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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.).
[1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
[1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Not to mention all the private services revolving around public prisons.
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...
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.
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.
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....).
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.
You just state it more concisely :)
Prison isn't something we should want in a society, but actively reduce, even if we never realistically achieve it.
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.
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.
https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-93-number-5/juris....
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.