drug they want and even commit assisted suicide for any reason they want (as long as they are sane). After all we own our body and the gov should only protect us from abuse from others(i.e misleading advertising like they did with the tabacco).

That being said I believe in indefinite time until rehabilitation. If the law is wrong we should work to fix it instead to bend it at the expense of so many especially for crimes that lead to violent/tragic outcomes.

I also think people should own the effects of their choices. Buying from criminal or terrorist organisations does lead to tragic situations for many people regardless of the product you buy. Being ignorant shouldn't absolve you of guilt.

Mandatory minimums don't work.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/5-charts-show-mandator...

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/end-...

Mandatory minimums should be used as punishments only. Obviously the release should depend by rehabilitation(mandatory).

Who/how determines rehabilitation? If the prison benefits financially from a prisoner staying in prison how is that going to work in practice?

I goggled this: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

I think it's kind of interesting. The people one might concerned about are probably: "Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses" -> 3.2% of prisoners. "Robbery" -> 2.8% ...

I think the first question is what % of all prisoners should probably not be there in the first place and how do you deal with the root causes of them getting there. Then we can worry about when we let them out.

Mandatory minimums do work. They don't work when they're draconian measures passed in law-and-order frenzies by reactionaries, but they work for decreasing sentencing disparities between sympathetic criminals and unsympathetic ones.

The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at. Without them, we'd just have judges sentencing white snorters to probation and putting black smokers under the jail on their own discretion, and we'd need statistics that we wouldn't be given access to in order to make a case. It's better when racism is out in the open rather than buried in a judge's latitude.

Surely I must be misunderstanding everything you just said.

> The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at.

So you're saying the system is racist and we're seeing it in the value of mandatory minimums, therefore we should aim for more mandatory minimums to even out the racism? Do you believe the same thing when it comes to police shooting black men, i.e. that more white men should also get shot in order to live in a world that's more fair? Therefore making it a "good thing" that people get shot at all?

> Criminals should never be left back in society unless they prove themselves fit/worthy to come back.

How could this be done in practice?

Well, we tried pulling back policing and slap-on-the-wrist prosecution policies and violent crime is surging. How long until friendship, positive energy, and rainbows kick in and bring crime levels down? There are more constructive solutions to the prison problem--notably solving frontend problems + prison reform, but locking up violent offenders is part of "solving frontend problems" so we can't exactly stop doing that and hope to make up the difference by investing in after school programs. Any serious solution to crime has to be "lock up offenders and X" rather than "letting offenders run rampant and X".

> we tried pulling back policing and slap-on-the-wrist prosecution policies and violent crime is surging

Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening? I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense?

Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation? Inflation is higher, more people are addicted to things, housing insecurity is rising.

> Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening?

Most metropolitan areas. Seattle [1][2] and Minneapolis [3] have both established public policies of not responding to, citing, or arresting for a wide range of offenses.

> I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense?

Minneapolis has reduced the number of police officers, through various means, by 30%. [4]

> Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation?

Because we have multiple studies proving a causal relationship. [5][6]

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sea...

[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-police-bellevue-oth...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...

[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-supreme-cou...

[5] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12142

[6] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/426877

If this is true, then why are the places with the least crime also not the places with the most police? I'm genuinely asking out of curiosity.

Crime has multiple causes, and multiple solutions. One proven solution is increased police presence. It isn't required, though.

Thanks for educating me about it!

I'm not the person you asked, but if I rephrase your question to "Then why do some places with low crime have less police?", then the answer just seems to be common sense.

"Crime is surging" seems to be the current thing in the political discourse. That's how conservatives are attacking liberals these days in the US and in other places. It's mostly not supported by numbers (at least I checked where I live).

(EDIT: I am not in the US but many here are, here's some stats: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...

EDIT2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States )

Crime rates have multiple causes to them, many go years back.

Maybe we should try to address the root causes instead of locking up more people? We have tough times economically, many reasons for people to despair, endless incitement to violence as means of resolving disagreements or other problems.

At the very least, a harsher approach to law enforcement has to be coupled with some path forward to address the other issues.

Sure, let's try to reduce the crime rate. Let's also not just ignore crimes and refuse to imprison people for them.

> That's how conservatives are attacking liberals these days in the US and in other places.

Primarily as a completely organized and funded way to attack recently elected "progressive" city officials. After the enemy prosecutor/sheriff disappears, the crime wave evaporates as fast as the complaints about kids in cages did when Biden took over.

You mean migrants at the border ;) Elections in the age of social media.

You are mistaken. Homicides are up 60% in the US since the pre-BLM era. This is widely acknowledged among criminologists and isn’t some “conservative misinformation”. Lots of research indicates at a causal relationship between the BLM protests and crime surges, including research that compares crime rates in individual cities before and after a major BLM protest. At some point I should just compile a canned list of papers so I don’t have to dig up links every time this talking point comes up.

Currently the options seem to be prison or Congress.

There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics.

For the winners to feel better about themselves, the losers have to lose hard. It's essentially just sadism.

This has nothing at all to do with preventing criminality, as the penal systems in other countries - notably Scandinavia - have proved.

> Currently the options seem to be prison or Congress.

This made me chuckle out loud, well done!

> There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics.

Yes, there are biases against various races and classes, but they absolutely don't override the bias against criminals. Our system is flawed, but it's far from "about terrorizing and brutalizing certain demographics". This kind extreme hyperbolic rhetoric isn't helpful, and insofar as it motivated the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge, it has done far more harm to minority communities than the criminal justice system could hope to do.

> the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge

I don't actually know if this is true, intuitively. The highest-crime areas are not the areas with the least police. The lowest-crime areas are not the areas with the most police. Crime seems to respond as a phenomenon to other dysfunction of society, not because there is opportunity to commit them.

So, I don't know, can you educate me more about the relationship between police presence and its causation statistically towards crime? [To be clear, I'm not asking in bad faith or whataboutism. I'm genuinely trying to become more educated in this as a layperson who doesn't study crime to any degree.]

I don’t think it makes sense to look at number of police versus crime because cities usually hire more officers when crime goes up, and in the case of the BLM crime surge it seems like they aren’t laying off officers but rather pressuring police to avoid discretionary, preventative policing for fear of becoming the next Ferguson. There are quite a few papers that establish this connection, but this one springs to mind:

> In June 2020, Harvard economist Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi released a paper showing evidence of the Ferguson effect. Across five cities where a deadly shooting that went viral preceded an investigation into crime and policing, they found that the violent crime rate increased, resulting in an additional 900 homicides and 34,000 excess felonies across two years. They suggest that this was caused by changes in the quantity of policing. Other theories, such as changes in community trust, were not supported by the data.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w27324.pdf

Crime is not distributed evenly across society for both victims or perpetrators, that doesn't mean that we should all become subject to crime as a result. I do believe we should make sentencing more fair and not overly police people on the basis of race or class of course. If someone is caught doing X violent/antisocial crime (including things like burglary or redicivist theft) they should not be left to continue doing it even if they are in a disadvantaged group.

A lot of crimes are not one-offs but something done over and over again until they're caught. This applies for both (sexual) assault and property theft. Laws against those need to be enforced even if the first X don't involve prison, because the people stealing hundreds of dollars of merch every week or picking fights are making their communities worse in systemic ways, and after a certain point separation from society is the only way to protect everybody else from the antisocial behavior (and serve as a deterrent).

No, I am not affected by a single instance of someone taking candy from Walgreens. But I am when so much theft occurs that everything valuable is locked up, when prices are raised to account for shrinkage, or when retail operations close down. I am when I have to tell people to leave nothing in their car and not to park in certain spots with frequent breakins, or when I can't leave my bike locked up outside even for a few minutes, or when I can't get packages delivered to my address anymore because it will be immediately stolen if I'm not there.

The victims in aggregate aren't just the people or businesses being stolen from, but all the other people in the community who subsequently have to live in a food desert, pay high prices, or can't even get deliveries any more because there is so much theft.

Scandinavian countries have generous social systems which reduce the demand for crime in the first place. We could have that too.

[deleted]

That's right. And that's why we put people who do things like smoke the devils lettuce or sniff a little columbian snow in there. To keep these menaces away from the rest of us.

I mean, can you imagine? People just walking around doing what they please to their own bodies and not providing slave labor to the state or private prison corporations? The absolute horror!

Around 40% of the prison population is there for violent crime. And for most, it's probably a very loose definition of "violent". Few would argue that you shouldn't put violent offenders in prison, but that's not the reason the majority of people are there.

Does this mean you think any criminal (that committed a violent crime) should be locked up for life? Or how does the length of prison sentences factor into this?

"Does this mean you think any criminal (that committed a violent crime) should be locked up for life?"

Lol what? No.

>Because prisons don't have a clear role, they end up being a weird and ineffective mix that achieves virtually nothing.

I think the role of prisons is really clear, we just have a common social lie we tell ourselves because the truth is really ugly. The prison system exists to provide slave labor to those willing to use it and as a tool to hurt marginalized communities.

The point of prison to me seems like a place you can put people that are dangerous and take them out of the equation for society.

But then how do you decide when to let people out again? Why do we have time limits on sentences?

The purpose of prisons is threefold: First incapacitation - that is at a minimum preventing incarcerated people from continuing their criminal behavior; Second, rehabilitation; Third, punishment.

Those are legitimate and valid goals. However it seems in many cases we only succeed in the third. Criminal activity in prisons is rampant and rehabilitation more often than not fails.

If rehabilitation were a goal, the US could learn a lot from other countries how to do that. I don’t see that happening though. So I conclude the system has other more important goals.

The usual complaint about rehabilitation methods seems to be that they compromise the deterrence or retribution aspects.

> So I conclude the system has other more important goals.

I think you are confusing "this system is bad at achieving its goals" and "this system has other goals". The goals of the prison system are really hard. Rehabilitating people is really hard.

No, rehabilitiation is explicitly NOT part of prison. Stop spreading that myth. From Federal Title 18 §3582. Imposition of a sentence of imprisonment:

"recognizing that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation"

And yet 18 U.S. Code § 3553 - Imposition of a sentence (referenced by 3582) says: the need for the sentence imposed—

(A) to reflect the seriousness of the offense, to promote respect for the law, and to provide just punishment for the offense; (B) to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct; (C) to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant; and (D) to provide the defendant with needed educational or vocational training, medical care, or other correctional treatment in the most effective manner;

D sounds a lot like rehabilitation to me.

3553 is about sentencing. Sentencing includes all sentencing only one part of which is prison. Section 3553 D give authority to a judge to sentence to things like residential drug treatment programs, or giving a term of supervised release after prison. Title 18 §3582 is the statute a judge is required to follow when imposing prison as part of a sentence, and it EXCLUDES BY STATUTE a judge considering rehabilitation when imposing a prison sentence. I show the exact statue that makes it ILLEGAL for a judge to do what you claim, and you repost your incorrect misreading of 3553, and then Hacker News tells me to slow down and prevents me from posting a response for hours.

Ok - IANAL - I’ll take your word for it that I misunderstand the statute.

There is no need to take my word, it's the law. Read the statues. Or, there are tons of cases (which is then settled case law) on this very subject.

Funny you care enough to post false information to shape a narrative of your choosing but not enough to educate yourself on the subject.

> Funny you care enough to post false information to shape a narrative of your choosing but not enough to educate yourself on the subject.

I think that was uncalled for. I am not “posting false information to shape a narrative”. I was wrong about my understanding of the statute because as you pointed out my understanding of “sentencing” was incorrect.

You might take “you’re right” with a little more grace.

(You also might look into state systems. Texas runs the second largest prison system in the US. They explicitly cite rehabilitation as a role for prisons.)

Let's see, I responded to your first comment with an actual statute. You then immediately responded with an incorrect interpretation of a different statute and presented a false narrative, instead of looking into the issue and understand what I posted. During the time the story was on the front page, I was blocked by HN from responding to your incorrect reply. So your bad hot take was amplified making my initial factual response look incorrect.

You then never said I was correct, you said 'I’ll take your word for it' which can have implied subtext and connotation. I responded there was no need to 'take my word' when it comes to the facts and what the law says, and that if you want to stake out a non-factual position instead of 'taking my word' maybe educate yourself on the issue that you felt strongly enough about to post false information about multiple times.

I'm sorry but 'I'll take your word' is not even close to saying 'you're right'.

Even in the above, you try to redirect to Texas, when the Feds have established via constitutional challenges and studies that 'imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation'. Who do you think has delved into the issue deeper? The Feds or Texas? Why do you keep pushing that prison is rehabilitative when you have 1. nothing to back your position 2. made assertions relating to it that are PROVEN not factual? 3. You present nothing to disprove the Federal Judicial System's position that it is not rehabilitative? Why do you keep pushing a false narrative? If the Federal Judicial System declares imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation you have a higher bar than 'your personal feelings' (which I apologize for hurting) that your personal opinion countermans the entire Federal justice system's position, along with Congresses' position and the Congressional committees that do extensive research in writing the statutes.

And I think the punishment part has two aspects to it. Deterrence being one, and preventing vigilantism being the second.

In cases where someone is wronged, they want to see the perpetrator punished and feel like they are getting what they deserve. It's not enough to have the perpetrator punished quietly. The victim wants to know it. And they want to feel as though it matches or surpasses their suffering. Eye for an eye.

The purpose of prisons is the same as that of any other large expenditure that doesn't go directly to the poor, in an inverted totalitarian state like USA. The purpose is to transfer public resources to private hands. That process is what drives every decision in a simulated democracy like the one to which we are subject.

An effect, but not the purpose.

At this time, such naïveté is understandable only in the very young.

> Is it removing criminals from society altogether? In that case, there's a far more efficient way to do that.

Such as?

You should definitely read “Discipline and Punish” by Foucault. Probably the most famous philosophical text about prison

If prisons send a message, who is that message directed at?

IMO prisons serve the functions of deterrence and rehabilitation - although not well - but they also serve to keep the public happy.

We put criminals in prison to sate the public’s need to see justice done. Even if we had the perfect rehabilitation regime that would just “cure” criminals, I think putting it into practice would be an uphill battle if it didn’t entail doing some kind of serious harm to the convicted.

People want revenge. Prison is a controlled method of providing that.

I think you may be confusing "this thing doesn't work for its intended purpose" with "nobody knows what this thing is for".

Prison would ideally do three things:

1. Act as a punishment and by extension as a deterrent to people who have functioning impulse control, but might otherwise choose to commit crimes, and to deter people who have committed crimes from committing more crimes after their sentence.

2. Segregate from the rest of society people who have harmed others through criminal acts so they can't continue to harm the public during their incarceration.

3. Rehabilitate people by addressing mental illness and unhealthy modes of thinking to reduce the chance that they will re-offend after their period of incarceration is over.

In the US, at least, I think the system does a decent job of the first one, to the point that prisons are full of people who are mentally ill, drug-addicted, or just have such terrible impulse control that the idea of avoiding punishment never figures into their actions. I don't think prisons need to be horrible or sentences long in order to serve as a a deterrent, the idea of loss of freedom is enough to deter anyone who can reasonably be deterred.

The second one is working OK, too, but it's terrible; people who are locked up somewhere are not out committing crimes, so crime goes down. So we give longer and longer sentences for smaller and smaller crimes, and it 'works', in the same sense that letting people starve to death reduces hunger.

Finally, there's rehabilitation; on a scale of 0 to 100, we rate a -100. We could not reasonably get any worse at this. As you mentioned, spending years locked in a cage with other criminals just makes people better criminals. If you wanted to design a system that maximized recidivism, you could do little better than the US prison system. Prison makes people harder, more violent and more ruthless, and/or breaks them psychologically. People join criminal gangs, which they remain in after they leave prison, and beyond that it provides an opportunity to make contacts and generally 'network' to further a criminal career. Little to no attempt is made to identify or treat existing mental illness, which is of course exacerbated by the conditions in prison. So we eventually let these people go, and they re-offend, which takes us back to the second purpose, in a feedback loop.

It's a huge mess. And the sad thing is, it's a problem that could be solved, but it would be expensive and politicians don't want to be seen as 'soft on criminals, so we just keep doing more and more of the same thing and it keeps costing us money and lives.

> We could not reasonably get any worse at [rehabilitation].

Sure you could! Would you like some suggestions?

Try adding classes on topics like lockpicking and marksmanship to the prison vocational programs.

Make it illegal for any business to hire ex-convicts for any position whatsoever.

Provide inmates with easy access to regulated amounts of prescription painkillers and other addictive drugs. Make it illegal for pharmacies to sell these to ex-cons.

Formalize the prison gang system, and make regular calls to one's gang leader a condition of parole.

I can probably come up with more if you'd like; once you give up on pretending it's not intentional, there's a lot that can be 'improved' here.

I believe prisons in part serve the purpose to keep us in check. With the threat of prison, society is encouraged to police itself. As another comment in this thread mentioned, Foucault helped to develop these sort of ideas and describes the motivations and development of the prison system in his work.

It keeps us in check but not like you think. At least for crimes with direct victims, prisons keep us out of blood feuds by letting the state monopolize retribution while keeping the object of it out of reach.

My conclusion is that they are designed to bring maximum psychological trauma to individuals who have not learned to protect themselves from amygdala hijacking.

For me it's fear, I don't want to be bad, because I don't want to be locked up.

Anyway I've never really had the desire to act badly towards others eg. despite being into technology, not a hacker/scammer.

> I don't really understand what the purpose of prisons is, and I don't think anyone else really does either.

It's to remove known criminals and violent offenders from society.

> Is it removing criminals from society altogether? In that case, there's a far more efficient way to do that.

It's also irreversible.

I think the primary purpose is to act as a deterrent. You do bad things, you lose the most precious thing a person can lose...their power.

It's manyfold. The reasons I can come up with are

* Punishment

* Retribution (yeah, it's different thing)

* Protection (of society)

* Time to think about your crime

There are probably more.

1. Protect the public.

2. Deter crime.

3. Rehabilitate.

4. Punish.

These are the four pillars of incarceration. How different countries weigh the different elements varies greatly between cultures.

Us system is basically 90 percent punishment, 10 percent protecting the public, and nothing else.

Depending on the crime it's neither of those things. First and foremost it's simply segregation from the rest of society. If you go around killing people, then segregated stops you from continuing to do so (in theory).

As for smaller crimes which carry time, then that begs the question of whether its for punishment or rehabilitation. Perhaps it's both, being stripped of your freedom to participate in society for years is a form of punishment. There is likely an outdated precedent that if you have those freedoms taken away for considerable time, people will not look to break the law again.

The problem is that there are systems in society which people are brought into which perpetuate crime.

Prisons also keep convicts locked up, where they can't kill/injure/steal any longer.

That's an important one.

> I don't really understand what the purpose of prisons is, and I don't think anyone else really does either

The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution says most of what's important to know about the carceral state of the US today:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States"

In most other countries, the prison system's job is to reform the prisoners.

In the US, it is designed to be punitive, and there is a direct financial incentive to increase the percentage of prisoners that are sent back to prison after serving their time.

The system is working as designed: the US has a much higher percentage of its population in prison than most other countries, and extremely high recividism rates.

You're really overplaying the financial angle. Only 8% of prisons are private. And even then, it's the government that has to pay the prisons. Imprisonment always costs tax money.

The prison labor alone is worth $11 billion dollars a year (from 800,000 workers):

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...

Also, many state run prisons outsource things to contractors that price gouge.

I don’t believe in life imprisonment but for truly exceptional cases. It is needlessly cruel and a huge burden to our system. The prison industrial complex is dystopian.

But what do you mean by “ineffective”? The purpose of prison in the US is twofold: punitive as a deterrent, and to keep criminals away from the rest of society. I have doubts about the effectiveness of the former, but the latter is super effective, we lock up more people than any other first world country! It’s really hard to argue against that from a political standpoint.

This is one of the things i hate most about our political system, is how it coerces people to pigeonhole themselves into an entire set of beliefs because it is made to seem that you have to embrace those beliefs once you accept the identity of “conservative” or “liberal.” We should be expanding our experiences wherever possible (in beneficial ways) to expand our consciousness and to learn to see life through the perspective of others. I’m glad you were able to do that here.

It's a beautiful experience, and thank you for sharing it.

>We want “problems” to just go away. And stay away.

We do. But the thing is, sharing public spaces with a fuller range of human misery and depravity each time you leave your home, is an option. I just don't see it accomplishing the sort of positive transformation that people credit it with. Instead it makes everybody miserable, afraid, and insular - avoiding public spaces, locking themselves in cars, moving to the exurbs.

There are clearly people who don't morally deserve some kind of brutal punishment, and yet are the reason we can't have nice things. God damnit, I want nice things. But it's probably true that justice demands we accept a certain amount of spoilage.

What do you think can be done to change the attitude of people who used to think like you? Nothing but a similar experience to the one you had, direct contact with it? I guess that's what you suggest at the end of your comment.

That's great that your congregation did such a thing and reached out to you and you took the opportunity.

Your comments about outsourcing human lives to an alternative universe invisible seems to me very observant. Have your attempts to talk about what you saw ever done anything to change the imagination of those who you are talking to?

[deleted]

> We can solve these problems in a month if enough people just thought with empathy about this topic for 10 minutes.

How?

> ineffective

Get back to us if you ever have a loved one get murdered, raped, or assaulted.

Justice is not solely about rehabilitation. It is very much about righteous punishment for doing evil. We can acknowledge that context and environment foster crime while also not tolerating crime.

Personally, I don't give one care about the "why" of certain classes of crime. I have zero tolerance or empathy for the doers of violence. If you murder someone, your life is forfeit to me. If you rape someone, I hope you get locked away for a minimum of 20 years. If you seriously assault someone, you should have to do jail time.

Do you have the same amount of confidence that the legal system can tell innocent people apart from guilty people?

So because we're not perfect we should do nothing?

Yes.

I have seen false conviction estimates ranging from 1 to 5 percent. All systems which involve any kind of classification will have a non-zero false positive rate. Does that mean we should do away with them? Of course not. We should simply seek to improve systems with better and better processes, while accepting that we might approach but never achieve zero false positives.

What alternative would you propose? Doing away with criminal justice? Do you think murderers and rapists should be allowed to roam free? How about drug traffickers who knowingly distribute life destroying substances in their communities?

Think of someone you really love. Maybe its your child, your parents, your partner, or a friend. Now imagine the pain and fear they would feel as they are murdered. What would they think and feel as they are choked to death? Or bludgeoned? The sheer terror. The pain. The senselessness of their life ending. Imagine that you find their corpse. Imagine the pain and horror you would experience. The hole in your heart. Really try to visualize this scenario. To feel it emotionally and with your senses.

Now imagine the perpetrator going unpunished. Walking free. Or getting put on some cushy rehabilitation program to better their life. Does that seem right? Does it seem just? Does it seem fair?

In my opinion, this discussion is way too academic, abstract, and one-sided. How about we focus on victims and their survivors?

In my opinion, this discussion is way too academic, abstract, and one-sided. How about we focus on victims and their survivors?

It seems that victims and their survivors already have a wellspring of support, but not as much effort on reducing the number of perpetrators and victims in our society.

We are focused on 'righting' the wrong rather than actually fixing it. Of course, you could incarcerate or execute these individuals, but that would not be a fix in the same way that starving people to death is a way of 'solving' the famine.

Individuals, no matter how much 'free will' or 'agency' they have, are all subjected to cause and effect.

This conversation isn't in the context of the concept of prisons, or even crime and punishment in general. It's specifically about solitary confinement which, along with corporal punishment, is torture that does permanent damage to someone. If you're going to countenance torture (or capital punishment), the very least you can do is is consider the likelihood of them being innocent.

Yes, the scene you describe is appalling. And, from reports, not uncommon in the States. Would I be in the right state of mind to make effective policy or humane decisions after that trauma? No. Would a reasonable person want revenge? Probably. Would a systematic revenge-based system lead to more or less miserable outcomes?

The US has the highest rate of incarcerations in the world. Is that working?

Putting so much effort into punshiment and so little into prevention smacks of revenge rather than wanting to actually improve things.

So it is OK to inflict righteous punishment on the 5% of innocent prisoners?

If we built a society that treated everyone with respect, we likely wouldn't have so much crime to begin with. If our social institutions were setup to remove children from abusive situations ASAP, if we lived in a world where baby formula didn't have to be locked up at grocery stores (seriously, that is very fucked up, anyone who needs baby formula should be able to go to a government provided store and get some no questions asked, no hoops to jump through), and if we lived in a world where parents didn't have to work multiple jobs with every changing shifts just to pay rent, maybe we wouldn't have to worry about crime so much.

Instead we live in a world where minority children are treated worse in schools, where society assumes teenagers who aren't white are "up to some trouble", and in a world where those in power regularly show distain for life in general.

We've had presidents go on TV defending torture, why the hell should some poor kid who has nothing in life start to feel empathy for anyone?

> So it is OK to inflict righteous punishment on the 5% of innocent prisoners?

It's not OK, but it is inevitable.

> If we built a society that treated everyone with respect, we ...

Agreed. But it's irrelevant. You can build a better world and still punish criminals at the same time.

> I have seen false conviction estimates ranging from 1 to 5 percent.

I agree with the rest of your comment, but I think this statistics only means that 1-5% of convicts were falsely convicted and could prove it. So the actual number is probably much larger. I would guess something like 20%.

What you call "righteous punishment" is just revenge. You want revenge. It is a natural response to being wronged. But that is not justice. And it is no way to build a society. To be overly cliche, two wrongs do not make a right.

The moral use of the penal system is to remove the danger from society, make restitution, and rehabilitate where possible. Those are not always possible. Torturing people held captive is its own crime, and one we are guilty of to a horrifying extent as a nation. To say nothing of the innocent people we subject to these horrors.

> that is not justice.

This might be your opinion, but it is definitely not in keeping with any standard or common definition of justice:

- https://open.lib.umn.edu/criminallaw/chapter/1-5-the-purpose...

- https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/reasons-...

- https://ua.pressbooks.pub/criminallawalaskaed/chapter/1-5-th...

This is not the argument you think it is - of course the people creating an unjust system will define their own system as just. We know that there are better ways, and appealing to tautology is just sort of burying one's head in the sand.

https://www.wbez.org/stories/how-finlands-criminal-justice-s...

I am merely pointing out that your personal opinion of "what justice is" does not accord with the principles upon which the U.S. justice system is built (along with many others around the world).

Any definition of justice is going to be arbitrary and subjective. I disagree with your definition. I see elsewhere in this thread that you take an absolutist stance with regard to your opinion on how justice should be done, one in which you're unwilling to acknowledge that it is possible to have differing opinions on what justice should be. That's fine. You're just out of sync with the majority opinion. And you will be ineffective in persuading a sufficient number of other people (see also Marjorie Taylor Green, AOC, etc). You also seem to be able to predict the future ("you're on the wrong side of history"). Again, that's fine (I'll take some stock tips if you can make those predictions too). I just disagree.

I won't be replying further as your replies suggest to me an inflexibility and intolerance regarding this subject.

> You also seem to be able to predict the future ("you're on the wrong side of history"). Again, that's fine (I'll take some stock tips if you can make those predictions too). I just disagree.

It's not hard, since we see other countries already in the "future" where it's working. You're free to disagree and turn a blind eye. I'm hoping that the people reading will see that this kind of attitude about being resolute that the horrors we inflict on our prisoners both innocent and guilty are good, is itself its own kind of horror. That this attitude will perpetuate the suffering of our fellow Americans.

Edit: you dont want my stock tips

I disagree. That’s exactly what justice is, providing it is carried about by the state after a fair legal process and not by private feuds. This is also a great way to build a safe and free society, and the fact we’ve gotten away from this is one of the reasons we’re less safe and free - to be “kinder” we’ve installed a surveillance state and horrible bureaucratic systems that provide neither justice nor peace nor freedom, but instead make a mockery of all of them.

You are free to disagree and be in the moral wrong, and on the wrong side of history. There are good examples of much better humanitarian penal systems with far better outcomes in Scandinavian countries that demonstrate this reality well. Returning to the past as you seem to want is just reactionary and does not serve progress.

> You are free to disagree and be in the moral wrong,

The reason I posted is because you seemed to be unaware other people have different moral value systems. This is the fundamental reason behind a lot of disagreements. Here's the root of it: you think I a morally wrong and I think I am morally right. There is no rational argument to demonstrate that either of us are correct.

That's also why you're fundamentally unpersuasive. You're not convincing anyone by making bald assertions of your unsupported moral beliefs.

> the wrong side of history.

History will go on for a long time, and there is no arc of some sort of moral progress, just shifting social norms changing with historical accidents. This type of argument is particularly unpersuasive and tends to raise people's hackles immediately, because it's a declaration that you are (again, without evidence) so incredibly righteous that history itself will steamroll people who disagree with you.

> There are good examples of much better humanitarian penal systems with far better outcomes in Scandinavian countries that demonstrate this reality well.

The better outcomes may have nothing to do with the nature of the penal system itself, but wider cultural differences. In fact, this seems much more likely, given the extant differences in US subcultures and demographics. Slicing up the US crime data by economic quintiles and various demographics gives the lie to a lot of arguments. Even excluding the wider cultural comparison, talking about this without evaluating the commonalities between the crimes in questions and aggravating factors between the two countries makes this a really apples-to-oranges comparison.

> The reason I posted is because you seemed to be unaware other people have different moral value systems. This is the fundamental reason behind a lot of disagreements. Here's the root of it: you think I a morally wrong and I think I am morally right. There is no rational argument to demonstrate that either of us are correct.

I have no such illusions; I'm simply saying that this archaic one is objectively wrong from a humanitarian and historical standpoint. We both think we are right; the difference is you are wrong. There is no agreeing to disagree here, and it is quite cut and dried.

Further, I am not saying these things to convince you of anything, and I of course don't think I will. I cannot convince someone to care about their fellow human being. I am saying these things for the sake of those reading.

Okay, so you can go ahead and lay out how I am objectively wrong from a humanitarian and historical standpoint? It’s fine to assert that but so far you haven’t actually explained it.

I agree there is no agreeing to disagree about value differences. The key is to identify what outcomes we both want and, from that starting point, evaluate what historical and sociological evidence suggests can get us to those outcomes. Moral framing does not help.

"Cite your sources as to why torturing prisoners is wrong" is simply shorthand for "I actually like the idea of this torture and you can't tell me otherwise". Like I said, I can't make an argument as to why you should care about your fellow human if you don't already. It's not a good faith question.

We know that punitive measures do not act as a deterrence and in the case of more progressive countries that have wildly better outcomes we know what actually has good outcomes. If you're really interested all the literature is just a google away. Check out US incarceration and recidivism rates (which are the worst in the world) and those of more progressive countries. The data is all there for you, if you are curious. We've seen what doesn't work, and we've seen what does. It's not my job to educate you.

Like I said, I'm not here to convince you of anything. I cannot change your value system, I can only make a public example of why it does no good to drag us into the past, and all the atrocities that entails.

EDIT: sort of an afterthought, but for those reading I always find it hilarious that whenever a reactionary sees something work in another country the first instinct is to say "actually the US might exist in a bizarro reality where everything is opposite, and you can't prove that it's not so ha". As if the most scientific approach to seeing someone's repeated successful results is to absolutely refuse to try to replicate it yourself!

It has been my observation that the “humanitarian” experiments in the US have been a large net negative for everyone involved. It is not theoretical.

It’s not a bizzaro reality: peoples and cultures vary across geography in different ways.

Contrary to being a reactionary, my fear is that the denial of these differences and the failure of well-intentioned policies is going to eventually lead to a draconian authoritarian backlash that could be prevented by having more sensible policies now. And as I said in my original post, many of the worst aspects of American culture and the legal system are already downstream consequences of failed “humanitarian” policies that are making a mockery of justice, civil rights, and peace/safety.

All in all, I am afraid that you will not make much progress by assuming everyone who disagrees with you is a morally objectionable reactionary and refusing to seriously engage with them. You are making a religious argument and not a policy argument. I also don’t think it does you service to conflate punishment with torture and make straw men.

> What you call "righteous punishment" is just revenge. You want revenge. It is a natural response to being wronged. But that is not justice.

Says you.

Sounds like you're more interested in feeling good than actually fixing the problem that caused people to be assaulted.

We can acknowledge that context and environment foster crime while also not tolerating crime.

Are you interested in having less victims and less perpetrators in the future, or is punishment you're interested in for its own sake rather than as a potential tool?

You present a false dichotomy. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

What is your specific proposal? Do you think murderers and rapists should go unpunished or be allowed to remain free?

I am not interested in punishing beyond what is necessary to reduce harms. I think harms beyond shown benefit is cruel and arbitrary.

What is your specific proposal? Do you think murderers and rapists should go unpunished or be allowed to remain free?

I don't care about punishing them. I care about reducing and preventing harm to society.

The point of prisons is to keep criminals away from the rest of society and prevent them from doing further harm.

That is one reason to imprison criminals. It is not the only reason.

- https://open.lib.umn.edu/criminallaw/chapter/1-5-the-purpose...

- https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/reasons-...

- https://ua.pressbooks.pub/criminallawalaskaed/chapter/1-5-th...

Since prison is "arbitrary" and "ineffective" then you're likely wasting your time by visiting prisoners.

You should turn to a more productive activity perhaps. But to do that without regret you'll have to first ask yourself why you are willing to spend your time on prisoners.

Take the next step and hire on as a prison guard. Your opinion won't change much but you'll get a feeling for "why things are the way they are" and a substantial part of it can be attributed to outside (well-intentioned) meddling.

My friend was a guard at a maximum facility and he said the best prisoners were the lifers; they had nothing to prove and were in it for the long haul; the worst were the ones doing a short sentence or had been transferred from lesser-security prisons.

Part of the problem is we have prison stratification - instead of each suburb or neighborhood having a jail for the appropriate inmates from the area, we ship them all to massive processing facilities for "efficiency" which has all sorts of side-effects.

It's entirely possible to have empathy for prisoners without desiring them to be released from prison.

I think it's possible to be "tough on crime" with respect to removing violent offenders from society while also reforming how prisons work on the inside as well as attenuating the problem from the frontend via social services and so on.

I've always been a pretty moderate liberal, but seeing how "soft on crime" policies (reducing the amount of policing and catch/release prosecution) have dramatically harmed communities in Chicago (especially the minority communities that were "plagued by racist police") over the last ~decade has made me into a "hard on crime" person insofar as I think violent offenders should be removed from society first and foremost. We can work on tackling crime from the frontend and we can try and make prisons more humane, but I don't think these concerns can override the need to keep law-abiding people safe.

I am not entirely sure what to make of your comment. You are clearly a very compassionate person. And yes a lot of people in prison are not the "tough guy" stereotype. However, there are more than a few that will exploit your sympathy. Asking you to bring them stuff or to give them money. Sadly it's almost always the same thing. It's very easy to make friends with a person in need. What happens when they get out is a different story.

To your same point about empathy for prisoners- I have a similar point about how I think everyone should be arrested and booked overnight at least once in their life. People speak far too harshly and absolutely about “criminals” and how they behave in situations they have zero understanding of and support laws that uphold those institutions. Getting arrested changed me and my opinions on criminal Justice at a fundamental level. Having no control over your future in that environment, being stripped and searched, it makes you feel vulnerable in a way that nothing else does and I think the average person would come out of it with a drastically different base opinion of crime and punishment.

Note: I’m not advocating for violence or violent crime; I was arrested for an overdue traffic ticket and just that experience alone was absolute shit.

I spent a month in the hole. It wasn't pleasant.

- I stayed asleep for as long as I could, whenever I could. Chlorpheniramine was readily distributed to prisoners.

- Exercise was difficult for me after the first week, as was motivation for basically anything.

- I read anything they would bring down there.

- We didn't have a choice in the books we had, so picking something to study wasn't really an option. Outside of the hole, I eventually had an outside person send me a biochemistry textbook though. However, being autodidactic is difficult with a single reference.

- No one talked to me in the segregated housing unit, except for correction officers and during the 5-10 minutes I was able to use the phone a day.

- I didn't experience any prison administrators attempting to provoke any inmates. Although, the grievance system was basically a journaling activity.

- I found it very difficult to write anything longer than a paragraph to anyone my whole time in prison.

- I was a known atheist in prison, due to some reading material I received in the mail. Outside of the SHU, people often tried to engage me about my beliefs, which I avoided.

> I was a known atheist in prison, due to some reading material I received in the mail. Outside of the SHU, people often tried to engage me about my beliefs, which I avoided.

Did this cause any issues other than attempted conversions?

Definitely -- bullying, off the cuff insults, etc. However, that seemed pretty common for most inmates regardless of what they did.

So is prison meant to reform or punish? Life without parole clearly means the person will never renter society, so there’s no point in reforming. It’s just punishment. So why not allow the guy to read literature? Or is it because that would be enjoyable for inmates, and we want them to be punished? But the analogy of a tree falling in the woods and no one around to hear it is apt. I can’t think of a single time I’ve contemplated how prisoners are punished and thought “man it’s so great they’re sitting in there bored out of their minds, this makes my life so much better and I feel happy about it.” They’re completely removed from society, they may as well be on Mars. It has no bearing on me or anyone else whether they’re having a good or shit miserable time. They will never leave, they will die in there. Can’t they just read a goddamn book if they want to?

Exactly. I think we discount just how horrible of a punishment it is just to be locked up for your entire life (or even just for decades). No need to also treat them like shit.

This is the part that kills me -- solitary is bad, solitary with no books is torture.

> So is prison meant to reform or punish?

Both, and some other stuff. Traditionally, the justice system is supposed to have 5 recognized goals, they are: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, and restitution

deterrence is about preventing others from breaking the law (this one is not about the incarcerated individual, but about currently law-abiding citizens outside of prison)

incapacitation is about preventing harm to society by completely removing certain people from it

rehabilitation is reasonably obvious. That being said, there are traditionally considered some people who are "beyond rehabilitation". From this view, that's not ideal, but still not the end of the world, as prison in these cases has value for several of the other reasons described.

retribution is about making the victim (or victim's family) feel better by inflicting pain on the guilty. This is a combination of explicit revenge, and keeping buy-in from the local populace by making them feel like the system is just, and keeping them feeling secure/valued.

restitution is just about financial payments to make up what the victim has lost. If someone steals your car, having them buy you a new car, plus pay some amount extra for your time is generally seen as a reasonably fair solution. This one doesn't necessarily involve prison unless the defendant refuses to pay.

Are you considering penitence to be a subset of rehabilitation? There's a reason they're called penitentiaries, after all.

Also, this is a nit but deterrence is usually considered to be about both the incarcerated individual and other citizens. Deterrence against re-committing the crime is an important part of incarceration, and I don't think it reasonably fits under rehabilitation.

> Are you considering penitence to be a subset of rehabilitation?

Yes, I would consider it part of the rehabilitation process.

> Also, this is a nit but deterrence is usually considered to be about both the incarcerated individual and other citizens.

This is fair. I was trying to draw the point that it's about people outside the prison (which the convict who may later re-offend would be when they're facing the choice to re-offend). I think I phrased this poorly/wrongly. Thanks for pointing it out.

> Are you considering penitence to be a subset of rehabilitation? There's a reason they're called penitentiaries, after all.

That reason is because “penance” is, in ecclesiastical law, the earthly penalty for sin, and a “penitentiary” is a place dedicated to the experience of those consequences.

The connection to “penitence” (“the action of feeling sorry and regret for having done something wrong”) is more distant. (Also, the desire to cause penitence is more directly retribution, though it can be viewed as instrumental to rehabilitation.)

I think you hit it on the nose. I'm surprised by how many people here don't seem to know about these points

> deterrence is about preventing others from breaking the law

Deterrence is about preventing the offender (specific deterrence) or other people (general deterrence) from breaking the law through intimidation by making manifest the adverse consequences thereof.

Rehabilitation is about preventing the offender from committing crimes by removing/reducing/counteractinf the inclination to do so (other than by intimidation.)

Incapacitation is about preventing the offender from committing crimes by denying them capacity, to some degree or for some period.

(Restitution and retribution are not aboit preventing crime.)

In practice, the US tends to ignore the science and deterrence ans rehabilitation and not optimize for it, and marginalizes restitution in the criminal justice system, so thr criminal justice system is mostly about retribution and incapacitation.

In the most charitable interpretation, prisoners misbehave, and the guards can ensure compliance by taking away privileges. There is no reduction in sentence for good behavior, so other tools must be employed.

Segregation is basically prison-prison; there's not much else that can (legally) be done as a punishment once you're already in the can for life.

I'm sure the family of the people this guy murdered appreciate that he is not getting pampered with their tax dollars.

>So is prison meant to reform or punish?

As downtown SF is currently demonstrating, prison is also designed to separate. If you let violent criminals and the mentally ill sleep on the street and steal at will, it makes life much worse for everyone else than it makes life better for them.

Do the mentally ill belong in prison?

Mental illness isn't a valid excuse for antisocial behavior. Free treatment should be made available, and if it isn't used or not enough on its own, they should be put in "inpatient mental healthcare"

Dangerous mentally ill people belong somewhere that isn’t on the streets. Bring back flop/workhouses and sanitariums.

It is designed to separate, to keep criminals away from the rest of society.

"So is prison meant to reform or punish?"

I think it's meant to remove.

Wouldn't the death penalty be a cheaper solution then?

Not everyone is removed forever. Also death is irreversible and the justice system does make mistakes.

Yikes. Here's a totally contrary opinion from someone who has also been to AggSeg -

AggSeg is the VERY BEST place you can be in jail or prison. I spent almost a year in AggSeg and it is lovely.

- It's "single cell" meaning you don't have to live in close quarters with a random criminal.

- You don't have to socialize with random criminals during your free time, so you don't have to worry about the constant violence and rudeness you find in General Population.

Other than that, just read books, work out, and sleep. They bring you food 3 times a day. Honestly I would pay for this. There is nothing difficult or badass about it at all. Surviving in general population, that's actually difficult.

Everyone who wants to it sound like "THE HOLE" is just being dramatic. They are also playing into the corrections industry propaganda about the matter: The industry wants people to think of this setup as awful and barely-legal because the reality is that all inmates would prefer to be housed in a cell to themselves and be guaranteed to not encounter violence in the yard, but it would cost 2-3x as much to provide this type of housing to the entire population.

I think I could see where you're coming from if not for the near-total elimination of stimuli. If I could have any book I wanted whenever I wanted I'd consider it over being with the general population. If I could have an internet connection I'd probably not consider it very different from my current life. But it seems neither are possible. In that case, I'd rather risk dying from attacks than dying of boredom and loneliness, unless it were a fairly short sentence.

If it's loneliness that concerns you (whew lad), I would just say that being forced to socialize with the criminal population feels just like being alone, with the exception that you can really get stabbed.

You're part of the criminal population, though. You are in the group you're demonizing.

The criminal population is as stratified as the outside population. The lifers often want nothing to do with the short term convicts, and none of them want anything to do with the violent or the child molesters.

There are prisoners in the system today that are in Seg and every time they get put back in genpop they immediately do the minimum required to get sent back to Seg.

> AggSeg is the VERY BEST place you can be in jail or prison.

You sound like you're introverted. Most people do not want to be left alone with their thoughts with no human contact - it would just drive them up the wall.

You also sound like you were focused on surviving your incarceration which end date. The author is in for life, without parole: he's the "random criminal" you didn't want to socialize with, because that was his survival strategy as a lifer, and it sounds like he can manage genpop just fine.

I like being alone and spend most of my days alone, but not having the choice to socialize would make me itchy. Gotta sate the urge to boogie every once in a blue moon.

Which leads into your point -- the author didn't/doesn't have that temporary notion of "This will pass; For now, just get me away from these people." He's in it for life-o and has a totally different set of realities to cope with than a transient convict.

You shouldn’t make personality diagnoses via online comments.

The math doesn’t change for introverts or extroverts. AggSeg is safe, easy living. It’s nowhere near torture, or dangerous, or inhumane, no matter what TikTok says your personality type is. Genpoop on the other hand is dirty and dangerous and you are statistically guaranteed to be involved in violence at some point.

But there are lots of people like him who will complain as if it’s torture, because they like to complain, will say anything against the pigs, and they like to pretend they endured “the hole”.

Meanwhile he talked with other inmates every day and likely had a view of a TV, as is common in most AggSeg pods.

People forget that anyone (let alone criminals) will use everything available to improve their situation; criminals in prison are well known to abuse every process available to them for their own ends.

And that includes crying about how horrible everything is. Every guard and convict knows the ones that do it, and when it's real and when it's faked.

But nobody "outside" can admit that happens.

Exactly.

> You shouldn’t make personality diagnoses via online comments.

Going by what you said alone - you prefer the safety of isolation over the lack of human contact (regardless of your personality). Author of TFA weighs the tradeoffs differently.

The author of article doesn't share your safety concerns, as they wrote that they adopted a gangster persona and probably resigned to the fact that they will be repeatedly involved in violence, so they'd rather do it on their terms. The calculus of a lifer is very different to yours

I liked the part where you told me about he "calculus of a lifer".

Anyway, that guy is misrepresenting what AggSeg is. It's not torture, he was not egregiously isolated, he still had contact with people. He ate better food and had more TV. He's just the type who will always complain about the conditions of the facility, and all the inmates like to LARP about "the hole" being hardcore, because that's where the violent folks are sent.

He didn't have a TV in his room... They also only get 1 book per week at Potosi.

https://solitarywatch.org/2011/04/10/voices-from-solitary-de...

1 book a week is a little rough. But meh. These guys tear library books up and clog the toilets with them.

And I didn't mean TV in the room - Often, there is a TV outside that you have view of in AggSeg pods (speaking from 2 facilities I have been to). They do this because AggSeg characters like to throw fits and shout and kick their doors and generally make the place sound like a zoo. When there is a TV most people can see, they are calmer and tell each other to be quiet so they can watch. It's not that "solitary", inmates can hear each other and usually approach each other's doors to chat on individual free times, depending on the facility. A lot of AggSeg guys just harass and threaten each other whenever they can.

Of course, there is usually some loss of privilege in AggSeg - he could probably have a TV in his room in genpop if he had the funds. Usually not true in AggSeg. Also he may or may not have had Cantine. In my experience they allow it, if you are not on restriction for whatever offenses you committed to land yourself in AggSeg.

Other than that it's just whining. AggSeg is disciplinary (in addition to being about segregating violent people for the safety of genpop). Grievance forms are usually one of the only things these folks can figure out as an activity.

> AggSeg is the VERY BEST place you can be in jail or prison. I spent almost a year in AggSeg and it is lovely.

You do realize that most people would go insane from lack of social interaction?

You have plenty of conversations in AggSeg if you want. Just with a small group of other inmates talking through your door while they are on individual free times.

There’s also usually an air vent people talk through. And that is the real torture, listening to 90IQ criminals talking 24/7.

I was lucky enough to have a quiet vent and kept people away from the door. It was great and not anywhere close to torture.

People act like this is “the hole” from some POW camp. That doesn’t exist in the system.

AggSeg is just a jail within a jail, for the violent and obnoxious troublemakers. Inmates are not allowed to be in the same space inside or outside of their cells because they are likely to be violent. It’s amazing because you can really relax, eat your 3 meals a day and do time. You watch more TV in AggSeg, have more personal space and privacy, you still get to talk to people if you really want to … the idea of calling it “the hole” and pretending it’s psych torture is absolutely ridiculous.

You are downplaying this scenario in my opinion, or were in a much nicer prison than I was in.

Getting out of your 8'x6' cell, wearing leg shackles and cuffs, for 45 minutes a day to walk in a concrete 15' diameter circle with a fence blocking the view of the sky or to take a shower in a box with a CO staring at you the whole time isn't something I would pay for.

There were no televisions.

There was a gigantic industrial fan, incessant screaming from people, automated lights, and food that barely passed as edible. It is not something I would call lovely.

What state is that? I had the same experience in AggSeg at two different facilities.

Automated lights? What's the torture there? It sounds nice. In fact the only real complaint I had (besides some behavior of the COs) was that in AggSeg, they don't turn off the lights at night. Something about safety and making their inspections easier. You have to devise something to cover your eyes to make it easier to sleep.

Your story about leaving your cell for free time in shackles and cuffs is also a little suspect. These facilities have remote locking cell doors in AggSeg units. Even the older facilities have this with pneumatic locks. They let you out into an area and give you commands over intercom. You are almost never in the same room as a CO. There is no reason for shackles. Getting an AggSeg customer into shackles and cuffs is a whole affair, and dangerous, no one is doing it on a routine basis just for free time, when they have remote locking doors. Also, this is also your time to use the shower, so shackles? no.

You're right about incessant screaming though.

I was in a segregated housing unit in the early 2000s in a prison in the northeastern United States.

We interacted with COs, were in the same room as them, and were often directly in front of them.

There were no intercoms in the hole. In general population, these were only really used by inmates who were doing custodial tasks between units.

To leave our cell, our hands were cuffed, through the door hatch before doors were released via radio, prompted by the CO. After, the COs secured our legs with shackles this happened whenever you left your cell.

Shackles were removed to take a shower, hence being watched by a CO the whole time.

What you are calling AggSeg is what they called the segregated housing unit, SHU, or "shoe". Having read others' experiences, this varies based on the prison.

It is interesting to me that you assume that this is a fabrication over considering that things are different in other administrative areas of the United States.

I have no reason to lie about my experiences while being in prison. Normally, I lie about ever having been there.

> Automated lights? What's the torture there?

I don't think I said it was torture, but it was incredibly annoying to me, having an abnormal sleep cycle. I slept with a shirt sleeve on my head, covering my eyes, which would leave me with acne, often.

They went off at like 9PM and came back on at 6AM for breakfast.

Well, I sympathize with your experience. There are some easy parts of the system and a lot of nasty parts. I prefer any type of isolated security housing, just for the safety aspect. Though I met a handful of slightly cool people in GenPop, I was never really interested in socializing with 99% of the people you find inside. GenPop can get really dodgy and dangerous with politics and COs looking the other way, and the COs like to get violent too.

> Normally, I lie about ever having been there.

Same. Somehow HN is the only place I talk about it occasionally.

Exactly, loneliness isn’t really a problem for me. You can read in peace and don’t have to deal with any violence.

One thing I think people often forget is the HUGE economic loss by having these people in prison. There are 5.5M people in the US correctional system. The vast majority of these are probably capable of contributing maybe $50k per year in productivity. That's $250B/yr in lost economic productivity! That's about 1% of GDP! HUGE!

We would all have 1% more stuff, on average, if these people were working instead of in prison.

This may not seem like a lot, but recall that in antiquity growth rates were much less than 1% annually, and in modern times we hope for ~2% growth, and might get zero or negative growth this year. 1% more would be a huge boost, especially after compounding that over many years.

This also doesn't account for the cost of actually keeping them in prison, which is higher than the cost of them living as free people.

All that to say, our prison system has an absolutely massive opportunity cost that must be taken into account. Obviously for some criminals this is a cost that must be paid. For most, it's probably not worth it.

https://www.statista.com/topics/1717/prisoners-in-the-united... https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp

And thinking about much better alternatives - I know this will seem wacky and ethically dubious, but hear me out: How about corporal punishment? That seems to me it would be a REALLY strong deterrent. It would also be very quick, then you're back to normal, hopefully the wiser for wear.

I don't know what form it would take, but suppose it was lashings. I've heard that's pretty painful. Let's say for some crime you get two lashes or whatever, but then that's it - you're out. I know I'd prefer that to almost any amount of jail time - but paradoxically it might also be a better deterrent. And for those repeat offenders that aren't deterred, you can always fall back on jail time.

Not sure what to do about the masochists though.... Um, withhold the lashing?

> How about corporal punishment?

For crimes not involving bodily harm/loss of life, sure, I am totally for corporal punishment. Public lashings/canings, with tarring and feathering for more serious offences to top it off

You're missing that more than half of the people in prison DO work. They're still contributing to GDP. They're just not getting paid for it (making less than a dollar an hour doesn't count).

Are they contributing to GDP as much as they would if free? I really doubt it. I think most of this is busy-work, or work the prison system can sell easily to a private company for extra profit.

But I'm sure (having done no research and having no supporting data, so I know it's true) that productivity inside can't be more than a tiny fraction of what it would be on the outside.

How much is that extra productivity worth to you? The majority of inmates are violent offenders, and are more likely than not to re-offend violently. Releasing them early to work is literally trading money for people's lives and safety.

I like the Norwegian penal system's view on prison terms: the punishment is the loss of liberty itself; there's no need to also treat prisoners inhumanely as an "additional" punishment -- which is what the U.S. generally does (and a lot of Americans agree with it). In the U.S. there seems to be this idea that "the worse you treat people in prison, the more it will scare people about going to prison". And yet, statistically that doesn't work. Norway's rate of recidivism is one of the lowest in the world, and nearly half that of the U.S. (Granted, this has a lot to do with social conditions outside of prison.)

If the goal of prison was "change behavior" rather than "make miserable", it might seem unfair ("bad people are getting away with it" etc.) but better for society in general (all of us). Yes, it won't work for everyone and there are some people who will never change and are just evil. But we tend to laser-focus on those few instead of the many who are not like that.

I think the major difference here is exactly what you point out: social conditions outside of prison.

The US's general lack of a social safety net, and the "every person for themselves" attitude, means that life for a lot of Americans, in the world's richest country, is super miserable and hopeless.

If US prisons treated people decently, I think many people would choose life in prison over their existing life outside of prison. Guaranteed meals, shelter, medical care, all paid for by the state? That's a lot more than many Americans have today.

So for their social structures to have at least some paper-thin justifications, life in prison has to be worse than life outside prison. I am sure this is at least somewhat by design.

> lack of a social safety net

Also has an effect on how fair the conditions are, or at least the perception around fairness of the system in general.

Absolutely.. when you believe in the idea that prison must be relatively worse than everyday life, it can get pretty horrible pretty fast.

And I will say the US is not unique in having horrible prisons, but they are uniquely the wealthiest country in the world, and actively choose to have that system.

They could fix it if they wanted to.

> the punishment is the loss of liberty itself

Additionally, released prisoners might become your neighbor. Do you want a hardened criminal or a reformed citizen to move in?

> Do you want a hardened criminal or a reformed citizen to move in?

That's not a choice you make regardless of who your government is. At least when Norway arrests someone, they seem to keep tabs on them instead of dropping them off across the street from the liquor store when they served their time.

I find it really odd how many people abhor the death penalty and capital punishment as a whole, while also tolerating life in prison and solitary confinement. I don't view executing someone as worse than forcing them to spend their entire life living in a concrete cell, under the mercy of cruel guards, until they die. Especially if that process includes year long stints without seeing a single person.

Perhaps we should have neither? I understand that many people are uncomfortable with having someone who committed a heinous crime walking free, but there should be some way of giving back one's freedom and one's humanity after a while. Someone who committed a crime at 19 is a wholly different person at 50. Even if we can't give them total freedom, there should be an opportunity to live in nice conditions, to earn a proper income, to cook one's own food.

Well, perhaps they actually believe that executing them would relieve them from their punishment…

I think neither is an important answer, but to reach neither, we have a lot to do:

1) we need a lot of counseling to the family. The ability for the family to feel safe and move on from the trauma is critical. Otherwise the cycle continues.

2) We need a lot of counseling and empathy training for the perp. The ability to understand what they did, and feel remorse past just the consequences faced is critical.

The craziest thing I've seen is when a guy was part of an armed robbery, and due to technical reasons didn't serve any time. He ended up turning everything around and becoming a massive boon to the community. The point here is we need to do what is right to society.

3) We need to take a person-by-person approach to rehabilitation.

4) We need to invest a lot of time into rehavbilitation spychaiatrists and groups vs just criminalization. This works in many countries. The sweedish island prison where every prisoner there feels honored to be given a chance at a productive life rather than incarceration. There are no walls, guards, escapes. There is only rehab.

This is an incredibly complex and nuanced problem that doesn't sound wonderful yelling from a podium for political points. But that's the point, real change is hard and nuanced.

You're focusing on justice for the person who committed the crime.

What about justice for the person or people who were victims of the crime? What about justice for the society in which the crime took place?

While the perpetrator may be a wholly different person now, what if not everyone agrees that a crime, or the consequences of that crime, can be expiated so easily?

Isn’t that just revenge seeking and why America’s criminal Justice system is so messed up compared to Europe? If we focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment, we would probably get better results for society, than focusing on punishment to appease the victim and their family’s needs for punishment?

How do we balance rehabilitation and punishment properly? Right now, the USA seems to do it very poorly.

In many places in Asia the penalties for crime, and conditions for inmates, make American prisons look like a resort. It's frequently little more than intentional sadism. For one commonly known example in Japan death row inmates are kept in absolute solitary confinement and never told when they're too be hanged until one day a guard walks in, and they're dangling from a rope a few moments later. Imagine hearing that gate swing open and the approaching footsteps, over and over and over. It could be your next meal, or the rope.

There's also greater than 80% support for capital punishment, and implicitly this system, in Japan. Yet crime rates, especially violent crime, are practically zero. And what violent crime does exist is almost entirely inter-personal (argument turns violent, deal gone bad, etc) as opposed to random. The obvious explanation for all of this is simply that people are different. And consequently, mimicking the methods of a country with a meaningfully different population is highly unlikely to result in mimicking their results.

what are you arguing? that the Japanese system is worse so united states should just suck it up?

Read the post I was responding to. The author hypothesized that "revenge seeking" is why US legal system has worse social outcomes than Europe. Yet "Asia" (and by this I include a large number of countries) is revenge seeking embodied and has significantly better social outcomes than Europe.

So the hypothesis seems unlikely to be valid.

Germany has lower murder rates then Japan.

Asia as a whole does not have nearly zero murder rates. It contains quite unsafe countries.

Also I've heard (no proof) that Japan is more likely to characterize deaths as "accidents" or "suicide" to keep the murder rates down.

Excessive punishments result in "missed" crimes - if the punishment for speeding was immediate death, cops would be much less likely to pull over speeders I feel.

> significantly better social outcomes

I think we have different ideas about what this means. For me, it is that crime ceases to exist because criminals integrate into society because of successful rehabilitation. For you it is that crime ceases to exist because criminals are scared.

I will editorialize that your system has the population effectively coerced into compliance by the state (so not coming to these conclusions about how to be a good community member on their own).

I hypothesize my scheme results in a better/happier/stronger community/society but I don't have data in either direction. With that said my system is more humane/humanistic and results in a positive outcome for the "criminals" too.

In many discussions of uniquely bad aspects to America that Europe has until now had a different and arguably better viewpoint on, there's one key fact that's always missing from many well-intentioned peoples' point of view: Europe has had a historically homogenous population within their different regions and America has not. This difference is massive for how life within prison actually works and what effects a different system might have.

That isn’t true anymore. Many Western European countries have more immigrants per capita than the states. We aren’t as exceptional as we think we are, just inept.

1) Agreed. I specifically used the word "historically" to indicate that it has been the case in the past, but is not necessarily the case going forward.

2) Unmentioned, but sort of obvious, is that the immigration groups that Europe is adding aren't necessarily the same ones that the United States has. There can be significant differences in how different cultural groups react to different situations so the comparison between America/Europe is still much more complex than just saying "both groups have diversity now so they should be alike in every way".

Yes, the parent comment redefined "justice" to mean "revenge". It doesn't make any sense because "an eye for an eye ..."

The "what about" game will ruin any debate.

The delivery of justice vs human rights is not a simple matter and anyone trying to discuss it in this type of forum is doing themselves and the subject a disservice.

What about preventing and reducing crime, and reducing how many people becoming perpetrators and victims?

Ultimately, humans don't randomly make choices. It is up to us if we want to prioritize less suffering for everyone and fixing the problems in the first place, or prioritizing some sort of vengeance.

Humans really do have agency. Not all criminal behavior can be chalked up to bad policy or bad environment.

Humans really do have agency. Not all criminal behavior can be chalked up to bad policy or bad environment.

If cause and effect exists in human beings as they do for literally everything else, than claiming 'agency' as an excuse to do nothing is basically moral bankruptcy.

Our science is not perfect, nor is our policies, and people will fall through the cracks, but we should keep striving and trying nonetheless.

Some causal things society would likely be unwilling to give up; and so some portion of society being sacrificed to prisons is what we're willing to pay for it.

> What about justice for the society in which the crime took place?

This for me is one of the strongest arguments against the death penalty. If the state can kill its prisoners and the state's government falls into authoritarian hands, one political faction, the authoritarian faction, can simply kill off those who oppose it. Did the accused commit a crime, a "crime", or do nothing at all? Well, too late to find out.

Of course, an authoritarian government can bring back the death penalty, but at least make it harder for them to hide what they are doing. And the longer your nation goes without the death penalty, the more egregious it is when the authoritarians reinstitute it, the more obvious it is what they're doing.

And the worst thing is that those who have been found as state actors to be murdering innocents are not punished. They are not treated like this or simply executed. And neither is the people who voted for them after this crime or part took to them with political funding.

Really makes one wonder what would be just and working society.

Looking at history, I'm not sure this is a reasonable argument. Vast numbers of governments have gone down this path, and not only authoritarian ones. Yet there's no need for a 'bad' government to rely on the death penalty or whatever else. Disappearing people is the normal method operandi. It's faster and reduces the chances of somebody becoming a martyr.

And incidentally, indefinite detention without trial or representation, of US citizens, was legalized in 2012 [1]. An initial legal case against it managed to obtain a permanent injunction against indefinitely detaining US citizens. That victory was tossed out by a higher court who ruled that the plaintiffs lacked the standing for a preemptive challenge to the law. So they need to be indefinitely detained, then when released (if ever) they might be allowed to challenge the constitutionality of the law. Great system.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...

Authoritarian boogeyman governments aren't going to death penalty people out of nowhere, they'll have tools and abilities to remove inconvenient people much more quietly.

After all it's much easier to "remove" someone who was "resisting arrest" than go through the bother of a trial.

I think there are two issues you don't address. Death is final. There's no later exoneration if you've killed someone and it seems pretty clear that this has happened. State and federal governments have executed innocent people.

The second is that content of this article itself. The author does not sound thrilled to be in solitary; but the author also seems to have found meaning in life. Do you think that the author would choose death over the life he has forged for himself? I don't think so.

Oh agreed. Death is not a good option. I'm mostly saying that life in prison, especially in American prisons, is not a good one either.

Agreed. The US has some weird priorities in my estimation.

I can’t speak for the author, but I would absolutely choose death over life imprisonment if given the choice (assuming a painless method of execution)

I'd take the pain anyway.

Some people live most of their lives "imprisoned": maybe they're blind, deaf, paralyzed, have birth defects, chronic pain/illness. But even they value life within limitations. There is always a reason to keep going. Perspective is everything.

I think It’s one thing to be born blind/deaf and never experience life without it, but it’s another when you were free and then went to prison for life/got blind/paralyzed

I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that everyone will have the same perspective on this.

You sound like the banker in "The Bet" by Chekhov. I hope nobody makes a bet in this thread. :D

> Death is final.

Years in prison can't be undone any more than death can.

Would you in principle call torturing someone for years on end but eventually letting them go free, a lesser crime than a quick death?

> State and federal governments have executed innocent people.

Very, very few in modern US history, thanks to years of appeals and reviews. Meanwhile, a tremendous number of innocent people serve a large number of years of their life in prison.

Even if you don't want to give up life in prison; it doesn't have to be as horrendous conditions as US prisons are.

> Someone who committed a crime at 19 is a wholly different person at 50.

Not necessarily, some people are just bad or damaged to the extent that they can not live a normal life within society.

I remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females, etc for no logical reason and these are all people who ended up in prison for some crime or another.

There has to be a sanction for this kind of destructive behaviour and the remote chance that some random violent criminal has a potential to be to be some of saint, if only they have one more chance, is robbed of this opportunity is a price worth paying for the greater good..

I wholeheartedly disagree. People can change and people do change. People can receive therapy. I was a very different person 5 years ago. I can't imagine how I will change in the next 20.

People can change but mostly the don't. If someone let you down 5 years ago they will, most likely, let you down again.

With a 40% reconviction rate after prisoners are released [1], I think it's reasonable to assume a lot of them will keep misbehaving.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6743246/

Well they don't need to be a saint, as none of us are. They just need to learn how to function in society. I think rehabilitation is possible for the majority. Norway seems to show this in that they do not instate capital punishment or life imprisonment, yet have extremely low recidivism rates (especially compared to the US).

If we set the criminally insane aside (a small portion to be sure) the majority remaining need training, motivation, assistance, and separation.

1. Training - many people in prison never learned how to "live productively" if you will - this includes things like job training but also basic life training, etc. Nobody should leave prison with anything less than an high school equivalent education, and training and knowledge on how to cook, clean, etc for themselves.

2. Motivation - the "why bother" needs to be shown and instilled - why bother doing a job when you can just do a crime or drugs instead?

3. Assistance - we shouldn't just dump people out of prison on the street - they don't know where to go or who to contact and it's likely the people they DO know are other criminals, which doesn't help. There should be "outpatient" assistance provided that gets them a job, housing, etc. Call it supervised release as part of the sentence and you could do quite a bit. Provide incentives and security for companies to hire ex-cons, and continue to assist as long as necessary.

4. Separation - it can be vitally important to help ex-cons separate their "con life" from their future life, whatever that may be. Many of the successful ex-cons were in prison for an "accident" (e.g, unintentional murder because they drove drunk, etc) and so their support groups are non-criminals, but the ones who only know other criminals may need to be moved elsewhere for a time.

> remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females, etc for no logical reason and these are all people who ended up in prison for some crime or another.

Yes, but did you ever follow up to see if all of these people you knew as kids were still evil as adults?

I did a lot of crazy shit when I was younger that I would never do today. People do change as they grow older. And even if there are exceptions, that is not a valid reason to imprison any particular individual with no hope of redemption.

> I did a lot of crazy shit when I was younger that I would never do today.

Did you torture a hamster because it was funny, like throwing it hard against a wall to see if it would bounce?

Did you beat the shit out of a 5 year old girl because there was no one around to stop you?

No? There is crazy shit and there is just evil. And yes, those people did end up doing much worse things because society just kept giving them that chance to turn into a saint.

what can you tell us about how they were parented?

I really don’t like this line of thinking.

This is the kind of bullshit trick that many terrible, violent criminals like the Menendez bros try to pull when they get caught: “It isn’t my fault I murdered/raped/etc, my upbringing was poor.”

whoa there, you made a big jump. I didn't remove culpability from them. I'm just curious if there were any recognizable patterns between the parenting and the future bad behaviors.

I hear you, and I simply stated that I don’t like where that line of reasoning can go.

I’ve spent plenty of time around people who have been incarcerated for serious crimes and many of them are life-long con artists who take no responsibility for their actions. Their profession seems to be manipulation and manufacturing endless excuses.

The trouble is that there are far too many naive people in the world that believe their bullshit stories and end up feeling sorry for them. The most charismatic of them are usually the most dangerous.

The saying “give them an inch and they will take a mile” applies perfectly to this type of criminal sociopath.

I believe I read a study showing how this relationship is not causal. It's actually the shared genetic code that makes both the son be violent and the parents neglectful and abusive, not the abusive parents changing the son's behavior.

Such information makes best sense in context. For example, if we learn that 40% of criminals were abused in childhood, we will interpret it certain way. But if we afterwards learn that 40% of non-criminals were also abused in childhood, now the previous interpretation does not make sense anymore.

So we should start from the point "how many kids you know who were abused in childhood" and then ask "and how many of them later became criminals".

I really don't want to get into the details, but yes, I did things that horrify me today, including causing pain and injury to animals and other humans. This is why I don't want to get into details. These are exceptionally painful memories. I had some pretty serious anger management issues.

Note BTW that what matters here is not whether I was actually evil (I don't think I was) but whether my behavior could lead someone to think that I was and treat me accordingly. And the answer to that is an unequivocal yes. I got very, very lucky that the people around me were not inclined to seriously entertain that hypothesis.

And then there’re people who commit robbery and serve time. Then not long after release they commit worse crime like murder, which could’ve been prevented if they’re still in jail. It’s not that simple man. Sure people can become better, or they stay the same, or they get even worse.

You need to watch "Minority Report".

This is a form of argument that I call "Proof by horror story". It is a logical fallacy, a specific instance of a broader category of logical fallacies called faulty generalization [1]. To debunk it we only need to observe that just about any behavior can be predictive of committing a serious crime if you are willing to ignore false positives. But I'm not willing to ignore them. I think it's worse to incarcerate an innocent person than to let a guilty one go free.

If you're willing to imprison a thief for life because there is a chance they might go on to commit murder, why not imprison their family as well? After all, they might have the same bad genes as the thief. For that matter, why not keep everyone in solitary confinement? That guarantees that no one will be free to commit murder.

People's behaviors are unpredictable. Having some people occasionally go rogue is just the price we sometimes have to pay to live in a free society. If you don't like it you might want to consider emigrating to North Korea. Very few guilty people go free there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization

An individual's behavior is unpredictable, but in groups it's pretty predictable.

Recidivism is a major issue and there are ways to address it, but they have to actually be worked on (and they will admittedly fail at times, people have to accept that).

Many (most?) of the jail-to-good-citizen pathways have been closed down or restricted over the years.

Maybe the right answer is to reopen them rather than throwing more people in prison.

I agree, but the people in general like to scream about "why did you let this happen" whenever something happens.

> I remember kids I knew as a child who were just evil, such as cruelty to animals, violence towards females

If they exhibit all of that as kids, they need intervention as kids. This sort of stuff happens when kids are abused by their families and don't get help.

It may be unfixable at some point, but the original of it is adults in those kids lives.

on the other extreme, across the pond you have a guy who murdered 77 teenagers and kids, and is chilling in a hotel-like facility with a good chance to be out in 2033. I'm really not sure what's worse.

There’s no chance he gets out in 2033 but the ability for level-headed decisions about continuing effectiveness on all prisoners is absolutely something we should emulate.

> a good chance to be out in 2033

Source needed. From what I've read he will probably never be free, which makes sense since he is actively dangerous.

If he repents, he can be free - after everything he has done. He currently chooses not to.

Citation needed. This does not match anything I’ve read about the situation.

It's not up to him. "Preventive detention" is still potentially a life sentence, it just has to be renewed by the court every five years after the initial 21 year sentence is up.

It seems wrong for him to ever get out of prison, even if he wasn't viewed as actively dangerous.

Why? Being vindictive (wanting someone to suffer because they made others suffer) serves no practical purpose, as far as I can tell.

The rational answer is because nothing in life is certain. Someone who decides to shoot and bomb and kill 77 people could decide to do so again. Certainly the odds seem much higher for that person repeating than it is for a random individual to do the same thing.

No science we have can say a person won't do the same thing again.

The emotional answer is that some people serve no practical purpose. I don't understand why society would care so much about the life of someone who values life so little that they can repeatedly kill dozens of people.

We have no problem as a society putting down a deranged dog, even though we could totally lock it up in a cage and let it live out it's days there. Heck, maybe it won't be deranged when it is 9 years old.

Let's consider this hypothetical: I am just really curious what it is like to kill someone, so I go out and randomly kill someone you love very dearly. After I do it, it turns out I don't like killing at all and never want to do it again. The rest of my life will be devoted to peace and love.

How much jail time do you think I should serve?

As someone from a neighboring country, I think that's a fantastic example of the justice system, justice at its very best. The murderer is absolutely the worst kind of criminal there is. He killed 77 people and he did so because of his Nazi ideology, to which he fully sticks a decade later. He got a fair trial. He got the conviction he deserved. In his desire to encourage violence and division, he failed completely and society did not for a moment fall to his level.

And he's not walking free. For some reason conservative US media loved the "he'll be out after 20 years" idea, which is, in plain terms, a lie. Norwegian law mandates a court hearing after 21 years of a sentence to decide whether the sentence has to be extended. There's no question that it will be and the killer in question will most likely die in prison or perhaps be released in the final days of his life. Having a mandatory additional hearing seems like a great safety feature built into the law.

Hotel-like facility? I haven't seen many hotels that lock you inside your room and don't allow a minute's unsupervised interaction with another person. We don't think it necessary to design prisons to be intentionally cruel to the inmates, we don't think torturing people accomplishes anything. The killer is provided with enough to meet basic human rights and that is overwhelmingly supported by public opinion. I've never been able to take anyone who says "Scandinavian prisons are like a vacation" seriously because nobody who claims that will admit to wanting to spend time in there.

Maybe. From what I understand, he's relatively happy about how it all turned out, and that makes me uneasy.

He can also fake repentance any time he feels like it, so I'm not sure why you are so convinced about the outcome of some future hearing 10 years from now.

Except that it does not work the way you imply. He wont get out merely for saying "I repent". What you are doing amount to a lie - using caricature and exaggeration of theoretical possibility.

Making rhetorical make points to make people outraged over shadows is harmful.

Take it easy with the accusations.

If he has absolutely no chance to repent in the next 10 years, what is the purpose of that hearing?

Because it's a general rule for all of the criminals, not one especially for him.

Even Treebeard eventually let Saruman go, so we can't predict what may occur in the future.

However, in this case, since he likely sees himself as a "freedom fighter", he'll never try to admit wrongdoing to get out because that would ruin his image of himself.

How would the courts differentiate between someone who actually repented and was sorry vs someone who just convincingly went through the motions?

How do the courts differentiate between witnesses who are truthful vs those who are lying? How do parole boards evaluate whether someone repents?

In such extreme cases especially, it wouldn't be a judge making their mind up after a two-minute statement from a convict. The hearing will have prison personnel testifying about years of interaction with the person. There will be psychologists providing their perspective. There could be a repeated psychiatric evaluation.

Can that process be fooled? Certainly, as there exists no certain way to tell whether someone is being truthful. But successfully faking your way out of a continued sentence requires more than putting on a convincing act for a few hearings.

Sure, I agree entirely. I just think the stakes are too high for him to ever be released. Not that it seems likely any time soon anyways.

Nobody in the country thinks it's at all a possibility for the foreseeable future. He won't be released - the man is behind the deadliest peacetime crime in Norway. Even if he sincerely repents at some point, he'll have to spend many more years behind the bars with perfect behavior for a release to be considered.

If he repents the murders, if he renounces his ideology, and if he spends a couple decades as a repentful man would, he will, just maybe, get released when he's old, frail and not expected to live long.

Long term track record of actions compared to severity of crime. Plus psychological reports, which are much harder to fake.

If this were true, then you must be presenting a single-sided story. Even for one murder, people typically get ten years or more (presuming no mitigating circumstances). But the sibling comments already revealed that your claim of freedom in ten years is not true in the first place.

you are wrong, I did not say anything about sentence of 10 years.

an assumption based on the only available information: 2033 is about ten years from now. For all I know, their life expectancy was until 2015 and they turn 100 years old in 2033, which could be reasonable. Since that made little sense as a sentence to be unimpressed by, I figured it was more likely a case you recently heard about and 2033-$recent=~10.

Maybe give some more info about the case then? Such as why they 'only' (in your eyes) got the sentence they got?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik

I would rather death than life in prison, much less life with years of solitary mixed in. I don't understand how the inmates deal with it, or why many prefer to live such an awful existence compared to a quick end.

Life in prison, especially an American prison sounds like its own form of hell. All of my energy would go into "checking out" if I found myself in that situation. It's not worth living at that point.

The biggest reason I oppose the death penalty, but am less opposed to the other two is that the death penalty is irreversible. I think the death penalty is warranted for some crimes. I feel pretty good about executing someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, for example. What I don't feel good about is the certainty of our courts results. And until we have courts that produce perfect or near perfect verdicts, I wouldn't be comfortable employing an irreversible punishment.

Or the fairness or cost of the death penalties application.

How is sending someone to prison for 50 years "reversible"?

You can at least let them out if/when you discover their innocence.

If you choose to send them to prison for 50 years, you can reverse the decision three years down the line if circumstances change (e.g. the real culprit gets identified), which is something that has happened.

> The biggest reason I oppose the death penalty... is that the death penalty is irreversible.

While true, there are better reasons to oppose the death penalty.[1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution#United_Stat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_capital_punishment_in...

Isn't #1 the same thing as what I said? Irreversibility is a problem because of the fallibility of the courts.

Wrongful execution is more specific. The term you've chosen is broad enough to include regret for the loss of possible defense or prosecution testimony for other crimes and suspects, as well as regret for the loss of any possibility of future pardon, which is a forgiveness, inappropriate for wrongful conviction. Though pardon has been used before to expedite release, forgiving the innocent doesn't make any sense. Wrongful execution is far more heinous than the loss of testimony or pardon.

Oh ok. Well what I meant to refer to was wrongful conviction, so I think we mostly agree.

> Perhaps we should have neither?

There is a scifi concept in the Culture book series. It is called a slap drone.

The society described in the books is a post-scarcity society. Nobody has to commit crimes out of economic desperation. Still there are some who hurt others (crimes of passion, mental disturbances, etc). They don’t throw these people into a prison but assign a robot guardian to them to prevent them hurting anybody ever again. And that robot guardian is called the slap drone.

There is an element of prevention: the robot is faster, smarter, and better armed than the convict is, therefore can prevent any further undesired behaviour. This is where the name “slap-drone” comes from. In most circumstances a convict never threatens anyone again. But if and when they do a simple slap is often enough to stop them.

And there is an element of punishment: the drone hangs out with the comvict all the time and warns others about what you have done. (Either verbaly or by just its very presence.) Which results in others being more cautious around the convict. Perhaps the convict is then not invited to the best, most exlusive parties and so on. And this social stigma acts as a deterent for others.

Clearly we are nowhere near able to produce such a robot. Many other things would be different about our societies if we could. It is not a practical proposal in any way, but I kinda like it as a thought experiment. Showing that there are possible ways we could handle crime more humanly maybe one day.

I think this gets at the most important question implicating the death penalty: what do we we do with people who can presumably never be allowed back into society?

This is a small portion of the prison population, and we have vast deserts and remote islands available; something could be done for them that is not freedom but is not perpetual solitary confinement, either.

I feel that most of the death penalty support left is some weird form of virtue signaling; that if "raped to death by a cactus" was on the menu they'd be howling for that punishment.

> I find it really odd how many people abhor the death penalty and capital punishment as a whole, while also tolerating life in prison and solitary confinement.

This is a false dichotomy describing a fictional group of people. What many people really want is no death penalty, and a proper, effective carceral system. There’s many countries who get this fairly right.

I really like the Norwegian model where the maximum sentence is 21 years, and a judge has to actively intervene near the tone of release if they want to extend it.

Requiring action to keep someone incarcerated rather than released makes it harder to forget about people and let them sleep through the cracks

I don't even know what to say after reading this, besides maybe that I would probably prefer dying over living a year like this. What an abhorrent way of treating a human being, or really any being at all.

I know what to say… how about… “don’t murder people if you want to live a good life”

You gotta take a higher perspective. Sure maybe those murderers deserve it. But what is the net benefit to society while those murderers are in prison and after those murderers are released?

Ironically, research and actual events show that treating criminals with humanity actually yields a net benefit.

I think excluding a murderer from participating in society is a solid choice for the safety of others. Not saying it's the most perfect solution to a problem, but it is a decent solution.

And keep them in cages indefinitely just in case the wrong person was convicted after all, or are you also for 'eye for an eye' at that point?

Oh I'm not saying that they should be released.

I'm asking about what's happening inside those prisons. And what happens to the prisoner after he's released from said environment. Is there a net benefit to society with the current status quo?

I guess in short a better way to put it is this: Is the prisoner reformed and able to reintegrate with society?

And how's that working as a deterrent?

We don't know what the circumstances were around the actions this individual did or did not do. The justice system can be as corrupt as any other government institution, where wrongful verdicts and convictions are made all the time. It takes years of costly uphill legal battles to dig yourself out of that hole, and many don't make it.

That said, even if this person did commit the crime, I'm siding with GP here: what is the purpose of keeping a human being behind bars for life, if there's no chance they would eventually reintegrate into society? Solitary confinement in particular seems like a medieval torture device designed to drive people mad, rather than rehabilitate them.

If the State wants to remove someone from society altogether, the death penalty is a more humane way of doing that. A life sentence makes no sense in this system, unless someone is benefiting from keeping prisoners alive. In many ways, this is just a modern form of slavery.

Judging by this person's writing, they've somehow managed to rehabilitate themselves despite of their cruel living conditions, which is nothing short of remarkable.

> We don't know what the circumstances were around the actions this individual did or did not do.

The crimes in question were rape and murder. Are you saying you doubt he actually did those things, or that you think there are some circumstances under which they'd be justified? If the latter, can you elaborate?

I'm not defending the crimes this person may have committed. I think my points were clear, but to summarize:

- Wrongful verdicts and convictions do happen.

- Is a life sentence the appropriate retribution to society?

- The US prison system works on punishment and exploitation, rather than rehabilitation.

- This person's writing shows remarkable thinking, despite of their environment.

Since the USA has more prisoners per capita than anywhere else in the world, I think we’ve pretty much failed as using jail as a deterrent. It really is all about punishment and removing those from society we don’t think deserve to live a free life (see the failed drug war).

The U.S. incarceration and recidivism stats show this clearly does not work as a deterrent (in general, not talking specifically about murder; only ~14% of prisoners are in for murder: https://felonvoting.procon.org/incarcerated-felon-population...

How about "don't be accused of a crime if you want to live a good life". There are countless innocent people in prison and even a single innocent person enduring this is one too many.

I agree that wrongful convictions are bad and we should try to reduce and even eliminate them. I don't agree that we should have milder punishments for crimes like murder and rape just because the wrongful conviction rate isn't zero.

Now imagine you were an American soldier captured during the Vietnam War and lived like this (but in filth) for 10 years. And survived.

That's what happened to John McCain (a 2008 US presidential candidate)

Every Vietnam vet I've spoken with has been mostly seething with righteous anger that our evil politicians lied us into that stupid evil war. It was supposedly to stop Vietnam from allying with "communist China", but the moment they beat us Vietnam went to war against China. Our war actually delayed that war!

Also it is pretty disgusting that CIA (or, as the latest agency-approved "conspiracy theory" has it, "rogue elements" of CIA) killed Kennedy to make sure we fought that stupid war. Then later they killed his brother because as president he could have done a real investigation. Why is Biden still breaking the law by not releasing all documents publicly? Why did Trump break the law and his own promises in the same way?

> Also it is pretty disgusting that CIA (or, as the latest agency-approved "conspiracy theory" has it, "rogue elements" of CIA) killed Kennedy to make sure we fought that stupid war.

You got any good sources on this? I say this as someone who’s not a skeptic but curious on good JFK sources as many are not.

My mom actually knew David Lifton at UCLA and his book presents an interesting case. If my memory’s right, he was a Cornell Engineering Physics graduate who was doing an advanced degree at UCLA. Which doesn’t make him right of course but does at least lead you to think that he knows a thing or two about objective data and what not.

I haven't read Lifton's book, and I don't want to imply agreement with any particular claim, but he is certainly correct that there were lots of implausible details about the autopsy, and especially with the official summary of the autopsy. It wasn't a physician who came up with the "magic bullet" theory, it was Arlen Specter, a cipher whose later continuing political success is inexplicable except in reference to his role on the Warren Commission.

The best book to read now is JFK and the Unspeakable, by James Douglass. If a book like that doesn't fit into your life right now, either of the recent Oliver Stone documentaries are great. I believe that "JFK: Destiny Betrayed", which I watched through tears, is a longer version of "JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass".

The Scandinavians got it right in terms of how to create prisons.

Can we pay the Scandinavians and send them prisoners?

If not, why not?

We can. It just depends on how much money. Everything has a price.

I don't think he even got close to adequately expressing what a horror it is. I've never been sent to the hole, but I've been to jail, and I know a lot of people who have been to prison. When they spend all day in a dark room with no outside contact, eat your "foodball" with no implements like an animal, and get beaten by guards without reason or recourse, people really do go insane. It's not legal, but very common to even deny prisoners in the hole their one hour per day outside. That's who-knows-how-long where the only light you see comes through the crack in the door and the only thing you hear is the demented howling of some crazy guy down the hall.

The “File JIRA tickets” advice is ingenious. The system is so cruel and arbitrary - so finding the parts with any kind of process you can use to your advantage, it’s just ingenious.

The typical American believes in human sacrifice. We don't think of it that way, but that's what it is. A heinous crime, especially one that violates an individual, is a shock to the social fabric, and the prescription is that somebody must be harmed to purge society of the bad juju. Ideally, it's the perpetrator, but historically, it isn't that important. We're more than happy to let innocent people rot in prison and to let corrupt police and prosecutors off the hook for misconduct, as long as they continue to produce the human sacrifices we demand. It's not even necessary to solve crime as long as the state is able to inflict damage to the right sorts of people in response. It doesn't particularly matter that our criminal criminal justice system is woefully inefficient at solving or preventing crime. The cruelty of the criminal justice system and everything that follows is the point.

Has nothing to do with bad ju ju, and everything to do with finding a fitting punishment of sufficient unpleasantness as to deter even people with short time preferences from harming others.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Remember the author, as cool as he sounds, murdered somebody.

And how is that working? For all of the cruelty of our justice and carceral system, we still have high crime and high recidivism. It's catastrophically bad policy from a public safety standpoint, costing an immense amount of money for the outcomes we get. And yet, there's not much public motivation to demand better.

I have concluded that the system largely does what the public wants. It inflicts tremendous harm and collateral damage with a veneer of plausible deniability that lets us tell ourselves that it's about crime reduction, justice, and/or rehabilitation.

To add to the previous, where is our commitment to misconduct and abuse of power that causes widespread damage? If we actually cared about deterring crime, we'd take the same punitive approach to white collar criminals as street crime.

I argue that white collar crime doesn't have the same psychological effect on society. It doesn't create the same demand for human sacrifice. Consequently, you've got no interest in taking a pound of flesh, combined with the same lack of actual care for safeguarding the public interest.

It's not a human sacrifice, it's putting the criminal somewhere will they won't be able to hurt anyone ever again, therefore reducing the expected level of killing.

I'm 100% for keeping people safe, including physically separating dangerous people from the rest of the population, but

1) Way too often, we don't catch the killer or put people away on flimsy evidence.

2) We have murderers in prison way beyond the circumstances that led to them to commit murder. In other words, ones that likely pose no particular elevated risk.

3) The inhumane conditions of the prison system do nothing to enhance public safety. In fact, they make it worse by doing immense trauma to incarcerated people, leading to high recidivism and high violence and poor health within the prisons.

This could well be a handout from HR at several jobs I've had.

Aside from the dark humor, it is a shame that we do not recognize rehabilitation in this country and focus on punishment.

18 and life, you got it 18 and life, you know Your crime is time and it's 18 and life to go

I wonder if life without parole should be reserved for people above 35 or 50 - at 19 unless you are serial killer, there is way too much time ahead of you, for someone to deem you irredeemable ...

Tell that to the victim(s) and their families.

The criminal justice system should not be a revenge system for victims and their families.

Why not?

What good does it do?

Victims rightfully desire revenge. If criminal justice system did not provide at least partial revenge, people would start searching for (and finding) other ways to conduct it.

There's hundreds of years of art and literature you can delve into if you're genuinely interested in the idea, from Victor Hugo to Dostoyevsky to Arthur Miller. But I guess to me it boils down to this. Harming other people, even within the context of civil institutions is harmful to the soul. It creates abusive relationships that degrade the harmer and the harmee. When we institutionalize harm we separate ourselves from that degradation and make others bear it. Furthermore, that culture of harm is not static. It is capable of moving through our society and reaching indirectly all kinds of people. Our civilizational aspirations should take us away from revenge and towards grace and understanding.

But that's just like my opinion man.

It's not just the people the murderer already killed, it's all his other potential victims, now that he has demonstrated himself to be willing and able to take innocent human lives.

As someone who has known several people among my family and friends who have been murdered, I don't think the wishes of the victim's family should be the overriding concern. Many victims desire righteous retribution, but that doesn't mean we have to fulfill that wish. At some point, you're just outsourcing vendetta violence to the state, to give it a veneer of civility.

The point of the justice system should primarily be public safety. Accountability is important, too, but there are many more ways to achieve that than inflicting damage on perpetrators.

Statistically, criminality decreases significantly with age. Particularly around middle age people's likelihood of committing a crime decreases drastically. It doesn't make a lot of sense in my opinion to have someone in prison at 50 for something they did at 18. But life without parole is currently the alternative to capital punishment.

I believe life in prison should exist. Some people simply don't fit in society. If you're caught the third time raping children, I don't think you'll ever be fit for society.

However, such extreme sentences should only be for Big Crimes. Threatening the democracy of a country, murdering politicians for extremist ideals, sending hitmen after judges, lawyers and police officers, mass murders for whatever reason, those kinds of crimes. Done by the people who society should be protected from. The death sentence is too extreme (though I'd support opting into euthanasia if we could ever find a way to prevent the prison system from torturing people into suicide) because the legal system in any country is flawed and people's innocence sometimes comes out decades later.

I don't know who this guy murdered and how to deserve life without parole, but I haven't heard of him and I can't find any news articles about him (assuming he's not using an alias) so I doubt he deserves this extreme a punishment. Even if he's in there for some kind of ritualistic baby murder, he doesn't deserve this. The captivity alone should be the punishment, the inability to have control over your life and do as you please, there is no reason to torture someone like this. The purpose of life in prison should be to protect society from evil or deranged people, not to torture people in some sick sort of entitlement.

Inhumane prisons bring out the very worst in society. People think prisoners have it so easy, being given free food and a place to live, but when they can't go to the office and need to stay home for a few months because of a deadly pandemic they go crazy. That alone should be reason enough not to listen to anyone who wants excessively large punishments because they're affected, people underestimate the effects of being locked up in the same place for an extended amount of time.

> Threatening the democracy of a country

This would quickly become the primary political prison method. And you already don't trust the justice system ("I doubt he deserves this extreme a punishment") so why would you trust the justice system to correctly determine "threats to democracy"?

One thing I don't understand (well, many, actually): why does the hole have a "one shower a week"? Is this strictly for torture? Not showering seems like a way to degrade and humiliate a person. I (sort of) understand isolating very violent prisoners from the rest of the inmates, but why is torture necessary?

Probably a combination of torture and it must be hard work for the prison guards to escort each individual to the showers. So torture and laziness that they can get away with.

I suppose it's a manpower issue. I guess showers would only happen during the daytime, and outside of meal-times and supervised yard-time. I suppose they could get 3 prisoners per hour through the shower, and probably 40 hours per week shuffling them back and forth to showers. So a pair of guards would be fully occupied doing nothing but supervising showers for 120 inmates in solitary. These numbers my be wildly off, but not an order of magnitude off, and the manpower issue still stands.

> going huge amounts of time without physically seeing people

That's how I've always lived. The problem is more that you're stuck in a small box with bad living conditions.

I think people are way too quick to "throw the baby out with the bath water" when it comes to prison reform.

Yes, private prisons are bad (although, worth noting that private prisons are like 8% of total prisons - a relatively small problem).

Yes, over-prosecution of non-violent crimes is a problem.

The solution is not to let murderers and rapists go free. Over half of all inmates are in prison for violent crime. There are bad people out there. I think it is sickening that people would prioritize the happiness of a murderer over the safety of society. Violent offenders are very likely to re-offend and to escalate their violence.

>So when I passed through the prison gates, I took on the persona of a deadly gangster. I did things that landed me in “the hole” — slang for administrative segregation — over and over.

while I am by no means a supporter of cruel punishment, the tone in a lot of prison inmate's writings mirrors that one in that they do not seem to take ownership of their own crimes. When you go to prison for literal murder, I don't think 'deadly gangster' is a 'persona' any longer. That's just a description of what you are.

At 18, a lot of kids are a very mixed up bag of emotions and needs. Doing one heinous act is different than dawning a whole persona and comitting to it. It's possible to do something you'll regret with uncertainty and insecurity the whole time.

At 18 not a lot of young adults (which are not kids), commit first degree murder. I really hope you're not intending to characterize intentionally killing another human being as "kids being kids ". That one heinous act snuffed out another life irretrievably, that victim doesn't even get to live in a cell or regret anything.

> really hope you're not intending to characterize intentionally killing another human being as "kids being kids ".

Nope. Those are your words not mine. Please don't try yo put them into my mouth. I think there's a lot of evidence from psychiatry and neuroscience that indicate that in fact "young adults" still have a lot in common with kids cognitively. I also think that a lot if not most "young adults" in fact don't fully comprehend other humans on the basis of undetstanding them empathetically. So I think it's very possible for them to kill without really understanding what they have done. If you read the literature of murderers one of the recurring themes is that it took them aging and exploring spiritually to understand that.

As to victims, there's not much which can be done for them is there? Their life is gone. That leaves a vacancy in the livws of those they loved and who loved them. The victim has been robbed of everything which I sincerely believe as someone who doesn't believe in an afterlife.

But is avenging that victim the purpose we should set thw state to doing? I personally don't think so. There is an asymetry there that I inderstand people abhore. The state cannot really do anything on behalf of the victim but it must deal with the perpetrator. Because when people ask, "what about the victim" this is what they are asking the state to do, to resolve to some degree the assymetrical outcome. And that is punishment.

Personally I don't believe the state should punish. I think power and punishment are a toxic mix. Jails IMO must exist to seperate but I don't think they should exist to punish. The idea that we can balance the assymetry of crime is an illusion IMO.

To put in programmerese what I’ve put elsewhere:

The US penal system is the /dev/null of social justice. You don’t know where things go. You just know you put stuff you don’t want (error codes, annoying output, side effects) in there. It could be rerouted by your hosting platform of choice to an S3 bucket for all you know. You just know things go away. And that makes you happy.

The abstraction of why an overuse of /dev/null or blind reliance on the penal system leads to problems down the road, is left as an exercise to the programmer.

How to Survive Solitary Confinement in Alcatraz

>> What I used to do is I’d tear a button off my coveralls, flip it up in the air, then I’d turn around in circles, and I’d get down on my hands and knees and I’d hunt for that button. When I found the button, I’d stand up and I’d do it again.

Source:

https://bobyewchuk.wordpress.com/2013/07/31/solitary-confine...

I spent two weeks in "The Hole" in California, and my first thought was "no prob, I'll meditate and do yoga." Let me tell you, in three days I was at the brink of insanity and in tears. It broke me. Later, however, long after my incarceration and during the lock-downs, I was absolutely unfazed as a result. Let that sink in.

And nowhere on the page is the name of the person he murdered.

And raped apparently

Good to know, a noose and a quick drop would have been better but alas we have to read his drivel. Oh he got a 6 pack now how nice.

I spent around 40 days int the hole from my 2 year sentence.

I read the first time, but they only allowed 1 book at a time and I ended up re-reading same book a twice a day.

Then second time they only allowed to read 1 hour a day. I ended up walking in circles and imagining various book plots and yc startup ideas.

Sad to know there were circumstances that led to a 19yr old that was driven and astute...stuck in jail for so long. Sometimes the dice don't roll your way...

It seems our destiny is set before we are even born. Our families (parents specifically) are a big part of it. Im thinking parents should have 1 lesson imprinted on them at the mat ward: your #1 job in 15 years will be to steer your immature yet independent son/daughter away from life-altering decisions that have no "UNDO" button. Everything else is unimportant.

EDIT: to be clear, this does not mean helicopter parenting or not allowing them to fail. It just means understanding when adolescents are playing russian rulette without knowing it, and letting them know about it.(ex. joining a gang)

> Im thinking parents should have 1 lesson imprinted on them at the mat ward: your #1 job in 15 years will be to steer your immature yet independent son/daughter away from life-altering decisions that have no "UNDO" button.

Unfortunately I think most parents don't support this and believe in vague hand-wavy styles like "I need to let my child have space to grow and be his/her best self!"

While that's partly true, there's a difference between raising your child to become an adult and helicopter parenting.

I think most parents do support this, but the amount of control you have over a fifteen year old seems pretty minor: you have to hope the emergent phenomena you get from years 0-10 plus circumstance won't conspire against you.

One thing I realized pretty quickly as a parent was how little control I have over my kid. Eventually, my kids will have space whether I like it or not. The challenge is giving the tools and experience to make good decisions within boundaries. They need to be able to think for themselves. It's anything but laissez faire nor is it authoritarian.

It's frustrating to me that a lot of people only seem to be able to think in terms of whichever of those extremes they dislike the most.

It's also important to understand that it's impossible to inoculate your kids against all possible life-altering bad decisions. Part of being a parent is always having a view towards how to support your children going forward, whatever their changes circumstances, without denial or enablement. That might make the difference between one bad decision and a years long chain.

> One thing I realized pretty quickly as a parent was how little control I have over my kid.

Exactly. And we can all think of those parents in our peer group who haven't figured this out. They are making themselves crazy miserable either fighting with their kids or scheming to manipulate them.

I'd say the #1 job you have as a parent is to make sure your child feels loved. This will create a sense of self worth, which is the best protection against bad decisions.

Some parents get so wrapped up in the steering part that they come down on their kids like a ton of bricks whenever they make a bad decision. These are often the times when your kid needs some understanding. You'd be amazed how much it means.

I'm going to guess you are not a parent.

In more straighforward terms, what are you saying is wrong with their argument? Rather than beating around the bush by remarking upon what they are or aren't likely to be in your opinion

My siblings and I all got the same upbringing, but they got up to some very bad things while I was hanging out in my dad's basement having LAN parties and going to college

Does make one wonder about the incidence of your case versus what I think most people presume to be the common case (bad environment leading to bad actions).

Well, I could see a bad environment making things bad. Hell, I suffered a tiny bit from that growing up in the USA. Our culture heavily pushes getting in debt and living paycheck to paycheck while driving new cars and enjoying other status symbols, and it took a few years of living paycheck to paycheck despite making a ton of money before I got my act together and put a budget together

Is "life without parole" in the USA actually a whole life until death sentence? Here in the UK I don't think it is, though I do think it would be preferable to have a name mean what it says. (ie if you want to give 20 years then call it that)

Yes. The U.S. does not have a maximum term of incarceration the way some other countries do. Life without parole is generally used as an alternative to capital punishment here.

> Here in the UK I don't think it is

The European Convention on Human Rights article 3 is being interpreted as declaring life imprisonment (without chance of parole) inhumane[1]. Assuming the UK is a signatory (fairly sure they are), it would be prohibited there, though it's up to the European Court on Human Rights to rule (iirc in Luxembourg) and then your own country to care about executing that judgement against itself. Russia is also a signatory to the ECHR which I find really interesting.

There is also a right to privacy (article 8) and it doesn't discriminate whether the person happens to be an EU citizen. There are so many things in this convention, that seem like really basic human rights, that are just not a thing in the USA. Boggles my mind that we just accept all of that without blinking and continue treating it like an example, or that people (even people living in Europe!) want to move there[2].

[1] I happened to be reading this page in Dutch on it https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenslange_gevangenisstraf so that's my source unfortunately. Feel free to ask for a translation if you want to know more and translation engines are not making sense or something

[2] https://best-citizenships.com/2021/09/29/10-most-popular-cou... for example. Depending on the survey, the USA is typically still more than doubly as popular as the next-most-popular destination.

If only there were a way to avoid being sent to a maximum security prison......

If you find the way to avoid that, this man would like to hear it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/new-attorney-helped-clea...

Apparently he raped and murdered someone when he was already on parole.

I wonder what penitentiaries look like in countries like Sweden or Denmark for people who are convicted of similar crimes. Are prisoners tortured like this fellow on a daily basis?

Why specifically Scandinavia? I mean obviously they're famous for doing something different. But you're asking a really specific question as if you didn't know.

I'm not sure. I always heard that the most severe punishment in Sweden is 10-18 years (the latter for murder). Although I wondered how prisoners would be treated there, I mean you're serving life in prison for a crime done at 19 years old, surely the guards shouldn't make their lives a living hell right?

You'd be interested in this: https://youtu.be/5v13wrVEQ2M

The architecture is just one part of the groundwork for an entirely different philosophy on what a prison should be.

I always found this podcast episode pretty interesting. I've read that Denmark has a similar system.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/17/17983456/futur...

I sure hope those that did heinous crimes are.

I don't mean to be snarky but for someone born and raised in an irreligious majority nation, this does read as if written by someone who's lost their mind

What really hurts my soul is how cruel, unempathetic and bloodthirsty the American population as a whole is. We do a lot of things we normally wouldn't when we're afraid. So guess what? There are plenty who are willing and able to manipulate us by simply stoking fear. I wish more Americans were adept at recognizing this.

You see this with rhetoric about crime spiralling out of control (it isn't). Or that we need more police officers (we don't) or harsher sentences (we definitely don't). The US has 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners. The US has the highest number of prisoners in the world (2.1 million) and the third highest (IIRC) incarceration rate as well as the highest incarceration rate.

If locking people up was the solution the US would be the safest country on Earth.

We treat prisoners as de facto slaves (eg [1]). Rape within prison [2] is effectively institutionalized as a means of systemic punishment. And of course we have examples of completely unjustifiable abuse of solitary confinement. Nobody should be put in solitary confinement (technically, administrative segregation or "ad seg"), as the author was, for a year.

[1]: https://innocenceproject.org/13th-amendment-slavery-prison-l...

Here is the author's inmate page (I think): https://www.inmateaid.com/inmate-profiles/michael-nichols-00...

You can contact him through that, if you wish. I'm still looking for the circumstances of the original case.

Wow, that author seems to really work hard on some things.

I hate that he sees the prison employees as enemies. They're just doing a job, and it's a job somebody must do.

It makes you wonder how far in life the author would have got if he hadn't committed the murder. It's a shame, really.

I'm trying to live alone within my apartment for a long time but it has become such a anxiety/depression sinkhole that it's impossible to live like that for more than 10 days.

I have tried all the suggested things but all effects have mortality.

Anyone has any suggestions on living in isolation.

Inspiring. If you can stay positive in that environment, what excuse do we have? Get it done!

> Now I am a unicorn, the rare 50-year-old with a stomach that looks like a Spartan warrior’s.

This tells me that you don't really need to take those protein shakes everybody is raving about.

Maybe…but the rest of us have jobs, we can’t work out all day

Lots of people did a year of solitary in 202⏻.

Life in prison without the possibility of parole reminds one of French oubliettes.

This isn't prison, this is torture. Absolutely disgusting.

How is Assange doing by the way.

“Stay out of frivolous conversations with other captives. For example, discussions about government politics, street politics and prison politics only lead to arguments. Instead, focus on topics that sharpen others, like spirituality, history, business and legal issues.”

We’re all captives.

And we're all free. Fewer people see that than the captivity.

Spending time in the non-dual I see.

So you think we are entering a time period where more people see the self created prison and decide it is no longer a useful abstraction and internalize more authority?

We could be free. The fences and iron bars that stop us from taking our world back from the billionaires, are mostly in our minds.

Who put them there?

This “spiritual” answer may not be a helpful answer, but “we” did. The government and billionaires hav no power when enough people said no.

All the weapons in the world mean nothing if no one is willing to use them.

“Solving” this problem will happen when enough people decide to live without violence and coercion. There likely will always be people that wish to use force to coerce, but if enough say no, the few violent ones will not be able to.

Of course if one person has a button that can destroy everyone else, then they can hold everyone else hostage. Right now a few people have almost direct access to these weapons, but mostly the power exists through the belief in external authority. There are many that will follow the orders of a few.

Pragmatically, I have no answers to how/if we can really get there. It’s a hope and dream in my heart.

When you never move you don't notice your chains.

In the same sense that every human on Earth is free to move vertically within its gravity well.

It is nested prisons all the way to the top and bottom, but you'll find it much easier to descend than to ascend.

I think the guy in solitary confinement would politely disagree.

I find it a bit disingenuous to have such stories without a mention of the original crime (not every murder gets one life without parole) and what got the author into isolation in the first place. Otherwise it's a bit like Godfather being a devout catholic. Nice, but are you fully following that faith of yours outside the church?

Now, it's quite possible that Michael J. Nichols was wrongly convicted, unfairly sentenced and/or is thoroughly rehabilitated and deserving a resentencing with possibility of parole. Or else a minimum security prison with outside work and other provisions to let him live decent enough life while incarcerated. I am just skeptical of stories that omit context that is highly relevant one way or the other.

His crime is not relevant to his story about incarceration

His current reflection on his crime and subsequent in jail violations is relevant to his claims of personal growth. I am willing to be open minded so long as the obvious subject is not ignored.

Nothing could be more relevant. It’s just not politically convenient

This guy killed a person.

no but he was responsible for severe injuries after a car crash due to his blood alcool level

Not true. Rape and murder charges when he was already on parole

Ascetics and monks voluntarily secluded themselves to holes in a remote mountain. When put in that perspective, solitary confinement may not be that bad, and even pleasurable for some. What is there to life anyway? It’s all in your mind.

There is a huge difference, demonstrated through experiment, between things we choose and things imposed on us.

Sure, but if you were to find yourself in that situation, what can you really do? The best thing you can do is accept it and make yourself desire it and find pleasure in it. The alternative is a life of pain and sorrow. Your fate has been decided, now it’s your choice what to make of it.

This is torture and the people responsible for it must be held accountable for giving in to their sadistic urges. If not, there is no incentive for any inmate to not reoffend and keep doubling down on violence. It creates the dangerous conditions that reward the very tendency that causes it. This system preserves itself. It's as though people who don't believe there is a hell decided they should try to invent one.

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